American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (5 page)

Just like in the movies.

IN JUNE 1921, FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD DUKE
graduated from Wilson Intermediate School, where he had lost his desire to be a loner and became a popular, good-looking student with real academic promise. In Glendale Union High School, he blossomed even further. He was president of the Shakespeare Club, cocaptain of the football team, a member of the French Club and the Drama Club, a winning member of the chess team, an effective leader of the debating team, and a first-class bridge player; and he maintained consistently high grades that earned him honor pins. He was also an active participant in putting together
Stylus,
his senior class’s yearbook. Because of all his good work, Marion was chosen class valedictorian.

He was also Glendale Union’s best football player. In his junior year, as a running guard Wayne led Glendale Union to the state championship against Long Beach. Glendale lost the big game 15 to 8, but it didn’t matter that much to Duke, because his superior playing had gained the attention of regional scouts, including one from the University of Southern California.

In 1925, his senior year, Glendale won the state championship. They not only went undefeated but were unscored on for the entire season, a record that would live in local lore as the greatness of the “Glendale Eleven.” Duke graduated with an overall grade average of 94 (out of 100), and from two hundred seniors he was chosen class salutatorian. USC offered him a football scholarship. Duke was thrilled, so was Doc, and so, even, was Mary, but for a different reason. USC was in the process of building a new law school.

That fall, full of hopes and dreams of one day playing professional football, Duke became a USC Trojan, a full-fledged member of the legendary Thundering Herd.

Chapter 2

Soon after starting classes and attending practice at the University of Southern California, the reality of a limited football scholarship soon set in. As Wayne later remembered, “In September 1925, I entered USC. The scholarship just covered tuition. I washed dishes in the fraternity house for my meals [and waited on tables at mealtime]. That left me a little short of money for such things as shoes, suits, laundry, and buying pretty girls ice cream sodas at the corner drugstore. I got work from the phone company. They called me a map plotter and I charted where the old telephone lines ran. I never did find out the purpose of this job.

“Meanwhile, Dad’s newest drugstore failed. He opened an ice cream company and this failed. He opened another drugstore and after that a paint manufacturing company. This didn’t do well either. When he could afford it, he would send me five dollars a week.”

Duke gave his dad free tickets to games. They cost $25 apiece, and for at least the first year, he had to pay for them out of his own pocket. And then things got worse, financially: “At the end of my freshman year I got bad news from the phone company. Seems they had run out of maps to plot. I desperately needed money.”

He found handyman work at Warner Bros in Hollywood, and at MGM in Culver City, a bus ride a few miles to the west of the USC campus. He made a few extra dollars doing whatever they assigned him, as an assistant property man, an electrician’s helper, a gofer, an animal herder, and even as an extra or as it was called at the time, “wallpaper.” Sometimes on-screen, mostly off, whatever they needed him to do he did it.

Wayne’s first recorded appearance in a motion picture was as a stand-in for Francis X. Bushman, the popular silent screen star, in MGM’s 1926 release
Brown of Harvard
. Directed by Jack Conway, it was a love triangle set among football players at the Ivy institution.
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College football films were an extremely popular genre during the 1920s. The studio sent a film crew over to nearby USC to shoot some scenes of the team’s football practice and Wayne appears in some of that footage. That same year, the nineteen-year-old was a spear carrier in the gallows scene of King Vidor’s period piece
Bardelys the Magnificent,
set in the court of Louis XIII (an as yet unknown Lou Costello also had a bit part in the film, years before he teamed up with Bud Abbott).
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As it happened, cowboy movie star Tom Mix was a huge USC football fan. Early in 1926, at Mix’s request, Howard Jones, the team’s coach, got him a season box on the fifty-yard line. In return, Mix told Jones that if there was anything he could ever do for him, he should just let him know.

Now there was. Jones told Mix some of his players were hurting for money, and he wanted to send a few boys from the squad to the William Fox (Fox Hills) Studios on Western Avenue, where Mix was filming, to see if there was anything he could do to get the boys some extra work. Mix said sure, send them over.

