"He's Just Playing JohnWayne"

...Among other things, he was the star of the Three Mesquiteers series and also enjoyed the dubious distinctiOn of playing Singin' Sandy, the movies' first singing cowboy, well before either Roy Rogers or Gene Autry...

...As his testimony was eagerly awaited and consumed, so has his book (BlindArabition, Simon & Schuster, $11.95) been pounced upon and stamped with authority...

...Thanks to journalism, it seemed so at the time...

...Starting in the early forties, Wayne went on to become one of Hollywood's major leading men, playing alongside some of the most notable female stars and distinguishing himself not only in action pictures, but romances and comedies as well...

...In a world of shallow events and shallow interpretation, surely everything counts and nothing matters...

...He got his start in the mid-twenties as a prop man, soon to become a double, stuntman, and bit player...

...No doubt this is exactly what some people object to about John Wayne, seeing him as a symbol of westward imperialism and nineteenth-century social and legal values...

...The Brush, maniacal Liddy, Ehrlichman the bearded New Mexico novelist, Strachan, Kalmbach, LaRue, Gray--the quivering bowls of jello--Baker, a snake in snake's clothing...

...The role established him finally as a star of the first order and the partnership between director and actor was to last for more than two decades, producing such American standards as Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance...

...Wayne's detractors also seem not to understand the rare ability to appear natural on the screen, to mask the technique necessary to produce this naturalness, a technique that is thoughtfully considered and perfected by years of experience...

...Are its characters more memorable or more venal than Teapot Dome's, or Grant's cabinet...

...In an interview with the Village Voice, Clint Eastwood, seemingly the only candidate as the Duke's heir, made a revealing remark about his own critical invisibility...

...How vivid they were: the leering, twitching President, contrite Segretti, pious Magruder, ponderous Mitchell...

...He can get rough with the lowly punks without fear of trampling on legal niceties and he can make a courtly bow to a fine lady, not out of a patronizing sexism, but from a bigness of spirit...

...To apply political definitions to these adventures is inappropriate, because, at their core, they are visions of what should have been, not what necessarily was...

...It is problematical whether the decline and fall of Dick Nixon was, apart from a Presidential first, any sort of station of the cross in American history...

...yesterday's villain, today's hero...

...That's playing yourself...

...However, this is a misreading of his films, for they operate on the level of entertainment and positive fantasy...

...As if acting does not include portraying positive qualities, qualities of strength.---~ The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977 19 In an unintentional way, this "he's just playing John Wayne" line is really an affirmation of John Wayne's accomplishment...

...No single event since World War II has inspired so massive an onslaught of unworthy books as Watergate...

...John Wayne has been a leading man for nearly forty years and his movies are estimated to have grossed more than any other star's...

...John Wayne's true importance may be as a symbol of permanence...

...He "licked the Big C" and went to Durango, with only one lung, to hit the trail for his next picture and put away his usual quart of booze a day...

...Of course, the importance of John Dean rests in the importance of Watergate, which I tend, perhaps unfashionably, to underestimate...

...In the Wayne persona, for at least two hours of screen time, we can latch onto something defmite and authoritative, a force ~ that is bound to succeed and may do so with an innate decency...

...One couldn't help but think that John Wayne the man was no different than the John Wayne in The Horse Soldiers, who would walk away from a bullet extraction on a makeshift operating table to lead a column of galloping cavalry...

...But it was not until he had been a star for thirty years that his talent received its proper critical acclaim, and that was for True Grit, in which Wayne altered his usual image and took on the guise of a character actor by putting on an eye patch...

...How often have we stood around in mindless boredom, fingering our buttons and staring into space as we await the sacrament administered by Ziegler, Nessen, Powell...

...Wayne's early years in the movie industry were something of a bumpy ride...

...By the end of the thirties he left this company for good...

...O ~ e ~ O O ~ O O ~ W ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ U O Q p t D . . . . O t ~ . . . . . . . . . . . b 4 t t O ~ . . . . . . . . . ~ J ~ 9 ~ * ~ . . . . . . . . . . ~ . . . . . ~ . . . . . . . . . . ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ 4 ~ David Everitt "'He's Just Playing Jolm Wayne" The ultimate measure of the Duke's abilities is that so many think he isn't even acting...

...His on-screen creation has become so convincing and so ingrained in people's thinking, that his would-be debunkers are themselves prone to the naive belief that the actor really is the Ringo Kid, Tom Dunson, Rooster Cogburn, that he really is capable of scaling up to the roof of a speeding stagecoach to hold off an Indian attack with a blazing Winchester...

...Although a friend of his since the twenties, Wayne did not get m play a substantial role in any of Ford's films until Stagecoach...

...What was once fodder for our secular sermons, its lessons already collect dust, drop peacefully into restful sleep...

...Dean was the central figure in the tortuous process, from the initial cracks in the cover-up through the damning revelations of the tapes...

...Not only has he insisted on doing most of his own rugged stuntwork...

...In part the misunderstanding reflects an unthinking prejudice against Westerns, a feeling that "horse operas" are rarely worth considering seriously and playing a cowboy is just not acting...

...Along the way, he played an important part in the development of the "pass system" (the now standard method of staging a movie fist fight) and did much to polish his spirited craft, but, with the exception of a small but faithful following in the South and Southwest, he remained an unknown, a star sharing a lower-bracket constellation with the likes of Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, Tex Ritter, and Johnny Mack Brown...

...Other leading men, James Stewart for instance, served and were decorated for their wartime efforts...

