Fever (2 page)

The very idea that a white boy could sing a black man's song, or adopt a black woman's sexual bravado, with such gusto, cracked the fifties—maybe the whole of twentieth-century American life—in half. And central to that style of singing was a frank and earthy enthusiasm for sex and an unabashed physical expression of its pleasures. At this remove, it's hard to say which scandalized middle-class white parents more—Presley's black vocal mannerisms, his vigorous shaking off of the personal restraints of his parents' generation, or his sexual expressiveness. But in the years since, historians and social critics have focused on the first two—Presley's mainstreaming of black singing styles and the generational revolt rock 'n' roll portrayed. That Presley anticipated this cultural sea change with a dash of eccentric, self-deprecating humor conveys only part of his protean musical imagination.

The other great theme of Elvis Presley's music—the way he completely reimagined male behavior and, by extension, what women desired in men—has been largely overlooked. To be sure, the other aspects of his revolt were more immediate and pressing: the racial conflict of the time and the boomers' demographic bulge tended to accent these matters first. But it's also because Presley was so successful that our minds rarely glance back to a time when men were forbidden such self-expression.

Where the reigning American male ideal of the middle 1950s, John Wayne, rarely exhibited excitement about anything, and eschewed all expressions of weakness or vulnerability, Presley openly shivered with the thrill women gave him, groaned with the force of his desire, pleaded for love without embarrassment, and personified romantic exuberance. In songs such as “Any Way You Want Me,” “Love Me,” and “Love Me Tender,” he guilelessly paraded gentleness, desperation, and emotional hunger and intimated, to his elders' horror, that “One Night” of illicit love might be worth any price he had to pay the morning after.

Presley's charisma pointed toward what the new ideal man would be in the modern era, from the ease with which he handled technological wonders to the humble-irreverent way he accepted the untold riches his music won for him. This new style of manhood established adolescent fun, risk-taking, and sexual exploration as positive values in themselves as well as necessary pathways toward adulthood. It also made manifest an intense identification with forbidden pleasures. In addition, Presley reshaped notions about what kind of woman this new man might desire, and how much he might expect from any romantic life he imagined for himself—a life very different from what his parents had raised him to expect. Beyond all this, Presley invented an open-ended idea of manhood: with such a personal sense of style, mere imitation missed the mark; the point was to cultivate your own idiosyncrasies with a sense of humor. His metaphors of freedom touched men in all kinds of different ways and set off wild, unpredictable responses. Before long, all kinds of different men would use Presley's model of self-realization to express many different kinds of manhood.

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John Wayne was such a powerful icon that by the 1950s he seemed to move and speak like an archetype. He inhabited his manhood unselfconsciously. That's why, in a way, viewers stopped expecting him to act—he simply had to be. “He filled the screen role of a necessarily difficult man as naturally as most actors wore clothes…” David Thomson writes. “He moved the way singers sing, with huge confidence and daring.” Wayne's hyperconfident gait was parodied by director Mike Nichols in
The Birdcage
(1996) when he had Robin Williams coach Nathan Lane on how to be “straight” by walking like Wayne—it only played up how openly gay Lane's character was, and how regressive the macho ideal was to a drag queen.

At least half of Wayne's appeal was the seeming grace he brought to his persona: he didn't seem to try to personify a new definition of a man, he simply reflected the gender code of his age as imperiously as Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck or Deborah Kerr reflected that code for women. And the Wayne archetype was an umbrella to a host of variations in Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and later, Nick Nolte (not to mention fictional giants like Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams or Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe). These men exuded control in all they undertook, were certain of their powers, mistrustful of women, and decidedly unemotional. Of course, nice guys like Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper modified Wayne's ideas, but cast in westerns they were usually required to test themselves against the same hard realities Wayne did. In
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(1962), director John Ford had Wayne and Stewart explicitly act this tension out, and Wayne's ghostly heroism is all but a foregone conclusion: Stewart, the lawman, the man of books and ideas, doesn't stand a chance against Lee Marvin's villain. The picture's premise presumes Wayne's code as superior to Stewart's (while, at the same time, it prefigures the disappearance of the Wayne archetype).

