Confusing actor and character
“Bill Cosby is Cliff Huxtable, regardless of what the critics say. We are all made up of perception and reality, fact and fiction, aspiration and confirmation. It is ridiculous to argue that a man who was capable of creating the character that fathered a generation did not, at some deep level, possess those nurturing characteristics.”
— Christine Flowers, in her June 13 column in the Philadelphia Daily News
John Wayne wasn’t a war hero. He was an actor, who was 34 years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Unlike a lot of people in Hollywood he didn’t immediately enlist in the military. He had his reasons.
We can surmise what some of them were. In 1941 Wayne was not the iconic star we think of today. He had made 80 B movies, but thanks to his breakthrough role in 1939’ s Stagecoach, was just starting to become established. He certainly wasn’t at the level of Clark Gable, who was 41 years old ( and possibly suicidal, despondent over the plane crash death of his wife Carole Lombard) when he enlisted, or Jimmy Stewart, who flew 20 combat missions over Germany with the Army Air Corps Reserve, or Henry Fonda, who joined the Navy at age 37. While they all put themselves at considerable risk, they could reasonably expect to resume their acting careers if and when they returned. A five- year break from the movies could have finished Wayne as an actor.
So Wayne availed himself of a 3- A deferment. He was married and the father of four, and his family relied on him as their sole support. They would have had a hard time making it on the $ 21 a month an Army private earned at the time.
( Wayne wasn’t living with his family at the time— he was separated from his first wife and living with the Mexican actress who would become his second.)
There’s evidence Wayne felt bad about not serving. He told friends that he’d enlist after making one or two more movies. But he didn’t. Instead, in 1944, Republic Studios applied to have his deferment changed to 2A for making a contribution to the war effort. When the Selective Service revoked this deferment and reclassified him as 1- A— fit for service— Wayne appealed and had the deferment reinstated.
Very late in the war, Wayne voluntarily changed his classification to 1- A and mailed in some paperwork that would have allowed him to join John Ford’s naval photography unit. But he never followed through and enlisted, and there was little chance of him getting drafted at that point. Hiroshima was only a month away.
Now John Wayne didn’t do anything illegal or extraordinary— he just didn’t do what some others did. He continued to enjoy his life. ( He visited troops in the Pacific theater as part of a United Service Organizations tour during the war.) Most of us would have done something similar.
It wasn’t comfortable for him. A lot of people wondered aloud why he didn’t serve. On a couple of occasions, he brawled with soldiers who pointedly questioned his courage.
The facts are what they are, and they are easily obtained. Yet people do not want to believe them.
People will tell you John Wayne didn’t serve because of an “old football injury.” This is ridiculous. Wayne was sound and athletic; he did most of his own stunts. They will tell you he didn’t serve because the government encouraged him to make morale- boosting movies. The truth was that almost any prominent Hollywood actor could have had a deferment— the U. S. government did classify the movies as an “essential industry”— but few accepted these deferments. In fact Wayne benefited greatly by remaining in Hollywood when other stars enlisted. He got parts that might have otherwise gone to Stewart or Fonda or Robert Montgomery or Tyrone Power or Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
Or Gene Autry, who wrote in his autobiography about his thinking when he was offered a deferment: “There was nothing noble about it. I would have much rather kept counting my money and firing blanks. But there didn’t seem to me to be any choice. If you were healthy and able, you either served or you learned how to shave in the dark.”
People will tell you Wayne couldn’t serve because of a recurring ear infection. That’s not completely untrue. It might have kept him out of the Navy.
Wayne is a problematic figure in part because he did his job of pretending to be a hero so well. He wasn’t a draft dodger; that’s too harsh an assessment. He made an understandable choice in a difficult situation. Maybe it’s ironic that, given a chance to serve, Wayne— who was highly critical of draft evaders during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts— chose not to. But he was an actor, not a hero.
Still, people want to ascribe to him the qualities he exhibited in fictional contexts. Plenty of people want to believe that he went on secret missions for Wild Bill Donovan during the war. If you want to believe that John Wayne was the guy he played in the movies, you’ll probably invent a way to preserve your illusions. I don’t think the Duke needs apologists, but he’s got plenty of them.
Bill Cosby’s image purposefully blurred the lines between character and actor, from the folksy autobiographical sketches of his childhood filled with characters like Fat Albert and Old Weird Harold through the TV series about the affluent post- racial family with the wise patriarch we were supposed to believe was based loosely on his own life. It was called The Cosby Show, after all.
Some people aren’t going to credit the allegations that 50- some women have made against Cosby because they liked his carefully calibrated family humor and his cultural conservatism— his penchant for criticizing hip- hop and reminding young black men to pull their pants up.
But you don’t have to be a doctor to play one on a show. A TV camera isn’t an X- ray for the soul.
It’s hard sometimes to be a grown- up, to acknowledge that our intuition isn’t infallible, that we can be fooled by the lights and the magic. Cosby may or may not be a serial rapist. That’s a question for judges and juries to decide. But he is demonstrably not Cliff Huxtable.