by Scott Eyman
Working in Duke’s favor with the Saenz family was his total lack of pretense and his honesty. Working in Duke’s favor with Josephine were his looks. Despite the Saenz family’s discontent, Duke and Josie found ways to keep the relationship alive for the next several years, although Josie’s family forbade marriage until such time as Duke proved he could support his prospective wife and children in a suitable manner.
“Their friends told me they were great fun,” said Gretchen Wayne, the wife of Michael Wayne, and Josie’s daughter-in-law. “They loved games, loved jokes, loved to laugh. Her education didn’t encompass more than a year or two of college, but she was properly reared. And she was very smart, very good with math. She was a Roman Catholic, who seriously lived her religion. A great person.”
Duke never held a grudge about his misfortune at the USC football program; certainly, he became the most famous dropout USC ever had, and he followed the football program carefully. As Gretchen Wayne would observe, “You didn’t want to be around him if the Trojans lost.”
“I think the lesson you learn on the football field is basic,” he would say in later years. “If the player on the other side of the scrimmage line is as good or better than you, you don’t care what color, religion or nationality he is, you respect him. I’ve tried to live by that all my life.”
And so Duke Morrison went back to lugging props at the Fox studio in the summer of 1927, more or less planning on working there for a year, saving his money, and going back to USC in the fall of 1928.
In that summer of 1927, Wayne was working on another picture for John Ford. Four Sons, an epic in the style, if not the equivalent emotional impact, of Murnau’s Sunrise. Four Sons called for Morrison to wait for a door to open on the set, after which he would throw some maple leaves in front of a fan to blow past the doorway. After the take, Morrison would sweep up the leaves and wait for the next take.
After several takes, Duke’s concentration wandered and he lost track of the order of his duties. He started to sweep up the leaves, then looked up and saw two cameras staring right at him. The cameras were turning. “And looking at me are the cameraman, and John Ford, and the wife of the man who was head of the studio then. Shit, there I was! I just threw down my goddamn broom and started to walk off.”
Once again, Ford was amused by the young man’s earnestness, his boyishness. The studio musicians played some martial music and marched Morrison over to the heir of the Archduke Leopold, who was working on the picture, and who pinned a medal on him. Then they marched him back to Ford. Morrison bent over and received a kick in the ass from the director.
That would have been the end of it, but he eventually had to leave the set because Margaret Mann—the actress playing the mother of the four sons—kept breaking up every time she saw him. “I was never so goddamn embarrassed in my life,” said Wayne.
Ford decided that the boy’s handsome face and eager, gauche quality might make him screen material, and he gave him a nice bit in his picture Hangman’s House, a moody, beautiful film about the Irish Troubles that started production in January 1928. The scene is a steeplechase, and young Duke Morrison is unbilled but clearly visible as a spectator who eventually stomps down a picket fence—not the last time Ford would seize on the young man’s enthusiasm.
Morrison was in another scene that didn’t make it out of the cutting room. He was playing a poor Irish boy brought before a hanging judge, who pronounced sentence upon him. The judge was played by the splendid old ham Hobart Bosworth, and he intoned his lines: “You shall hang by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead.” Morrison thought it was a pretty corny line reading, even if it was a silent film. He blurted out “AAAAMEN!”
“There had been a lot of noise,” he remembered. “Suddenly there was silence.” Ford made a loud, emphatic pronouncement: “Get that son of a bitch out of the prisoner’s box! Get him off the stage! Get him off the goddamned lot! I don’t ever want to see him again.”
For neither the first nor the last time, Duke thought his movie career was over, but propman Lefty Hough came up and told him to just get out of sight, that Ford only wanted him out of the way in case he had angered Bosworth. Morrison’s banishment lasted no more than a couple of days.
Since he had joined the circus, Morrison decided to check out the other tents. Warner Bros. was making a picture called Noah’s Ark that, naturally enough, featured a spectacular flood sequence. The call went out for extras over six feet tall willing to work for $15 a day. The job entailed risking their lives while rivers of water and, just for good measure, a temple, washed over them.
