Eyman Scott - John Wayne: the life and legend

PRAISE FOR

JOHN WAYNE: THE LIFE AND LEGEND

[An] authoritative and enormously engaging new biography.... [Eyman] takes you through Waynes life, his death and his legend in a detailed, remarkably knowledgeable yet extremely readable way.

Peter Bogdanovich, The New York Times Book Review

No Wayne biography until now has ridden the defile between the reverential and the tendentious with quite the graceful equilibrium of this one.... Eyman gets at the details that the bean counters and myth-spinners miss....Waynes intimates have told Eyman things here that theyve never told anyone else.

David Kipen, The Los Angeles Times

Deeply researched and totally absorbing.

Clive Sinclair, The Wall Street Journal

A spirited portrait of John Wayne and the Hollywood he worked in.... Traces his transition from the eager, boyish roles he played in early movies to confident leading man.

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

We all think we know John Wayne, in part because he seemed to be playing himself in movie after movie. Yet as Eyman carefully lays out, John Wayne was an invention, a persona created layer by layer by an ambitious young actor.

Glenn Frankel, The Washington Post

[An] exemplary biography.... Eyman appears to have had broad access to Waynes business and family life, and the result is a book with a compelling claim to being definitive.

Robert Horton, Film Comment

Scott Eyman has taken a legend and a statue and given us an odd, decent, muddled but deeply likable man. Thats what makes this book so readable and so touching.

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and Moments That Made the Movies

In comprehensive detail, this new biography chronicles a great star at work.... Like a cinematographer, Mr. Eyman offers readers Wayne from many angles, in his own words and the words of those who worked with him.... An engrossing record of how the Duke stayed top dog for so long.

The Economist

Eyman... does an expert job in nailing Waynes enduring appeal: On-screen and off, he presented a man of action, confidence, self-determination and, sometimes, compassion.

Chris Foran, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

[A] splendid biography of Hollywoods most enduring movie star.... Eyman offers perceptive views of Waynes many films and a wagons worth of revealing and entertaining anecdotes. If you think you know John Wayne, youll know him even better as a movie starand appreciate him even more as a personafter reading John Wayne: The Life and Legend .

Douglass K. Daniel, Associated Press

Full of historical detail and fan facts, John Wayne tracks shy Marion Robert Morrisons path to the screen hero who got scant credit for his own craft in creating the John Wayne that rallied audiences.

David DArcy, San Francisco Chronicle

One of the greatest movie star biographies ever written.

Allen Barra, Salon.com

A comprehensive and compelling examination of the Duke.... Insightful, exhaustive and engrossinga definitive portrait of the man and the legend.

Kirkus Reviews

Drawing deeply on interviews with family and friends, acclaimed biographer Eyman colorfully chronicles Waynes life and work.... Compulsively readable.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Eymans exhaustively informative biography is, in essence, a tribute. One ends it liking Duke a lot more.

John Sutherland, The Times (London)

It would be hard to find a more complete picture of a public figures life and legend than Eyman gives us of the Duke.

Larry Thornberry, The American Spectator

[Written] with deep research, clear, strong prose and unfailing good humor. The great strength of Mr. Eymans book derives from the strength of its subject.

John R. Coyne Jr., The Washington Times

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For Jeff Heise

And for Harry Carey Jr.,

Who said,

Just put on my tombstone, He rode with the Duke.

Ride away...

That guy you see on the screen isnt really me. Im Duke Morrison, and I never was and never will be a film personality like John Wayne. I know him well. Im one of his closest students. I have to be. I make a living out of him.

DUKE MORRISON, AKA JOHN WAYNE, 1957

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach.

THE MOVIEGOER, WALKER PERCY

John Wayne, with the customized, sawed-off Winchester he twirls in his introductory shot in Stagecoach.

T he scene had a problem, and the problem was the gun.

Dudley Nicholss script was specific: There is the sharp report of a rifle and Curly jerks up his gun as Buck saws wildly at the ribbons.

The stagecoach comes to a lurching stop before a young man who stands in the road beside his unsaddled horse. He has a saddle over one arm and a rifle carelessly swung in the other hand... It is Ringo...

RINGO. You might need me and this Winchester. I saw a coupla ranches burnin last night.

CURLY. I guess you dont understand, kid. Youre under arrest.

RINGO (with charm). I aint arguing about that, Curly. I just hate to part with a gun like this.

Holding it by the lever, he gives it a jerk and it cocks with a click...

John Ford loved the dialogue, which was in and of itself unusual, but the introduction of the Ringo Kid needed to be emphasized. Ford decided that the shot would begin with the actor doing something with the gun, then the camera would rapidly track in from a full-length shot to an extreme close-upan unusually emphatic camera movement for the period, and an extremely unusual one for Ford, who had grown to prefer a stable camera.

Since the actor was already coping with two large props, Ford decided to lose the horse. He told his young star what he was planning to do: Work out something with the rifle, Ford said. Or maybe just a pistol. He wasnt sure.

And just like that the problem was dropped in the lap of his star, a youngbut not all that youngactor named John Wayne, better known to Ford and everybody else as Duke.

Wayne ran through the possibilities. Every actor in westerns could twirl a pistol, so that was out. Besides, the script specified a rifle cocked quickly with one hand, but later in the scene than what Ford was planning. In addition, Ford wanted him to do something flashy, but it couldnt happen too quickly for the audience to take it in. All the possibilities seemed to cancel each other out.

And then Yakima Canutt, Waynes friend and the stunt coordinator on the film, offered an idea. When Canutt was a boy he had seen Buffalo Bills Wild West show. As the overland stage raced around the arena, a messenger trailing behind the stagecoach had carried a rifle with a large ring loop which allowed him to spin the rifle in the air, cocking it with one hand. The crowd went wild. Canutt said that it had been thirty years ago and he still remembered the moment. More to the point, he had never seen anybody else do it.