John Wayne

The Full Biography

John Wayne. Actor. The Winterset boy who made a walk into the country’s idea of a West, and left both a doorway and a 1971 interview the file still has to hold at the same time.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a hat, a rifle, and a man turning a landscape into a sentence. The Duke. The walk is half a roll and half a decision. What the still cannot show is Marion Robert Morrison of Winterset, Iowa, a USC football injury, a Fox prop department, a decade of cheap Westerns before Stagecoach, an Oscar for an eye patch, a war the stills imply and the body did not fight, and a set of published opinions that will not fit under the hat.

He was born on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa, to Clyde Leonard Morrison, a pharmacist, and Mary “Molly” Brown. The birth name is Marion Robert Morrison. After a brother died, the family reused Mitchell; the grown man’s middle name is often listed that way. The little house in Winterset is a museum now. The family went west, to Palmdale and then Glendale, California. A Glendale fireman took to calling the boy after his Airedale terrier, Duke. The dog’s name stuck to the person. The first pressure was a large body in a new state, a football scholarship, and a household that needed the scholarship to mean something.

He played for Howard Jones at the University of Southern California. A bodysurfing accident wrecked the shoulder. The scholarship went with it. He found work at Fox as a prop man and an extra, moving furniture and standing in the back of frames. Raoul Walsh cast him in The Big Trail (1930), a wide-film Western that failed at the box office, and the billing became John Wayne. The name was a studio invention. The walk was already his. What followed was not stardom. It was a decade of Poverty Row and Republic B Westerns — Lone Star oaters, serial dust, dozens of pictures in which he is already the man and nobody outside the matinee has noticed. John Ford had known him from the prop days. Ford waited.

The door is Stagecoach, 1939. Ford cast him as the Ringo Kid and bet a career on a face the A pictures had ignored. Claire Trevor is the other adult in the coach. Monument Valley becomes a grammar. Overnight, in the way Hollywood means overnight after ten years of dirt, he was a star. The war years made him a Marine and a sailor on screen — The Fighting Seabees, They Were Expendable, Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), which brought a first Academy Award nomination. The stills imply a combat soldier. The body did not give that service. He was classified 4-F: the old shoulder, dependents, and a studio that wanted him working. He did not serve in combat. That belongs in the file without a sneer and without a recruiting poster pasted over it.

Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948) made him a cattle baron who can be wrong. Ford’s cavalry pictures — She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) among them — put gray in the hair before the man was old. The Quiet Man (1952), again for Ford, opposite Maureen O’Hara in Ireland, is the rare romance in which the walk is asked to court someone. Then The Searchers (1956). Ethan Edwards rides out to find a niece taken by Comanche and returns as a problem the porch cannot absorb. The last shot, the doorway, the desert at his back, is a civic object. It is also a picture about racial hatred that the film both uses and, in careful readings, shows. Fond memory that keeps only the doorway has cleaned the room. A reading that keeps only the hatred has cleaned it from the other side. The picture is large enough to be both monument and charge sheet. That is why it lasts.

Rio Bravo (1959), for Hawks, with Dean Martin and Angie Dickinson, is the professional’s Western: a sheriff, a drunk, a jail, a town that will not help. The Alamo (1960) he directed himself, an expensive civic sermon. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Ford again, with James Stewart and Lee Marvin, is the elegy that admits the newspaper story and the fact are not the same. He was, for a generation, the most complete American walk the pictures had hired. He knew it.

I play John Wayne in every part regardless of the character, and I’ve been doing okay, haven’t I?John Wayne

The turn is not the first coach in Monument Valley. The turn is the decade in which the walk became a national argument and the man refused to separate them. Before the eye patch there is a pile the doorway does not hold. Hondo (1953). The High and the Mighty (1954). The Wings of Eagles (1957). Hatari! (1962), Hawks in Africa. McLintock! (1963), a comic Western with O’Hara. El Dorado (1966), Hawks again, with Robert Mitchum. The War Wagon (1967) with Kirk Douglas. The Green Berets (1968), which he directed and starred in, is a Vietnam sermon the counterculture treated as an insult and a portion of the country treated as a hymn. He knew what he was making. He made it anyway. True Grit (1969), for Henry Hathaway, gave him Rooster Cogburn, a one-eyed marshal, a true comic gravity. On April 7, 1970, the Academy named him Best Actor. The statue arrived late and was not a misunderstanding. He had been playing the same man with more weather in the face, and for once the town paid the weather. Two years after the Oscar, in the May 1971 issue of Playboy, he sat for an interview with Richard Warren Lewis and said things about race, politics, and the country that are still quoted as a charge sheet. A complete life holds the walk and the interview. Fond memory that keeps only the hat is a cleaned room. A pile-on that keeps only the interview is a different cleaned room. Both rooms leave out the person who went to work in the morning.

