American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  “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.)

  Duke followed his work in that movie with Ford’s The Black Watch (1929), the director’s first all-talking film, a British-army-in-India saga again starring McLaglen.18 Duke was put in charge of props and did an unbilled walk-on, along with the then-unknown Randolph Scott. For Ford’s 1929 Salute, an Army-Navy football film, he did props and extra work on the field, along with some members of USC’s 1929 football team, each of whom was paid $50 a week (up from the $35 they were offered, after Duke successfully argued with the studio for the extra $15 for him and each member of the team).19

  One of USC’s players was Wardell (Ward) Bond, whom Ford liked because he was strong-looking with a face like a bulldog, and Ford thought it would make Bond stand out. Upon reviewing the team Ford yelled out, “I want the big ugly guy.” Bond, however, was nearly fired during filming for exceeding his daily food allowance of $20 a day. He was a big eater, especially when the food was (almost) free. When Duke stood up for Bond, he was fired instead; he was rehired only after Bond organized a strike among the football players and Ford, in a move of solidarity, purposely exceeded his own food per diem, daring the studio to fire him too. Duke was quietly rehired and the strike went away. Ford liked both boys: “Ward Bond and Wayne were both so perfectly natural, so when I needed a couple of fellows to speak some lines, I picked them and they ended up with [unbilled] parts.”

  Duke and the entire USC team went directly into Eddie Cline’s footballer, The Forward Pass, followed by A. F. Erickson’s The Lone Star Ranger, an oater in which he served as a horse wrangler, stunt double, and bit player. John Ford then directed a film called Men Without Women (during production known as Submarine), the story of fourteen men trapped in a disabled submarine, noteworthy among other things as the first collaboration between Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols.20 Men Without Women starred George O’Brien, and to give Duke a chance to earn more money, Ford hired him to perform several stunts during the film’s diving sequences, and to act in two uncredited parts, a sailor in the doomed submarine and a radio operator on the rescue ship.

  With the assistance of the U.S. Navy, which loaned the production the use of a fleet submarine, Ford wanted to shoot a scene on location both on and near the island of Santa Catalina that required a stuntman to jump from the ship into the sea. A yacht was anchored offshore with an air pump ready to agitate the waters for the duration of the shoot, but it wasn’t needed because a storm had churned up the ocean. That made it an even more dangerous stunt; since the weather couldn’t be controlled, the two assigned stuntmen refused to make the dive, even with the extra hazard pay of $75 for each scene.

  Pappy was furious. According to Hedda Hopper, an on-set observer at the invitation of the director, “Ford turned to Wayne who was standing around, cranking the pump and said, ‘Over you go. Show these chicken-livered slobs up.’ ”

  Ford himself later recalled the incident this way: “A blank of a blank blank [sic] storm came up and our two blankety blank [sic] stuntmen who were supposed to come up in bubbles, like they’d been shot out of an escape hatch, said it was too rough to work . . . Well, Duke was standing on the top deck of this boat we were on. He wasn’t supposed to go in the water at all, but I asked him if he’d try this stunt. He never said a word, except ‘Sure.’ Dove right into the cold water from that deck. I knew then that boy had the stuff and was going places.”

  Although he figured he was due the extra money for all the stunt work he did that day, when it came time to sign his work sheet, Duke saw he was only being credited $7.50 for pump cranking. When he asked the production paymaster why, he was told that he wasn’t listed as a stuntman, and therefore, he couldn’t receive stuntman pay. He desperately needed the extra money but said nothing about it. He didn’t want to be seen as a troublemaker, especially to Ford, who hated complainers. “I haven’t a thing to squawk about. I’m just a lucky ham,” was all he would say. On the twenty-six-mile boat ride back to the mainland, he made up his losses by winning $600 in a high-stakes poker game with some of the crew.

  IN ADDITION TO ALL THE work and extra money he had in his pockets, after taking care of Robert, his mother, and his father, he still had enough left over to ask Josie out. She accepted, and after only a few dates, he told her he had a steady job with enough money to be able to take care of her, and he asked Josie to marry him. She said yes, if her father gave his approval. Duke went to him and he didn’t. He left empty-handed and disappointed but took it like the man he told Josie he had become. He was sure he would eventually be able to change her father’s mind.

  BY THE END OF 1929, Duke had become a familiar face with the Fox Studio stars, contract players, and off-screen workers who busily crisscrossed the lot like ants on a hill. He met and became good friends with one of them, Ewing Scott, a young assistant director who, like Duke, liked to have a good time at the end of the working day. They started hanging out together nights, for dinner and drinks, sometimes skipping dinner and going straight to the drinks. After a few, they would confide their sorrows and complaints to each other about the injustices of those who worked at the low end of the studio. Duke also poured his heart out to Scott about his problems with Josie. Scott listened patiently and his answer was always the same. Let’s have another round. By eleven each night, they were both pretty much done, Duke in his cups, Scott feeling no pain.

