John Wayne
Marion Robert Morrison, known professionally as John Wayne, was an American actor. Nicknamed "Duke", he became a popular icon through his starring roles in films which were produced during Hollywood's Golden Age, especially in Western and war movies. His career flourished from the silent film era of the 1920s through the American New Wave, as he appeared in a total of 179 film and television productions. He was among the top box-office draws for three decades and appeared with many other important Hollywood stars of his era. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected Wayne as one of the greatest male stars of classic American cinema.
Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, but grew up in Southern California. After losing his football scholarship to the University of Southern California due to a bodysurfing accident, he began working for the Fox Film Corporation. He appeared mostly in small parts, but gained a leading role in Raoul Walsh's Western The Big Trail, an early widescreen film epic that was a box-office failure. He played leading roles in numerous during the 1930s, most of them also Westerns, without becoming a major name. John Ford's Stagecoach made Wayne a mainstream star, and he starred in 142 motion pictures altogether. According to biographer Ronald Davis, "John Wayne personified for millions the nation's frontier heritage."
Wayne's other roles in Westerns included a cattleman driving his herd on the Chisholm Trail in Red River, a Civil War veteran whose niece is abducted by a tribe of Comanches in The Searchers, a troubled rancher competing with a lawyer for a woman's hand in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and a cantankerous one-eyed marshal in True Grit, for which he received the Academy Award for Best Actor. Wayne is also remembered for his roles in The Quiet Man with Maureen O'Hara, Rio Bravo with Dean Martin, and The Longest Day. In his final screen performance, he starred as an aging gunfighter suffering from cancer in The Shootist. Wayne made his last public appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony on April 9, 1979, and died of stomach cancer two months later. In 1980, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor of the United States.
Early life
Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907, at 224 South Second Street in Winterset, Iowa. The local paper, Winterset Madisonian, reported on page 4 of the edition of May 30, 1907, that Wayne weighed 13 lb at birth. Wayne claimed his middle name was soon changed from Robert to Michael when his parents decided to name their next son Robert, but extensive research has found no such legal change, although it might have been changed informally or the documentation may have been lost. Wayne's legal name apparently remained Marion Robert Morrison his entire life, although to this day his original name is almost always referred to as Marion Michael Morrison.Wayne's father, Clyde Leonard Morrison, was the son of Marion Mitchell Morrison, a veteran who had served in the Union army during the American Civil War. Wayne's mother, the former Mary "Molly" Alberta Brown, was from Lancaster County, Nebraska. Wayne had Scottish, Scotch-Irish, English, and Irish ancestry. His great-great-grandfather Robert Morrison left County Antrim, Ireland, with his mother, arriving in New York in 1799 and eventually settling in Adams County, Ohio. The Morrisons were originally from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. He was raised Presbyterian.
Wayne's family moved to Palmdale, California, and then in 1916 to Glendale at 404 Isabel Street, where his father worked as a pharmacist. He attended Glendale Union High School, where he performed well in both sports and academics. Wayne was part of his high school's football team and its debating team. He was also the president of the Latin Society and contributed to the school's newspaper sports column.
A local fireman at the station on his route to school in Glendale started calling him "Little Duke" because he never went anywhere without his huge Airedale Terrier, Duke. He preferred "Duke" to "Marion", and the nickname stuck. Wayne attended Wilson Middle School in Glendale. As a teen, he worked in an ice-cream shop for a man who shod horses for Hollywood studios. He was also active as a member of the Order of DeMolay, which he was later inducted into the Hall of Fame. He played football for the 1924 league champion Glendale High School team.
Wayne applied to the U.S. Naval Academy, but was not accepted due to poor grades. Instead, he attended the University of Southern California, majoring in pre-law. He was a member of the Trojan Knights and Sigma Chi fraternities. Wayne, who stood tall, also played on the USC football team under coach Howard Jones. A broken collarbone injury curtailed his athletic career; Wayne later noted that he was too terrified of Jones' reaction to reveal the actual cause of his injury, a bodysurfing accident. He lost his athletic scholarship and, without funds, had to leave the university.
Career
Early works and first lead role
As a favor to coach Jones, who had given silent Western film star Tom Mix tickets to USC games, director John Ford and Mix hired Wayne as a prop boy and extra. Wayne later credited his walk, talk, and persona to his acquaintance with Wyatt Earp, who was good friends with Mix. Wayne soon moved to bit parts, establishing a longtime friendship with Ford, the director who provided most of those roles. Early in this period, he had a minor, uncredited role as a guard in the 1926 film Bardelys the Magnificent. Wayne also appeared with his USC teammates playing football in Brown of Harvard, The Dropkick, and Salute and Columbia's Maker of Men. While working for Fox Film Corporation in bit roles, Wayne was given on-screen credit as "Duke Morrison" only once, in Words and Music. Director Raoul Walsh saw him moving studio furniture while working as a prop boy and cast him in his first starring role in The Big Trail. For his screen name, Walsh suggested "Anthony Wayne", after Revolutionary War General "Mad" Anthony Wayne. Fox Studios chief Winfield Sheehan rejected it as sounding "too Italian". Walsh then suggested "John Wayne". Sheehan agreed, and the name was set. Wayne was not even present for the discussion. His pay was raised to $105 a week.The Big Trail was to be the first big-budget outdoor spectacle of the sound era, made at a then-staggering cost over $2 million, using hundreds of extras and wide vistas of the American Southwest, still largely unpopulated at the time. To take advantage of the breathtaking scenery, it was filmed in two versions, a standard 35 mm version and another in the new 70 mm Grandeur film process, using an innovative camera and lenses. Many in the audience who saw it in Grandeur stood and cheered, but only a handful of theaters were equipped to show the film in its widescreen process, and the effort was largely wasted at the time. The film was considered a huge box-office flop at the time, but came to be highly regarded by modern critics.
