John Wayne obituary

If Rip Van Winkle had woken up the other morning, he might have guessed, for a moment or so, that he was in the 1920s. America's sweetheart was front-page news, so was a cowboy star. A young American had flown into France after a feat of aviation which had been tried and failed since 1912, or perhaps I should say since young Icarus tried it in 3500 BC.

Well, America's sweetheart was still nobody but Mary Pickford. However, the cowboy was not Tom Mix but John Wayne and the 26-year-old American was not Charles Lindbergh, but a peddle-pushing Lindbergh named Bryan Allen. 

An old friend, who was with me on Tuesday evening and caught the splendid satellite pictures of young Allen gliding and dipping over a syrupy-smooth English Channel, said, 'Oh my God! Every 19-year-old in America is going to start buying up polyester film and heading for Dover!' I must say that what looked at first like a happy lark is drawing reams of praise from aeronautical engineers, one of whom said that Allen's flight is a landmark – an air mark – in the history of flight. 

The main point seems to be that while in the past 20 years there has been steady research on developing a craft that could be kept aloft with one horsepower, which has meant experimenting with feather-light materials like aluminium alloys and plastic covers, finally Dupont came through with this tough polyester film which is yet only two-thousandths of an inch thick. Before that, they'd found that one horsepower was too much for an extended flight. 

Young Allen needed only one-quarter horsepower to stay up there but the margin of excess power that this gave him allowed him to beat the problem that had afflicted all previous efforts at man-powered flight. He could manoeuvre. To you and me that sounds as simple as saying that the handlebars of a bicycle can turn but I gather that even, say, last week if you'd asked first-rate aviation engineers who were unaware of Allen's attempt, if you'd asked them what would happen to him when a wind blew in, they'd have said he would hit the drink. 

For decades it has been standard doctrine that no glider, or airplane for that matter, can turn without banking, dipping the wing towards the direction you wish to fly. To bank is inevitably to slow down and if Allen had slowed from a height of six feet or so above the water, that would have been the end of the brave affair. But two years ago the prototype of the Gossamer Albatross managed to fly a figure-eight course, hence the awesome moment on Tuesday evening when the chief engineer of an aviation company heard about Allen's flight and paid him the supreme compliment in two words, 'he manoeuvred'. It's never been done in man-powered flight. 

It reminded me of the evening almost 200 years ago when the population of New Orleans gathered outside the town to see a Frenchman accomplish the impossible feat of boiling off sugar cane into crystals. It had never been done, but as the city fathers came close and peered into the cooling vats, a great cry went up, 'It granulates!' It was the beginning of the South's vast sugar empire. 

So it seems we must be careful not to look on Bryan Allen as a lucky, hare-brained youngster who took a mad risk and made it. The technical stuff that's been written in the past few days suggests that the big bugs in aeronautical research are looking on Allen as a pioneer worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with the Wright brothers. Who knows? A year or two from now we may see a man with polyester wings flying over Central Park or Hyde Park and youngsters will cry, 'It's a bird! It's Superman! It's not – it's Bryan Allen!' A name to remember. 

With very many people of my age and younger, bets could be won by simply declaring that Mary Pickford was still alive, just as bets can be won today by asking a group to say just when William Powell died. He didn't. He's still there in Palm Springs in his eighty-eighth year. Similarly, I remember a few years ago waiting for a twosome ahead of me to clear the eighteenth green at Riviera, a famous golf course west of Hollywood. My partner noticed a big, rugged old man up front in a wide-brimmed planter’s hat. He putted out, looked at his watch and hurried off. 'He's gone,' said my partner, 'to pay his regular visit to Mary.' 

He was Buddy Rogers. And even I, an old film critic whose brain is stuffed with useless information about the vital, or mortal, statistics of movie stars, was surprised to hear that Mary Pickford was still in the land of the living. Well it seems only just. For several years a complete recluse, half-blind, her legs paralysed, musing and sleeping, but breaking often into lucid intervals in which she saw the history of the movies and the usual progress of fame with shrewd clarity. She knew, once the silent film was doomed, that she was too, after a half-hearted shot at what we quaintly called 'the talkies', she quit when she was forty, an age when a woman star today sees herself as, if not a nubile temptress, at least a rounded one. 

