“That’s not a question, it’s a theory”: revisiting the moment when John Wayne lost his cool
Nobody was more protective of John Wayne’s legacy than John Wayne himself, and as a result, he couldn’t tolerate somebody else pinpointing the catalyst for his ascent to greatness.
Born Marion Morrison, the Hollywood icon hardly arrived on the scene as ‘The Duke’. He found himself increasingly forlorn by his immediate prospects after being relegated to background and bit-part roles during the early years of his career. The ultimate slap in the face came when he went uncredited as a corpse.
He’d made dozens of features before he was even awarded leading man status for the first time in 1930’s The Big Trail, and it bombed at the box office. It would be almost another decade before he gained mainstream prominence, and what ended up becoming the habit of a lifetime happened when he partnered with John Ford for the first time.
One of the greatest actor/director partnerships in cinema history, Stagecoach elevated Wayne into a believable and bankable leading man, but he didn’t take too kindly to being informed that it wasn’t the movie that made him. In fact, when an unfortunate interviewer tried to take that exact route, they ended up being shut down and brushed off by ‘The Duke’.
Fast forward a decade on from Stagecoach, and Wayne was working under the direction of another all-time directorial great in Howard Hawks, with Red River effortlessly attaining classic status and earning two Academy Award nominations. Was that – and not his first collaboration with Ford – the real genesis of the superstar he would reign as for the next three decades? According to ‘The Duke’, absolutely not.
Speaking to Joe McInerney in 1972, when his days as a fixture of the silver screen were beginning to wind down, the journalist made a major mistake by deviating from established history and suggesting that Wayne’s career didn’t really begin until after the release of Red River.
“That’s not a question, it’s a theory,” the star bit back. “You want me to sit here like a dummy and nod my head while you put words in my mouth.” Clearly pissed off by the line of questioning, any further attempts to poke around in the period between 1939’s Stagecoach and 1948’s Red River was swiftly shut down when Wayne informed the person asking the questions to “start somewhere else”.
‘The Duke’ knew exactly what his position was, and he had his own assessment of how he got there, which clearly didn’t involve him acting “like a dummy” and being told it was Red River. The face of the western genre carefully cultivated his own mythology and spent the bulk of his professional life fine-tuning it, so anything that didn’t fit his interpretation wasn’t even worth discussing.