The next morning, Duke and another member of the team, Don Williams, carried a letter of introduction to the “Tom Mix Lot,” a Fox set built to look like the main street of a frontier town to be used only by Mix and his production team.
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Duke first saw his childhood idol standing in the middle of the fake street, a bit shorter than he had imagined, resplendent in his ivory-white ten-gallon hat and shiny clean cowboy clothes, looking like a movie poster of himself. Timidly, the two walked over and Duke handed Mix the letter. He read it, looked up, and grinned. “Man,” he said, smiling, “a star owes it to his public to keep in fine physical condition. I want you two to be my trainers. Report to me personally when school is over.” It wasn’t exactly what Jones had had in mind, but the thought of working out with Tom Mix seemed like a great deal to Duke and Williams, certainly better than the grunt work of being human wallpaper or moving around heavy scenery.

“What had excited me was the prospect of becoming a sparring partner for Mix, who just happened to be my hero,” Duke later recalled, but he and Williams were disappointed when they learned that Mix only wanted them to watch him box with his regular partner.

The morning after his last class, Duke, by himself this time, reported for work to the Fox studio, hoping to pick up some work, but he couldn’t get past the front gate. Just then, Mix happened to arrive in a big black chauffeur-driven “locomobile,” as Wayne later remembered “about two blocks long.” He called out Mix’s name, smiled, and waved. Mix nodded as if he didn’t know who Duke was and signaled his driver to continue on. The nod was enough, however, for the front gateman to let him pass through.

He had no trouble finding day labor work at Fox, and occasional assignments in the extra pool. His first on-camera job at Fox that summer was as an unbilled extra in Lewis Seiler’s silent western,
The Great K and A Train Robbery
.
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The film starred Mix, who did all his filming on location in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Duke made ten dollars that day, money he sorely needed.

After
The Great K and A Train Robbery,
Duke became a regular part of a “swing gang” set-dresser crew, carrying furniture and props and physically arranging them for the set designer, at a starting salary of $35 a week. Sometimes the work was easy, more often than not difficult and demeaning, especially wrangling untrained animals.

It was during one of these assignments that Duke first met director John Ford. According to Pete Martin, “Ford was the founder and guru of a Hollywood cult of brawn. Like Frederick William I, who combed Europe for giants for his Potsdam guard, Ford liked to surround himself with non-runts.” Ford especially liked football players. “At that point everybody in the picture business had USC fever. Wayne fell to my lot [on-set] and I made him a fourth-assistant property man.”

Wayne later remembered: “They sent me [on an assignment] to Lefty Hugg, assistant director to John Ford. Ford was shooting
Mother Machree
. The title loosely translates to ‘Mother of my Heart.’ ” The film is a sentimental journey of loss, journey, and redemption. A woman (Belle Bennett) is forced to leave Ireland after her husband is lost at sea. Her travels bring her to America, the circus, and trouble. The authorities take her son away. Broke and alone, she becomes a domestic. In the last reel they are finally reunited—the daughter of the wealthy family she works for has miraculously fallen in love with her long-lost son. The film has elements of Ford’s later family sagas and features one of his early “family” of players, Victor McLaglen, already a star earning $1,200 a week.
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For his work on the film, Duke earned $35 a week.
Mother Machree
is notable for being the first time he was in directed by John Ford.
⁹
Mother Machree
wasn’t released until 1928. Caught in the transition to sound, the silent version was pulled twice by Fox, first to add a synchronized score and again to add synchronized sound optical track. “The Irish scenes were shot on a set that was supposed to be a small street in an Irish village. Ford wanted a flock of ducks and geese to add a touch of atmosphere . . . during a break in the shooting Ford suddenly called to me: ‘Hey, gooseherder!’ ” Duke’s first impression of the director was that he was “huge and strong, mentally as well as physically, a tough, sarcastic character.” Ford asked Duke if he was one of Jones’s bright college boys. “Yes, Mr. Ford.” The director asked if he played guard. Duke nodded. Ford then asked him to get down in position and show him. Duke got down on one knee. Ford scoffed. “You call yourself a guard? I bet you can’t even take me out.”

