John Wayne: The Life and Legend (6 page)

The young man liked his semicolons, and apparently never turned down an extracurricular activity—he was also in charge of advertising for the school paper.

In all of Duke’s reminiscences of his time in high school, he never pointed out his early interest in performing, because that would have run counter to his preferred narrative of falling into show business by accident. But he appeared in the school play—Marc Connelly’s
Dulcy
—in the role of Mr. Forbes; he appeared in the senior play as well—
The First Lady of the Land,
a historical drama about James and Dolley Madison and Aaron Burr.

When he wasn’t in front of the footlights, he was behind the scenes, working on the stage crew. Wayne loved his drama teacher, so when she suggested that he give Cardinal Wolsey’s farewell speech with two days’ notice, he decided to go for it.

“I studied like a son of a bitch,” he told me. He traveled to the Pasadena Playhouse, where the competition was taking place, to find a group of young actors who, as he put it, “were all so fucking Shakespearean. I felt like a goddamned fool up there.” He froze up.

There was a similar contest for best essay, and young Duke won the contest for a piece he wrote on World War I. The award was the opportunity to recite the essay at the graduation ceremonies.

There was a line in his essay that went, “The worst things the Germans had done . . .” but as Duke rehearsed, he kept forgetting the word “had.” His teacher was helping him rehearse, and she insisted over and over again that if he left out the word “had” he’d sound like an oaf, so he focused hard on that single word.

Came the day when the essay was to be recited, Duke looked right at his teacher and said, “The worst thing the Germans HAD done . . .” and promptly went completely blank. After a few seconds of struggle, he simply bowed and walked off the stage.

By this time Duke Morrison was a serious overachiever, more than comfortable academically, with a demonstrable bent for the public arena. There were also unconfirmed rumors that the parents of the attractive girls at Glendale High didn’t want their daughters to date him because they thought he ran with a fast crowd. Members of that crowd stoutly denied the charge.

“He was just a good, clean-cut guy,” remembered his best friend, Ralf Eckles. “We were raised that way.” But rambunctious exuberance was beginning to be a prominent feature of Morrison’s personality. One day the pranks got a little out of hand. Eckles and Morrison spread asafetida, a gum resin used as an antispasmodic, around the halls and classrooms of Glendale High. It was a fairly vile chemical and everybody within smelling distance got nauseated.

A chemistry professor found the bottle and took it to Clyde Morrison, who asked his son to spell asafetida. Duke spelled it out exactly as it was on the label of the bottle, which misspelled the word. Clyde turned his son in, and both Eckles and Duke had to apologize in front of the entire school.

The yearbook had a fanciful preview of what the various students would be doing in the year 1940. The crystal ball for Duke Morrison involved him being president of the Glendale Ice Cream Company and authoring a book entitled
The Most Famous Men Have Humble Beginnings.

His peers regarded him as a leader. “He was mature and conservative,” said Bob Hatch, who was vice president to Morrison’s president for the graduating class of 1925. “He had confidence and maturity that most of us didn’t have . . . he was a good leader.” Even his teachers liked him; Park Turrell, who taught chemistry, remembered Morrison as a “fine student who got an A in [the] course.”

As nearly as Ralf Eckles could recall, the boys met in fifth grade. Eckles remembered his friend as always in control of himself, “never in trouble and not looking for it.” The closest the two boys came to juvenile delinquency was trying to sneak into the Palace Grand movie theater. On the other hand, Saturday nights could get a little dull in Glendale.

“Our Saturday night pastime,” remembered Eckles, “was to get a case of rotten eggs or old tomatoes, and take my father’s car, which had a rumble seat. The old streetcars used to have an open section at the rear that people would stand on during the summer. We had lots of fun peppering them with eggs and tomatoes.”

The boys’ other casual pastimes involved greasing the tracks of the Eagle Rock–Glendale streetcar and watching it slide backward downhill. One time a classmate took his father’s Reo automobile, which came with balloon tires. Morrison and Eckles deflated the tires and crossed a train trestle with the car. “There were five or six of us in that car and the trestle was a little narrow, but we made it.”

The same group rented a cabin in Big Bear and got stuck in a snowstorm. “Duke and I were outside the car, trying to find the road. Some rangers came by and started yelling at us. They told us we were on the lake. We could have gone right through the ice!”

Another close friend was a diminutive young man named Bob Bradbury, whose father was a film director who would make a dozen or so films with young Morrison. Bob Bradbury would change his name to Bob Steele and become a western star, not to mention nearly a lifelong presence around his high school buddy.

By the time Duke graduated from high school in 1925, he was president of the senior class, president of the Latin Society, president of the Lettermen’s Club, on the staff of the school newspaper, chairman of the Senior Dance, chairman of the Ring Committee, and a member of the debate team. He remembered that he graduated with a 94 average.

This man who would excel at playing outsiders was as a boy a consummate insider, popular with his classmates, obviously destined for great things. In the years to come, he would be amused by the gap between his image—which, it must be pointed out, he strenuously cultivated—and the man he started out to be. “This so-called last of the cowboys,” he would say with an amused smile. “I could say ‘isn’t’ as well as ‘ain’t.’ ”

Duke gave some thought to a career in the Navy, or said he did. He would tell his oldest son, Michael, that he took the test for admittance to Annapolis and came in third in the state. Unfortunately, each state got to place two people per year, and Morrison was odd man out. “A pimply-faced kid like you beat me out,” he told his son, then considered tactics not taken. “If they’d have known I could have played football, I’d have been in Annapolis. . . . You’ve gotta remember that Glendale was a small town, and we weren’t on to sophisticated things like buying athletes. I never even spoke to my high school coach about what I wanted to do.”

