Wayne’s World : JOHN WAYNE’S AMERICA: The Politics of Celebrity. <i> By Garry Wills</i> .<i> Simon & Schuster: 380 pp., $26</i>

America’s consummate screen cowboy, who rode the Chisholm Trail in “Red River” and guarded the frontier in “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” feared snakes, loathed horses and had to remind himself to say “ain’t.” America’s consummate screen soldier, who died leading the squad that raised the flag over Mt. Suribachi in “Sands of Iwo Jima,” fought his most determined battle to stay out of World War II. America’s consummate screen Cold Warrior, who routed the reds of Hawaii for HUAC in “Big Jim McLain” and ran the children of China down “Blood Alley” on a ferry to escape the Chinese Communists, entered the anti-Communist fray in Hollywood only after the battle of the blacklist was won. That protector of the American frontier family, who obsessively hunted for an abducted child in “The Searchers,” married three times; that staunch individualist in our on-screen memories was a docile member of the Hollywood “family” of abusive director John Ford, always ready to “assume the position” and be booted in the butt.

Marion Morrison, as he was born, was a man, until success was well upon him, fiercely concerned only with his own career. As Garry Wills comments in “John Wayne’s America,” he “had no interesting ideas in his private life.” Nothing about Marion Morrison, in fact, was worthy of a biography. However, his alter ego John Wayne, an image of a man inscribed in national consciousness as the essence of America, was another matter. From Wayne’s self-assured walk to the way he sat in the saddle, from his ease twirling a rifle to his refusal to show fear, from his sense of authority to his aura of invincibility, “John Wayne” remains an image worthy of a book. Carefully crafted, assiduously maintained and constantly if subtly revised to suit changing times, his was an image so real that moviegoers came to believe they had lived with him forever, so real that Congress struck a medal to his prowess, so real that Morrison disappeared into him, dedicating his life to making movies, each of which would be, in Wills’ words, a “monument to his idealized self.”

As an image and as an actor, Wayne, though largely ignored by modern film critics and scholars, still seems monumental to many Americans--to judge, at least, by popularity polls. He stood at the far end of a great American imperial cycle. As Wills points out, where previous frontiersmen and Indian fighters like Davy Crockett or Buffalo Bill Cody stepped from frontier life into myth, Wayne reversed the process. “Beginning in myth, he entered the company of those who actually lived on the frontier.”

Around his image gathered a near-religious cult. Wills aptly calls this worship “Wayne-olatry.” He was probably the closest thing Cold War America had to a national religion--and a thoroughly male-centered one it was. A generation of boys growing up in the shadow of World War II, their fathers’ war, idolized him. It was at his altar that they fanned their Matty Mattel six-shooters; it was in his name that they jumped into backyard foxholes to fight off banzai charges. The writer Ron Kovic went to war in Vietnam, in part, because of Wayne (and returned a paraplegic in part because of him as well). Newt Gingrich spent much time as an adolescent imitating his walk. A generation of boys adopted him as their substitute father, just as in his films, he always seemed to leave a special place for adopted sons (whether filled by Montgomery Clift, John Agar or Frankie Avalon).

The story of how that image of a war-fighting man came to be--the story, in fact, of how most images come to be--is normally a subject neither for biographers nor for critics, even though everyone agrees that we live in an age of the dominant image. A biography of an image is a much-needed project for our times. And who better to write about the Wayne image than our best popular historian of the ways in which religion intersected with politics, from the nation’s founding to the campaign trail (in “Under God”), from the battlefield to the graveyard (in his gem-like “Lincoln at Gettysburg”)? As an author concerned with image-making, anti-Communism and Hollywood in what is still the most intelligent biography of our first screen president (“Reagan’s America”), Garry Wills seems perfectly positioned to assess Wayne’s image, that great “popular expression of the tensions” of the Cold War. As a writer who has warned intellectuals that they ignore the fundamental (as well as fundamentalist) importance of religion at their own risk, there is a logic to his special interest in Wayne, another ignored but popular phenomenon.

