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A few years ago, a woman in Berkshire, England who had never paid the slightest attention to John Wayne happened to catch part of Andrew V. McLaglen’s McLintock! (1963) on TV. She became fascinated by Wayne, and determined to watch all his movies, read all the literature, and find out as much as she could about his life. She decided to write her own book about Wayne and, with an unswerving resolve akin to that of Ethan Edwards, she contacted Wayne’s family, his friends and associates, other chroniclers of the legend – anyone who might help her come close to understanding John Wayne, the man. She wrote her book, then offered it to a major publisher, who was willing to accept it if she made a number of revisions which, in her view, would have rendered her work indistinguishable from several others purporting to tell Wayne’s story. Many a seasoned pro would have swallowed pride and signed on the dotted line, but she declined the offer.

Instead, she resolved to publish her book herself: not by paying a vanity publisher, but by setting herself up as a publisher. That’s what Carolyn McGivern did, and her 465-page book John Wayne: A Giant Shadow is not just a personal vindication but a magnificent achievement (she has since written and published another, The Lost Films of John Wayne, dealing with his two long-unavailable airplane-in-peril adventures, Island in the Sky (1953) and The High and the Mighty (1954), both recently re-released on DVD).

This is a triumphant but not triumphalist book, written with admiration, affection, and even love – but McGivern is constantly intrigued by her subject rather than in awe of him. The life she chronicles is not a particularly happy one: a young boy unloved by his mother; a man unable to find lasting security in three successive marriages; the archetypal All-American hero shamed by his failure to serve in World War II; the workaholic consumed by the compulsion to provide for and protect his family, deeply hurt by his children’s need to escape his shadow. McGivern shrewdly makes the connection between Wayne’s private heartaches and the exorcizing of these torments in the conflicts and relationships he enacted on the screen:

‘Part of the problem with his younger children was related to the guilt he continued to feel about the older ones. It could be seen in many of his later films where most of the characters he played had trouble with women and children, where he is alienated because of his work, which is either dangerous or takes him away for long stretches. He consistently demonstrated love and a willingness to sacrifice himself for his family whilst being unable to live within a normal relationship. On screen he said exactly how he felt about that’ (p.409).

Everything about John Wayne was larger than life: the hard-drinking friendship with John Ford and Ward Bond; his outspoken political views; his lonely crusade to film The Alamo; his heroic, heart-breaking battle against cancer. McGivern gives them all due and full attention. There’s a wealth of information about Wayne’s screen career, and a good deal of intelligent commentary about the films themselves. Yet it cannot be overstressed that this is primarily a book about John Wayne, the man – and, as such, it is of inestimable value in deepening our appreciation of the enduring potency and poignancy of Wayne as an American icon.

Louise Brooks, who co-starred with Wayne in Overland Stage Raiders in 1938, thought even then:

‘[T]his is no actor but the hero of all mythology miraculously brought to life’ (p.82). Appropriately for such a hero, McGivern has written an epic. It’s the tale of a man who was loved and idolized by millions all over the world – a man who had a truly wonderful life. Yet it is also the tragedy of a man who never found true contentment, a loyal friend who trusted too readily, an innately generous man whose heart often led him to make wrong choices. McGivern quotes a Playboy interview from 1971, in which the Duke was asked about the legacy he hoped to leave behind. Wayne replied: ‘I hope my family and friends will be able to say that I was honest, kind and a fairly decent man’ (p.376). The truth of that shines all the way through McGivern’s book. One can’t help feeling Wayne would’ve admired her true grit, would’ve been proud of the result, and would’ve been first in line to offer (to borrow from a Henry Fonda Western) ‘a big hand for the little lady’.

Despite my pessimism about the viability of the Western in contemporary Hollywood, it is evident from these recent publications that the genre, the individual classics and the most enduring icon continue to hold powerful sway over the imagination, not only in America but around the world. Yet there is something else I wrote, specifically concerning John Wayne, a decade ago – something I should never wish to revise.

John Wayne was a genuine hero. His final battle against cancer was one he could neither avoid nor win, and he fought with a dignity and a courage that dwarfed his filmic exploits. It was a tragedy worthy of the gods. He had earned fame, fortune, respect and adulation, by pretending to be a hero, and he proved his own heroism at the very end of his life. Legend had become fact. The haggard, cancer-ravaged shell of a man who stood in front of the Oscar night audience in April 1979 and promised he’d be ‘around a whole lot longer’ – that was the real John Wayne. That was the John Wayne I had in mind as I neared the end of The Crowded Prairie and chose the dedication: “May 26 1907 – June 11 1979, To The Life and The Memory.”

I stand by my dedication. He earned it. John Wayne sold us the dream of a hero and, when the chips were down he delivered, just like we always knew he would. Comedians still call him ‘The Fifth Face on Rushmore’. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a joke. In many American hearts, he’s as revered as the four who are up there. They know he didn’t fight in World War II, but he was a superhawk on Vietnam. They don’t care. They love him. More than any other, he’s most emphatically their ideal of American Man. They are forever drawn to the dream of greatness embodied by John Wayne. The Man is the Legend; the Legend is America.

Michael Coyne is the author of The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western (I. B. Tauris, London) and American Political Films (forthcoming from Reaktion Books).