  Somehow, the next morning, Duke always made it to the studio on time no matter how early the call, available for whatever anyone needed him for that day, all the while keeping his eyes and ears open, watching how the stars did their magic in front of the cameras, and how the crews could build a dream out of two-by-fours, hammers, nails, paint, and lights. He continued to get uncredited walk-ons and extra work mostly in props, a job made easier by the massive air-hangar-size prop warehouse Fox had; if he couldn’t find what he wanted there, nearby rental outlets kept full inventories of whatever junk a director might want to use.

  Ford used him off-screen whenever he could because he liked him: “He was just a rangy, overgrown boy who looked too tall for his clothes. But there was something about the confident way he carried his body that caught my eyes.” He used Duke again for Born Reckless, Dudley Nichols, a sequel of sorts to Words and Music. Andrew Bennison was originally supposed to direct it, but he was fired after only four days and replaced by Ford (Bennison shares director screen credit). Duke did props on the film, which turned out to be a real stinker. Ev
en Andrew Sarris, one of Ford’s greatest admirers, called it, “By any standard, one of the worst movies ever to come out of Hollywood.”

  Next up for Duke was Sidney Lanfield’s Cheer Up and Smile (1930), another football film, this one with music and song. The film starred Arthur Lake, who would go on to play Dagwood Bumstead in the Blondie movies. Duke received screen credit for his bit in Cheer Up and Smile, again as “Duke Morrison.” After that, he played a card player in two scenes with a single line of dialogue in A. F. Erickson’s Rough Romance, with no accreditation.21

  And then, after years on the thankless sidelines, Duke Morrison was reborn as John Wayne, baptized on the road to stardom not by Ford, but former D. W. Griffith silent-actor-turned-director Raoul Walsh.

  If Ford was a director whose love of and devotion to family drove the action of his films, and Howard Hawks’s were action-oriented stories that propelled his characters through and out of their emotional entanglements, Raoul Walsh’s fall somewhere in between, with characters driven by a perverse love of power. Ford divided by Hawks equals Walsh.

  The wildly handsome and gruffly macho Walsh, who had helmed a number of silent films, played John Wilkes Booth in Griffith’s landmark 1915 The Birth of a Nation. After that, he appeared in or directed a number of silent films until 1929, when, along with Irving Cumming, he got a chance to direct Fox’s first western “talkie.” It was called In Old Arizona and proved a huge hit with audiences.

  The film introduced two new things to American moviegoers, the character of “the Cisco Kid,” here played by Warner Baxter (later in movies and TV by Duncan Renaldo), the first screen appearance of the character that originally appeared in O. Henry’s short story, “The Caballero’s Way.” Baxter won an Academy Award for his performance, and the film was nominated for four more. Walsh had originally been set to play the Cisco Kid himself until he was in a freak auto accident when a jackrabbit crashed through the windshield of the vehicle he was driving. It cost him his right eye, which he kept covered with a black patch the rest of his life and put an end to his acting career. The other thing the sound film Old Arizona introduced to the world was the singing cowboy. In the film, when Baxter, as Cisco, sang “My Tonia,” a new and absurd genre was born.

  Following the huge commercial success of In Old Arizona, Fox bought a new script for Walsh to direct called The Big Trail, the most expensive, most ambitious film the studio would make that year. He had heard that Paramount Pictures had developed something called Magnafilm, a 56 mm negative frame that enlarged and widened the movie screen from the standard 1.33.1 ratio that had been in place since 1892, to 1.65.1. William Fox ordered his technical people to come up with something better. In 1929, they came up with “Grandeur,” a 70 mm process that could project a widescreen 2.20.1 image (65 mm for film, 5 mm for optical sound tracks). Fox ordered Walsh to film The Big Trail in Grandeur.

  The studio head had a lot riding on this film. He had recently tried, unsuccessfully, to take over MGM, which itself was caught in the expensive silent-to-sound upgrade, and when Fox failed, he faced an arduous and expensive lawsuit from the government, instigated by Louis B. Mayer, who had strong connections in the nation’s capital, charging him with having violated antitrust laws. Fox now needed a hit, a big one, to fight the lawsuit and keep his studio. A bad car accident and the stock market crash made things even worse.

  WALSH’S FIRST CHOICE TO PLAY the leading role of Breck Coleman in The Big Trail was everybody’s first choice for any western, Tom Mix, who was at the time making another film and had to turn down the role. Walsh’s second pick was Gary Cooper, red-hot after Victor Fleming’s 1929’s The Virginian and Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco, in which, as a member of the French Foreign Legion (where, curiously, everybody speaks English), he drove Marlene Dietrich and every woman in America crazy, until at the end of the movie, Dietrich, in an act of symbolic sexual submission, removes her shoes and follows him into the desert. Women loved it, believing they would follow their man into the desert as well, if he looked like Gary Cooper. These were only two of the ten movies Cooper made between 1929 and 1930, but they were the two that made him the hottest star in Hollywood. He wanted to take the role in The Big Trail but was under contract to Samuel Goldwyn, who refused to lend out his valuable star to anyone.

