John Wayne: The Life and Legend (7 page)

This was on a Friday. On Monday, Morrison and Williams reported for work. Wearing his white Stetson, Mix drove onto the lot in a black Locomobile trimmed in red. Williams and Morrison said, “Good morning, Mr. Mix.” The star responded with a blank look. Mix had forgotten about them and didn’t seem interested in being reminded. “That was the last encounter I ever had with Tom Mix,” said Wayne. But the boys were given jobs on the swing gang at $35 a week, lugging furniture and props around the various sets.

As far as Morrison was concerned, Tom Mix was a blowhard who broke a promise. “Duke never really got over that,” said an employee in later years. “Duke [always] had a hard-on for this guy. Fifty years later he still didn’t like the man.” Long after Duke Morrison had become John Wayne, Tom Mix’s last wife came to Wayne’s office. She wondered if Wayne would be interested in buying Tom Mix’s personal phone. It was made of mother-of-pearl, had Mix’s initials on it, and was a thing of beauty.

“What am I going to do with it?” asked Wayne coldly.

Mix’s wife kept spinning. “You might know somebody that’s interested to have Tom Mix’s telephone. Maybe you could just leave it out at your house and people would see it.”

Wayne could never resist a sob story, so he gave her some money, but never used the phone. It was found in storage after he died.

Duke Morrison’s life in the movies had actually begun before he showed up on the Fox lot. His entrée was apparently doubling for Francis X. Bushman Jr. in an MGM football movie called
Brown of Harvard
, released in April 1926.

Bushman eventually left the movies, changed his name to Ralph Bushman, and became an air conditioning repairman. A quarter century later, he remembered what happened. “I had been running up and down the field until I was exhausted. Finally I had to make the long run down the field and be tackled on the one yard line. Since my back was to be to the camera I asked for a double. The man they sent in to double for me was . . . named Marion Michael Morrison, now known as John Wayne.”

“I got seven and a half dollars for it,” remembered Wayne. As Bushman indicated, the young Duke is not visible in the picture, so we have to take everybody’s word for his participation.

Wayne also remembered working as an extra in “a Norman Kerry picture at MGM in which I was dressed in a Scotsman outfit, but for the life of me, I could not tell you the name.” The picture was the excellent
Annie Laurie
, starring Lillian Gish, shot in the summer of 1926 and released in May of 1927. (Fun Fact: the director of
Annie Laurie
was John S. Robertson, who years later was the subject of the Byrds song “Old John Robertson.”)

A blue-collar boy who loved football could publicly acknowledge a fairly limited list of enthusiasms. Loving the movies was okay—who doesn’t love the movies? But wanting to be an actor? Not likely. Then, and for the rest of his life, Wayne would claim that he had backed into the movie business simply by being eager and young, that acting was the furthest thing from his mind.

But it’s obvious that Duke Morrison had already set his sights on his future profession. Sam White, the brother of the comedy producers Jack and Jules White, remembered that a bunch of boys from the USC football team were hired to work in a comedy two-reeler centering on football that was being directed by Norman Taurog. Sam White used to go to the barbershop at the corner of Western and Sunset as did Morrison, who continually pestered White for work.

“Why don’t you get your brother Jack to give me an acting job?”

“Have you any experience as an actor?”

“No, but hell, I can do it. There’s nothing to it.”

“I’ll see if I can, but I doubt it very much.”

The main problem was that White didn’t see exactly where Morrison could fit in silent comedies. “Maybe you could play a mean heavy or something because of your size, or a henchman, but I don’t see how you could play a lead because he doesn’t use guys of your type.”

“Well, ask him anyhow,” said Morrison.

Jack White wasn’t interested in football players who wanted to act, but Morrison was determined, as he would be all his life. And in fact, Duke did get at least some work in silent comedies, as the historian Richard Roberts discovered nearly ninety years later, when he uncovered stills proving that Duke worked as an extra in a now lost two-reel comedy for Educational Studios entitled
Seeing Stars
. He’s a head taller than everybody else, wearing what was undoubtedly his own suit, and earned $5 a day. The film was released in October of 1927, and would probably have been shot in the early summer of that year. It also fits with his recollections of having bit parts at the Educational Studio after he met a certain famous director at Fox in late 1926.

Bit parts weren’t what he had in mind, and Duke Morrison’s ambitions had a way of being fulfilled. He decided to bide his time and keep playing football. He was young; he’d get his shot.

In September 1926, Morrison was assigned to work on a picture unpromisingly called
Mother Machree.
Duke’s job was to herd geese that were being used for rural atmosphere. When they weren’t waddling down the street, the geese liked to rest under the sets, and it was Morrison’s job to herd them into a chicken-wire enclosure and keep them in one place so they could be quickly found when needed.

As he told the story to Peter Bogdanovich, one day, Morrison heard a loud, sarcastic voice yelling, “Hey, gooseherder!”

