John Wayne

• 1. Introduction

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  Marion Robert Morrison weighed thirteen pounds when he was born at 224 South Second Street in Winterset, Iowa, on the 26th of May 1907. A fireman in Glendale, California, later renamed him for the dog he never went anywhere without, a huge Airedale Terrier called Duke. The boy preferred Duke to Marion, and the world would come to know him as John Wayne. He appeared in a total of 179 film and television productions and ranked among the top box-office draws for three decades. Yet the man behind that frontier image was a USC pre-law student who lost his football scholarship to a bodysurfing accident. How did a prop boy moving studio furniture become, in the words of biographer Ronald Davis, someone who personified for millions the nation's frontier heritage? Why did his failure to serve in World War II haunt him for the rest of his life? And how did a screen name, chosen while he sat absent from the room, outlast the man who carried it?

• 2. The Name And The Break

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  Director Raoul Walsh spotted him moving studio furniture as a prop boy and cast him in his first starring role in The Big Trail in 1930. Walsh first suggested Anthony Wayne, after the Revolutionary War general Mad Anthony Wayne. Fox Studios chief Winfield Sheehan rejected that as sounding too Italian, then agreed to John Wayne. Wayne was not even present for the discussion, and his pay was raised to one hundred and five dollars a week.

  The Big Trail was meant to be the first big-budget outdoor spectacle of the sound era, made at a cost of over two million dollars. It used hundreds of extras and wide vistas of the American Southwest, and was filmed in both a standard 35 mm version and the new 70 mm Grandeur process. Many in the audience who saw it in Grandeur stood and cheered, but only a handful of theaters could show the widescreen process. The film was a box-office failure, though modern critics came to regard it highly.

  John Ford's Stagecoach in 1939 became the second breakthrough. Because of Wayne's track record in low-budget Westerns, Ford struggled to finance an A-budget film. After every major studio rejected it, he struck a deal with independent producer Walter Wanger, under which Claire Trevor, a much bigger star, received top billing. Cast member Louise Platt recalled Ford predicting that Wayne would become the biggest star ever because of his appeal as the archetypal everyman.

• 3. Poverty Row Craft

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  From 1932 to 1933, Wayne starred in six B-movie Westerns for Leon Schlesinger Productions and Warner Bros. He disliked their constant reuse of footage starring Ken Maynard and their cheap production values, owed to Schlesinger's focus on his Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. By Wayne's own estimation, he appeared in about eighty of these horse operas between 1930 and 1939. In Riders of Destiny in 1933, he became one of the first singing cowboys of film, though the voice was dubbed.

  Stuntman Yakima Canutt worked with Wayne to develop and perfect stunts and onscreen fisticuffs techniques still in use. One innovation credited to Wayne in these early Westerns was letting the good guys fight as convincingly as the bad guys, by not always making them fight clean. He explained it directly: "Before I came along, it was standard practice that the hero must always fight clean. The heavy was allowed to hit the hero in the head with a chair or throw a kerosene lamp at him or kick him in the stomach, but the hero could only knock the villain down politely and then wait until he rose. I changed all that. I threw chairs and lamps. I fought hard and I fought dirty. I fought to win."

  He also credited his walk, talk, and persona to his acquaintance with Wyatt Earp, who was a good friend of silent Western star Tom Mix. It was through Mix and Ford, hired as a favor to USC coach Howard Jones, that Wayne first reached a film set as a prop boy and extra.

• 4. The War He Missed

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  America's entry into World War II drew support from every sector, and Hollywood was no exception. Wayne was exempted from service due to his age, thirty-four at the time of Pearl Harbor, and his family status, classified as 3-A. He repeatedly wrote to John Ford saying he wanted to enlist, once asking whether he could join Ford's military unit. Republic Studios resisted losing its only A-list actor under contract. Its president, Herbert J. Yates, threatened a lawsuit if Wayne walked away, and the studio intervened in the Selective Service process to request his further deferment.

  U.S. National Archives records show Wayne did apply to serve in the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA, but the bid failed. He toured U.S. bases and hospitals in the South Pacific for three months in 1943 and 1944 with the United Service Organizations. During that trip he carried out a request from OSS head William J. Donovan to assess whether General Douglas MacArthur or his staff were hindering OSS work. Donovan later issued Wayne an OSS Certificate of Service.

  By many accounts his failure to serve became the most painful part of his life. His widow wrote that his patriotism in later decades sprang from guilt: "He would become a 'superpatriot' for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying home."

