Audie Murphy Truly Hated Him… The Real Reason Was Worse Than Jealousy. HT

Audi Murphy truly hated him. The real reason was worse than jealousy. The gold medal. March 6th, 1980, Washington DC. 3 months after John Wayne died, his family walked into the capital building. Congress handed them a gold medal. Three words were carved across it. Not actor, not movie star, just John Wayne, American.

Nine years earlier, in May of 1971, a small plane hit the side of a mountain in Virginia. Everyone on board was killed. One of the dead was the most decorated American combat soldier of the Second World War. His name was Audi Murphy. He had won the Medal of Honor at 20. He had killed or wounded 50 enemy soldiers in a single hour.

He came home with 33 medals, including every single combat decoration the United States Army gave out. Congress did not vote him a medal. There was no airport renamed for him. There was no bronze statue. He was buried in Arlington Cemetery under a regulation white headstone, the same one given to every other soldier in that field.

His widow could not afford to fly all of his children to the funeral. For the rest of his life, Audi Murphy carried a quiet, organized hatred of one man in Hollywood. That man was John Wayne. And the reason was not jealousy. It was darker than that. It involved a movie that was cut to pieces. A war this country wanted to forget.

And a single year, 1968, when these two men finally became the opposite of each other in a way you have probably never been told. Stay with me because by the end you will not look at John Wayne the same way again. And you may never look at the country that loved him the same way either. Two boys, two countries. Before we go any further, let me put both of these men in front of you.

Some of you grew up watching John Wayne every Saturday afternoon. Some of you have never heard the name Audie Murphy. By the end of this section, you will know enough about both of them to understand why this story matters. Start with the one most people remember. John Wayne was born Marian Robert Morrison in Iowa in 1907.

His family lost the farm. They drove west to California when he was a boy. He was tall. He was big. He played football for the University of Southern California until a shoulder injury killed his scholarship and his sports career in the same week. He found a job at a movie studio loading props, then small parts, then bigger parts.

Then a director named John Ford put him on a stage coach in 1939 and the country had its cowboy. He made over 170 films. He played soldiers in the Second World War, soldiers in the Civil War, soldiers in Vietnam, sheriffs, ranchers, Texans, marshals. He won an Oscar in 1969 for True Grit.

By the time he died, his face was for an entire generation of Americans, the face the country trusted itself to see in the mirror. That is the man you remember. Now, meet the one most people forgot. Audi Murphy was born in Texas in 1925. His father walked out of the family. His mother died when he was 16. He had 11 brothers and sisters and most of them ended up in foster care or orphanages because there was no money and no parent left to keep them together.

He was small. He was thin. He weighed about 110 lb when he tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor. The Marines turned him down for being too small. The paratroopers turned him down. The army finally took him because he was the only Murphy boy old enough to send. He lied about his age to get in.

He spent the next 3 years killing Germans. By the time he came home, he was 20 years old. He had been wounded multiple times. He had outlived almost every soldier he had trained with, and he could not sleep without a loaded pistol under his pillow. That habit never went away. Two boys had grown up poor. One of them played a soldier on a film set.

The other one became one in a snowy field in France. America paid both of them, but it never paid them in the same currency. what this is really about. I want to be careful here because if I’m not, this turns into the wrong story. The wrong story is John Wayne was a coward and Audie Murphy hated him for it.

That is the version you can find on a lazy afternoon on the internet. That version is too simple and it gets one important thing wrong. John Wayne was 34 years old when the Second World War started. He had four small children. The government gave him a draft deferment, the same kind given to other men with families and dependent.

He tried to enlist in the Navy. The Navy turned him down because of an old football injury and his age. The studio he worked for, Republic Pictures, also pulled strings to keep him out of uniform because the country needed faces on movie screens to keep morale up. That was real. That happened. So this is not a story about a coward.

This is a story about something more difficult. It is the story of a country that needed two kinds of men in 1945. It needed real soldiers, the ones who came home with shrapnel in their hips and ghosts in their bedrooms. And it needed the picture of soldiers, clean, tall, easy to look at, easy to put on a recruiting poster.

The country had John Wayne for the second job and it had Audi Murphy for the first. Audi Murphy did not hate John Wayne because Wayne stayed home. He hated what Wayne proved. He hated what it meant about the country he had bled for. That this country could love a face on a screen more than it could face the man it had sent into the fire.