Duke Morrison was one of the extras, as was a young man named Andy Devine, even though he was under six feet. “Another fella and I were standing together,” Wayne remembered in later years, “and Andy came up beside me and he says, ‘Hey, give me a hand, will you?’ And he put a hand on my shoulder and a hand on this other guy’s shoulder, and . . . he’s the first one they picked, you know.”
Devine was also standing on a couple of bricks that he’d brought in order to make himself look taller.
After two summers of working at Fox, Duke Morrison had saved $500—a fortune as far as the Morrison family was concerned. Besides propping, he was a general dogsbody around the Fox lot; one of his more demeaning jobs involved pasting labels for premium booze on bottles that actually contained cheap bootleg hooch for Fox executives who wanted to impress their girlfriends.
One night, Wayne and Josie were chaperoning Polly Ann Young, Loretta’s sister, who had a date with a Fox executive. On the way to the Ambassador Hotel, the executive said, “I just happen to have a bottle of really good Scotch . . .” Morrison recognized the fake label. The executive wondered why he looked so unhappy.
Wayne was becoming acclimated to the movie business—its perpetual excitement, its neuroses, its personalities: the roughnecks, the wranglers, the stuntmen, and the far more sophisticated Ford, who enjoyed playing the part of a roughneck. “He was a labored learned man,” Wayne would say of his mentor, who “absorbed everything—mood, wine, lines, everything.”
The sojourns at MGM and Warners were for extra pocket money; Fox was for living expenses, and Morrison was beginning to rethink his plan to head back to USC. “Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.
“But at the same time I was getting such enthusiasm out of working with Jack Ford and with the people that were in the movie business in those days—the prop men, the grips, the cameramen. The attitude was that it was our picture, everybody was working for the picture, there were no departmental heads and union bosses telling us what we could and couldn’t do. And luckily for me Jack Ford needed a prop man.”
Wayne’s obvious worship of Ford led him to initially think of becoming a director, or at least work in the production side of the business. “I just looked up to this man Ford—he was a big hero to me. He was intelligent and quick-thinking. Had great initiative. It was just wonderful to be around him. He kept you alive and on your toes. Of course, I started watching what he was doing, how he was working on people.”
Morrison had grown up in a poverty further afflicted by Mary Morrison’s shanty-Irish pretensions. In comparison, Duke liked the rough-and-tumble honesty of a comfortably blue-collar environment.
“There were a lot of tough guys around in those days, working in the picture business,” he would reminisce to a friend years later.
Some of them were really tough. Their idea of a Saturday night was to go over to Pickwick Stables and look for a fight. They wanted a fight and if they couldn’t find one they’d start one. That was a big thing for them, to knock somebody around.
Probably the toughest of all those guys was a guy by the name of Art Acord, who was also a leading man in cheap westerns. Acord was really tough. He bit a guy’s ear off in a fig
ht once—that’s the kind of tough he was. With that kind of tough you’re going to make some enemies along the line. He made a lot of them. And some of them tried to do him in. Hell, they shot him, they stabbed him, finally killed him. The only way they could kill him was to poison him. They finally did it, they poisoned him. He was the toughest son of a bitch I ever saw.
Acord died in Mexico under mysterious circumstances in 1931, and Duke’s version of his demise is widely believed to be accurate. He also casually mentioned knowing Wyatt Earp, as well as Stuart Lake, Earp’s first biographer. There’s no independent confirmation, but it’s certain that Tom Mix was a pallbearer at Earp’s 1930 funeral, and Earp was also an acquaintance of Ford’s. It’s possible that Ford could have introduced the young prop man to the fabled lawman.
The stuntman Yakima Canutt believed that Wayne’s behind-the-scenes exposure to such authentically hard men played a major part in his screen character. Wayne, says Canutt, “thrived on working with the cowboys. He never pretended he was a real cowboy, just a screen cowboy, but he picked up on what those men were like, and he’d find ways of bringing those things out in his pictures. That’s partly why Wayne was so realistic as a cowboy.”
