Duke: Images from a Lifetime

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

John Wayne: 1907-1979

Youth. A mountain man, 22 years old, fresh-faced and heartbreakingly handsome in his fringed buckskins, says goodbye to the girl he shyly loves. He speaks awkwardly, in tones still untutored by the professionalism that was to come, of the wild land that he must abandon her for, to explore along The Big Trail.

Manhood. In the stark grandeur of Monument Valley an unhorsed outlaw hails a Stagecoach with a confident twirl of the Winchester he holds in his hand. The vehicle that carries the Ringo Kid to high adventure also carries the actor who played him on the first leg of a journey to immortality.

Patriarch and moralist. Amid the wreckage of the trail camp, the herder who started the stampede is dragged before the man whose cowhands and fortune he has placed at risk. "Shoot me," the herder blubbers. A look of disgust flickers across Thomas Dunson's face. "Not gonna shoot you," he says, "gonna hang you." He is merciless toward those who violate the trust of the masculine group that confronts danger on the cattle drive from the Red River to Kansas.

Mentor. Captain Nathan Brittles' habit of speaking his mind has cost him his career. Now he must retire, and he has ridden out to receive the farewell salute at a half-forgotten frontier garrison in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. There is a huskiness in his voice as he speaks his credo: "Never apologize and never explain--it's a sign of weakness."

Apotheosis. "I mean to kill you or see you hanged," the grizzled old marshal tells the four outlaws he confronts at the edge of the autumn woods. "Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man," their leader sneers. "Fill your hand, you sonuvabitch," the old lawman cries, clamping the reins of his horse between his teeth and filling his own hands with six-gun and repeater. In a moment the bad guys are dead, and just as the old man faced them down in True Grit, so did the actor face down the last of his doubters, at once affectionately parodying and paying tribute to the American heroes he had played in more than 200 films. The film brought John Wayne an Academy Award and a sort of universal indulgence to do, say or be anything he wanted in his sunset years.

It was an indulgence he had earned long before and had long since been granted. Not by critics, who had consistently underrated both the kind of genre films he appeared in and his low-keyed, naturalistic acting technique. Not by those who, intent on forcing all of life through political metaphors, deplored his rightist politics. It was ordinary moviegoers who sensed the authenticity of the man--that compound of morality, short temper, self-humor and sheer physical energy. They knew that though he had never fired a gun in anger, he had found other ways to live up to his image.

They had seen him go to the wall financially to make a movie, The Alamo, in which he tried to propagate political beliefs. They had seen him fight off what he called "the big C" (cancer) once before, in 1964, returning to work on a rugged location months before he should have because he hated being an invalid. In more recent years, they saw him posed proudly with one or another of his grandchildren (he married three times and had seven children). They saw that even though one could no longer live the life of a mythic Western hero, one could sometimes approximate his simplifying virtues. "I stay away from nuances," he was heard to say. From excesses of psychology too. "Couches are good for one thing only," he was wont to grouse. Reflection, introspection --these activities interfered with the truly important things in life. Like work.

There were ironies in the matching of man and mythic background. John Wayne entered the world on May 26, 1907, as Marion Michael Morrison, the son of an Iowa druggist who migrated to the San Fernando Valley, just east of Los Angeles. Young Michael played football for U.S.C. but retained many more intellectual interests than he liked to admit.

During down time on his movie sets, for example, he was an inveterate chess player. At home he read Western history and gathered one of the world's finest collections of Hopi Indian kachina dolls. If his right-wing beliefs emblemized a rugged individualism, he also had a reputation among movie people as a fiercely loyal colleague quick to aid old comrades and as an affectionate if hard-kidding coworker.

This sense of community and camaraderie was the flip side of Western individualism. Most people risked pioneering not to get rich quick or to build vast empires but to find modest lives that might be more congenial than the ones they had left in the East or in Europe. In his best films Wayne, for all the machismo he displayed, only rarely played a loner--a scout or gun fighter. More often he appeared as a soldier, lawman or rancher, a man acting in concert with others to create order where formerly there had been emptiness or anarchy.

Movies of the kind Duke Wayne (the nickname was derived from a dog he once owned) liked to make were made by tightly knit, masculine groups off on their own in some ruggedly photogenic country. The experience of making them under the direction of men like John Ford (who rescued Wayne from poverty-row westerns with Stagecoach) or Howard Hawks (who gave him that first leader-patriarch role in Red River) or Henry Hathaway (who made True Grit) taught him much about craftsmanship and professionalism. Wayne revered them and shared credit for his achievements with them.

Of course, there were defects in their common code. Women were always a problem for them. They saw them as Madonnas or hookers or, in the case of Hawks, useful only to the degree that they could become one of the boys. Again excepting the versatile Hawks, they had trouble--as Wayne himself did--in making persuasive films when they moved away from open spaces and distant times. Half of Wayne's later films cast him in roles that had nothing to do with cows and horses, Indians and gunslingers.

Though Wayne stoutly and correctly insisted, "I have always tried to give a true characterization of the part that I'm playing," he was also quick to add, "Some of John Wayne must come through it." It came through most clearly when people would tell him, "Everything isn't black and white," and he would inevitably respond, "Well, I say, 'Why the hell not?' " There was a refreshing innocence, a kind of bravery in that attitude, especially as the power of the Western myth dimmed. His heroes were not like Hemingway's. They did not have grace under pressure; they had instead a stubbornness --foolish, willful and glorious--when they were caught between the rock and the hard place. We could not forget Wayne if we tried. Those images of a big man etched against the big Western sky were part of the experience of growing up in America in the past half-century.

Out of them, he created a beloved national institution. Congress ordered a gold medal struck for him just before he died of cancer last week, and he was never more gallant than when he made his final public appearance at this year's Oscar ceremony. Three years ago, John Wayne's last movie, The Shootist, was released. It was about a dying gun fighter facing up to the end of his life. It was not an entirely successful valedictory for its star, but in it the screenwriters produced some lines that came easily to Wayne. To the boy he is teaching how to handle a gun, he says, "I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to others, and I require the same of them." That stands up as well as an epitaph for a good, cranky and singular man, but he himself would not have chosen it. John Wayne preferred an old, simple Mexican saying: "Feo, fuerte y formal" (He was ugly, he was strong, he had dignity).

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