American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  By 1916, the year the Morrisons arrived, Glendale’s downtown already looked like a real city; it had commercial brick buildings, concrete sidewalks, and the houses all had inside plumbing, hot and cold running water, electricity, and a few even had the newest sensation, telephones. Over the next two years, Doc worked hard to make it in this thriving community. He got a job with the new Glendale pharmacy and became an active member of the Unity Chapter of the Royal Arch Masons. He rented a modest house at 421 South Isabel, and most nights after coming home from work he would take Marion out back to play football with him. He taught the boy how to run, cut, dodge, divert, tackle, throw, and catch. When Doc had enough money saved, he bought a car and every Sunday drove the family one hour to the beach at Santa Monica. Marion and Doc would race each other to see who could reach the water first. They would swim, splash, and play water football, coming out of the water soaking wet and laughing as they stretched out on their towels and let the sun dry and tan their skins. Mary was less thrilled with the beach. She felt uncomfortably overrevealed even with the typical Victorian bathing suits of the time, which covered women nearly head to toe. She put up with it because she believed that Clyde deserved his time of fun, as he had kept a good job, paid the bills, and provided a decent roof over their heads.

  Although Glendale was a vast improvement over Palmdale, it was still a hard place for Marion to grow up. “From the time I was in the seventh grade,” he later remembered, “I had a paper route. I was eleven years old and delivered the Los Angeles Examiner. Had to get up at four A.M. because it was a morning paper. And after school and football practice, I delivered drug orders on my bicycle. Later on I worked as a truck driver, soda jerk, fruit picker, and ice hauler.”

  In 1918, Marion was going to the Sixth Street Elementary School in Glendale. He called his pet Airedale that he had picked out of a kennel “Duke.” Duke followed him to school every day and slept outside the nearby firehouse number 1 while Marion went to class. Some of the firemen took to calling Marion “Big Duke,” and then just “Duke.” He loved the attention and companionship of the firefighters. He was their mascot, and they were his first image of what big, strong, healthy men looked and acted like, as opposed to his father, who lived under the domination of his never-satisfied mother. For the rest of his life, he would be attracted to tough, strapping male figures and look to them for guidance, support, and camaraderie. He soon started telling everyone his name was really Duke. Even his parents started calling him Duke.2

  Marion now had a new name, and a new body. At the age of eleven, he had already begun his growth spurt toward the six-foot-five height he would eventually reach. As his body filled out and he became stronger, he was still afraid of the bigger and tougher schoolhouse bullies, who, because he was the biggest kid in school, always wanted to challenge him and take him down to prove they were the toughest. One of them wanted to make Duke his personal punching bag and regularly beat him up after classes in the schoolyard. Following a pummeling, on the way to the firehouse to pick up Little Duke, a volunteer fireman saw him, took him inside, cleaned him up, and asked him what happened. He told him, and the fireman, who happened to be an amateur boxer, started giving Duke some lessons. The fireman knew more about fighting than Doc did, and he taught Duke how to defend himself so that the next time the other boy picked on him he would be able to take care of it. Soon enough, the bully started talking trash, in preparation of giving Duke another beating. Duke said nothing; then, before anyone knew it, he threw one carefully placed punch and flattened the boy. After that there would be no name-calling, no more finger poking, no more tough talking from big-boy bullies. After that, whenever anyone asked Marion how he had learned to fight, he always had the same answer: “Just call me Duke.”

  MEANWHILE, AS CLYDE CONTINUED TO struggle, he began drinking to ease his frustrations and to prefer the lively pool halls and straw-floor card-player bars to his proper living room at home. He usually lost at the card tables and, as was his nature, was always ready to help out a friend who needed a few extra bucks. He was still the same old Doc, the easy-touch, amiable fellow going nowhere fast. He soon ran out of money and lost the small house he had rented, and only the kindness of the owners of the Glendale Pharmacy saved the family from being thrown out into the street, by letting them move into a too-small apartment above the establishment, meant for one, not four and a dog.

