John Wayne

The Winterset paper reported that the Morrison baby weighed 13 pounds. His name was Marion Robert, his father sold pharmaceuticals, and the family moved west to Glendale in 1916. A fireman on his walk to school started calling him Little Duke because he never went anywhere without his Airedale, also named Duke, and he took the nickname gratefully. He played football and argued on the debate team, was rejected by the Naval Academy for his grades, and went to USC on a football scholarship. Then a bodysurfing accident broke his collarbone. He was too frightened of his coach to admit how it happened, lost the scholarship, and left school with no money. John Ford, returning a favor to that coach, got him work on the Fox lot moving furniture.

Raoul Walsh saw him carrying a table and gave him the lead in The Big Trail, a 1.25 million dollar widescreen experiment that flopped in 1930. Walsh proposed the screen name Anthony Wayne. The studio chief said it sounded too Italian and settled on John Wayne, with the actor not in the room. Nine years of Poverty Row westerns followed, including dubbed singing-cowboy parts, and there he broke the rule that the hero fights clean: he threw chairs and lamps and said so proudly. Stagecoach got financed in 1939 only after every major studio passed and Claire Trevor took top billing. He appeared in 179 films and television productions. True Grit won him the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1970.

He was 34 at Pearl Harbor and classified 3-A on family grounds. He wrote to Ford about enlisting and applied unsuccessfully to the Office of Strategic Services, but Republic Pictures, whose only A-list star he was, threatened to sue if he broke his contract and went to the Selective Service to keep his deferment. He toured Pacific bases with the USO in 1943 and 1944. His widow wrote that he spent the rest of his life as a superpatriot trying to atone. He helped create the Motion Picture Alliance in 1944 and was elected its president in 1949, and he worked as an inside enforcer of the blacklist, denying work to actors and writers over politics they had held years earlier.

He chain-smoked from young adulthood, lost his entire left lung and two ribs to cancer in 1964, and went public against his advisers' warnings to tell people to get screened. He is credited with calling it the Big C. His last role was a gunfighter dying of it. Congress gave him its Gold Medal on his 72nd birthday and he died 16 days later. His grave went unmarked for 20 years. In 2019 a 1971 Playboy interview resurfaced in which he said he believed in white supremacy until Black Americans were educated to responsibility, and called the taking of the continent survival. Orange County was asked to rename its airport. As of 2026 the name is still on it.

John Wayne's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Big Trail film
  His first lead, shot in two formats at staggering cost, and a commercial failure 1930
• Stagecoach film
  Financed only after every major studio turned it down 1939
• The Searchers film
  Ethan Edwards, the part critics reach for when they argue that he could act 1956
• The Alamo film
  He produced, directed and starred, and put in 1.5 million dollars of his own on second mortgages 1960
• The Green Berets film
  The only major picture made in support of the Vietnam War while it was being fought 1968
• True Grit film
  Rooster Cogburn, and the Oscar 1969

• 1916 aged ~9 The family settles in Glendale, where a fireman starts calling him Duke The dog was named Duke too. He preferred it to Marion.
• 1929 aged ~22 Credited on screen as Duke Morrison for the only time, in Words and Music
• 1930 aged ~23 Raoul Walsh casts him in The Big Trail, and Fox renames him His pay went to 105 dollars a week.
• 1939 aged ~32 Stagecoach ends nine years of low-budget westerns
• 1943 aged ~36 Tours Pacific bases for the USO after failing to get into the OSS Republic Pictures had gone to the Selective Service to keep his deferment.
• 1949 aged ~42 Elected president of the Motion Picture Alliance He worked as an inside enforcer of the Hollywood blacklist.
• October 24, 1960 aged 53 The Alamo opens, financed partly on his houses and cars It took 7.9 million dollars at the domestic box office against a 12 million dollar budget.
• 1964 aged ~57 Surgeons remove his left lung and two ribs, and he announces it His advisers had wanted the diagnosis kept quiet.
• June 11, 1979 aged 72 Dies of stomach cancer at UCLA, 16 days after the Congressional Gold Medal

• Davy Crockett 1786–1836
  Frontiersman, soldier, and politician who became a folk hero of the American frontier. portrayed
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. campaigned for
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. supported
• Joseph McCarthy 1908–1957
  Senator whose unsupported accusations and investigations gave “McCarthyism” its name and damaged civil liberties. backed
• George Wallace 1919–1998
  Segregationist governor whose campaigns helped shape racial backlash and modern populist politics. declined to run with
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. voted for in 1936