John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity - Hardcover

Wills, Garry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684808234 ISBN 13: 9780684808239

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1997

Synopsis

The best-selling author of Lincoln at Gettysburg explores the life and times of John Wayne and his legend, explaining how the man, Marion Morrison, became a myth and how that myth shaped Americans' political attitudes and ideas. 75,000 first printing. $60,000 ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

Review

This book poses an interesting question: How is it that John Wayne came to embody a certain politics for America? In giving his answer, Wills flashes his usual encyclopedic knowledge of intellectual and cultural materials. He knows his Aristotle and his Groucho and knows when to use them. The knee-jerk analysis of Wayne's status is that he was a blustery flag-waver. Wills's answer is more subtle: that Wayne "stood for an America that was disappearing or had disappeared." And according to Wills, Wayne did this in different ways at different stages of his career. In his early successes (such as Stagecoach), he represented naive virtue; later he would portray the dark acceptance of responsibility (Sands of Iwo Jima). And finally, he moved on to model a conscious acceptance of the anachronism of all such individual honor (The Shootist).

From the Publisher

Eighteen years after his death, John Wayne is still America's favorite movie star. He was less an actor than a symbol, the most popular pop icon of the twentieth century, and one of the most important political figures in America. People shaped their lives or adopted political stands to conform to him as a template of authentic Americanism. Wayne became the lens through which people saw their own and their country's history. In this brilliant, ground-breaking study of the relationship between politics and popular culture, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills focuses on the manufacture of "John Wayne" from the raw materials of Marion Morrison, the person born in Iowa who became a myth, his own reality swallowed up in his meaning as master directors such as John Ford crafted films that made him the personification of America's frontier myth.

Unlike other actors and actresses with whom we associate political views, Wayne embodied a politics of large meanings -- a politics of gender (masculine), ideology (patriotism), character (self-reliance), and personal responsibility. It was a politics of implicit dogmas that often transcended his own views and behavior. Although Wayne avoided serving in the military during World War II, he became, through his screen roles, the model of the American soldier. Likewise, although Wayne's popular image is that of a staunch anti-Communist, in reality he avoided taking a stand in the bitter ideological war that raged in Hollywood until after the issue had been decided.

Wayne acquired his larger political meaning gradually, as he moved from one film role to the next: from the young, individualist cowboy hero (the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach) to the middle-aged authority figure weighed down with responsibility (Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima) to the cool, determined patriot in the midst of Cold War dangers (represented by Davy Crockett in The Alamo) to the elderly lone survivor of a past heroic time (Rooster Cogburn in True Grit). Wayne himself became aware of his larger political meaning only through a progressive act of self-identification, in much the same way that his fans came to associate their ideals with his screen personae.

In this work of great originality, the biography of an idea, Wills shows how John Wayne and the Hollywood image factories distorted or ignored important facts of Wayne's life to create his myth. Wills shows for the first time how Wayne, through his screen characters, spoke to the needs of his audience at crucial periods in American history, and how in response Americans invested their emotions in that embodiment of their deepest myths.

John Wayne's America traces the way Wayne's countrymen became "entangled in his story, by the dreams he shaped or inhibited, in us or in others, by the things he validated and those he scorned, by the particular definition he gave to 'being American."

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0684808234
• ISBN 13: 9780684808239
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384