Hero for a promised land michael coyne iss22

Hero for a Promised Land

By Michael Coyne ‘I BELIEVE IN AMERICA.’ Whether or not you agree with the sentiment, you recognise the words.

They are the first words spoken in The Godfather, one of the greatest American films ever made.

I agree with the sentiment. I believe in America. When I was a student at Edinburgh University in the early 1980s, my enthusiasm for American history was so passionate that it bordered on the evangelical.

The teacher there who did so much to give that enthusiasm a sense of substance and direction was a man not exactly unknown to readers of The Drouth.

Owen Dudley Edwards was fond of quoting G. K. Chesterton’s assertion that America was the only country in the history of the world to be founded on an idea: the idea of liberty. I agree with that, too – both with the observation and, above all, with the aspiration.

In all honesty, however, that was not the America which first captivated my imagination, my allegiance and my devotion.

From earliest memories I was entranced and enchanted by flickering images of the wonderful land three thousand miles and a million dreams away. I’ve been known to declare that, in mythic terms, there are basically only two countries in the world: there is America, and there is everywhere else. But, on reflection, that’s not strictly true; there’s a third country, perhaps the most enthralling and awe-inspiring country of all.

The cartoonist Jules Feiffer defined it best when he observed in the book Jules Feiffer’s America (1982): ‘Ronald Reagan presides over two countries: the United States, about which he is ignorant, and Movie America, about which he is expert. Movie America is a country that operates within the logic, illusion, and structure of a myth … Movie America was born out of the hearts and imaginations of immigrant Jews and first-generation Irish, who as producers, directors, and screenwriters propagated a secular faith, the essence of which was that all Americans could be handsome,

charming, rugged go-getters, winners, classless, and white.

Movie-faith: the leveling of diversity, the whiting of America.

Nostalgia for a time that never existed except on movie and television screens: supply-side fantasies that prepared us for a leader off the studio backlot, well-versed in the dream, waiting in the wings to take over, as the country, demythified and decomposing, with little faith in the future, summoned forth its last hope: the handsome old prince.

A hero whose principles were made of popcorn.’ (p.229) I was a disciple of Movie America, and my youthful dedication to that ideal was of the starry-eyed variety.

On first reading the above passage by Feiffer, I could appreciate his wry, incisive, cynical humour; but I did recognise it as cynical. I still believed in the pure, shining, wholesome promise of Movie America. I hadn’t yet been to the United States, mind you – but happy are those who have not seen, and yet believe.

Movie America was my promised land, my utopia, my heaven on earth.

The world began anew in 1776, and my Movie America was a land of truth, justice, fairness, courage and white picket fences. All the heroes were valiant; and all the women were virtuous – and, of course, achingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful. Who wouldn’t want to live in a land and a world like that? Above all, however, this internalised ideology – so much more attractive than those drab home-grown alternatives on offer – was coloured by one particular myth and one specific Hollywood confection: the West and the Western. To this day, my personal political beliefs – republicanism, libertarianism, individualism – stem from being immersed in American history and culture, which originated from my fascination with the filmic frontier.

So I was perhaps the only Scots-born student at Edinburgh University whose perception of American history was – initially, at least – influenced as much

by Ethan Edwards as by Owen Dudley Edwards. As I told ODE right after the 1980 election, much as I had cheered for Reagan, he was not my real hero. It

the drouth

13

was no surprise that my real hero was John Wayne.

May 26th 2007 will be the centennial of John Wayne’s birth. He died on June 11th 1979. Although he has been gone more than a generation, he is still the biggest money-maker in the history of Hollywood – up to and including the contemporary DVD market.

As an enduring American icon, he has a resonance and a potency which far outstrips that of his friends and peers, such as Gary Cooper, James Stewart and Henry Fonda. As a celluloid tough guy Wayne’s following dwarfs that of other celebrated big-screen bruisers such as Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum.

