It’s hard for any actor to maintain movie stardom over a long period of time, but it’s more difficult to get there in the first place. John Wayne might be one of Hollywood’s biggest and most enduring icons, a status nobody thought he could attain during his early years in the business.
‘The Duke’ was over a decade into his life as a working actor before he finally secured a star-making role in John Ford’s Stagecoach, and there was no looking back after that. However, Wayne toiled for a long time to become a headline attraction, and not even the studios believed in him.
To be fair, his first time taking top billing hadn’t gone so well when 1930’s The Big Trail flopped at the box office, after which Wayne continued playing bit-parts in a succession of westerns and adventure films. By the end of the decade, RKO was on the hunt for its next major star, and the list of candidates to replace the flagging George O’Brien included ‘The Duke’.
Ironically, O’Brien was an established member of Ford’s inner circle, having made ten pictures with the filmmaker Wayne would come to call ‘Pappy’. Still, they existed on different planes of stardom in 1937, a year when the actor was only listed as the seventh most popular western actor behind O’Brien, Buck Jones, Gene Autry, William Boyd, Ken Maynard, and Dick Foran.
When the search was underway for O’Brien’s short and long-term replacement, several RKO executives suggested Wayne for the position. Of course, others disagreed, most notably distribution chief Ned Depinet, who sent a telegram to corporate head Leo Spitz voicing his indignation.
“We believe it would be a mistake to distribute John Wayne westerns,” it read. “He is in the same category as a dozen others with the disadvantage of having been sold cheaply and, in our opinion, with little prospect of gaining popularity. He is one of the poorest of so-called western stars, seems miscast, and his pictures are doing little at Universal.”
Depinet believed that it “would be better to go ahead with George Shelley” because he hadn’t been “identified with cheap western pictures,” unlike Wayne, suggesting that the former was someone “with whom we would have a chance of building into a worthwhile singing western star like Autry.”
Obviously, Wayne would get the last laugh just a couple of years later when Stagecoach elevated his standing to the next level, and it wasn’t long before he was firmly entrenched as one of the most noteworthy stars and bankable commodities in the business. Still, RKO didn’t think he was a talent worth investing in, which is one of many reasons why hindsight is always 20/20.
RKO had absolutely no faith whatsoever in Wayne’s prospects of evolving into the face of the western, which is laughable in retrospect, considering how things panned out in the decades that followed.