John Wayne: The Life and Legend (3 page)

It can be seen that, while Wayne would make important films in many genres, it was the western that made him a star, and it was the western that kept him a star. As Charles Silver of the Museum of Modern Art wittily observed, “Wayne made westerns for twice as long as it took to fight the Indian wars. He made westerns for about as long as it actually took to settle the continent west of the Missouri.”

It was the western that defined John Wayne for audiences the world over, that made him the symbol of America to the world at large. In many ways, it still does.

Audiences traditionally assume that movie stars are just playing themselves, a gross oversimplification that ignores the massive adjustments that changed Duke Morrison from Winterset, Iowa, into John Wayne.

As the briefest glance at any of Wayne’s early B westerns shows, the easy, likable personality was there from the beginning, but so was a lumbering gaucheness not far removed from a high school play. The accoutrements that spelled John Wayne were added incrementally, painstakingly, intentionally. The John Wayne of 1932 has little to offer except his looks and personality; the Wayne of 1938 is a greatly improved actor of authority and concision. Duke Morrison built John Wayne the actor, John Wayne the businessman, John Wayne the icon, brick by brick. “He worked hard to be a graceful big man,” said Harry Carey Jr. “It didn’t just happen.”

As a man, Wayne could be demanding and impatient, as everybody from prop men to directors found out, but he had an innate gregariousness, an interest in other people, that was unexpected and charming. “What was different than the roles he played,” said his oldest son, Michael, “was that he would listen to people. He wanted to hear what they thought. He was a listener as well as a talker.”

His daughter Toni said, “He was an expert in western Indian tribes. He was a history buff who knew all about the Civil War. He knew what battle was where, and how many men died at this place. He knew an awful lot about Oriental art, about Native American art. He knew an awful lot about a lot of things.”

He was also a demon chess player. Although he wasn’t quite tournament caliber, he would make up for technical flaws with controlled aggression and by psyching out opponents. “Is
that
the move you’re gonna make?” he would say with an air of deep regret. “You’re sure? Well, okay.” The opponent was soon convinced that he had blown the game. He did the same thing playing bridge.

But when it came to making movies, there was no guile involved. He relished the process. He almost never went off to his trailer during the lengthy period when shots were being set up, but hung around the set, preparing, playing chess, joshing with the crew. For Wayne, a movie set was home, and he loved being home.

Forged by years of working for little money and less acclaim, Wayne became the compleat professional. “I never saw him miss a word,” said Harry Carey Jr. “I never saw him late. I never saw him with a hangover. Oh, all right, I saw him with a hangover, but he was really a good man to work with.”

The years of laboring in thankless vineyards produced an actor who could effortlessly command a scene simply by entering it, who could communicate complex emotions without words. His own strength of character was easily lent to the men he played, but that strength often derived from an isolation that came at a terrible cost. Wayne’s power as an actor, and his greatest triumph, was that he never shied away from the ultimate implications of his screen image.

All this earned him his place as America’s idea of itself, a man big enough, expansive enough to serve as a metaphoric battlefield for America’s conflicting desires. He wasn’t born that way. As a boy he was insecure, bedeviled by poverty and nightmares. Until he accreted the security of a screen character, whose certainties he gradually made his own, he regularly berated himself for his clumsiness in the craft he pursued with such passion.

So the story of John Wayne is simultaneously the story of Duke Morrison—an awkward boy who transformed himself into the symbol of American self-confidence.

There have been several biographies of John Wayne over the years, mostly written by two disparate breeds: rapt fans, or scholars—alternating currents of hero worship and a quizzical wonder mixed with covert—or not so covert—disdain.

I knew Wayne slightly, but until I invested four years in research I couldn’t claim any special insights into the man other than witnessing his good humor, his courtesy, his surprising sensitivity.

“Had you read the O’Neill plays?” I bumptiously asked him once, regarding John Ford’s film of
The Long Voyage Home
.

He could have blown me right out of the water, and probably should have. Instead, he eyed me wearily, sighed, and quietly said, “I’d been to college; I’d read O’Neill.”

Point taken.

John Wayne’s story is about many things—it’s about the construction of an image, the forging of a monumental career that itself became a kind of monument. It’s about a terribly shy, tentative boy reinventing himself as a man with a command personality, of a man who loved family but who couldn’t sustain a marriage, and of a great friendship that resulted in great films.

And it’s also about a twentieth-century conservatism considered dangerously extreme that became mainstream in the twenty-first century.

It is, in short, a life that could only have been lived by one man.

1. One Winchester with a ring loop used by Wayne—he also did the move in
Circus World
and
True Grit
—does survive and the barrel has indeed been slightly sawed off. I’m grateful to Yakima Canutt for telling me about all this, to Jeff Morey and Joe Musso for explaining how it was done, and especially to Musso for showing me one of Wayne’s customized rifles.

1907–1939

“The son of a bitch looked like a man.”

The man the world would come to know as John Wayne was not born Marion Michael Morrison—as tradition would have it—nor was he born Marion Mitchell Morrison—as revisionist tradition would have it. His name at birth was actually Marion Robert Morrison. What is definitive is the date—May 26, 1907—and the place: a house the Morrisons were renting from Mr. M. E. Smith, a pharmacist who owned the Smith Drug Store. The house was and is at the corner of Second and South Streets in Winterset, Iowa, populated at the time by 2,956 people. The room was and is a small back corner that spans about eight feet by fifteen feet in a house of 860 square feet.

