by Scott Eyman
Clyde had been forced to learn the piano as a young boy, so he told Duke that he could choose any musical instrument he wanted to play. Duke chose the banjo. His teacher was a boy named Fat Stockbridge, who was a year or two older. But all of Duke’s extracurricular activities meant that he didn’t have any time for practice. When he and Stockbridge would get together, Duke would have made no progress, so Stockbridge would amuse himself by playing dirty songs on the banjo. A few years later, Morrison pawned his banjo to pay for a fraternity weekend at Lake Arrowhead. “That was the end of my musical career,” he would observe.
Money was tight—money would be tight for decades. Recreation had to be grabbed in an impromptu fashion. He learned to swim in the legendarily shallow Los Angeles River and recalled raucous weekends on the waterfront.
“Me and a bunch of kids would come down to the Balboa Peninsula to do some ‘poor boy sailing’ in these round bottom boats. I remember we all used to go over to this big mud flat over there and do surf dives in the mud.”
A surf dive?
A surf dive, he would explain, was accomplished by following a wave back to the ocean and then diving, belly down, into a long slide on the slippery mud. “It was a lot of fun. And then we’d go over to the flat by the pier and do the same thing there until we were just covered with this mud. And then we’d run over to the pier and run all the girls off while yelling and jumping around in this dried mud.”
It was a simpler time. But the purity of these pastimes, which had probably been practiced since the Civil War, never left him. Nor would the scalding humiliation implied by the term “poor boy sailing.”
One of his father’s failed pharmacies was in the Jensen Building in Glendale, which also housed a movie theater. The man who ran the theater was a friend of Clyde’s, so he let his movie-struck son go to the movies as often as possible. Duke remembered seeing The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse twice a day for the entire week it played in Glendale, although, in common with most of young America, his favorite actor was not Rudolph Valentino but Douglas Fairbanks. “I admired his dueling, his stunts, his fearlessness in the face of danger, and his impish grin when he was about to kiss his lady-love.”
After Fairbanks, Duke’s favorite actor was Harry Carey, because, he remembered, “he looked real.” In time, Duke would replace Harry Carey as John Ford’s equally real man of the West, and Carey would become an important influence on Wayne’s sense of acting, although the two had very different backgrounds.1
The neighborhood kids played cowboys and Indians, but they also played “movies”; that is, the kids would pretend to be actors, or a director, or even a cameraman—the camera was made out of a cigar box. When it was young Morrison’s turn to be the hero, he would usually mimic Fairbanks, and once he remembered leaping out of a second-story window while holding on to some grape vines. “I ruined a beautiful grape arbor,” he said.
The Glendale Evening News reported in the summer of 1922 that young Morrison was part of a large delegation of boys from the local YMCA to attend a camp on Catalina Island. As 1923 got under way, Clyde Morrison rated a small article in the local paper: “To C. L. Morrison falls the honor and responsibility of the management of the Jensen’s Palace Grand drug store. Mr. Morrison is a well known drug store man to Glendalians . . . he has conducted a business of his own and has also been connected with the Roberts and Echols drug stores.”
Early in 1923, Duke took another YMCA cruise, this time to the Santa Cruz Islands. By 1923, young Morrison was a fledgling football star, playing at 155 pounds for an excellent Glendale High team. In November, Glendale High came from behind to beat archrival San Bernardino 15–10 in the semifinal for the state championship. Duke played left guard on both offense and defense, and the local paper’s breathless reportage left no doubt that Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen were going to have some competition: “The whole line played well . . . Dotson, Morrison, Brucker and Phillipps showed up well both on offensive and defensive.”
“Morrison was supposed to be opposite the prep guard in Southern California,” reported the Glendale Evening News’ high school football reporter. “If he was, Morrison has established his right to that title, for he made that jackrabbit look like a fuzzy bunny. He also uncorked some good points when [teammate Howard] Elliott was taken out.”
