American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (4 page)

Mary hated everything about Palmdale. There was simply nothing culturally involving and no chance of a good eastern-style education for her boys. There was never any real food for her to cook, and nowhere to go out for a decent meal. She had no friends, and there was nothing at all to do at night except listen to the haunted, distant howling of desert wolves. The idea of divorce once again began to fester inside of her.

By now, any vestige of what could be called love between Mary and Doc was gone. All her affection went solely, and openly, to Robert. She literally smothered the boy, as if trying to protect him from the raw elements of the West, while she all but ignored Marion. As far as she was concerned, he was Doc’s boy, and he could have him. One time she left Robert on the porch with Marion to watch him for a few minutes so she could take care of something inside, when a rattlesnake went for Robert. Marion, who was never without his shotgun, blasted the creature just before he struck, but instead of this lifesaving act to save her precious Robert endearing the older boy to his mother, it only made her hate the desert, and her husband for bringing her there, all that much more.

DOC JUST COULDN’T MAKE THE
farm work. A nearby dairy farmer felt sorry for the Morrisons, especially the children, and left milk at their door at dawn every day, without ever mentioning it or sending a bill. Clyde was humbled and appreciative, but Mary felt humiliated by what she took to be pitiful charity. Any real food they managed to get came from Marion’s jackrabbit kills. She hated rabbit meat.

By 1916, the Morrisons’ Palmdale experiment came to an end. Barely a year after they had arrived, Doc threw up his hands in surrender; he hadn’t been able to conquer the land, the land had conquered him. He reluctantly abandoned the homestead, pulled up the family’s roots, such as they were, and headed farther west, to a little town called Glendale, not far from a little patch of land called Hollywood and just beyond there the Pacific Ocean. Glendale was not just settled but relatively urban, due mainly to the new business that had sprung up in Southern California—motion pictures.

GLENDALE (WHICH MEANS “VALLEY” IN
Scottish or Gaelic, the likely origin of the name) is located at the east end of the San Fernando Valley, and by the time the Morrisons arrived, the community had proudly proclaimed itself “the fastest-growing city in America.” It had once belonged to Mexico but was taken along with most of Southern California by the American government in 1848 as the spoils of victory from the Mexican War. Peace began a renewed wave of relocation to California supercharged by the historic gold rush that brought people, goods, services, and money to its rapidly developing townships. In 1906, with its plentiful citrus orchards and vineyards, Glendale was incorporated as a city with homes built in the popular California bungalow and Spanish Colonial Revival styles. The Southern Pacific connected Glendale to other communities and it increasingly thrived on the fast-growing moving picture industry’s need for workers. Film brought a lot of money to the city. And movie theaters.

By 1916, the year the Morrisons arrived, Glendale’s downtown already looked like a real city; it had commercial brick buildings, concrete sidewalks, and the houses all had inside plumbing, hot and cold running water, electricity, and a few even had the newest sensation, telephones. Over the next two years, Doc worked hard to make it in this thriving community. He got a job with the new Glendale pharmacy and became an active member of the Unity Chapter of the Royal Arch Masons. He rented a modest house at 421 South Isabel, and most nights after coming home from work he would take Marion out back to play football with him. He taught the boy how to run, cut, dodge, divert, tackle, throw, and catch. When Doc had enough money saved, he bought a car and every Sunday drove the family one hour to the beach at Santa Monica. Marion and Doc would race each other to see who could reach the water first. They would swim, splash, and play water football, coming out of the water soaking wet and laughing as they stretched out on their towels and let the sun dry and tan their skins. Mary was less thrilled with the beach. She felt uncomfortably overrevealed even with the typical Victorian bathing suits of the time, which covered women nearly head to toe. She put up with it because she believed that Clyde deserved his time of fun, as he had kept a good job, paid the bills, and provided a decent roof over their heads.

Although Glendale was a vast improvement over Palmdale, it was still a hard place for Marion to grow up. “From the time I was in the seventh grade,” he later remembered, “I had a paper route. I was eleven years old and delivered the
Los Angeles Examiner.
Had to get up at four
A
.
M
. because it was a morning paper. And after school and football practice, I delivered drug orders on my bicycle. Later on I worked as a truck driver, soda jerk, fruit picker, and ice hauler.”

