by C McGivern
Anyone who knew him at all understood that saying “No” was like waving a red flag at a bull. He may have seemed shy, polite and reticent, but above everything he was a fighter. Being told he was unwelcome in their home only served to make him all the more determined to slug it out for the prize and he stubbornly refused to accept “No” from Dr Saenz. He arranged to see Josie as often as he could. He may have been crushed by what had happened at college, but once he recognized the challenge he could not resist lifting himself for the fight in prospect.
They were tough times for Duke. He loved, respected and longed for Josie, but she also enraged him as no one else in his life ever did and at her hands he openly wept tears of bitter rejection, “She frustrated and confused me, but I could never have given my heart so completely had I not respected her.” And so they carried on, Duke increasingly frustrated, cursing the fate that had led him to Josie and to the beach on the day that cost him his future, and Josie sympathising with his urgent needs, unable to satisfy them.
He had lost football, law and was still unable to get Josie. He had decided not to go back to college, he no longer felt part of that set up, and excluded from the camaraderie he had known before, and at this point in the life of the man who was to become the epitome of machismo there was dark poetry. He spent many depressed hours pouring over the tribulations of Shelley, Byron and the other romantics who wrote of the hopelessness of love. Duke even tried his own hand at writing.
He and Josie argued all the time and Duke, who could not abide raised voices, was goaded into them by the strength of his feelings for her. It had been during one of their many heated exchanges that he finally blurted out that he had left college and was earning forty dollars a week at Fox Studios. He told her that should be enough for them to live on if she would marry him right then. Needless to say, when he asked her, he knew she wouldn’t even consider it and that her parents would never willingly allow her to marry him. Even though he had known what the answer would be, he was still angry when she told him, “You know I can’t.”
In 1928 he moved out of Pexy’s garage to rent a room nearer her home. He continued dating her despite every obstacle thrown in his path. He was, however, already suffering the bouts of depression that later swamped his life. He became discouraged and didn’t know how to get what he wanted. He had been fighting stubbornly, building up his savings, taking extra work, and had started doing some stunt work. By the standards of the times he was earning good money, easily enough to support a wife. But he was also, like his father, always lending money to friends, and the savings he put together seemed to pour through his fingers.
In a sudden fit of despair he decided he’d never be able to make enough to win Josie and he told her it was over, “Josie, I just can’t take anymore.” They both cried but when he took her home that night he didn’t let her out of the car and his hand didn’t brush her arm. There was no kiss. Her father had won and Duke’s resistance over, he finally gave up. Like his father, grandfather and great grandfather Duke decided to go west in search of a brighter future. He was running again; not forging a way forward as they had, but running away from a hopeless past. He went to San Francisco where he planned to find work on any ship in port. He loved stories of the sea and longed to be a sailor, now he saw his chance to live the life of adventurer. He sold everything he owned, including the car he had scratched around for, all his sports equipment, his books and his few clothes. He had started at USC with one case of belongings, now he was setting off on his own, with nothing. Things could only get better from here on in.
He planned having a wild time in a city where those “certain sort of girls” were readily available and where he could get Josie out of his system. He went after them with a vengeance, seeking revenge. He took everything he so badly needed and said, “I hoped I would never again feel guilty for having those needs!” But in San Francisco Duke discovered that was not the way things worked for him and he was left strangely unsatisfied. No matter how many women chased him he was only ever interested in one girl at a time and although it was uncomfortable, he found he had to be just a little bit in love before he could accept any of the offers that continued flooding in.
For only a very short time he tasted the exotic delicacies on offer in San Francisco. He didn’t enjoy himself or have the fun he’d anticipated, “It was like stumbling around in the dark and then suddenly being blinded by a flash of lightning for a brief moment. Most of the time I felt lost in the dark; I just wanted to be with Josie.” The only time he escaped her was when he passed out after a heavy drinking session. So he saw the sights, drank and partied, felt empty and alone, guilty and dirty in turn.
Desperate to escape America and Josie’s haunting influence, he scoured the port for work. There was nothing to be found. He was hiding in dreams, enthralled by the romance of his misery and frustration. He was twenty and even more reckless now than he had been as a child and he decided if he couldn’t get work, stowing away on a passing cruise ship might be a good adventure, at least it would be romantic. After checking out the destinations of some of the ships, he chose one sailing for Hawaii. Not caring about the consequences of his actions he walked up the gang plank and began mingling with other passengers. No one took any notice of him and a wild sense of excitement filled him as he ambled around, smiling and shaking hands with everyone he came across, “Course, really I shoulda’ felt foreboding and doom… shoulda’ remembered my earlier attempts at running away. Nothing I ever did then worked out like I expected.”