And I am just one of millions for whom John Wayne is, in truth, more than a mere movie star. What is at the heart of this cult, this idolatry? Why, all these years after his death, is John Wayne still so phenomenally popular? What is his specific ongoing significance for US culture?

Why does this indisputably chauvinistic AllAmerican icon have such immense global appeal?

Whoever coined the phrase sic transit gloria mundi didn’t figure on the Duke. John Wayne was an icon for an age and an ethos.

Well before 9/11 he was the icon of US omnipotence in a world of limitations.

Take a glance back at those lists of heroes and hard men. Cooper, Stewart and Fonda were all convincing as archetypal small-town populists or Westerners of integrity; you’d be happy to have any one of them as your next-door neighbour.

But they never quite cut the mustard in the violence stakes (Fonda’s brutal child-killer in Once Upon a Time in the West notwithstanding). They could never quite shake their image as essentially gentle, churchgoing, flag-saluting family men. Lancaster, Douglas and Mitchum, by contrast, were a far cry from Mr. Deeds, Mr. Smith and Young Mr. Lincoln of the roseate Frank Capra-John Ford Weltanschauung.

When Burt Lancaster’s characters made patriotic speeches, as in John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May (1964), they were represented as sinister and subversive, rather than inspirational and classically American. Even if portraying heroes, Lancaster, Douglas and Mitchum frequently radiated menace.

14

the drouth

John Wayne alone embodied – still embodies – both patriotic Americanism and machismo in full, equal and flawless measure. Wayne is the foremost and perfect symbol of a nation whose power and progress have been unparalleled in the course of human history – yet which now faces the uneasy dread that its greatest glories might be past.

A friend who shares my enthusiasm for the Duke told me that Wayne’s pro-Vietnam War epic The Green Berets (1968) prompted a tortuous moral dilemma in his teens. During the late 1960s, my friend had been engaged in protests against the war.

Then, in 1968, on the release of Wayne’s hawkish valentine to the US Special Forces, protesters decided to picket the local fleapit screening The Green Berets. Consequently, my pal was torn between the dictates of ideology and his desire to see the latest Wayne film. His solution? He leaned forward, grinned conspiratorially and informed me: ‘I got there early and paid my money.’

Ideology be damned. More than any other figure, John Wayne was the 20th-century’s apostle of Americanism. His appeal still transcends and supersedes political convictions.

He was the one American whom Nikita Khrushchev and Hirohito expressly wished to meet during their respective visits to the United States in 1959 and 1974.

Millions the world over who might deplore Wayne’s politics have happily queued up for his unique brand of Manichaean certitudes. And why shouldn’t America’s foremost cultural icon be a movie star? Film has been the great art form, the great public entertainment of our century – the American century. Cinemas are cathedrals of confected myths. Hollywood gifted the romance of America to a world hungering for dreams. In this respect, moviegoers of all nations now share a common ‘American’ past.

Death has done nothing to diminish his popularity. In 1995, fully 16 years after his death, the Duke topped a

poll of America’s favourite film stars. The reason for his death-defying durability is simple: they’re not making heroes, or confecting legends, like they used to. None of today’s action heroes can hold a candle to the Duke.

Not Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sly Stallone or Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme. The longer the list of pretenders grows, the more preposterous the idea becomes. Kevin Costner has virtually fashioned a career from comparison with older, infinitely more entertaining film stars (Cooper, Stewart, Fonda, Steve McQueen) – but he can dispense with his excruciatingly obvious attempt to mythologise himself as a hero for all seasons, the Great All-American Movie Star. That post has been filled for the duration.

Besides, imitation is the poorest route to a pantheon.