...Acting is playing tormented neurotics...

...In 1948 his image hardened into the salty, leathery mold we are now more accustomed to when he played Tom Dunson, the unrelenting cattle baron, in Howard Hawks' RedRiver...

...How feverishly we tear the copy from the wire, pour the coffee down our throat, tap out the leader, grab that taxi, shove that microphone, run, shout, pursue the glimmering, illusion...

...The movie was a big financial failure and Duke was quickly relegated to lower-class stardom in B Westerns...

...They also teamed up for some memorable nonWestern films, including The Quiet Man and the stunning Eugene O'Neill adaptation, The Long Voyage Home...

...What is its attraction...

...EMINENTOES hy Philip Temian Metamorphoses, or the Story of John Dean If John Dean had not existed, it would have been unnecessary to invent him...

...It is intriguing that this image was in no way diminished by the fact that Wayne did not fight in the real adventure of World War II...

...All expense of shame, as Malcolm Muggeridge has said, in a waste of spirit...

...How has Wayne come to this position...

...Philip Terzian is on the staff of the New Republic...

...Over the years, Wayne's specialty has been to play characters of dignity and authority and to play them with conviction...

...Both cases testify to his remarkable position...

...All through Nixon's death agonies his owlish smile hung suspended, awaiting the inevitable...

...He will root out the bad man, who is a loathsome snake for sure, and when the time comes for him to go for his gun the snake will be as good as dead and gone and that goes for every mother's son of them...

...What is it about his persona that has captured people's imagination...

...His version of events must be accepted as reliable, or roughly so...

...Of course, his competition has not been fierce...

...If a "natural" like Wayne were less of a professional and followed the Brando example by occasionally lapsing into awful, self-conscious performances, perhaps critics would take more note of his good renditions...

...And, undoubtedly, with good reason...

...In times when nothing is permanent, when so much is brought into question, when the trend of one month is likely m become subject for nostalgia in the next, the Duke remains a fixed point of reference, embodying a firm moral stance...

...To call him just a notable actor or star seems inadequate...

...He's just playing John Wayne," they say, and they have been saying it with a stubborn and downright uniformity for years...

...For millions of movie-goers he has become a living mythic figure...

...Those with something to hide, naturally, have had little to say...

...And John Dean...

...David Everitt, of Great Neck, N.Y., is a recent graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo...

...Each has weighed in with a mighty tome, one more turgid than the other, recounting the familiar events from their worm's eye view, celebrating their prescience or grace under pressure, revealing a vignette or two good for a wire-service story...

...He is the dream of what a single man can do...

...Believing in nothing, he is prepared m believe in anything, and as surely as his right index finger is wetted and held in the breeze his prodigious memory and insatiable appetite will find some--find any--outlet...

...As few others did, Dean told the truth to the Ervin committee, and was vindicated...

...however, Stewart, for all his talent and appeal and all the Westerns he's made, has not come close to the same hero stature...

...Considering the larger-than-life nature of the characters he plays, this apparent ease is all the more extraordinary...

...In this Western classic, under Ford's commanding, sometimes emotionally brutal instruction, Wayne gave his affecting portrayal of the honor- and destiny-bound outlaw, the Ringo Kid...

...His history is the 1970s pilgrim's: his career, such as it is, has wandered from one temptation to another, whoring for whoever or whatever has come along to summon him forth, now this, now that...

...And ultimately, what does this man-myth illusion amount to...

...So soon after Watergare's climactic events, what of them today...

...Wayne has never been properly appreciated, however, by critics...

...beware of those on the side of the angels...

...By 1970, after winning his Oscar for True Grit, he had become more firmly entrenched than ever before in the Western and has since worked almost exclusively in that genre...

...The cowboy loner is the definitive American hero, and while there have been other outstanding Western stars, John Wayne has come to represent this figure more than any others...

...He says that maybe what really turns critics offabout him is that "the kind of thing I do is to glorify competence...

...I Was Hitler's 20 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977...

...What has set him apart from other Western stars...

...The Duke's manner of style and bearing outweighs any current political theory...

...But, oh...

...All the previous full-bodied portrayals were still virtually unaccounted for...

...But this attitude displays as little understanding of acting as it does of John Wayne...

...He languished in this capacity until 1939...

...All we remember now are the faces and the voices, and in another generation, perhaps sooner, they will be forgotten, too...

...But then, it seems, that's not acting...

...He has also exhibited his cowboy heroism in his personal life, as when in 1964 he survived his bout with cancer...

...Even his name has a kind of symbolic simplicity about it--' 'John Dean" rolls so trippingly off the tongue that it could not serve as anything but allegory...

...He has served both God and Mammon, Rolling Stone and John Mitchell...

...What is next...

...This persuasive illusion, this confusion between the man and the myth is the culmination of his professional skill and imposing presence, and this is what is being inadvertently admitted...

...In 1930 he got his first starring role in a big budget Western called The Big Trail...

...Related to this odd critical standard is the tendency to take for granted an actor who maintains a great consistency of characterization...

...In his own words, there was one reason for this lasting change in fortune--John Ford...

...For his fans, his two-fisted image symbolizes all that is admirable about the American tradition (in short, the "old-fashioned" values and the frontier spiri0, and for his disparagers he represents everything wrong with that tradition (he is, and probably always will be, the only actor to have been challenged to a debate in Harvard Square...

...Wherever ambition and mediocrity form their unholy alliance, there the John Deans will be...

...But it was a highly active languishing, if nothing else, coming out with as many as eleven pictures a year...