He had the clothes he stood in, a toothbrush, a comb, and some loose change in his pocket, “I was finished with the past... said all my farewells… when I looked out to sea I was searching for a future… I was hungry for happiness. I wandered round trying to look like I belonged, talking to passengers. I was looking for a place to settle, to hide, somewhere to sleep. It always looked so easy in the movies.”
In spite of his yearning to be a sailor this was actually the first time he’d ever been to sea. He felt completely alone on the ship in the middle of the ocean and he was both excited and frightened. He liked the sensation that man was only a very small and ultimately unimportant entity in the scheme of things, it scaled his problems down, and perhaps they didn’t even really matter at all. Life went on, regardless of anything he did or didn’t do. Later that was the very reason he was drawn back again and again to the sea.
His dramatic soul gazed out at the sight before him and in a symbolic, cinematic touch, he threw his loose change, all that was left to him of his old life, into the ocean. He wanted to start his new life completely uncluttered and he turned away from the rail to continue his search for a convenient hiding place. He crept stealthily in and out of the public rooms, looked for a lifeboat to climb into, searched for a coil of rope to curl up in. The lifeboats were too high, he could find no ropes, and when he went into the public rooms he began to be aware of the smell of food and the fact that he now had no money.
He hadn’t eaten before boarding and was, as ever, hungry. For Duke there was hunger and there was starvation, and even before the first night was over he was starving. Things would get a lot worse, but that night, despite the discomfort, it was all just part of the adventure, “My whole life was on the line, so to hell with dinner, a man should be hungry when he sets out to establish himself.”
By the next morning a growling and empty stomach caused him to doubt the philosophy. Whenever he told the story in the years that followed he made light of it; hunger was a feeling he had known in some degree most of his life. But it wasn’t funny to him then, and although the adventure may have been good in the telling, he wished he hadn’t been so stupid when he was twenty.
Things didn’t go the way he had expected when he first set off and he found out he lacked the basic instincts of the adventurer. He paced up and down outside every cabin on every deck looking for any scrap of food and found nothing. He craved a drink. He was on a ship full of bars and legal drink and he couldn�
��t get one. One evening he joined three men in a game of cards and he had winning hand after winning hand, “If I had been playing for money I would have won hundreds of dollars. Never before or since have I had such a run of luck. The bastards didn’t want to stop for dinner and they weren’t even buying drinks.”
Eventually he was discovered by a steward who turned him over to the captain. He was handcuffed and taken to a room below decks where he was held prisoner, after being fed stale sandwiches left by the card players, until being transferred to another ship going back to San Francisco. There he was handed over to the Harbor police who arrested him. He spent the day in jail before finally gathering the courage to ring John Ford who organised a speedy release and a ticket back to Los Angeles.
Duke no longer knew where home was but it seemed that forces, elemental and strong, carried him back to Hollywood where he had appointments to keep. He had no plan for the future but knew that, whatever the cost, however much it hurt, he wanted to spend it with Josie. He rushed straight to Balboa to tell her he loved her and couldn’t live without her. He told her he was going back to Fox where he would earn enough to support her. He was no longer a boy, and whilst his voyage had been a childishly petulant act, it was also a turning point in his life. He could not go back to being a college boy, struggling to earn a crust when he was already able to earn a man’s wage, “That was the time I really took a different view of pictures. I enjoyed the work and, because of my friendship with George O’Brien, the leading man at Fox, I felt I belonged on the lot. For the first time I knew that was where my future lay.”
It seemed to Josie and her parents that nothing had changed. Duke knew, everything had. From now on, though she held a place in his heart, she would have to share what he had to give with Hollywood. He wanted her, but he wanted a career in the movies too, he already needed it as much as he needed her.
In spring 1929 he was assigned to work on another Ford film, Salute, a story about naval cadets being shot at Annapolis. Duke jumped at the chance of seeing the school he had longed to go to as a cadet himself. He was also thrilled that Ford had offered him another chance. In fact the director was taking a keen interest in the developing career of odd-jobber Morrison and over the next years he began testing Duke in ways imperceptible to outsiders. He belittled him, befriended him, gave him extra responsibility and took it away again. Whatever was happening in Ford’s complex mind, Duke obviously, but unknowingly, passed all the tests.
Ford had already begun telling people about Duke’s potential in front of the camera but perhaps even he didn’t understand the power of their fast developing relationship. Many later suggested Ford was homosexual. If he was he was never open about it. He certainly feared intimacy, mistrusted love, and preferred the comfort of celibacy. He undoubtedly found the young Duke very attractive, seeing him with an artist’s eye, but if such attraction was homosexual in its connotations, Duke remained blissfully unaware of it. Both were always happiest in the company of men, possibly for different reasons. That didn’t make either of them homosexual and Ford’s behavior toward Duke was never, at any time, of an overtly sexual nature. If the director suspected homosexuality in himself he controlled his feelings, firmly repressing any sign of what he considered to be weakness in his character. Even at nineteen, and despite the frequent child-like lapses, Duke appeared everything a man should be and Ford could never have made any sexual approach toward this epitome of maleness. Duke’s heterosexuality was beyond doubt, and whilst the reasons for Ford’s interest in him remain open to conjecture, their relationship was certainly special, strong and unusual. In fact Ford himself went some way to explaining why he promoted the prop boy into one of the permanent members of his Stock Company, confirming that he had seen something deep inside Duke at a very early age, “I guess you could call it star power.”
