John Wayne: A Reality Check

John Wayne was one great American who by way of his Hollywood movie career portrayed to America, what it really means to be a man. Not only was he tough on screen, he was unabashedly and refreshingly honest, always to say truthfully what is on his mind. None of this political correctness nonsense for him! If ever a Gloria Steinem or Germaine Greer-type woman got uppity with him, he had no second thoughts to turn them across his knee and give their fannies the true-grit paddling they so richly deserved! Yet, he was actually very generous in his attitude towards women and their rights. Shortly before he died, The Duke said, "Women can do anything they want to....as long as they have supper ready for us men when we come home from work."

Fair enough: throughout the history of America, men have done a very great deal, from which women have benefitted. So there is some justice to be had in a little gracious compensatory gratitude back to men from the distaff side.

For all his portrayal of male machismo on the Hollywood movie screen, however, John Wayne never actually served in the U.S. military armed forces, despite being of appropriate age to do so in World War II and in the Korean conflict. (He was born in May 1907.) He never led any real-life charges up San Juan Hill, nor did he ever ride into the proverbial very jaws of hell and return again, unscathed. A college football injury was responsible for his marked absence from military service to his country.

John Wayne may have had great basic physical strength, but as an alleged inveterate smoker off-screen, he never had any enduring stamina to display in any of his movies, i.e. he never ran or swam continuously for any great distance. He also never participated in the Olympic Games. These facts create something of a credibility gap between his on-screen invincibility, and his real-life athletic capability. But at least, when we Americans turned off the TV after watching a John Wayne movie, we felt damn good to be an American! Stars and stripes forever, and no bowing to foreign heads of state to apologize to them for America's past doings abroad!

Yet, John Wayne was never gratuitously pugnacious or petulant. He was always well-reserved, saving the full force of his wrath exclusively for those who deliberately provoked it. He obliged both good and evil with the utmost of equity becoming a patriotic American.

This blogger confesses that John Wayne was every bit the man yours truly never was and should be. He has it in mind that when he dies and goes to heaven, his first question to God will be, "Lord, why did you not make a John Wayne out of me?" God's answer may well be, "But Larry, John Wayne knew not a lick about music! Look at all the musical talent with which I blessed you!" "I am mighty grateful to you for that, Lord", I would reply in kind. But all my musical talent won me more scornful and jealous enemies than admirers in my lifetime, even among alleged friends and family relatives. John Wayne was far better-off in the popularity department with an America which admires crude brutality over refined cultural erudition.

Thanks to the stereotype of such effeminate music composers as Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn, this musician blogger never dated girls in high school and college, feeling assured no woman in her right mind would be caught dead in the company of a sissy-wimp cellist. Yet, the reality is that even The Duke himself experienced divorce several times in his life. Maybe wives exposed to the private lives of the rich-and-famous know something about wowie-kazowie men the rest of the general public does not know about them.

No, there is never any rose without thorns, even if that rose is named John Wayne. Still, it is well beyond dispute that on the Hollywood screen, The Duke was and still is a hero--a great American hero--to tens of millions of Americans. In an American Rust Age of anti-hero, The Duke still remains rhetorically an eternal torch in the hearts of those who remember him, of all those traditional values which built America into the world's greatest and uniquely-exceptional nation.

-LKM