The 1970s kept him on a horse and then took the horse away. Rio Lobo (1970). Big Jake (1971). The Cowboys (1972) put him in charge of boys on a drive. Cahill U.S. Marshal (1973). McQ (1974) and Brannigan (1975) tried him as a modern cop. Rooster Cogburn (1975) put the eye patch beside Katharine Hepburn. The Shootist (1976), for Don Siegel, opposite Lauren Bacall and a young Ron Howard, is the last film: J.B. Books, a gunfighter dying of cancer, teaching a boy how to end. The rhyme with the life is obvious and was not hidden. He had already lost a lung and five ribs in 1964. He went back to work as if the schedule were a form of courage. The 1971 pages did not recede because the pictures were beloved. They sat in the same drawer.

The Ford and Hawks rooms are the shop. Ford waited through the Poverty Row decade and then used him as Ringo, as a cavalry officer with gray in the hair, as Sean Thornton in Ireland, as Ethan Edwards, as Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — the man who does the killing so a newspaper can print a cleaner story. Hawks used him as a cattle baron who can be wrong, as a sheriff who will not leave a jail, as a hunter in Africa, as a professional who knows the other professional in the frame. Claire Trevor, Maureen O’Hara, Dean Martin, Angie Dickinson, James Stewart, Lee Marvin: the people opposite him are why the walk is not a monologue. He said he played John Wayne in every part. The joke is true and incomplete. The parts changed the weather in the face. The walk stayed. The country hired both. Winterset is the first room. Glendale is the dog’s name. Monument Valley is the grammar. Republic is the decade the A pictures ignored. The Oscar is Rooster. The doorway is Ethan. The 1971 pages remain on the desk.

He married Josephine Saenz in 1933. Their children include Michael, Mary Antonia, Patrick, and Melinda. The marriage ended in 1945. He married Esperanza Baur in 1946; that marriage ended in 1954. He married Pilar Pallete in 1954. Their children include Aissa, John Ethan, and Marisa. Patrick followed him into pictures. Ethan did too. Friends from the Ford sets describe a professional who was first on his mark and done with a false line. The man in the hospital corridor at the end had already been a climate and was now a name about to go on a wing. Both are the life.

The later years

In 1964 he lost a lung to cancer and five ribs with it. The studio wanted the illness quiet. He went public instead, called it the Big C, and treated the comeback as another picture that had to be finished. The pictures that followed — The Green Berets, Rooster, the cop parts, The Shootist — are a man working on one lung and refusing to let the walk become a waxwork. In 1974 he accepted a Harvard Lampoon invitation and rode a tank into Cambridge, a conservative star walking into a room that had come to jeer and leaving with the room on his side. He kept the politics public. He kept the schedule public. The 1971 pages did not recede because the pictures were beloved. They sat in the same drawer.

Home in the last decade was Newport Beach, a boat, Pilar, and the younger children. Patrick and Ethan were already in the business. Michael produced. Friends from the Ford sets still describe a professional who was first on his mark. Friends from the hospital corridor describe a name about to go on a wing. In 1979 Congress voted him a Congressional Gold Medal; Maureen O’Hara testified. The medal is a civic object. So is the interview. Both belong in the house.

Stomach cancer took the rest. He died on June 11, 1979, at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was seventy-two. The funeral was private enough. The country treated the death as the closing of a landscape. Orange County put his name on an airport. Research doctors put it on an institute. The John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica became a civic object: a hospital wing built out of a box-office name and a disease he had already beaten once and could not beat twice. President Jimmy Carter awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, after the body was gone. The walk had already been the country’s idea of a man on a horse for forty years. The last years were a man finishing the job on one lung, saying what he said, and leaving a hospital to argue with the hat.

After he was gone

Pilar and the children remained. Patrick and Ethan kept working. The institute kept the name on oncology. The Searchers stayed in the classroom and on late television. True Grit stayed as the statue and as a part young actors still steal from. The 1971 interview stayed in the charge sheet. New Westerns still have to decide what to do with his walk — imitate it, correct it, or pretend it was never the country’s idea of a man on a horse. None of those choices erases the pictures. None of them erases the pages.

He came out of Winterset, lost a scholarship, moved furniture on a Fox lot, rode a decade of cheap dust, walked into Ford’s coach in 1939, made Ethan Edwards and Rooster Cogburn, did not fight the war the stills assigned him, said what he said in 1971, and died in Los Angeles in 1979 with a hospital already reaching for the name. If you only remember the hat, you have the still. If you remember the B Westerns, the 4-F, the doorway, and the interview, you have him.

Portrait: Unknown photographer · Public domain (publicity still) · via Wikimedia Commons

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