John Wayne: The Life and Legend (4 page)

The house where Marion Morrison was born, at 224 South Second Street, was built around 1880 and contains four rooms. It remained in private hands until 1981, when it was purchased by the chamber of commerce and restored to look like it did in the first decade of the twentieth century, with period furniture donated by residents, but with some of the original grace notes remaining—generous amounts of woodwork throughout the house, as well as stained glass in the parlor windows and the front door.

“Just about all I remember about Winterset is riding horses, playing football, and the time I thought I discovered electricity,” said John Wayne years later. “It was when my brother Robert was born. I went in to see him, rubbed my shoes on the rug, and accidentally touched the metal foot of the bed. Sparks shot off. I thought I had found one of the wonders of the universe. I didn’t know that Benjamin Franklin had beaten me to the discovery by about 150 years.”

None of this happened in Winterset, because Marion was only about two years old when the family left for nearby Brooklyn, 105 miles east of Davenport. Within another year, the Morrisons moved to Earlham, where Clyde bought a Rexall pharmacy at 328 Ohio Street.

Clyde’s business ventures had a way of going belly-up, and in December 1911, Clyde declared bankruptcy and lost the pharmacy. He then got a clerk’s job in Keokuk, while Molly tended young Marion in Earlham. But the boy always preferred his father, and Molly didn’t have the temperament to jolly him along. She told Clyde to come get his son. He took him back to Keokuk and on September 3 enrolled him in the first grade at the George Washington Elementary School.

Neither Winterset, Brooklyn, Earlham, or Keokuk was ever visited by John Wayne in later years—he was always far more interested in the future than the past. Besides, chronic instability isn’t attractive to a child, either at the time or retrospectively.

By 1913, they were in Des Moines, living off of Molly’s family. Late in 1914, Clyde’s father wrote to his son that some land he had bought in California needed someone to work it. Would Clyde be interested? Since there were no other offers pending, he would.

By that time, Marion probably wanted to drop his brother on his head, for Molly Morrison openly doted on Robert, as she would all her life. Marion sensed the favoritism and continued preferring his father.

The older boy’s resentment of his mother would always be between the lines, if for no other reason than it would have been bad manners for a midwestern gentleman born in the first decade of the twentieth century to criticize a parent. He would speak of her strength of character, her strong sense of right and wrong, and her temper—all of which he inherited. But there was never much affection in his reminiscences of her, unlike his memories of Clyde Morrison: “My father was the kindest, most patient man I ever knew.” Further complicating his life was his name. Children made fun of him, asked him why he had a girl’s name and why his mother didn’t dress him in skirts. Not surprisingly, in later years he didn’t particularly like to talk about his childhood; his last wife said that the stories came out only in fragments during their twenty years together. Mainly, he felt unloved by his mother and was quietly distressed by his father’s ineffectuality.

In 1914 the Morrison family moved to Palmdale, on the edge of the Mojave desert. Clyde’s father had spent $3,000 for eighty acres, and according to the homestead rules then in effect, if they could develop the property they could leverage their eighty acres into the surrounding 560 acres. Within the family, it would be claimed that Clyde had developed tuberculosis and needed a dry climate.

He sure got one.

Clyde Morrison took over a farmhouse, “a glorified shack,” according to his son. There was no gas, electricity, or running water. Nearby was a small barn, twelve feet by sixteen feet. When they were finished unpacking, they looked around and saw . . . nothing. Wayne remembered it as “barren, deserted country. . . . Palmdale was in the middle of nowhere.” In addition, Clyde Morrison didn’t know anything about farming. Other than that, it was a great move.

That same year, young Morrison saw the first newspaper headline to make an impression: “WAR DECLARED.” The nearest town was Lancaster, eight miles away, which had been settled by Mexican railroad workers. Lancaster got electricity the same year the Morrisons moved to Palmdale, a town with two paved streets, five saloons, two hotels, two banks, and a dry goods store. There was also a two-hundred-foot watering trough for the horses and an annual rabbit hunt. All it lacked was Frederic Remington to paint it. Molly Morrison was appalled, and when Molly Morrison was appalled, somebody was going to suffer.

