Belying his black-and-white public image, in real life my dad was a warm shade of gray.
As a child he had once felt spurned by his mother. As a Hollywood star many years later, I believe he still craved love and acceptance. Unlike a Marlon Brando or Warren Beatty, John Wayne aimed to please, not to be mysterious. He gave the fans, the press, America, precisely what he knew they wanted: the Duke, a man of action and not ideas.
In fact, my father was a physical creature. But contrary to his simplified image—the taciturn, uneducated Westerner living on a ranch with all his horses—he also cherished art, his collection ranging from Renoir to Remington, the distinguished Western artist; greatly preferred the sea to the plains; had little affection for horses, viewing them as little more than tools of his trade; played chess compulsively; wrote and rewrote many of his own speeches; read four newspapers a day when in between movies; and read thousands of books during his lifetime.
For pure escape, my father favored mysteries: Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, and Raymond Chandler. He was also a fan of Hemingway, more as a novelist than as a man. My dad once told a close friend he considered Hemingway self-important and ostentatious. To my knowledge my father and Hemingway never met, but I do know they had at least one indirect encounter. In 1957, when Hollywood adapted The Sun Also Rises, a script was first sent to my father. Would he consider playing Jake Barnes, the American expatriate whose genitals had been shot off during the war? Amused, my father said, “I respect Hemingway’s work, and I’m honored they want me. But do they really think I could play this part? Even if I wanted to, no one would let me.”
Other than Hemingway, mysteries, and novels he thought might translate well to the screen, he stuck mostly to nonfiction: political histories, military biographies, anything at all by Winston Churchill, the public figure my father most revered. In an interview with Playboy in 1971, when his questioner asked him who he would most like to spend time with, my father replied, “That’s easy: Winston Churchill. He’s the most terrific fella of our century. He took a nearly beaten nation and kept their dignity for them. Churchill was unparalleled.”
When my father spoke to me of his Hollywood peers, he also had more good words than bad. Though he never regarded them as his models or idols, he had heartfelt respect for Jimmy Stewart, Richard Burton, Spencer Tracy, and George C. Scott, whose work in Patton my dad singled out as a tour de force. He also praised the restrained and honest acting of Gary Cooper, and yet he never liked Cooper’s High Noon, still widely hailed as a Western classic. My father didn’t criticize Cooper’s performance, but the movie’s central premise. In an entire American town, only one man has the nerve to confront the bully. Any American town, my father said, would have more than one brave soul. Finding the scenario implausible, he said it undermined the whole movie.
Although he did not appear on TV until late in his life, I never heard him disparage it, or imply that its actors were any less skilled than those working in feature films. He was especially fond of Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy, Hal Linden in Barney Miller, and Jackie Gleason, both in the Honeymooners and The Jackie Gleason Show. Saturday nights in the late 1960s, at the end of each Jackie Gleason show, when Gleason came out and drank his coffee and smoked his cigarette, my dad always said it was the only time he really missed smoking.
When it came to his contemporaries in film, I only heard him speak once with any real venom. Gene Hackman could never appear on-screen without my father skewering his performance. I wish I could tell you why he so harshly criticized Hackman, but he never went into detail. Although it’s pure speculation, had my father lived to see more of his work, I think his view of Mr. Hackman would have changed. Back then, however, my father called Hackman “the worst actor in town. He’s awful.”
He was also harsh toward the fabled star of Gone With the Wind. Clark Gable, he told me, is “extremely handsome in person. That’s one guy that doesn’t need Hollywood to make him look good. But Gable’s an idiot. You know why Gable’s an actor? It’s the only thing he’s smart enough to do.” My dad called Gable handsome but dumb at least four or five times, and now I wonder if it had something to do with my father’s friend, John Ford. During the filming of Mogambo, Ford and Gable had clashed again and again and the subsequent feud had simmered for years. In my father’s way of thinking, disloyalty to allies, support in any fashion for their enemies, was expressly forbidden. If Clark Gable took on John Ford, my father’s code demanded that John Wayne stand by his old pal.
