Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (5 page)

During the Vietnam War, the draft-dodging Wayne vocally condemned teenagers who went to Europe or Canada in order to avoid the draft, calling them “cowards,” “traitors,” and “Communists.” He was fond of issuing similar chest-beating attacks on Hollywood activists who opposed the war, such as Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.

Like so many of our current right-wing political leaders and pundits who playact at being a warrior for so long that they come to believe it is their reality, Wayne spent his last several decades convinced that “war hero” was not merely a fictional role he played, but was what he in fact was.

And it is no surprise that Wayne came to view himself as a genuine war hero, since that is how the country—more enamored of the image of warrior courage than the reality—continuously treated him. According to the 1969
Time
profile: “Nobody took a dim view of Wayne for staying out [of World War II]. In the ’50s, General Douglas MacArthur told him, ‘Young man, you represent the cavalry officer better than any man who wears a uniform.’”

The gap between Wayne’s tough-guy image and his fear of combat was perhaps matched only by the gap between Wayne’s public moralizing and the decadent, adulterous, and hedonistic personal life he led for decades. Almost as much as he paraded around as a tough warrior, Wayne held himself out as a defender of traditional moral values and the beacon of the wholesome American man.

Long before it was fashionable as a political weapon, Wayne attacked anything that had any whiff of homosexuality to it. Upon the 1959 release of
Suddenly, Last Summer,
he denounced Tennessee Williams’s vaguely homoerotic film as “too disgusting even for discussion” while making clear he would never see it. Wayne sermonized: “It is too distasteful to be put on a screen designed to entertain a family, or any member of a decent family.”

A decade earlier, in 1949, producer Robert Rossen had offered Wayne the role of Willie Stark in
All the King’s Men.
After reading the script, Wayne refused to have anything to do with the film, sending his agent an angry letter claiming that the film “smears the machinery of government for no purpose of humor or enlightenment” “degrades all relationships” and is suffused with “drunken mothers; conniving fathers; double-crossing sweethearts; bad, bad, rich people; and bad, bad poor people if they want to get ahead.” The film, wrote Wayne, degraded “the American way of life,” and he concluded by telling his agent that “you can take this script and shove it up Robert Rossen’s derrière.”

Yet again, like so many of our current right-wing moralizers, Wayne’s actual life could not have been any less faithful to the moral standards he loved using to attack others publicly. And it was not merely a sinful act here and there that Wayne committed. To begin with, Wayne—like much of the leadership of the right-wing political faction today—was incapable of adhering to any of the basic oaths of so-called traditional marriage. He vowed on three different occasions, with three different women, that he would remain in holy matrimony till death do us part, yet failed to do so even once.

Wayne, after twelve years of marriage, divorced his first wife, Josephine, after he became a successful film star. While married to Josephine, with whom he had three children, he had a series of affairs with various actresses he met on the sets of his films, while his wife and children were at home. Wayne divorced Josephine in order to marry his then-mistress, Esperanza Baur. His marriage to Esperanza occurred literally weeks after his divorce from Josephine was finalized.

But Wayne’s second marriage fared no better than his first. Plagued by reports of chronic adultery, Wayne divorced Esperanza after seven years of childless marriage. Once again, Wayne did not wait long to take on his next wife, this time marrying Pilar—a Peruvian woman he met while filming a movie in her homeland—
on the very day his second divorce was finalized.

The marriage with Pilar also did not last. Although he never formally divorced Pilar, with whom he had four more children, they separated in 1973 so that Wayne could live with his new mistress—his secretary, Pat Stacy, with whom he remained, while still married to Pilar, until his death in 1979.

The numerous broken families Wayne created could not have been any more antithetical to the traditional moral values he endlessly claimed to espouse. His confirmed adulterous relationships are too numerous to chronicle, including a lengthy affair with Marlene Dietrich during his first marriage. His multiple divorces and split-ups were anything but amicable. As entertainment journalist Emanuel Levy reported concerning Wayne’s breakup with his second wife,

There were indeed charges and counter-charges of unfaithfulness, drunken violence, emotional cruelty, and “clobbering.” Wayne described his wife as a “drunken partygoer who would fall down and then accuse him of pushing her.” He deplored the publicity his divorce proceedings received in the press, though they did not hurt his career or popularity.

The 1969
Time
profile gives a small glimpse into the enormous disparity between the Moral Crusader Wayne and the reality of how he lived his life:

Aging and raging, he began to take on all enemies in the same spirit: Commies, Injuns, wrongos, Mexicans—and his wife Esperanza. “Our marriage was like shaking two volatile chemicals in a jar,” he said. She recalled the night he dragged her around by her hair. He countered with a claim that when he was on location she had a house guest named Nicky Hilton. During the divorce proceedings, Wayne uttered an aside that could have come from one of his early oaters: “I deeply regret that I’ll hafta sling mud.”

The moral mess in Wayne’s private life was not confined to draft dodging and serial broken marriages. And in that regard, his life was an almost exact precursor of one of the current leaders of our nation’s Values Voters movement—superpatriot and war lover Rush Limbaugh. Like draft evader Limbaugh, the law-and-order moralizer Wayne, in the midst of his serial marriages and divorces, developed a rather nasty addiction to drugs.

Throughout the 1960s, Wayne regularly took amphetamines during the day in order to work and barbiturates at night in order to sleep. On one occasion, Wayne actually confused his habits. During a taping of a guest appearance on
The Dean Martin Show
in 1969, Wayne accidentally took a downer rather than the speed he used in order to work, and arrived announcing: “I can’t do our skit. I’m too doped up. Goddamn, I look half smashed.”

