John Wayne remains an American icon thanks to his roles in popular Westerns and war movies,
but what do we really know about him?
From his early days to his heights of fame and later controversies, this is the untold
truth of John Wayne.
Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison in 1907 in Iowa.
In 1914, he headed west with his family to California.
Young Wayne's closest companion was his little dog, an Airedale named Duke.
The two were so inseparable that they became known as "Little Duke" and "Big Duke," and
thus a lifelong nickname was born.
While attending Glendale High School, Wayne excelled at football and theater.
At first, he believed he was destined for a career on the gridiron.
He played so well that he received a scholarship to play for the University of Southern California
Trojans.
In his leisure time, he was a typical surfer dude at Newport Beach.
Unfortunately, his days on the waves and his budding football career ended in 1926 when
he was injured in a bodysurfing accident.
This forced him to leave school, and he began working for local movie studios.
Wayne's first job in the film industry was at the Fox Film Corporation, where he worked
as a prop man.
He shoved furniture and equipment for low wages, but it was a living.
He was also able to serve as an extra in several films beginning in 1926.
His first role was as an anonymous Yale football player in Brown of Harvard.
He would go on to have 13 more uncredited roles before he finally received notice in
1929's Words and Music, in which he was credited as Duke Morrison.
Around this time, he met director John Ford, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship.
But it was director Raoul Walsh who finally gave Wayne his first big break in 1930's The
In the film, the actor plays Breck Coleman, who leads covered wagons west on an overland
trail.
Wayne auditioned against 81 other actors before winning the role.
Walsh believed that his actor needed a stage name, so he suggested "Anthony Wayne."
But Fox Studios boss Winfield Sheehan thought that sounded too Italian, so he suggested
"John Wayne" instead, and the name stuck.
John Wayne reportedly did not like horses.
In fact, according to the book John Wayne: The Life and Legend, his own son Michael was
taught to ride horses by stuntmen instead of his father.
This revelation might be a hard pill to swallow, considering that the Duke spent so much of
his career atop a horse.
But multiple sources attest to this very fact.
As journalist Gary Wills put it in a PBS interview,
"[Wayne] hated horses.
Never rode except on the set, and never rode when he didn't have to."
But according to Wayne's son Patrick, his father was actually a terrific horseman.
During the filming of 1971's Big Jake, Patrick watched as his dad stayed astride his horse
even after it got spooked during a chase scene.
Patrick also recalled a time when he himself was riding a horse for 1961's The Comancheros
and it wasn't going so well.
He explained,
"I looked awful.
It looked like I didn’t know what I was doing riding the horse.
[My father] came to me and said, 'You’re going to learn how to ride a horse,' and he
made sure I learned.
There was a later scene when I looked very good, so good that they reshot the earlier
scene so that I looked as good then as I did later in the film."
Onscreen, Wayne's persona was that of the ruggedly handsome man's man.
But off-camera, he was reportedly somewhat reserved and even awkward around women.
Yet he still managed to get married three times and have seven children.
He married his first wife Josephine in 1933, and out of that union came four children.
The marriage ended in 1943, though, possibly due to his affair with Marlene Dietrich, his
co-star in the films Seven Sinners, The Spoilers, and Pittsburgh.
Most biographers blame Dietrich for the affair, which began shortly after she saw Wayne for
the first time and reportedly told her agent,
"Daddy, get me that."
Wayne and Dietrich's affair lasted about three years, after which Wayne married his second
wife, Esperanza.
Their union was marred by jealousy and drunken fights, as well as Wayne's alleged affair
with actress Gail Russell.
On the day that their divorce was finalized in 1954, Wayne married actress Pilar Palette.
Three more children were born before the couple split up 1973.
Wayne never remarried after that, although he did live his last years with his secretary,
Pat Stacy.
Between 1940 and 1945, as World War II raged on, John Wayne starred in seven war movies.
He had dutifully registered for service, but he received a 3-A deferment for "family dependency."
As a father and sole provider for his family, he wanted to make a few more movies before
entering the service.
There's also little doubt that he wanted to keep his name fresh in Hollywood.
He did expect to eventually go to war, though.
But Wayne never ended up serving during the duration of the conflict.
In 1942, Congress revised the Selective Service Act to defer all married men until further
notice.
The fact that Wayne avoided service reportedly annoyed his friend John Ford so much that
during the filming of They Were Expendable in 1945, he barked,
"Duke, can't you manage a salute that at least looks like you've been in the service?"
Wayne was so angry that he reportedly stormed off the set for the only time in his career.
There's also evidence that the actor thought he could have been more useful on the big
screen than overseas.
Ford's grandson Dan recalled Wayne once telling him,
"I felt it would be a waste of time to spend two years picking up cigarette butts.
I thought I could do more for the war effort by staying in Hollywood."
Despite all this, there is also evidence that the actor attempted to find a way to serve,
including a letter of application to the Office of Strategic Services contained in the National
Archives.
In 2015, this topic came up again when David James Elliott played Wayne in the film Trumbo.
