A photo of John Wayne from the 1940 film, “The Long Voyage Home.”Courtesy | Wikimedia Commons
When a tycoon tried to take a family’s land in the movie “El Dorado,” an alcoholic sheriff did nothing to help – but John Wayne did.
“Your gun hand’s no good,” gunman Nelse McLeod said.
“Just give me time to get down off of this wagon and we’ll find out,” Wayne replied.
While Wayne embodied the character of the American frontier, few Americans know the story behind his own character.
Wayne was born in 1907 to a pharmacist in the small town of Winterset, Iowa. His parents, who struggled financially and often fought, gave him the name Marion Michael Morrison at age five.
His grandfather, a Union Civil War veteran, bought a homestead in California’s Mojave Desert, and his father moved there to help tend the land in 1914. The rest of the family followed soon after and lived on a farm in what Wayne called a “glorified shack.”
“Didn’t have gas nor electricity nor water,” Wayne said, according to The Washington Post. “A stranger visiting from Iowa wouldn’t have believed he was in the 20th century.”
Wayne rode a horse to school until his family moved to Glendale, a Los Angeles suburb, in 1916. He went to Glendale Union High School, where he was president of the Latin society, on the debate team, on the football team, and wrote sports news for the school paper. During these years, his dog Duke never left his side. Locals started calling him “Duke,” and the name stuck.
Wayne’s family kept struggling with finances, which strained the relationship between his mother and father.
“Mom was just not a happy woman,” he said, according to The Washington Post. “No matter what I did, or what Dad did, it was never enough.”
He went to study at the University of Southern California in 1925, where he continued playing football. He worked for the Fox Film Corp. during the summer, where he made inroads and eventually got minor roles in Western films under the name “John Wayne.” He made his first major appearance in the 1939 movie “Stagecoach.”
When America entered World War II, however, he never enlisted. The Japanese struck Pearl Harbor when he was 34 years old, and he was the sole provider for his family, so he got an exemption from the draft.
When the Army later changed its mind, film studios threatened legal action against Wayne should he enlist. They convinced the military he would be more useful making war movies. So he served from the studio, making movies including “The Fighting Seabees” and “Back to Bataan.”
Wayne’s only field experience came from entertaining soldiers in the Pacific with the USO. Army Lt. Col. Fred Stofft, however, served with Wayne in the New Britain Campaign, and recalled him sneaking onto a landing craft to join soldiers invading an island.
“I turned around and there alongside me was Duke. I said, ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘I want to go and see what’s going on,’” Stofft said. “There was actual fighting and he was part of that.”
Wayne applied to the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, but was  never accepted. His wife Pilar wrote that he would become a “superpatriot” to atone for this.
He starred in patriotic films like “The Green Berets” and “The Alamo,” and classic Westerns like “El Dorado” and “Rio Bravo.” He brought a new grit to the industry, which had been stuck in the habit of simply pitting “white hats” against “black hats.”
“The heavy was allowed to hit the hero in the head with a chair or throw a kerosene lamp at him or kick him in the stomach, but the hero could only knock the villain down politely and then wait,” Wayne said. “I changed all that. I threw chairs and lamps. I fought hard and I fought dirty. I fought to win.”
Wayne applied this in other areas of his life, supporting conservative causes and pushing against Hollywood’s left-wing current.
“I thought I was a liberal,” he said. “I came up terribly surprised one time when I found that I was a right-wing, conservative extremist.”
Wayne founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944 to obstruct efforts by “communist, fascist, and other totalitarian-minded groups to pervert this powerful medium.” He strongly supported Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, even playing the role of a HUAC investigator in the 1952 movie “Big Jim McClain.” Wayne criticized communist teaching in schools.
“You’re being conned into Keynesian socialism,” Wayne said. “It isn’t going to stop the selfishness of human behavior. It isn’t going to stop the greed.”
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, a film buff, allegedly tried to kill Wayne for his on-screen persona and his off-screen anti-communism, according to the book “John Wayne – The Man Behind the Myth.” Author Michael Munn wrote that Stalin sent two KGB assassins after Wayne in 1951, but the FBI intercepted them in Hollywood, according to The Guardian. They brought the men to Wayne, who made them defect by staging a mock execution on the beach. Munn wrote that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev apologized to Wayne in 1958 for the plots.
While these claims are disputed, Munn cited popular actor Orson Welles, who supposedly heard of the plots from imprisoned Soviet filmmakers. Welles disliked Wayne, so would have nothing to gain from spreading these rumors.
Wayne’s status as an American icon, however, is undisputed. He acted consistently with principle and true grit.
“I want to play a real man in all my films, and I define manhood simply,” Wayne said. “Men should be tough, fair, and courageous. Never petty, never looking for a fight, but never backing down from one either.”