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John Wayne
Marion Mitchell Morrison, known professionally as John Wayne and nicknamed Duke,
was an American actor and filmmaker. An Academy Award-winner for True Grit,
Wayne was among the top box office draws for three decades. Born in Winterset, Iowa,
Wayne grew up in Southern California. He found work at local film studios
when he lost his football scholarship
to the University of Southern California as a result of a bodysurfing accident. Initially working
for the Fox Film Corporation, he appeared mostly in small bit parts.
His first leading role came in Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail, which led
to leading roles in numerous B movies throughout the 1930s, many of them in the Western genre.
Wayne's career took off in 1939, with John Ford's Stagecoach making him an instant star. He went on
to star in 142 pictures. Biographer Ronald Davis said, "John Wayne personified
for millions the nation's frontier heritage. Eighty-three of his movies were Westerns,
and in them he played cowboys, cavalrymen, and unconquerable loners extracted
from the Republic's central creation myth." Wayne's other well-known Western roles include a
cattleman driving his herd north on the Chisholm Trail in Red River,
a Civil War veteran whose young niece is abducted by a tribe of Comanches in The Searchers,
and a troubled rancher competing with a lawyer
for a woman's hand in marriage in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. He is also remembered
for his roles in The Quiet Man, Rio Bravo, and The Longest Day.
In his final screen performance,
he starred as an aging gunfighter battling cancer in The Shootist. He appeared
with many important Hollywood stars of his era, and his last public appearance was
at the Academy Awards ceremony on April 9, 1979.
Early life
Winterset, Iowa,
in which Wayne was born in 1907]] 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 pounds at birth.
His middle name was soon changed from Robert to Mitchell when his parents decided
to name their next son Robert. Wayne's father, Clyde Leonard Morrison,
was the son of American Civil War veteran Marion Mitchell Morrison. Wayne's mother,
the former Mary "Molly" Alberta Brown, was from Lancaster County, Nebraska.
Wayne's ancestry included Scottish, Irish, Scots-Irish, and English. He was raised Presbyterian.
Wayne's family moved to Palmdale, California, and then in 1916 to Glendale, California,
where his father worked as a pharmacist. 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, a youth organization of the Freemasons.
He played football for the 1924 league champion Glendale High School team. Wayne applied
to the U.S. Naval Academy, but he was not accepted.
He instead attended the University of Southern California, majoring in pre-law.
He was a member of the Trojan Knights and Sigma Chi fraternities.
Wayne 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. As a favor
to USC football coach Howard 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 Tom Mix. Wayne soon moved to bit parts,
establishing a longtime friendship with the director who provided most of those roles, John Ford.
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.
Early career and breakthrough
Riders of Destiny ]] Marsha Hunt in Born to the West ]] Angel and the Badman ]] Jean Rogers
and Ward Bond in Conflict ]] 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 of
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. However,
only a handful of theaters were equipped to show the film in its widescreen process,
and the effort was largely wasted. Despite being highly regarded by modern critics,
the film was considered a huge box office flop at the time.
After the commercial failure of The Big Trail, Wayne was relegated to small roles in A-pictures,
including Columbia Pictures'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 which are still in use. Wayne's 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 main 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".
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, although actor Henry Fonda born two years earlier volunteered and served three years,
and family status, classified as 3-A. He repeatedly wrote to John Ford saying he wanted
to enlist, on one occasion inquiring whether he could get into Ford's military unit,
but consistently kept postponing it until after "he finished just one or two pictures".
Wayne did not attempt to prevent his reclassification as 1-A,
but Republic Studios was emphatically resistant to losing him. 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. Wayne toured U.S. bases and hospitals in the South Pacific
for three months in 1943 and 1944. with the USO. By many accounts, his failure
to serve in the military was 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." U.S. National Archives records indicate that Wayne had, in fact,
made an application to serve in the Office of Strategic Services,
that day's equivalent of the CIA, and had been accepted within the U.S. Army's allotted billet
to the OSS. William J. Donovan, OSS Commander,
wrote Wayne a letter informing him of his acceptance into the Field Photographic Unit,
but the letter went to his estranged wife Josephine's home. She never told him about it.
Donovan also issued an OSS Certificate of Service to Wayne.
