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JOHN WAYNE’S AMERICA: |
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David Gergen engages Garry Wills, professor of History at Northwestern University and author of "John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity."
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Finally tonight a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor at large of "U.S. News & World Report," engages Garry Wills, Professor of History at Northwestern University and author of "John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity."DAVID GERGEN: Garry, you write in your book that in 1995 a survey of Americans asking who their favorite movie star is had John Wayne at the top, 17 years after he died. How do you explain his hold upon the American imagination?
GARRY WILLS, Author, "John Wayne’s America": Well, it’s not something that he could do just in terms of himself. Obviously, we were conditioned to receive some extraordinary jolt from him. What conditioned us, I think, is our deepest myth, our frontier myth. We were taught in the 19th century especially that the frontier defined us. We were different from all other countries because we had space; we had freedom; we had an opening into nature. And by going West, by going out, we would become ourselves. And we couldn’t really be free if we stayed clustered together in the Eastern cities. And so we had all this transcendentalist literature, all these people saying, go West, that’s how you become an American, escape the lettered littleness of the past in Europe. You know, from Jefferson on, Jefferson said, pose a moral question to a professor and a plow man, and the farmer will answer as well or better because he’s in touch with the earth. Well, Wayne is that. He doesn’t know books. He doesn’t know cities. He doesn’t know that, but he’s in touch with nature. And he is a kind of force of nature, himself.
DAVID GERGEN: You call him an American Adam.
GARRY WILLS: Yeah. Herman Melville said the American Adam is like the original Adam. He comes out of the earth at God’s call. He’s not brought from any previous descendants. Well, that was what the idea was of America. Here we had this great continent. It was a clean slate, a fresh start. We were not going to be like any other country, and so this Adam, who is naive in some ways, not learned in the ways of the world, has an earthy wisdom from contact with the great outdoors, and, you know, Wayne just breathes that, moves that, walks that.
DAVID GERGEN: Does he embody manliness then for us as well?
GARRY WILLS: Certainly, one ideal of manliness and a very powerful one. It’s interesting, women are not nearly as great fans as men. Men--
DAVID GERGEN: So it’s not a sex appeal?
GARRY WILLS: It’s an odd kind of sex appeal. You know, his major influence in the big roles was as a very mature, responsible man. He was not the young flirty lover, except in some of his earlier, not very influential movies. He’s the solid, dependable person who can hold together a wagon train or a cavalry unit, or Marine detachment. And young men look up to him. In his most influential movies there’s a two-generation plot in which he’s the man in his 40's who has--is burdened by these tremendous responsibilities, and there’s a younger generation, and the love interest is down there, of a young man in his 20's who rebels against him and doesn’t like his strong ways. He feels he’s going to be swallowed up by this strength. And then, of course, as the movie goes on, he sees that there is a kind of tenderness underneath it all; there’s a tough love, and surrogate father is forgiven by the young rebel. Well, that had tremendous appeal to young boys and lots of old men.
You’ve got lots of stories now of people who were influenced by that. Newt Gingrich was bowled over when he was a little kid by this, and it’s still with him. He closed down the government, and Elizabeth Drew, the reporter, went to him and said, some of your own followers are saying you’ve gone too far; that this is extreme, you should back off. And he said, "I learned from Sgt. Striker," hero, "Sands of Iwo Jima," " that you have to be tough on your own for their own good." And he said, "That was the formative movie in my life." And it was a formative movie in a lot of people’s lives. And it is to this day. I lectured at the Naval Academy on John Ford, who’s a big naval figure. And a midshipman came up to me and said, every Saturday I play "Sands of Iwo Jima" in my room and a bunch of my friends come in, and every time John Wayne dies, I break up. So here’s a kid, 20 years from now he and his friends are going to be admirals, and they will have had the same training that Newt Gingrich had.
DAVID GERGEN: I was interested in how much of an emphasis you placed upon the way he moved in his body, his body movements. In fact, your book has pictures comparing the way he stood and looking at Michelangelo’s "David" and Donatello’s "David." They were, very similar poses.
GARRY WILLS: Well, Raoul Walsh, the director who discovered him when he was 22 years old, sawing him moving furniture around. He was a prop man at Fox, and he said, "My God, this guy is just so rhythmic and graceful and ease." He had tremendous strength. He was very well coordinated. He was slow. That’s why he wasn’t great at football. But he used his body with tremendous economy. So even though he was slow he got things done because he went right to the point in all of his movements and gestures. And he was very conscious of that. Richard Widmark was directed by him in the "Alamo," and he said, "He would crack me up because he would say, ‘Goddamn it, be graceful like me!’"
DAVID GERGEN: Well, you had written an earlier biography of George Washington.
GARRY WILLS: That’s right.
DAVID GERGEN: And I wonder whether there’s a comparison because Washington’s stature, his physical stature, gave him so--
GARRY WILLS: Yes. You know, Washington was a very good horseman, and so he could ride fast to where he wanted to go when he was working, could ride all night and be fresh in the morning. And, of course, that kind of physical indomitability is what Wayne conveys, among other things.
DAVID GERGEN: And yet in the end the idea of John Wayne was really a myth. You say that he hated horses, a man--
GARRY WILLS: Hated horses. Never rode except on the set, and never rode when he didn’t have to.
DAVID GERGEN: And you told a tale that I had never seen described this way before about World War II and how he and Ronald Reagan were on parallel paths in Hollywood and yet, they very different ways in World War II.
GARRY WILLS: Yes. Both in 1939 had a breakthrough movie. And the breakthrough movie made it possible that they were going to move up. But then along came the war. Reagan could have stayed out because he was practically blind, but he went in, and when he came back, he was over the hill because his appeal was of the young, light friend of the hero type. And when he came back, he was a little too old for that, so he never quite regained his--Wayne was afraid that was going to happen to him. He had just made "Stagecoach," and he thought, if I leave, all these young folks are going to come up behind me; they’ll be in place by the time I come back, and all this nine years of waiting will be wasted. So even though his friends went in, John Ford kept saying, why aren’t you coming in? He kept writing letters to him, saying, oh, I’m coming in, I’m coming in, I’ve got to do one more movie.
He got an exemption because he had four children, though he wasn’t living with them. He was living with another woman, not his wife. And then later on when the criteria changed and he didn’t have that family exemption, he was made 1A, and the studio begged to keep him, as it could have begged for the big stars and who had a much stronger case, and he took the opportunity. So he never served.
DAVID GERGEN: Final question then. So in the end did you emerge from this book admiring John Wayne?
GARRY WILLS: I admire the artist. You know, it’s funny. People say he just played himself. No. There’s a tremendous difference. The man doesn’t interest me very much because he was not interested in much outside of making movies. But he was a wonderful professional, very hard working and skilled person who worked with the highest talents in Hollywood and made six or seven best movies made in those decades. And aside from that, of course, the movies were of the kind that created the super human, this larger than life image which is still ranging across the imaginations of people to this minute. So I admire that. And I admire all the other people who contributed to making that, that image, that confection, that creation. The man, himself, doesn’t interest me much.
DAVID GERGEN: Gary Wills, thank you very much.
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