'I left the screen,' Mary Pickford said three years ago, 'because I didn't want what happened to Chaplin to happen to me. The little man eventually killed him. The little girl made me. I wasn't waiting for the little girl to kill me.' 

But if Mary Pickford was the first victim of typecasting, and knew it, John Wayne was the first, or certainly the most enduring, triumph of typecasting. Some of us looking way back remembered him first as the lanky Swedish lad in 'The Long Voyage Home', an O'Neill adaptation which was far from the Apaches and 'The Old Corral'. In fact, 'The Long Voyage Home' was about his fiftieth film, which just goes to show how long in those days a hack (his word) could hack away in B-films and C-films. Forty of those early quickies were Westerns, but I don't believe even avid film fans could put the name to the face before he played the Ringo Kid in 'Stagecoach' in 1939. 

Even then, Wayne's achievement was one of 'sticking in there' – being in so many Westerns that when you saw the first close-up of a posse and Wayne wasn't in it, you felt there'd been some mistake. Perhaps he was out to lunch? He was never much of an actor and was the first to say so. Fame came with simply being present and gradually, over about 20, 30 years accepting himself not as an actor, but a behaviourist. In the movies, as in life, he loped, he drawled, he squinnied up his eyes, he was ready to unloose an upper-cut from his blacksmith's right arm or a spatter of bullets from the hip. He was uncomfortable with women but awkwardly gentle with them, thus endearing himself to generations of male chauvinists and generations of women who liked male chauvinists before the term was ever invented. 

I wonder if he would have become as famous as he did if he'd not lumbered off the movie set on to the political scene. Just when America was losing its post-war confidence, when the Russians got the bomb and, most, when Vietnam was wounding the national ego, John Wayne symbolised the very character everybody knew was dead and done with – Wyatt Earp, who solved all problems by stalking towards the villain in the empty, sunburnt street at high noon. Well, naturally Wayne came in for wide and wild ridicule. He also came in for a new kind of admiration, even reverence, from the hawks who couldn't bear to feel that there was finally a problem that could not be licked by Americans rolling up their sleeves and gritting their teeth. 

The really puzzling and interesting phase came later. If there'd not been some unexplained new element, I don't think John Wayne would have lasted as a force, even a romantic force, in the popular consciousness any more than General Douglas MacArthur did after his barnstorming speechifying in the wake of his dismissal from his Korean command. Nobody, it seems to me, has put a finger on why this primitive, flag-waving simpleton loped through the competing mobs of idolaters and haters and eventually became something and somebody a great majority of Americans could begin to like and even admire. I am myself, frankly, baffled but I venture the hint that it had something to do with his surprising lack of ill will towards his political critics and enemies. 

I suspect the turning point came five years ago when he was invited by Harvard to go there and debate war and peace, permissiveness and order, dissent and deference, the old America and the new, with the students. A lot of people felt he'd made a ghastly mistake in leaving himself open to public ridicule before a gang of unsympathetic students. Well, it turned out to be a sort of triumph. His hosts put him on an armoured car and gave him an armed guard. He waved, he saluted, he loved it. He debated with no ire, no sarcasm even but with a clumsy, perfectly typecast grimness and sincerity and an apologetic end piece to his opponents saying all he was against was what he called, 'dissension by rote'. They were amazed to see that he had intelligence and they were charmed to see he had good nature and grace. 

It was put best, I think, by an old actress, an unflagging liberal, who had signed up to play in a picture with him, loathed his politics, braced herself for the worst and, as she said, 'The first morning I was to meet him I was a nervous wreck, a bundle of distrust and dislike. I can only say', she mentioned the other day, 'he was the most gracious actor I ever worked with. He was very kind and compassionate to me. I guess... I guess he was a gentleman.' 

His long illness finally softened even his detractors. He'd gone on talking about duty, love of country, courage, loyalty, grit, and then for two years, in a quiet way, he behaved that way. Even the rebellious young, now moving into middle age, began to harbour the sneaking thought that maybe Wyatt Earp had something. Something laughable, of course. But good. And gone for ever.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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