John Wayne: A Giant Shadow

by C McGivern

  Duke was given a small part in Hangman’s House as an Irish peasant found guilty of a murder he hadn’t committed. He had to stand with bowed head in the witness box as the judge told him, “You shall hang by the neck until dead.” It should have been easy enough, but something tickled Duke’s sense of the ridiculous and he started giggling during the first take. By the second and third he was laughing helplessly. This was a sight directors eventually had to get used to, but Ford was not one of them and he screamed in rage, ordering him off the set, “And don’t bother coming back, you dumb oaf!”

  Duke couldn’t remember what he had been laughing at, all that stayed with him was the sense of overwhelming humiliation as he trudged away. As he sat in the dressing room dejectedly getting out of costume, he felt complete despondency and looked pretty much as he should have done for the shot that Ford had set up. When the angry assistant director came to find him he saw the white face and the tightly clenched jaw, “Don’t worry Duke, just lie low for a while. Put your shirt back on. Come back out with me. But keep quiet.”

  “I don’t think I’d better.”

  But he did get back into costume and wandered toward the set. He stood waiting, hardly daring to breathe until Ford relented. The experienced director had, of course, known exactly what he had done to the untrained Duke and he hoped his rugged handling would pull a performance out of him. And sure enough, when he next stood with head bowed in the dock it was full of the vision of Ford ranting at him. There was no more laughter and instead the magical cameras of John Ford caught a great and very real sense of fear and a quivering cheek muscle. The director was pleased with the effect his tantrum had created. “Right. Print it.”

  What they achieved together on set that day was pure accident. Duke sensed no sudden desire or ability to act, his reaction simply looked good on film. Ford told him years later that it had been as he was laughing in the dock that he knew for sure that he had something vital, unprofessional, adolescent and unformed, not acting ability certainly, but something profound that the camera saw. By chance he had discovered Duke’s innermost self was effortlessly revealed in the glare of the arc lights.

  In the summer he started working at Fox, he returned from college to his parental home and received a severe shock to the system. He arrived in Glendale on the first day of the vacation eager to tell everyone about his job. He knocked at the front door and called out loudly when no one answered. He went to the house next door and was told his parents no longer lived there and that another family had moved in some weeks before! Neither his mother nor father had bothered to tell him they had finally separated.

  He was nineteen. He had no home, no family, nowhere to go, and no idea what to do. He was hardly surprised his parents had split but he was devastated by the disappearance of everyone and everything he knew. Even worse was the fact that no one had thought about where he was going to go that night. He had seen his dad only days before, yet he hadn’t told him he had no home to go back to, and he had been allowed to arrive back on the doorstep completely unprepared for what met him. When he thought about it he supposed it was not really surprising his dad hadn’t had the courage to warn him, nor that his mother hadn’t cared enough to, “I guess they each thought the other had told me. Well, it sure was a shock I can tell you. I ran down to Pexy’s house, and was fortunate enough to find him home.”

  Pexy’s parents were deeply moved by the plight of their son’s homeless friend and they allowed him to sleep in a room over their garage all that summer. It took Duke several days to locate his own family and he decided not to move in with either parent, preferring the peace of Pexy’s refuge instead. And it turned out to be a good summer, despite its horrific start. He liked his friend’s family who allowed him the freedom to do anything he wanted. In fact Pexy’s parents had no reason to worry about their young workaholic guest, he gave them no trouble and spent most of his time on the Fox lot.

  His parents finally divorced in 1929. Divorce was rare and he was filled with shame and humiliation, but also, finally, with a sense of relief. Both his mother and father later remarried and Duke grew to be fond of both step parents. His Mother moved to Long Beach with Bobby to start her new life. Doc and Molly were filed away separately, deeply. They had affected every aspect of his life yet were now kept separate within it. He hardly ever mentioned them again. Neither they, nor the pain they caused him were permitted to intrude into his public life which was developing very nicely.

  When he wasn’t working he was down at the beach. He had no money but that didn’t prevent him body-surfing or hanging out there with friends. He was a real water baby and could usually be found at Balboa, swimming, surfing, drinking, and later, dancing the nights away.

