John Wayne

Any John Wayne biography begins far from Hollywood, in the small farming town of Winterset, Iowa, where he was born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907 ^[1]. His father, Clyde Morrison, was a pharmacist whose ventures rarely prospered, and his mother, Mary Alberta Brown, kept the household together through years of financial strain. When a younger brother arrived, the family reportedly reassigned the name Robert to the new baby, and the future actor grew up as Marion Michael Morrison ^[2].

Around 1914 the Morrisons left Iowa for southern California, first attempting to farm near Lancaster on the edge of the Mojave Desert, then settling in Glendale after the farm failed ^[1]. The boy delivered newspapers, worked odd jobs, and acquired the nickname that stuck for life: neighbors called him Duke after the family's Airedale terrier, and he preferred it to Marion ^[2].

At Glendale High School he was a strong student and a standout football player. His athletic ability won him a scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he played tackle for the Trojans beginning in 1925. A shoulder injury, often attributed to a bodysurfing accident, ended his football career and with it his scholarship, forcing him to leave the university and look for steady work ^[3].

Film work came to him almost by accident. Through football connections, including the cowboy star Tom Mix, Morrison found summer employment at the Fox Film Corporation as a laborer and prop man in the late 1920s ^[3]. On the studio lots he met the director John Ford, who put him to work in bit parts and became the single most important professional relationship of his life ^[1].

His first leading role arrived in 1930, when director Raoul Walsh cast the unknown prop man in the expensive widescreen Western The Big Trail. Studio executives judged the name Marion Morrison unsuitable for a Western hero, and he was billed as John Wayne ^[2]. The film failed commercially, a casualty of its costly widescreen format during the early Depression, and Wayne spent most of the 1930s grinding out low budget Westerns and serials for minor studios on what was known as Poverty Row ^[3].

The apprenticeship lasted nearly a decade. Then, in 1939, John Ford cast him as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, a Western that critics embraced and audiences flocked to see. Ford's camera introduced Wayne with a dramatic tracking shot, and the role transformed a B movie journeyman into a major star at the age of 31 ^[4]. Anyone asking who was John Wayne before 1939 would have found a hardworking but obscure contract player; after Stagecoach, he never left the front rank of Hollywood leading men.

The list of John Wayne achievements rests chiefly on the Westerns and war films he made between the 1940s and the 1970s. With Ford he built a remarkable body of work: the cavalry trilogy of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), the Irish romance The Quiet Man (1952), and The Searchers (1956), in which Wayne played the obsessive, racially embittered Ethan Edwards, a performance many critics now rank among the finest in American film ^[4]. Howard Hawks drew comparable depth from him in Red River (1948), where Wayne played an aging, tyrannical cattle baron, and in the influential Western Rio Bravo (1959) ^[1].

During the Second World War, Wayne did not serve in the military, a circumstance that biographers attribute to his age, family obligations, and studio pressure, and one that reportedly troubled him afterward ^[5]. He instead became the screen's foremost fighting man in pictures such as Flying Tigers (1942), They Were Expendable (1945), and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), the last of which brought him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor ^[2].

Wayne also worked behind the camera. Through his production company, Batjac, he produced numerous films, and in 1960 he directed, produced, and starred in The Alamo, an expensive epic about the 1836 siege that he had pursued for years; it received a Best Picture nomination despite mixed reviews ^[3]. In 1969 he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as the one eyed, hard drinking marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, a role he reprised in the 1975 sequel ^[1]. Exhibitors' polls placed him among the top ten box office stars for 25 years, a record of sustained popularity no contemporary matched ^[4].

Wayne married three times, and each of his wives was of Hispanic descent. His first marriage, to Josephine Saenz in 1933, produced four children, including Michael and Patrick Wayne, both of whom later worked in the film industry; the couple divorced in 1945 ^[2]. A stormy second marriage to the Mexican actress Esperanza Baur ended in a widely publicized divorce in 1954. That same year he married Pilar Pallete, a Peruvian actress, with whom he had three more children, among them Ethan Wayne; the two separated in 1973 but never divorced ^[5].

Away from the set he was an avid chess player, a poker enthusiast, and a devoted yachtsman who spent long stretches aboard his converted minesweeper, the Wild Goose, based near his home in Newport Beach, California ^[5].

His politics became almost as famous as his films. A vocal conservative and anticommunist, Wayne served as president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in the late 1940s and campaigned for Republican candidates, including his friend Ronald Reagan ^[3]. His 1968 film The Green Berets, which he codirected and starred in, defended American involvement in Vietnam and drew fierce criticism even as it performed well commercially ^[4]. A 1971 Playboy interview containing disparaging remarks about Black Americans and Native Americans generated controversy then and has drawn renewed condemnation in the decades since ^[6].

In September 1964 doctors removed a cancerous left lung and two ribs after Wayne was diagnosed with lung cancer, the consequence of decades of heavy cigarette smoking ^[5]. Rather than conceal the illness, he announced it publicly, declaring that he had beaten what he called the Big C, and he urged Americans to get preventive examinations. He returned to work within months, filming The Sons of Katie Elder in the high altitude of Durango, Mexico, in 1965 ^[2].

The films of his final decade traded on his age rather than hiding it. True Grit (1969) and its Oscar were followed by a run of late Westerns including Big Jake (1971), The Cowboys (1972), in which his character is killed on screen, and the detective pictures McQ (1974) and Brannigan (1975) ^[1]. His farewell came in The Shootist (1976), directed by Don Siegel, where Wayne played J. B. Books, an aging gunfighter dying of cancer. The parallel with his own life gave the film an elegiac weight that critics noted at the time and that has only deepened since ^[4].

Stomach cancer was diagnosed in early 1979, and Wayne made his last major public appearance that April, presenting the Best Picture award at the Academy Awards ceremony to a standing ovation. He died at the UCLA Medical Center in the Westwood district of Los Angeles on June 11, 1979, at the age of 72, and was buried at Pacific View Memorial Park in Corona del Mar, California ^[1]. Shortly before his death, Congress voted to strike a Congressional Gold Medal in his honor, inscribed simply John Wayne, American ^[6].

Few careers in cinema cast a longer shadow. Wayne appeared in more than 170 films across half a century, and his unhurried walk, distinctive drawl, and imposing frame became fixtures of world popular culture ^[3]. Film historians credit him, together with Ford and Hawks, with elevating the Western from cheap program filler to a serious American art form, and The Searchers in particular has shaped generations of directors ^[4].

Official honors accumulated after his death. President Jimmy Carter signed the Congressional Gold Medal legislation, and in 1980 Wayne was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom ^[6]. Orange County, California, renamed its airport John Wayne Airport in 1979, and his family established the John Wayne Cancer Foundation to fund research and education, honoring his own public battle with the disease ^[5]. For years after he died, polls of American moviegoers continued to list him among the country's favorite film stars.

His reputation is now contested as well as celebrated. The 1971 interview remarks and the treatment of Native Americans in many of his Westerns have prompted campaigns to remove his name from public institutions, and scholars continue to debate the gap between the man and the myth ^[6]. Yet the basic John Wayne facts are not in dispute: a pharmacist's son from small town Iowa became, for millions of viewers around the world, the face of the American West, and the films he left behind still define what a Western looks like.