• 5. Grudges And Refusals

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  Wayne lost the leading role of Jimmy Ringo in The Gunfighter in 1950 to Gregory Peck because of his refusal to work for Columbia Pictures. Its chief, Harry Cohn, had mistreated him as a young contract player. Cohn had bought the project for Wayne, but the grudge was too deep, so he sold the script to Twentieth Century Fox, which cast Peck. The lost role carried a strange echo. The character of J. B. Books in his final film was also a dying gunfighter, and The Shootist shared numerous plot similarities with The Gunfighter.

  Director Robert Rossen offered Wayne the lead in All the King's Men in 1949, but Wayne refused, calling the script un-American in many ways. Broderick Crawford took the role and won the 1949 Oscar for Best Actor, beating Wayne, who had been nominated for Sands of Iwo Jima.

  The pattern of refusals ran for decades. Wayne turned down the lead in High Noon in 1952, feeling its story was an allegory against blacklisting, and later called it the most un-American thing he had ever seen. He withdrew from The Dirty Dozen in 1967 to make The Green Berets. At sixty-three he was passed over for Dirty Harry in favor of the forty-one-year-old Clint Eastwood. He even declined the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles in 1974, fearing the dialogue was too dirty for his family-friendly image, though he told Mel Brooks he would be first in line to see it.

• 6. The Roles That Lasted

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  Rooster Cogburn, a cantankerous one-eyed marshal in True Grit, won Wayne the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 42nd Academy Awards in 1969. He reprised the role in Rooster Cogburn in 1975, this time opposite Katharine Hepburn. The character had become inseparable from the man.

  The Searchers in 1956 was the first film in which Wayne called someone Pilgrim, and it is often considered to contain his finest and most complex performance. He played a Civil War veteran whose niece is abducted by a tribe of Comanches. Maoist filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard captured the contradiction Wayne provoked, asking how he could hate Wayne for upholding Goldwater yet love him when he takes Natalie Wood in his arms in the last reel of that film.

  Wayne appeared in nearly two dozen of John Ford's films over twenty years, among them She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man with Maureen O'Hara, and Rio Bravo with Dean Martin. Howard Hawks, who directed him in five films, felt Wayne became a much better actor after losing a lung. He explained that Wayne paused in the strangest places simply because he no longer had the breath, and that the device kept the audience watching, waiting to see what came next.

• 7. Politics And Persona

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  Wayne was a vocally prominent conservative Republican who supported anti-communist positions, yet he voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 and admired Harry S. Truman. He took part in creating the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in February 1944 and was elected its president in 1949. As a supporter of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he acted as an inside enforcer of the blacklist, undermining the careers of actors and writers. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin is alleged to have said Wayne should be assassinated for his anti-communist politics, despite being a fan of his movies.

  When John F. Kennedy won in 1960, Wayne expressed a different kind of patriotism: "I didn't vote for him, but he's my president, and I hope he does a good job." In 1968 wealthy Texas Republicans asked him to run for national office, but he declined, joking that the public would never seriously consider an actor in the White House. He supported his friend Ronald Reagan's runs for Governor of California instead.

  His off-screen image governed his choices. At a party in 1957 he confronted Kirk Douglas over playing Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life, telling him they had to play strong, tough characters. A May 1971 Playboy interview, in which he said he believed in white supremacy until Black Americans were educated to a point of responsibility, resurfaced in February 2019 and brought calls to rename John Wayne Airport, calls that as of 2026 the name has survived.

• 8. Duke And His Diseases

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  Wayne had been a chain smoker of cigarettes since young adulthood and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1964. He underwent surgery to remove his entire left lung and two ribs. Against the advice of business associates who feared it would cost him work, he announced the diagnosis and urged the public to get preventive examinations. He has been credited with coining the term the Big C as a euphemism for cancer. Five years later he was declared cancer-free.

  Though he enrolled in a cancer-vaccine study, Wayne died of stomach cancer on the 11th of June 1979, at age seventy-two, at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. According to his son Patrick and his grandson Matthew Munoz, a priest in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, Wayne converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before his death. He requested that his tombstone read Feo, Fuerte y Formal, which he described as meaning ugly, strong, and dignified.

  The honors arrived in his final months and after. On his seventy-second birthday, the 26th of May 1979, Wayne was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, with figures from Maureen O'Hara to Frank Sinatra testifying to Congress in support. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His grave remained unmarked for twenty years. Since 1999 it has carried his own words about tomorrow: that it comes into us at midnight very clean, perfect when it arrives, and hopes we have learned something from yesterday.