If John Wayne symbolises America to the world, then that’s the America the world wants to see – the America we wish to believe in. No-one forced us to buy tickets. In large part, Wayne’s appeal to movie audiences is primal. I’d suggest it’s founded on his mythic, hyperbolic representation of masculinity, rather than his specifically American brand of chauvinism. John Wayne embodies courage, gallantry, tenacity and honesty – and, above all, ageworn but unadulterated integrity. In 1952 TIME magazine ran a cover story on Wayne, titled ‘The Wages of Virtue’. People like to believe in the idea of John Wayne and the ultimate triumph of selfless, uncompromising heroism; yet movies can no longer lull us into believing that somehow everything will turn out all right in the end. Our own age of ‘in-yourface’ atrocities has shattered that cosy optimism irrevocably. Real life is too cruel – and media evidence of that harsh truth is all-pervasive. What Wayne represents in our post-Oklahoma City, postColumbine, post-9/11 world is a nostalgia for virtue.

Among fans, affection for the Duke runs deep and wide – but the cult is far from universal. Rather, he inspires or incites profoundly divergent responses, dependent on the identity of the particular viewer.

As a white male heterosexual, my instinctive and cultural response to the Duke is apt to be markedly different from that of a viewer who is, say, Black or Native American or female or gay. This is certainly not to imply that he is unanimously revered by white male heterosexuals, but that is assuredly his primary constituency. The antithesis of screen ‘smoothies’ from Cary Grant to Leonardo DiCaprio, Wayne is a film star for men – and increasingly, for mature men. He represents a primitive yet inherently unattainable ideal of masculinity.

The archetypal Wayne hero is supremely confident, self-sufficient and sagebrush-smart (endowed with the 19th-century equivalent of ‘street cred’). He’s a gargantuan secular saint, a figure of vast and (more

often than not) flawless moral authority. He’s rough and righteous, and his almost omniscient brand of frontier wisdom stems not from intellect but from native cunning. In contrast to the Jeffersonian ideal of man’s innate goodness, the Gospel According to Big John recognises that all other mortals are lesser, venal or back-shooters. A well-balanced individual is a man handy with both fists, and survival in Wayne’s world depends on being able to hit first and not ask questions at all. The Wayne hero is not cursed by selfdoubt. ‘Never apologise,’ says his character in Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). ‘It’s a sign of weakness.’

Side-by-side with Wayne’s absolute self-certainty is a casual, indeed, cheerful reliance on violence as the best means of solving both individual and societal problems.Yet key to understanding the broad and enduring appeal of Wayne’s films and the Wayne image is the fact that the cheerfulness is just as important as the violence. He once accounted for his appeal by declaring that there was no nuance to the characters he played. They were painted in broad brush strokes, often with poignancy but customarily devoid of subtlety. Wayne may have essayed a frontier Falstaff, but he was too kinetic, dynamic and vigorously uncomplicated to posture as a homestead Hamlet.

Consequently, violence in the majority of Wayne’s movies tended to be grounded in knockabout humour rather than in tragedy. Perhaps the most remarkable instance of this was in Howard Hawks’s El Dorado (1967), which began as an adaptation of Harry Brown’s 1961 novel The Stars in Their Courses, recasting the Trojan war as a Western range conflict.

Wayne’s character was a gunfighter based on Achilles, initially suffering from a heart ailment and destined to die from a minor wound. Brown’s novel and the original screenplay ended with the prairie littered with corpses – but this scenario was simply too downbeat for Howard Hawks. John Ford or Anthony Mann might have fashioned this tale into a classic Western tragedy, but Hawks got bored and just decided to rework his Rio Bravo (1959), reusing Wayne and substituting Robert Mitchum for Dean Martin as his drunken foil.

While one tragic incident remained from Brown’s novel, the overall tone was one of good-natured brawling – and audiences lapped it up. Filmgoers didn’t flock to John Wayne movies to be awed by classical tragedy. Instead, they went to be entertained by a tested and winning formula which guaranteed fistfights, a gal in sore need of taming, and a happy ending.

Sometimes this formula produced a masterpiece, as in Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952); sometimes, it was designed to reflect Wayne’s patriarchal and ultraconservative world-view (see Andrew V. McLaglen’s McLintock! (1963)); and sometimes The Duke was just going through the motions (Henry Hathaway’s North to Alaska (1960) might serve as an apposite example of a typically boisterous but honestly not so good Wayne

the drouth

15

vehicle). His dominant characteristic is the lusty laugh, rather than the mean streak. Much of the violence in his films is devoid of malice or brutality. Sure, Scar gets scalped in The Searchers and Liberty Valance gets shot and a few dozen other no-good critters get gunned down or blown up or otherwise despatched as befits their innate nastiness (villains in John Wayne movies died because … well, because they deserved to).

