John Wayne: The Life and Legend

by Scott Eyman

  But before that, there was marriage.

  When Josie and Duke finally announced their engagement in December 1932, there were twelve lines about the upcoming nuptials in The New York Times. Wayne got second billing.

  They were married on June 24, 1933, at the Bel Air home of Loretta Young. The ceremony was performed by a priest from the Church of the Immaculate Conception, and Wayne signed the certificate as “Marion Mitchell Morrison.” A couple of new friends named Henry Fonda and Grant Withers also attended. The best man and the ushers were all drawn from Wayne’s Sigma Chi fraternity brothers.

  Josie was, of course, a serious Catholic, but Loretta Young never let her religion get in the way of a location affair. Years later, Wayne was at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He looked around and noted that he hadn’t been there in a long time, since soon after his marriage, when he and Josie had accompanied Young to a lunch/dance. They were the beards for Spencer Tracy, who was having a torrid fling with Young despite his status as a married man.

  As was his wont in this period, Tracy got drunk, which meant he got belligerent. Neither Wayne nor Josie was interested in going dancing with him. They got a room and Wayne dragged Tracy upstairs and slung him on the bed. Wayne was bending over, taking Tracy’s shoes off, when Tracy reared up and sucker punched Wayne in the mouth.

  “Split my lip and, needless to say, it hurt,” remembered Wayne. “Jesus Christ, my lip’s all puffed up, my nose is bleeding, the drunken bastard gives me a Sunday punch while I’m taking his shoes off.

  “What followed was a reflex action on my part, but I’m not sorry about it. I really busted him one. I put him to sleep for good. He probably woke up about two days later. I didn’t know and I didn’t give a damn. All I knew is that he was out. I closed the door and went to the dance.”

  Wayne and his new wife moved to a three-room apartment in Hancock Park that was close to her parents’ house, so they could be within her social circle. As Wayne and Josie set up housekeeping, he told her in no uncertain terms that “I don’t do light bulbs. I make enough money to call professionals.” He associated being handy around the house with the poverty that had enveloped him as a child, something he had neither the desire nor the intention to replicate. He was done with plumbing and yardwork, and always would be.

  Children soon followed: Michael in 1934, Antonia (Toni) in 1936, Patrick in 1939, and Melinda in 1940. Although he loved his wife, Wayne was not immune to the temptations endemic to the movie business. His friend Paul Fix would say that Wayne was never a “mainstream womanizer. . . . Duke would occasionally stray, but he always felt so guilty about cheating on Josephine, he usually broke it off as quick as he could. He just wasn’t immoral enough to, let’s say, ‘put it about,’ the way a lot of Hollywood leading men did.”

  Wayne came from an insecure blue-collar background, and he was clearly marrying up. At the same time, Josie was marrying down, which would prove to be a critical problem for the marriage. Yakima Canutt would come to believe that the marriage was problematic from the beginning because Josie “didn’t respect John’s profession.”

  Wayne was beginning to assemble the core group of cronies that would surround him for the rest of his life—Ford, Canutt, Paul Fix, a dozen others. Besides Ford’s yacht, their most frequent meeting place was the Hollywood Athletic Club, which also attracted such hard drinkers as Frank Borzage and Johnny Weissmuller.

  The producer Paul Malvern promoted a western series starring Wayne at Monogram. It was a long way down from Warners, and even a distance from Columbia. Monogram was usually a place where actors ended up, not started out, but work was work.

  This time, twelve pictures were planned (there were eventually sixteen), and they came to be known as the Lone Star westerns. The Lone Stars, while not as entertaining as the six Warner Bros. westerns, have had a far wider audience because of their public domain status and their narrative lunacy—they’ve probably been in continual circulation longer than anything outside of the twelve two-reel comedies Charlie Chaplin made at Mutual in 1916–1917.

  None of the Lone Stars is really good, except by the bizarre standards of 1930s B westerns. The sets consist of sparsely populated dusty towns for the locations and stage flats for the interiors. But there’s little or no stock footage, and making an hour of action footage in five or six stringently budgeted days means that you’re not shooting a movie so much as you’re shooting a schedule.

