Drive down John Wayne Drive in Winterset, Iowa, and you’ll find it: the John Wayne Birthplace Museum, designed with an imperative to make it “timeless and masculine.” There’s a bronze of Wayne, splay-legged; across one street, there’s a garage filled with tractors; across the other, there’s a makeshift war memorial, perched on a trailer with “PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN” emblazoned on the side. Winterset, population just over 5,000, is the type of town where students toilet-paper friends’ homes in anticipation of homecoming and the Wednesday night special at the local diner is ham balls. When I drive into town, the sky’s a perfect shade of Midwestern blue-black, and the lights of the courthouse square — one of the best preserved in all of America, according to various proud brochures and friendly waitresses — can be seen for miles.
Until this May, the birthplace museum was little more than a humble, sleepy old house, believed to be where the 13-pound infant Wayne came into the world as Marion Morrison, and a van, airbrushed with scenescapes of Wayne, straight out of the ‘80s. But under the management of Museum Director Brian Downes — a former Wild West performer and travel writer — the museum raised $2.5 million for a building that includes a small theater, an expansive gift shop (best-selling items include a tin sign with Wayne holding a rifle beside “THIS COMMUNITY PROTECTED BY NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH,” and The Official John Wayne Way to Grill) and a gallery, about the size of a large Starbucks, where all manner of Wayne trinkets are arranged into three thematic areas: "Movie Star," "Family Man" (his massive station wagon, customized by Pontiac so that The Big Man could easily maneuver), and "American."
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Some artifacts are more suggestion than fact — it’s easy to make the conclusion that a pistol displayed in one of the exhibits was one used, by Wayne, on set; in fact, it’s from Downes’ personal collection, placed for ambiance. That’s the guiding thesis of the house, still snuggled behind the main museum, where visitors can imagine that the tiny, metal-springed bed in the kitchen would’ve been where toddler Wayne slept, or the glass bottles on the shelf, dug out from the backyard, were Wayne’s family refuse. The family was there for little more than two years, and left little trace on the Winterset public record save Wayne’s birth certificate. But it’s easy to imagine all of these things to be true, even if the only evidence that the house in question was Wayne’s birthplace comes from a neighbor, decades after the fact, who remembered a commotion at the house the day Wayne was born.
Inside the house, a tiny, white-haired woman named Ruth takes both my hands in hers and holds them for a solid three minutes, asking warmly where my people are from. She leads me through the house, narrating “Marion’s” early life, rounding out a few of the details of Wayne’s father’s life and his future accomplishments. It’s not that Ruth, who’s lived in Winterset since the late ‘60s, is fibbing — she’s just the latest to sing the refrain in what has become the well-practiced ballad of John Wayne.
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The image of John Wayne on offer at the museum is a tapestry of half-truths and tall tales, a myth meant to assuage a nation’s anxieties and assure its citizens that a certain type of man, with a sort of principle, was still central to American identity. It’s also a contradiction: an evocation of an idyllic past that never was, a man who only played at, but never actually lived, the wars and skirmishes and shoot-outs that served as a testament to his character and the foundation of his image.
He’s a conservative whose gravitas and charm can sway even the archest of liberals, a man who disliked horses but, more than any other figure, came to represent the entirety of Western ideals. Who avoided military service during World War II but became a hawkish supporter of Vietnam, and whose code of integrity was shadowed with racism, sexism, and thinly veiled bigotry, publicly stating his belief “in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility” and calling the Native Americans “selfish” for refusing to hand their land over to white settlers.
And yet: He’s so difficult to resist. He’s charismatic and charming, with a hypnotic onscreen presence and a drawl that sounds like a gruff lullaby. He was a top box office draw for nearly 20 years; in 1995, 16 years after his death, a national poll voted him America’s favorite movie star. There’s a sense that he’s always been, always will be. He’s like the racist grandpa that millions of Americans nevertheless acknowledge as their own; he’s the embarrassing tear in your eye when you root for America in the Olympics or watch a good Chevy commercial. He’s a mansplainer; he’s a xenophobe; he’d probably have horrible things to say about Islam. And Obama. And trans rights. And so many of the issues that are shaping the future of our collective identity.
