John "The Duke" Wayne

John Wayne (May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979), popularly known as "The Duke," 1 was an American film actor whose career began in silent movies in the 1920s. He was a major star from the 1940s to the 1970s. He is most famous for his Westerns, but he also made films of various other kinds. He epitomized a certain kind of rugged individualistic masculinity and has become an enduring icon.

Life and career

John Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa in 1907, but the name became Marion Mitchell Morrison when his parents decided to name their next son Robert. However, in later life, he often stated that his middle name was Michael. His family was Presbyterian; father Clyde Leonard Morrison was of Scottish descent and the son of an American Civil War veteran while mother Mary Alberta Brown was of Irish descent. Wayne's family moved to Glendale, California in 1911; it was neighbors in Glendale who started calling him "Big Duke" because he never went anywhere without his Airedale Terrier dog, who was Little Duke. He preferred "Duke" to "Marion," and the name stuck for the rest of his life.

Duke Morrison's early life was marked by poverty; his father was a man who did not manage money well. Duke was a good and popular student. Tall from an early age, he was a star football player for Glendale High School and was recruited by the University of Southern California.

After nearly gaining admission to the U.S. Naval Academy, he attended the University of Southern California, where he was a member of the Trojan Knights and joined the Sigma Chi Fraternity. Wayne also played on the USC football team under legendary coach Howard Jones. An injury while supposedly swimming at the beach curtailed his athletic career, however; Wayne would later note that he was too terrified of Jones' reaction to reveal the actual cause of his injury. He lost his athletic scholarship and with no funds was unable to continue at USC.

While at the university, Wayne began working around the local film studios. Western star Tom Mix got him a summer job in the prop department in exchange for football tickets, and Wayne soon moved on to bit parts, establishing a long friendship with director John Ford. After two years working as a prop man at the William Fox Studios for $35 a week, his first starring role was in the 1930 movie The Big Trail; it was the director of that movie Raoul Walsh who gave him the stage name "John Wayne," after Revolutionary War general "Mad Anthony" Wayne. His pay was raised to $75 a week. He was tutored by the studio's stuntmen in riding and other western skills.

The Big Trail, the first "western" epic sound motion picture, did not make Wayne a major star. Wayne would have to wait nine more years until his performance in the 1939 film Stagecoach achieved that. In between, he kept busy as a "star" of the B-level westerns, most notably at Monogram Pictures and in serials for Mascot Studios where he played the role of d'Artagnan in The Three Musketeers, set in modern North Africa (with co-stars Ray Corrigan and Max Terhune).

Although he appeared in many war films and was frequently eulogized as an "American hero," unlike other prominent Hollywood actors (Clark Gable, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, to name a few), Wayne refused to fight in the Second World War, a fact that reportedly embarrassed him. His friend Bob Hope speculated that Wayne did more for the WWII war effort as an actor than he ever could on the battlefield. Between 1940, when the military draft was reinstated, and the end of World War II in 1945, he remained in Hollywood and made 21 movies. (Among them was Cecil B. DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind (1942), in which he portrayed one of the few less-than-honorable characters in his career.) He was of draft age (34) at the time of Pearl Harbor in 1941 but asked for and received a deferral for "family dependency," a classification of 3-A. This was later changed to a deferment in the "national interest," 2-A. Years later, he outspokenly criticized those who refused to fight in Vietnam.

His friendship with Ford led them to work together on films which featured some of Wayne's most iconic roles. Beginning with three minor parts in 1928, Wayne would appear in over twenty of Ford's films in the next 35 years, including Stagecoach (1939), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956), The Wings of Eagles (1957), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

Wayne appeared in many strong masculine roles in western films and war films, but he also had a down-to-earth sense of humor that allowed him to appear in a pink bunny suit for an episode of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, as well as in comedy movies. According to the Internet Movie Database, Wayne played the male lead in 142 of his film appearances, an as yet unsurpassed record.

One of Wayne's most praised roles was in one of the few films that he made that wasn't a Western or war picture The High and the Mighty (1954). The movie was directed by William Wellman and based on a novel by Ernest K. Gann. Wayne played the co-pilot of a plane that develops serious engine problems in flight. His portrayal of the heroic airman won widespread acclaim. Interestingly, one of the few other non-war and non-Western films he made Island in the Sky (1953) is also an airplane disaster movie. These two films were also made only one year apart and had the same producers, director, writer, cinematographer, editor, and distributor. Another film which took Wayne out of the saddle was Donovan's Reef (1963), a film perhaps most memorable for its treatment of race issues. His last film with John Ford, it portrayed the Polynesians with great respect and dignity, while the white stars (except for Jack Warden's "Doctor Dedham") were comedic figures.