  It wasn’t until 1920, when Mary literally pulled him up by his ears and threatened to leave him and this time for good, that Doc straightened out enough to get some work picking apricots and oranges in the orchards, and another job in a pharmacy, and eventually earned enough to put together a down payment on a new house. Soon enough, though, aces came up eights and he lost his new job and defaulted on his mortgage less than a year later. Doc was forced to find yet another place to rent. At one point there was so little money coming in they had to rely on Marion’s meager seven-days-a-week Los Angeles Examiner paperboy income to make ends meet. On Sundays, when the papers were too heavy, Clyde got up with him at dawn and helped the boy make his rounds. Mary felt terrible about having to depend upon Marion’s money for groceries and angry at Clyde for making her feel that way.

  That summer, Marion was able to give up the paper route when he found work in the thick and aromatic orange and lemon groves, bean patches, and hay fields that surrounded the San Fernando Valley. The base of the Sierra Madre foothills was lush with fields of fruit, and Duke didn’t mind working all through the long hot summer days. It felt good to be outside doing physical work in the warm California sun, with sweat running in rivulets down his bare muscled chest.

  Not everything was great for Marion. Mary insisted that when he had free time, he should take Robert along wherever he went. He was five years older and distinctly different from his younger brother. Duke was tough, Robert was tender. Marion loved the outdoors, Robert wanted to stay home with Mary and help her in the kitchen. The only place Marion could be completely alone, even from Robert, was when he snuck away by himself and went to the movies. As he later remembered, “Most of the Glendale small-fry were movie-struck because [we had a movie theater and], the Triangle Studios were located there.” Robert didn’t care for them, so it wasn’t a problem for Duke to spend some weekdays alone, where for a nickel he could see the silent serials. He enjoyed The Perils of Pauline, the “cliffhanger” that virtually invented the genre of the never-ending damsel in distress. But westerns were his favorite, like Paul Hurst and J. P. McGowan’s 1916 A Lass of the Lumberlands, or Edward Laemmle’s 1921 Winners of the West, two of hundreds that were made.3 Film historian William K. Everson once noted, “There is a period in every child’s life when a cowboy on a galloping horse is the most exciting vision imaginable.”

  Marion loved movies so much, he often cut classes at school and went to them during the week (there were no truancy laws in Glendale in those years). Sometimes, he recalled, “I went, on average, four or five times a week.”

  IN LITTLE MORE THAN A decade, motion pictures had developed from the novelty of the individual viewer nickelodeon, approximately the size and shape of today’s stand-alone ATM machines, to a booming industry with elaborate theaters that offered plush seats, live orchestra accompaniment, and big silver screens that played to packed houses of all ages and genders in every town with enough residents to support one. Smaller burgs eager to see movies rented out halls and hung sheets to see the latest releases. Going to the movies had become the latest craze, not just in America but around the world. At one point in the second decade of the twentieth century, Charlie Chaplin’s creation, “the Little Tramp,” was the single most recognizable image on Earth.

  Glendale had gotten its first real movie theater in 1910, the Glendale, and four years later, the grander Jensen’s Palace, and both were filled to capacity from the first day they opened. Duke’s favorite screen cowboys were the romantic, if stoic, save-the-damsel-in-distress William S. Hart; the flamboyant, athletic Tom Mix; rodeo-star-turned-ac
tor Hoot Gibson; and most of all the reticent, unaffected dusty-clothed, manly but homely Harry Carey, whose lined face and worn-out hat translated on-screen into high moral heroism. Throughout his decades-long career, Carey, who always wore his gun without a holster, tucked into his pants belt, never once played a villain. Years later, when John Wayne was himself a big cowboy star, he said, “I copied Harry Carey. That’s where I learned to talk like I do; that’s where I learned many of my mannerisms.” One of Carey’s signature poses was to stand with his right hip slightly out, and his left arm crossed over and holding on to the upper part of his right. Wayne would one day pay homage to Carey by repeating the gesture in John Ford’s The Searchers.

