The Hollywood Tough Guy Who Ducked Military Service in WWII
John Wayne was in his early 30s when America joined WWII. Many famous public figures rushed to enlist. Some were significantly older than Wayne, such as Clark Gable, who enlisted in his 40s. Another was Jimmy Stewart. Underweight, he pulled strings to join the military. Wayne, by contrast, pulled strings to stay out of the military. Both Gable and Clark risked their lives in combat. Wayne did USO tours, in which he entertained troops overseas. Even those, were done with an ulterior motive: to keep out of the military. As he once put it during the war: “I better go do some touring – I feel the draft breathing down my neck“. Post-WWII, many bought into Wayne’s public image of manly toughness. During the war, that image was not bought by America’s real tough guys: the fighting men.
When Wayne visited a hospital in Hawaii, wounded GIs and Marines booed him. He never got over that humiliation. Wayne developed a guilt complex for his failure to enlist during WWII. It shaped the public image he sought to project thereafter. It also explained his decision to star in numerous testosterone-drenched war movies throughout the rest of his career. In those films, he got to play heroic characters on screen: the kinds of men he wished he had been like in real life. Four years after he was booed offstage by wounded Marines for being a phony, Wayne played a grizzled combat Marine sergeant in The Sands of Iwo Jima. He nailed it, and got a best actor Oscar nomination for the effort. As Wayne’s third wife put it: “He would become a ‘superpatriot’ for the rest of his life, trying to atone for staying at home“.