Commercial success
Wake of the Red Witch ]] Wayne's first color film was 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. In 1949,
director Robert Rossen offered the starring role of All the King's Men to Wayne. Wayne refused,
believing the script to be un-American in many ways. Broderick Crawford,
who eventually got the role, won the 1949 Oscar for best male actor, ironically beating out Wayne,
who had been nominated for Sands of Iwo Jima. He lost the leading role in The Gunfighter
to Gregory Peck due to his refusal to work for Columbia Pictures, because its chief, Harry Cohn,
had mistreated him years before when he was a young contract player. Cohn had bought the project
for Wayne, but Wayne's grudge was too deep, and Cohn sold the script to Twentieth Century Fox,
which cast Peck in the role Wayne badly wanted, but for which he refused to bend.
Joan Blondell in Lady for a Night ]] One of Wayne's most popular roles was in The High
and the Mighty, directed by William Wellman, and based on a novel by Ernest K. Gann.
His portrayal of a heroic copilot won widespread acclaim.
Wayne also portrayed aviators in Flying Tigers, Flying Leathernecks, Island in the Sky,
The Wings of Eagles, and Jet Pilot. He appeared in nearly two dozen of John Ford's films
over twenty years, including She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, The Wings of Eagles,
and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
with James Stewart: the first movie in which he called someone "Pilgrim". Ford's The Searchers,
is often considered to contain Wayne's finest and most complex performance.
He named his youngest son Ethan after the character.
Later career
John Wayne won a Best Actor Oscar for True Grit.
This came 20 years after his only other nomination.
Wayne was also nominated as the producer of Best Picture for The Alamo,
one of two films he directed. The other was The Green Berets, the only major film made
during the Vietnam War to support the war. During the filming of The Green Berets, the Degar
or Montagnard people of Vietnam's Central Highlands, fierce fighters against communism,
bestowed on Wayne a brass bracelet that he wore in the film and all subsequent films.
Wayne took on the role of the eponymous detective in the crime drama McQ.
His last film was The Shootist, whose main character, J. B. Books, was dying of cancer—the illness
to which Wayne himself succumbed three years later. Batjac, the production company cofounded
by Wayne, was named after the fictional shipping company Batjak in Wake of the Red Witch,
a film based on the novel by Garland Roark.
Batjac was the arm through which Wayne produced many films for himself and other stars.
Its best-known non-Wayne production was Seven Men From Now,
which started the classic collaboration between director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott.
In the Motion Picture Herald Top Ten Money-Making Western Stars poll, Wayne was listed in 1936
and 1939. He appeared in the similar Box Office poll in 1939 and 1940.
While these two polls are really an indication only of the popularity of series stars,
Wayne also appeared in the Top Ten Money Makers Poll of all films from 1949 to 1957 and 1958
to 1974, taking first place in 1950, 1951, 1954, and 1971. With a total of 25 years on the list,
Wayne has more appearances than any other star, surpassing Clint Eastwood who is in second place.
 [^]  In later years, Wayne was recognized as a sort of American natural resource,
and his various critics, of his performances and his politics, viewed him with more respect.
Abbie Hoffman, the radical of the 1960s, paid tribute to Wayne's singularity, saying,
"I like Wayne's wholeness, his style. As for his politics,
well—I suppose even cavemen felt a little admiration for the dinosaurs that were trying
to gobble them up." Reviewing The Cowboys, Vincent Canby of The New York Times,
who did not particularly care for the film, wrote: "Wayne is, of course,
marvelously indestructible, and he has become an almost perfect father figure".
Radio work
Like most Hollywood stars, Wayne appeared as a guest on various 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 films,
on programs like 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 exist, 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.
Personal life
Wayne was married three times and divorced twice. He was fluent in Spanish and his three wives,
each of Hispanic descent, were Josephine Alicia Saenz, Esperanza Baur, and Pilar Pallete.
He had four children with Josephine: Michael Wayne, Mary Antonia "Toni" Wayne LaCava,
Patrick Wayne, and Melinda Wayne Munoz. He had three more children with Pilar: Aissa Wayne,
John Ethan Wayne, and Marisa Wayne. Pilar Pallete
at Knott's Berry Farm in 1971]] Several of Wayne's children entered the film
and television industry; Wayne's son Ethan was billed as John Ethan Wayne in a few films,
and played one of the leads in the 1990s update of the Adam-12 television series.
