John Wayne: The Life and Legend (9 page)

In January and February of 1929, Ford was shooting
The Black Watch
, and Duke Morrison was propping, but he was already part of Ford’s social circle; Myrna Loy, who was playing a femme fatale in
The Black Watch
, was invited to a party at Ford’s house where Morrison was lurking around the edges of the room, “young and handsome . . . and as shy as I was.” Loy understood what was happening: “Jack was grooming him.”

In the late spring of 1929, Morrison was still propping for $35 a week when Ford asked for his help. He had been assigned a picture called
Salute
, which called for locations at the Naval Academy, and he wanted to use some of the USC football players in small parts. The studio’s liaison to USC wasn’t having any luck, so he asked Morrison if he wanted the job.

Morrison set up a lunch for Howard Jones and Ford, which went well. The salaries on offer were from $50 to $75 a week, but the clincher for Jones seems to have been Morrison’s claim that the boys would have plenty of time to visit Washington, D.C., for on-site civics lessons. With that, a group of athletes and ex-athletes were freed up for six weeks of location shooting. One of the players—“a big ugly bastard” according to Morrison—was Ward Bond. Bond already had established a reputation as a drinker, so Morrison thought it best to keep him off the set, but the casting director liked him. Bond was hired.

In
Salute
, Ford’s first, requisitely awkward talkie, Duke Morrison plays a naval cadet named Bill who razzes new recruits. Fox’s in-house paperwork bills him twelfth, six spots behind Ward Bond and right below Stepin Fetchit. Duke Morrison’s first line of spoken movie dialogue was only innocuous at the time: “He doesn’t mean the audience. What do the actors do, Mister?”

As relentless weather molds obstinate stone, so John Ford began molding Duke Morrison. “Duke . . . was just a stick of wood when he came away from USC,” said the director Allan Dwan. “Jack gave him character.”

A pattern was already forming: everything Ford gave Wayne to do, he did with alacrity. Ford again encountered Morrison’s game heart on the set of a submarine picture called
Men Without Women
, shot off Catalina Island. The scene called for some actors to disappear under the water, grab some air from a hose beneath the water, then come up gasping as if they were shipwrecked sailors.

But the day was gray and unpleasant, the water was cold, the waves were high, and the actors were far from enthusiastic about their appointed task. Years later, Ford told his version of the story: “Our two blankety-blank stunt men who were supposed to come up in bubbles, like they’d been shot out of an escape hatch, said it was too rough to work. The blanks.

“Well, Duke was standing up on the top deck of this boat we were on. He wasn’t supposed to go in the water at all, but I asked him if he’d try this stunt. He never said a word, except ‘Sure.’ Dove right into the water from that deck.

“I knew right then that boy had the stuff and was going places.”

“I could see,” said Ford, “that here was a boy who was working for something—not like most of the other guys, just hanging around to pick up a few fast bucks. Duke was really ambitious and willing to work.”

Duke would always remember the years when the movies first beckoned, then receded, with nostalgia. This was in contrast to just a few years later, when he’d be starring in B westerns, a regimen he always regarded as demeaning. “You could operate in every department of pictures,” he reminisced in 1968. “You didn’t need a union card. I was a carpenter. I was a juicer. I rigged lights. I helped build sets. Carried props. Hauled furniture. I got to know the nuts and bolts of making pictures.” He concluded this reverie with the most crucial criterion of all: “More importantly, I was made to feel like I belonged.”

The lonely boy was becoming less lonely. He even got a union card. In 1929, Duke Morrison became member number 34854 of Local 37 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators, affiliated with the AFL. He kept his membership card for the rest of his life.

And he was still nibbling around the edges of acting. His first screen credit—as “Duke Morrison”—actually came in a Fox campus musical called
Words and Music
that was barely released in September 1929 (it had a New York run of one day!). He also became friendly with George O’Brien, John Ford’s favorite leading man of the period. O’Brien got him another small part in a movie called
Rough Romance
, which came out in June 1930. But by that time, Duke Morrison was no longer Duke Morrison. He had a new name and a new career—the very one he had been hoping, dreaming, and planning for most of his young life.

The story of the christening of John Wayne varied only slightly in the telling. Raoul Walsh had approached Fox production head Winfield Sheehan regarding a western about the pioneers’ trek west. The film was to be based on a
Saturday Evening Post
serial by Hal G. Evarts entitled “The Shaggy Legion” that ran from November 30, 1929, to January 4, 1930, and was later published as a novel. The serial’s title referred to the last great herd of buffalo, but Walsh’s imagination converted it into a vast saga of western expansion, a sound version of
The Covered Wagon
or
The Iron Horse
—two of the greatest hits of the silent era. Fox signed Evarts to a screenwriting contract in February 1930 that paid $1,000 a week.

That was easy; the hard part was the casting. As Evarts would write, “the male lead must be a true replica of the pioneer type—somewhat diffident with women, being unused to them, but a bear-cat among the men of the plains. Walsh was afraid that the sophistication of an experienced actor would creep through and be apparent to the audience. As against that was the probability that a man chosen from the ranks of the inexperienced would be unable to carry the part in so big a picture.”

When people at the studio grumbled about Walsh’s plans to use an unknown, he told them, “I don’t want an actor. I want someone to get out there and act natural—be himself. . . . I’ll make an actor out of him if need be.”

As Walsh said at the time, “If there was one thing I did not want, it was an established star for the role of Breck Coleman . . . I wanted . . . a personality, not an actor.”

Walsh remembered that the critical moment came when he saw Duke Morrison lugging some furniture across the soundstage for John Ford’s
Born Reckless
, which was being shot early in 1930. “He was in his early 20s—laughing and the expression on his face was so warm and wholesome that I stopped and watched. I noticed the fine physique of the boy, his careless strength, the grace of his movement.”

