DUKE OF AMERICA

HOW JOHN WAYNE MADE HIMSELF THE EMBLEM OF A NATION

Author: By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, February 23, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

``Duke,'' with its implication of intimacy, sounds phony. ``Wayne'' seems too distanced for such an immediate presence -- it would almost be better to go all the way and make it ``Mr. Wayne.'' For that matter, the surname courts obscurity. By itself, ``Wayne'' could just as easily stand for . . . ``Gretzky''? ``Newton''? Garth's buddy from ``Wayne's World''? No, the only way is the full name, pronounced as if one word: ``JohnWayne,'' two matter-of-fact monosyllables that fit together as smoothly -- as purposefully -- as holster and Colt.

Purposefulness is crucial. For John Wayne became ``John Wayne'' in much the same way Thomas Dunson gets his cattle from Texas to Abilene in ``Red River,'' the greatest of all Westerns as well as the vehicle for the greatest of all John Wayne's performances. The drive is made through determination, luck, and calculation. So too with John Wayne: ``He had to be invented,'' Garry Wills argues in the prologue to ``John Wayne's America,'' and ``all his work, especially in the Westerns, was part of one project -- to build a persona full of portent, to maintain a cumulative authority in his bearing.''

Before there was the John Wayne of Monument Valley and points West, there was Marion Morrison of Winterset, Iowa. Before there was the ultimate cowboy, there was the honor student who hated horses and represented his high school in the Southern California Shakespeare Contest. Before there was ``overnight'' stardom with ``Stagecoach'' in 1939, there were a dozen years of grueling apprenticeship in threadbare B movies and Western serials. Most paradoxically of all, before there was the movies' favorite military hero, there was the man who (unlike such Hollywood contemporaries as Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Clark Gable, and Tyrone Power) chose not to serve in World War II.

An awareness that little was natural in John Wayne's becoming ``John Wayne'' -- and nothing inevitable about his reaching a point where, as Elizabeth Taylor put it shortly before his death, ``He gave the whole world the image of what an American should be'' -- is central to ``John Wayne's America,'' a book Wills might have as accurately titled ``America's John Wayne.'' A comparable awareness is not to be found in Herb Fagen's ``Duke: We're Glad We Knew You.'' For proof of how negligible an enterprise Fagen's oral biography is, one need look no further than the dust jacket, which trumpets a ``Foreword by Ronald Reagan'' that turns out to be a Reader's Digest obituary tribute from 1979.

Still, Fagen does have one splendid anecdote: A pair of the actor's friends, looking for a gag gift, send him a year's subscription to Pravda. What makes this such a funny story is, of course, John Wayne's superpatriot status. A very public hawk during the Vietnam War, he was for a time a member of the John Birch Society and never expressed any regrets over his support of the Hollywood blacklist. The association with Americanism went far deeper than that, though. John Wayne was ``Manifest Destiny on the hoof,'' as Wills memorably puts it. ``We are entangled in his story, by the dreams he shaped or inhabited, in us or in others, by the things he validated and those he scorned, by the particular definition he gave to `being American.' ''

That entanglement contains multitudes, from an immigrant named John Shalikashvili, who four decades before becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff taught himself English by watching John Wayne movies, to an Army brat named Newton Gingrich, who found in ``The Sands of Iwo Jima,'' which earned John Wayne the first of his two Academy Award nominations, ``the formative movie of my life.'' (The idea of a John Wayne picture being Gingrich's formative movie is less startling, surely, than the notion that any speaker of the US House of Representatives has a ``formative movie'' in the first place.) It makes perfect sense that a Los Angeles Times editorial cartoon printed after John Wayne's death should depict him as a fifth head on Mount Rushmore.

No one has written better about the cultural ideology of John Wayne's career than Wills does here. As one might expect from the author of such books as ``Nixon Agonistes,'' ``The Kennedy Imprisonment'' and the Pulitzer Prize-winning ``Lincoln at Gettysburg,'' Wills's sensitivity to the larger implications of John Wayne as an auteur des politiques is superb.

It is to another of his books, however, that Wills draws a parallel: his similarly titled ``Reagan's America.'' In that work, Wills revealed a thoroughgoing familiarity with Hollywood and unmistakable enthusiasm for movies. It's surprising, then, that ``John Wayne's America'' tends to be fussy and pedantic -- not words anyone would associate with an appreciation for John Wayne -- when its focus is exclusively on his films. Wills's preferred practice in much of the book is to compare the character John Wayne plays onscreen with the character as described in the original source on which the film is based. It's an approach that consistently reveals unexpected facets, but facets that do little to enlarge or deepen our knowledge of a given movie or its ideological resonances.

In Wills's defense, such a (relative) failure may say less about his book than about his book's subject. In the end, John Wayne eludes analysis and criticism (``criticism'' in both senses of the word) to a greater degree than does any other star. That elusiveness extends to the star: For all that John Wayne so impressively invented what he became, even he failed to understand fully the nature of his gifts. The clearest evidence of this comes in his two supreme performances: as Dunson in ``Red River'' and as Ethan Edwards in ``The Searchers.'' Both Dunson and Edwards are individuals who teeter on the brink of becoming monsters. Not the least of the contradictions in the invention of ``John Wayne'' is that the star who wore the whitest of white hats in nearly all of the 160 movies he made was never so magnificent on the screen as when playing a pair of hate-filled men driven by demons.

Magnificent may well be too weak a word. Consider just one shot from ``The Searchers,'' and it lasts no more than a few seconds, when Ethan Edwards first sees the destruction wrought by Comanche marauders on his brother's ranch. Swinging out his rifle so as to fling off the fringed sheath covering its barrel, he spurs his horse in a gallop toward the burning house. He does this in a single electric motion -- an overwhelming, imperial gesture -- at once phenomenally expressive and gunshot-terse. It simultaneously communicates rage, recognition, resignation, horror and mere reflex in one simple act, and with an eloquence no words could match. It's there on the screen for but an instant, and in one's memory forever after, this image of a remorseless man sweeping free his rifle, readying himself for action, repelling grief the only way he knows how: in preparation to kill or be killed.

Here is the greatness of the movies at its purest, grandest, most unforgettable. Here is artifice -- here is invention -- become force of nature. Here, too (the pair of names become one, as perilously indissoluble as Lincoln's Union), is ``JohnWayne.''