John Wayne - The Man Behind the Myth
September 8th 2006 04:18
I love John Wayne. I don't think he was a sissy, it's not an ironic love like Rik's fannery of Cliff Richard in 'The Young Ones'. This is a genuine appreciation of a screen giant and his unique talent and just how generally damn iconic he was. When I think Superstars (yes, with a capital S) I think... Steve McQueen, John Wayne and Tom Cruise. These people are known everywhere in the world and will be remembered for some time after they went. We might not get a mythical icon like Wayne again... Cruise has damaged his name too much with his offscreen weirdness, and the media is too quick to latch onto anything that damages the image of a star these days. Wayne is an icon from a dying era.
So it was with great trepidation that I approached this biography of John Wayne... I'm aware there are dozens, maybe even scores, of biographies of John Wayne out there. How would I know that I picked the right one? What if I got something that dragged his name around in the mud too much... there are a lot of critics of Wayne out there, most people my age think of him as a joke. I don't want to read several hundred pages by someone who thinks he's a dickhead! Luckily this book, 'The Man Behind the Myth' turned out to be perfect and exactly what I was after.
The author, Michael Munn, is a journalist and one-time friend of Wayne. He knew Wayne in the 70s when Wayne was winding down his career and Munn was just starting out. Munn alleges that they actually became friends, and if the conversations relayed in this book are even slightly authentic then I think this can probably be believed. Munn uses his own personal contact with Wayne to shed light on the many controversies Wayne faced in his fifty year career, and he takes us from the myth's early creation right up until the man's death and subsequent canonisation.
There was a lot in this book that I was unaware of, being relatively new to all the trivia that lives behind the facades of mega-celebrities like Wayne. For instance, I had no idea that Wayne's speaking voice was the result of his screen persona and not the other way round, nor was I aware that he was once an eloquently-spoken and naive college boy. The book doesn't shy away from Wayne's dodging of the draft (often cited as evidence of his cowardice) and claims that Wayne actually wanted to join up but was prevented by the US government. This could very well be baloney, but it's something we'll probably never know for sure.
There are also some exciting assertions that Wayne actually recieved death threats from Stalin and that Stalin even tried to have him assassinated! (This sequence of the book, whilst very entertaining and eye-opening, is particularly hard to swallow - it's said that Wayne actually caught two Soviet spies and handed them over to the authorities!) With this in mind it's hard to know where the man ends and the myth begins and the book tries to be as honest about it as it can, but even with Wayne's word it's something that you can never trust one way or the other. I was kind of glad that Munn's deconstruction of Wayne's screen image actually brought to light some previously unseen real-life toughness... whether it's true or not, I don't care to know!
Wayne was exceptionally prolific on the screen, with well over 100 film credits, and Munn does an outstanding job of taking us through everything worth hearing about. He writes in a clear and easy to understand fashion, never falling into the trap of waxing lyrical or descending into technical filmtalk jargon, nor does he sensationalise anything. It's exactly the way a biography should be written... respectful to it's subject, unafraid to address anything related to the subject and presented in an enjoyable and entertaining fashion.
I'll just finish off with this off-the-record quote from the book. It's from Wayne himself and it blows to pieces the misconception that he was a right-wing monster, it concerns his friendship with Rock Hudson...
"Who the hell cares if he's a queer? The man plays great chess... I couldn't understand how a guy with those looks and that build and the... manly way he had about him could have been a homosexual, but it never bothered me. Life's too short."
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Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
The line between myth and reality with Wayne is as blurred as Presley.
My favourite Wayne story is the one about him trying to kill Dennis Hopper for being a commie. Wayne in a frenzy on the backlot and Hopper having to hide out.