Perhaps my father’s comment—Gable acts because it’s the only thing he’s smart enough to do—also pointed to his own ambivalent feelings toward actors and acting. While he always said he “loved the goddamn business,” he thought of himself as more of a star than an actor. “How many times do I gotta tell you,” he frequently told the press in one of his most famous quotes, “I don’t act at all, I react.” My father explained, “In a bad picture, you see them acting all over the place. In a good picture, they react in a logical way to a situation they’re in, so the audience can identify with them.” He also said, “All I do is sell sincerity, and I’ve been selling the hell out of that since I started. . . . I was never one of the little theatre boys. That arty crowd has only surface brilliance anyway. Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity—and I don’t mean simple—it’ll be good and the public will know it.”
As Katharine Hepburn once said of him, my father had an “extraordinary gift. An unself-consciousness in front of the camera, a unique naturalness, developed by movie actors who just happened to become actors.” Ms. Hepburn was right. My dad had dreamed of becoming a lawyer, and even after he stumbled into acting, he always eschewed Hollywood terms like “my craft,” or “my motivation.” Like two of his mentors, John Ford and Howard Hawks, he considered filmmaking a job, and not an art form.
My father enjoyed the money, awards, and acclaim. But working hard, simply working hard, also brought him real satisfaction. When it came to working longer and more strenuously than anyone else on a film set, he needed no director’s prodding. I think it had more to do with his physical constitution than with his ego. The same life force that brought him bursting into my bedroom every morning at seven A.M. enabled him to perform at peak efficiency when exhausted actors half his age were entering scenes on wobbling legs. My father made more than 200 movies, spanning five decades. To survive that long in Hollywood, an industry that has always devoured its own, perhaps most of all a person must keep going. With all that adrenaline surging through him, I’m not sure my father had any choice.
As for his mixed feelings about his profession, he always said he felt honored whenever he received a script, and he said it ingenuously. I know that he loved the medium, loved movie making. But on some emotional level, I think he felt embarrassed to be an actor. George Bernard Shaw once said, “An actress is something more than a woman. An actor is something less than a man.” While my father would never evaluate such a notion with me, I’m quite sure he knew the quote. And while he never castigated actresses, and respected specific male actors, male actors as a group were open season. Most Hollywood actors lacked depth, my father told me. He called them decadent, weak-willed, effeminate. Or as he said, “faggy.” Being an actor himself, especially after bearing the childhood stigma of having a feminine name, could be one reason why he always seemed so hellbent on displaying his machismo. That, and his days as a singing cowboy.
In truth, my father could not sing at all, nor play the guitar. So while Hollywood dubbed it—two men would stand off-camera, one singing, one strumming—my father faked it. For a short series of 1930s B Westerns, he was reluctantly billed as a crooning cowpoke named Singin’ Sandy. In those days, my father said, Hollywood cowboys were “pretty,” with their snow-white Stetsons, their uncreased faces, their tender, mellifluous voices. One of his favorite stories revolved around one of his earliest casting calls. While he and another cowboy actor read lines at an audition, the manicured-looking man said, “What do you expect? I’ve been working all day out in the field.” Stepping out of character, my father turned to the producer and director. “I’m supposed to react to that line?” he said. “Look at his hands. Those are field hands? They’ve never worked a day in his life.” When the Hollywood big shots roared, my dad won the part and shortly after became Singin’ Sandy.
Once he begged out of this “embarrassing” role, my father said he shattered the mold forever, evolving the Hollywood cowboy into a steely, masculine loner. Still, effeminate cowboys and Singin’ Sandy were images he preferred to undo. He couldn’t—not completely—and, as a result, I could often hear him reasserting his male persona, even when he bragged about his customized car. “This Pontiac station wagon, with this special engine, is the best performance car made.” He once told Peter Bogdanovich, when Mr. Bogdanovich still wrote about film, that a hero in a movie should never cry in the presence of his wife or child. He never said so, but I think my father also meant real life. I can’t speak for him and my mother, but he never cried in front of me until their marriage was crumbling, his health was slipping away, and my father knew there was no time left for striking poses.