Dark Space

In “John Wayne: A Love Story,” an essay in her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Joan Didion describes a dinner party she and her husband attended, with John Wayne and his wife, Pilar, “in an expensive restaurant in Chapultepec Park,” on one night during the last week of the filming of The Sons of Katie Elder in Mexico City. Didion frames this event by concisely summarizing the “number of ways” she had thought about Wayne's film persona since first seeing him as an eight-year-old girl in the summer of 1943 in War of the Wildcats. Twenty-two years later, in 1965, she first recollects how, after a few drinks over dinner, she had “lost the sense that the face across the table was in certain ways more familiar than my husband's.” But then “something happened”: “Suddenly the room seemed suffused with the dream, and I could not think why.” This abrupt, unexpected transformation of “a nice evening, an evening anywhere” into a dreamscape that dates from her childhood past occurs as three men playing guitars appear at their table. At this interruption Wayne raises his glass “imperceptibly” toward Pilar and then orders more wine for the table – and “some red Bordeaux for the Duke.” As the ensuing communion with wine proceeds, the musicians continue playing and eventually, Didion comments, “I realized what they were playing, what they had been playing all along: ‘The Red River Valley’ and the theme from The High and the Mighty. They did not quite get the beat right, but even now, I can hear them, in another country and a long time later, even as I tell you this.”

At the essay's outset Didion claims that the John Wayne film persona “determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams,” dreams whose utopian shape existed in stark contrast to that real-world shape of the turbulent 1960s “characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities.” His was a reel world “which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more”; his body was the “perfect mold” into which film directors could pour “the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost”.