“I’d like to try,” Duke said, softly but with conviction. Ford went twenty feet downfield and Duke took off after him. Ford attempted to fake a move to his left, but Duke anticipated it and hit him hard with a leg to the chest. Ford looked up and glared. A heavy pause followed, then he burst into laughter. It was a jolt-of-electricity moment for Duke. Ford’s challenge had been a test, a measure of Duke’s ability. He would remember it across his lifetime. Decades later, he described the events that day as “the beginning of the most profound relationship of my life—and I believe the greatest friendship.”

Overlooked by Mix, Duke had discovered John Ford, or, more accurately, been discovered by him. As the director later recalled, “I could see 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. Inside of a month or six weeks we were fast friends and I used to advise him and throw him a bit part now and then.” At the time Duke had no idea who Ford was, what other pictures he had made, just that he liked him, and he trusted him. Like a father.

ALTHOUGH JOHN FORD WOULD GO
on to become one of the titans of cinema, if his film career that began in 1917 had ended after 1928’s
Mother Machree,
he would still have left a mark in the history of American film. However, it would take several more years for Ford to be recognized as a “pantheon” filmmaker, a director of sharp intellectual insight, deep emotional compassion, and profound vision. In the early days of silent filmmaking, many young and ambitious men were drawn to Hollywood as much, if not more, for the easy money and beautiful women than the opportunity to express themselves making movies. Film itself wasn’t yet considered an art, just a novelty of the new electricity phenomenon, a pulpy, disposable entertainment, which is why so many films made in the first half century of moviemaking were thrown away without a thought that they might be worth anything more. Virtually no one in the business, except perhaps Charlie Chaplin, had any notion of the intrinsic value of what he or she was doing, or the foresight to preserve it. Films were disposable commodities, like the daily newspaper, and depended upon fresh material to keep the audiences buying tickets. Yesterday’s films were as useless as yesterday’s newspapers.

Enterprising, restless, and bright, the Cape Cod–born and –raised young John Ford drifted west, to where he believed his best chance was to make money; to do that, he learned how to make movies. There is nothing in Ford’s background that suggests he had a preternatural calling to film, or for that matter, any of the arts. His first love was fishing, something he hoped he could make a living at, and when he realized he couldn’t, he decided to head west to join his brother, Francis, twelve years his senior, whose deep-set eyes, thick, dark wavy hair, and handsome face had helped him become a successful silent film actor. Years later, when the always-reticent John Ford was asked how he first came to Hollywood, the director replied, “By train.” He adopted the same last name his older brother had when he entered the film business.
¹⁰
John Ford had always claimed he was born Sean Aloysius John O’Feeney (his real birth name was the less floral John Martin Feeney).

Ford was the tenth of eleven children born to immigrant Irish parents, of which only six lived into adulthood. Upon graduating from high school, after failing to gain an appointment to Annapolis, in the fall of 1914, he enrolled in the University of Maine, but his heart wasn’t in it, especially when part of his chores included kitchen service, which he detested. Early on, he got into a fight with a junior, who called him a shanty and he threw a plate of food in the student’s face. He was called before the dean and, afterward, he left the campus and never returned.
¹¹

Three weeks after he dropped out, he wrote to his brother asking if he could help find a job for him at Universal. Francis, known to the public as Frank Ford, specialized in Civil War adventures (he portrayed Abraham Lincoln in several films) and westerns, or “oaters” as they were sometimes called (the term was first coined by
Variety,
Hollywood’s daily industry publication). Francis wrote back, telling his brother to come out, that there was lots of work he could do behind the scenes.

John arrived at Universal in the fall of 1914 and soon had steady work as Francis’s stand-in, with a small part thrown in here and there in the prodigious output of films he starred in.