John Wayne: The Life and Legend (5 page)

Duke Morrison’s learning experiences were not always pleasant, but deeply imprinted on his ethical compass. He remembered catching a bee, and tying a thread around the creature so all it could do was fly in circles. A boy who was about three years older and had recently arrived from Poland walked by and said, “Don’t do that.” Morrison ignored him and kept tormenting the bee, at which point, he remembered, “The roof fell in.”

He found himself lying on the ground with the Polish boy standing over him. With a heavy accent, the boy said, “I’ve just come from a war, from Poland. Don’t ever be cruel to animals. Or people.”

“It was quite a lesson,” Duke said. “I’ll never forget it.”

The
Examiner
was a morning paper, so Duke had to get up at four in the morning for his deliveries. He had begun playing football, and after school there was practice, and then he would make deliveries for the drugstore on his bicycle.

While Duke was growing up, his parents continued to fight. Sometimes Molly—“a very beautiful red head,” according to Fred Stofft—would come sailing into the pharmacy in high dudgeon to berate Clyde for some perceived or actual failure. Clyde’s drinking had picked up and Molly’s anger hadn’t abated. She insisted that Duke drag his little brother along wherever he happened to be going.

In 1919, Duke joined the Boy Scouts and stayed active in the troop until high school graduation, although he never made Eagle Scout. He also joined the YMCA, which put the boys on boats, inspiring a love for the sea that lasted the rest of his life.

In 1921, Clyde and Mary Morrison separated. Bob went with his mother to Long Beach, Duke stayed with his father in Glendale. Each of the boys developed a personality that was the antithesis of the parent they lived with—Duke became ambitious and driven like his mother, while Bob was compliant and easygoing like his father. Not that Mary Morrison cared, for Bob would always be her favorite child, which provoked no end of quizzical confusion from outsiders observing the family dynamic over the years.

From the public record, Duke’s years in Glendale could be drawn from Booth Tarkington’s
Penrod
stories: in March of 1920, Duke made the pages of the local paper for the first time: “Clyde Morrison’s eldest son Marion M. got the thumb of his left hand caught between the chain and sprocket wheel of his bicycle last Saturday while tuning it up for practice on the boy’s speedway at the corner of Hawthorne and Central Avenue, in hope of entering some of the races. The flesh was badly lacerated and the joint spread somewhat, necessitating the care of a surgeon, but the boy is getting along very favorably.”

It seems that Duke had problems with two-wheel vehicles; another time he was riding a motorcycle down Brand Boulevard on the trolley tracks. It was raining, he lost control of the bike and laid it down. The motorcycle slid and wedged itself under a mailbox. Duke just walked away and left it—motorcycles were too dangerous.

That same month, Clyde bought a six-room house at 313 West Garfield Avenue in Glendale. The year before, they had sold a house at 404 North Isabel and had bided their time living in an apartment over the Glendale Pharmacy.

The boy was still on the quiet side, and between his job delivering papers in the morning, making deliveries for the pharmacy, attending Boy Scout meetings and DeMolay, he couldn’t have been spending much time at home—which was probably the general idea. In whatever spare time he had, he would haunt the Glendale library, reading the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Arthur Conan Doyle. “He was well-dressed and intelligent, but very shy and retiring,” remembered a classmate.

Clyde had been forced to learn the piano as a young boy, so he told Duke that he could choose any musical instrument he wanted to play. Duke chose the banjo. His teacher was a boy named Fat Stockbridge, who was a year or two older. But all of Duke’s extracurricular activities meant that he didn’t have any time for practice. When he and Stockbridge would get together, Duke would have made no progress, so Stockbridge would amuse himself by playing dirty songs on the banjo. A few years later, Morrison pawned his banjo to pay for a fraternity weekend at Lake Arrowhead. “That was the end of my musical career,” he would observe.

Money was tight—money would be tight for decades. Recreation had to be grabbed in an impromptu fashion. He learned to swim in the legendarily shallow Los Angeles River and recalled raucous weekends on the waterfront.

“Me and a bunch of kids would come down to the Balboa Peninsula to do some ‘poor boy sailing’ in these round bottom boats. I remember we all used to go over to this big mud flat over there and do surf dives in the mud.”

A surf dive?

A surf dive, he would explain, was accomplished by following a wave back to the ocean and then diving, belly down, into a long slide on the slippery mud. “It was a lot of fun. And then we’d go over to the flat by the pier and do the same thing there until we were just covered with this mud. And then we’d run over to the pier and run all the girls off while yelling and jumping around in this dried mud.”

It was a simpler time. But the purity of these pastimes, which had probably been practiced since the Civil War, never left him. Nor would the scalding humiliation implied by the term “poor boy sailing.”

One of his father’s failed pharmacies was in the Jensen Building in Glendale, which also housed a movie theater. The man who ran the theater was a friend of Clyde’s, so he let his movie-struck son go to the movies as often as possible. Duke remembered seeing
The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
twice a day for the entire week it played in Glendale, although, in common with most of young America, his favorite actor was not Rudolph Valentino but Douglas Fairbanks. “I admired his dueling, his stunts, his fearlessness in the face of danger, and his impish grin when he was about to kiss his lady-love.”

After Fairbanks, Duke’s favorite actor was Harry Carey, because, he remembered, “he looked real.” In time, Duke would replace Harry Carey as John Ford’s equally real man of the West, and Carey would become an important influence on Wayne’s sense of acting, although the two had very different backgrounds.
¹

The neighborhood kids played cowboys and Indians, but they also played “movies”; that is, the kids would pretend to be actors, or a director, or even a cameraman—the camera was made out of a cigar box. When it was young Morrison’s turn to be the hero, he would usually mimic Fairbanks, and once he remembered leaping out of a second-story window while holding on to some grape vines. “I ruined a beautiful grape arbor,” he said.

