John Wayne: A Giant Shadow

by C McGivern

  Soon after Bobby’s birth Clyde became seriously ill with tuberculosis and Duke was afraid when he listened to his father struggle to breathe and heard his hacking cough. Although he hated listening to his parent’s nightly arguments, fearing what they meant, this was worse. He was terrified his father was going to die and he could not bear the thought of being left alone with his mother. In fact, although Clyde didn’t die, Marion was left alone when his father set off for California in search of a hot, dry climate where his condition might improve and where he hoped his family might eventually settle. Apparently no one told Marion he was going, all he knew was that suddenly the only stable factor in his life had disappeared. Molly had considered him too young to understand why his father was leaving and Clyde had been too ill to argue the point. He had also been too weak to face the tantrum he knew would follow from his son when he heard the news and he walked away leaving the boy to pick up the pieces of his shattered life alone. He was devastated by the turn of events and was left running up and down the streets, frantically searching for his dad. Eventually he was found by a family friend who sat him down at the side of the road, wiped the tears away and tried to explain what his parents should have told him earlier. Duke clutched the man’s hand tightly until they reached home where he was left on the doorstep to go in and face Molly on his own. Mother was waiting for him, her eyes hard. He looked at her and wished she would take hold of him, knowing she wouldn’t. And, sure enough, she was unmoved by the plight of her aching son. He was desperate and lonely, terrified that he would never see his father again. He needed something or somebody to cling onto.

  The next months saw no improvement in their relationship and Duke slid into severe depression, becoming withdrawn, uncommunicative and sullen. Things didn’t get any better until, in 1914, Clyde wrote to tell Molly he was feeling better and that she could bring the boys out West to join him. He had acquired some cheap land in the Mojave Desert from his father and had built a small shack to house his family. He planned to grow corn in the desert and then move on to Los Angeles once his health improved further. Marion was thrilled. It didn’t matter to him that the place his dad had chosen to homestead was the end of the world, or that a real hell awaited the whole family; nothing mattered except being back with Dad, joking, playing football, having his comfort to cling onto again. As soon as he saw him at the station he ran full tilt into his dad’s arms, the aching forgotten, words tumbling out of his mouth as Clyde held him up high toward the sunshine.

  When Molly alighted at Palmdale she had been horrified to find nothing but desert as far as the eye could see, it was like something from a nightmare. Iowa had been fertile, prosperous and pretty, but all that was here was heat and grinding poverty in the middle of a desert. Molly hated the shack and even Duke recalled his new home as a “miserable little shanty,” there was no gas, no electricity, no water, no telephone, no road.

  The things he had taken for granted no longer existed for Marion but still he felt tremendous exhilaration, “Imagine how it was for a boy from the plains to be set down in a land that had huge mountains looming along its western rim, stretching hundreds of miles. My horizons widened. So did my love and awe of my country.” In Palmdale he was cut off from the rest of the world, and the hard life he faced there honed him for his destiny, where year after year he made movies in the arid lands that reflected the harshness of the old West, “We were real homesteaders and it was tough.” He experienced all the difficulties the pioneers faced when his family settled there and when he acted the lonely cowboy roaming the wild frontier he well remembered how the reality felt. Back then he found himself in a land teeming with rabbits and snakes and he was as uncomfortable there as his mother was.

  His dad gave him a job to keep him occupied and out of trouble. He had to shoot as many wild critters as he could, “The more I shot the more kept coming. The more Dad cleared the land the more rabbits and snakes appeared and the more I had to shoot.” Later Hollywood gossips said he couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces, but in fact by the time he made his first movie he had already spent a lifetime around guns and knew the need to be both accurate and fast.

  Although he was scared of snakes he still helped his dad, following him around, rifle at the ready. He picked corn until his hands bled at harvest time. He did everything in his power to make things work for his parents, for Bobby and for himself, driven by anxiety that if he didn’t work hard enough everything he cared about would come crashing down around his ears, that maybe his father would disappear again with no warning. He did find a bonus in his effort; if he worked till he could hardly stand he was sometimes able to sleep a little more peacefully.

  Duke’s memories of Palmdale were not all bad. Things were rough but he had some fun too. He loved to be out in the fresh air and thrived in the hot, dry climate. His fair skin burned badly at first but then deepened into brown, he toughened up, began to look like a real Westerner and the desert became his natural environment. He came into contact with horses for the first time. Again, the media later said he didn’t like horses, but that wasn’t the case, he didn’t dislike them, “No one taught me to ride. I could ride as soon as I could walk, but I didn’t particularly enjoy horses the way some people do.” He was always around them but explained that he thought of them as tools, always just an extension of his life, “I wouldn’t make a pet of one. To me a horse is something you use on a farm or in a movie. They’re big critters with a leg at each corner.” And yet when he was caught off-guard gently stroking the horse he was about to ride in a film, whispering in its ear, he offered, “Isn’t that lovely? The greatest vehicle of action in the world is the horse. Oh, a car has speed, but a horse has grace. The world can escape its problems on a horse, can ride back to the simple things.” He understood the function and value of the horse back in Palmdale, but he came to appreciate it more when he later filled his own home with wonderful statues and pictures of horses.

