American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read online

  Cimino, a onetime protégé of Clint Eastwood, and three others won for The Deer Hunter, a picture Wayne especially hated, but he kept his opinion to himself as he politely handed the brash young director his award. Then, before Wayne could leave, Carson came out and told him “a few friends want to say hello.” All the presenters and winners that night, regardless of their politics, came onstage to pay their respects to this Hollywood legend while the closing credits rolled and the orchestra played “That’s Entertainment.” Sammy Davis Jr. gave Wayne a big, warm hug as the broadcast ended.

  Backstage, after the show, fistfights nearly broke out over the political polarities of many of the nominees. Hostile words were said, some shoving took place. Wayne, however, stayed above the fray, either oblivious to what was happening, uninterested, or simply too weary to do battle on this front. When someone asked Wayne for his opinion about what was taking place, he shrugged them off, saying, “Go ask Marlon Brando.”

  Pilar watched the show on TV and had wept when Wayne came out, realizing that the end for him was very near.

  He was exhausted by the time Aissa got him home and put him to bed. He was told by his doctors to stay in it, and this time he listened. Several friends came to visit, among them Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara, the last time they ever saw him. Pat Stacy tried to comfort him as best she could, but she knew it was close to the end, especially when he asked her for his .38 pistol so he could blow his own brains out.

  According to Pilar, who couldn’t bear to be there at the end, “I really prayed that God would take him. I hated to see a man who was so strong and powerful in his lifetime deteriorate little by little by little.”

  On June 11, 1979, barely awake, with his last breaths, Wayne converted to his first wife’s religion, Catholicism. Later that afternoon, surrounded by his seven children, he fell into a coma and never regained consciousness.

  AS HE WISHED, HE WAS buried atop a low hill overlooking the ocean at Pacific View Memorial Park in Corona del Mar, in Orange Country, California. His burial plot is located at Bayview Terrace, section 525, not far from where John Ford was laid to rest.

  Although Wayne had told his family he wanted his tombstone to read, “Feo, Fuerte y Formal,” a Spanish proverb that means “ugly, strong, and dignified,” in fear of grave robbers, and the family wanting to have him finally all to themselves, his resting place was left unmarked until a generation had passed. A bronze marker was finally placed at the site in 2001, showing Wayne astride a horse with a Fordian horizon behind him. Above his name is the following inscription:

  Tomorrow is the most important thing in my life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.

  In May 1979, a month after his death, Congress approved the awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to John Wayne. It was officially presented to Wayne’s family by President Carter at the U.S. Capitol on March 6, 1980. On one side of it is the image of John Wayne riding his horse through Monument Valley. On the other is an impression of John Wayne’s face.

  Above it are the words: JOHN WAYNE—AMERICAN.

  He was surely that.

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  By auteurist standards, this must necessarily be a revisionist biography of the life and art of John Wayne. If hearing Wayne’s body of work described as “art” jars your cinematic sensitivities, then welcome to the Wonderful World of Auteurism, a place where Wayne’s prodigious and consistent output cannot be thought of as anything less. Auteurism, it should be noted, is not a tool of the filmmaker, but a critical method, an evaluation. Directors often, and absurdly, refer to themselves as “auteurists.” They should not. Nor should actors. Or producers. Or screenwriters. Or even heads of studios.

  Auteurism was introduced into American film criticism in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the late Andrew Sarris as a reaction to the relatively uninformed, scattershot film criticism that existed, from which a reader could not tell if the critic was reviewing a book, a stage performance, or a film. During that time, film was not yet generally recognized in America as a separate, unique, and invaluable art form. Nor were the individual films of a director (or actors, etc.) perceived to be linked in any way as part of a larger body of work.

  Auteurism really began with the influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca and featured among its prime writers Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut. During World War II, films from the West were not allowed to be shown in France. After, the French critics were able to see all they had missed, not once a year, but on a day. It was then that the notion of auteurism was born, that individual films of a single director do not exist in a vacuum, that they are linked stylistically.

  After spending a year in Paris with the Cahiers crowd, Sarris returned to America and began writing about films from the perspective of a single film belonging to a unified body of work, most often (but not always) of the director. In 1968, Sarris published The American Cinema and a new generation of filmgoers, and critics, was upon us. Originally released in paperback, this was the book that turned my generation on to the deeper joyful experience that films could be—seeing them over and over, arguing about them, studying them in graduate school, writing them, making them, criticizing them, categorizing them. We carried that book around in our back pocket, like the generation before did The Catcher in the Rye. For us, it was not just another book about film, it was the bible. Others, many of whom were competitors of Sarris, especially The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, hated it and him, and the Kael-Sarris feud became absurdly personal. Today, both are gone, and much of the controversy about auteurism died with them.