Yet often the fistfight with a rival was a necessary ritual before emerging at brawl’s end as the best of pals or, at least, imbued with mutual respect – the most famous and best-loved example being his punchup with reluctant brother-in-law Victor McLaglen in The Quiet Man. Both this ritual and its accompanying resolution were as classically American as the legendary donnybrook between young Abraham Lincoln and ring-tailed-roarer Jack Armstrong, who in defeat extended his hand to the ‘better man’ – and thereafter was Lincoln’s staunch friend and admirer. I’d suggest that this good-humoured violence (pardon my oxymoron) is absolutely central to Wayne’s lasting appeal to mature male audiences.

Wayne is the celluloid archetype of everything a man should be – unswervingly resolute, honest, forthright, courageous, unbowed before the countless petty and pettifogging little compromises of everyday modern life that whittle us down, one shred at a time, so that we no longer recognise our dreams of our own best selves. (A personal anecdote: I recall a lady once complimented me on having had the guts to leave a full-time, potentially permanent job I hated. I replied that if I had had real guts, I would never have taken the job in the first place. But, even as I said it, I realised that was John Wayne talking.) John Wayne isn’t just larger than life, he’s larger than our lives. He wouldn’t take any crap from some obnoxious little office tyrant. In his mythic West, mortgages, tax returns and time-clocks were as alien and as inconceivable as spaceships.

Violence righteously dispensed and never legally questioned is a cinematic construct, not a contemporary reality. In John Wayne’s moral universe, a man can come and go, free as he likes, and there’s nothing that can’t be fixed by a punch on the right nose or, as a last resort, a bullet from the right gun. So any resemblance to ‘civil’ society is entirely coincidental.

About that gal I mentioned in sore need of taming. One implicit ideological corollary of this dream world in which men are men and the Duke is the biggest ‘he-bull’ of all: it ain’t no paradise for womenfolk. Women in Westerns represent the values of civilization and, consequently, they tend

16

the drouth

to articulate the voice of reason and pacifism. The genre is full of women who tell the hero: ‘If you go out there and fight the bad guy, it’s over between us.’

Now, the hero might dignify this with some response other than one potentially last fierce clinch, but chances are he won’t explain because he’s naturally laconic and If-you-don’t-know-I-can’t-tell-you and There’s-some-things-a-man-just-can’t-ride-around and I-couldn’t-call-myself-a-man-if-I-threw-down-and-ran.

Now, as a younger man, Wayne went through this transparent pretence of a dilemma, eg. with Claire Trevor in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and with Gail Russell in James Edward Grant’s Angel and the Badman (1947). But I have watched literally hundreds of Westerns, and I can’t recall a single one – and certainly not one starring the Duke – in which the hero paid any heed and opted to stay home and help with the housework. No, he straps on his gun and goes out to do what he has to do, and the lady forgets her previous ultimatum and melts happily into his arms – reinforcing dominant masculine will over submissive, feminine wishful thinking. The subliminal ideological message is: men mean what they say; women don’t.

Yet, as the Wayne figure matured, he found himself confronted not with schoolmarms and saloon-girls, but with older variations on those Madonna and Magdalene archetypes. Writing for the magazine The Movie in the early 1980s, Graham Fuller noted: ‘It is significant that in many of his films he is essentially womanless … The Wayne persona inevitably engenders sexual disharmony. For such an American hero Wayne frequently cut an impotent, asexual figure – so colossal that he swamps mere masculinity.’ Wayne’s on-screen bachelor status was often explained away by having an unseen, estranged wife back East (usually a prissy, starchy, chilly snob, and usually from Philadelphia) who had been too much lady and not enough woman for him. The women the mature Wayne hero gravitated toward emotionally and romantically were, by contrast, gutsy, unpretentious and plain-spoken, eg. Patricia Neal in the naval epics Operation Pacific (1951) and In Harm’s Way (1965), Charlene Holt in El Dorado.