  Once the family settled in Marion had to go back to school. Lancaster Grammar lay four miles from the homestead and the road was not paved until 1921, long after the Morrisons left the area. Whilst he was a pupil there he got up at five every morning to do his chores before trudging off on his eight mile round trip. Sometimes, when he was lucky, he was allowed to ride the older of the family’s horses, Jenny, instead. The horse was skinny and some parents complained about him abusing the animal, “Some nosey biddies accused me, a seven-year old, of not feeding or watering my horse. This was a lie.” The complaint was taken seriously and investigated by the school, and although his name was eventually cleared, he was deeply embarrassed by the incident and matters were made worse when his new classmates dubbed him “Skinny” after the horse. He had been relieved when they dropped Marion but he was ashamed of his thin frame and his height and he found it hard being constantly reminded of it. His strange mid-western accent further ostracized him and once again he found himself ridiculed.

  Generally his early life remained hard, “There were days when I was so hungry, I thought my stomach was glued to my backbone. If we wanted meat Dad had to go hunting. He used to say, “Marion, if you’ve just got one bullet you better bag two rabbits-one for your Mom and me and Bobby, and the other for you.” Still, he rarely complained, his school friends never knew about his home life, and he never told his parents about the misery of school. In Palmdale he learned how to hide his feelings and he spent the rest of his life carefully and deliberately not telling people how he felt. He kept his innermost troubles to himself, and ultimately he could hardly even admit them to himself. It became a big problem for him and everyone close to him, but those who were interested later could always scan his movies, where every slight he had ever suffered was professionally portrayed, for the world to see.

  Back then he made light of his fears, hurts and childhood difficulties, although the whole family was in serious trouble. Doc saw himself as a failure, Molly ferociously protected Bobby, who could never escape her attention, and Marion, n
aturally gregarious, loyal and in constant need of love was desperately lonely. Perhaps he remained unloved, but while the rest of his family stumbled and faltered, he learned how to cope. Surviving without any of the things he most needed was one of his greatest achievements. Palmdale was the place where, against all odds, Duke began laying down the rules that he lived the rest of his life by, where the John Wayne credo was born, “I will always keep my word. I will try always to be a gentleman. I will never insult anyone unintentionally. I will not look for trouble, but if it finds me I’ll make sure I finish it.” It was also where he started avoiding the trouble that dogged him earlier. He kept his head down and got on with his life as everything crumbled around him and family life eroded away. Parents and brother faded into the distance as he grew stronger in his ability to cope. And though he was only a child, he had already discovered he had a natural talent for avoiding things he didn’t want to face.

  He developed the skills that later became useful in his career when he began to escape into a world of fantasy as he walked to and from school. He slaughtered countless imaginary bad guys and Indians never dreaming how his life would pan out. He often played the cowboy, outnumbered and heroic as he approached the rocks where Apache warriors were waiting in ambush. He was brave as he held his breath and crept with the greatest stealth so they couldn’t hear his approach. In his vivid imagination he played the scenes with all his heart and soul, shouting his joy when another hostile bit the dust, the thrill of it left him breathless. It had been so real to him that if John Ford, the famous director, had seen the boy at play he would have known for sure that Duke could act.

  Marion had never seen a movie, but he had lived all his life with tales of the frontier. The stories he had heard so often at Grandfather Brown’s knee about the wagons traveling Westward, the train-robbers, Indians, stagecoaches, the gold rush, were real where he had been born back in Iowa. The frontier that John Wayne came to inhabit on celluloid existed for his grandfather, and even for his father, and he had relished it all those years before as he sought escape, shooting from the hip all the way.

  His parent’s marriage was at breaking point and they argued constantly, not caring how much they upset their two small boys. At night Marion tried to think about other things as he covered his head with a pillow. By day he sought peace and refuge from the misery that school bullies and his brother heaped on him. And Bobby had become a big problem. His mother insisted Duke took him everywhere he went, “He was always too little, and whenever he cried or was unhappy I was always to blame.” Still he kept his mouth shut and let the kid tag along, life was easier that way, and Bobby continued to hang onto his big brother’s shirt tails long after they reached adulthood. As children it troubled Marion deeply when Molly scolded him if his little brother came home with a scratch but seemed completely unmoved when he got hurt. She had not offered him a word of comfort when he nearly lost his thumb in a bicycle chain. The accident, so severe it hit the local papers, never raised a second glance from her, “You just look out for Bobby” she warned him, “I’ll hold you responsible if anything happens to your brother.” It had been tough and he wanted to ask, “What about me?” He didn’t bother, he knew the answer.

  Children approaching adolescence are faced with a mass of seemingly overwhelming problems and uncertainties, but Marion had already, at an early age, faced and overcome a multitude of difficulties to emerge a headstrong, self-willed, and self-motivated youngster. By the age of nine he was already manifesting the resources that were to power his future career.

