John Wayne’s real-life might make a perfect Hollywood script.
John Wayne is a name synonymous with the Western genre, partly due to his fruitful cinematic partnership with John Ford and partly simply due to his own personal charisma and the way that he so naturally embodied the iconic image of grit, determination, and endurance that became the hallmarks of the protagonists of the Western genre. His acting persona was in many ways a testament to the actions of his personal life, as well. After a swimming accident derailed a promising college football career at USC, he shifted gears, turned to acting, and ended up becoming one of the most influential and recognizable actors of the 20th century. He ultimately became so emblematic of the American way of life, in fact, that none other than Joseph Stalin himself tried to get Wayne assassinated. On multiple occasions.
How Did John Wayne Become an American Film Icon?
In addition to starring in such classics as Stagecoach, The Searchers, The Quiet Man, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and True Grit, for which he won his Oscar, during his career, many saw John Wayne as the icon of American patriotism. He worked with the USO and visited troops at the front multiple times in both WWII and Vietnam. He apparently tried on multiple occasions to actually enlist in the army during the Second World War but was derailed by the combination of his age, his marital status, and his studio, which was desperately trying to cling onto every A-list actor they could at the time and even interfered in the Selective Service process in order to keep Wayne. His inability to enlist apparently haunted him for many years, and according to his wife, it may have been one of the reasons that he became so committed subsequently to embodying “Americanism” both publicly and on the screen.
John Wayne’s public persona was, of course, outspoken and unapologetic about his pro-American sympathies, and his position was occasionally used to support the government. He even worked for the OSS (modern CIA) in a temporary capacity at one point during WWII, and afterward amid rising tensions between the USA and the Soviet Union became one of the most outspoken anti-communist voices in the country.
Why Did Joseph Stalin Try to Assassinate John Wayne?
What Actually Happened Between John Wayne and Joseph Stalin?
In a plotline that could have been lifted from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, when John Wayne was informed about the Soviet agents dispatched to kill him, rather than going into hiding, he hatched a plot with the FBI agents and his scriptwriter James Grant to kidnap the assassins instead before they had a chance to execute their plan (or Wayne, for that matter). The (believed to be KGB) agents made their way to Wayne’s office under their prepared identities as FBI agents, but found Wayne and the real FBI waiting for them instead. Wayne and the FBI then took the Soviet agents off to an abandoned beach (no doubt while sinisterly growling “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” at them) and staged a classic intimidation technique on them: a mock execution. It may seem harsh, but the agents themselves were trying to stage a real execution of Wayne instead. Fair is fair, after all. At any rate, at this point, the assassins were handed over to the FBI and were apparently so intimidated both by Wayne and by the prospect of returning to the Soviet Union having failed that they turned informants for the FBI instead.
Again, this seems too much like a Hollywood script to be real, but the Soviet plot to assassinate Wayne was apparently corroborated by Orson Welles himself — no great personal fan of Wayne. Welles apparently heard the story through his personal connections with Soviet filmmakers, coming originally from Sergei Gerasimov, who had apparently been the one to advise Stalin about the problems Wayne posed in the first place. At the end of the day, though, Wayne survived the attempt.
Not to be deterred, apparently, Stalin tried to have Wayne assassinated again a few years later. While working on Hondo in Mexico in 1953, there was another scuffle with a local communist cell, though it is unclear whether this time it was a leftover order from Stalin (who died early in 1953) or simply a local communist group acting on their own initiative. John Wayne himself initially suspected Khrushchev, as Stalin’s replacement, of continuing the effort to bump him off, but was informed by Khrushchev himself in 1958 that he had actually rescinded Stalin’s order when he took over as Premier.
When Mao Zedong Tried to Assassinate John Wayne
But even this wasn’t the end of the affair. When John Wayne visited the troops in Vietnam in 1966, an enemy sniper was caught trying to shoot Wayne, and after he was caught he revealed that Chairman Mao had placed a price on the head of John Wayne for any who could manage to kill him.
But that seems finally to have been the end of the attempts to assassinate John Wayne. But even if only a portion of the story is true, the drama behind the scenes for Wayne was just as fascinating and dangerous as the movies he so often made. And unless Soviet agents or communist cells somehow figured out a way to give the Duke stomach cancer, all of the efforts to kill him were ultimately unsuccessful, whether due to luck, friends, or even somehow the most essential “John Wayne” response ever to a crisis: I’ll take care of it myself.