John Wayne, accidental cowboy

I’m not making a picture [The Green Berets] about Vietnam, I’m making a picture about good against bad. I happen to think that’s true about Vietnam, but even if it isn’t as clear as all that, that’s what you have to do to make a picture. It’s all right, because we’re in the business of selling tickets. It’s the same thing as the Indians. Maybe we shouldn’t have destroyed all those Indians, I don’t know, but when you’re making a picture, the Indians are the bad guys.

— Mike Wayne, producer of The Green Berets, starring his father, John Wayne

The words above appeared in a 1968 issue of Esquire magazine above a colour drawing of Wayne’s father in blue cavalry uniform and green beret, astride a stagecoach. A tiny Ho Chi Minh is shooting arrows at him from horseback. Michael Wayne signed it for me: ‘Charlie, It wasn’t said quite like this! Michael.’ To which his father appended, ‘Oh, yes it was, Charlie! With a son like him you don’t need an enemy. John Wayne.’

One of the few errors in Scott Eyman’s fascinating biography of John Wayne attributes ‘the Indians are the bad guys quote’ to pater Wayne. Otherwise, Eyman has dug deep, trawling records including the 1907 Iowa birth certificate of Marion Robert Morrison, and interviewing most of the people who knew him and are still alive. It borders on hagiography, but for Wayne fans like myself, and probably you — that’s no flaw.

I was a fan before I worked as his driver, first in 1967–68 as an after-school job and again full-time in the summer when I finished university four years later. It may be that no man is a hero to his valet, but Wayne was one to this driver.