Walsh walked over and asked the boy his name. The gangling youngster looked him over and said, “I know you. You directed
What Price Glory.
The name’s Morrison.” He explained that he wanted to be in pictures but “this is as far as I’ve come.”

“What else can you do besides handle props?” Walsh asked.

“I can play football.”

“I believe you. Let’s see how much you want to be an actor. Let your hair grow. Come and see me in two weeks.”

Duke believed that Walsh had first noticed him at a Fox company picnic a week or so earlier. Morrison was hungover, having a beer, wearing a Harris tweed suit, and eventually competed in a walking contest, which he narrowly won against a “little grip that’s just right on my ass.”

A few days later, Walsh saw Wayne crossing the lot with a table on his head and “it must have reminded him of the picnic. Actually, I was goin’ to a Ford set, and Walsh asked [producer] Edmund Grainger who I was, and Eddie yelled to me. I came over, we were introduced, and then Walsh came over to the set. I guess he talked to Ford then. That night, as I was leaving, Eddie came around: ‘Jesus, don’t cut your hair—Walsh wants to take a test of you for this picture.’ ”

The clock was ticking—the picture had to start shooting in the spring—and Walsh needed a leading man right away. “The part wasn’t too exacting,” remembered Walsh. “What I needed was a feeling of honesty, of sincerity, and Wayne had it.”

In the future, Duke would claim that he was thunderstruck by the invitation to act, that “it was the furthest thing from my mind.” But in 1946, he confided to the gossip columnist Louella Parsons that John Ford thought he had the makings of an actor rather than a technician, and “I was ashamed to admit I was hipped on the idea of acting. That’s why I started in with the props.”

There was a screen test of course—million-dollar movies weren’t hung on people who might not photograph. Before that, Morrison was sent to a drama coach, who he recalled as one of many “phonies” who washed up in Hollywood after the coming of sound to teach elocution. “All day long, this drama coach had me declaiming in deep, stentorian tones. Over and over again, I had to roar, ‘Tell that great white mountain hello for me.’ After a few weeks of that, I quit. A Shakespearian delivery wasn’t for me.”

Morrison reported back to Raoul Walsh, who set up a different test. There was no script, no lines to memorize. Instead, Walsh had Ian Keith and Marguerite Churchill, both experienced actors, ask him questions in character, with Duke responding in character.

How long was the trip? Will we see buffalo? Any danger of Indian attack? Wayne felt self-conscious with the camera on him, a feeling that would plague him for years, so he combatively turned the tables. “Where you from, Mister?” he asked Keith. “Why do you want to go west? Can you handle a rifle?”

Walsh called “Cut!” A week later John Ford told the boy he had the job. He was no longer making $35 a week; Fox generously gave their new star a whopping $75 a week.

And since Marion “Duke” Morrison was not a name that carried much synchronicity for the part of a fearless young scout, studio head Winfield Sheehan decided to change his name. Raoul Walsh claimed that he came up with the name “Wayne,” and that Sheehan added the “John,” but Duke said that the whole thing was Sheehan’s idea. Sheehan was a fan of Mad Anthony Wayne, the Revolutionary War general, because “he had been tough and a non-conformist.” The “John” seems to have been an afterthought, but it worked—gave the two halves of the name the equivalence of two blocks of granite that miraculously fit together.

As far as the newly christened star was concerned, the name was irrelevant. “I was known as Marion Morrison to my family and older friends, and I had become Duke Morrison to my generation—neither of which is a good theatrical name. Duke Morrison would sound too much like a stuntman or something, and Marion Morrison would have probably got me in more fights than I’d normally get in.” In Fox’s eyes, “Marion” was a problem even retrospectively; they decided to tell the press, in the person of Louella Parsons, that the boy’s name had actually been Wayne Morrison before they changed his name.

The emotional reality was that he would always think of himself as Duke Morrison, not the fictional construct known as John Wayne. In fact, he never legally changed his name; on his death certificate, he’s listed as “Marion Morrison (John Wayne)” and for the sake of psychological clarity he always asked people to refer to him as “Duke,” not John. “It took me a long time,” he reminisced in 1975. “I never have really become accustomed to the John. Nobody ever really calls me John . . . I’ve always been Duke, or Marion or John Wayne. It’s a name that goes well together and it’s like one word—JohnWayne. But if they say John, Christ, I don’t look around today. And when they say Jack, boy, you know they don’t know me.”

Duke Morrison knew all too well the deprivations of fear and loneliness, the humiliation of poverty, the pain of powerlessness and not a little psychological neglect. He was learning self-reliance (which was very much to his taste), the virtue of hard work (ditto), as well as what he always regarded as the dubious nature of solitude. “John Wayne” would be the vehicle through which Duke Morrison acquired power—as an actor and as a man.

With the casting complete, production of the picture Fox was calling
The Big Trail
began to move forward. According to Hal Evarts, Raoul Walsh wanted to emphasize authenticity of setting, costume, and props as much as possible. Complicating Walsh’s desire was the fact that the Missouri River near Kansas City, the actual embarkation point for many wagon trains, was now dotted with smokestacks and railroads.

Walsh decided that he and Evarts would go on a location recce, and that they would customize the story and dialogue to the locations. Whereupon they set off east across the Teton Pass by sled, bound for Jackson Hole. “After a 30 mile sled trip across the range, we landed in Jackson a few hours after nightfall,” wrote Evarts. “We cruised the valley for two days by sled, then headed out over the pass. A blizzard was in progress; not a cold one, but a wet, sloppy one, the snow falling in wet chunks. . . .

“Through it all, we plugged and plugged on the story—adding here, cutting there, while we were preparing to leave for other locations within a few days time.”