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Movie Stars: John Wayne's Body

Garry Wills wanted to understand why John Wayne held such sway over this country. What did the image of Wayne mean and how does he keep American audiences enthralled even years after his death? Wills carefully picks through Wayne's career and his movies. But in understanding the enduring nature of Wayne, Wills starts first with John Wayne's body. Notice how he uses research in fields beyond film studies to make sense of Wayne. Wills earned a Ph.D. in Classics -- a field far from Western films. Yet he used his knowledge of Western art to help us analyze Wayne.

What gave Wayne his aura of slumberous power? Much of it had to do with the easy control of his large body. Hawks said that the young Wayne moved "like a big cat ." … [A] lifelong friend of Wayne, said she thought of Nureyev when she saw Wayne walking. [John] Ford's daughter, Barbara, said there was something overpoweringly sexy in the way Wayne sat and rode his horse. Katharine Hepburn noticed his small feet and "the light dance steps he took with them." Once, when he was drunk, Wayne whimsically turned Marilyn Carey . . . upside down while dancing with her, and didn't notice that her face was turning red until Marilyn's husband pointed it out to him. "Duke apologized," says Harry Carey, Jr. The move was so effortless for him it did not occur to Wayne in his stupor that it could be physically trying for another.

Wayne's control of his body was economical, with no motions wasted. This gave a sense of purpose to everything he did. He worked out characteristic stances, gestures, ways of sitting his horse. He learned to choreograph his fight moves with the creative stuntman, Yakima Canutt. In stills from his early pictures, even when the face is fuzzy, one can identify Wayne by his pose or gait, the tilt of his shoulders, the contrapposto lean of his hips. Classical sculptors worked out the counterpoised position to get the maximum of both tension and relaxation, both motion and stillness, in the human body: the taut line of the body is maintained through the hip above the straight leg, while the torso relaxes, it deviates from rigid lines, on the other side, where the leg is bent. Wayne constantly strikes the pose of Michelangelo's David. Sometimes, with a wider throw of hip, he becomes Donatello's David. He was very conscious of his effects. Richard Widmark used to laugh when Wayne, directing The Alamo, shouted at his actors: "Goddamnit, be graceful-like me!"

-- Garry Wills. John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997, pp. 18-19.