In January and February of 1929, Ford was shooting The Black Watch, and Duke Morrison was propping, but he was already part of Ford’s social circle; Myrna Loy, who was playing a femme fatale in The Black Watch, was invited to a party at Ford’s house where Morrison was lurking around the edges of the room, “young and handsome . . . and as shy as I was.” Loy understood what was happening: “Jack was grooming him.”
In the late spring of 1929, Morrison was still propping for $35 a week when Ford asked for his help. He had been assigned a picture called Salute, which called for locations at the Naval Academy, and he wanted to use some of the USC football players in small parts. The studio’s liaison to USC wasn’t having any luck, so he asked Morrison if he wanted the job.
Morrison set up a lunch for Howard Jones and Ford, which went well. The salaries on offer were from $50 to $75 a week, but the clincher for Jones seems to have been Morrison’s claim that the boys would have plenty of time to visit Washington, D.C., for on-site civics lessons. With that, a group of athletes and ex-athletes were freed up for six weeks of location shooting. One of the players—“a big ugly bastard” according to Morrison—was Ward Bond. Bond already had established a reputation as a drinker, so Morrison thought it best to keep him off the set, but the casting director liked him. Bond was hired.
In Salute, Ford’s first, requisitely awkward talkie, Duke Morrison plays a naval cadet named Bill who razzes new recruits. Fox’s in-house paperwork bills him twelfth, six spots behind Ward Bond and right below Stepin Fetchit. Duke Morrison’s first line of spoken movie dialogue was only innocuous at the time: “He doesn’t mean the audience. What do the actors do, Mister?”
As relentless weather molds obstinate stone, so John Ford began molding Duke Morrison. “Duke . . . was just a stick of wood when he came away from USC,” said the director Allan Dwan. “Jack gave him character.”
A pattern was already forming: everything Ford gave Wayne to do, he did with alacrity. Ford again encountered Morrison’s game heart on the set of a submarine picture called Men Without Women, shot off Catalina Island. The scene called for some actors to disappear under the water, grab some air from a hose beneath the water, then come up gasping as if they were shipwrecked sailors.
But the day was gray and unpleasant, the water was cold, the waves were high, and the actors were far from enthusiastic about their appointed task. Years later, Ford told his version of the story: “Our two blankety-blank stunt men who were supposed to come up in bubbles, like they’d been shot out of an escape hatch, said it was too rough to work. The blanks.
“Well, Duke was standing up on the top deck of this boat we were on. He wasn’t supposed to go in the water at all, but I asked him if he’d try this stunt. He never said a word, except ‘Sure.’ Dove right into the water from that deck.
“I knew right then that boy had the stuff and was going places.”
“I could see,” said Ford, “that here was a boy who was working for something—not like most of the other guys, just hanging around to pick up a few fast bucks. Duke was really ambitious and willing to work.”
Duke would always remember the years when the movies first beckoned, then receded, with nostalgia. This was in contrast to just a few years later, when he’d be starring in B westerns, a regimen he always regarded as demeaning. “You could operate in every department of pictures,” he reminisced in 1968. “You didn’t need a union card. I was a carpenter. I was a juicer. I rigged lights. I helped build sets. Carried props. Hauled furniture. I got to know the nuts and bolts of making pictures.” He concluded this reverie with the most crucial criterion of all: “More importantly, I was made to feel like I belonged.”
The lonely boy was becoming less lonely. He even got a union card. In 1929, Duke Morrison became member number 34854 of Local 37 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators, affiliated with the AFL. He kept his membership card for the rest of his life.
And he was still nibbling around the edges of acting. His first screen credit—as “Duke Morrison”—actually came in a Fox campus musical called Words and Music that was barely released in September 1929 (it had a New York run of one day!). He also became friendly with George O’Brien, John Ford’s favorite leading man of the period. O’Brien got him another small part in a movie called Rough Romance, which came out in June 1930. But by that time, Duke Morrison was no longer Duke Morrison. He had a new name and a new career—the very one he had been hoping, dreaming, and planning for most of his young life.
