The dictator who wanted to assassinate John Wayne
Art is a powerful weapon. Donald Trump has just proven that in the most bizarre possible way by getting his hands on Hollywood and ensuring that Rush Hour 4 finally gets made. Buts sometimes ‘cultural hegemony’ is a lot clearer.
That was readily apparent as the Cold War got underway. Few American actors hated communists more than John Wayne. The silver screen gun-slinger hated them so much, in fact, that he helped set up the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944, and he was elected its president in 1949. This fame and philosophy made him a very powerful tool.
If that administrative position doesn’t convince you of Wayne’s stern anti-communist sentiment, let’s not forget that he was an ardent supporter of the now-infamous House of Un-American Activities Committee, which in 1947 held hearings into alleged communist propaganda and influence in the Hollywood motion picture industry, blacklisting the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Alan Lomax, Paul Robeson and Yip Harburg. No wonder Joseph Stalin wanted him dead.
A vocal supporter of ‘Red Scare’ architect Joseph McCarthy, Wayne was known worldwide for his anti-communist campaigns, to the extent that Soviet Leader, Joseph Stalin – himself a fan of Wayne’s movies – said he should be assassinated for his views. According to Michael Munn, author of John Wayne – The Man Behind The Myth, Stalin learned of the Hollywood actor’s anti-Soviet beliefs from Russian filmmaker Sergei Gerasimov, who met him at a peace conference they both attended in New York in 1949.
Stalin’s swift solution was to simply have Wayne killed by the KGB. Munn’s source for this information? None other than Orson Welles, who apparently recounted the story unprompted at a dinner in 1983. According to Munn, Russian filmmaker Alexei Kapler blabbed to fellow director Sergei Bonachuck about the order. Bonachuck, though sceptical at first, asked Gerisimov to confirm the tale. He did, and so Bonachuck told Welles.
While the information, naturally, has been filtered through a web of sources, it still remains highly credible given how seriously both sides viewed cultural hegemony – a soft power essentially defined as ‘Elvis, Coca Cola, and cowboy movies, can these guys really be bad?’ – during the Cold War.
Yakima Canutt, a close friend of Wayne’s, also told Munn of an assassination attempt in the 1950s. “Yakima told me that the FBI had discovered there were agents sent to Hollywood to kill John Wayne,” said Mr Munn [quotes via The Guardian]. “He said the FBI had come to tell John about the plot. John told the FBI to let the men show up, and he would deal with them.”
According to Yakima’s story, Wayne decided to hatch a plan with his scriptwriter Jimmy Grant to abduct the would-be assassins, drive them to a beach and stage a mock execution. It seems the plan wasn’t needed in the end, as the two men stayed in the US to work with the FBI.
“Afterwards, though, John shunned FBI protection and did not want his family to know,” Munn continued. “He moved into a house with a big wall around it.” He also hired a group of loyal stuntmen to infiltrate communist cells in America and inform him of further assassination plots should they hear of any between bouts of jumping out of windows, crashing into fruit stands on motorbikes, and campaigning for the Oscars for their own category.
But Wayne wasn’t all that happy with how little intel he was receiving about the lack of subsequent attempts on his life. “He then gathered all the stuntmen, went to the communist meetings, and had a huge fight,” said Mr Munn, who claimed that a further attempt on Wayne’s life was, in fact, made in Mexico during the making of Hondo.
If any of what Munn’s book proposes is indeed true, I imagine Wayne breathed a sigh of relief when he learned that Stalin’s order had been cancelled by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, following the Soviet leader’s death. However, he might not have been quite as pleased that some of this was perhaps to do with his sliding stardom, too.
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