His stormiest divorce was from Esperanza Baur, a former Mexican actress. She believed that Wayne
and co-star Gail Russell were having an affair, a claim which both Wayne and Russell denied.
The night the film Angel and the Badman wrapped, there was the usual party for cast and crew,
and Wayne came home very late. Esperanza was in a drunken rage by the time he arrived,
and she attempted to shoot him as he walked through the front door.
Wayne had several high-profile affairs, including one with Marlene Dietrich that lasted
for three years and one with Merle Oberon that lasted from 1938 to 1947. After his separation
from his wife, Pilar, in 1973, Wayne became romantically involved and lived
with his former secretary Pat Stacy until his death in 1979.
She published a biography of her life with him in 1983, titled Duke: A Love Story.
Wayne's hair began to thin in the 1940s, and he had begun to wear a hairpiece
by the end of the decade. He was occasionally seen in public without the hairpiece.
During a widely noted appearance at Harvard University, Wayne was asked
by a student "Is it true that your toupée is real mohair?" He responded: "Well sir,
that's real hair. Not mine, but real hair." A close friend of Wayne's,
California Congressman Alphonzo E. Bell, Jr., wrote of him, "Duke's personality
and sense of humor were very close to what the general public saw on the big screen.
It is perhaps best shown in these words he had engraved on a plaque: 'Each of us is a mixture of
some good and some not so good qualities. In considering one's fellow man it's important
to remember the good things. We should refrain from making judgments just,
because a fella happens to be a dirty,
rotten SOB.'" Wayne biographer Michael Munn chronicled Wayne's drinking habits. According
to Sam O'Steen's memoir, Cut to the Chase, studio directors knew
to shoot Wayne's scenes before noon, because by afternoon he "was a mean drunk".
He had been a chain smoker of cigarettes since young adulthood and was diagnosed
with lung cancer in 1964. He underwent successful surgery to remove his entire left lung
and four ribs. Despite efforts by his business associates to prevent him from going public
with his illness for fear that it would cost him work, Wayne announced he had cancer
and called on the public to get preventive examinations. Five years later,
Wayne was declared cancer-free. Wayne has been credited
with coining the term "The Big C" as a euphemism for cancer.
Wayne's height has been perennially described as at least. He was a Freemason,
a Master Mason in Marion McDaniel Lodge No. 56 F&AM, in Tucson, Arizona.
He became a 32nd Degree Scottish Rite Mason
and later joined the Al Malaikah Shrine Temple in Los Angeles.
He became a member of the York Rite. During the early 1960s, John Wayne traveled extensively
to Panama, during which he purchased the island of Taborcillo off the main coast. It was sold
by his estate at his death. Wayne's yacht, the Wild Goose, was one of his favorite possessions.
He kept it docked in Newport Harbor and it was listed on the U.S.
National Register of Historic Places in 2011. Wayne was fond of literature,
his favorite authors being Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.
His favorite books were David Copperfield, and Conan Doyle's historical novels The White Company
and Sir Nigel.
Political views
Throughout most of his life, Wayne was a vocally prominent conservative Republican in Hollywood,
supporting anti-communist positions. Initially a self-described socialist
during his college years, he voted for Democratic President Franklin D.
Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election and expressed admiration for Roosevelt's successor,
fellow Democratic President Harry S. Truman. He took part in creating the Motion Picture Alliance
for the Preservation of American Ideals in February 1944,
and was elected president of that organization in 1949. An ardent anti-communist
and vocal supporter of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he made Big Jim McLain
with himself as a HUAC investigator to demonstrate his support for the cause of anti-communism.
Declassified Soviet documents reveal that, despite being a fan of Wayne's movies,
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin contemplated assassination of Wayne
for his frequently espoused anti-communist politics. Richard Nixon
and Henry Kissinger in San Clemente, California,
July 1972]] Wayne supported Vice President Richard Nixon in the presidential election of 1960,
but expressed his vision of patriotism when John F. Kennedy won the election: "I didn't vote
for him, but he's my president, and I hope he does a good job." He used his iconic star power
to support conservative causes, including rallying support for the Vietnam War by producing,
codirecting, and starring in the financially successful, critically panned The Green Berets. Due
to his status as the highest profile Republican star in Hollywood,
wealthy Texas Republican Party backers asked Wayne to run for national office in 1968,
as had his friend and fellow actor Senator George Murphy. He declined,
joking that he did not believe the public would seriously consider an actor in the White House.
