American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (6 page)

He first learned how to operate a camera while serving as assistant director on several of his brother’s films. To pick up some additional pocket change, John donned a white sheet and played a faceless racist in D. W. Griffith’s
Birth of a Nation
. Ford was mesmerized by Griffith’s masterful direction of his epic. He studied his techniques and became friendly with the director, and he later claimed Griffith as one of the major influences of his own style of filmmaking. In 1917, “John Ford” directed his first film, a western called
Tornado
; westerns would comprise fully one-fourth of his total output. (
Tornado
no longer exists. Almost all the films Ford made between 1917 and 1921 are lost.) He soon overshadowed his brother, who became bitterly jealous of his younger brother’s success, and he soon left the bright lights of Hollywood for the natural sunshine of the South Seas.

Also in 1917, Ford directed
The Soul Herder
(western slang for a preacher). It too is lost but is remembered today as the first of twenty-four movies he would direct that starred Harry Carey. Carey was a Bronx-born law school graduate who had wanted to be a baseball player before D. W. Griffith brought him to Los Angeles, when the director relocated his operation from Queens to Hollywood. Carey became one of Hollywood’s primal stoics, whose hard, unsmiling American face became his trademark. His acting style was purely external, reflecting the cowboys he played rather than opening a window to offer a glimpse of his real self. Ford loved Carey because he so perfectly projected the director’s image of himself. They fed creatively off each other; Ford learned how to use Carey’s stoicism as the foundation for a directorial style that was becoming more expansive without being grandiose, and Carey learned how doing less could reveal more in front of a camera.

Despite Ford’s having made him a star, their four-year collaboration ended over Carey’s resentment of other members of Ford’s growing company of players getting what he felt was more attention. Ford, meanwhile, had wearied of Carey’s inflating ego. Ford had made Carey a major star who earned $2,250 a week, to Ford’s own $150 salary at Universal. Audiences tired of Carey as well, and he blamed his director for that. In 1921, when Ford got an offer to move to Fox, which offered him higher budgets and a starting salary of $600 a week, it ended the Ford/Carey collaboration of twenty-six westerns and left the director in search of his next great projected screen other.

Ford’s first western for Fox was
The Big Punch
(1921). It starred Charles “Buck” Jones, a Hollywood actor who, in Ford’s view, didn’t have what it took to be the next Harry Carey. He kept looking. A few years and several pictures later, a new, unknown, tall, strong, and handsome stagehand literally stumbled into Ford’s world. His name was Marion Morrison.

IN 1926, AFTER TWENTY YEARS
of marriage, on May 1, Clyde and Mary legally separated. According to public records in the Superior Court of Los Angeles, almost immediately after, Molly filed for divorce. She took Robert and moved in with her parents, who had since relocated to Los Angeles to be near their daughter. Clyde quickly found himself a new girlfriend. Florence Buck, an attractive twenty-nine-year-old who worked in Glendale as a clerk at Webb’s department store, was divorced and had a young daughter named Nancy. They fell for each other quickly and lived together while waiting for Clyde’s divorce to become final. It would take nearly five years before the courts granted it, on February 20, 1930 (not an unusual amount of time in those days as divorce was discouraged by the California courts especially when there were children involved). Clyde then took Florence, Nancy, and his few possessions and rented a small house in Beverly Hills, not yet the movie star glamour spot it was soon to become, to be nearer to his son. He found work at a nearby electrical supply store, even as his health continued to fail. The asthma and tuberculosis that had caused him to move west had brought on heart disease, something he hid from his fellow employees when he applied for the job.

And he married Florence.

Duke couldn’t bear the thought of his father having a new woman and child in his life. When Clyde told Duke he could meet his new wife, he said no. Although he never completely forgave his father for leaving his mother, eventually he became close to Florence because of how well she took care of Clyde, and how encouraging and uncritical she was. She brought him a measure of peace, and that meant something to Duke.
¹²

He also had a new girlfriend of his own. He had first met the beautiful, dark-haired Spanish Josephine Saenz, from a prominent Catholic family in the Hispanic section of Los Angeles, at a dance in Balboa he went to with some of his frat brothers. Duke’s prearranged date for the evening was Josephine’s older sister, Carmen Saenz. After the dance, all the boys and girls went out for ice cream. Joining them was Josephine, whom Duke somehow got to sit next to; according to Maurice Zolotow, he “happened to look into Josephine’s eyes. He felt as though something had hit him and suddenly realized that, for the time in his life, he was in love . . . he remembered feeling so hypnotized by the girl that he doubts whether he spoke a dozen words all evening.”

