He was made to be on camera: perhaps that is the very American solution to how he was also a chump in life (especially with money) and inclined to meanness if he thought no one was watching He longed to be good, to be seen as good, to be admired. That mother was the first person who taught him failure, and she helped establish his gentle, rather wistful bewilderment with women. (He was seldom a good husband, to three women, all Latin.) The family came to California, and lived as best they could as farmers near Lancaster (semi-desert), clinging on to the shifting land, before moving in to Glendale.But Marion was a terrific-looking kid, and enough of an athlete to get a scholarship to the University of Southern California. He was named Marion Robert, and called “Bobby”, but when the parents had a second son (Marion was five) he got the name “Robert” and the Duke-to-be became Marion. “The fact that he never really was a cowboy or soldier,” they wrote, “is cause not for scorn but for reflection.”He was from the mid-West, from Iowa, child to an amiable, feckless father and a tough chilly mother. The one thing he’s better at is talking about the way Wayne moved and spoke, and how some of the films came into being. This was not a matter of expose, but they established the ordinary being once known as Marion Morrison, and the inescapable fakery in the life of any actor.

Again, I never quite felt that he was moved by Red River or The Searchers (and the philosophy or politics of Wayne depends on emotion), but Wills has been to the archives and traced the progress on scripts so that we see the evolution of Wayne’s persona.What Roberts and Olson managed is the very thing I anticipated in Wills. They showed the uneasiness in Wayne, the gap between myth and reality. But their book is nearly twice as long as his, and the length is rich in detail that describes America as much as Wayne. On the other hand, ironically, Wills enjoys the role of film critic. (There’s a dust jacket photo of Wills in Wayne’s Monument Valley that carries an unmistakable air of the proud tourist.)Wills is highly appreciative of what Roberts and Olson have done: indeed, on most matters of historical record, he trusts and repeats them.

I suspect they feel they lived in John Wayne’s country and regard it as home – a place that Wills observes with warm, scholarly detachment, as a place to visit. They found the real man, root and branch, and let the record speak for itself beside the legend. There’s something else to say – even if I offer it as a hunch – which is that Roberts and Olson like Wayne, and his world, more than Wills does. Though I find it hard to believe that so many were baffled at the choice. Americans “get” the relevance of Wayne quickly and naturally.

Maybe Wills is still having to convince himself, or get over the fact that, while he worked on his book, two history professors, Randy Roberts and James Olson, filled the gap that had long been apparent: they wrote and published, in1995/6, a lovingly researched biography, John Wayne: American.They didn’t write as well as Wills does; they were not his match as thinkers; but they spent ten years on their biography. But Wills is solemn about it; he doesn’t share in the grisly humour of the dream taking over from real life. He reckons that a diligent historian can keep the two things separate.So it’s a step in the right direction that a writer like Wills sensed the significance, the place, of Wayne. That’s proof of the building awareness in America’s political classes that movies or dreams on celluloid (that’s where the former become today’s political campaign ads) have a lot to do with the idea of ideas and leadership. No, he wants to discover what Americans feel about Wayne – not least someone like Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who has admitted that Sands of Iwo Jima has been the most influential film in his life, and that Wayne’s graceful walk was a model for him. Straight away, it tells us a lot about Wayne’s authority that the roly- poly Gingrich is admitting this. It’s a sign of how deeply Wayne’s look and manner has penetrated our fantasies – and it may be more of a sign than Wills ever quite grasps that America in this century has been a dreamscape as well as a real place.This is a large point.

Wills is very willing with the movies; he wants us to like them and respect them as works of art and show business. I had received no such queries when I said I was writing about Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. They, after all, held political office, formed political policy, and depended on a political electorate People cast votes for them They just bought tickets for John Wayne’s movies. Yet it is a very narrow definition of politics that would deny John Wayne’s political importance.”

And so begins what seems a strange but very promising marriage. Garry Wills, after all, is not a movie historian or critic; he is a sober commentator on America’s political culture, the author of Reagan’s America, Nixon Agonistes and The Kennedy Imprisonment, which attempt to explore the mind- set of recent presidents, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, an inspired disquisition on the great but rather brief speech Lincoln gave there, and what it said and says to and for America.
He warns early on that this book is by no means a biography of Wayne, or a thorough survey of the films.