Marion began attending the Lancaster Grammar School, eight long miles from Palmdale, riding a horse named Jenny back and forth every day. Twice a week, he would stop at the general store to pick up groceries. One time the general store had a good buy on several cases of tunafish, which provided a dietary staple for the Morrisons for months on end. In later years, he would always try to avoid tunafish.

Sometimes he’d pretend there were outlaws lurking on the deserted country roads, but there weren’t any outlaws and barely anybody else. “All I ran across were a few scrubby palms, some mesquite, a pack of jack rabbits and a few lazy rattlesnakes.”

Once, the boy let a younger friend ride Jenny the full length of the town, which he remembered was about the distance between two telephone poles. The friend fell off the horse. “[She] was no thoroughbred, but I couldn’t have loved [her] more if she had been. I was really crazy about that horse!”

Unfortunately, Jenny had a congenital stomach ailment that caused emaciation. Jenny was young Morrison’s responsibility as well as his transportation to and from school. Some nosy women decided that the horse was being abused, and reported the family to the local Humane Society. Marion stoutly insisted he was always feeding his horse, that he carried oats for the horse even on their daily commute to and from school.

His teacher and his parents stood up for him. The county vet examined the horse and diagnosed the wasting disease, but a sense of outrage over being falsely accused never left him. “I learned you can’t always judge a person or a situation by the way it appears on the surface,” he remembered. “You have to look deeply into things before you’re in a position to make a proper decision.” Jenny never got healthier and eventually had to be put down.

Clyde Morrison tried planting corn and wheat, because they were more valuable crops than hay or alfalfa, but corn and wheat needed more water than he had. With a lot of work, the plants might sprout, but the jackrabbits ate everything. Then there was the heat—118 degrees in the summer, 90 degrees in the house. Further complicating the literal hothouse atmosphere was the fact that Molly’s parents were living with them, making sure no harm befell their little girl. Finally, they bailed out for Los Angeles, after strongly advising their daughter and son-in-law to do the same.

For a couple of years, the Morrisons barely got by. “Mostly we ate potatoes or beans in one form or another,” he remembered. “One Halloween, Mom gave us a big treat—frankfurters.”

The Morrisons couldn’t afford a replacement for Jenny, so Marion began to walk to school, or hitch a ride on another family’s wagon. In any case, he had to get up at five in the morning in order to finish his chores before he could go to school, where once again he was taunted because of his name. Nevertheless, he was well behaved and a good student—he would always be a good student.

He learned lessons that weren’t taught in school, mainly admonitions from his father about self-reliance. “Never expect anything from anybody,” his father told him. “Don’t take things for granted. The world doesn’t owe you a living. You have to work for everything you get; nobody’s coming around with plums on a silver platter.” The lessons took, and in later years formed the core of his conservative political philosophy.

In later years, he asserted that the two years the family spent in the desert were too much for his mother and too much for the marriage. Clyde Morrison had one decent corn harvest before the market plunged. He had failed yet again, and Mary Morrison wouldn’t let him forget it. She berated him in front of his sons, branding him a failure and enumerating the myriad ways in which he had disappointed his children. Increasingly, she doted on her younger son. Wayne’s daughter Aissa believed that her father first resented his mother, then became bitter about her.

The boy was frankly miserable, and had to content himself with reading the Sears Roebuck catalogues every farming family lived with. He read them cover to cover, over and over again, and would circle all the things he wanted but couldn’t afford. “I used to dream that someday I’d have enough dollars to order everything in that damn catalogue. Catalogues became an obsession with me.”

Catalogues would stay an obsession with him, and when he was rich and famous he would do a great deal of his shopping from mail-order catalogues, which always signified the height of luxury.

The fights between Mary and Clyde became ugly, and the marriage, never solid to begin with, became irreparable. A generalized anxiety began to beset the boy; in one of his few admissions of fear, young Morrison remembered patrolling their land with a rifle while his father worked the corn. His job was to shoot any rattlesnakes that appeared.

On the upside, it taught him to be a good rifle shot. On the downside, if he missed, his father could die. “Shooting those snakes also gave me many sleepless nights—visions of thousands of slithering snakes coming after me. I used to wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, but my dad, or my family, never knew it. I kept my fears to myself.”