  It had been at a Thanksgiving dance at the Balboa Inn that friends fixed him a blind date with the wealthy Carmen Saenz. Her father was consul for the Dominican Republic and her mother was French. After the dance he walked Carmen back to her beach side home and was introduced to Carmen’s younger sister, Josephine and her date for that evening. The four of them liked each other and went out together later for supper. They sat around talking and drinking coffee.

  Duke was immensely drawn to Josephine and vividly recalled catching her eye frequently as they chatted. The hot-blooded Duke also possessed a highly romantic nature and on that magical night fell hopelessly in love with, “The most beautiful girl I had ever seen.” She was tiny, delicate, and he thought, perfectly formed. She had white skin and jet black hair smoothed back from a perfect face. She had the deepest, most enormous black eyes, framed by the longest, thickest lashes, “I felt as if a hypnotist had put me in a trance. I stared at her all night. She was aristocratic, serene, and I was lost.”

  Carmen finally lifted the trance-like state he had fallen into, asking, “Duke, are you going to put the sugar in, or not.” He had no idea how long he had been sitting with the spoon hovering above his drink, “I was so lost in admiration that I put it straight in my mouth, rather than into the coffee. I felt just like Jack’s big dumb oaf alright.” Not knowing what else to do he chewed the sugar and Josie laughed as he crunched the granules. She liked him.

  Once more fate took a hand and Josie became his date for the rest of the evening. Relationships in those days were casual and there was no problem about changing partners mid-evening, “I walked toward the water’s edge with her. Later we strolled along the pier, we stood real close, gazing out to sea. I vividly remember the ocean and the sky. I was full of feelings I hadn’t known before… I was real sentimental about Josie. That never changed.” He couldn’t remember saying more than two words to her all that evening, “But as I opened the car door for her later, my hand brushed against her arm as she stepped out.” Years later he still felt the shiver of excitement run right through him, “It was the first time it had happened to me, but I knew I was in love. It was just like in the movies. But I wish someone had told me how much it would hurt. They never tell you in those movies how much it hurts. They don’t tell you it hurts from the start and I guess it never stops. But it’s still a beautiful feeling to have. We started to keep company and she was my steady girl, and it was beautiful. But it hurt a lot. Why don’t they warn you how much it hurts?”

  At the very first chance Duke had, he rushed straight back to Balboa, excited at the thought of seeing her again, determined to talk to her more this time, hopeful that he wouldn’t appear so stupidly naive. They went to the beach where Josie sat in the sun, pleased to discover he had a tanned, muscular body to go with his beautiful face. She watched him as he spent the afternoon showing off in the element that was all his own and where he knew he appeared to best advantage. Usually the waves were just right for surfing at Balboa, breaking comfortably into four foot of water. Only occasionally did they become violent and unpredictable. He seemed to be at least a mile out to sea as he waited for a big wave. Eventually he threw himself into a cascading roller, and raced in toward the beach with the wave. He was in control and holding his
flat body position in the torrent of foaming water. His heart thumped in his chest until the second of truth arrived. It was vital not to get dragged into the underside of the wave. Once that happened the surfer was no longer in control and he got sucked back out to sea like a piece of driftwood. And he lost it, right there in front of the girl he so badly wanted to impress. His body had rarely let him down before, he had no idea what went wrong, but this time he was well and truly beaten and, as he was pulled into the underbelly of the wave, he became all flailing arms and legs.

  His muscular power was no help and he was eventually deposited stomach down, straight onto the unforgiving beach, “I felt like I’d been shot out of cannon. I could only lie completely still, winded, unable to catch my breath. Jesus, I hurt.” Josie and some surfers ran to his rescue and started pumping water out of him until he vomited, right there in front of his aristocrat! The dazed confusion left him, “I knew my right shoulder was badly smashed up. I was surprised I was alive at all. I could hardly move my neck or arm, I felt just awful.” He felt particularly bad because he couldn’t hide the pain he was in before the fussing girl. He took no pleasure in her obvious concern for his well-being. He was deeply embarrassed and ashamed of himself. By the next morning he felt worse.