He hated that the makebelieve version of his own war made more money than his actual life had been worth. He hated that when he walked into a room of veterans, they treated him like a brother. And when he walked into Hollywood, they treated him like merchandise. By 1968, that difference would put one of these men on a Pentagon-funded movie set in North Carolina and the other one in bankruptcy court.

We will get there, but first you need to understand what kind of boy Audie Murphy was before Hollywood ever heard his name. Because the wound that started everything did not start in 1945. It started a long time before the war. The boy who killed 50 men. Audi Leon Murphy spent his childhood picking cotton.

By the time he was 10 years old, he was working in the fields outside Kingston, Texas for whatever the day’s wage was. By 12, he was hunting rabbits and squirrels because the family needed the meat. He once told a friend that as a boy, he never missed a shot. Not because he was a great marksman yet, because if he missed, the family did not eat.

That is what poverty looked like in America when you grew up before food stamps. Quiet, skinny, always watching. His mother was the only steady thing in his life. She died in 1941. Audi was 16. He stood in front of her grave and made what he later called the most important promise of his life. He was going to do something with his life that she could be proud of.

He tried to enlist almost immediately. The Marines told him to come back when he weighed more. The paratroopers said the same thing. The army accepted him in 1942. He looked younger than he was. His sergeant in basic training nicknamed him baby. He shipped out North Africa, Sicily, Italy, then France.

I’m going to skip past most of his combat record because I want you to understand the one moment that defined the rest of his life. It happened on January 26th, 1945 in a forest in eastern France near a village called Holtz. His unit had been pushed back by a German tank attack. Most of his men were dead or wounded.

Their position was about to be overrun. Murphy ordered everyone left to retreat. Then he climbed onto the burning hull of an American tank destroyer that had been knocked out earlier that morning. The fire was still going. The vehicle could have exploded at any moment. Murphy swung the heavy machine gun mounted on top toward the German lines and started firing.

He held them off for nearly an hour alone with one machine gun. The Germans came within 10 yards of him at one point. They threw everything they had at him. He kept firing. He took a wound in the leg and kept firing. By the time the tank destroyer finally exploded, Murphy had killed or wounded approximately 50 German soldiers and stopped a counterattack that should have wiped out his entire company.

He was 19 years old. For that single hour, the United States Army gave him the Medal of Honor. He came home in 1945 to magazine covers, parades, and a country that wanted to put a hero on its mantle. Life magazine put his face on the cover that July, he was 20. He looked like a boy. He was already drinking to sleep.

When he was asked decades later what was going through his mind on that burning tank destroyer, his answer was short. He said he was so tired he did not care if he lived. He said he just kept firing because firing was the only thing he had left to do. Hollywood saw the magazine cover. Hollywood saw the dollar signs.

Hollywood called. And the worst part of his life was about to begin. The man who built the mask. Now turn the camera around because the same year Audie Murphy was on that burning tank destroyer, John Wayne was already a star. Wayne was 34 when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He had a wife, four children, and a contract with Republic Pictures, a small studio that depended almost entirely on his face for its income.

The week the United States entered the war, John Wayne wrote a letter trying to enlist. He wrote more than one. The Navy passed. He talked about joining the OSS, the wartime spy service that became the CIA. That fell through, too. Some accounts say his studio threatened to sue him for breach of contract if he tried to leave for the military.

Other accounts say he kept his deferment because his family needed the income. You can argue about which of these is the real reason. Historians still do. But here is the part you cannot argue about. While other actors of the same age went into uniform, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, John Wayne stayed in Hollywood.

And he made war movies, a lot of them. Flying Tigers in 1942, The Fighting CBS in 1944, Back to Baton in 1945. They were expendable in 1945, Sands of Ewima in 1949. He played a pilot, a sailor, a marine, a gorilla fighter. He saluted. He barked orders. He died bravely on screen. He won battles in two reels.

Audi Murphy was bleeding in the snow at Holtzer while John Wayne was filming Back to Baton on a sound stage in California. I’m not telling you this to attack John Wayne. I’m telling you this because the country that watched these movies during the war did not always know the difference.

