My father was born on May 26,1907, in Winterset, an Iowa town of less than 3,000 residents. His parents were Mary and Clyde Morrison, both Anglo-Saxon protestants. A football player in college, Clyde was muscular, quietly amusing, easygoing, and quick to trust others. He was a druggist, of Scottish, English, and Irish descent. Pure Irish, Mary had blue eyes and red hair. Vivacious, intelligent, ambitious, she dominated her husband and son.
When my father was born during their first year of marriage, his parents named him Marion Michael Morrison. When Marion turned five, his parents bore a second son named Robert. It was then that my father’s life flipped upside down.
His mother chose her youngest boy to shower with love, saving only what trickly drops remained for my father. My dad resented his mom, even while aching for her love. Perhaps the rejection he felt as a child later influenced the unsettling way my father behaved toward me—lavishing me with affection, demanding my constant reassurance that I loved him back. Perhaps, after all those years, he was still trying to fill a void that cast such painful shadows over his childhood.
Night after night, my father’s parents fought bitterly. Mary was a perfectionist, Clyde a romantic and dreamer. While my father listened, his mother berated his dad, usually beginning with his lack for making money and his over-willingness to extend his customers credit, then spilling into all the other ways he had left her disappointed. Mary often threatened to leave her husband, stopping only when Clyde fell ill and began coughing blood. Clyde had tuberculosis, and a doctor said he would die if he remained in Iowa. The Morrisons moved westward in 1915, to the dry heat of Palmdale, California.
I doubt if they knew what they were getting into. At the desolate edge of the Mojave desert, with its hot, bone-dry winds, the Morrison’s new home had no gas, electricity, or running water. As my father once told a writer, their rural property teemed with reptiles and rodents. “I don’t mean just a few,” my father said. “Seems to me like there musta been millions. The more you killed, the more they kept on comin’.” My dad had recurring nightmares, about greasy rattlesnakes cornering him as he tried to scream out. As the snakes crept through his subconscious, my father would sweat and moan in the desert night.
Despite the harshness of the new land, Clyde was determined to homestead. He grew corn in the desert and actually had one plentiful harvest. The volatile market plunged, though, and the family barely earned enough to buy food. Mary branded her husband a failure. She doted more and more blatantly on Robert, leaving my father embittered, feeling unloved by the most important woman in his life.
He found no refuge at school. Rising at five A.M., he walked four miles to his classroom, all the while dreading what awaited him. Tall for his age and still exceedingly thin, he also spoke with an accent his California schoolmates had never heard. My father was ridiculed, especially for his name, which he despised. The older boys called Marion “little girl.” They asked him why he wore pants instead of a skirt. I think one of the reasons my father frequently acted so macho in later life was to compensate for this boyhood torment; I believe it scarred him deeply.
For the lonely, impoverished Morrisons, one year in the Mojave desert felt like ten. In 1916 they moved west again, this time to Glendale, where Clyde went back to working at a drugstore, and where money still was short. Nine-year-old Marion acquired a second-hand bicycle. He got a paper route and delivered the Los Angeles Examiner. On his daily route, my father’s springy-haired Airedale trotted alongside him. He had named the dog Little Duke, and that’s how my father landed his world-famous nickname. Some friendly Glendale fireman, seeing my dad and his dog together day after day, started calling my father “Big Duke.” Soon, it shortened to Duke. The monicker stuck, and only his mother continued calling him Marion.
One morning in eighth grade my father approached the firehouse with a gashed lip and a purple eye. He threw down their newspaper, attempting an escape without explanation, but the firemen called him over. My father confessed: he’d been attacked, again, by the same cruel bully at school. One of the firemen, a former professional boxer, taught my father to fistfight. His aggressive new skills notwithstanding, my father continued avoiding the boy, determining where he was likely to be, then going elsewhere. After school one day the boy found him. My father said he felt scared, but fought through his fear and punched the boy in the eye. Unlike so many bullies, this one did not turn and run the first time he was struck back. He and my father fought until both were sore and bloodied. As my father told the story, the boy never touched him again.
