… the “Duke”               …John Wayne May 26th, 1907 – June 11th, 1979 “John Wayne” was carefully fashioned out of the red clay of the 19th century American West and tailored to fit one Marion Michael Morrison from Winterset, Iowa. The name itself came from director Raoul Walsh who stole it from Revolutionary War General “Mad Anthony” Wayne and threw in the “John” because it sounded American. John Ford and Howard Hawks took it from there, molding and nurturing the image until it became so familiar to American audiences that the screen persona and the real person became one and the same…an American icon! But John Wayne, the icon, never forgot he was Marion Morrison and often observed that it made him feel like an imposter to use the name “Wayne”. Marion Robert Morrison (it was later changed to Michael when brother Robert Emmett came along) was born on May 26th, 1907 to Clyde and Mary Morrison in a small rural Iowa town with unpaved roads and historic covered bridges. Clyde, a pharmacist, and his wife were totally opposite in temperament and argued incessantly. Clyde was easygoing and friendly while Mary was ambitious and quick to anger (Marion clamed his hot temper came from his mother). In 1917, Clyde was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He sold his drugstore and moved his family westward to the Antelope Valley in California. The town of Lancaster, originally settled by Mexican railroad workers, had two paved streets, telephones and electric power. But the house on the Morrison property was small with no electric or running water and an outside privy. It did have other things in abundance….insects and snakes. Young Marion learned to ride and shoot while on horseback between crop rows looking for poisonous snakes and rabbits while his father farmed the land. His horizons widened considerably in this vast mountain and desert country. Marion usually rode his horse Jenny to school but after the mare died, he walked or caught a ride on a passing wagon. School posed another problem for the young boy. The name “Marion” didn’t sit too well with his schoolmates and he often went home dirty and bloodied. “Defending that first name taught me to fight at an early age”, he recalled later. Clyde Morrison, his health restored, gave up farming after 2 years and 2 failed crops and moved his family to nearby Glendale where he took a pharmacist’s job in the town’s drugstore. Marion took odd jobs after school to help out often accompanied by the family dog, a big Airedale called “Duke”. The local firemen began calling them “Big Duke” and “Little Duke”. Marion, approaching 6”4” soon outgrew the “little” and became just “Duke”. Duke excelled in school studies and sports, becoming a football star at Glendale High. He missed getting an appointment to Annapolis and took a football scholarship to USC. Between semesters, Morrison worked at Fox Studio working at everything from gofer to prop boy. It was just after his freshman year at USC that he heard his parents were separating. They would later divorce. During his sophomore year he dated several girls, among them Loretta’s sister Polly and her best friend Josie Saenz. Josephine Saenz was the daughter of a wealthy Hispanic business man and consul general in Los Angeles and very beautiful. She became his steady but because her family disliked him, they often met secretly. Then, in 1927 after his second year, Duke suffered an injury to his shoulder while surfing that ended his football career and he lost his scholarship. His college days were essentially over. Duke began work at Fox Studio in earnest first in the property department and then as a part time stunt man. He met John Ford on the set of “Mother Machree” and a lifelong friendship began that day. Ford gave him bit parts in “Hangman’s House”, “Salute”, and “Men Without Women” and also introduced him to Raoul Walsh who changed his name and put him in “The Big Trail”. “John Wayne” was on his way! In 1931, the new Wayne left Fox after two unsuccessful films and went to Columbia. In 1932, Columbia dropped his option after prez Harry Cohn became green-eyed over what he perceived to be Wayne’s attentions to a girl he was seeing at the time. Duke was picked up by Warner Bros. to do a series of “B” westerns where he was the star and he spent the next 10 years grinding out formula westerns at studios all along “Poverty Row” ( a name given to the smaller and cheaper studios). In 1933 Duke finally had enough money amassed to placate the Saenz family and wed Josie. They were married in Loretta Young’s garden because John was not Catholic, another blow to Josie’s very religious family. But after 6 years, the romance was almost gone out of the relationship and only the problems remained… cultural and religious differences plus Josie’s social lifestyle versus Duke’s heavy workload and his need for home and hearth afterward. Their first child, Michael, was born in 1934, their second, Antonia Maria, in 1935 but Duke was rarely home during those years. Between 1935 and 1952 he made 33 movies at Republic, 6 at Universal. Another son, Patrick, was born in 1938 and a daughter Melinda in 1940. But the marriage was going downhill and Duke was seeing other women. He also spent more time with his