Sometimes the romantic dynamic revolved around our hero knocking the starch out of a lady to uncover the woman underneath. This was the winning formula when he was teamed with his favourite and bestloved romantic sparring-partner, Maureen O’Hara.

This lusty variation on The Taming of the Shrew – clearly apparent in The Quiet Man, McLintock! and Ford’s Donovan’s Reef (1963), in which Elizabeth

Allen’s Boston bluestocking substitutes for O’Hara – is problematic from the perspective of modern sensibilities, and assuredly from the perspective of modern feminist sensibilities. In these films the Duke quite literally knocks the starch out of his reluctant paramours – dragging O’Hara up hill and down dale in The Quiet Man, putting Allen over his knee in Donovan’s Reef. Now, there are plenty of male cinemagoers who have enjoyed those scenes and quipped: ‘That’s the way to treat them!’ yet who would never dream of lifting their own hands to a woman. Regrettably, however, there are also plenty of men who believe Wayne’s on-screen roughness – and much worse – is precisely the way to treat a woman, and they are not afraid to practice what they preach. I would consider it absurd to suggest that Wayne’s on-screen behaviour bears any responsibility for the proliferation of domestic violence – just as I’d contest that the sacrifice of clean-cut American boys in Vietnam may reasonably be attributed to him (though Ron Kovic is known to feel strongly to the contrary – and God knows, Ron Kovic has more right to his views on that subject from his wheelchair than I have to mine from my armchair).

Moreover, his rough-and-tumble antics with O’Hara et al. should not obscure the fact that, on-screen and off, Wayne was gallant toward women, as exemplified in his relationship with Linda Cristal in The Alamo (1960) – coincidentally, the type of woman to whom he was most attracted in real life (all three of Wayne’s wives were Hispanic or Latin American). It’s true that he drew flak because, when asked for his views on Women’s Lib, he quipped that he believed women had the right to do any job they wanted, pursue any career they desired, and rise as high as their abilities would take them – as long as they were home in time to have the dinner ready for the man coming in. There’s no disputing Wayne’s inherent chauvinism, but it was grounded in his paternalistic world-view and certainly not in brutality, either on film or in life.

And it is impossible to conceive of one of Wayne’s characters dragging a woman off the street and raping her, as Clint Eastwood’s mysterious gunman did in High Plains Drifter (1972). Wayne’s macho swagger was always present, but always balanced by an innate sentimentality, enormous gallantry, and his truly awesome and unbending sense of personal honour.

Male chauvinism is not the only ideological charge levelled against Wayne in our era of heightened political consciousness. Wayne was not a racist but, almost inevitably, became an icon of white supremacy.

What’s the difference? And why ‘almost inevitably’?

Wayne as a man wasn’t personally prejudiced against any individual on account of race or colour, but as a creation of his time and place he espoused – and as the screen’s foremost hero of the frontier, he epitomised – culturally internalised attitudes of white supremacy. Like many other mature white male

Americans of his day – born, raised and educated in a land whose most celebrated historical triumphs stemmed from mature white male endeavour – he accepted as natural that the United States should be forever governed by and for the greater glorification of like individuals. Thus John Wayne is primarily a hero of and for white America. What does he represent to non-Caucasian Americans?