The country went to the theater on a Saturday night, watched John Wayne charge a Japanese pill box, and walked out feeling like they had been there with him. It worked. That is what made Wayne valuable. The studios figured out very early that he was not just an actor. He was a kind of soldier the country could afford to lose.

He could die in a movie a hundred times and still walk out of the theater alive. His grief was rented. His courage was scripted. His blood washed off in the makeup chair. He became the face the country put over the war. like a mask laid carefully over an open wound. And here is the part that is hard to admit because it complicates the easy version of this story.

John Wayne knew he was not a stupid man. By the late 1940s, after the war ended, Wayne was carrying something heavy about all of this. He started turning his characters harder, cruer, lonier. He started playing men who could not connect with the world around them. He played the soldier who outlived his unit, the cowboy who could not go home, the killer who could not stop being a killer.

Some of his best films, The Searchers, Red River, the man who shot Liberty Valance, are not really about heroes. They are about men who had to become something cold to survive their own legends. John Wayne, the actor, understood. What he could not do was step out of the costume. That was the trap. And by the time Audie Murphy walked into Hollywood with his Medal of Honor and his nightmares, John Wayne was already wearing the costume that had been built using men like Audi as the original measurements. The factory had already made the soldier. Audi Murphy arrived in Hollywood in 1945. He was 20 years old. He had no acting experience. He had no agent. He had a Medal of Honor, a Life magazine cover, and a friend named James Kagny who saw the cover and said, “That boy ought to

be in pictures.” Kagny brought him out west. Murphy slept on a cot in a gym for several months. He was shy. He was quiet. He had trouble looking people in the eye. Studios looked at him and did not know what to do with him. You have to understand something about Hollywood after the war.

It was a factory, a real one. Studios held actors under long-term contracts the way a steel mill holds workers. Every actor had a face that was supposed to do a specific job. The studio decided what kind of stories that face could tell. When Audie Murphy walked through the gates of Universal Pictures, the studio looked at him and saw a problem. Their problem was this.

They already had John Wayne. They already had Robert Mitchum. They already had Gregory Peek. They already had a complete supply of tall, deepvoiced, square jawed faces ready to play soldiers and cowboys. What they had in Audi Murphy was a small, thin, babyfaced kid who looked 16, who could barely speak above a whisper, who flinched at loud noises on set, who could not look directly into the camera without his eyes going somewhere far away.

He did not look like a hero, not the kind Hollywood was selling. He looked like a boy who should have been sent home. And that more than anything else was what Hollywood could not forgive him for. Because the real war hero had arrived in the wrong body. Universal eventually signed him. They put him in B westerns, cheap ones, the kind that played for 35 cents on a Saturday afternoon in small towns.

He played good guys with quick guns and not much else. The studio did not invest in him. They did not give him acting lessons. They did not pair him with great directors. They paid him a small fixed salary and put him on horse after horse. He made 44 films in his career. Most of them are forgotten.

He was a working actor, not a star. Not in the way John Wayne was a star. There is a story Murphy told late in his life that I want you to keep in your head. He said he once walked onto a Universal Sound stage during the filming of one of his westerns and he looked around at the crew and he realized that none of these people had ever asked him a single question about the war. Not one.

He had been working with some of them for years. They knew he had won the Medal of Honor. They had read about his combat record and the press releases the studio sent out. They had used it to sell tickets, but they never asked. He understood in that moment that to Hollywood, he was a name printed on a poster.

The actual man inside the name was invisible. You can sell a war hero. You cannot sell what war does to a hero. And Hollywood sells what it can sell. Now we come to the one moment in his career when somebody almost saw him. when a real director almost made the real movie about Audie Murphy. And what the studio did to that film tells you everything you need to know about why he hated John Wayne.

The film they cut to pieces. In 1951, Audie Murphy made the only movie of his life that was about a soldier instead of a cowboy. The director was John Houston. Houston was one of the great American directors. He had made the Maltese Falcon. He had made the treasure of the Sierra Madre. He had served in the army during the war and made documentaries about combat fatigue that the government had quietly buried because they were too honest.

Houston was a man who had seen real war and had no patience for movie war. He wanted to make a film of Steven Crane’s novel, The Red Badge of Courage. The book was about a young Union soldier in the American Civil War. The soldier runs from his first battle in fear. He hides.

