The most ludicrous thing about all the social media outrage at the recently rediscovered John Wayne interview is the assumption promoted by rhetoric that this is some buried obscurity that only recently came to light.
Folks, that interview was notorious THEN.
The Playboy Interviews had a huge footprint in general. They didn’t just profile show-business celebrities but also world leaders, activists, politicians on both sides of the aisle; they could make or break people. I have two volumes on my shelves, and by God, they are fine documents of the cultural landscape of mid-century. Martin Luther King was one of them. So were multiple Presidential candidates.
And one of the most transformative was John Wayne’s. At the time of the interview, he was a declining old Hollywood lion enjoying the last of his successes while the kind of movies he’d made all his life were on their way out. Politically, he was a dinosaur, and in the last few years of his life, people pointed at that interview, at the things he said then, and said, look, he’s a racist, he’s a sexist, he’s so stupid he doesn’t understand the plots of his own movies, he’s so out of touch you can almost feel sorry for him then. His PLAYBOY interview was trotted out as reason to throw his collected work on the trash heap then.
Hell, you didn’t have to go far in the same collected volumes to find other celebrated people talking about what a problem he was. I recall Ed Asner talking about what an anti-Semitic prick he found Wayne to be, Kirk Douglas rolling his eyes at an anecdote about Wayne contacting him after he made the Van Gogh biopic LUST FOR LIFE, to advise him that he was a he-man movie star and should not be making sensitive portraits of “some fag.”
John Wayne was *understood* to be a bigoted old embarrassment, at about that time. I remember John Wayne the man as the painfully thin, visibly exhausted and confused old codger trotted out at the Oscars to read a list of current nominees from a Hollywood he no longer understood. I remember him puzzling out names he’d never heard of, at one point naming “Warner Beatty.” He was dead in months.
It was profoundly out of touch to say you liked John Wayne movies, for a while. It was by the time the leftist folksinger Phil Ochs stood on stage and declared his love for them even while averring in the next breath that the man had not been all that bright.
Don’t even get me started on the man’s range as actor, which was effective enough only within the very narrow category of roles he could be plugged into. This, too, people knew then. None of this was a secret.
If you want to know why all this blew over and why his movies remain a part of our shared cultural landscape, it is because he was so big that the biggest talents wanted to work with him, and because their skills went to crafting stories that could make him look good. When you have John Ford and Howard Hawks on your side, hiring people like Leigh Brackett, and casting co-stars like Henry Fonda and James Stewart, the *work* lasts even if you’re the most objectionable part of it.
Comment By: Levy Sergio Mutemba
April 22nd, 2021 at 5:31 pm
Very interesting text, written with light feet, not judgemental at all.
Indeed, Wayne could not feature in cinematographic treasures such as “Out of the Past”, with Mitchum and goddess Green. Kirk Douglas was the top. He had so much more virility than Wayne in my view, far finer.