Once Wayne got a handle on his persona (by about the time he starred in Ford's
Stagecoach,
1939), the typical Wayne character didn't strive toward an ideal manhood—he was already there. Rather, he acted from an imperturbably secure center, responding to events that only sharpened some long-standing resolution. Wayne's western persona was soon inseparable from his status as Cold War gladiator, the larger-than-life mascot for a war fought on psychic battlefields. He sheriffed the small town of American ideals (and prosperity) on the nuclear frontier, before vigilantism became an epithet. And he came to this code from some conflict that was long since buried; the code was the end result, its formation was secondary. This ethic was alive and active in the male ruling class of the mid-twentieth century, both onscreen and in the imaginations of those who paid to watch him in the dark.

In the contrast between Wayne and Presley, there's a tangle of father-son emotions getting played out that's no less fraught than those between any real authoritarian father and his hell-raising son. Along with Frank Sinatra, Wayne was part of the older generation who bemoaned the rise of Elvis Presley and his music, dubbing it “music for goons.” But this defensiveness illustrates not only how much Presley had to revolt against, but how intimidating that revolt was.

Wayne's code of male behavior is inseparable from that formed by World War II. Barely ten years after American boys (not men) stormed the beaches at Normandy, the human cost of the war and its aftermath was not carried lightly. It was as if the cold-war curtain came down both across Europe and across some imaginary field in the American male psyche that held men in check, taught them to beware, be cautious, ignore the subconscious, and clamp down hard on the American virtues and liberties so many good people had died to preserve. (Wayne's sudden, random death in 1949's
Sands of Two Jima
may have been intended to put the absolutes of wartime attitudes to rest, but it only canonized them.)

The nonverbal aspect of the World War II macho code is worth stressing. John Wayne's silences were far more dramatic than his line readings. The Red scare and the McCarthy hearings fed this temperament; talking could literally ruin your life and the lives of your friends. To show one's feelings openly in combat situations, or differ from mainstream opinions in politics and public life, was weakness, and potentially dangerous. Since many of Wayne's later cowboy movies work as cold-war allegories, his code automatically had political overtones. It took Hollywood over fifty years, until
Saving Private Ryan
(1998), to show images of men openly crying for their mothers amidst the bloody waves at Normandy.

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Wayne's perceived power and aura of control are of a piece with his restraint—the aspect of deep, conflicting feelings that are as large and vital as his face is glum and stodgy. In fact, if you watch
Stagecoach
next to
Liberty Valance,
you get an idea of how much charm Wayne discarded as so much personality baggage. Wayne's charm is built on strength at the expense of humor, and his characters less often seek out pleasure, ponder enjoying life, play pranks because they're simply worth playing, or have fun for its own sake—rather it's usually at the expense of tearing down somebody else's pride. In
Liberty Valance,
Wayne shoots a bucket of paint above Jimmy Stewart's head to mock Stewart's genteel law training as petty thought in the face of decisive action. Wayne's characters are motivated by vengeance and sadism; their temperaments are easily stirred toward anger and irritation; and when they're making moral decisions, there is no revelation of feeling through eyes, face, or even a horse rider's lope. All emotional life is hidden, smothered beneath a certitude meant to convey an intimidating grandiosity.

And, ironically perhaps, a central element of Wayne's persona was, as it was with Elvis, the way he carried himself and the way he moved his body. As Garry Wills explains: “[Wayne's] body spoke a highly specific language of ‘manliness,' of self-reliant authority. It was a body impervious to outside force, expressing a mind narrow but focussed, fixed on the task, impatient with complexity … It is ‘male' in a way that has rightly become suspect—one-sided, exclusive of values conventionally labeled ‘female.'” Burying feelings was among the chief ethics of Wayne's code of manhood; burying sexuality, treating it more as a duty than as a pleasure, was another. When Wayne got romantic with a dame, that was just the instinct in him working its natural muscles; he accepted the powers and privileges of the male class without ever questioning the woman's role, and tenderness barely knew his name.