  FILMS, BY DEFINITION, ARE ARTIFACTS of nostalgia; they chronicle the past. From Jesus to Jesse James, from Pearl Harbor to the Twin Towers, cinematic reenactment always follows hard-edged reality. In Hollywood’s early years, as the novelty of the nickelodeon exploded into a big-screen million-dollar industry, nothing was more popular than the filmed reenactments of the “wild” West, the expansionist period following the Civil War glorified in the movies by gun-slinging “heroes,” made more heroic by the convenient presence of “villains,” who also almost always ran the saloon and the prostitutes upstairs (sanitized in films as “singers” or “dancers”) and of course the interchangeable one-lump tribe of “Indians,” almost always played by white actors.

  The Sierra Madre foothills that encircled Glendale and the nearly always sunny climate made it easy for directors to shoot outdoors there and make today’s West look like yesterday on-screen. Many Hollywood studios had separate Glendale operations specifically for shooting cowboy movies. Their indoor facilities had pullback roofs so they could utilize natural light to shoot indoors. By 1919, seven hundred feature films a year were being made in or near Glendale.

  That was where the twelve-year-old Duke, imagining himself a real-life amalgam of Hart, Mix, and Carey, joined the baddest gang at Glendale High School, whose “posse” only a year or so earlier had regularly beaten him up; now, membership was an emblem of his heroic stature. The only thing he didn’t like was the burden of still having to take his little brother, Robert, along whenever invited to a party by the other gang members. If he didn’t especially like his little brother, he was still fiercely protective of him. If somebody made a disparaging remark or wanted him thrown out of the party, Duke always came to his defense. At one such soiree, “After the cake and ice cream and punch was served . . . some wise guy said ‘Get that little jerk out of here [meaning Robert].’ I took a poke at this character and the party almost broke up in a free-for-all.”

  Just like in the movies.

  IN JUNE 1921, FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD DUKE graduated from Wilson Intermediate School, where he had lost his desire to be a loner and became a popular, good-looking student with real academic promise. In Glendale Union High School, he blossomed even further. He was president of the Shakespeare Club, cocaptain of the football team, a member of the French Club and the Drama Club, a winning member of the chess team, an effective leader of the debating team, and a first-class bridge player; and he maintained consistently high grades that earned him honor pins. He was also an active participant in putting together Stylus, his senior class’s yearbook. Because of all his good work, Marion was chosen class valedictorian.

  He was also Glendale Union’s best football player. In his junior year, as a running guard Wayne led Glendale Union to the state championship against Long Beach. Glendale lost the big game 15 to 8, but it didn’t matter that much to Duke, because his superior playing had gained the attention of regional scouts, including one from the University of Southern California.

  In 1925, his senior year, Glendale won the state championship. They not only went undefeated but were unscored on for the entire season, a record that would live in local lore as the greatness of the “Glendale Eleven.” Duke graduated with an overall grade average of 94 (out of 100), and from two hundred seniors he was chosen class salutatorian. USC offered him a football scholarship. Duke was thrilled, so was Doc, and so, even, was Mary, but for a different reason. USC was in the process of building a new law school.

  That fall, full of hopes and dreams of one day playing professional football, Duke became a USC Trojan, a full-fledged member of the legendary Thundering Herd.

  Chapter 2

  Soon after starting classes and attending practice at the University of Southern California, the reality of a limited football scholarship soon set in. As Wayne later remembered, “In September 1925, I entered USC. The scholarship just covered tuition. I washed dishes in the fraternity house for my meals [and waited on tables at mealtime]. That left me a little short of money for such things as shoes, suits, laundry, and buying pretty girls ice cream sodas at the corner drugstore. I got work from the phone company. They called me a map plotter and I charted where the old telephone lines ran. I never did find out the purpose of this job.

  “Meanwhile, Dad’s newest drugstore failed. He opened an ice cream company and this failed. He opened another drugstore and after that a paint manufacturing company. This didn’t do well either. When he could afford it, he would send me five dollars a week.”

