Fever (3 page)

Wayne's closest musical analog was Johnny Cash, who added subversive tints to the Wayne template, reworking the stoic certitude to become Mr. Country and Western on television in the late sixties. Cash embodied the American Man's Man both to the world and to himself with such shameless affection for Wayne's precedent that the conceit was nearly transparent. With his deep, rippling voice and affinity for prisoners and loners, you could almost say Cash played Wayne as a Down-but-Not-Defeated Country Singer—who had no problem flipping the bird when the authorities pissed him off. The subversive overtones came from Cash's politics, which were left of Wayne's (as almost everybody's was). He played to Folsom Prison inmates, not Wayne's beloved Green Berets. And, of course, Cash was the man who sang “A Boy Named Sue,” that hokey novelty about sissyhood: any man wearing a girl's name would feel such unknowable shame as to wish himself dead.

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Concealed within Wayne's unnerving stoicism lay a grand love of country and its freedoms. But the concealment was all, and the cost was high. It was the emotional reserves that Wayne brought into play, in long silences and gripping eye contact with his fellow actors, that defined how deeply felt his actions were. And it was precisely this reserve that infuriated the younger generation. In his
New Biographical Dictionary of Film
David Thomson recounts his experience screening
Red River
(1948)—which contains one of Wayne's greatest performances—for a class of American students in 1971:

I once showed
Red River
in a course for American students and at the end—like Charles Foster Kane at the opera—I stood up alone to applaud. This was 1971. Later we argued about the film. Yes, they could see the relaxed epic storytelling. They admitted that Hawks brought a beautiful simplicity to the filming. Of course, the action scenes were breathtaking. They liked the way Walter Brennan was used as a narrator. They had been very impressed by the shots of cattle on the move. Grudgingly, they conceded that the theme of family relationship and conflicting stubbornness was well worked out. They had nothing against the special masculine romanticism. Clift was astonishing, was he really dead? And even Joanne Dru was pleasing. Pushed to the limit, they allowed that this film showed more aspects of John Wayne than most. But ultimately,
Red River
never had a chance because they would not stomach John Wayne.

The students in Thomson's film class understood Wayne only in relation to Elvis Presley's renunciation of his kind—which is to say, Presley's manhood was the new lens through which Wayne was viewed.

By the time Presley burst upon the scene, Wayne's overworked persona was as ripe for ridicule as the tired Tin Pan Alley song formulas were to be debunked by the blues, folk, and R&B. What had once seemed necessary—an unabashed toughness, an unrelenting pursuit of frontier justice—now seemed beside the point. America had evolved from wartime consciousness to peacetime boom and prosperity, and there were new kinds of people walking around, with new questions about how their parents behaved. These misgivings began to express themselves in youth culture with the emergence of the beats in the early 1950s, whose fondness for bebop jazz, fast cars, rambling lifestyles, and Eastern philosophy created the first stirrings of a counterculture. Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
(1957) became a bible of self-discovery for those seeking a different kind of American experience than the one being sold to them through the mushrooming medium of television ads. But the Beats were notorious misogynists who had no interest whatsoever in treating women as equals—they may have had new ideas about Eastern mysticism and experiential writing, but they didn't have much new to say about manhood. Even harmless television fare like
Leave it to Beaver
and
Father Knows Best
threw up extreme scenarios of fear, caution, and intrigue, library-book fines and kitchen-bites-man plots, while proposing an essentially conservative version of male probity. A best-selling novel of the period, Sloan Wilson's
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
(1956), took on this simplistic worldview and exposed it through the character of Tom Rath (read “wrath”) as workaholism, emotional denial, and shallow intimacy. As a critique, it struck a nerve. But it barely explained the new kind of acting styles audiences responded to.

Presley's persona drew from what Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean were creating on the big screen, and nobody was more conscious of this than Presley himself. Dean, Brando, and Clift posed alternatives to the stiffness in reigning Hollywood stereotypes, the aloofness from feeling, and the contradictory signals surrounding sexuality. Once Montgomery Clift played up his ineffable insecurity opposite Wayne himself in
Red River
and Elizabeth Taylor in
A Place in the Sun
(1951), the contrast with prevailing male ethic was electric.

Marlon Brando twisted scripts around the kinks in his personality, and his appearances in
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1951) and
On the Waterfront
(1954) took male vulnerability and anger to strange new depths. Often, these new Method actors conveyed waves of emotion through the things they didn't say, but it had nothing to do with restraint; their sheer physicality was as expressive as any dialogue they uttered. It isn't hard to imagine superimposing a sublime rock 'n' roll soundtrack to the motorcycle gang Brando rides with in
The Wild One
(1954), which is the premise of
Easy Rider
(1969). John Wayne would never have called after Stella from the porch stoop the way Brando does in
Streetcar,
or confessed his humiliation to his brother by saying, “I coulda been a contender,” as Brando did in
Waterfront.
Such display was simply unthinkable to Wayne. Dean's worried brow and pouting probably made Wayne sick to his stomach. In the larger sense, Brando played out an eccentric screen career which bespoke great range, odd taste, and concession to Hollywood pap, but which could in no way be called the path of the traditional man.

James Dean smoldered for too short a time, but in his roles as the pent-up sons in
Rebel Without a Cause
and
East of Eden
(1955) and the sleazy upstart in
Giant
(1956), his sensibility influenced Presley, and Presley ushered in the new rock era, which quickly superseded Hollywood as the medium teens looked to for realism. “According to the notes in the screenplay for his part [in
Rebel
],” writes David Halberstam in
The Fifties,
“Dean was to be ‘the angry victim' of insensitive, careless parents: ‘At seventeen he is filled with confusion about his role in life … Because of his ‘nowhere' father,
he does not know how to be a man
[italics added]. Because of his wounding mother, he anticipates destruction in all women. And yet he wants to find a girl who will be willing to receive his tenderness.'”