Despite his prolific output, John Wayne won only a single Best Actor Oscar, for the 1969 movie True Grit. He received a nomination for Best Actor in Sands of Iwo Jima and another as the producer of Best Picture nominee The Alamo, which he also directed. In 1973, he released a best-selling spoken word album titled America, Why I Love Her that was nominated for a Grammy and re-released with similar success in 2001. Wayne also hosted a 1970 NBC television special. Swing Out, Sweet Land featured cameos from some of the biggest stars of the time, from Bob Hope to Johnny Cash, giving a mostly tongue-in-cheek (yet inspiring) look at American history.

Wayne was well known for his pro-American, anti-communist, conservative political views. In 1968, he directed The Green Berets, a film that overtly supported the Vietnam War. It was produced in close collaboration with the Armed Forces. It was also ironic that he appeared in an episode of the TV series Maude, created by ultra-liberal Norman Lear and starring the liberal actress Bea Arthur, who stood 5'9" and to whom Wayne referred as "little lady." Wayne seemed to enjoy acting with actresses of a liberal bent, such as Lauren Bacall, Colleen Dewhurst, and Katharine Hepburn.

In 1970, he financed the documentary No Substitute for Victory. The documentary made the claim that the U.S. had held back from directly confronting communism in the world since the 1940s and that a "hot war" should be substituted for what was considered a sellout "cold war." The documentary further suggested that U.S. inaction had "lost" Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea to communism. Wayne in the film described an America gone soft that lacked the will to do what was necessary to win in Vietnam and against the forces of communism in general.

The High and the Mighty is one of four films (the others are Hondo, Island in the Sky, and McLintock!) that are owned outright by Batjac, a production company co-founded by Wayne and named after the fictional shipping company in The Wake of the Red Witch. Batjac now belongs to the Wayne family estate. Because of lawsuits and copyright issues with the estate, these films, with the exception of McLintock!, have not been seen for many years. Hondo was not shown from Wayne's death in 1979 until 1994, a fifteen-year hiatus. As of the end of 2005, however, Batjac has allowed The High and the Mighty and Island in the Sky to be reissued on television and all four films released as special edition DVDs in digitally remastered versions.

John Wayne died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1979 at the age of 72 at the UCLA Medical Center. He had previously had a cancerous lung and two ribs removed in 1964. He was interred in the Pacific View Memorial Park cemetery in Corona del Mar, Orange County, California. Although he was a heavy smoker until 1964, some trace his cancer back to his work in The Conqueror, filmed about 100 miles downwind of Nevada nuclear-weapons test sites. Other actors who worked on that movie and later died of cancer include Dick Powell, Agnes Moorehead, Pedro Armendariz, Susan Hayward, and John Hoyt. It should be noted however that most of these people also smoked. On June 9, 1979, the Archbishop of Panama arrived at the hospital and baptized Wayne into the Roman Catholic Church. This was at the request of his eldest son Michael, who gave him a Catholic funeral service.

Wayne was married three times, always to Spanish-speaking Latinas; to Josephine Alicia Saenz, Esperanza Baur, and Pilar Palette. He had four children with Josephine, three with Pilar, most notably actor Patrick Wayne and Ayissa Wayne, who wrote a moving memoir of her life as the daughter of John Wayne. All but one of his children went on to have minor Hollywood careers.

His romance with Josie Saenz began when he was a college student and continued for seven years before their marriage. Miss Saenz was 15 or 16 at their first meeting at a beach party at Balboa. The daughter of a successful Spanish businessman, Josie resisted considerable reluctance on the part of her family to maintain her relationship with Duke.

In the years prior to his death, Wayne was happily involved with his former secretary Pat Stacy.

At the time of his death, John Wayne resided in a bayfront home in Newport Beach, California. His home remains a point of interest in Newport Harbor.

He is the most celebrated utterer, and apocryphal coiner, of the tmesis "ri-god*amn-diculous."