He convinces himself the others would have run too. Then he goes back to the fight and survives and learns he is neither a coward nor a hero. He is a man who was afraid and acted and lived. The book is about the loneliness of being inside a battle. Houston cast Audi Murphy as the soldier. He did this on purpose.

Houston knew Murphy was a real combat veteran. He knew Murphy carried the wounds the country did not have a name for yet. He knew that if he asked Murphy to play a frightened, shaking boy in a Civil War uniform, Murphy would not have to act. He would have to remember. Murphy did not have to act. The footage Houston shot is, by every account from people who saw it, the best work Audi Murphy ever did in front of a camera.

Critics who saw early prints called it haunting, quiet, real in a way American war movies almost never were. There were scenes of Murphy hiding behind a tree, his breath shallow, his eyes empty, that other people on the set said they had to look away from. They felt like they were intruding on something private.

Houston turned in his cut to MGM, the studio that paid for the film. MGM hated it. The studio executives watched what Houston had made and did not see a movie that would sell tickets. They saw a slow, sad, quiet meditation on fear. They saw a young soldier with empty eyes hiding in the woods. They did not see a hero.

MGM took the film away from John Houston. They cut it down. They cut it again. They added a narrator to explain things. the audience was supposed to understand from the silence. They removed scenes they thought were too heavy. They removed scenes they thought were too long. They cut out some of Murphy’s best work entirely.

By the time they were done, the film was 69 minutes long, less than half of what Houston had originally shot. Some of the scenes that had made critics gasp at early screenings were never seen again. The original cut was lost and as far as anyone knows has never been recovered. When the studio version of the Red Badge of Courage was released, it failed at the box office.

This was the crulest part of all. Hollywood took the only honest film ever made with Audi Murphy in it. They cut it to pieces. They released the broken version. And when the broken version did not sell tickets, they used that as proof that audiences did not want the real story of war. What audiences had been given was not the real story.

What audiences had been given was what MGM allowed them to see. Murphy understood this. He understood it for the rest of his life. He told friends more than once that the only film he was proud of was The Red Badge of Courage. And he could not stand to watch the released version because it was not the film they had made on set.

It was a different film, a safer one, a version of him that the studio had been comfortable with. If you watch the 1951 cut of The Red Badge of Courage today, you’re not watching what Audie Murphy did. You are watching what Hollywood let you see of what he did. That is a hard sentence.

Sit with it because that sentence is also part of the answer to the bigger question. Why did Audi Murphy come to hate John Wayne? Now you have part of the answer. While the studio was burying the only honest film about a soldier in their archive, they were paying John Wayne a small fortune to play soldiers in films that were getting wide releases. Prime advertising.

And Saturday night audiences from Maine to California. The real soldier got cut. The actor playing soldier got promoted. And Audie Murphy was never a man who could pretend not to notice. when the money ran out. Let me slow down here because this part of the story is harder to tell.

Most of you know how it ends for Audie Murphy. The plane crash, Arlington. The years in between are the years almost nobody talks about. After the red badge of courage failed at the box office, Hollywood made a decision about Audi Murphy. They decided he was a belist actor. They put him back on horses.

They cast him in westerns that were beneath his talent and beneath his name. He kept working. He had a wife and children to feed. He needed the paycheck. In 1955, Universal made a film called To Hell and Back. It was the story of Audie Murphy’s combat record. He played himself. He stood in for himself in scenes he had actually lived.

He watched himself on a soundstage perform actions he had performed for real on the worst day of his life in front of cameras instead of bullets. The film made a fortune. It became the highest grossing film in Universal’s history at that point. It held that record for almost 20 years until a movie called Jaws finally beat it in 1975.

Murphy did not enjoy making it. He told friends he felt sick during much of the production. He found it difficult to play himself. He said it felt like watching his own funeral happen in slow motion frame by frame. The studio paid him a flat fee. He did not own a percentage of the film.

To Helen back made Universal Pictures rich. It made Audi Murphy a paycheck. This was the pattern. Hollywood would call him when his pain could be packaged and sold. They would look away when the pain stopped being profitable. By the late 1950s, Murphy was bleeding money. He was a bad gambler. He bet on horse races.