The West is gone; the frontier is closed. But the same craving for an idealized version of it, complete with “traditional” gender and race dynamics that accompanied it, has regained currency, legitimacy, and airtime — through the museum, where Donald Trump recently made a campaign appearance, and in texts like The John Wayne Code: An American Conservative Manifesto, filled with quotes from “John Wayne, American Conservative.”
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Wayne’s image has long been yoked with ideals of Americanism, patriotism, and liberty. On the surface, those ideologies are hard to decry — they’re the building blocks of our nation! — but the Wayne-inflected versions are undergirded by a dark and unspeakable fear: of change, of difference, of anything that threatens the primacy of a white, masculine, heterosexual world. Over the last 50 years, that fear has been explored, interrogated, and decried: Playing "cowboys and Indians" isn’t just un-PC, but flatly racist; anti-miscegenation laws feel like a relic of another time; cowboys can be gay, and feminist, and women. And yet a desire to return to Wayne’s America nevertheless remains strong: Just because a thing never existed doesn’t mean people don’t yearn for it anyway.
But how did Marion Morrison became John Wayne, and, in turn, the ultimate embodiment of those values? He went west.
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Wayne became a movie star three times. Each time, there was a different publicity campaign intended to introduce and solidify his stardom, and each time it emphasized slightly different values. It wasn’t until the third try — when Wayne’s boyish beauty had receded, when he’d accumulated the addled look of a divorced father of four, when the plots were less about taming him and more about him taming others, that Wayne finally became a true movie star.
The first try came in 1930, when Wayne, then 23 years old, appeared in Raoul Walsh’s epic Western The Big Trail. Up to that point, Wayne had just been a college student working at the studios to help cover tuition. But after his sophomore year, his mediocre football skills meant the end of his scholarship at the University of Southern California, and he started working full time as a “juicer” (electrician’s assistant) and prop boy. He got chummy with director John Ford, but his break didn’t come until Walsh saw him moving scenery and thought he had the sort of build that a Western boy would. He was told not to cut his shaggy hair, which would make him seem more feral, and sent him on location, where he was dressed in the fringed suede of a Western hero.
The Big Trail was a massive production that failed for various Depression-related reasons, but the studio worked hard to make a star out of Wayne. They changed his name — Marion was “too feminine,” so Walsh suggested “Wayne” — the surname of a Revolutionary War general. Wayne still went by his childhood nickname of “Duke,” which, on another man, could’ve connoted something like royalty, but on the newly christened Wayne, it just gave a sense of something hard and masculine.
“John loves to fight better than anything,” an early profile reported. “After that, he likes to eat: ‘I like meat. Plenty of it. Almost raw. It seems I can never get enough to fill up this big carcass of mine.” Hollywood Magazine reported that “he gets to champing at the bit, feeling a mite coltish,” and has to abscond to the woods. “This movie stuff is alright,” he said, but “this glamour stuff stinks.”
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He was repeatedly compared to Gary Cooper: They were both tall and blonde, both had made-up names to make them sound more masculine, and both starred in Westerns. According to Screenland, “John is extremely modest, talks with a drawl, wears a ten-gallon gray hat, pioneer boots — leather affairs with fancy stitching and high heels — and a long, flowing black tie.”
The difference: Cooper had actually grown up ranching and riding in Montana, first finding work in Hollywood as a stunt rider. By contrast, Wayne had been born in Iowa, where his father worked at a drugstore; his family migrated to California, where they first attempted to do something like farming in the desert, before settling in Glendale. Whatever pioneer boots Wayne might have been wearing were new to him — as was the habit of dropping G's that journalists ascribed to him.
Wayne may have played football, but he was no dumb jock: As would become clear later in his career, he was incredibly well-read and articulate; before he was forced to drop out of college, he planned to be a lawyer, and soon married a society girl — Josephine Saenz, the daughter of a Panamanian diplomat. But that was glossed over in favor of narratives that suggested his onscreen performances as an extension of his IRL personality, and when they couldn’t find true West, they built up his football accomplishments, calling him an “All-American” and suggesting his name was all over the papers, even though, as Wayne biographer Garry Wills has convincingly demonstrated, Wayne wasn’t even a college standout, let alone a star.