Two responses – one anecdotal, the other academic. I remember being told that, when Wayne died in 1979, the news of his passing was that day’s hot topic of conversation, all over America. But one young Native American woman, hearing Wayne discussed by other customers in a bank in New Mexico, declared that she wasn’t sorry he was dead – not after all the Indians he had killed (proving that Ronald Reagan was surely not the only one to confuse what happened on screen with what transpired in real life). Secondly, the book The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford’s Classic Western (edited by Arthur M. Eckstein and Peter Lehman, 2004) ends with Tom Grayson Colonnese (Santee Sioux), Director of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington, offering his ‘Native American Reactions to The Searchers’: ‘[A]sking Indians to watch a John Wayne western [italics mine] is like asking someone if they would like to go back and visit the schoolyard where they used to get beat up every day. No – that’s too unserious a comparison, though the connection to our childhoods and bad childhood memories is important. Rather, for Native American people, watching westerns is like Jews watching movies about the Holocaust.

It’s that painful. It’s that real: between 1850 and 1875, for instance, the Comanches lost 90% of their population. But even this comparison misses the mark, because for Indians, watching westerns would be like Jews watching films about the Holocaust in which the Jews themselves were presented as the violent, aggressive villains! We were the ones who were slaughtered and destroyed, but that’s not usually how we’ve been depicted.’ (pp.335-336) What is most significant about that particular passage, in the present context, is Colonnese’s use of the phrase ‘a John Wayne western’ – suggesting Wayne, not Ford (or any other Western star) is considered

by Native Americans to be centrally culpable for the celluloid subjugation of their race. I would point out in fairness that Wayne often spoke up for the Indians on screen. It was Wayne who condemned white perfidy and treated the Indians with respect in Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) – against great liberal icon Henry Fonda, no less! He was the Indians’ respectful foe in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and John Farrow’s Hondo (1953), and he defended the dignity of displaced

the drouth

17

Indians in McLintock! and Andrew V. McLaglen’s Chisum (1970). Granted, Wayne’s sympathy was that of the authoritarian white man recognising and attempting to redress injustice, and the accompanying racial problem was thus presented as one for white America to solve.

Yet, in truth, Wayne’s characters (his racist Ethan Edwards in The Searchers naturally excepted) operated from the starting point of white male primacy, rather than any consciously vaunted concept of supremacy.

Once again, as with his remark about women having dinner ready, off-screen ruminations tended to reinforce both his on-screen image and his public reputation as the spokesman for old-fashioned rightwing certitudes (and never has there been a more prominent example of screen image and a persona blending and blurring). He created quite a stir and caused offence when he remarked in a 1971 Playboy interview: ‘With a lot of blacks there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility … I think any black man who can compete with a white today can get a better break than a white man. I wish they’d tell me where in the world they have it better than right here in America.’ And despite my rationalisation a few lines back about the racial attitudes and motivations of Wayne’s characters, the most significant part of that passage are his words: ‘I believe in white supremacy.’ In Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the newspaper editor famously declares: ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’

When Wayne asserts his belief in white supremacy, one can still admire the legend, but one can’t ignore the fact. I revere John Wayne, and I love Westerns, but I can see it would perhaps be grossly insensitive for me, as a non-American Caucasian, to suggest that Tom Grayson Colonnese’s non-Caucasian American perception is fundamentally erroneous.

Nevertheless, over a generation since his death, it is John Wayne, more than any other movie star, who epitomises America to the world. There’s a certain Socratic inevitability about this. Hollywood movies are America’s greatest cultural gift to the world; the most

18

the drouth

truly American of all genres was the Western; and John Wayne bestrode the Western – America’s own national myth, epic, saga and dream – like a colossus.

Among the warriors of the filmic West, there was the Duke, and then there was everyone else (I realise I’ve just used the same differentiation as when I launched into this article by declaring that, basically, there are only two countries; in each case, the most spectacular example is the most exceptional). Put simply, indeed, reductively: to the world, America is the movies, the most American genre is the Western, and the Western is John Wayne. The Man is The Legend; The Legend is America. Little wonder, when he died in 1979, one Japanese newspaper proclaimed: ‘Mr. America is Dead.’

There’s no comparable worldwide cult celebrating Cooper or Stewart or Fonda or Randolph Scott or Joel McCrea as a Western icon; and there’s no comparable cult of the tough guy with Lancaster, Douglas or Mitchum at its pinnacle. In the latter context, Humphrey Bogart has a certain following, which is in large part due to his peculiar status as a romantic icon in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1943).