Clyde’s father began suffering from the onset of dementia, as well as tuberculosis. Clyde had to commit him to a sanitarium in Glendale for a few weeks, after which he was transferred to a veterans hospital. Clyde and his family visited his father a couple of times in Glendale, and Molly began agitating for a move.

Young Morrison remembered that the last straw came in the unprepossessing form of black-eyed peas. “We had five acres of greenery going, beautiful tender young shoots,” he remembered. “We went away for a weekend, and when we came back, they’d been completely eaten by rabbits. . . . That broke them. They never made that adjustment where they could get together again.”

Clyde Morrison finally agreed that he wasn’t cut out for agriculture and the family moved to Glendale, about ten miles from Los Angeles, at the juncture of the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys. Clyde got a job in a drugstore and began saving money to open his own place.

A year after the Morrisons arrived, Forest Lawn cemetery opened in Glendale, whose population was about eight thousand. The town had five schools, five banks, fifteen churches, two newspapers, a City Hall at 613 Broadway, a couple of markets and general stores, and three drugstores. Fred Stofft, who would become a neighborhood pal of Marion’s in Glendale, remembered that “there was no industry there. All the men that lived there worked in Los Angeles. It was a very nice town, about a 20 minute ride into Los Angeles on the Red Car.”

All of that would change, and soon, as the population and opportunities of Southern California exploded. (By 1930, Glendale’s population would be 62,736.) The Morrisons lived at 421 South Isabel, Clyde worked at the Glendale Pharmacy on West Broadway, and they joined the First Methodist Church. It was certainly an improvement over Palmdale.

Young Marion was about nine years old when he picked up his lifelong nickname. Big Duke was the name of the family Airedale, a dog that Wayne always remembered as “very good. . . . He chased the fire engines and I chased Duke.”

The Airedale’s name was no accident, for Duke was also the name of the great cowboy star Tom Mix’s large, indeterminate hound, as the boy would surely have known—Tom Mix was one of his favorite movie stars. Duke—Morrison’s Duke—would occasionally sleep at the fire station until his boy came back from school to pick him up. The firemen christened young Morrison “Little Duke,” which was gradually shortened to “Duke.”

These would seem to have been hard years for the young boy, although there was a temporary financial respite when Clyde’s father died, leaving him a small inheritance. But that didn’t last long and Clyde resumed his habit of downward mobility. The family moved every year or two.

“[Clyde] was lucky if he cleared $100 a month,” said his son. He remembered that the firemen gave him milk, telling him to take it home to his cat. But the Morrisons didn’t have a cat—the milk was really for Duke and his brother. He was also bullied by older, larger boys. One day he walked by the firehouse with a black eye, and one of the firemen started giving him lessons in self-defense.

By 1917, the ten-year-old Duke Morrison was attending Intermediate School at Wilson and Kenwood and getting good grades. The family was living in a small house in the heart of downtown Glendale at 136 North Geneva, behind City Hall. Duke’s neighborhood hangouts included the Litchfield Lumberyard and Sawmill a block or two down the street on Geneva, Lund’s Blacksmith Shop on Wilson, and Malscher’s Livery Stables on North Glendale, where he occasionally went horseback riding.

One neighbor was named McCalveny, who supplied some much needed raffish charm for the boy. Wayne remembered that Mr. McCalveny ran guns for Pancho Villa. “They went from rags to riches every other month,” said Wayne. “If they were eating beans, the gun-running business was bad, and if the neighbors were invited in, business was good.”

From the time he was in the seventh grade, Duke had to supply his own spending money and clothes. A girl in the neighborhood remembered him as “quiet, withdrawn.” Delivering the
Los Angeles Examiner
put enough money in his pocket to pay for the movies that he loved.

While young Morrison was not growing up in the heart of the movie business, he wasn’t exiled from it either. Glendale had a couple of working movie studios—Sierra Photoplays, which opened for business in 1917, and Kalem—or Astra—Studios, which opened in 1913 and was in operation until 1924 on North Verdugo Road. Wayne occasionally spoke of watching Kalem star Helen Holmes working on the streets of Glendale. Production crews and actors were frequent sights around town, where young Duke, along with other neighborhood kids, watched with open mouth and beating heart.