The one and only time John Wayne starred in a TV show: “I was on and off so fast”
These days, the list of movie stars who haven’t appeared in a TV show grows thinner by the week, with the ongoing ‘Golden Age’ luring Hollywood’s biggest names to the small screen, with many of them citing superior writing and storytelling as the reason, which wasn’t the case when John Wayne ruled the roost.
Back when ‘The Duke’ was the biggest draw in the business, the increasing number of homes with access to a television set caused consternation among the studio executives who panicked about diminishing attendances in the theatre, and derision among the actors who wouldn’t be caught dead on the tube.
It was sound thinking, though; if a performer had any value, then audiences would happily pay to see them on the big screen a couple of times a year. Naturally, when anyone who used to be a big name headlined an episodic series, giving themselves away for free, on a weekly basis, no less, it was taken as a sign that their 15 minutes of filmic fame were over.
Wayne wasn’t as averse to TV as some of his A-list successors, with Jack Nicholson refusing to do talk shows and making guest appearances at the 40th and 50th anniversaries of Saturday Night Live his only outings in the medium after 1967, but at no point did ‘The Duke’ ever want to be a staple of the box.
He played the leading role in the 1955 episode ‘Rookie of the Year’ of the anthology Screen Directors Playhouse, which was directed by John Ford, and he played a military sergeant in the 1962 episode ‘Flashing Spikes’ of the anthology Alcoa Premiere, which was also directed by John Ford.
Those were both one-shot deals, though, which means there was only one time in his entire career that Wayne starred in an ongoing, recurring TV series. It happened in 1960, he wasn’t credited under either his real name or his stage name, and based on his previous televised exploits, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who was behind the camera.
“It wasn’t completely unconditional,” ‘The Duke’ explained. “Because it was as a favour to Pappy and Ward Bond. Ward was the star of the western TV series, Wagon Train, and Jack Ford was directing an episode, so he asked me to make a fleeting appearance as General Sherman. I was billed as Michael Morris, and I was on and off so fast people were left wondering if that had been John Wayne they’d seen.”
Wagon Train ran for eight seasons and over 280 episodes between 1957 and 1965, and it was the sole hour-long network drama that Wayne ever acted in. ‘The Colter Craven Story’ was the ninth instalment of the fourth run, and it’s not a coincidence that the only one that Ford directed also happened to be the only one that his most famous collaborator appeared in.
It also helped that they were both close friends of the leading man, and it turned out to be a bittersweet experience after Bond passed away from a heart attack less than three weeks before it aired, giving him one last chance to work with the actor he called his best friend in the world.
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