The cult of Bogart really began with revivals of Casablanca on the East Coast of America in the early 1970s, and it’s probably on the wane now. The only movie icons whose cults can rival Wayne’s in terms of global popularity, depth, devotion and durability are Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean – all stylistically, ideologically and sexually far removed from the world and the ethos that John Wayne symbolises.

John Wayne represents not just a model, but the

moral absolute of masculinity: tough, unswerving, incorruptible, and all but indestructible – in effect, Superman without the cape. The comparison is apposite; for, above all, what he represents is a romanticised, heroic ideal of American man – yet one who transcends purely domestic US appeal; and there can be no disputing Wayne’s truly global reach. I personally know of two individuals, neither one American, each of whom

has transformed personal enthusiasm for the Wayne image into a business enterprise with the potential for worldwide profitability.

Edinburgh-based artist David Todd has already painted dozens of privately-commissioned portraits of Wayne, and he’s currently in the process of developing a website to sell his artwork on various subjects.

David Todd’s output is impressive by any standards.

His oeuvre includes sporting events; pop icons; scenes from Scottish literature and history; Scottish landscapes; military paintings; Laurel and Hardy; scenes from classic movies – and the list runs on.

John Wayne features prominently in the filmic strand of Todd’s art. A recent painting depicts Wayne, craggy, weather-beaten and battle-hardened, crowned with coonskin cap and looming above the Alamo. It’s magnificent – and like the best of paintings, mere words cannot do it justice.

The second case is a tale of astonishing determination.

A few years ago a woman in Berkshire who had never paid the slightest attention to the Duke happened to catch part of McLintock! on TV. She became fascinated

by Wayne, and decided to watch all his films, read all the literature, and find out as much as she could about his life. She decided to write her own book about Wayne and, with an unswerving resolve akin to that of Ethan Edwards, she contacted Wayne’s family, his friends and associates, other chroniclers of the legend: anyone who might help her understand John Wayne, the man. She wrote her book, then offered it to a major publisher, who was willing to accept it if she made a number of revisions which, in her view, would have rendered her work indistinguishable from several others purporting to tell Wayne’s story. Now, many a seasoned pro would have simply swallowed pride and signed on the dotted line, but she declined the offer. Instead, she resolved to publish her book herself: not by paying a vanity publisher, but by setting herself up as a publisher. So that’s what Carolyn McGivern did; and her 465-page book John Wayne: A Giant Shadow (2000) isn’t just a personal vindication but an outstanding achievement (she has since written and published another, The Lost Films of John Wayne, dealing with his two long-unavailable airplane-in-peril adventures, Island in the Sky (1953) and The High and the Mighty (1954), both recently re-released on DVD).

This is a triumphant but not triumphalist book, written with admiration, affection, and even love – but McGivern is constantly intrigued by her subject rather than in awe of him. The life she chronicles is not a particularly happy one: a young boy unloved by his mother; a man unable to find lasting security in three successive marriages; the archetypal All-American hero shamed by his failure to serve in World War II; the workaholic consumed by the compulsion to provide

for and protect his family, deeply hurt by his children’s need to escape his shadow. McGivern shrewdly makes the connection between Wayne’s private heartaches and the exorcising of these torments in the conflicts and relationships he enacted on the screen: ‘Part of the problem with his younger children was related to the guilt he continued to feel about the older ones. It could be seen in many of his later films where most of the characters he played had trouble with women and children, where he is alienated because of his work, which is either dangerous or takes him away for long stretches. He consistently demonstrated love and a willingness to sacrifice himself for his family whilst being unable to live within a normal relationship. On screen he said exactly how he felt about that.’ (p.409) Everything about him was assuredly larger than life: hard-drinking friendships with John Ford and Ward Bond; his outspoken political views; his lonely crusade to film The Alamo; his heroic, heart-breaking battle against cancer. McGivern gives them all due and full attention. There’s a wealth of information about Wayne’s screen career, and a good deal of intelligent commentary about the films themselves.Yet it cannot be overstressed that this is primarily a book about John Wayne, the man – and, as such, it is of inestimable value in deepening our appreciation of the enduring potency and poignancy of Wayne as an American icon.