If Annapolis was out, Los Angeles was in. Between his academics and his football expertise, the boy was more than good enough for the University of Southern California. “One thing [USC] insisted [on] was that he have good grades,” remembered Vic Francy, who was attending USC while working as an assistant coach at Glendale High. “I checked his record and he had 19 A’s.” Beginning in September 1925, Duke Morrison began attending the University of Southern California on a football scholarship.

1. Carey was born in the Bronx in 1878, the son of a judge. He initially studied to be a lawyer, then gave it up to write and act. Carey wrote a successful play called
Montana,
and used his own horse onstage every night, while the critics noted his walk—a “swagger” said one.

A USC athletic scholarship was not generous; it covered tuition, which was $280 a year, and one meal a day on weekdays—if you were on the varsity. “The training table was a five-day-a-week thing,” said Eugene Clarke, who lettered in football for Coach Howard Jones in 1930 and ’31. “We sort of had to scratch around for our other meals and for all of our meals on weekends. We were always pretty hungry by Monday mornings.”

When Duke Morrison reported for his first workout, Howard Jones liked what he saw. Morrison was taller than anybody else on the squad and was soon moved from guard, where he’d played in high school, to tackle.

The USC freshman team did spectacularly well, and so did Morrison; the team won all seven of their games, scoring 261 points to their opponents’ 20. Only three opponents managed to score at all, and the team’s first victim was the Glendale High team, who got creamed 47–0. Morrison must have had some conflicted loyalties, but not enough to stop him from earning a freshman letter and being singled out in the USC yearbook along with the rest of the line for his “work on the forward wall.”

Morrison was taking the standard pre-law curriculum, and soon became a leader of the freshman debate team. He joined Sigma Chi fraternity and was again well liked by everybody, although he lacked the aggression that is a necessary part of frat life. One time he got out of a hazing by putting some ketchup in his mouth and letting it dribble down his chin. The other boys thought he was bleeding and let him go, but then Morrison started laughing, and gave his own game away.

Except for the constant worry about money, everything seemed to be coming together. In later years, Duke would talk about the embarrassment of being in the fraternity and having to cover the holes in his shoes with cardboard. He remembered bartering washing dishes and busing tables at the fraternity house in exchange for his meals, and working with the phone company as a map plotter, figuring out where old telephone lines ran, for 60 cents an hour.

Otherwise, he was in good standing. He was developing a gregarious personality, and since he was happy to see most people, most people were happy to see him. He wore the traditional freshman beanie, got paddled when he forgot to address upperclassmen as “sir,” walked around with his pants legs rolled up as part of his initiation. For a boy who had always felt like an outsider, to be accepted, to be liked, was crucial.

The first eighteen years of Duke Morrison’s life gave birth to a political philosophy centered on self-sufficiency. Surreptitiously, he was also engaged in a comprehensive search for parental substitutes, which was ironic because the second half of his life would largely revolve around portrayals of parental substitutes—an actor seeking self-definition in his work, then imposing that definition on his life.

The first of the men that Morrison idolized was Howard Jones, the football coach at USC, who recruited him for the team known as the Thundering Herd. Jones was born in Ohio in 1885 and won seven Pacific Coast Conference championships, five Division One national championships, and five Rose Bowls before his early death in 1941. He was an aloof autocrat who couldn’t delegate, lived and breathed his job and was completely intimidating. “If you’d just made a good play and were coming off the field, [Jones] wasn’t the type to pat you on the back,” said a player named Ray George. “He just gave you that look, just a hint of a smile, and you’d know if he was happy.”

In short, Jones was everything Clyde Morrison wasn’t.

The same year he entered USC, Duke Morrison moved out of his father’s house and got a place of his own at 207 West Windsor in Glendale. The city directory listed him as “Morrison, Marion M., student.” Duke was always independent, and from the time he entered college he began making his own way in life. But it was immediately clear that Duke, along with several other kids on the team, were in dire need of money.

Luckily, Howard Jones had friends.

In the spring of 1926, at the end of Morrison’s freshman year, Jones sent Duke and a couple of other boys over to the Fox studio. “Last year,” he explained, “I got Tom Mix a good box for the [football] games. He said if there was ever anything he could do for me, he would do it.” Jones wanted Mix to get the boys summer jobs. This was standard practice for local colleges at the time, and a lot of the Southern California football players of Morrison’s time became movie professionals: Cotton Warburton became a film editor, and Aaron Rosenberg became a producer, as did Howard Christie and Mike Frankovich.

The Fox lot was on Western Avenue, and Morrison and his friends found the Mix company shooting on the set of a western town, with the star resplendent in a startlingly white ten gallon hat. They showed him a letter of introduction from Jones, and Mix responded by showing them books of clippings and photographs about Tom Mix in Europe, Tom Mix in Africa, Tom Mix in Catalina. He announced that “a star owes it to his public to keep in fine physical condition. I want you to be my trainers.” In the meantime, Morrison and Don Williams, a quarterback, could work in the prop department. Mix called someone and told him to put the boys on the payroll.