It should have been a perfect match, and why it’s not in “John Wayne’s America” is puzzling. After a cursory dip into Morrison’s early life, Wills begins his biography of the building of Wayne’s frontier image with director Raoul Walsh’s “The Big Trail” (1930); shows how in “Red River” (1948), director Howard Hawks aged Wayne 20 years, giving him a superstar status he never lost; and how John Ford honed that image in three cavalry films that fought the Cold War in refighting the Indian wars. Wills’ rift on Ford’s films, particularly “Rio Bravo” (1959), which resonated with the “duties of empire . . . [with] a global mission that refused to observe national borders” is splendidly insightful. In fact, several of his mini-essays, including one on what to make of a country that idealizes its wilderness but has no sacral city, rank with his very best work.

Once upon a time in the West, as everyone knew, Wayne never missed his man, but even fine writers, not being images, are bound to do so sooner or later. Garry Wills is a remarkable writer who has a wonderful idea for a biography appropriate to our times. Think of “John Wayne’s America” as the first test run of a not yet perfected form. Certainly there is something slapdash about this book--as if the author himself were a bit puzzled by the audacity of the project. Were it a movie, you might say that its director was undecided on his focus. The camera zooms in for such close readings of films like “Stagecoach” (1939) that readers unfamiliar with them are likely to be lost. Much space is devoted to small-scale debunking of the various stories that Ford and Wayne wove around their relationship, of the historical accuracy of Wayne’s clunker of an epic, “The Alamo” (1960) and so on.

But what’s missing in a book narrowly focused on the director as image molder is the larger shaping of John Wayne. There is little on the role of the movie studios or the economics of the movie business or on how the media helped develop the Wayne-that-was-to-be and next to nothing on the rest of us, still at least partly in thrall to the cult of Wayne-olatry. Wills doesn’t deal with what we did to the image that Hollywood offered us--not only the ways in which we celebrated his rites but the ways in which we, his believers, further cleansed and purified his image, the way each of us became a mini-John Ford.

“John Wayne’s America” reminds us that Wayne on screen could be meaner, crazier, quirkier, more vulnerable than we recall. We forget him as the bad father, staggering drunk and unpleasant, on leave in “Sands of Iwo Jima,” or pulling a Captain Queeg in the desert in “Red River,” or savage and crazed in “The Searchers.” He was closer to the Clint Eastwood of the spaghetti Westerns than we like to imagine. We purified him in our minds, and it is good to be reminded of just how “terrifying” his image could be.

In some ways, nothing is more moving or better proof of the religious nature of his cult than the way the adolescent soldiers who took him in their hearts into Vietnam, like some demigod, proceeded to take his name in vain when things went wrong. Don’t pull a John Wayne, old-timers told newcomers as the war dragged on--don’t, that is, try any stupid heroics and endanger the lives of your fellow soldiers. Others talked of those returning home with war-related stress as experiencing John Wayne Syndrome.

Wayne, who died fighting numerous times on screen before cancer finally got Marion Morrison, outlasted those who took his name in vain and those who mocked him, in part, by half-mocking himself in his later films. There, he was the mean old drunk who had always lurked in, and had now outlived, his younger self and the American world that bred him. To the end, however, that lone hero of the frontier always moved in company, even when his companions were no longer men but a young woman (“True Grit,” 1969), armed schoolboys (“The Cowboys,” 1972) or an old woman (“Rooster Cogburn,” 1975). Our “action heroes” of today move and kill in more solitary ways for they have no empire to protect or to protect them. They muscle up and overarm in a fashion that would have embarrassed John Wayne.

And yet. as adaptable as he was, as popular as he still is, his is not a cult likely to withstand the test of time. One recent Saturday night, I sat down with my 11-year-old son to watch “Red River.” About halfway through that cattle-drive epic, he suddenly expressed an interest in seeing something else--almost anything else--on television. At its end, he was willing to admit that the young Montgomery Clift (acting in premature James Dean fashion) had been good, but John Wayne--he was vociferous on the subject--was a terrible actor. The man showed no emotion whatsoever. He never even changed the tone of his voice!

I wasn’t surprised. The Wayne image--and the style of manhood that went with it--now lacks all context. And so I put aside “Sands of Iwo Jima,” film two in our weekend video special. Those films were such highly coded forms that without the proper surroundings, without a specific sort of American childhood, there was no way to get them. There was, in a sense, nothing to get. John Wayne now wanders television’s late hours as if in a cultural wilderness, an image without a country.