The following weekend, only a few days before practice was to resume at USC in preparation for the fall schedule, Duke drove to Balboa to spend some time with Josie, as he was now calling her. Because it was the summertime, he had let his hair grow longer than allowed at USC. It was a look he picked up from some of the other cowboy actors at the studio, who wore it that way for westerns.

This Friday night, during which he was with her in a supper club, someone tried to pick Josie up right in front of him. As Wayne later remembered, “Some punk alongside pipes up, ‘Forget about him, lady; not with that long hair.’ So I sat her down and went over and explained very quietly to him that if he would step outside, I’d kick his fuckin’ teeth down his throat. That ended that.”

Saturday during the day, and on Sunday after church, he took Josie to the beach. On his off days he had become a proficient bodysurfer, and wanted to show off for her. She watched from the sand as he had himself towed by speedboat out to the bigger waves. He caught one too late and was slammed all the way to the bottom of the ocean. When he bobbed to the surface, he felt severe pain in his upper body. He had separated his right shoulder and broken his collarbone. The next day he could barely use his right arm, and at practice, Coach Jones, unaware of his injuries, accused him of having no guts and demoted him off the first string. For the rest of that year, Duke had to wear a specially fitted harness that restricted his movements and made it difficult for him to play.
¹³

The next fall, he was dropped from the team and lost all his privileges, including team workout meals, which he had counted on to save on food money. He was ostracized for those meals by some of his fellow classmates who were not on football scholarships and resented his free ride. He spent his sophomore year trying to stay in school without being able to play football, but it was no use. In the spring, he quit USC, moved out of the garage apartment he’d shared with his friend, and found a small, run-down place in Beverly Hills, not far from where Clyde was now living.

His father was extremely disappointed when he found out, and Mary was furious. She believed USC was her son’s only chance to become a lawyer. And she had her hands full trying to bring up Robert by herself. The boy, as handsome as his older brother, was not nearly as ambitious. He wasn’t interested in studies, working, or anything except going to the beach. When he dropped out of high school at the end of the 1927 academic year, Molly blamed Marion for having set a bad example by leaving USC and insisted that he had to let Robert move in with him. She claimed she couldn’t take care of him anymore; he was too lazy and she was too tired, and Clyde too sick to take him in. Maybe living with his older brother would be good for the both of them.

Duke reluctantly agreed even though he didn’t appreciate Robert tagging along wherever he went. He spent a lot of time talking with the boy, and he eventually convinced him to go back and finish high school, which he did. Robert later attended USC and played football for the team as a fullback, in 1932 earning the letter that his older brother never got. Nonetheless, Duke was happy for him.

Despite Clyde’s and Mary’s continuing to separately try to convince Duke to return to school as well, he insisted his mind was made up. He had seen the last of USC, and it had seen the last of him. Dropping out also put an end to his relationship with Josephine. At first, he was too embarrassed to face her. When he finally did call her, she told him her parents, the diplomat Dr. Saenz and his wife, who were socially well set in their community, did not approve of his lack of social status and his association with the “dirty” film industry. Worst of all, he was Presbyterian, not Catholic. That sealed the deal for them. She said they forbid her to ever see him again.

Morose and lonely, Duke drowned his sorrow in eighty-proof self-pity. All of it hurt like hell. As he later recalled, “They don’t tell you that love hurts. They never tell you how much it hurts. They don’t tell you it hurts from the start and I guess it never stops hurting . . . why don’t they tell you how much it hurts?”

