Western movie icon John Wayne played some of the most definitive characters in all of cinema, from Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s classic The Searchers to Jacob McCandles in the 1971 film Big Jake. Perhaps it’s more correct to say that he played numerous slight variations on one character – the cowboy hardman synonymous with his stage name.
Wayne was one of the Hollywood stars for whom you could truly say the part was fitted to the actor rather than the actor adapting to the part. His real name was Marion Morrison, and he was given his on-screen moniker for his first western film, The Big Trail, in 1930.
Upon adopting the stage persona that went along with his new name, Wayne became synonymous with hard-talking as much as gunslinging. As he says in his Oscar-winning performance as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, “Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.” Wayne always talked big with few words and, particularly later in his career, very often talked down, too, reflecting his stern and traditionalist way of thinking off-screen in his characters.
Arguably, his most famous line in any movie typifies the patronising demeanour of his late-career performances. “Get off your horse and drink your milk,” he tells a young farmhand, in reference to the habitual tendency of his own characters to drink whisky from a hip flask or in a saloon bar during breaks from long journeys on horseback.
So, in which movie did he say the line?
Except that this scene never happened in any John Wayne film. He’s reported to have said, “Get off your horse and drink your milk,” during his 1972 performance as Wil Anderson in The Cowboys. The movie tells the story of a rancher forced to use young teenage boys on his farm when all of his cowhands run off to join the California gold rush.
The origins of the apocryphal line stem from the idea that the boys in Anderson’s employ are too young to drink the liquor with which Wayne’s films were usually associated. Around this time, celebrity impressionists began using variations on this line in impersonations of Wayne. Actor and comedian Robin Williams does his own version of it during a scene of the 1996 film The Birdcage, and there have been countless other examples of the impersonation broadcast down the years.
The fact is, Wayne never said the line. There are other excellent one-liners in The Cowboys, including, “A big mouth don’t make a big man,” and “I wouldn’t make it a habit, calling me that, son,” which Wayne delivers with his trademark dryness. But nothing about getting off horses or drinking milk.
The line might work perfectly for an impersonation designed to caricature Wayne. But Wayne himself certainly wasn’t one for drinking milk midway through a horse ride. At least not when the option of whisky was on the table.