“So happy”: The rock star John Wayne asked for an autograph
‘Never meet your heroes’, they say. That left John Wayne with a peculiar predicament. He had no issue meeting people, but he did have to spend his life avoiding mirrors.
The swaggering cowboy held himself in high regard. Someone has to. A bum can’t save the day, and so, surrounded by the perils of the old West, he took it upon himself to be the barrel-chested hero abiding by the strong-jawed virtues of a bygone America.
Speaking of mirrors, the coffee-sipping conservative certainly didn’t see these same virtues reflected in the uptick of the counterculture movement. All he saw there was sordid perversion that projected an America in free-fall.
“I’m quite sure that within two or three years, Americans will be completely fed up with these perverted films,” he said about the scene that arose in the 1960s. The argument would be that these films were a truer reflection of modern society, one crafted by those self-same Americans, than his own movies that stayed firmly rooted in a fallacy from 100 years ago.
He didn’t see it that way, controversially continuing, “Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy—that kind of thing. Wouldn’t you say that the wonderful love of those two men in Midnight Cowboy, a story about two fags, qualifies?” which makes particularly difficult reading in 2025.
He did, however, feel pained to qualify that he had no issue with same-sex perversion, through fear that admonishing all intimacy might detract from his macho image. “But don’t get me wrong. As far as a man and a woman is concerned,” he continued to tell Playboy, “I’m awfully happy there’s a thing called sex. It’s an extra something God gave us. I see no reason why it shouldn’t be in pictures. Healthy, lusty sex is wonderful.”
He’s not the first figure in history to proclaim the wonders of sex. In fact, doing so was a major part of the counterculture movement that he looked to dismount from prominence. Alas, the horse had bolted, The Beatles and their buddies had awakened the youth of the nation, and to use the words of Bob Dylan – a man whom Wayne once met on a battleship in Hawaii – “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command”.
John Wayne’s own daughters were converts to the new world of counterculture rock ‘n’ roll, and it seems their fandom helped to open their father’s eyes to it a little. If an all-American hero’s own daughters were going cockahoop for David Coverdale, then maybe their appeal wasn’t all that abhorrent. So, when he bumped into Deep Purple in the lobby of a swanky hotel, he was decidedly personable.
The British band were a booming force for the anti-war agenda, and David Bowie was even cutting Glenn Hughes’ hair, storing locks of it through fear that Hughes was a witch and he wanted to have a snippet of antidote against any potential spells. It’s not known whether Wayne knew any of this when he embarked on his fatherly deed.
“David Coverdale and I were walking through the Beverly Wilshire hotel and we spotted John Wayne in the lobby. He was a big man, girthy, massive… he completely filled up the room,” Hughes recalled in an interview with Louder Sound.
He continued, “We walked up to him and said we were fans of his. He asked us who we were and we told him we were in Deep Purple. He said: ‘Oh, my daughter would be so happy to get your autographs.’ So David and I got John’s autograph on a piece of paper and we both signed his cowboy boots so he could give them to his daughter. We still talk about that incident.”
The pair were dumbfounded. It’s not often you’ll encounter a literal edifice of your own figurative enemy, and he’ll ask you to sign his bloody cowboy boots. The times had changed, and for a brief, stupifying, fatherly moment, John Wayne had changed along with them.
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