  Duke gave his dad free tickets to games. They cost $25 apiece, and for at least the first year, he had to pay for them out of his own pocket. And then things got worse, financially: “At the end of my freshman year I got bad news from the phone company. Seems they had run out of maps to plot. I desperately needed money.”

  He found handyman work at Warner Bros in Hollywood, and at MGM in Culver City, a bus ride a few miles to the west of the USC campus. He made a few extra dollars doing whatever they assigned him, as an assistant property man, an electrician’s helper, a gofer, an animal herder, and even as an extra or as it was called at the time, “wallpaper.” Sometimes on-screen, mostly off, whatever they needed him to do he did it.

  Wayne’s first recorded appearance in a motion picture was as a stand-in for Francis X. Bushman, the popular silent screen star, in MGM’s 1926 release Brown of Harvard. Directed by Jack Conway, it was a love triangle set among football players at the Ivy institution.4 College football films were an extremely popular genre during the 1920s. The studio sent a film crew over to nearby USC to shoot some scenes of the team’s football practice and Wayne appears in some of that footage. That same year, the nineteen-year-old was a spear carrier in the gallows scene of King Vidor’s period piece Bardelys the Magnificent, set in the court of Louis XIII (an as yet unknown Lou Costello also had a bit part in the film, years before he teamed up with Bud Abbott).5

  As it happened, cowboy movie star Tom Mix was a huge USC football fan. Early in 1926, at Mix’s request, Howard Jones, the team’s coach, got him a season box on the fifty-yard line. In return, Mix told Jones that if there was anything he could ever do for him, he should just let him know.

  Now there was. Jones told Mix some of his players were hurting for money, and he wanted to send a few boys from the squad to the William Fox (Fox Hills) Studios on Western Avenue, where Mix was filming, to see if there was anything he could do to get the boys some extra work. Mix said sure, send them over.

  The next morning, Duke and another member of the team, Don Williams, carried a letter of introduction to the “Tom Mix Lot,” a Fox set built to look like the main street of a frontier town to be used only by Mix and his production team.6 Duke first saw his childhood idol standing in the middle of the fake street, a bit shorter than he had imagined, resplendent in his ivory-white ten-gallon hat and shiny clean cowboy clothes, looking like a movie poster of himself. Timidly, the two walked over and Duke handed Mix the letter. He read it, looked up, and grinned. “Man,” he said, smiling, “a star owes it to his public to keep in fine physical condition. I want you two to be my trainers. Report to me personally when school is over.” It wasn’t exactly what Jones had had in mind, but the thought of working out with Tom Mix seemed like a great deal to Duke and Williams, certainly better than the grunt work of being hu
man wallpaper or moving around heavy scenery.

  “What had excited me was the prospect of becoming a sparring partner for Mix, who just happened to be my hero,” Duke later recalled, but he and Williams were disappointed when they learned that Mix only wanted them to watch him box with his regular partner.

  The morning after his last class, Duke, by himself this time, reported for work to the Fox studio, hoping to pick up some work, but he couldn’t get past the front gate. Just then, Mix happened to arrive in a big black chauffeur-driven “locomobile,” as Wayne later remembered “about two blocks long.” He called out Mix’s name, smiled, and waved. Mix nodded as if he didn’t know who Duke was and signaled his driver to continue on. The nod was enough, however, for the front gateman to let him pass through.

  He had no trouble finding day labor work at Fox, and occasional assignments in the extra pool. His first on-camera job at Fox that summer was as an unbilled extra in Lewis Seiler’s silent western, The Great K and A Train Robbery.7 The film starred Mix, who did all his filming on location in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Duke made ten dollars that day, money he sorely needed.

  After The Great K and A Train Robbery, Duke became a regular part of a “swing gang” set-dresser crew, carrying furniture and props and physically arranging them for the set designer, at a starting salary of $35 a week. Sometimes the work was easy, more often than not difficult and demeaning, especially wrangling untrained animals.