The
Glendale Evening News
reported in the summer of 1922 that young Morrison was part of a large delegation of boys from the local YMCA to attend a camp on Catalina Island. As 1923 got under way, Clyde Morrison rated a small article in the local paper: “To C. L. Morrison falls the honor and responsibility of the management of the Jensen’s Palace Grand drug store. Mr. Morrison is a well known drug store man to Glendalians . . . he has conducted a business of his own and has also been connected with the Roberts and Echols drug stores.”

Early in 1923, Duke took another YMCA cruise, this time to the Santa Cruz Islands. By 1923, young Morrison was a fledgling football star, playing at 155 pounds for an excellent Glendale High team. In November, Glendale High came from behind to beat archrival San Bernardino 15–10 in the semifinal for the state championship. Duke played left guard on both offense and defense, and the local paper’s breathless reportage left no doubt that Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen were going to have some competition: “The whole line played well . . . Dotson, Morrison, Brucker and Phillipps showed up well both on offensive and defensive.”

“Morrison was supposed to be opposite
the
prep guard in Southern California,” reported the
Glendale Evening News
’ high school football reporter. “If he was, Morrison has established his right to that title, for he made that jackrabbit look like a fuzzy bunny. He also uncorked some good points when [teammate Howard] Elliott was taken out.”

At this point, Duke’s interests focused mostly on athletics, but he was also developing an interest in performing. That said, athletics definitely had the edge. He played everything and he played it well. A neighborhood girl named Mildred Power remembered that she used to stand outside a fence on East Broadway where the local boys erected a makeshift basketball court. The most prominent of them, by dint of his size, curly hair, and overall good looks, was young Morrison. “Duke was the tallest and the most handsome thing you ever saw. I was in awe.”

Throughout these years, the Morrison family was moving constantly. The Glendale public library doesn’t have a complete run of city directories, but the ones they do have show different addresses for the family nearly every year between 1915 and 1925. They first show up in Glendale in 1915 living at 421 South Isabel; a year later they’re at 315 South Geneva. By 1919 they’re at 443 West Colorado; two years after that they’re at 815 South Central; and in 1922 they’re at 129 South Kenwood.

What makes all this intriguing is that Clyde Morrison bought a six-room house in 1920. The address was 313 Garfield Avenue. Either he rented the house out, or, more likely, lost it soon after buying it—rental income would have made a yearly move unnecessary. Wayne’s attitude toward his father gradually became one of affectionate forbearance. He evinced sympathy for him and the values he taught him, which included football. “I was very envious of Duke,” said a Glendale friend named Frank Hoyt. “His father would use every spare moment to teach him how to pass the ball and tackle. They were very close.”

Morrison was regarded as a top athlete, but with a slight problem: “He could have been a great football player, but he never wanted to hurt anybody,” said one teammate. The family always needed money, so Duke learned the value of constant effort. Eugene Clarke, a friend in the Glendale period who followed Duke to USC, remembered that they worked on ice wagons, ran errands, mowed lawns, and filled in the times they weren’t working by playing baseball and football.

There are people who always look like themselves, even as children, and Duke Morrison was one of them. As a boy, his face was round, but his eyes already had their familiar oriental shape. By the time he entered high school, he had definitely begun to assume the form the world would know. He was lean and very tall, over six feet, with dark, curly brown hair. He had another growth spurt in high school and by graduation weighed 170 and had assumed his full height of six feet and three and three quarter inches. His face lengthened, which made his cheekbones more prominent, and his blue eyes peered out from behind almond-shaped lids. He was gorgeous.

“I don’t think it’s possible to realize from watching his movies how absolutely stunningly handsome he was then,” remembered a classmate named Dorothy Hacker. “His looks alone could stop traffic. He was about the handsomest young man that ever walked on two legs.”

Dorothy Hacker sounds as if she was carrying a blazing torch for Duke Morrison, but she wasn’t the only one. “My girlfriend and I used to go into the drugstore,” said Ruth Conrad. “I had a crush on him, but I don’t know whether he ever realized.”

Duke’s only problem with women was shyness. “He was very bashful with girls in high school,” said Dorothy Hacker. “He was very popular, but as far as I know he didn’t date in those days.”

The record, in the form of the 1924–1925 Glendale Union High School yearbook,
The Stylus,
reports that Duke Morrison was in serious training to be a big man on campus. He was on the sports staff of the school paper, one of the student assistants in the cafeteria, received a bronze pin for scholastic honors, was in the Boy’s G club. He also studied journalism, and that bore fruit in some breathless sports stories bylined “M.M.M.” in the
Explosion
—the Glendale High School newspaper:

By winning today’s game from the Covina “Colts,” Glendale can cinch the league title. The fracas this afternoon will be the hardest league game because there is so much at stake and because the teams are so evenly matched.

Both teams have nine lettermen back; both teams have about the same amount of avoirdupois to back up against. Glendale is noted for its end around play as ground gainers, likewise Covina has the same style plays.

Other sports stories Duke Morrison wrote embodied much the same enthusiasm, not to mention a flamboyant vocabulary:

Facing Alhambra today in the third league game of the season, Glendale will have much different opposition than she had last week, when she trounced the “Wildcats” 25–0. As in the case of the Citrus-Glendale game, the two opposing teams have never been beaten by a high school team; this alone insures a hard fight for honors in this afternoon’s tussle.

Glendale’s varsity has more than the Alhambra team to fight when it enters the field today; it must also conquer overconfidence.