Inside Wayne's world

NOBODY can understand America if they do not know John Wayne. He was the most famous film star of his day, but he became far more than that. He was an icon, a symbol of a way of life and a set of values cherished by many Americans.

He was also an arch anti-communist, an ardent supporter of the war in Vietnam and arguably a coward. Three times married, his private life was a mess. Yet when he died he was almost universally regarded as an honest, decent man who stood by his friends. He won medals and honours around the world. Even Nikita Khrushchev sent him a crate of vodka.

R Roberts and J Olson, both professors of history in the United States, have not produced the usual superficial tour of an actor's life. This is a thorough exploration of the man and his times, and it proves to be a winning combination.

Without understanding the era in which Wayne lived it is impossible to understand him. Only one thing counts in Hollywood, the bottom line, and that irreducible economic law ruled Wayne's life.

The son of a broken marriage, Marion Mitchell Morrison, as Wayne once was, won a football scholarship to read law at university in the 1920s. But sensing he would never succeed in the money-conscious legal world, he gave it up to go to Hollywood. He started as a scene shifter and extra, until his footballer's physique brought him to the notice of directors.

He was given the name John Wayne almost by accident for his first major film. But it turned out to be a turkey and Wayne spent the next 10 years doing minor Western B movies. That period of purgatory was the making of Wayne's popularity. Playing to small theatres in the Mid-West, Wayne became the actor who appealed, not to the East Coast establishment, or to the West Coast, but to the working class across the whole of the United States.

He started to come into favour in 1939, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and America was in the war. Unlike many of the other leading men in Hollywood, such as Henry Fonda Wayne did not go to war, an amazing contrast to the gung ho tough man he usually played on screen.