  Today, every filmmaker thinks of him- or herself as an auteur. In Henry Jaglom’s 2013 book of interviews with Orson Welles with an introduction by the esteemed writer and film historian Peter Biskind, I was surprised by what Biskind wrote about auteurism in his introduction: “Auteurs [was] a term popularized in America by Andrew Sarris in the Sixties . . . Sarris argued, controversially, that even studio directors such as Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock . . . displayed personal style, were the sole authors of their pictures and were therefore authentic artists.”

  It saddens me to see how Sarris and his work remain so misunderstood. In 1996, he addressed this issue, years before Biskind wrote the above: “If all that Auteurism represents is an emphasis on directors, this so-called theory should be banished for its banality.” What it was, and what it remains, is an examination of a director’s overall body of work, in search first of a style, and then a consistency of style. That is why it is necessary for any serious student to see as many films of a director as possible.

  Later on, Sarris expanded on his theory, and admitted that screenwriters, producers, cinematographers, even actors could be auteurs. Here is part of Sarris’s perceptive auteurist evaluation of John Wayne, actor, that appeared in the August 1979 edition of New Republic, not long after Wayne’s death:

  “There was always more to the legend of John Wayne than met the eye. To judge by most of the obituaries, the unifying effect of his long war against cancer had transcended the divisive effect of his long war against communism. His illness was thus regarded as a metaphor for all the problems that plague Western man in his descent from power. With Wayne’s passing, we were told by solemn editorialists, the last simplistic American Hero had bitten the dust . . . The squint, the rolling walk, the roundhouse right, the clipped cadences of his speech were not granted to Marion Michael Morrison at his birth . . . Toward the end of his life Wayne acknowledged the high-brow veneration accorded him by serious cineastes here and abroad. ‘I was just the paint for the palettes of Ford and Hawks,’ he once remarked with rueful modesty. This may have been true at the time of Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and Hawk’s Red River (1948), but by the time of Ford’s The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Hawk’s El Dorado (1967), they needed him more than he needed them. To a great extent he had become his own auteur . . . Wayne was dismissed [in his lifetime] not only because he lacked the wide classical range of the great British actors, but also because he lacked the emotional depth of the great method actors. Wayne was thus less than Olivier on one level, and less than Brando on another. Indeed, nothing could be more alien to Wayne’s temperament and upbringing than the Freudian-Stanislavskian mix of the method. Instead of reaching back into his past to dredge up the feelings that would bring his characters to life, Wayne followed a relatively Jungian process of building up a new persona into which he gradually grew . . . Wayne’s most enduring image, however, is that of the displaced loner vaguely uncomfortable with the very civilization he is helping to establish and preserve . . . It took me a long time to appreciate him as an actor . . .”

  Of course, not every movie star qualifies for auteurist examination; not every actor is an auteur. John Wayne not only does, he holds a well-deserved place in the pantheon. Every film biography I have written, including ones on Walt Disney, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Clint Eastwood, Ronald Reagan (the Hollywood Years), Steve McQueen, and Michael Douglas, is, by auteurist standards, revisionist, because most of those that precede them suffer from a haphazard approach to the artist’s work, and offer mostly a voyeuristic view of the sensational details of his or her life. Or the subjects are so revered, they devolve into hagiography.

  What I wanted to do in this biography was to reach beyond the precious idea that Wayne was a symbol, perhaps the definitive one, of twentieth-century America, to the point where in a world of political correctness to criticize him at all is to criticize John Wayne’s America. I wanted to examine him from an auteurist point of view, to put the emphasis on his work, to show how the films reflected his personal life, and how, in turn, his personality was reflected in his films. Wayne’s is a life illuminated by a style born out of the lives of the characters he played, personalized through his own. Everything from his childhood to his death, including his still-controversial resistance to military service, his difficulties with women, and, perhaps most important, his collaborations with John Ford and Howard Hawks, especially, helps us to better understand Wayne as a man and Wayne as an auteur.