  He steadfastly refused to wallow in self-pity, did his utmost to laugh at hardship, and even recognized the challenge in it. In 1916 when Clyde finally accepted defeat in the desert and moved the family on to Glendale, California, Marion was simply taking the next giant step along the path to stardom. He had learned to make the most of life in the circumstances of grinding poverty, now he was about to be offered some of life’s rewards. He rarely looked back and, ever the optimist, he preferred to focus on life’s riches.

  When he first arrived in Glendale he had moved home and changed schools frequently, moving from the Midwest to the desert and on now to prosperous California. He had been regularly bullied both inside and outside his home, had been unsure of himself, almost neurotic and shy to the point of terror. He had learned to protect himself behind a detached facade and so it was hardly surprising, considering the way he shielded himself that children in his new school found him strange. They saw only an outsider who made little effort to join in. Fortunately one classmate, Pexy Eccles, found something to like in him and they became close friends. Marion spent as much time as he could at Pexy’s home in a further effort to avoid his own and life began to settle down nicely in California.

  Both his parents wanted him to do well and they both invested time in his future, ensuring he was well-read, and equally well-mannered. They had long recognized that a major part of their son’s problem was that he simply had too much energy and too little direction. He had difficulty settling to anything for long and bored easily. When they hit Glendale they devised a plan to keep their wayward boy out of trouble by ensuring he was kept occupied and he suddenly found he was expected to contribute toward family finances. They needed him to make money but they also wanted to keep him out of harm’s way. It was a strange turn of events and he did everything he could, pleased to think they depended on him, unaware of their ulterior motives. He really didn’t care about their motives either, he was just happy to be able to escape the whole family. He found welcome relief at work. He took as many odd jobs as he could manage, earning enough to pay his own way, to satisfy the demands his parents made and, at the same time, escaped the endless arguments. He also began attending numerous youth clubs for the same reason. Whilst he was out working or at scouts he was safely away from the anger and also from the bane of his life, “The biggest trial of my young life was shepherding my little brother around. Wherever I went, Bob had to follow.” Now he specifically chose groups he knew Bob couldn’t go to and in such formal settings found the peace he had craved.

  However, a new problem presented itself at school, one that he had no idea how to manage and was almost too much for him to bear. To his horror, he found the teachers liked him. He had buried himself in books in an attempt to escape his bleak reality for some time and he excelled in the resulting knowledge; that confirmed his place in class as teacher’s pet.

  They smiled pityingly at trousers that were always too short, at shabby, threadbare clothes, and offered words of comfort when he got involved in a scrap. He did his best to avoid their pity. He wanted to be shorter and heavier. He wanted to feel normal. His height alone meant he could never disappear into the background of any situation, he was always plainly visible to teacher and bully alike and he was very self-conscious about something that was a distinct handicap to the stranger in town who longed to go un-noticed.

  In the past he had never made much attempt to fight back when the bullies targeted him. He had no idea what was expected of him, and no understanding of why anyone would want to harm him. He hated conflict and did his utmost to avoid it. Word of course soon flew round Glendale that sissy Marion was easy game and anyone who thought they were tough could easily prove their point by attacking him.

  But things had changed. He had changed. He suddenly found the determination to stand up to the intimidation and provocation, to show everyone that he was much more than a skinny mid-western misfit. He had grown even taller and now possessed a pair of fists almost twice the size of those of his tormentors. At long last, with an inner sigh of relief, he recognized the time had arrived to put them and his boxing lessons to good use. He handed out a few short, sharp lessons. They did the trick and whilst he never started anything and continued trying to avoid fights, he finally discovered he could stand up for himself, and win.

  He no longer considered himself a child and he decided to do something about his clothes, about the trousers that were always too sh
ort, about the threadbare shirt cuffs. He started getting up at four every morning to go to work before school. He saved his earnings until he had enough to buy the things he wanted and began going to school in the immaculate navy blue suit and fresh white shirt paid for by his own hard labour. Unlike the other boys in class he always wore a tie. The proud habit of dressing well was established then but became something he clung to later when he came to understand the worth of image. The clothes he wore became an important symbol of his own success and were a mark of his achievement.

  Success now became vital to him and he was so determined to do well that he started going to the local libraries where he devoured every book he could get his hands on. He remained a voracious reader all his life, scanning most new books and journals, always on the lookout for stories that might make a good film. He had an exceptional memory that, together with his reading, ensured he continued to do well in school. He gave up worrying about being teacher’s pet when he discovered he enjoyed studying for its own sake.

  He was like a sponge soaking up every piece of information that came his way and a friend remembered, “I never knew anyone so interested all the time.” Staff were impressed with the rapid progress of their quiet, sensitive, likable, intelligent and attentive boy who so rarely spoke. He would answer questions if called upon but never volunteered information and was never seen raising his hand in class. Later, when biographers questioned the teachers, they described him as clean, tidy, well behaved… a good student… bright-eyed… neat, a nice boy. They were however worried that he often appeared ill, pale and bruised. For some time they suspected he was ill but when they asked him about it, he mumbled, “I’m fine.” He stubbornly refused to tell anyone about the punishing schedule he had set himself, both in the classroom and out on the street.