THE sonuvabitch looked like a man. That was film director Raoul Walsh's description of the 22 year old extra he noticed one day at Fox Studios in 1929. Walsh immediately cast John Wayne as the hero in his 1930 epic The Big Trail, thereby launching an actor who would become the emblem not just of American manhood but of American individualism - part redeemer, part force of nature.
"When he was called the American, it was a statement of what his fans wanted America to be," Garry Wills writes in the prologue to John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity. Readers fearing yet another tedious deconstruction of a popular icon can relax. Mr Wills is not that kind of cultural commentator. He may note the ritual humiliation of women in Howard Hawks's films, and refer to the homoeroticism in Red River, but he is too subtle and honest a writer to take the jargon spiked gender studies route.
Instead he presents a study, not of the man ("Wayne had no interesting ideas in his private life") but of the idea Wayne embodied on screen. In doing so, Wills also produces a concise and valuable history of the Western, a genre more reverentially misunderstood than perhaps any other in cinema.
The story of John Wayne, Cowboy, is the story of The Frontier. And the story of The Frontier is the story of America. Garry Wills acknowledges that powerful doctrine, observing that "The great urge of the American imagination is to light out for the territory." At the same time he reveals the legend to be, in large part, the self conscious creation of directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks, filmmakers who reinvented the John Wayne myth whenever the prevailing ideology demanded a new hero, while they preserved the West's image as "a crucible for separating real men from weaklings."
Invention was and is, of course, Hollywood's business. John Wayne, however, is traditionally venerated as a natural in that artificial world. Unlike rigid Gary Cooper or earnest Henry Fonda, "The Duke" faced down the bad guys effortlessly, laconically. As he told the film critic Roger Ebert, "ordinarily they just stand me there and run everybody up against me."
The truth, as Garry Wills presents it, is quite different but no less impressive. Even the characteristic Wayne pose hip cocked with the opposite knee bent - is one the actor consciously employed to convey the easy authority of American imperial dominance. "Wayne constantly strikes the pose of Michaelangelo's David," Wills writes, confirming his point with a series of photographs. "Sometimes, with a wider throw of hip, he becomes Donatello's David."
In a business that took male beauty seriously John Wayne knew, above all, that he was graceful. He rejected costume devices like the bandoliers or clanking spurs worn by other heroes to signify mastery, and instead chose simple outfits that "let the body do its work". Through skill and discipline, the man who hated horses and who favoured a suit and tie became the most recognisable horseman in screen history, even when viewed in silhouette.
Wayne's trademark drawl was similarly developed for artistic purposes and his model was the legendary stunt man, Yakima Canutt. "I spent weeks studying the way Yakima Canutt walked and talked," Wayne recalled, "I noticed that the angrier he got, the lower his voice, the slower his tempo." Wills notes that in Fort Apache, Wayne's slower delivery is deliberately contrasted with Henry Fonda's clipped tone. Authentic command resides in Wayne's falling cadences.
Stagecoach, John Ford's 1930 art film based on a Maupassant story, finally delivered a background equal to the actor's presence: Monument Valley. "The handling of space pits foreground intimacy against background immensity," Wills notes, "And Wayne is the space traveller who provides the visual link between the poles." He is also the outsider fighting for the community, a recurring theme in Ford's work and one the director would resurrect during the Cold War when he and, to a lesser extent, Wayne became useful mascots of the CIA elite.
The film marked the beginning of the Ford/Wayne collaboration, one characterised by Ford's sadistic behaviour (he kicked and jeered his star) and Wayne's docile submission. They made 13 films together between 1930 and 1963, tumultuous years during which Wayne's roles and his political ideology gradually merged. "He embodied a politics; or his screen image did," Wills writes. "It was a politics of large meanings, not of little policies . . . of patriotism, [self reliance] and responsibility." Thanks to the power of that image, the US has more statues dedicated to the actor who avoided military service than it does to any soldier.
Garry Wills makes passing, merciless references to Wayne's self inflated ideology. He notes, for example, that "Wayne the late arriving antiCommunist cut no profile in courage" during the blacklist era, despite the actor's claims to have run several "commie" scriptwriters out of Hollywood. "His, role, finally, was to emerge from the battle and shoot the wounded," Wills concludes of a professional whose first consideration was always his career.
THAT career is generally regarded as essentially static - John Wayne repeatedly being John Wayne in films where only the plots varied. But having viewed over 140 Wayne movies, Garry Wills discerned a complex evolution. The Wayne character changes to meet the needs of the American imagination, he argues. Born as The Kid, a callow young cowboy embodying the innocence of his surroundings, maturing into the middle aged leader and finally emerging as the lone survivor of a vanished heroic time in films like True Grit and The Shootist, Wayne delivered the reassurance his audience craved when war or social unrest loomed.
"Even the myths that simplify are not, in themselves, simple," Wills observes of this living monument who "seems to become larger the farther off he goes". The author, who has written 19 books - including studies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan - was repeatedly asked "Why him?" when John Wayne's America was published.
"Nixon had policies," Wills replies, "but beneath those positions were the values Wayne exemplified." In making his case, Mr Wills is not only convincing but entertaining. It is a winning combination that John Wayne would have recognised.