  Bill Fox had already invested more than $100,000 in preproduction (not counting the cost of the technical development of Grandeur) but because he was still recovering from his auto accident, he assigned Winfield “Winnie” Sheehan, the head of production at Fox, to sit on Walsh to make sure got the film made on time and without going over budget. Sheehan, a former secretary to the New York City police commissioner, was a tough, no-nonsense executive who had helped Fox fight off the notorious Motion Picture Patents Corporation, otherwise known as the Edison Trust, in the pioneering days of early Hollywood. Fox kept the pressure on Sheehan, and he kept it on Walsh, who, despite all the urgency, hadn’t as yet shot a foot of film because he still didn’t have a leading man.

  Then, one afternoon while walking through the studio on the way to the commissary, Walsh happened to pass by and watch as a young man, shirtless and muscles rippling, dropped a large table he was carrying, balanced on his head, out of one of the studio’s prop warehouses. Walsh noticed that this furniture mover “had a western hang to his shoulders and a way of holding himself and moving which is typical of a westerner . . . He was tripping over the light cables, but he was big and looked like a he-man. . . . His hips were flat enough to fit into a pair of cowboy pants.” And there was something else. He had a face that, although not traditionally handsome in a leading man sort of way, bore more than a passing resemblance to Gary Cooper’s.

  Walsh asked the furniture mover if he could act.

  “Don’t be silly,” Duke said, “I can’t act.”

  For the first time Walsh heard the halting, slightly high-pitched voice that was to become familiar to audiences around the world. “Maybe you could learn.”

  “I couldn’t learn in a thousand years.”

  Walsh decided to screen-test him anyway.

  He scheduled one for Duke, which he failed because his voice sounded too nasal on film. The director told him to go to the top of Mulholland Drive and scream out loud until he was hoarse, so he would sound like a man of his size and build should. He then tested Duke again. Walsh liked what he heard and wanted to cast him on the spot, but Sheehan still wasn’t sure; this was a big, expensive movie to put on the shoulders of a complete unknown. Bill Fox had a lot riding on this, he reminded Walsh, and that it might be too risky to use someone in the lead whose acting abilities had not been proven. The next day, over Sheehan’s strong objections, Walsh gave Duke the part anyway. “I had to find someone immediately . . . What I needed was a feeling of honesty, of sincerity, and Wayne had it.”

  Sheehan, realizing he couldn’t prevent the young unknown from being in the film, then argued that the name Duke Morrison was too long for a marquee and didn’t suit the star of a western movie. He and Walsh spent a few hours together running down names. Walsh later remembered, “We called him Joe Doakes and Sidney Carton and all those sort of names—and I remembered I had read a book that I liked one time about ‘Mad’ Anthony Wayne. I thought this Wayne was a great character. So I said, ‘Let’s call him Anthony Wayne or Mad Wayne or whatever the hell you want to call him, call him Wayne.’ Well, they called him John Wayne. That’s how he got his name.” Short, tough, and sounding a lot like John Payne, who was already a big star. If people bought tickets thinking they were going to see John Payne, that would be all right too.

  Wayne remembered it this way: “The studio decided that Marion was not exactly a proper name for an American hero and Duke sounded a little too vulgar, for some reason. So they came up with John Wayne. It’s worked all right for me.” Some believe Wayne himself came up with John as an homage to John Ford.

  As production began in the spring of 1930, Duke Morrison cross-faded into John Wayne. “I was determi
ned to be as cooperative as possible,” Wayne later wrote in an unpublished memoir. “After all, Fox had given me a great many opportunities, first as a prop man and then as a stuntman and an actor. They started what was called a star buildup campaign for me. Who was I to complain?”

  Walsh then sent Wayne to the studio’s resident voice and acting coach, Lumsden Hare, a Broadway veteran who was a master teacher of the neutral sound of Eastern Standard speech. Fox hired Hare after the arrival of sound to train the studio’s actors and actresses how to speak for the microphone. Wayne hated it. “My teacher had me rolling my r’s like I was Edwin Booth playing Hamlet. I felt ridiculous.”

  Despite all the lessons, his voice remained higher than a baritone, accompanied by an intimidating squint of his eyes whenever he spoke, and the jerky arm and neck movements that made it look as if he were about to throw a punch every time he turned his head. To learn how to toss a knife for the picture, he was trained by stuntman and good friend Steve Clemente, and for roping, gun handling, and horseback riding, by another Fox pro, Jack Padgin.

  Production on The Big Trail began with a three-hundred-man crew on location in Yuma, Arizona, where Wayne referred to Walsh in football rather than film terms, as “Coach.” Wayne played Breck Coleman, a young trapper who is enlisted by the government to help cross the Oregon Trail and open up the Wild West to commerce, trade, and land development. A band of pioneers assembles at the Mississippi to begin their historic quest. Early on, Coleman is suspected of having killed a trapper for his furs while he suspects one of the other trailblazers, wagon boss Rod Flack (played by the handsome Broadway star Tyrone Power Sr.). Meanwhile, Coleman finds love with young Ruth Cameron (Marguerite Churchill), who is close with a gambler friend of Flack. Coleman and Flack lead the settlers west, while Flack does everything he can to have Coleman killed. Flack and his gambler friend have joined the caravan to avoid being hanged for previous crimes. The settlers’ trail ends in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where Coleman kills Flack and his friend, and settles down with Ruth.