John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [72]
When I interviewed Patrick Wayne, he said, “John Ford saw himself as the same kind of man as my father—I think that’s who he really wanted to be. He saw himself as a Western character and identified strongly with that sort of role, which was my father.
Maureen O’Hara was the perfect mate for my father— on screen, that is—and so she must therefore be the perfect mate for Ford.”
In fact, John Wayne also saw himself more and more as the kind of character he was getting to play. He said, “For years I’ve played the kind of man I’d like to have been.”
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JOHN WAYNE
As Charlton Heston noted when I interviewed him in 1979 in his suite at The Dorchester hotel in London, “Wayne’s greatest achievement may have been creating John Wayne. The character he played, the character he invented, was the American persona of the man who is hard and believes in doing right and will do it against all the odds.”
From my observations and from what I was told by those who knew him best, Wayne was as close to the kind of man he’d been playing for years as any actor could ever get. After all, how many actors could play the part of the all-American patriot fighting the evils of Communism and fight that same evil in real life while it was preparing to fight back? How many actors would have been prepared to put their lives on the line for what they believed?
Duke was well aware that the lines between his screen self and his real self were often blurred. “Whatever part I’m playing, whether it’s a cowboy or a sergeant in the marines, or a cop, I always have to be John Wayne and living through the experience. You know, the hardest thing to do in a scene is nothing—or seem to do nothing, because doing nothing requires extreme discipline. You see, there are critics who say that I’m just natural on the screen, but nobody can be natural on the screen. If you are, you’ll drop the scene. The audience will ignore you. The trick is making every nuance minimal.
One look that works is better than twenty lines of dialogue. I know what the critics think—that I can’t act—but it seems nobody likes my acting but the people.
“What is a good actor anyway? You might say that a good actor can play all kinds of parts, like Olivier can. Well, my roles are all tailored to fit me—or rather to fit John Wayne. All I do is sell sincerity, and I’ve been selling the hell out of that ever since I started—or at least, since I learned that lesson. You know, I’m an investment in a motion picture, and I’ve got to protect that investment. If I don’t, the people will stop coming to see me and producers won’t hire me because I can’t sell their films.”
He was certainly doing all right selling films in 1950 when he topped the list of the top ten box-office stars of that year. He would stay in the top ten for the next twenty years.
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Quiet in Ireland
In the autumn of 1950, Wayne returned to Warner Bros. to make Operation Pacific, a Second World War adventure in which he played the captain of a submarine. His leading lady was Patricia Neal and she had very few happy memories of making that film when she spoke to me in 1979.
“I don’t know why, but I just didn’t really warm to Duke when we first worked together, and he didn’t really warm to me. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that he was going through marital problems at the time and so he was not exactly good humored at the time. He could even be a bully and was at odds with the director [George Wagner]. He also gave the publicity man a bad time; he was gay and just seemed to draw Duke’s wrath at every turn.”
Wayne, oddly enough, had more pleasant memories: “Patricia was in love with Gary Cooper, and Coop was often on the set as a visitor, and I got to like him an awful lot. We became good friends.”
He knew the film wasn’t particularly good, though. “You hope every film you make will be great, and the reality is