The Duke dug Noel Coward
Dick Cavett blogs about meeting John Wayne who professes a love for Noel Coward.
To be honest, I was more surprised to learn that Cavett blogs than that The Duke dug Coward. Anyone intimate with Red River or She Wore A Yellow Ribbon or The Shootist knows Wayne possessed an enormous artistic intelligence which he rarely had the opportunity to display outside of the maligned genre that imprisoned him so compellingly. "Get John out of the saddle and you've got trouble," Joan Crawford concluded about the admittedly awful wartime melodrama Reunion in France (1942).* But to quote Howard Hawks quoting John Ford, who knew better, that big sonofabitch could act and thus he could've knocked Coward's Blithe Spirit out of the park, spurs well-hidden beneath tux and tie.
Still a good ole boy, though, as Tab Hunter's autobiography makes clear.
* Roy Newquist, Conversations with Joan Crawford (New York: Berkley, 1980), 90.
To be honest, I was more surprised to learn that Cavett blogs than that The Duke dug Coward. Anyone intimate with Red River or She Wore A Yellow Ribbon or The Shootist knows Wayne possessed an enormous artistic intelligence which he rarely had the opportunity to display outside of the maligned genre that imprisoned him so compellingly. "Get John out of the saddle and you've got trouble," Joan Crawford concluded about the admittedly awful wartime melodrama Reunion in France (1942).* But to quote Howard Hawks quoting John Ford, who knew better, that big sonofabitch could act and thus he could've knocked Coward's Blithe Spirit out of the park, spurs well-hidden beneath tux and tie.
Still a good ole boy, though, as Tab Hunter's autobiography makes clear.
* Roy Newquist, Conversations with Joan Crawford (New York: Berkley, 1980), 90.
posted by Kevin John Bozelka at 11:05 AM
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