CHAPTER THREE
The story of the christening of John Wayne varied only slightly in the telling. Raoul Walsh had approached Fox production head Winfield Sheehan regarding a western about the pioneers’ trek west. The film was to be based on a Saturday Evening Post serial by Hal G. Evarts entitled “The Shaggy Legion” that ran from November 30, 1929, to January 4, 1930, and was later published as a novel. The serial’s title referred to the last great herd of buffalo, but Walsh’s imagination converted it into a vast saga of western expansion, a sound version of The Covered Wagon or The Iron Horse—two of the greatest hits of the silent era. Fox signed Evarts to a screenwriting contract in February 1930 that paid $1,000 a week.
That was easy; the hard part was the casting. As Evarts would write, “the male lead must be a true replica of the pioneer type—somewhat diffident with women, being unused to them, but a bear-cat among the men of the plains. Walsh was afraid that the sophistication of an experienced actor would creep through and be apparent to the audience. As against that was the probability that a man chosen from the ranks of the inexperienced would be unable to carry the part in so big a picture.”
When people at the studio grumbled about Walsh’s plans to use an unknown, he told them, “I don’t want an actor. I want someone to get out there and act natural—be himself. . . . I’ll make an actor out of him if need be.”
As Walsh said at the time, “If there was one thing I did not want, it was an established star for the role of Breck Coleman . . . I wanted . . . a personality, not an actor.”
Walsh remembered that the critical moment came when he saw Duke Morrison lugging some furniture across the soundstage for John Ford’s Born Reckless, which was being shot early in 1930. “He was in his early 20s—laughing and the expression on his face was so warm and wholesome that I stopped and watched. I noticed the fine physique of the boy, his careless strength, the grace of his movement.”
Walsh walked over and asked the boy his name. The gangling youngster looked him over and said, “I know you. You directed What Price Glory. The name’s Morrison.” He explained that he wanted to be in pictures but “this is as far as I’ve come.”
“What else can you do besides handle props?” Walsh asked.
“I can pl
ay football.”
“I believe you. Let’s see how much you want to be an actor. Let your hair grow. Come and see me in two weeks.”
Duke believed that Walsh had first noticed him at a Fox company picnic a week or so earlier. Morrison was hungover, having a beer, wearing a Harris tweed suit, and eventually competed in a walking contest, which he narrowly won against a “little grip that’s just right on my ass.”
A few days later, Walsh saw Wayne crossing the lot with a table on his head and “it must have reminded him of the picnic. Actually, I was goin’ to a Ford set, and Walsh asked [producer] Edmund Grainger who I was, and Eddie yelled to me. I came over, we were introduced, and then Walsh came over to the set. I guess he talked to Ford then. That night, as I was leaving, Eddie came around: ‘Jesus, don’t cut your hair—Walsh wants to take a test of you for this picture.’ ”
The clock was ticking—the picture had to start shooting in the spring—and Walsh needed a leading man right away. “The part wasn’t too exacting,” remembered Walsh. “What I needed was a feeling of honesty, of sincerity, and Wayne had it.”
In the future, Duke would claim that he was thunderstruck by the invitation to act, that “it was the furthest thing from my mind.” But in 1946, he confided to the gossip columnist Louella Parsons that John Ford thought he had the makings of an actor rather than a technician, and “I was ashamed to admit I was hipped on the idea of acting. That’s why I started in with the props.”
There was a screen test of course—million-dollar movies weren’t hung on people who might not photograph. Before that, Morrison was sent to a drama coach, who he recalled as one of many “phonies” who washed up in Hollywood after the coming of sound to teach elocution. “All day long, this drama coach had me declaiming in deep, stentorian tones. Over and over again, I had to roar, ‘Tell that great white mountain hello for me.’ After a few weeks of that, I quit. A Shakespearian delivery wasn’t for me.”