It was the director.

“You’re one of Howard Jones’ bright boys?”

“Yes.”

“And you call yourself a football player?”

“I don’t—mean—well . . .”

“You’re a guard, eh? Let’s see you get down in position.”

Morrison assumed the three-point stance, whereupon the director quickly kicked the boy’s hand out from under him. Morrison collapsed on his face. “And you call yourself a guard. I’ll bet you couldn’t even take me out.”

“I’d like to try.”

The director trotted about twenty yards away, then came at Morrison. Instead of trying to tackle him, Morrison stuck out a leg and hit the director in the chest, knocking him down.

“He sat there,” remembered Wayne, “and for a minute it was a case of whether or not I had a future in the motion picture business—I didn’t realize how important it was then. But he took it humorously and laughed like hell—and the crew laughed. When he laughed, they laughed—they waited their turn. But that started our association.”

There it was, a nearly fifty-year relationship in microcosm—goading and torment, followed by release and friendship.

The director’s name was John Ford. He was thirty-two years old and had been a football star in high school in Portland, Maine, where he was known as “Bull” Feeney (his real name) for the way he crashed into the line. His team had won the Maine state championship, but all Duke Morrison knew was that Ford was tall, rangy, tough, sarcastic—in total command of a movie set, and, apparently, life.

At this point, John Ford was a craftsman on his way to becoming an artist, not that he would ever admit to yearnings for the latter. He had been working at Fox since 1920, and had directed
The Iron Horse
, his first huge hit, in 1924. He had a wife named Mary, two children, a drinking problem, an unmatched gift for visual narrative.

Duke Morrison had found his enduring father substitute.

Money continued to be an issue for the boy. He resorted to selling the football tickets each of the players received. Sophomores got one ticket for each home game, juniors two, seniors four, and the captain of the team got six. Most of these tickets were sold for extra income, and Wayne began buying tickets off the other players for $7.50 or $10 apiece, selling them for $15. One time he sold two tickets for $50 and it felt like his ship had come in. He always saved one ticket for his father, and a half century later he would say “Wish I still could.”

But shortly after beginning his junior year, Duke Morrison got hurt. Various stories were told over the years, but Eugene Clarke had the advantage of being an eyewitness:

One day we went to Balboa and there were a lot of pretty USC sorority girls down there that day and we decided to do a little showing off. We jumped in the water—it was Duke’s idea—and started to do what the kids nowadays call body surfing. The waves were pretty high, real rough, and one of them caught the Duke and tossed him ashore with a badly wrenched right shoulder.

We had to report for the start of football practice a few days later and when the first scrimmages started, Duke’s shoulder was still in bad shape. Now, Duke was a tackle, you understand, and Howard Jones always insisted that when you blocked the opposing lineman, you hit him with your right shoulder, hit him real hard.

If the Duke tried to do that with his injured shoulder it would have killed him. So what he tried to do was twist his body around so he could block with his left shoulder. Well, Jones saw him do that and that was all he needed. All hell broke loose. Jones accused the Duke of being yellow, of being afraid to block and demoted him to the scrubs.

It was an event that would prove a huge boon in the long term, but at the time it must have been devastating. It meant that Morrison wasn’t on the 1927 team that lost only one game—7–6 to Notre Dame—or on the 1928 team that went undefeated and won the national championship, with the minor assistance of a young backbench tackle named Wardell Bond, “Ward” for short.

Woody Strode, who became part of the John Ford stock company in its last years, was an all-around athlete who once played for the Los Angeles Rams. He didn’t buy the story about the damaged shoulder. “It’s unlikely,” he said, “almost unthinkable, that a good coach would drop a promising [player] because of one injury. Duke just was not good enough to stay on the team.” Strode believed Wayne was too slow. Maybe, but Strode was seven years younger than Wayne and never played football with him. In the absence of any other contrary testimony, Eugene Clarke’s story has to be regarded as the best available version of the truth.

Duke Morrison was informed that his football scholarship was not being renewed. If he wanted to stay in school, he’d have to pay his own way. The core problem went beyond his shoulder, or, for that matter, his foot speed, and involved the perennial bête noire of the Morrisons—money.

“I had borrowed money to go to school the year before,” Wayne explained. “The scholarship only took care of your entrance fees. I had other expenses. As a consequence, when I paid them all back, I didn’t have any money to go back to school, and my shoulder was hurting so I figured, what the hell, I’ll lay out this one year so I won’t lose my eligibility for that year and I’ll catch up on some money.”

Losing the scholarship was no joke. It meant that Duke couldn’t get his one meal a day at the training table, which meant that he couldn’t eat. The actual tuition was far beyond Clyde Morrison’s ability to pay. (Duke’s brother, Bob, had better luck in football, if nowhere else; he earned a letter as a USC fullback in 1932.)