Davis traces John Wayne's story from its beginnings in Winterset,
Iowa, to his death in 1979. This is not a story of instant fame:
only after a decade in budget westerns did Wayne receive serious
consideration, for his performance in John Ford's 1939 film Stagecoach.
From that point on, his skills and popularity grew as he appeared
in such classics as Fort Apache, Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,
The Quiet Man, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
and True Grit. To depict the different facets of Wayne's life and
career, Davis draws on a range of primary and secondary sources,
most notably exclusive interviews with the people who knew Wayne
well, including the actor's costar Maureen O'Hara and his widow,
Pilar Wayne. The result is a portrait of a man whose private identity
was eventually overshadowed by his screen persona - until he came
to represent America itself.
"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." - Library Journal.
"Plenty has been written about Wayne and his movies, but Davis's
biography is exemplary, highly informative, and eminently readable;
in short one for serious fans." - Booklist
"Anyone seeking the true "heartland" might well veer
toward Winterset, Iowa 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." - Publisher's Weekly.
"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
cliché,-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." - Kirkus.
