The legendary Hollywood star John Wayne called the industry’s biggest phony: “Wasn’t any actor”
It’s funny that John Wayne would point fingers and accuse one of his fellow actors of being an imposter when, for all intents and purposes, phonies have never come much bigger than John Wayne himself.
After all, one of cinema’s most iconic stars was a fictional creation, one devised by Marion Morrison to help him get ahead in Hollywood. The name, the look, and even the walk that became synonymous with ‘The Duke’ didn’t come naturally; they were all developed, refined, and honed into what they became.
Even the voice, as close as it was to the Iowa-born actor’s natural brogue, was exaggerated for the cameras. Marion Morrison didn’t stand much of a chance of succeeding in the business, but after John Wayne was created, he became one of the silver screen’s most enduring legends.
That makes it somewhere between odd and oblivious that he would point fingers at one of his peers and call them the industry’s foremost phony, and audiences generally don’t care about a performer’s backstory or alleged credentials, so long as they continue to entertain them in the multiplex.
It’s even more ridiculous that the biggest issue ‘The Duke’ had with them was that they became the most famous cowboy on the planet, despite not being a real cowboy. Eventually, Wayne became the most famous cowboy on the planet, and he didn’t seem to be in any great rush to remind anyone that he wasn’t a real cowboy, either.
After making his screen debut in 1935’s Slightly Static, Roy Rogers would go on to star in over 100 pictures, most of them westerns. He became so synonymous with the genre that he was nicknamed the ‘King of the Cowboys’, and he’d spend the two decades as one of its biggest draws.
Wayne, who’d take that mantle for himself and hold onto it for dear life until Clint Eastwood came along, didn’t seem impressed with his co-star in 1940’s Dark Command. “You know, the problem with this business of ours is that too many people pretend to be something they’re not,” he told Robert Osborne. “Take Roy Rogers.”
‘The Duke’, who spent most of his professional life pretending to be John Wayne, someone he was not, didn’t seem to understand the irony. “He wasn’t a cowboy,” he accurately pointed out. “He was a goddamn country singer from Ohio!” Again, he wasn’t wrong, but that’s coming from a guy who grew up in California and didn’t own a ranch until the 1950s.
It sounds as though there might have been some jealousy there, too, since Wayne, who had one star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, compared to Rogers’ four, remembered the latter getting the biggest round of applause at a Dark Command premiere. “And Rogers wasn’t any actor,” he reiterated. “Rogers was barely a singer! And they applauded him!” Phony or not, neither of them were real cowboys.
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