American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (3 page)

Chapter 1

Robert Morrison was born in 1782, the newest addition to the John Morrison British-Scottish-Irish clan of Counties Antrim and Donegal. While still a teenager, young Robert became active in the Free Irishman Movement that was opposed to the rule of the British Crown. Later on, when a warrant was issued for his arrest that would have certainly meant imprisonment and execution, he and the rest of the Morrisons hurriedly gathered their belongings and, in the black cover of the night, boarded a freighter bound for America.

They arrived in New York in 1799 and, still fearing the long reach of British justice and its East Coast thug enforcers, continued west, following along the rivers and trails of Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois before settling in Iowa, where they believed they were safe at last. Robert became a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church and a brigadier general in the Ohio militia. He married and had a son named Marion—an Old French derivative for Mary or Marie, used by the British and Irish for males since medieval times—who fought in the Civil War and was wounded in the Battle of Pine Bluff.

Marion’s son was the outgoing and ambitious Clyde Morrison, who attended the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, hoping to earn a degree in pharmacy. He hoped to start a practice in Des Moines, which was still mostly farm country, and although Clyde had never worked a yard of land in his life, he figured all these farmers, and their wives and children, would need medicine and family supplies. Marion was not just smart; he was big and strong enough to make the university’s all-star football team.

He had another, perhaps more surprising talent. “Doc,” as everyone called him, possessed a deep and sonorous singing voice. Whenever he was asked to at the university’s social gatherings, and even sometimes when he wasn’t, he loved to break into song. If slightly annoying in its arrogant braggadocio, there was also something undoubtedly charming about a big, handsome, hulking athlete who loved to sing.

At one such university social gathering, a diminutive, vivacious blue-eyed redhead named Mary (Marion) Brown, sometimes called Molly, heard the tall, husky Doc perform, was charmed and, despite being pursued by all the handsomest and well-set young men at the college and in town, decided he was the one she was going to marry.

She made a plan.

In August 1906, at an especially intimate moment, she politely informed Clyde she was pregnant.

Because he was about to become a father, Doc had dropped out of the university, and before Mary started showing, he decided it might be best to relocate with her to Winterset, Iowa, the county seat and a robust farming community with a population of 17,770, forty-five miles southwest of Des Moines. There, Doc believed, he’d have a good chance of finding real work even without a degree. Soon after they settled in, they were married that September. The officiating was done by the Justice of the Peace at the Civil Hall rather than by a preacher at the local church. On May 26, 1907, Mary gave birth at home to a big baby boy, thirteen-pound Marion Robert Morrison; big babies ran in the Morrison family genes. Marion was named after his grandfather, who was in turn named after his grandfather, and his mother, Mary.

Doc took a job as a pharmaceutical clerk, a “pill-pounder” in M. E. Smith’s, Winterset’s only drugstore. The work was menial, the pay reflected it, and it was difficult for Doc to provide Mary the lifestyle she had dreamed of. It took three long years, but by 1910, Doc had managed to save enough money for a down payment on his own drugstore in nearby Earlham, where they moved as soon as his pharmacy was ready to open for business. Doc hired one pharmacist, business boomed, and soon enough he could afford to hire a second, and contractors to build a two-story Victorian house not too far from the store. On Sundays, his day off, he proudly drove Mary and the baby around town in their new fancy one-horse carriage, pulled by Sadie, the family’s beloved steed.

Everybody in town knew and liked Doc. They affectionately called him the town philosopher, for his broad smile and good nature. However, despite the outward appearances of affluence and harmony, the relationship between Doc and Mary had been a rocky one even before they tied the knot, and now Mary’s material demands didn’t help any; still, Doc worked hard to provide for his family. He lavished expensive gifts on Mary, believing he could afford it because business was good at the pharmacy. He didn’t know much about running a retail operation. To Doc, cash flow meant success. And whenever he was flush with it, he was an easy touch for every sob story that came through the front door. As young Marion later remembered, “He couldn’t pay his bills because he hated to press his customers to pay their bills.”

Mary announced she was pregnant again, but despite her “condition,” she took over the bookkeeping, and the business’s margin of profit slowly improved, but it was soon apparent to her that it was too expensive to run and would never be able to break even. Five years after Marion’s birth and two years after they had relocated to Earlham, the pharmacy that had once held such financial promise failed. On December 30, 1911, only a year after Doc had opened the store with such grand vision and hopes, and one day after their new baby was born—another healthy, but not as big a boy, who didn’t rip up Mary’s insides the way Marion had, who came forth with the help of a local midwife—the Morrisons were forced into bankruptcy.

For a while, Doc worked as a clerk for the new owner, eking out a living. Almost in the next breath, though, Mary kicked Doc out of the small house they were now renting and told him not to come back until he had a real job. His search for more lucrative employment led him to Keokuk, at the southeastern end of the state. There he could only find menial work, but the hard truth was that for all intents and purposes, he and Mary had separated.

In his absence, Mary raised the two boys by herself. The second boy she named Robert Emmett Morrison. Robert was her favorite name, and she had always called Marion Bobby, until her second baby was born. She then gave him Marion’s middle name and had his birth certificate changed from Marion Robert Morrison to Marion Michael Morrison, so that there would be no confusion between the two boys.

Her newest baby was also her favorite. Mary believed he was destined for greatness. The fawning favoritism she showered on Robert instigated a lifelong sibling rivalry between the two sons. From the start, young Marion wanted to be his mother’s favorite but knew it would never happen. It turned the boy distant and sullen. According to Pilar Wayne, “The happiest part of Duke’s childhood ended the day his brother was born.”