At this point, Duke’s interests focused mostly on athletics, but he was also developing an interest in performing. That said, athletics definitely had the edge. He played everything and he played it well. A neighborhood girl named Mildred Power remembered that she used to stand outside a fence on East Broadway where the local boys erected a makeshift basketball court. The most prominent of them, by dint of his size, curly hair, and overall good looks, was young Morrison. “Duke was the tallest and the most handsome thing you ever saw. I was in awe.”
Throughout these years, the Morrison family was moving constantly. The Glendale public library doesn’t have a complete run of city directories, but the ones they do have show different addresses for the family nearly every year between 1915 and 1925. They first show up in Glendale in 1915 living at 421 South Isabel; a year later they’re at 315 South Geneva. By 1919 they’re at 443 West Colorado; two years after that they’re at 815 South Central; and in 1922 they’re at 129 South Kenwood.
What makes all this intriguing is that Clyde Morrison bought a six-room house in 1920. The address was 313 Garfield Avenue. Either he rented the house out, or, more likely, lost it soon after buying it—rental income would have made a yearly move unnecessary. Wayne’s attitude toward his father gradually became one of affectionate forbearance. He evinced sympathy for him and the values he taught him, which included football. “I was very envious of Duke,” said a Glendale friend named Frank Hoyt. “His father would use every spare moment to teach him how to pass the ball and tackle. They were very close.”
Morrison was regarded as a top athlete, but with a slight problem: “He could have been a great football player, but he never wanted to hurt anybody,” said one teammate. The family always needed money, so Duke learned the value of constant effort. Eugene Clarke, a friend in the Glendale period who followed Duke to USC, remembered that they worked on ice wagons, ran errands, mowed lawns, and filled in the times they weren’t working by playing baseball and football.
There are people who always look like themselves, even as children, and Duke Morrison was one of them. As a boy, his face was round, but his eyes already had their familiar oriental shape. By the time he entered high school, he had definitely begun to assume the form the world would know. He was lean and very tall, over six feet, with dark, curly brown hair. He had another growth spurt in high school and by graduation weighed 170 and had assumed his full height of six feet and three and three quarter inches. His face lengthened, which made his cheekbones more prominent, and his blue eyes peered out from behind almond-shaped lids. He was gorgeous.
“I don’t think it’s possible to realize from watching his movies how absolutely stunningly handsome he was then,” remembered a classmate named Dorothy Hacker. “His looks alone could stop traffic. He was about the handsomest young man that ever walked on two legs.”
Dorothy Hacker sounds as if she was carrying a blazing torch for Duke Morrison, but she wasn’t the only one. “My girlfriend and I used to go into the drugstore,” said Ruth Conrad. “I had a crush on him, but I don’t know whether he ever realized.”
Duke’s only problem with women was shyness. “He was very bashful with girls in high school,” said Dorothy Hacker. “He was very popular, but as far as I know he didn’t date in those days.”
The record, in the form of the 1924–1925 Glendale Union High School yearbook, The Stylus, reports that Duke Morrison was in serious training to be a big man on campus. He was on the sports staff of the school paper, one of the student assistants in the cafeteria, received a bronze pin for scholastic honors, was in the Boy’s G club. He also studied journalism, and that bore fruit in some breathless sports stories bylined �
�M.M.M.” in the Explosion—the Glendale High School newspaper:
By winning today’s game from the Covina “Colts,” Glendale can cinch the league title. The fracas this afternoon will be the hardest league game because there is so much at stake and because the teams are so evenly matched.
Both teams have nine lettermen back; both teams have about the same amount of avoirdupois to back up against. Glendale is noted for its end around play as ground gainers, likewise Covina has the same style plays.
Other sports stories Duke Morrison wrote embodied much the same enthusiasm, not to mention a flamboyant vocabulary:
Facing Alhambra today in the third league game of the season, Glendale will have much different opposition than she had last week, when she trounced the “Wildcats” 25–0. As in the case of the Citrus-Glendale game, the two opposing teams have never been beaten by a high school team; this alone insures a hard fight for honors in this afternoon’s tussle.
