The New York Times bestselling biography of John Wayne:
"authoritative and enormously engaging...Eyman takes you through Wayne's
life, his death, and his legend in a detailed, remarkably knowledgeable
yet extremely readable way" (Peter Bogdanovich, The New York Times Book
Review).
John Wayne died more than thirty years ago, but he remains one of
today's five favorite movie stars. The celebrated Hollywood icon comes
fully to life in this complex portrait by noted film historian and
master biographer Scott Eyman.
Exploring Wayne's early life with a difficult mother and a feckless
father, "Eyman gets at the details that the bean-counters and
myth-spinners miss...Wayne's intimates have told things here that
they've never told anyone else" (Los Angeles Times). Eyman makes
startling connections to Wayne's later days as an anti-Communist
conservative, his stormy marriages to Latina women, and his
notorious--and surprisingly long-lived--passionate affair with Marlene
Dietrich. He also draws on the actor's own business records and, of
course, his storied film career.
"We all think we know John Wayne, in part because he seemed to be
playing himself in movie after movie. Yet as Eyman carefully lays out,
'John Wayne' was an invention, a persona created layer by layer by an
ambitious young actor" (The Washington Post). This is the most nuanced
and sympathetic portrait available of the man who became a symbol of his
country at mid-century, a cultural icon and quintessential American male
against whom other screen heroes are still compared.