Instead, he supported his friend Ronald Reagan's runs for Governor of California in 1966 and 1970.
He was asked to be the running mate for Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1968,
but he rejected the offer and actively campaigned for Richard Nixon;
Wayne addressed the Republican National Convention on its opening day in August 1968. For a while,
he was also a member of the anti-communist John Birch Society. Wayne openly differed
with the Republican Party over the issue of the Panama Canal,
as he supported the Panama Canal Treaty in the mid-1970s; conservatives had wanted the U.S.
to retain full control of the canal, but Wayne believed that the Panamanians had the right
to the canal and sided with President Jimmy Carter and the Democrats.
Wayne was a close friend of the late Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos Herrera,
and Wayne's first wife, Josephine, was a native of Panama.
His support of the treaty brought him hate mail for the first time in his life.  [^]  In May 1971,
Playboy magazine published an interview with Wayne which resulted in a firestorm of controversy.
Wayne expressed his support for the Vietnam War, and made headlines
for his resolute opinions about social issues
and race relations in the United States: In the same Playboy interview, Wayne also responded
to questions about whether social programs were good for the country:
Death
Although he enrolled in a cancer vaccine study in an attempt to ward off the disease,
Wayne died of stomach cancer at the age of 72 on June 11, 1979, at the UCLA Medical Center,
and was buried in the Pacific View Memorial Park cemetery in Corona del Mar, Newport Beach.
According to his son Patrick and his grandson Matthew Muñoz,
a priest in the California Diocese of Orange, he converted
to Roman Catholicism shortly before his death. He requested that his tombstone read "Feo,
Fuerte y Formal", a Spanish epitaph Wayne described as meaning "ugly, strong, and dignified".
The grave, which went unmarked for 20 years, is now marked with a quotation
from his controversial 1971 Playboy interview: "Tomorrow is the most important thing in life.
Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands.
It hopes we've learned something from yesterday." Among the cast
and crew who filmed The Conqueror on location near St. George, Utah,
91 developed some form of cancer at various times, including stars Wayne, Susan Hayward,
and Agnes Moorehead, and director Dick Powell. The film was shot in southwestern Utah, east of
and generally downwind from the site of recent U.S.
Government nuclear weapons tests in southeastern Nevada. Many contend that radioactive fallout
from these tests contaminated the film location and poisoned the film crew working there.
Despite the suggestion that Wayne's 1964 lung cancer and his 1979 stomach cancer resulted
from nuclear contamination, he believed his lung cancer
to have been a result of his six-packs-a-day cigarette habit.
Cultural image as an American icon
Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy, 1955]] Wayne rose beyond the typical recognition for a famous actor
to that of an enduring icon who symbolized and communicated American values and ideals.
By the middle of his career, Wayne had developed a larger-than-life image,
and as his career progressed, he selected roles that would not compromise his off-screen image.
At a party in 1957, Wayne confronted actor Kirk Douglas about the latter's decision
to play the role of Vincent van Gogh in the film Lust for Life, saying: "Christ, Kirk,
how can you play a part like that? There's so goddamn few of us left. We got to play strong,
tough characters. Not these weak queers." Wayne's rise
to being the quintessential movie war hero began to take shape four years after World War II,
when Sands of Iwo Jima was released. His footprints
at Grauman's Chinese theater in Hollywood were laid in concrete that contained sand from Iwo Jima.
His status grew so large and legendary that
when Japanese Emperor Hirohito visited the United States in 1975, he asked to meet John Wayne,
the symbolic representation of his country's former enemy. Likewise
when soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visited the United State in 1959 he made two requests:
to visit Disneyland and meet Wayne. Wayne is the only actor
to appear in every edition of the annual Harris Poll of Most Popular Film Actors,
and the only actor to appear on the list after his death.
Wayne has been in the top ten in this poll for 19 consecutive years, starting in 1994,
15 years after his death.
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