I’ve heard that John Wayne’s feet were small for his height, which resulted in that distinctive swaggering walk his is well-known for. He had to walk that way to keep from falling over. Any truth to this?
What is your source? All get from typing “John Wayne” into Google are links to Gacy and Bobbitt (double yuck). So we’re left with two posibilities:
- Go to Grauman’s Chinese Theater for a boot print. Or try to compare JW’s fist imprint and ballpark the shoe size from that. My fist is about as wide as my shoe, and I wear a 9½. His boot print looks to be wider than his fist.
- Watch the “I Love Lucy” where he lays on a table to get a massage from the wacky redhead. IIRC, his feet are visible in that shot and while you might not be able to determine what size they are, you should be able to see if they were unusually small.
The only reason why I hesitate to think it’s a UL is because it’s spectacularly borning piece of trivia. Nothing at all like the 40 lbs of impacted fecal matter UL.
“A spectacularly boring piece of trivia”?!??! Other than the voice, one of the most distinctive features of any actor to ever live being caused by what might loosely be defined as a deformity, and you call it trivial? 
Oh, and I have no cite at all, just something an old girlfriend mentioned once. I just thought it would be hilarious if it were true.
I don’t remember his wobbly gait, and I was never a fan. That’s why I say boring. But now that I look at those boot prints, they look more like high heels- now there’s a great UL!
Attrayant wrote:
Well, his real first name was Marion…
Does it look to everyone else like John spelled his name as “Wajne”?
I met the guy once when I was a kid (he lived in Newport Beach, where I grew up), and all of the man seemed huge! Although I will admit I didn’t check out his feet.
“Deformities” can indeed become someone’s signature. Look at Bob Fosse. Prematurely bald, he almost always wore a hat, hence the hat gags in his numbers. Also, his primary muse, wife Gwen Verdon, was knock-kneed from a childhood case of rickets, and his loose-limbed, bent-knee style of choreography for her became his signature style.
A Google search for “John Wayne small feet” yielded this site wherein Katherine Hepburn takes note of that feature.
Also, the description of another site seems to make reference to Wayne purposely wearing too-big boots for his Hollywood Walk of Fame imprints, but the link doesn’t work.
[Hank Hill]
You take that back!!
[/Hank Hill]
As I have mentioned before in my extreme youth I was in a couple of Wayne’s westerns. And while I never asked him why he walked that way (I never noticed if his boots were especially small), I did ask some of the guys that were part of the “John Wayne Repertory Company” (a group of actors who often appearaed in Wayne’s films), and they pointed at Harry Cary jr., a regular in most of Wayne’s westerns.
He said that Wayne learned it from his father (Cary’s father Harry Cary sr. a leading man in silent westerns and a character actor in talkies specializing in older-sheriff type parts). Wayne and he appeared in a number of early Wayne “oaters”. Cary sr. (according to Cary jr.) suggested that Wayne try a walk more like him rather than the bow-legged waddle that many of the western stars were using at the time.
The others sitting around agreed with Cary jr. and since then I have watched films with Cary sr. in them and he does in fact have the same walk as Wayne. I might suggest that you watch “Angel and the Bad Man.” They both appear in it, and their gaits are very similar.
Now, they could have just been trying to get a rise out of a high school kid hired to sit a horse along side of them. They were not above that sort of think, but usually when it was a joke they would let me in on it after a bit of good natured ribbing. This time there was none of that. So I tend to believe it.