"Where did you serve again?"
"You trying to say something?"
"No, Duke, he wasn't."
In 1948, when Wayne was 41 years old, a look in the mirror told him what many middle-aged
men dread: he was progressively losing his hair.
From that point forward, he wore a toupee in his films, although he was occasionally
seen in public without it.
He notably made one onscreen exception as he declined to wear his wig for 1957's The
Wings of Eagles.
He was even quite open about wearing a rug.
When a reporter once asked about him about his phony hair, he quipped,
"It's not phony.
It's real hair.
Of course it's not mine, but it's real."
As it turns out, a celebrity's fake hair can end up being quite valuable.
In 2010, the toupee that Wayne wore for 1967's El Dorado ended up fetching $1,244 at auction.
In 2013, another one of his custom-made toupees was found.
That wig, along with its canvas block, sold for $6,250.
In 1954, Wayne was in the Utah desert shooting The Conqueror, in which he played Genghis
Khan.
The shoot was taking place 100 miles from an atomic bomb testing site in Nevada.
Officials assured everyone that fallout couldn't possibly reach the production site, although
a Geiger counter on the set crackled so loudly that Wayne believed it was broken.
Nobody knew it at the time, but everyone on the set was exposed to radiation as the fallout
was blown south and east.
People who were exposed in this way between 1951 and 1962 in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada
are now referred to as "Downwinders."
In 1964, Wayne was diagnosed with cancer.
He lost a lung and some ribs to the disease.
He would eventually die from stomach cancer in 1979.
His sons Michael and Patrick, who were also on the set of The Conqueror, got cancer as
well, though they survived.
By 1981, 91 of the 220 cast and crew members on the set of The Conqueror had developed
cancer.
And 46 of them had died, including Wayne, lead actress Susan Hayward, and director Dick
Powell.
Wayne was friends with many American presidents, including Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy,
Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan.
He was especially supportive of Nixon, whom he rallied for in the 1960 presidential election.
But Wayne was also a good sport.
When Kennedy won the election that year, he received a telegram from Wayne expressing
"congratulations from the loyal opposition."
And when Kennedy was assassinated three years later, Wayne was as devastated as anyone else.
Indeed, Wayne reportedly aimed to be fair-minded when it came to politics.
When his friend Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 election, he again bowed gracefully to the
loss.
But when the chance came to vote for Nixon again in 1968, he once more became a huge
supporter.
The support was reciprocal, as Nixon appreciated that Wayne had a way with the blue-collar
voters.
After Nixon won the election, the two remained good friends, even when the president became
embroiled in the infamous Watergate scandal and subsequently resigned in 1974.
"He probably should've just stood up at the very beginning and said, 'Anybody that's done
something wrong, go to jail.'
He didn't do it soon enough."
In 1976, John Wayne appeared on the big screen for the last time in The Shootist, which co-starred
Lauren Bacall and Ron Howard.
The film was, appropriately enough, about an aging Old West gunman who was dying from
cancer.
After Wayne's character, J.B. Brooks, is diagnosed as terminal, he chooses to meet his maker
in a gunfight.
The John Wayne Heritage heralds it as being "among his greatest performances."
"Most men, regardless of cause or need, aren't willing, and they blink an eye or draw breath
before they pull the trigger."
Because Wayne himself had battled cancer, the general public assumed that he still had
it during production of The Shootist.
The actor was indeed clearly ailing during filming, which was evidenced by his character
grunting and groaning as he moved around.
In truth, though, Wayne actually didn't have cancer during filming, having kicked his illness
back in 1969.
He would later suffer a bout with stomach cancer in 1975, but it went into remission
before The Shootist was filmed.
During production, he also was hospitalized with a bad case of the flu, but he nevertheless
showed no signs of slowing down.
He actually had another movie booked that he was planning on appearing in called Beau
John.
It was intended to be a light comedy about the patriarch of a Kentucky family during
the 1920s.
Unfortunately, Wayne's stomach cancer returned in January 1979, and he died on June 11 of
that year.
In 2019, a 1971 Playboy interview with Wayne resurfaced.
In it, the actor expressed some incendiary views, such as,
"I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.
I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible
people."
Wayne also voiced his beliefs that Black people needed better education opportunities, that
the slavery of long ago wasn't his generation's fault, and that taking American land from
indigenous people was a matter of survival.
As he put it,
"I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from [Native Americans],
if that's what you're asking.
Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival.
There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying
to keep it for themselves."
"I am sad to see minorities make so much of themselves as a hyphenated American."
Wayne also voiced his displeasure with socialism in the interview, saying at one point,
"You can't whine and bellyache 'cause somebody else got a good break and you didn't, like
these Indians are.
We'll all be on a reservation soon if the socialists keep subsidizing groups like them
with our tax money."
"There shouldn't be so much whining and bellyaching."
The interview prompted many responses, including some people considering the possibility that
John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, should be renamed.
Clearly, like many icons of the entertainment industry, Wayne had a controversial side that
persists to this day.
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