He bought raceh horses. He invested in cattle and oil deals that fell apart. He was sued by business partners. He fell behind on taxes. The IRS came after him. Some of this was his own fault. Some of it was the disease he could not name yet. He had what we would now call severe post-traumatic stress disorder complicated by chronic insomnia.

He took prescription sleeping pills to get a few hours of rest. He became dependent on them. When he tried to come off them, the nightmares came back so violently that he could not function. He locked himself in a hotel room for several days in the 1960s and quit the pills cold. He came out of that room shaking and pale, but he was off the pills.

He never spoke publicly about that week. He did, however, do something else, something nobody in Hollywood was doing. He started talking about combat fatigue. He gave interviews. He told reporters that the United States government was abandoning its combat veterans. He said the country was happy to put men on a parade float in 1945 and forget them by 1955.

He said the Veterans Administration was understaffed, underfunded, and failing the men who needed it most. He said veterans needed mental health care, not parades. He was the first major American celebrity to speak publicly about what we now call PTSD. And he did it not from a press release. He did it from inside his own life.

He told a reporter near the end of his life that he still slept with a loaded German pistol he had kept from the war. He told another that some nights he sat by his window with the pistol on his lap just listening to the dark. This was the man Hollywood was paying to ride a horse in a 35 cent western.

By 1968, the bills had finally caught up with him. He filed for bankruptcy. 1968, two men, one year. I want you to hold a single year in your head. 1968. Because in 1968, the two men in this story were on opposite ends of the country doing two completely different things.

And once you see what they were each doing, you will understand why this story is not actually about a feud. It is about something much bigger. In 1968, Autum Murphy was 43 years old. He was bankrupt. The IRS was after him. His Hollywood career was effectively over. He was making low-budget television appearances and small rolls for whatever paychecks he could find.

His doctor had told him his hands shook so badly he could no longer fire a gun accurately, which meant westerns were no longer an option. He was being slowly written out of the only profession that had ever paid him. He was still showing up to veterans hospitals to visit men nobody else came to see.

He paid out of his own pocket, out of money he did not have to fly to funerals of fellow soldiers he had served with. He was still talking publicly about combat fatigue. He was still telling anyone who would listen that the government was failing its veterans. That same year on the other side of the country, John Wayne was directing and starring in a film called The Green Beretss.

The Green Beretss was a movie about the Vietnam War. It was the first major Hollywood film about Vietnam. It was made while the war was still being fought. It supported the war. Wayne believed in the war. He believed in it deeply in a way that came from somewhere personal, although he never quite said where.

To make the Green Berets, John Wayne wrote a letter directly to the president of the United States, Lynden Johnson. He asked the federal government for help making the movie. He asked for use of military bases, military equipment, and military personnel. The Pentagon agreed. They gave Wayne access to Fort Benning in Georgia.

They lent him helicopters, weapons, vehicles, and uniforms. In exchange, the Pentagon was given the right to read the script and request changes. Several scenes were rewritten at the Pentagon’s request. The version of the film America eventually saw was at least in part a version the Department of Defense had approved.

That happened, that is documented. You can read about it in newspaper archives and in books about the period. The Green Berets was released in the summer of 1968 while the bodies of American soldiers were arriving home from Vietnam in steel boxes. the same summer. Real coffins on real airfields.

John Wayne on a movie screen at the same time in a film the Pentagon had helped shape telling Americans the war was good and the soldiers were heroes and everything was going to be all right. Now hold that against the other side of the country. In 1968, while John Wayne was selling a war on a Pentagon-f funed set, Audi Murphy was bankrupt and asking the country to take care of veterans nobody wanted to look at.

While the Green Berets was filming, Murphy was attending the funerals of fellow Medal of Honor recipients he had paid out of his own pocket to reach, while Wayne was directing helicopter shots at Fort Benning. Murphy was sitting up at night in a small room in California with a loaded pistol on his lap. One man was paying with the rest of his life for what war had actually done to him.

The other was still selling Americans the picture of what war was supposed to look like. And here’s what nobody usually says out loud about that year. Both of these men were doing what they truly believed. Wayne believed the war was right. Murphy believed his country had abandoned the man it had sent. They were not pretending.