Subsequent films and breakthrough
After the commercial failure of The Big Trail, Wayne was relegated to small roles in A pictures, including Columbia's The Deceiver, in which he played a corpse. He appeared in the serial The Three Musketeers, an updated version of the Alexandre Dumas novel in which the protagonists were soldiers in the French Foreign Legion in then-contemporary North Africa. He played the lead, with his name over the title, in many low-budget Poverty Row Westerns, mostly at Monogram Pictures and serials for Mascot Pictures Corporation. By Wayne's own estimation, he appeared in about 80 of these horse operas from 1930 to 1939. In Riders of Destiny, he became one of the first singing cowboys of film, albeit via dubbing. Wayne also appeared in some of the Three Mesquiteers Westerns, whose title was a play on the Dumas classic. He was mentored by stuntmen in riding and other Western skills. Stuntman Yakima Canutt and Wayne developed and perfected stunts and onscreen fisticuffs techniques that are still in use. One of the main innovations with which Wayne is credited in these early Poverty Row Westerns is allowing the good guys to fight as convincingly as the bad guys, by not always making them fight clean. Wayne claimed, "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."Wayne's second breakthrough role came with John Ford's Stagecoach. Because of Wayne's B-movie status and track record in low-budget Westerns throughout the 1930s, Ford had difficulty getting financing for what was to be an A-budget film. After rejection by all the major studios, Ford struck a deal with independent producer Walter Wanger in which Claire Trevor—a much bigger star at the time—received top billing. Stagecoach was a huge critical and financial success, and Wayne became a mainstream star. Cast member Louise Platt credited Ford as saying at the time that Wayne would become the biggest star ever because of his appeal as the archetypal "everyman".
1940s
America's entry into World War II resulted in a deluge of support for the war effort from all sectors of society, and Hollywood was no exception. Wayne was exempted from service due to his age and family status. Wayne repeatedly wrote to Ford saying he wanted to enlist, on one occasion inquiring whether he could get into Ford's military unit. Wayne did not attempt to prevent his reclassification as 1-A, but Republic Studios was emphatically resistant to losing him, since he was their only A-list actor under contract. Herbert J. Yates, president of Republic, threatened Wayne with a lawsuit if he walked away from his contract, and Republic Pictures intervened in the Selective Service process, requesting Wayne's further deferment.U.S. National Archives records indicate that Wayne, in fact, did make an application to serve in the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the modern CIA, but his bid was ultimately unsuccessful. Wayne toured U.S. bases and hospitals in the South Pacific for three months in 1943 and 1944, with the United Service Organizations. During this trip, he carried out a request from William J. Donovan, head of the OSS, to assess whether General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the South West Pacific Area, or his staff were hindering the work of the OSS. Donovan later issued Wayne an OSS Certificate of Service to memorialize Wayne's contribution to the OSS mission. By many accounts, his failure to serve in the military later became the most painful part of his life. His widow later suggested that his patriotism in later decades sprang from guilt, writing: "He would become a 'superpatriot' for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying home."
Wayne's first color film was The Shepherd of the Hills, in which he co-starred with his longtime friend Harry Carey. The following year, he appeared in his only film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, the Technicolor epic Reap the Wild Wind, in which he co-starred with Ray Milland and Paulette Goddard; it was one of the rare times he played a character with questionable values.
Like most Hollywood stars of his era, Wayne appeared as a guest on radio programs, such as: The Hedda Hopper Show and The Louella Parsons Show. He made a number of appearances in dramatic roles, mainly recreations for radio of his own film roles, on such programs as Screen Directors Playhouse and Lux Radio Theatre. For six months in 1942, Wayne starred in his own radio adventure series, Three Sheets to the Wind, produced by film director Tay Garnett. In the series, an international spy/detective show, Wayne played Dan O'Brien, a detective who used alcoholism as a mask for his investigatory endeavors. The show was intended by Garnett to be a pilot of sorts for a film version, though the motion picture never came to fruition. No episodes of the series featuring Wayne seem to have survived, though a demonstration episode with Brian Donlevy in the leading role does exist. Wayne, not Donlevy, played the role throughout the series' run on NBC. Director Robert Rossen offered to Wayne the starring role in All the King's Men, but Wayne refused, believing the script to be "un-American in many ways." Broderick Crawford, who was eventually cast in the role, won the 1949 Oscar for Best Actor, ironically beating out Wayne, who had been nominated for Sands of Iwo Jima.