Presley watched
Rebel
relentlessly. When he met Nicholas Ray, the director, he fell to his knees and began reciting whole passages of the script verbatim. On occasion Dean signed his name to letters in a way that showed he was conscious of the different influences at play in his work: “Jimmy (Brando Clift) Dean.” There's plenty that's already been said about Clift's and Brando's and Dean's daring sexuality, the strange new sparks they generated in romantic scenes with Elizabeth Taylor, Angie Dickinson, and Joanne Woodward, and how their personas combined hip attitude with indifference to stardom. What hasn't been discussed as much is how this new sensibility mined a newfound vulnerability, the ability to portray men as twisted by disappointment in their father figures' weaknesses—the theme steering a lot of 1950s films from
Death of a Salesman
(1951) to
East of Eden
(1955) to
Rebel Without a Cause
(1955) to
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1958).

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By the End of 1955, RCA had bought out Presley's Sun Records contract for an unprecedented $25,000, and he signed to do four Saturday-night appearances on a program produced by Jackie Gleason called
Stage Show.
He got $1250 a show for the Gleason appearances—plus, of course, national exposure. Gleason knew exactly what was happening: “He's a guitar-playing Marlon Brando,” he said. A lot of beats and jazzers looked down on Presley as naive and trendy. But Norman Mailer's “The White Negro,” his influential essay from 1957, applied directly to Presley's manhood: “One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel), one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.” Furthermore, the Hipster, Mailer wrote, “kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body.” The intelligentsia would catch up with Presley's blues, not the other way around.

Mailer's comments were composed from inside the context Wayne had established, the male ideal that shunned feeling—except perhaps patriotism and disgust with evil—because it implied timidity. More than completing the emotional rebellion that Brando, Dean, and Clift had waged against Wayne's stoic father figure, Presley made this rebellion seem almost superfluous next to the fun that could be had along the way.

If emoting meant timidity, openly showing affection towards another man crossed a still sacrosanct line. As humorist Dave Barry put it in 1997, in a column called “The Guy Test,” the only time men can kiss and retain a sense of manhood is “when he is your brother and you are Al Pacino and this is the only really sportsmanlike way to let him know that, for business reasons, you have to have him killed” (in
The Godfather Part 2
). Crying, of course, was the absolute taboo. Eisenhower's secretary of state, the rabid anticommunist John Foster Dulles, forbade his sons to cry. “To cry was to be emotional; to be emotional was to be weak; to be weak was to be unworthy,” writes Halberstam. (394) No wonder Johnnie Ray brought such high emotional melodrama to his defining 1951 hit “Cry,” which spent eleven weeks at number one in 1951. Ray was a novelty act (the “Nabob of Sob” started out as one of Okeh's few white blues singers), but his sincerity was affecting. He cried through a mountain of repression for a whole army of tearless men. At a time when the older generations saw crying as sissified, and thought tears made a man unworthy of manhood, pop musicians acted out what until then men couldn't allow themselves to do. Presley swiveled his pelvis with a pleasure that shook loose from Wayne's deeply engrained cultural mannerisms with irresistible élan.

*   *   *

The parallels between Presley's and Wayne's upbringings are intriguing: both had submissive fathers and domineering, possessive mothers, though Elvis was much closer to Gladys than the Duke was to his mother; both had childhoods scarred by rootless poverty; and most importantly, both men were the heroes of their family epics, carrying the burden of family redemption.

In part, Presley's pose was a reaction to Wayne's—and the distance between the two made the split both emotional and political. This was the generation gap writ so large it would take the better part of three decades to play itself out in story and song. Presley's voice created a new code, a new ethic of feeling and freedom that provided an antidote to John Wayne's sensibility and those who revered it. And while it may seem simplistic to play these two types against one another, the contrast couldn't be more vivid: could Wayne have ever sustained a scene with the mood that Presley creates singing “Love Me Tender”? Or the sexual menace that “Heartbreak Hotel” barely keeps in check? Who could say that Wayne is any tougher than the Presley who sings “Blue Suede Shoes”? Presley's stamina, the sense of raw feeling uncoiled into action, made his emotionalism, gentleness, and exuberance more acceptable, more of a piece with his manhood. Presley didn't contrast to Wayne as a weaker man but more as a completely different kind of man, more complex, more open to change, less fixed on a single idea or attitude. Presley's was an idea of man large enough to embrace many more moods and modes, and eager to experience all of them.

Wayne's restraint only puzzled Presley. If Wayne's credo was “No wasted motion,” Presley's might have been “What's a few wasted motions between lovers—for the sake of fun?” Presley heaved his Adonis frame into the beat so thoroughly it was as if the music was in possession of his body—much like the Holy Spirit possessed the congregations of the Pentacostal churches he first sang in as a boy. That Presley was invoking a decidedly secular spirit was only half the point—that he did so while reanimating male physical space and energy often gets overlooked. Perhaps because a lot of Wayne's physical grace was so invisible, it came to seem like defensiveness, an unwillingness to cut loose and have fun, a reserve of anger and tension that wanted some kind of outlet other than violence. Elvis turned the male physique into a dynamic sexual object that trumped both Wayne and Sinatra.

In James Carroll's memoir of father-son relations during this period,
An American Requiem,
he remembers Presley's influence as all-consuming:

… Lewd Elvis embodied the opposite of all that I'd been raised to be. The showy sexlessness of my parents' relationship and the aggressive Puritanism of my parish and monastery schools had established a standard of repression that we called morality. I was dying to fall short of it. I had been conditioned, like every parochial Catholic, to an exquisite vigilance against “impure thoughts” and “illicit pleasures.”