They were both inside their own truth. The country chose the easier truth. The country bought tickets to the Green Beretss. The country gave John Wayne another decade of stardom. The country gave him an Oscar in 1969 for true grit. The country eventually carved his name on a gold medal.

The country did not show up for Audie Murphy. He died 3 years later on that mountain in Virginia on his way to a meeting about a small business deal that was supposed to keep him solvent. The plane was off course. The pilot had less experience than the flight should have required. He flew into the side of a ridge in heavy fog.

Everyone on board was killed instantly. Audi Murphy was 46 years old. The country he had served gave him a regulation headstone in section 46 at Arlington. His widow had to do fundraising to cover the household expenses for the next year. That was 1971. In 1980, Congress voted John Wayne a special gold medal.

Same country, two men. The math is the math. when the legend becomes fact. Now I want to come back to the question we started with. Audie Murphy hated John Wayne. People close to him said so. Other actors who knew them both said so. The hatred was not a rumor. It was real. It was something he carried. But here’s the thing about that hatred.

It was not the hatred most people assume. It was not the hatred of a man who is jealous. It was not the hatred of a man who wanted to be famous. Audi Murphy did not want what John Wayne had. He had said so more than once in interviews. He thought what John Wayne did was a kind of work he himself could not do.

He did not want to be a movie star. He had tried it. He had hated it. What he hated about Wayne was not Wayne himself. What he hated was what Wayne meant. He hated that the country he had bled for, the country he had killed 50 men for, the country that had given him a Medal of Honor and a magazine cover, and then forgotten to fund the hospitals where its veterans tried to sleep at night.

This country could love a makebelieve soldier more than it could love a real one. He hated that the easier version of the truth was the version that won. He hated that you could put a man on a horse, give him a script, and the country would salute that man longer and louder than it would salute the boy who actually did it.

He did not blame John Wayne for being good at his job. John Wayne was very good at his job. He was, by most accounts, a complicated man. He understood the costume. He was trapped inside it, the way every legend ends up trapped inside the legend. By the time he was 60, after he had lost a lung to cancer in 1964 and was still acting and still riding horses on screen and still selling toughness, he was in his own way a kind of prisoner.

But the costume sold, the man inside the costume sold, and the country bought. In 1962, John Ford and John Wayne made a film called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It is one of the most famous westerns ever made. The film ends with one of the most quoted lines in American cinema. A reporter, having just learned that the entire heroic legend of a famous senator is based on a lie, looks at his notepad and decides not to print the truth.

He says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That line was a movie line. It was also the only honest sentence Hollywood ever told the country about itself because Audie Murphy and John Wayne were not really enemies. They were the two halves of that sentence. Wayne was the legend. Murphy was the fact.

And the country chose the legend the way people always do, the way maybe people have to because the fact is too hard to keep looking at. Audi Murphy died on a mountain in Virginia. John Wayne died in a hospital surrounded by his children. One of them got a regulation headstone. The other got an airport, a bronze statue, and a gold medal that called him American.

That was not an accident. That was a choice the country made slowly, year after year, ticket after ticket, until the choice felt like the truth. Now I am going to ask you the question I have been asking myself for the last week and I would like you to think about it before you scroll away. Was John Wayne a fraud? Or was he the man America needed to put in a costume because the country could not look at the men who had actually worn the uniform? Was Audie Murphy a hated outsider? Or was he the kind of hero a country prefers to thank quietly in private in a small ceremony with a regulation headstone and then forget about? I do not have a clean answer to these questions. I do not think there is one. But I will tell you this. If you walk through Arlington Cemetery today and you

find section 46, you can stand in front of Audi Murphy’s grave for as long as you want. There is almost no signage. You will not be on a tour route. You will probably be alone. The headstone is the same as the ones on either side of it. You can put your hand on it, and the man under it will be exactly as he asked to be remembered as one of them.

Then if you drive a few hours west and visit John Wayne Airport in California, you will see the bronze statue, 9 ft tall, cowboy hat, boots, squared shoulders. Tourists take photos, children point. Both of those men are real. One of them is honored. The other one was true. The country is still deciding which one matters more.

It has not finished paying the bill. In the comments, I want you to tell me what you think. Was Wayne the fraud or the costume the country needed? Was Murphy hated or just the kind of hero we prefer to put in a quiet field?