Though still slim and sensitive to slights, his confidence bloomed when he starred as a pulling guard in football at talent-laden Glendale High. While learning to drink on weekends with teammates, during the week my dad excelled at school. He wrote for his high school newspaper, joined a debate team, and became a voracious reader, a habit he would indulge the rest of his life. By senior year he was earning straight A’s. Vowing to earn a college degree, which he knew his parents couldn’t afford, my father applied to the U.S. Naval Academy. He thought they would pay for his education, and armed with that he could learn to be a lawyer. But my dad was rejected.
He turned back to football, and the University of Southern California, which had offered him a scholarship to play offensive line. Grabbing it, my father enrolled in pre-law. Just as he was about to go home at the end of his freshman year, he discovered his parents’ marriage was ending. He was not exactly surprised, but divorce in 1920s America was hardly the commonplace it is today, and my father felt shamed and scandalized. In retreat from the two angry voices of his childhood, he distanced himself from both parents. Rather than go home and take sides, he asked his coach, Howard Jones, to help him secure a job for the summer. Jones sent my dad right to the lot at Fox, and told him to ask for Tom Mix, the cowboy star who loved USC football, and for whom Jones provided box seats for all USC home games. In return, Mix had promised Jones he’d give summer jobs to his players.
Mix took my dad to his favorite bar, where the actor and athlete got drunk. Mix promised my father two jobs—one as his personal trainer, one as an extra in the star’s next movie. But when my father reported to work, he had a job moving furniture and props from set to set. “I was also a grip,” my father used to recall. “Around the rest of the country, they call that a janitor.”
One day at Fox my father spotted Tom Mix, resplendent in the red-leather backseat of a limousine, its black doors embossed with his gold initials. Reintroducing himself, my dad politely reminded Mix of their meeting. Deadpan, the actor turned away without a word, dismissing my fuming father. Perhaps this first ugly impression later had something to do with my father’s disdain for industry liars and phonies. “There’s some real SOB’s in this business,” my father used to tell me.
That summer, working as a prop man on the set of Mother Machree, he first encountered John Ford, thirty-one years old and already supremely gifted. In those days Ford was in the habit of hiring the USC football team as extras for his cavalry movies. My dad worked on a few, unbilled, sometimes never making the final cut. Regardless, the Fox directors saw my father on film and sensed his raw appeal. “Dammit,” said the legendary director Raoul Walsh, “the son of a bitch looked like a man.”
As the nation inched nearer to the Depression, my father plunged into a malaise of his own. His second year at USC, spanning 1926 and 1927, was one of life’s critical junctures after which nothing is ever the same. First, he was fixed up with a girl named Carmen Saenz, but fell madly in love with her dark-haired sister Josephine (who would someday become his first wife). His sophomore year he also made varsity football, part of a celebrated team that captivated Los Angeles. That November, the season practically over, my father went bodysurfing one morning, and was pounded into the shoreline by a late-cresting wave. With his right shoulder muscle ripped, he kept going to practice all week, traumatizing the tissue even more. Though my father stayed on the roster and received his varsity letter, his shoulder would not allow him to play football. Unable to perform, my dad would lose his scholarship.
His glory days shockingly over, he sulked and received poor grades. At the end of his second semester, feeling nervous about his future, my father asked John Ford for a fulltime summer job at Fox. Planning to earn enough to pay his fall tuition, my dad never returned to college. He was twenty years old, the same age I was when I left USC nearly half a century later.
At Fox my father did prop and stunt work. Rehabilitating his shoulder, he performed strenuous workouts at the old and famous Hollywood Athletic Club. Then in 1928, Hangman’s House was released. This John Ford movie had songs and the sound effects of bells and whistles, but the actors were silent and the dialogue was in subtitles. Directed by Ford and produced by Fox, Hangman’s House was my father’s first credited role. It was also the first time John Wayne’s face could clearly be seen on celluloid. He played an Irish peasant, a spectator at a horse race, who takes off his white cap at the end of a thrilling finish, busts down a white picket fence with some other fans, and sprints into the track. It was a turning point in his life. Seeing himself on-screen lifted my father out of his doldrums, gave new rise to his dreams.
For better and worse, John Wayne was hooked on making movies.