John Wayne: The Life and Legend

The New York Times bestselling biography of John Wayne: authoritative and enormously engagingEyman takes you through Waynes 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 todays 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 Waynes early life with a difficult mother and a feckless father, Eyman gets at the details that the bean-counters and myth-spinners missWaynes intimates have told things here that theyve never told anyone else (Los Angeles Times). Eyman makes startling connections to Waynes later days as an anti-Communist conservative, his stormy marriages to Latina women, and his notoriousand surprisingly long-livedpassionate affair with Marlene Dietrich. He also draws on the actors 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.