  Finally, most movie actor biographers know about their subjects largely through (and mostly useless) interviews with friends, associates, family, and so on, which are distorted through self-glorification disguised as fact; biographers then use them as the foundation of their authority. What most don’t have is an understanding of the medium of film, and their subjects’ placement in them. I prefer bring my point of view to my work, rather than having a point of view influenced by “experts.” To my thinking, auteurist biographies offer emotional reality. A hundred years from now, only scholars will remember the malignancy of the film industry at midcentury and how it tried to preserve democracy by taking freedom away from those who might have had another point of view. But in the future, anyone who wants to know how those who made films in the twentieth century viewed the nineteenth will have to look no further than The Searchers.

  I am not a Democrat (what people assumed after my Disney book), I am not a Republican (although after my Reagan book many people thought I must be), I am not a radical (although that is how I was labeled after my biography of Phil Ochs). I am an American pure and simple. I have no party affiliation, other than the Brotherhood of Man. John Wayne’s motto could, in a way, also be mine: “Felo, Furete, y Forman”—Ugly, Strong, and Dignified. (Well, maybe I’m not that ugly, maybe not that strong, and certainly not that dignified.)

  Thanks to all who helped, especially Mark Chait, my editor, and Alan Nevins, my agent. Thanks to my mentor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of the Arts, Andrew Sarris. Thanks to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science.

  New York City gave me the best education I could ever have hoped for. I am a graduate of the High School of Performing Arts, when it was the Fame School on Forty-Sixth Street. I used to cut academic classes to go to the movie theaters on nearby Forty-Second Street, before it was underwent its Disneyfication, when tourists stayed as far away from the street as possible. It was there I could spend an afternoon watching three movies in one theater for twenty-five cents. I then went to City College of New York, where I took a film class with Herman G. Weinberg, who had written a book about Josef von Sternberg. It was there I was first introduced to the exotic word of Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant. After I received my B.A., I attended Columbia University’s School of the Arts, with the gracious help of a fellowship. I received my MFA in 1972. I chose Columbia because it was in New York City and because I knew Andrew Sarris was teaching film there. I had first heard of him while he was still lecturing nights at New York University. My girlfriend at the time told me how much she thought I would enjoy his class. I began to sit in, so easy to do in those days. A few years later when I found out he was at Columbia, that sealed the deal for me. One day while discussing with me the early auteurist battles he’d had, he warned me always to be careful not to open too many fronts against the mainstream or the politically correct unless I was sure I could defend them.

  This biography is another one of those fronts.

  And finally, I thank you, my faithful readers, for the many years of your wonderful loyalty and support. I will leave you now, but know we’ll meet again, a little further on up the road . . .

  Bibliography

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  Bazin, Andre. Orson Welles. Venice, CA: Acrobat Books, 1991 (English translated edition).

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  Bogdanovich, Peter. John Ford. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978, expanded edition.

  Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

  Bosworth, Patricia. Montgomery Clift: A Biography. New York: Limelight Editions, 2001.

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  Eliot, Marc. Walt Disney, Hollywood’s Dark Prince. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1993.

  Everson, William K. A Pictorial History of the Western. Secaucus, NJ: The Secaucus Press, 1972 (second bound printing).

  Fleischer, Richard. Just Tell Me When to Cry: A Memoir. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1993.

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  Ford, Dan. Pappy. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1998.

  Frankel, Glenn. The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2013.

  Goldman, Michael. John Wayne: The Genuine Article. San Rafael, CA: Insight Editions, 2013.

  Holden, Anthony. Behind the Oscar. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

  Kinn, Gail, and Piazza, Jim. The Academy Awards. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, Inc., 2002.

  Landesman, Fred. The John Wayne Filmography. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland and Company, 2004.

  McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.

  Moldea, Dan E. Dark Victory. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986.

  O’Hara, Maureen, with John Nicoletti. ’Tis Herself: An Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

  Riggin, Judith M. John Wayne: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.

  Roberts, Randy, and Olson, James S. John Wayne: American. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

  Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema. New York: First Da Capo Press edition, 1996 (an unabridged reproduction of the Chicago 1985 edition with birth and dates amended). Originally published by Dutton in paperback form in 1968, copyright Andrew Sarris.

  Sarris, Andrew. The John Ford Movie Mystery. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975.

  Sarris, Andrew. You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: The American Talking Film History and Memory 1927–1949. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

  Schickel, Richard. The Men Who Made the Movies. New York: Atheneum, 1975.

  Stacy, Pat. Duke: A Love Story, An Intimate Memoir of John Wayne’s Last Years. New York: Atheneum, 1983.