Louise Brooks, who co-starred with Wayne in Overland Stage Raiders in 1938, thought even then: ‘[T]his is no actor but the hero of all mythology miraculously brought to life.’ (p.82) Appropriately for such a hero, McGivern has written an epic. It’s the tale of a man who was loved and idolised by millions all over the world – a man who had a truly wonderful life. Yet it is also the tragedy of a man who never found true contentment, a loyal friend who trusted too readily, an innately generous man whose heart often led him to make wrong choices. McGivern quotes from that 1971 Playboy interview, in which he was asked about the legacy he hoped to leave behind. Wayne responded: ‘I hope my family and friends will be able to say that I was honest, kind and a fairly decent man.’ (p.376) The truth of that shines all the way through McGivern’s book. One can’t help feeling Wayne would’ve admired her true grit, would’ve been proud of the result, and would’ve been first in line to offer (to borrow from a Henry Fonda Western) ‘a big hand for the little lady’.

McGivern acknowledges she took encouragement in her quest from the resolve Wayne epitomised in his films. In this particularly contentious era John Wayne can still serve as a shining example of all that’s best in America – but the bad guys who need to be faced down are the first ones to hide behind his shadow.

the drouth

19

There is no doubt 9/11 would have outraged John Wayne to the point of apoplexy. He would have definitely given staunch support to the unelected princeling whose administration’s negligence of incoming intelligence reports contributed to that tragedy. Wayne would likely have lurched into Ethan Edwards mode and advocated gung-ho action in Iraq. He supported Joe McCarthy, the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon. It would require a sophistry beyond this particular Wayne fan to argue that, no, really, he would have baulked at Bush II’s adventures in the Gulf. Wayne didn’t fight in World War II yet, a generation later, was vocal in support of the Vietnam conflict. Dubya went nowhere near Vietnam, and now over two thousand American soldiers lie dead in pursuit of his fantasy that he’s a strong man and a great war leader. This is as close as I ever wish to come in discerning a comparison between the Duke and George W. Bush. Unquestionably, the legend and myth that Wayne embodied repels just as many Americans as it captivates. His confrontational, Manifest Destiny-oriented, ‘saddle-up-and-punchout-the-bad-guys’ Weltanschauung is a major turn-off for those multitudes of Americans who earnestly believe it was precisely that inflexible sense of righteousness, that swaggering self-confidence, that cheerful resort to violence which got them into Vietnam to begin with – and then kept them mired there for a decade. Tragically, inflexible belief in righteousness, swagger, and a faith in overwhelming

20

the drouth

force without contemplation of consequence are clearly there for all to see in current US policy in Iraq.Yet Wayne only supported a fatally-misconceived war; Bush – who proclaimed America would pay Iraq back for 9/11, then later admitted Saddam Hussein had no part in the atrocity – created one.

George W. Bush as Wayne’s heir? In his dreams. Or, in the Duke’s own words: ‘That’ll be the day.’ On the lookout for new wars to wage and old liberties to erode, the character from Wayne films whom Bush most resembles is the opportunistic, debased land-baron (see Rio Bravo, The Sons of Katie Elder, The War Wagon, El Dorado, Rio Lobo and Chisum) whom Wayne despises; the petty, thuggish, landgrabbing tyrant against whom the Big Guy finally takes a stand. An American first, a conservative Republican second, John Wayne is still hero for a promised land, whose life, legacy and legend are in keeping with America’s ideals. That greatness must not be tarnished by men who would usurp his image to exploit Americans’ worst fears.

Michael Coyne is author of The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western (I.B. Tauris, London, 1997), the novel The Sun From Both Sides (Sorelli, 2006), and American Political Films (forthcoming from Reaktion Books).