In 1918, Marion was going to the Sixth Street Elementary School in Glendale. He called his pet Airedale that he had picked out of a kennel “Duke.” Duke followed him to school every day and slept outside the nearby firehouse number 1 while Marion went to class. Some of the firemen took to calling Marion “Big Duke,” and then just “Duke.” He loved the attention and companionship of the firefighters. He was their mascot, and they were his first image of what big, strong, healthy men looked and acted like, as opposed to his father, who lived under the domination of his never-satisfied mother. For the rest of his life, he would be attracted to tough, strapping male figures and look to them for guidance, support, and camaraderie. He soon started telling everyone his name was really Duke. Even his parents started calling him Duke.
²

Marion now had a new name, and a new body. At the age of eleven, he had already begun his growth spurt toward the six-foot-five height he would eventually reach. As his body filled out and he became stronger, he was still afraid of the bigger and tougher schoolhouse bullies, who, because he was the biggest kid in school, always wanted to challenge him and take him down to prove they were the toughest. One of them wanted to make Duke his personal punching bag and regularly beat him up after classes in the schoolyard. Following a pummeling, on the way to the firehouse to pick up Little Duke, a volunteer fireman saw him, took him inside, cleaned him up, and asked him what happened. He told him, and the fireman, who happened to be an amateur boxer, started giving Duke some lessons. The fireman knew more about fighting than Doc did, and he taught Duke how to defend himself so that the next time the other boy picked on him he would be able to take care of it. Soon enough, the bully started talking trash, in preparation of giving Duke another beating. Duke said nothing; then, before anyone knew it, he threw one carefully placed punch and flattened the boy. After that there would be no name-calling, no more finger poking, no more tough talking from big-boy bullies. After that, whenever anyone asked Marion how he had learned to fight, he always had the same answer: “Just call me Duke.”

MEANWHILE, AS CLYDE CONTINUED TO
struggle, he began drinking to ease his frustrations and to prefer the lively pool halls and straw-floor card-player bars to his proper living room at home. He usually lost at the card tables and, as was his nature, was always ready to help out a friend who needed a few extra bucks. He was still the same old Doc, the easy-touch, amiable fellow going nowhere fast. He soon ran out of money and lost the small house he had rented, and only the kindness of the owners of the Glendale Pharmacy saved the family from being thrown out into the street, by letting them move into a too-small apartment above the establishment, meant for one, not four and a dog.

It wasn’t until 1920, when Mary literally pulled him up by his ears and threatened to leave him and this time for good, that Doc straightened out enough to get some work picking apricots and oranges in the orchards, and another job in a pharmacy, and eventually earned enough to put together a down payment on a new house. Soon enough, though, aces came up eights and he lost his new job and defaulted on his mortgage less than a year later. Doc was forced to find yet another place to rent. At one point there was so little money coming in they had to rely on Marion’s meager seven-days-a-week
Los Angeles Examiner
paperboy income to make ends meet. On Sundays, when the papers were too heavy, Clyde got up with him at dawn and helped the boy make his rounds. Mary felt terrible about having to depend upon Marion’s money for groceries and angry at Clyde for making her feel that way.

That summer, Marion was able to give up the paper route when he found work in the thick and aromatic orange and lemon groves, bean patches, and hay fields that surrounded the San Fernando Valley. The base of the Sierra Madre foothills was lush with fields of fruit, and Duke didn’t mind working all through the long hot summer days. It felt good to be outside doing physical work in the warm California sun, with sweat running in rivulets down his bare muscled chest.