  The shoulder was swollen and he was forced to go to the doctor who diagnosed torn and separated shoulder muscles. The pain-wracked Duke was informed he would take several months to heal. He could not use his right hand or arm for anything and the only way his shoulder would heal was with rest and immobilisation, “I couldn’t believe what doc was saying. Oh, sure, I could eat and write with my left hand but what about football?”

  “No more football this season son.”

  It was catastrophic, “But I have to play Doc.” No football meant no scholarship, meant no food, meant going back to a home that no longer existed for him. “There was simply no way I could accept the doctor’s diagnosis or treatment. I kept it to myself. Told no one at college, especially Coach Jones. I practiced every afternoon, using my right shoulder the best I could, but the pain was excruciating. I tried to play like nothing had happened. I even tried to tackle with my left shoulder. Coach went crazy… called me a damned coward in front of my teammates. He wanted to know why I was afraid to block. Then I got demoted. I was fitted a special shoulder harness so I could train. That was how I played all the rest of that year, Jeeesus… ”

  He carried on until one day as he practised tackling against a dummy the slowly healing shoulder muscles tore apart again in an injury so severe he had no option but to confess to Coach Jones, who was glad to finally know what was going on, to know he hadn’t been wrong about Duke. He felt sorry for the blistering he had given him about being a coward and knew not many of his players would have attempted to tackle with an injury like Duke’s. In an effort to compensate he didn’t release him from the team and allowed him to keep his scholarship. However, he did loose training privileges, including the all-important free meal a day! Life was a complete disaster and Coach Jones could do no more for him.

  His courtship of the beautiful Josephine also proved long, arduous and as usual for Duke nerve-wracking, “She had a way of saying “no” that was like an invitation.” Whether she invited him or not he doggedly pursued her all summer despite his injury and the fact that he had no money. He never dated anyone else, nor did he chase “those certain kinds of girls” anymore. Pexy remembered the courtship as “stormy” and felt sorry for his roommate’s problems which he rarely seemed able to escape, but which he unflinchingly met head on with an endurance that amazed him. Generally the difficulties were caused by Josie’s jealousy. Duke rarely then gave her cause to be suspicious but she taunted him for looking at other girls and he was unable then, or later, to convince her of his devotion. And the taunts stung because they were the same ones his mother had thrown at his dad, because they had no foundation, and because he was the most loyal of souls. Still, he also recognized that, “In the end Josie paid a high price for loving me too. Neither of us got out of it whole. Ours wasn’t a one way love.”

  Pexy discovered that Duke started selling his blood at the local blood bank and that he had, in fact, occasionally been doing it during training. He immediately understood why he sometimes looked so pale and tired. Duke now sold so much blood that he was eventually banned by the blood bank and even barred from entering the building. Feeding himself was a huge problem as he stared at failure once again, “I was never started on the team again. The only real food I got was earned because of my place on the team. I was angry but more than anything right then, I was just goddamn hungry.”

  It was a practical problem that Duke anticipated being able to sort out once he was fit again. He tried to hang on and for another term managed to live on money borrowed from friends. But finally, and despite every determined effort, he realized he couldn’t even repay the money he had already borrowed. He had to accept he wasn’t only finished in football but at college too. He had a term’s worth of debt and didn’t want to start another. He made one of the hardest decisions of his life, “I didn’t have any money… son of a bitch! My shoulder was hurting so I figured, what the hell, I’ll lay out this year and catch up on some money… I got so interested in pictures that I never went back. I got work with Pappy Ford as a prop man and was so intrigued by him that I decided to strive to be a director, like him. I worked with him as often as I could just so I could get more experience.” The explanation sounded simple, straightforward, it was how he liked to present his life, but it hadn’t been like that at the time. It was a devastating blow that he was slow to recover from.