Wayne was far from the first actor whose backstory was massaged to match with his onscreen image. What’s more interesting is that it didn’t turn him into a star — at least not yet. After the disappointment of The Big Trail, Wayne descended to the land of “quickie” Westerns. These were ramshackle affairs, generally made on shoestring budgets over eight days — some so cheap they’d take silent Westerns from the ‘20s and splice them together with new footage of Wayne on a horse. It was during this time that Wayne acquired the actual skills that, to that point, had been fiction: For five years, he worked alongside rodeo star–stuntman Yakima "Yak" Canutt who, according to observers, “carried himself so that he was ready to get rough on a second’s notice.” Wayne learned his own Western walk, how to fake punches in a way that looked convincing, and how to say things “low and strong, the way Yak talks.”
Throughout this time, Wayne cultivated his friendship with John Ford, whose name, 20-plus films later, would become forever linked with Wayne’s. But at that point, they were just drinking buddies — until, in 1938, Ford cast Wayne in Stagecoach, and Wayne was asserted as a star for the second time.
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Only Wayne wasn’t supposed to be the star. Stagecoach was intended as an ensemble picture; Wayne doesn’t even show up until 15 minutes into the film. But when he does, it’s with a hero’s intro: Wayne twirls his rifle as if it were a pistol as the camera zooms in to a glorious close-up of Wayne’s face. It’s become one of the most iconic scenes in classic cinema — and Wayne’s way out of quickie Western purgatory.
Gradually, Wayne became something of a leading man: He was in Ford’s next picture, The Long Voyage Home, as a Swedish fisherman, and played a Navy officer opposite Marlene Dietrich in Seven Sinners. Wayne’s Westernness was treated as a matter of fact: He was, in Photoplay’s words, “the typical Western-American-open-spaced and open-minded.” But the press also emphasized that he enjoyed the finer things: Wayne “dressed with meticulous care, like any well-calfed businessman, looks divine in tux or tails ... He doesn’t whang a guitar or sing sad pieces about Western skies, either.” He lived in an “exquisitely furnished home in the swankiest section of Hollywood” and “has no yen for horses offscreen.”
John Wayne was a truer cowboy, then, because he didn’t act the part offscreen. He worked steadily for the next two years, but was nothing we’d consider a star — more on par with the lead in a TV crime drama. When the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, Wayne was 34 and the father of four, and thereby subject to an official deferral. Yet other Hollywood actors waived their deferrals and went anyway, including Clark Gable (age 41) and Jimmy Stewart (age 33), who, when rejected from the Army for being underweight, enlisted his studio’s trainer to help bring him up to 143 pounds. Ford — who, at 47, became a commander in the Navy and headed up its documentary production — repeatedly urged Wayne to enlist. But Wayne resisted, writing Ford with a litany of poor excuses.
The truth of Wayne’s hesitation was logical, if unspeakable: He’d worked for a decade to claw his way out of the quickies. If he left Hollywood then, even to serve his country, he might not ever regain his momentum. So he stayed put, made a dozen films, two of which dealt with the war, and allowed the press to rationalize his lack of service. As Modern Screen explained, “a man of 35 heading a family of six has to think twice before leaving. Just the same, Big John Wayne is restless because, like I said, he’s a man’s man who thinks straight and believes in action. It’s a dilemma for a family man and an American gentleman who wants to make a personal appearance in The Big Scrap.”
At the end of the war, Wayne watched as Stewart and Gable returned home with medals of honor. It’s said that Ford, who routinely abused Wayne, both physically and verbally, never forgave him. It’s also said that Wayne felt deep shame about the decision his entire life — and that it motivated his extreme hawkishness, decades later, when it came to defending the Vietnam War.
But Wayne did, indeed, sustain his career, and starred in one of the most successful renderings of the war — the Ford-directed They Were Expendable, released in 1945. Behind the scenes, Ford, still furious about Wayne’s refusal to enlist, insulted Wayne’s salute and generally gave him hell; in the film’s credits, Ford listed the naval rank of the cast and crew, including Wayne’s conspicuous lack thereof. Still, Wayne’s ability to play at heroism and service was enough to distract from the fact that he hadn’t served— and also made it possible, two years later, for him to become a star a third, final, and decisive time.
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