Not everything was great for Marion. Mary insisted that when he had free time, he should take Robert along wherever he went. He was five years older and distinctly different from his younger brother. Duke was tough, Robert was tender. Marion loved the outdoors, Robert wanted to stay home with Mary and help her in the kitchen. The only place Marion could be completely alone, even from Robert, was when he snuck away by himself and went to the movies. As he later remembered, “Most of the Glendale small-fry were movie-struck because [we had a movie theater and], the Triangle Studios were located there.” Robert didn’t care for them, so it wasn’t a problem for Duke to spend some weekdays alone, where for a nickel he could see the silent serials. He enjoyed
The Perils of Pauline,
the “cliffhanger” that virtually invented the genre of the never-ending damsel in distress. But westerns were his favorite, like Paul Hurst and J. P. McGowan’s 1916
A Lass of the Lumberlands,
or Edward Laemmle’s 1921
Winners of the West,
two of hundreds that were made.
³
Film historian William K. Everson once noted, “There is a period in every child’s life when a cowboy on a galloping horse is the most exciting vision imaginable.”

Marion loved movies so much, he often cut classes at school and went to them during the week (there were no truancy laws in Glendale in those years). Sometimes, he recalled, “I went, on average, four or five times a week.”

IN LITTLE MORE THAN A
decade, motion pictures had developed from the novelty of the individual viewer nickelodeon, approximately the size and shape of today’s stand-alone ATM machines, to a booming industry with elaborate theaters that offered plush seats, live orchestra accompaniment, and big silver screens that played to packed houses of all ages and genders in every town with enough residents to support one. Smaller burgs eager to see movies rented out halls and hung sheets to see the latest releases. Going to the movies had become the latest craze, not just in America but around the world. At one point in the second decade of the twentieth century, Charlie Chaplin’s creation, “the Little Tramp,” was the single most recognizable image on Earth.

Glendale had gotten its first real movie theater in 1910, the Glendale, and four years later, the grander Jensen’s Palace, and both were filled to capacity from the first day they opened. Duke’s favorite screen cowboys were the romantic, if stoic, save-the-damsel-in-distress William S. Hart; the flamboyant, athletic Tom Mix; rodeo-star-turned-actor Hoot Gibson; and most of all the reticent, unaffected dusty-clothed, manly but homely Harry Carey, whose lined face and worn-out hat translated on-screen into high moral heroism. Throughout his decades-long career, Carey, who always wore his gun without a holster, tucked into his pants belt, never once played a villain. Years later, when John Wayne was himself a big cowboy star, he said, “I copied Harry Carey. That’s where I learned to talk like I do; that’s where I learned many of my mannerisms.” One of Carey’s signature poses was to stand with his right hip slightly out, and his left arm crossed over and holding on to the upper part of his right. Wayne would one day pay homage to Carey by repeating the gesture in John Ford’s
The Searchers
.

FILMS, BY DEFINITION, ARE ARTIFACTS
of nostalgia; they chronicle the past. From Jesus to Jesse James, from Pearl Harbor to the Twin Towers, cinematic reenactment always follows hard-edged reality. In Hollywood’s early years, as the novelty of the nickelodeon exploded into a big-screen million-dollar industry, nothing was more popular than the filmed reenactments of the “wild” West, the expansionist period following the Civil War glorified in the movies by gun-slinging “heroes,” made more heroic by the convenient presence of “villains,” who also almost always ran the saloon and the prostitutes upstairs (sanitized in films as “singers” or “dancers”) and of course the interchangeable one-lump tribe of “Indians,” almost always played by white actors.

The Sierra Madre foothills that encircled Glendale and the nearly always sunny climate made it easy for directors to shoot outdoors there and make today’s West look like yesterday on-screen. Many Hollywood studios had separate Glendale operations specifically for shooting cowboy movies. Their indoor facilities had pullback roofs so they could utilize natural light to shoot indoors. By 1919, seven hundred feature films a year were being made in or near Glendale.

That was where the twelve-year-old Duke, imagining himself a real-life amalgam of Hart, Mix, and Carey, joined the baddest gang at Glendale High School, whose “posse” only a year or so earlier had regularly beaten him up; now, membership was an emblem of his heroic stature. The only thing he didn’t like was the burden of still having to take his little brother, Robert, along whenever invited to a party by the other gang members. If he didn’t especially like his little brother, he was still fiercely protective of him. If somebody made a disparaging remark or wanted him thrown out of the party, Duke always came to his defense. At one such soiree, “After the cake and ice cream and punch was served . . . some wise guy said ‘Get that little jerk out of here [meaning Robert].’ I took a poke at this character and the party almost broke up in a free-for-all.”