Paradoxically,
The Quiet Man,
John Ford's 1952 Irish revel, deliberately plays against this Wayne trait. Ford's variation on Shakespeare's
Taming of the Shrew
tries to season Wayne's emotional monotone with gentle humor. Wayne plays Sean Thornton, a boxer who left the ring after killing an opponent. He returns to his childhood home in Innisfree and courts the ravishing Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O'Hara). The plot paints Wayne as the victim of an old-fashioned code, putting a bunch of old-Irish customs as obstacles to the couple's happy ending. But Wayne's garrulous Thornton is tortured by his experience in the ring, which gets exacerbated by his confrontation with O'Hara's brother, Will (Victor McLaglen), over her dowry. When it's clear he'll have to fight this guy to gain his wife's trust, consummate the marriage, and win the respect of the locals, he hurls O'Hara back at the brother rather than raise his fists.

But the film's visual cues define Wayne's mannerisms as part of his macho sensibility. He smokes like a chimney, for example, lighting cigarettes against roof beams, rocks, his shoes … anything but matchbooks. The cigarettes practically spell out “sublimated desire” in smoke rings. When the marriage finally does get consummated, O'Hara even lights one up for him before they bed down. And the sexual code this film displayed must have been unthinkable to the young Presley and his audience: Wayne doesn't have sex with O'Hara
even after they're married
until he earns her stubborn respect and goes to bat for her dowry. Like his other female costars', O'Hara's attraction to Wayne stems from this monklike resolve: her awe of his control, his command of tense situations, and his calm courage in the face of conflict is meant as a female code of response. As charming as Wayne is in this role, he's still stifled by his code's resolve even as he protests that the quaint but rigid Irish customs he's forced to observe make no sense. His sexual frustration gets played out in a series of butt spanks, and an angry wedding-night scene where he tosses O'Hara down on the bed alone, which collapses. The threat of rape is in the air, but O'Hara plays along as if it's just the way his studliness grapples with frustration.

Of course, the John Wayne ideal that Presley challenged is still with us, and in a way these two vastly different conceptions of manhood are still slugging it out in popular culture. One of the most pervasive echoes of Wayne's code came in the form of the “Marlboro Man” cigarette campaign, which the Leo Burnett Agency first ran in January 1955. This rugged cowboy image has survived for four decades as a billboard monument to Wayne's macho sensibility. Pierre Martineau, one of American advertising's pioneer market-research gurus, praised the Marlboro campaign for placing the cigarette “right in the heart of core meanings of smoking: masculinity, adulthood, vigor, and potency.” Tobacco also poisoned John Wayne's manhood: he lost a lung to cancer.

Wayne and Presley are still so alive that they represent their two generations in ways few other figures could. Could there be two more different kinds of men than the steely-eyed World War II vet and his baby-boom progeny? Between Charlton Heston and James Dean? Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown? Archie Bunker and his Meathead son-in-law? Jesse Helms and Robert Mapplethorpe? President George Bush Sr. (or Bob Dole or Ken Starr) and President Bill Clinton? Does President George W. Bush resemble anything so much as a “reformed” Elvis, trying to play the Commander-in-Chief he imagines John Wayne might have been?

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A lot of baby-boom actors and singers tried to mirror Wayne's authority in miniature. Clint Eastwood became an icon by taking Wayne's attitude and shrink-wrapping it for the small screen on TV's
Rawhide,
and then biting down even harder in Spaghetti westerns like
A Fistful of Dollars,
thrillers like
Play Misty for Me,
and a string of right-wing hoohah like
The Gauntlet
and the
Dirty Harry
series. Eastwood mined a thousand tiny grimaces from Wayne's reserve; he played a decent soul battling with ingrown cultural demons who finally unraveled in
Unforgiven
and
A Perfect World,
saying “I don't know nothin'.” Steve McQueen took the same ideas in different directions: as an unflappable thief in
The Thomas Crown Affair,
he made sex with Faye Dunaway seem like a chess game of cloaked secrets. Contemporary action heroes Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude van Damme, Steven Seagal and Vin Diesel all worshiped at Wayne's man-with-a-code macho throne, even if semiautomatics and martial arts updated their tactics.