  The supporting casts are mostly has-beens and never-wases—Reed Howes, who backs up Wayne in The Dawn Rider, was a busted Arrow collar man from the 1920s. Most of the pictures were directed by Robert N. Bradbury, whose son Bob had been a pal of Duke’s in Glendale. Bradbury had an eye for good locations and liked flashy little camera accents such as whip pans.

  Bradbury also wrote a lot of the scripts, and he had a vivid, if shopworn imagination—the Lone Star westerns offer mad killers in florid disguises, secret passages, and a plethora of mistaken identities—anybody found kneeling by a dead body is automatically assumed to be the killer.

  Malvern’s great gift was in spotting talent that was willing to work cheap. His cameraman was a young man named Archie Stout, who had been working at Paramount shooting remakes of old Jack Holt silents for Henry Hathaway. (Stout would go on to shoot the first several years of the Hop-along Cassidy series, and was eventually hired by John Ford and William Wellman.)

  Malvern, who would go on to a career at Universal, where he produced horror pictures and some of the lucrative Maria Montez/Jon Hall Arabian nights movies, also had an eye for good character actors such as George “Gabby” Hayes. Yakima Canutt is in most of the pictures, usually as the dog heavy1 and to double Wayne.

  In many of the films, Canutt doubles Wayne chasing Canutt, i.e., Canutt chases himself. (Canutt’s bald spot gives away his presence when he’s doubling Wayne in fight scenes; so does his square body.) During one picture Malvern forgot to hire a second stuntman for an action sequence that involved Canutt, doubling Wayne, leaping from a running horse onto a railroad handcar. If Canutt doubled Wayne, there was nobody to double Canutt as the bad guy on the handcar.

  Wayne looked at Canutt, and Canutt looked at Wayne. They exchanged clothes, and Canutt doubled Wayne while Wayne doubled Canutt—Canutt made the transfer from the horse to the handcar with Wayne catching him, and they started fighting in a long shot. The long shot completed, they changed clothes and went back to playing themselves.

  It was typical of the can-do spirit that animated B picture production of the era. “It was good experience,” Wayne would say with the benefit of hindsight. “In westerns, you meet a hardy bunch of characters. There is no jealousy on such pictures. You can’t steal a scene in a quickie—there just isn’t enough time. Everybody is pulling for the picture. . . . [It was] get the scene on film and get on to the next scene. They were rotten pictures, most of them. But they taught me three things: How to work. How to take orders, and how to get on with the action.”

  As far as Wayne was concerned, Canutt’s only drawback was that he wasn’t a good actor, although the stuntman ended up influencing the young actor through reverse example. Canutt also seems to have served as a sort of unwitting mentor for Wayne’s screen character. Just before he died, Wayne recalled how Canutt would react when one of the wranglers or stuntmen got rambunctious off-screen.

  “I saw a couple of them chivvi and challenge him and watched his reactions. When in real trouble he had a half humorous glint in his eye and talked very straight and very direct to his opponent. You had a feeling that there was a steel spring waiting to be released; but when he played a heavy in my pictures he made grimaces and raised his voice and snarled. I tried to explain to him that his real attitude was better than his reel attitude for motion pictures. He didn’t react to it, but I did; and I copied his real attitude when I face odds before the magic box.”

  Canutt was a godsend in all sorts of ways—a fiend for work, a good man to have on a film set, and big enough to effectively double the s
tar. But the influence went only so far. Over the years there were various intimations that Wayne had also copied Canutt’s walk, which anyone who knew Canutt, let alone watched him in the movies, knew was ridiculous. As Wayne pointed out, “We don’t have anywhere near similar strides.”

  A young man named Paul Fix was around too, playing shiftless heavies or weaklings. Fix had been in the movies since the silent days, and over nearly a sixty-year career proved he could play just about anything. Wayne was only too conscious of his own shortcomings—he was a star before he was an actor—and asked Fix to work with him as an acting coach. Late in his life, Wayne said that “Paul Fix is the first actor who gave me any confidence.”

  Fix said that Wayne’s problem was a pervasive feeling of awkwardness. “His main trouble,” remembered Fix in 1969, “was with those big hands of his. He didn’t know what to do with them. And he had some bad mannerisms, like always wrinkling his brow.

