John Wayne: The Life and Legend (8 page)

“He had to go to work,” says Ralf Eckles. “He had no place to go and he knew my folks, so I brought him home and he lived upstairs over our garage for a while.”

“Duke was in bad shape financially,” said Eugene Clarke. “He owed money to the fraternity for his dues, room and board, and he didn’t have a dime. The fraternity was urging him to pay up; he felt his football playing days were over because of his bad shoulder. So he did what he felt he had to do; he quit school and went to work at the studios.”

The fact that young Morrison was staying at a friend’s house rather than home with his father might indicate either a breach or stubborn self-determination, probably the latter—if there was a disagreement between the boy and his father, Duke never spoke of it.

Either way, Duke had already fallen in love with the woman he would marry. Lindsley Parsons, whose life would intersect with Morrison’s in the movie business, was a Kappa Alpha from UCLA, while Morrison was a Sigma Chi from USC. The two young men got to know each other at the beach at Balboa.

“[Duke] was down there particularly because Duke Kahanamoku was there,” remembered Parsons. “Duke had bought one of those ten-ton mahogany surfboards, and the only place he could use it was down at the Newport jetty. There’d been a wreck of a big sailing schooner down there that one of the picture companies had used, and the wreck had caused some sandbars that made some beautiful waves to ride. He and some of the big swimmers used to swim around the jetty and I would try to do it myself and they’d generally go clear around and be on land again by the time I got about halfway out.”

One of Duke’s fraternity brothers set him up on a blind date with a girl named Carmen Saenz. They went to the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, then back to the girl’s house, where he first set eyes on Carmen’s sister, Josephine. And that, as they say, was that.

The Rendezvous became the place for Duke and Josie, as well as for a lot of other young couples. It was, remembered Lindsley Parsons, “a little thing right on Front Street there. . . . Josephine and her sister Carmen were the most beautiful girls in Balboa that summer, in fact I think any summer we went down there.”

The kids were all broke, which posed a problem because you had to buy a ticket for every dance. Morrison and Parsons grew skilled at scrounging discarded or lost tickets off the dance floor. If they found one, they would separate the pasteboard into two halves and get two dances for the price of none.

The actor William Bakewell had been dating Loretta Young and became close to her family and her sisters, who were all devout Catholics. “Josephine Saenz had gone to convent with Loretta, Polly Ann and Sally, and she became like a member of the family. She was over there all the time. And she started to go with this guy named Duke Morrison.”

Josephine Saenz was totally unlike any woman Duke had ever met. Specifically, she was totally unlike Mary Morrison. Josephine embodied class, breeding, intelligence, and composure. Her father, Dr. José Saenz, had a medical degree but had made his living operating a string of pharmacies. In 1921, Haiti, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador retained Saenz as their consul for the city of Los Angeles.

Duke seems to have committed to Josephine quickly, but Josephine . . . Josephine wasn’t too sure, and the Saenz family was definitely on the fence. The more they learned about the boy, the less sure they were. A football player from a broken marriage, who had lost his scholarship, who lived in Glendale, was in love with their ardently Catholic, aspiring socialite daughter from Hancock Park?

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 fight 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.”