For the next three years Duke remained a property man at Fox and he loved his work, setting the artefacts for scenes, arranging the other objects that actors carried to suggest personality, and helping to create the background for action sequences. He was highly regarded for his talent at the studio. He worked hard, was keen and interested in everything going on around him and he developed a great insight into the world of making films there.
The knowledge he gained stood him in good stead later when he turned to acting, and later still when he moved into directing his own productions, he admitted, “My mind, both as an actor and director, was conditioned by the work I did in my youth. I read somewhere that it took a certain minor talent to write, direct, produce or star in a movie, but that it took genius to be a good prop man. That made me, in some minor way, a genius too.” He learned the movie industry from the bottom up and received an education he could not have got anywhere else but on the Hollywood back lots.
He learned the importance of detail serving an apprenticeship behind the cameras, whilst his contemporaries and future colleagues rarely gave a thought to such trivia as they struggled to learn their lines and positions. To Duke, detail was the vital element in a good production and he never lost the sense of precision he acquired then. He remained the same artist all his working life, maintaining near infallible judgement in the handling of props for the next fifty years, “When I read a script I needed to know why a character did a certain thing, there had to be a point of action for me; when a character threw a cigarette butt into a flower pot I wanted to know what brand of cigarette it was, was there a cigarette case in evidence? I had to know what kind of pot the flowers were in, what type of flowers were they? Were they on a table?” His endless questions drove directors and producers mad at the time; he was fanatical about having things perfect, but his perseverance later made all the difference to John Wayne movies.
Even when he eventually stepped in front of the camera himself he still got excited about lighting and prop set-ups, and he often barked out orders to independent crews, “Take that one to the side… and please bring me that chair to sit on, bring that stone elephant over… yeah… that’ll do it.” And the crews seemed unable to resist his infectious enthusiasm as they jumped to carry out his instructions. Sometimes, if he suddenly realized he wasn’t in charge, he looked up, embarrassed, laughed and apologized, “Oh… sorry,” before getting straight back to business as usual a few moments later. He loved every second he spent working with cameras and film crews. He could be over-generous with his advice perhaps, but anyone who took the trouble to listen learned valuable lessons from the master prop man.
His eye for detail was so precise that whenever he chose gifts for friends or relatives he unfailingly knew what would suit who, and which size would fit them. He surprised people with gifts from all over the world, and many of his friends received the very ornament to perfectly compliment their decor. His enthusiasm for getting things right made him a great prop man, it also meant people often found a package on their doorstep containing the very thing they had been looking for! He never tired of “getting things right” and even at the end of his career he could be found twirling his six shooter or rifle off screen with the enthusiasm of a child playing with a toy, still practicing because he needed to perform perfectly.
He started in props but became just as interested in every aspect of filmmaking, going to enormous lengths to learn everything he could about each craft involved in the industry. He spent every spare moment he could at the lot, working from sunup to sunset, soaking up the knowledge that sustained his career through the next fifty years. There were no unions in Hollywood then and he moved freely from one trade to another. He became a decent carpenter as he helped build sets, he rigged lighting, carted and arranged furniture and got to know everything that went on behind the scenes. He developed an uncanny ability to visualize what a scene was going to look like long before it was shot and later in his career he rarely needed to look at the daily rushes to know what had been filmed the day before.
He enjoyed being around everyone involved in the movie industry and he responded to their energy; they all
led frantic lives as they struggled to meet demanding schedules. Their existence was abnormal, they spent most of the day in a fantasy land, surrounded by the producers of dreams and they compensated for their long hours of work in the bars around the studio at the end of each day. At the studio and in the bars Duke found a family atmosphere that held an obvious appeal. Everyone, involved in any capacity at Fox, knew everyone else, from the boss down to the prop boy and Duke felt more at home there than he had ever felt anywhere else. The instant he walked onto the lot at the crack of dawn he was relaxed, content, settled and focused. Much was demanded and expected of him, but that exactly suited his own needs and for the first time in his life he felt in control of his destiny. He had a regular job and many friends. He particularly enjoyed the company of George O’Brien who was already a big star but liked all the same things he did; talking, laughing and drinking. Because of their close friendship Duke felt he belonged and had found his place in the world.