  “My job, other than playing the role I was signed for, was to watch Wayne. We worked out a set of hand signals so I could tell him what he was doing wrong without the director knowing. . . . Duke was not what you would call a natural actor, but he learned. And when he learned, he mastered one of the hardest things of all—to act natural. And he does it so well that a lot of people still don’t know he’s acting.”

  Wayne had grown up on the films of Tom Mix and Buck Jones, so he knew the western genre and its conventions, and he wasn’t crazy about some of them. “I felt many of the Western stars of the twenties and thirties were too goddamn perfect. They never drank nor smoked. They never wanted to go to bed with a beautiful girl. They never had a fight. A heavy might throw a chair at them, and they just looked surprised and didn’t fight back in this spirit. They were too goddamn sweet and pure to be dirty fighters.

  “Well, I wanted to be a dirty fighter if that was the only way to fight back. If somebody throws a chair at you, hell, you pick up a chair and belt him right back. I was trying to play a man who gets dirty, who sweats sometimes, who enjoys really kissing a gal he likes, who gets angry, who fights clean whenever possible but will fight dirty if he has to. You could say I made the Western hero a roughneck.”

  Wayne was exaggerating, but not by much. William S. Hart in particular played a character who embodied the title of one of his early films: The Knight of the Trail. The next generation of cowboys presented by the major studios—Tom Mix and Buck Jones at Fox, Tim McCoy at MGM—provided less behavioral gloss to go with the increased production gloss. The films from the B studios were even scruffier.

  There isn’t room for much acting in the Lone Stars, so Wayne has to rely on his physicality. In The Lawless Frontier, Wayne flips off a surfboard he’s riding through a sluice run, hops up, grabs a railroad tie passing overhead, raises his legs, and crawls through. The action is slightly undercranked to make it seem faster than it really was, but Douglas Fairbanks couldn’t have executed the move any more gracefully. (Wayne also rode a sluice run in The Lucky Texan—B movies didn’t let a good visual gimmick lie fallow for long.)

  The Lone Stars were released every six weeks or so over a year and a half, from December 1933 (Sagebrush Trail) to July 1935 (Paradise Canyon). Their budgets were starvation level: $8,000 to $12,000, with the star getting $1,000 to $1,500 a picture—a major upgrade from the $2,000 he got from Mascot for three months’ work making three serials. The Lone Stars have energy and they showcase the unassuming clarity of their star; dramatically, they have a ratty charm deriving from eccentric narrative asides.

  The first reel of The Lucky Texan is exactly like a play—a dark and stormy night, with nervous honeymooners at a lonely hotel. In the same movie, Yakima Canutt tries to bulldog a burro and is momentarily overmatched. You can hear the crew laughing at the result. George “Gabby” Hayes plays an old actor who used to star in Charley’s Aunt, which means he has to dress up in drag. He turns out to be rather fetching, and even shows some leg.

  The Lone Stars that weren’t written by Robert Bradbury were written by Lindsley Parsons, Duke Morrison’s old surfing buddy. The intervening years had seen Parsons become, first, a newspaper reporter, then an unemployed newspaper reporter. He was driving down Sunset Boulevard when he saw a sign announcing “Trem Carr Productions.” Parsons knew Carr as a friend of his mother-in-law and decided it couldn’t hurt to make a pitch.

  He introduced himself to Carr and asked if he needed a publicity man. Carr said that he had just started Monogram Pictures, and they could indeed use a publicity man, especially one who could draw the ads. “Are you an artist?” he asked Parsons.

  Parsons said he was. He promptly went home to get some sketches done by his uncle, who actually was an artist. Parsons got the job, figuring Monogram would do until something better opened up. Nothing better opened up, so he spent his life in the movie business.

  One day Parsons went into Paul Malvern’s office where a screenwriter was complaining he had completely run out of ideas. Parsons rushed back to his office and batted out a four-page synopsis. “Later on sometimes I’d have to dictate these Waynes,” Parsons told Leonard Maltin, “so [my wife would] say, ‘Well, you sound just like John Wayne.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s [who] I’m writing for. . . . One of the reasons we got along so well was ’cause I could write dialogue he could talk.”

  Parsons found that screenwriting paid better than publicity—Malvern paid him between $100 and $200 per script. It was the Depression, Parsons had a wife and child, so an extra hundred dollars for a week’s work was a godsend.

