John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity - Hardcover

Unlike other actors and actresses with whom we associate political views, Wayne embodied a politics of large meanings -- a politics of gender (masculine), ideology (patriotism), character (self-reliance), and personal responsibility. It was a politics of implicit dogmas that often transcended his own views and behavior. Although Wayne avoided serving in the military during World War II, he became, through his screen roles, the model of the American soldier. Likewise, although Wayne's popular image is that of a staunch anti-Communist, in reality he avoided taking a stand in the bitter ideological war that raged in Hollywood until after the issue had been decided.

Wayne acquired his larger political meaning gradually, as he moved from one film role to the next: from the young, individualist cowboy hero (the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach) to the middle-aged authority figure weighed down with responsibility (Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima) to the cool, determined patriot in the midst of Cold War dangers (represented by Davy Crockett in The Alamo) to the elderly lone survivor of a past heroic time (Rooster Cogburn in True Grit). Wayne himself became aware of his larger political meaning only through a progressive act of self-identification, in much the same way that his fans came to associate their ideals with his screen personae.

In this work of great originality, the biography of an idea, Wills shows how John Wayne and the Hollywood image factories distorted or ignored important facts of Wayne's life to create his myth. Wills shows for the first time how Wayne, through his screen characters, spoke to the needs of his audience at crucial periods in American history, and how in response Americans invested their emotions in that embodiment of their deepest myths.

John Wayne's America traces the way Wayne's countrymen became "entangled in his story, by the dreams he shaped or inhibited, in us or in others, by the things he validated and those he scorned, by the particular definition he gave to 'being American."