Wayne’s World

When John Wayne died, in 1979, an Austin TV news anchor called me to get my thoughts on Wayne as a Texan. I said he wasn’t any more a Texan than Davy Crockett was, but later I reconsidered. Davy Crockett became a Texan by dying at the Alamo, and John Wayne became a Texan by making The Alamo, the biggest film ever about the fateful battle. “Big” was the word from the start. The year they shot the film, 1959, Texas needed to be reminded of its outsized history because, on January 3, Alaska had entered the Union.It was Texas chauvinism that got the film made here in the first place. The shocking truth is that Wayne, who had been interested in filming the Alamo story as far back as 1945, had searched for locations in South America and Mexico. At one point he was close to settling on Panama, which had San Antonio-like scenery and cheap labor. Later he seriously considered Durango, Mexico, a site that John Huston would use for The Unforgiven the same year Wayne made The Alamo. Alarmed at the...