  Parsons concurred with Paul Fix’s judgment about Wayne’s lack of self-confidence. “We’d be out on location, he’d do a dialogue sequence and he’d just cuss himself out terribly. He’d go off behind a rock and talk about how lousy he was.”

  Many of these early B westerns were shot at Kernville, a little western town that eventually ended up at the bottom of a man-made lake. Failing that, they were made at Newhall, and the cast and crew would arrive before sunrise to build a bonfire to warm up the cameras so that the crew could start shooting the minute the sun came up over the hill—you couldn’t run cold cameras.

  Lindsley Parsons remembered Robert Bradbury as “good enough to get by,” but if you were still middle-aged on Poverty Row, you were going to grow old there as well. The money was from hunger, but Parsons and everybody else tried to make the pictures as good as they could be, given the exigencies.

  “Certainly I tried to get something different in the scripts,” said Parsons.

  I would walk around the lot and try to find something distinctive. In one case, they had an old 1914 Ford touring car and I said, “I got to write this into a John Wayne picture.” I went in to see Paulie [Malvern] and I told him the opening I had in mind—John Wayne’s riding along on a desert trail someplace and then this old prospector stumbles and just looks like he’s at the bitter end and he says “Look, my Sally is over the hill and I’ve gotta have some water.”

  So John Wayne says sure, takes his canteen to go over the hill and Sally is the Ford. . . .

  You had to think of something different. Sometimes it was a novel beginning. John Wayne stopping by a creek and taking a drink of water out of the creek and somebody sticks a gun in his back. Where do you go from there? Another one, where he drives up in front of a small town saloon, there’s practically nobody on the street, he hears the sound of a mechanical piano in there, and he goes in—everybody’s dead. . . . You cut to the wall and there are two eyes watching him. Good opening. All you needed was a good opening to get those things started off.

  Wayne was bruised by failure and insecurity, but Parsons remembered him as soldiering on despite feeling “pretty low.” At that point, Wayne’s primary goal was to keep working—he too was a married man, and his son, Michael, was the first of what would become a large brood. “I was tall, curly haired, shy and a clod-kicker,” Wayne remembered from the vantage point of 1952. “I could say, ‘Reach for the sky, mister!’ pretty well, but beyond that I was the lea
ding character in the nightmares of [acting teacher and character actress] Madame Ouspenskaya.”

  “He wasn’t trying to perfect his acting,” said Lindsley Parsons. “He had no confidence in his acting, but he was coming across as a personality. . . . He had a steady home at Monogram and Lone Star and we became very well acquainted. I attended the christening of his first son, and we both got very drunk together. . . . We got loaded quite a few times; if you could get hold of whiskey you drank it. In fact, we had our own bootlegger and I still remember his phone number: Gladstone 8000.”

  Parsons remembered that Wayne would be very formal at times, even with his peer group. He always called Parsons “Mr. Parsons” when there were other people around, and “Lin” when they were alone. They only quarreled “when we were drinking, which was quite often. I used to delight in teasing him and arguing with him. He had adopted this very strict, Republican, conservative attitude even in those days and I would fight with him. I know that he wanted to hit me but he couldn’t because I was so small. I can remember one time we were coming back on the bus with a bunch of the [Monogram] exchange men and he got so mad at me he picked me up and put me up on the luggage rack on the bus.”

  Wayne wasn’t the worst actor among the B movie cowboys, but he wasn’t the best either. He was taller than Bob Steele—everybody was—but at this stage in their careers, Steele was a better actor. Wayne was sexier than Hoot Gibson, but Gibson was a better rider. What Wayne had was charm, great good looks, a wonderful smile, and the beginnings of technical and physical assurance to go with the assertiveness that was written into the characters, if not always the performances.

  Throughout these pictures, Wayne is always at least adequate, and sometimes more than that. The very real physicality is there—in West of the Divide, he does a backward somersault—and so is a strength of personality fascinating to watch in embryo form. He’s occasionally gauche but always sincere and winning; he’s not a natural actor by any means, but he is a natural star, and you can watch him working at both polishing and transcending his innate gifts. He’s incrementally assembling the pieces, working on presentation, working on movement, working on dialogue, and always being a good co-worker.