Glendale’s varsity has more than the Alhambra team to fight when it enters the field today; it must also conquer overconfidence.
The young man liked his semicolons, and apparently never turned down an extracurricular activity—he was also in charge of advertising for the school paper.
In all of Duke’s reminiscences of his time in high school, he never pointed out his early interest in performing, because that would have run counter to his preferred narrative of falling into show business by accident. But he appeared in the school play—Marc Connelly’s Dulcy—in the role of Mr. Forbes; he appeared in the senior play as well—The First Lady of the Land, a historical drama about James and Dolley Madison and Aaron Burr.
When he wasn’t in front of the footlights, he was behind the scenes, working on the stage crew. Wayne loved his drama teacher, so when she suggested that he give Cardinal Wolsey’s farewell speech with two days’ notice, he decided to go for it.
“I studied like a son of a bitch,” he told me. He traveled to the Pasadena Playhouse, where the competition was taking place, to find a group of young actors who, as he put it, “were all so fucking Shakespearean. I felt like a goddamned fool up there.” He froze up.
There was a similar contest for best essay, and young Duke won the contest for a piece he wrote on World War I. The award was the opportunity to recite the essay at the graduation ceremonies.
There was a line in his essay that went, “The worst things the Germans had done . . .” but as Duke rehearsed, he kept forgetting the word “had.” His teacher was helping him rehearse, and she insisted over and over again that if he left out the word “had” he’d sound like an oaf, so he focused hard on that single word.
Came the day when the essay was to be recited, Duke looked right at his teacher and said, “The worst thing the Germans HAD done . . .” and promptly went completely blank. After a few seconds of struggle, he simply bowed and walked off the stage.
By this time Duke Morrison was a serious overachiever, more than comfortable academically, with a demonstrable bent for the public arena. There were also unconfirmed rumors that the parents of the attractive girls at Glendale High didn’t want their daughters to date him because they thought he ran with a fast crowd. Members of that crowd stoutly denied the charge.
“He was just a good, clean-cut guy,” remembered his best friend, Ralf Eckles. “We were raised that way.” But rambunctious exuberance was beginning to be a prominent feature of Morrison’s personality. One day the pranks got a little out of hand. Eckles and Morrison spread asafetida, a gum resin used as an antispasmodic, around the halls and classrooms of Glendale High. It was a fairly vile chemical and everybody within smelling distance got nauseated.
A chemistry professor found the bottle and took it to Clyde Morrison, who asked his son to spell asafetida. Duke spelled it out exactly as it was on the label of the bottle, which misspelled the word. Clyde turned his son in, and both Eckles and Duke had to apologize in front of the entire school.
The yearbook had a fanciful preview of what the various students would be doing in the year 1940. The crystal ball for Duke Morrison involved him being president of the Glendale Ice Cream Company and authoring a book entitled The Most Famous Men Have Humble Beginnings.
His peers regarded him as a leader. “He was mature and conservative,” said Bob Hatch, who was vice president to Morrison’s president for the graduating class of 1925. “He had confidence and maturity that most of us didn’t have . . . he was a good leader.” Even his teachers liked him; Park Turrell, who taught chemistry, remembered Morrison as a “fine student who got an A in [the] course.”
As nearly as Ralf Eckles could recall, the boys met in fifth grade. Eckles remembered his friend as always in control of himself, “never in trouble and not looking for it.” The closest the two boys came to juvenile delinquency was trying to sneak into the Palace Grand movie theater. On the other hand, Saturday nights could get a little dull in Glendale.
“Our Saturday night pastime,” remembered Eckles, “was to get a case of rotten eggs or old tomatoes, and take my father’s car, which had a rumble seat. The old streetcars used to have an open section at the rear that people would stand on during the summer. We had lots of fun peppering them with eggs and tomatoes.”