  Pexy, though still a member of Sigma Chi, was now living at home with his parents. He still attended the fraternity house for social gatherings and one evening he drove up to find Duke sitting on the porch with a box containing everything he owned in his hands. Duke confessed, “I don’t know what to do. I can’t pay my bills, and I can’t live here anymore.”

  “When he finally got the word, I guess he was too proud to ask for help. He didn’t even call me, which he could have, and he didn’t have the faintest idea what he was going to do or where he was going to go. It was just coincidence that I passed when I did.”

  Pexy was so upset to see his friend like that, that even before asking his parents, he offered Duke his old room over the garage and drove him and his box straight home. Pexy’s parents had known Duke since childhood. He had always spent a lot of time at their house, escaping the horrors of his own. They had known him so long that he was still Marion to them. They remembered him always towering above their son and their other friends, but as the most gentle and decent boy. They, like Pexy, had a soft spot for the laughing boy he had always been and for the charming, sincere and considerate young man he had become. He had stayed above their garage when his parents split, and now they told him he could stay there again for as long as he wanted or needed.

  Duke wanted to do what he had always done in times of trouble, run away. He had no idea how to tell his dad that he had left USC, “Worse than that was the thought of telling Josie.” Although he was soon back at work and making reasonable money at the studio he confessed, “It was a hell of a problem. I hoped she’d accept I was no longer a college boy… I was a man making my own way in the world.” He hated confrontation, and right then, even as a man making his own way, he felt a strong urge to run from it, the need almost as strong as when, at five, he had jumped on the passing railcars.

  He had suddenly learned at USC that he was just a scholarship boy surrounded by money, and that he was accepted at Sigma Chi because of his prowess on the football field.

  As far as a career in law was concerned, he’d never had any real future. Lacking the contacts in the outside world so vital to a career in law, he could never have gone far. Though brighter than the other students and despite working harder than any of them, he would have ended up working for them in their father’s firms. Even if he could somehow pay the rest of his way through scho
ol, he now knew he would end up writing briefs in a back-room for people who weren’t as smart as he was. On consideration his leaving was not such a disaster, it just seemed like it at the time, “I didn’t figure I’d amount to much then.”

  He was undecided about his future. If he could win his scholarship back he could go back to his studies, but he was no longer sure that was his best option. Friends on the lot said, “Duke just lit up when he talked football,” but his shoulder took over a year to heal and by then he’d accepted he wasn’t such a special player and he suspected he’d never make it back onto the first string. He had missed so much training and lost too much ground to other, better, faster players. He could surf, swim, ride and take part in all the other sports he loved but he could no longer pay his way playing football.

  Years later whilst making a film about football where he played the part of a coach himself he badly injured the same shoulder causing long term and far reaching damage. As far back as he could remember that shoulder had hurt and the movement of his right arm been severely restricted. Whenever he fell off a horse in some stunt he inevitably landed on it, when he got hit in a staged fight it was always that shoulder that took the full brunt of the blow. He believed fellow actors had an ability to find it, like homing pigeons drawn to a loft.

  All in all then, just another rotten year. His indecision about the coming ones left him irritable and he began losing interest in what was going on around him. He started drinking heavily, even by his standards, as he tried to drown his sorrows in whiskey. He brooded, was depressed and felt tired. All he wanted was to be with Josie, but even when he was with her, all was not well. She told him she loved him, but it didn’t seem like it to him. Too often she did what her parents told her to do rather than what he wanted. He was all too aware they didn’t approve of their Catholic, church-going daughter dating him. In part he even agreed with them; he had no career prospects, no social status and no future. He was not Catholic, and worst of all, his parents were separated. Dr and Mrs Saenz conceded that he was handsome, dashing even. He dressed well, was polite, courteous, well spoken, very gentle and they understood why Josephine had fallen in love with such a nice boy. Still, they believed she would get over her crush and whilst they didn’t stop her seeing him, knowing it would only make matters worse, they repeatedly pointed out his faults, belabouring the issue of the amount he drank. He was allowed to see her twice a week, but her parents made sure she also met other men. Duke was left in no doubt, they considered him a most ineligible suitor for their daughter.