That May, still afflicted with lovesickness, he drifted up to San Francisco, and when he heard of a steamer about to leave for Honolulu, he decided to stow away and steal himself a free trip to Hawaii. Soon enough, with nothing to eat and unable to sleep, he turned himself in to the captain, in the hopes he would at least feed him. He did, after throwing him in the brig. A month later, when the ship returned to San Francisco, the captain handed Wayne over to the San Francisco Police Department. They declined to press criminal charges and put him on a train back to Los Angeles.

Flat broke and despondent, Duke sought out John Ford at Fox, confided in him, and sought comfort from the director as if he were his father.

Ford felt sorry for him and let Duke hang around the studio and during downtimes on-set, taught him the card game “Pitch,” or, as what Pappy’s friends liked to call it, “Claiming Low,” an old New England game Ford had learned as a child, a version of “High/Low,” where each side bets, draws a card, and the high one wins.

As Wayne later remembered, that wasn’t the only thing the director showed him. “In the years to come, Ford would teach me everything I knew about filmmaking.”

Chapter 3

For the next two years, Duke worked at Fox as a low-paid nonunion property man, putting in a lot of overtime to help his brother stay in school and send whatever was left over to his mother. Through hard work, and toughness, he gradually made himself a valuable team player, mostly under the supervision of “Pappy” John Ford, as good on a movie set as Coach Jones was on a football field. “In those days,” Wayne later remembered, “you could operate in every department of pictures. You didn’t need a union card. I was a carpenter. I was a juicer [electrician], I rigged lights. I helped build sets, carried props, hauled furniture. I got to know the nuts and bolts of making pictures . . . at the time I had no ambition beyond becoming the best property man on the Fox lot, [because] a chief property man was getting a hundred and fifty a week . . .”

In 1928, not long after
Mother Machree
was released, Duke made his next appearance on-screen, as an unbilled walk-on in Ford’s
Four Sons,
a melodrama about the agonies suffered by the mother of four boys in Germany during World War I.
¹⁴
Ford later remembered this incident that happened during one of the most important scenes in the film, an outdoor shot done within the confines of a Fox studio: “John Wayne was the second or third assistant prop man, and I remember we had one very dramatic scene in which the mother had just received notice that one of her sons had died, and she had to break down and cry. It was autumn; the leaves were falling, the woman sitting on a bench in the foreground—a very beautiful scene. We did it two or three times and finally we were getting the perfect take when suddenly in the background comes Wayne, sweeping the leaves up. After a moment, he stopped and looked up with horror. He saw the camera going, dropped the broom, and started running for the gate. We were laughing so damn hard—‘Go get him, bring him back.’

“They finally caught up with him and he came back sheep-faced. I said, ‘All right, it was just an accident.’ We were laughing so much we couldn’t work the rest of the day. It was so funny—beautiful scene and this big oaf comes in sweeping the leaves up.”

Work continued to come Duke’s way. He made two unbilled appearances in Ford’s
Hangman’s House,
a Foreign Legion epic starring Victor McLaglen, in a fantasy sequence of a man about to be hanged and again as a spectator at a horse race who gets so excited he breaks down the fence (only one scene survived the final cut). He also worked on Michael Curtiz’s
Noah’s Ark,
in which Duke and a young and slim Andy Devine did stunt swimming. He then found himself back with Ford for
Strong Boy
(1929), again starring McLaglen. Duke did props and worked as an unbilled extra.
¹⁵
For Benjamin Stoloff’s
Speakeasy
(1929) he once again did props.
¹⁶

James Tinling, a former Fox prop man himself turned director, gave Duke his first on-screen credit, “Duke Morrison.” He had seen him around the lot, liked his looks, and cast him in a frat-boy musical,
Words and Music,
about college students competing for the attention of coeds, a film Fox made to show off its newly developed ability to make films that could talk and sing and appeal to young ticket-buying audiences.
¹⁷
In it, Duke played an undergraduate. He wore a tuxedo and danced the fox-trot with Lois Moran, an actress who could not make the transition to sound films and soon after retired. (F. Scott Fitzgerald later fell in love with Moran and described her as “the most beautiful girl in Hollywood.” She was the model for Rosemary Hoyt in Fitzgerald’s novel
Tender Is the Night.
)