THE AMERICAN DUKE

And scorn he does, though not always unjustly. Wills shows that much of Wayne’s public behavior was compensation for private failings. The actor’s refusal to enlist during World War II, for example, led to a kind of penance afterward, when he practiced McCarthyite politics and made ideologically charged movies. And his confused sense of manhood led him to submit to the cruelties of tyrannical director John Ford. But Wills’s insights are buried under heaps of biographical and cinematic trivia and interrupted by windy excursions into mythological analysis. His conclusion — that Wayne, for good or ill, represents the dynamism of the American frontier — is disappointingly banal.

John Wayne got off to a slow start. According to legend, he was lifting boxes on the Fox lot in 1929 when a director thought he “moved well.” When the Depression hit, Wayne spent a tedious decade making lowbudget serials. He attracted notice in 1939 with Stagecoach, his first film with Ford, in which he dazzled as The Ringo Kid. When the war broke out, Wayne recognized the opportunity of a lifetime — as Wills notes, Wayne was “at the peak of his physical attractiveness, and the need for male stars was increasing as those in Wayne’s age bracket went off to some form of military service.”

Wayne was 34 years old in 1941, with four children. Many of his peers signed up to fight: Clark Gable (40 years old), Tyrone Power (28), Henry Fonda (36), Robert Montgomery (37), and Jimmy Stewart (33). While they were serving, Wayne made three films with Marlene Dietrich and wrecked his family with a highprofile affair with the actress Esperanza Bauer. He wrote to Ford that he could not fill out the proper military forms because he had no typewriter on location, and also that his wife, from whom he was not yet divorced, would not allow him to retrieve necessary documents from home. “In short,” Wills quips, “the dog ate his homework.”

Wayne’s decision contrasts with that of Ronald Reagan, who at 32 was also coming off a breakthrough performance after years in B-movies. “Reagan did not serve abroad because he was practically blind without his contact lenses,” Wills writes. “But his military film work for the Signal Corps kept him from commercial movie making and definitely hurt his career.” After the war, Reagan’s film career dwindled while Wayne’s took off. Wayne’s wartime flicks with Dietrich were not important in themselves, but he knew that they provided the credentials needed to make it big: In 1948, he became a superstar with Red River. The next year, it was Sands of Iwo Jima, in which he played the valorous Sergeant Stryker. “From then on,” Wills writes, ” the man who evaded World War II service would be the symbolic man who won World War II.” Newt Gingrich calls Sands “the formative movie of my life” and copied Stryker’s walk. Pat Buchanan adopted his battle cries — “Lock and load!,” “Saddle up?” — and so does a psychopathic sergeant in Oliver Stone’s Platoon.

Around the time of Sands, Wayne decided to lend himself to the antiCommunist cause, becoming president of the conservative Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Yet by that time, 1949, Wills argues, Wayne’s new cause had already been won. The “Hollywood Ten” had been brought before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities two years before, and Congress had been investigating film-community Reds since 1939. ” Wayne,” Wills writes, “entered the ideological wars as he did World War II — retrospectively, and with compensatory bravado.”

A string of ideological films put this bravado on display. In 1952, Wayne played a HUAC bloodhound in Big Jim McLain. In 1960, he targeted candidate John Kennedy in an advertisement for The Alamo: “There were no ghostwriters at the Alamo,” Wayne mocked, while the movie’s publicist said that true patriots would never criticize the film. And in 1968, Wayne played a swaggering Vietnam commando in The Green Berets.

The ideological purposes behind these films are magnified by their awfulness. Big Jim McLain, for example, looks like an episode of Dragnet filmed with plastic palm trees; and in case the audience is nostalgic for World War II, there is the casting of venal Japanese as the Communists. The Green Berets, in addition to being racist, borders on camp — Wayne looks geriatric, the VC cower under evergreen trees (the filming was done at Fort Benning, Georgia), and the soldiers seem more concerned about shooting down liberal straw men than about real fighting. ” There’s something called due process,” an idealistic newspaper correspondent whines to Wayne. “Well, out here, due process is a bullet,” Wayne sneers. (Take that, Mr. Halberstam.)

Though Wayne often descended into caricature, there was one director who could almost always get him to act — Ford. And Ford got not only acting out of Wayne, but heart, body, and soul. “Wayne’s father was a dreamy nonachiever, ” Wills writes, “and Wayne idolized John Ford, a hard taskmaster and ruthless professional.” So, Wayne got a father figure, and Ford got a strapping son to beat. Ford could be brutal to his actors, and he especially loved to pick at Wayne’s sores. While filming his World War II paean They Were Expendable (1945), Ford yelled, “Duke, can’t you manage a salute that at least looks like you’ve been in the service?” It was the only time Wayne ever walked off a set.

Wills argues that the director’s “tough love” produced great westerns precisely because such love is the touchstone of the western hero. The western hero is individualistic, unsettled, and violent when necessary, but not, Wills notes, a thug. In other words, he is something like Ford was with Wayne, and like Wayne was on camera. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), for instance, Wayne shoots the last outlaw, then surrenders his vigilante power to the town’s idealistic but wimpy sheriff (played by Jimmy Stewart). In The Searchers (1956), Wayne is enraged at his niece, who has “gone Injun,” but, having finally cornered her, he reins in his hatred: He lifts her over his head menacingly, but then cradles her, saying, “Let’s go home.”

John Wayne’s America would make an interesting essay on how offscreen behavior influenced some of Hollywood’s best, and worst, films. As a book, however, it is turgid and directionless. For one thing, Wills’s obsession with the deconstruction of American icons leads him on tangents. Do we really need dozens of pages on how Wayne’s Alamo differs from the real battle? To appreciate Sands, must we be dragged through a treatise on the Marines’ manipulation of the Mount Suribachi flag-raising? Most readers can grasp that the movie’s flag-raising is a dramatization and realize that Wayne’s purpose is to glorify a patriotic ideal, not to recreate a specific historical moment.

Tedious, too, is Wills’s film criticism, which includes 20 pages on Stagecoach, complete with diagrams of seating arrangements on the coach. There is also the question of posture: “Wayne constantly strikes the pose of Michelangelo’s David (see Figures 8a and 8b). Sometimes, with a wider throw of the hip, he becomes Donatello’s David (see Figures 9a and 9b).” Not only that, but the Duke’s “physical autonomy and self-command, the ease and authority of his carriage, made each motion a statement of individualism, a balletic Declaration of Independence.” Read on, and Wills will inform you that, until he, Wills, came along, Wayne had “largely escaped such metaphysical attention.”

You’re telling me. Sadly, Wills’s metaphysical musings don’t say much. He ends with an 11-page “Conclusion,” 9 pages of which are devoted to rambles about Emerson, Romulus, Ovid, Dreiser, Constantine, Henry Adams, and others before Wayne makes an appearance. And then Wills concludes that Wayne ” embodies the American myth,” the “American Adam — untrammeled, unspoiled, free to roam, and breathing a larger air than the cramped men behind desks. He is the avatar of the hero in that genre that best combines mythic ideas about American exceptionalism.”

Which is unexceptional and anticlimactic, leaving this odd book with little reason for being.

By Michael Brus; Michael Brus is a student at the University of Pennsylvania