The “terribly embarrassing” 1933 role John Wayne couldn’t stand playing: “Screw this”
The more successful an actor becomes, the less likely they are to embarrass themselves, since they hold more control over their career. Unfortunately, in the early 1930s, John Wayne was only one or two steps removed from being a complete nobody.
After dozens of uncredited and bit-part roles in cheap and cheerful pictures, he was finally awarded his first leading role in Raoul Walsh’s 1930 western, The Big Trail, which promptly shit the bed at the box office and left its director to wonder if the entire production had been cursed from the beginning.
Determined to continue making hay while the sun was shining for the first time, Wayne followed it up with Girls Demand Excitement, another disaster that he hated making so much that he seriously considered giving up the acting game for good, with his maiden attempts at establishing himself as something even remotely resembling a valuable commodity going down in flames.
He decided to persevere, and he’d be vindicated by the end of the decade when he secured his big-screen breakthrough in John Ford’s Stagecoach, but he had to wade through an awful lot of shite to get to that point, not least of all when the star, who couldn’t carry a tune to save his life, agreed to play a singing cowboy.
Ironically, alongside Gene Autry, Roy Rogers had laid down a marker for how crooning cowpokes could find success in Hollywood, but ‘The Duke’ would later call him the biggest phoney in Hollywood because he wasn’t a cowboy at all. In 1933, when he played Singin’ Sandy Saunders in Riders of Destiny, he wasn’t a cowboy, and he sure as shit wasn’t a singer, either, but that didn’t stop him from trying anyway.
The film actually did a decent job of showcasing Wayne’s credentials as a potential B-level leading man, even if his singing voice was so atrocious that he was dubbed. Still, most audiences were none the wiser that it wasn’t him belting out the tunes, which made things awkward whenever he was out in public.
“The fact that I couldn’t sing or play the guitar became terribly embarrassing to me, especially on personal appearances,” the ‘Golden Age’ icon shared. “Every time I made a public appearance, the kids insisted that I sing ‘Desert Song’ or something.” Since he couldn’t, or the entire charade would be ruined, he did the only sensible thing and begged for a way out of the subgenre.
To achieve that, he went straight to the head of Monogram Pictures, which distributed Riders of Destiny and many of his other ’30s releases, and promptly told them, “Screw this, I can’t handle it.” Just like that, his days as a singing cowboy were effectively over, with ‘The Duke’ finally realising that square pegs can’t be shoved into round holes.
Wayne was still over 30 movies and half a decade away from Stagecoach, and most of what he made in the interim wasn’t up to much, but the silver lining was that at least he didn’t have to pretend to be a singer. He didn’t want to disappoint the children, sure, but there’s also the fact that he fucking hated every second of pretending to be something that he wasn’t or couldn’t be, too.
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