I've always been a big fan of John Wayne. I grew up not only watching his westerns and World War II pictures, but listening to how much both my grandma and great-aunt loved him. They even got to meet him once when he was filming Rio Bravo at the Old Tucson studio in Arizona. I remember my grandma telling me how my great-aunt, her sister, got angry while they were filming a fight scene and the Duke had blood coming out of his mouth. She actually walked up to and slapped the man who she thought had struck Wayne, only to find out that it was just a blood pill that the actor had bitten down on in his mouth to simulate taking the blow.
He'd never really been hit.
Reading Joan Didion's "John Wayne: A Love Song" brought this back fresh to my mind. She writes from a reporter's perspective, covering the last two weeks of shooting of Wayne's 165th film, The Sons of Katie Elder. We receive an enlightening account of The Duke, with the other primary cast members and crew relegated appropriately to their position on the undercard. Dean Martin was a star in his own right, but when sharing the screen with John Wayne, he might as well be you or me.
Didion admits to being fascinated with the Duke from an early age, first seeing him on screen when she was eight years old in 1943. It would be 22 years later that she would finally meet him and write "Love Song", but her appreciation for the man is readily evident in her article. The way he walks, the way he talks, even the way he stands up from his chair…all of those idiosyncrasies that anyone who has ever seen Wayne in a film know all too well…they are part and parcel part of John Wayne. They are not portrayed in his characters on screen. What we are seeing in a John Wayne picture is the star himself, playing a part, but not adopting an accent or movements that are anyone's but his very own.
But Didion does more than focus on how manly the Duke is, or how soft spoken and nice he can be to the people around him. Though she does both of those things to some degree, she takes us somewhere that we, as fans, may not necessarily want to go. Especially in 1965, when the article was published. She takes us down a dark road, albeit briefly, to a time when the Duke really did get hit. But her telling us about Wayne's battle with cancer doesn't make her story morose. It doesn't detract from the overall message that John Wayne is a man. That John Wayne is the man. Instead, she turns the tide on the "Big C" much as Wayne himself had done by beating the disease itself.
She manages to paint an image of a true American Icon, all in a few brief pages, by sharing her personal experiences and relating them to her time spent on the set with the one and only John Wayne.
My grandma and great-aunt would be so jealous.