His missing father, whose presence would have likely been the solution to Marion’s emotional conflict, made the turbulence that grew out of this Oedipal conflict worse. Marion’s jealousy of his younger brother continued to cause problems between the two boys until one day with no advance warning Mary packed up Marion’s things and shipped the boy off to Keokuk to live with his father. Marion had no complaints. Doc’s presence more than made up for the separation from his mother and helped to restore some stability to the psychological merry-go-round he had had to endure.

IT WAS ALWAYS DIFFICULT FOR
Marion to make new friends with a name like that. Despite his size, the other children at school picked on him because of it. In the local schoolyard they wanted to know why he had a girl’s name, if he really was a girl, if he had snuck out of his house wearing boys’ clothes instead of girls’. How, they asked, tauntingly, could anyone with a girl’s name be a real boy? Marion decided the way to stop the teasing was to punch the biggest boy, the leader of the bullies. He did, got beaten up by the others, and came home covered in blood.

Doc was naturally strong and athletic but not a tough guy, a charmer rather than a fighter. He had taken up boxing as a teenager and after he cleaned the boy up, he showed him a few moves. Doc quickly realized that his boy had a natural athleticism about him that led Doc to dream that one day Marion would honor the family by attending Annapolis and playing football for the Naval Academy. But he also wanted his boy to grow up morally straight; otherwise Annapolis would have no place for him. As Wayne later recalled, “Doc gave me advice on any and all problems. He never had an unkind thought in his mind and rarely spoke harshly to me or anyone else. He never lectured me. But I remember three rules he taught me for living: Always keep your word, a gentleman never insults anybody intentionally, don’t go around looking for trouble, but if you ever get in a fight, make sure you win it.”

Before he had lost his business and left Winterset, Doc had used his free time in the late afternoons to put together a football team at the town’s Earlham Academy; his 1911 team was considered by scouts and local reporters to be the best of all the high schools in Iowa. Doc had hoped that Marion would one day play for it as a showcase for Annapolis. Mary had always thought both football and Doc’s volunteer involvement with it were a foolish waste of time that could have been better spent working harder to save the family business. Her vision for Marion was to go to college to learn the profession of law.

After shipping Marion to Keokuk, Mary had seriously considered divorcing Doc, until he and the boy unexpectedly returned to Earlham. Doc had come down with asthma and tuberculosis, not uncommon in the Midwest of the early twentieth century; he was spitting up blood and needed Mary’s care. He told her his only chance of survival was to move to a warm, dry climate to try to recover. If he stayed in Iowa, he would surely die. He asked Mary to go with him to California and she agreed. She couldn’t let this sick man make that trip by himself. He was, after all, still her husband. Besides, in his absence she had come to realize that living without a man in the house was not as easy as she thought it would be. Now that Doc was back, even sickly and weak, she had to admit that it was good to have the family together, intact, and she nursed Doc during their journey west, in search of recovery for her husband and a new life for the boys.

IN 1914, THE MORRISONS ARRIVED
in California, where land was cheap and plentiful, and the climate warm and dry. The journey had been a difficult one, via covered wagon along the grueling trails through Death Valley, where the temperature reached a blast-furnace heat of 118 degrees by day and dipped to below freezing at night. The family finally emerged on the other side, into a small farming community called Palmdale, a stopover for covered wagons and a vital link on the Transcontinental to the small western towns up and down the coast. Palmdale was a dusty, near-treeless western town consisting of a post office, saloon, hotel, smithy, two churches, and a one-room schoolhouse. Iowa, by comparison, was a lively metropolis. Here there were no pharmacies, and no apparent need for any. Medicine in Palmdale was a shot of cheap whiskey. If an illness persisted, a second shot. For man, woman, child, it was the standard cure-all.

A year later, his health improved, Doc registered with the government as a homesteader and was granted a near-worthless plot of desert property on eighty acres on the outskirts of Palmdale. The land was full of wild brush that attracted rabbits, snakes, and rats, all living together and off one another. It was full of everything but crops. Doc determined to clear it and make it suitable for planting. He converted an old plow he found into a harrow, something that resembled a giant comb similar to a rake; then he had Jenny, the new family horse, drag it back and forth for hours every day to gather up the brush and debris, which Doc then burned in the late afternoon.

While Doc built a new house, the family settled in a temporary shelter, an empty shack with no running water; they pulled it from an outside pump well. They used kerosene lamps to keep the place lit and relied on a woodstove and fireplace for heat.

Every day after school, eight-year-old Marion’s job was to literally ride shotgun alongside Doc on his rickety wagon and whenever he saw a rabbit or a rattlesnake, to blast it. The rattlers especially gave him nightmares; if he didn’t get one quickly enough, it could start rattling its tail, strike, lock its viselike jaws around his ankle, and sink its fangs into him, after which he would likely die a horrible death from the venom. Because of that dread, his weapon was always loaded with shot as it lay across his lap, ready to be fired at a moment’s notice. Rabbits and snakes were the last remnants of what had once been called the Wild West.

A lifetime later Wayne still had vivid memories of these times, when the family was forced to move eight times in five years because of a lack of funds to pay their way: “Riding a horse always came as natural to me as breathing. As far back as I remember I was riding. I guess I started playing cowboy when I was not more than seven years old. We lived on an eighty-acre farm near Palmdale, California, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. It was barren, deserted country in those days and Palmdale was in the middle of nowhere . . . our house was a glorified shack and the land was in miserable shape . . . It was a hard life and we were living close to the margin of starvation. Mostly we ate potatoes or beans or one for another. One Hallowe’en Mom gave us a big treat—
Frankfurters . . .
I’d be trotting late home in the afternoon, with the supplies tied to my shoulder, and there was a place in the road where it made a sharp turn around a cliff. I would pretend there was a gang of outlaws lying around that bend, waiting to ambush me. I managed to scare myself to death, almost . . . then I’d dig my heels into Jenny and she’d gallop down the road . . .”