The boys’ other casual pastimes involved greasing the tracks of the Eagle Rock–Glendale streetcar and watching it slide backward downhill. One time a classmate took his father’s Reo automobile, which came with balloon tires. Morrison and Eckles deflated the tires and crossed a train trestle with the car. “There were five or six of us in that car and the trestle was a little narrow, but we made it.”
The same group rented a cabin in Big Bear and got stuck in a snowstorm. “Duke and I were outside the car, trying to find the road. Some rangers came by and started yelling at us. They told us we were on the lake. We could have gone right through the ice!”
Another close friend was a diminutive young man named Bob Bradbury, whose father was a film director who would make a dozen or so films with young Morrison. Bob Bradbury would change his name to Bob Steele and become a western star, not to mention nearly a lifelong presence around his high school buddy.
By the time Duke graduated from high school in 1925, he was president of the senior class, president of the Latin Society, president of the Lettermen’s Club, on the staff of the school newspaper, chairman of the Senior Dance, chairman of the Ring Committee, and a member of the debate team. He remembered that he graduated with a 94 average.
This man who would excel at playing outsiders was as a boy a consummate insider, popular with his classmates, obviously destined for great things. In the years to come, he would be amused by the gap between his image—which, it must be pointed out, he strenuously cultivated—and the man he started out to be. “This so-called last of the cowboys,” he would say with an amused smile. “I could say ‘isn’t’ as well as ‘ain’t.’ ”
Duke gave some thought to a career in the Navy, or said he did. He would tell his oldest son, Michael, that he took the test for admittance to Annapolis and came in third in the state. Unfortunately, each state got to place two people per year, and Morrison was odd man out. “A pimply-faced kid like you beat me out,” he told his son, then considered tactics not taken. “If they’d have known I could have played football, I’d have been in Annapolis. . . . You’ve gotta remember that Glendale was a small town, and we weren’t on to sophisticated things like buying athletes. I never even spoke to my high school coach about what I wanted to do.”
If Annapolis was out, Los Angeles was in. Between his academics and his football expertise, the boy was more than good enough for the University of Southern California. “One thing [USC] insisted [on] was that he have good grades,” remembered Vic Francy, who was attending USC while working as an assistant coach at Glendale High. “I checked his record and he had 19 A’s.” Beginning in September 1925, Duke Morrison began attending the University of Southern California on a football scholarship.
* * *
1. Ca
rey was born in the Bronx in 1878, the son of a judge. He initially studied to be a lawyer, then gave it up to write and act. Carey wrote a successful play called Montana, and used his own horse onstage every night, while the critics noted his walk—a “swagger” said one.
CHAPTER TWO
A USC athletic scholarship was not generous; it covered tuition, which was $280 a year, and one meal a day on weekdays—if you were on the varsity. “The training table was a five-day-a-week thing,” said Eugene Clarke, who lettered in football for Coach Howard Jones in 1930 and ’31. “We sort of had to scratch around for our other meals and for all of our meals on weekends. We were always pretty hungry by Monday mornings.”
When Duke Morrison reported for his first workout, Howard Jones liked what he saw. Morrison was taller than anybody else on the squad and was soon moved from guard, where he’d played in high school, to tackle.
The USC freshman team did spectacularly well, and so did Morrison; the team won all seven of their games, scoring 261 points to their opponents’ 20. Only three opponents managed to score at all, and the team’s first victim was the Glendale High team, who got creamed 47–0. Morrison must have had some conflicted loyalties, but not enough to stop him from earning a freshman letter and being singled out in the USC yearbook along with the rest of the line for his “work on the forward wall.”
Morrison was taking the standard pre-law curriculum, and soon became a leader of the freshman debate team. He joined Sigma Chi fraternity and was again well liked by everybody, although he lacked the aggression that is a necessary part of frat life. One time he got out of a hazing by putting some ketchup in his mouth and letting it dribble down his chin. The other boys thought he was bleeding and let him go, but then Morrison started laughing, and gave his own game away.