Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne

Traces the life story of the famous actor from his beginnings in Winterset, Iowa, to his death in 1979, becoming a legendary character in his own right

Anyone seeking the true "heartland" might well veer toward Winterset, Iowa?it is not only the setting for Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County but also the 1907 birthplace of John Wayne. An SMU history professor and the author of several books on film, including a 1995 bio of Wayne's longtime buddy John Ford, Davis follows Wayne's trek to Hollywood from high school in Glendale, Calif., to USC on a football scholarship, and then on to his initial film studio jobs and on through his appearances in more than 150 films between 1928 and 1976. In the 1930s, Wayne made scores of grade-B "horse operas" before Ford cast him in Stagecoach (1939), the film that made him a star and "elevated the screen persona that Wayne had developed over the past decade to the level of popular art." During the past three decades, some two dozen books on Wayne have been published. What moves this entertaining biography to a higher plain is that Davis, as the director of SMU's oral history program on the performing arts for 25 years, was in a singular position to document the memories of Wayne's family, friends and associates. He combined more than 65 interviews with extensive research through books, clipping files, printed interviews, film reviews and magazine articles, in addition to major studio production files, Indiana University's John Ford Collection and the papers of Wayne's agent, Charles K. Feldman. The exhaustive yet readable and entertaining result might explain why the back of this book carries rave blurbs by Janet Leigh and other actors and directors who worked with the Duke. Twenty-seven b&w photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Historian Davis (Southern Methodist Univ.) weighs in with another contribution to the recent spate of biographies of America's larger-than-life cowboy hero. It's hard to imagine someone adding much to the thorough job done by Randy Roberts and James Olson in John Wayne: American (1995), which Davis himself calls ``exhaustive.'' Davis draws on extensive interviews with Wayne's third wife, Pilar, and his favorite leading lady, Maureen O'Hara, as well as on research he did for his biography of John Ford (1995), the director who contributed the most to the creation of the actor's screen persona, but the result is not a lot of new material. Davis offers a competent but clich-riddled recounting of Wayne's career (``In 1946 Hollywood's studios were a beehive of activity. The Golden Age of moviemaking had reached its zenith; every soundstage in town was bustling. . . .'')--from his rather unhappy childhood (starved for affection from his chilly mother, deeply attached to his hard-drinking father, a warm presence but a failure as a provider) through his stumbling into the motion pictures by chance and his discovery that he really liked the process of making movies, his lengthy apprenticeship in B westerns, his sudden rise to stardom with Stagecoach, and so on. Although Davis promises at the book's outset that he will examine the nature of Wayne's image (without engaging in extensive analysis of the films, a remarkable feat, indeed), the resulting volume adds little to our understanding of Wayne as an actor, a political activist, or an icon. On the positive side, one does get a sense of the complexities and contradictions in the man, but even those are reduced to a handful of commonplaces. Despite thorough research, a book that adds little to our picture of Wayne. (27 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Since his death from cancer nearly 20 years ago, John Wayne continues to be both praised for embodying traditional American ideals and reviled for archconservative bigotry. Davis (history, Southern Methodist Univ.; John Ford: Hollywood's Old Master, Univ. of Oklahoma, 1995) draws heavily on memoirs and oral histories by relatives, friends, and key filmmakers to explore the man behind the legend. What emerges is a sympathetic portrait of a rather ordinary man who was able to parlay his macho, no-baloney acting style into a screen image beloved by legions of fans who could identify with those very qualities of simple honesty and unpretentiousness. Davis's entertaining narrative primarily covers Wayne's personal life and the day-to-day production of his films, and the extensive use of personal recollections and anecdotes adds considerable dimension to his human side. This nicely complements the standard study, Maurice Zolotow's Shooting Star: A Biography of John Wayne (LJ 3/15/74). Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Richard Grefrath, Univ. of Nevada Lib., Reno
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

So great was the popularity of the testosterone-soaked Wild West persona of his film roles that in 1995, "sixteen years after his death, John Wayne still ranked as America's favorite movie star." In a virile, red-white-and-blue biography of an ostentatiously virile man, Davis examines how Wayne built and maintained the image that soon grew "to overshadow his private identity and . . . came to represent America itself." Yet he intentionally presents "a sustained life story, not [a] detailed film analysis that would undermine the thread of . . . narrative." Davis offers much detail and many tidbits; for example, Joan Crawford was "entirely too aggressive a woman to suit Wayne's taste," which may signify to many that Wayne possessed a discerning nature as well as an endearingly wooden acting style. Plenty has been written about Wayne and his movies, but Davis' biography is exemplary, highly informative, and eminently readable; in short, one for serious fans. Mike Tribby