In the midst of the initiation of the now-infamous Republican “Southern strategy” led by Richard Nixon, whereby the Republican Party would seek to exploit racial tensions in order to recruit white Southerners to the GOP, John Wayne gave a 1971 interview to
Playboy
magazine filled with one reprehensible comment after the next. The most enduring one was his explicit embrace of “white supremacy” as his governing ideology:

We can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership to irresponsible people.

The
Playboy
interview was one of the few truthful and candid moments of Wayne’s sad and deceitful life. Just like George W. Bush on his Texas ranch, even the recreational activities Wayne pretended to enjoy, in order to cast an image of a macho tough guy, were the opposite of how he actually lived. As Reyes and Rampell wrote,

Although the star of countless Westerns such as John Ford’s 1939
Stagecoach
and 1953’s
Hondo
owned a ranch, the Duke “didn’t particularly like horses and preferred suits and tuxedos to chaps, jeans and boots,” according to his son, Michael Wayne.

The more he demonstrated in his own life that he lacked particular virtues, the more loudly and flamboyantly he claimed to embody them. The more guilt he experienced over his draft dodging, the more loudly he cheered on new wars and attacked war opponents. The more adulterous affairs he carried on and the more broken and hedonistic his personal life became, the more publicly and boisterously he crusaded for America’s traditional moral values.

And thus John Wayne is indeed the pure and perfect model of today’s right-wing political movement and the Great American Hypocrites who lead it. He was one of the first of the seemingly endless stream of right-wing polemicists who tout the very values and virtues that, in their own lives, they repeatedly prove themselves to be most lacking.

The principal sins of moralizing tough guys like John Wayne and his heirs in today’s right-wing movement are not mere deceit and hypocrisy—pretending to be something that they plainly are not, or insisting that they believe in values that they repeatedly and deliberately refuse to live by in their own lives. To be sure, those are sins, and reprehensible ones at that.

But the sinister character represented by John Wayne is worse than merely hypocritical and deceitful. Those who wallow in feelings of inadequate masculinity become quite destructive, incomparably dangerous. Those who lack in their private lives any evidence of warrior courage—from Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh to Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney—are far more likely to cheer on unnecessary wars and other acts of pointless brutality in order to feel the vicarious sensations of courage and masculine strength that they actually lack in their real lives. And those whose private lives are filled with moral disgraces and wrecked marriages, yet who want to impose “Traditional Morality” on others—the likes of Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Ann Coulter, and John Wayne, and a seemingly endless slew of “Values Voters” leaders—become the most invasive, the most authoritarian of moralizers. Public moralizing against others becomes the only tool available to obscure the profound, grotesque moral failures in their own lives.

In an astoundingly revealing
Wall Street Journal
column in October 2001, Peggy Noonan proclaimed that the 9/11 attacks had ushered in the return of the Real Man—of John Wayne manliness:

Men are back. A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country since Sept. 11. You might say it suddenly emerged from the rubble of the past quarter century, and emerged when a certain kind of man came forth to get our great country out of the fix it was in.

I am speaking of masculine men, men who push things and pull things and haul things and build things, men who charge up the stairs in a hundred pounds of gear and tell everyone else where to go to be safe.

Describing a man who once punched a shark to death after it attacked his wife, Noonan gushed further:

I don’t know what the guy did for a living, but he had a very old-fashioned sense of what it is to be a man, and I think that sense is coming back into style because of who saved us on Sept. 11, and that is very good for our country.

Why? Well, manliness wins wars. Strength and guts plus brains and spirit wins wars….

I was there in America, as a child, when John Wayne was a hero, and a symbol of American manliness. He was strong, and silent. And I was there in America when they killed John Wayne by a thousand cuts. A lot of people killed him—not only feminists but peaceniks, leftists, intellectuals, others….

I missed John Wayne. But now I think…he’s back. I think he returned on Sept. 11. I think he ran up the stairs, threw the kid over his back like a sack of potatoes, came back down and shoveled rubble. I think he’s in Afghanistan now, saying, with his slow swagger and simmering silence, “Yer in a whole lotta trouble now, Osama-boy.”

I think he’s back in style. And none too soon.

Welcome back, Duke.

Truer words have never been spoken. The 9/11 attacks did indeed render once again dominant—especially among the war-crazed Right—the John Wayne version of “manlihood”: those who masquerade as tough guys and warriors, cheerleading for wars and sending others off to fight them; the type who swagger around saying things like “Yer in a whole lotta trouble now, Osama-boy” while doing nothing to back up those words, and who pose as wholesome defenders of American morality while living deeply decadent and depraved private lives.

John Wayne has long been considered the epitome of the American right-wing male. And he is—but not because of the wholesome, tough-guy virtues that he has long been thought to embody. The opposite is true. He is the perfect symbol of the political right-wing movement in the United States because—just as is true of that movement’s leaders today—his actual life was in every respect the precise opposite of what he claimed to be. And the larger his failings were, the more he lacked those virtues in his life, the greater was his need to present himself in public as the symbol of those virtues. As Noonan suggested, it is impossible to imagine a more perfect hypocrite and model for America’s right-wing movement than the sadly conflicted and profoundly deceitful John Wayne.

CHAPTER TWO

How Great American Hypocrites Feed Off One Another

R
IGHT
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MEARS AND THE
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STABLISHMENT
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