The birth announcement ran in the May 30, 1907, edition of the Winterset
Madisonian
complete with a typo: “A 13 pound son arrived at the home Mr. ank Mrs. Clyde Morrison, Monday morning.” Sometime after Marion became famous his birth certificate disappeared from the courthouse, although conspiracy theorists should know that an entry in the Madison County Record of Births (Book 2, page 329) attests to the town, name, date, and parents.

Gazing down at young Morrison, Dr. Jessie Smith undoubtedly realized that he was going to be a big boy. Dr. Smith was one of the rare turn-of-the-century women doctors, universally remembered as “a faithful physician and a steadfast friend,” according to Father Paul Barrus, who was born in Winterset five years before the town’s most famous citizen.

Winterset, Iowa, is thirty-five miles southwest of Des Moines, 350 miles west of Chicago. It’s a pleasant small town, the seat of Madison County, as in
The Bridges of
 . . . In the hundred-odd years since, the population has incrementally increased to 4,800. Before the birth of Marion Morrison, Winterset’s only distinction was the residency of George Washington Carver in the 1880s.

This is the world Marion Morrison was born into:

At the Candy Kitchen on the east side of the public square, ice cream sodas cost 15 cents. If a housewife telephoned for groceries, they would be delivered within the hour. On Wednesday evenings, the Methodist church and the Baptist church would both call the faithful to worship in the evening by ringing their bells. The Methodist bell was light and silvery, the Baptist bell much deeper. The Catholic church would toll its bell on Sundays, or when a parishioner died. Every year in the Winterset High School, a Civil War veteran named Cooper would give an eyewitness account of Pickett’s Charge. In the event of an outbreak of diphtheria or smallpox, individual houses that were affected would have large QUARANTINE signs (yellow, with black letters) displayed in the front yards.

Winterset had two black citizens. One was Charlie Moore, and the other his son, Main, who graduated from Winterset High in 1896. There was also a man known only as “Nigger John,” who lived in a shack south of the southwest corner of the square, but he wasn’t counted in the official census. (There was a pre–Civil War stone house on Summit Street leading toward Council Bluffs that was said to have been a station on the Underground Railroad.)

Every year, a production of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
would play Winterset, and the actress who played Little Eva would drive her ponies in a parade around the square. Funerals took place at home, and sitting up with the dead the night before burial was a part of mourning. Every day at 4:40 P.M., people would attentively gather at the railroad station to see who came in from Des Moines.

In short, it was the sort of place that needed the presence of Professor Harold Hill to stir things up. There might have been trouble in River City, but there was never any trouble in Winterset.

Much has been made of the admittedly odd discrepancy of the birth name and the official name he carried until he entered show business, but there wasn’t really much to it. As Wayne would explain on his application for the OSS during World War II, “Name supposedly changed to Marion Michael Morrison when brother born and named Robert. There is no legal record of this change. Registered in school as Marion Mitchell Morrison, my grandfather’s name—never corrected same.”

All of this sloppy switching happened in Earlham, where the family moved in 1910, and where Marion’s younger brother, Robert, was born in December 1911. Using a child’s name as the pea in a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t shell game was only the beginning of Marion’s ragged childhood.

What probably happened is that his mother, a formidably strong-willed—read borderline unpleasant—woman born Mary Brown in 1885 in Lincoln, Nebraska, simply appropriated the older boy’s middle name for the preferred new arrival.

Both of Marion’s parents were born into the nervous middle class; Mary’s father had been a proofreader for a Des Moines newspaper, while Clyde Morrison’s father had been a real estate agent. Clyde was born in 1884 in Monmouth, Illinois, but grew up in Iowa and attended Simpson College on a football scholarship. He started in his freshman year, but was relegated to the second string midway through the season.

“Morrison did well [in an early game] but does not get into condition for proper work,” reported a local newspaper. In his second year, Clyde Morrison rode the bench. He left school before graduation and served an internship as a pharmacist in Waterloo, Iowa, where he met his future wife. Clyde Leonard Morrison and Mary Brown were married in Knoxville, Iowa, on September 29, 1905, and shortly afterward settled down to a war of marital attrition in which Clyde was always failing and Mary was always judging.

The Morrisons had moved to Winterset in 1906, where Clyde worked as a pharmacist’s clerk at Smith’s Drug Store on the town square. According to the memories of Father Barrus, Mrs. Morrison was considered “different” from other Winterset women, most of whom had grown up together. She was an outsider, and content with that status. Her best friend was Hazel Benge, who also kept a certain distance from most people. Alice Miller, a neighbor of the Morrisons, remembered seeing Mary, whom family and friends called “Molly,” pushing the carriage with her newborn boy around the town square and home again. Sometimes a neighbor would take over young Marion’s daily constitutional down South Second Street.

Then and later, Clyde was always liked—the standard line about him was that if he “only had four bits left in his pocket, he’d give one quarter to a friend, buy a beer for himself, and sit down and talk.” The standard line about Molly was that she was a grievance collector with a long memory and a good person to stay away from. “Molly Morrison was a stern woman,” said Alice Miller. “You had to be real careful around her. She could fly off the handle when you least expected it.”