drinking buddies. Clyde Morrison died of a heart attack shortly after Patrick was born and John Ford became even more like a surrogate father to Duke Wayne. In professional matters, Ford’s word was law. While Wayne already knew how to handle action parts, Ford taught him how to act convincingly in dramatic sequences and romantic scenes. He must have learned well because several leading ladies fell hard. Marlene Dietrich made her wishes perfectly clear (he took her up on it for a while) and so did Joan Crawford (she got a no for her diary). Nothing lasting came of it because Duke disliked aggressive women. In 1941, John Wayne got his chance for superstardom. He continued to make westerns at Republic but was loaned out for more expensive films at paramount, Universal, RKO, and MGM when the big studios were losing their leading men to the war. He made a DeMille spectacular in Technicolor (“Reap the Wild Wind”) and fought WW II on film from sea to shining sea. He also left home and announced his separation from Josie. In the spring of 1942 Duke met Chata (Esperanza) Bauer while in Mexico looking over commercial property. Wayne had a penchant for Latino women who, he said had both beauty, pacifism and tended to be submissive to their husbands. Josie, crushed by their open affair, sued for legal separation and then, in 1943, divorce. She could never remarry so she put her energies into charitable affairs among Hollywood’s Catholic circle with Loretta Young and Irene Dunne. Duke married Chata three years later on January 17th,1946 (it seemed to take Duke longer than most to commit marriage). It may have been the biggest mistake of his life. In March , 1949 Wayne was installed as president of the Motion Picture alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a ultra-conservative group established to root out communism in the industry. Duke endorsed the HUAC headed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and would be severely criticized for this extreme right-wing political stand. He never apologized for it and continued to be vocal against anything that was, in his opinion, anti-American. Eventually Wayne realized Chata had only married him for what he could give her and soon felt used and degraded. The union endured for 6 years but Wayne stayed away from home more and more. When the end came, it was a very messy divorce. In the midst of the chaos, Duke met Pilar Palette who had come from Peru to Hollywood and Warner Bros. to make an English soundtrack for her film “Green Hell”. A chance meeting led to a more intimate relationship and they began to meet secretly to prevent scandal during the divorce proceddings which were dragging on and on. When Pilar found out she was pregnant she opted to get an abortion rather than cause Wayne to lose his career. It almost destroyed her. Meanwhile Chata continued to hurl accusations of abuse at Duke in divorce court and he continued to deny it all. In the end, both the temporary settlement and the final agreement reached by the judge were far less than Chata felt she deserved. But she never lived to spend it all. Esperanza (Chata) Bauer was found dead of a heart attack in the fall of 1954 in a room littered with empty liquor bottles. She was 38 years old. In June, 1954 Wayne began his next picture “The Conqueror” for RKO now woefully behind schedule due to the court trial. Shot on location in the Escalante Desert of St. George, Utah, it was about 140 miles from the atomic testing station site in Nevada. They were there for 6 weeks enduring heat up to 120F and working unaware of the danger in radioactive sand that had been in the direct path of fallout from nuclear tests. Some of the sand was even trucked back to the studio backlot for use in later re-takes. Forty or more of those working on this film died of cancer…including director Dick Powell, leading lady Susan Hayward, character players Agnes Moorehead, Thomas Gomez and Pedro Armendariz and…John Wayne. Many of them were smokers (Duke had a 3-pack-a-day habit) but the incidence of the disease was still overwhelming. Wayne and Pilar were married by a justice of the peace on November 1st, 1954 in Kona, Hawaii where he was making “The Sea Chase”. She was 26 and he was 47. In 1955 their first child, Aissa Marie, was born. A second child, John Ethan, was born 7 years later in 1962. Before leaving for Hawaii again in the summer of 1964 to do “In Harm’s Way” Wayne went to Scripps Clinic for a compulsory physical demanded by the insurance company before stars began a film. He had been coughing since leaving the Spain location for “Circus World” that past fall. He got a clean bill of health but the coughing continued. Back in California by late August he took Pilar’s advice and went back to Scripp’s for a thorough check-up. A malignant tumor the size of a golf ball was found in his left lung. It was removed leaving Duke with only one functioning lung. In 1966 Pilar gave him another daughter, Marisa. Duke was 59 and making a gallant effort to continue his lifestyle and work schedule as it had always been even though he was acutely aware of his own mortality. At the 1969 Academy Awards ceremonies John Wayne won his first Oscar for “True Grit”. Eyes full of tears, he acclaimed “Wow! If I’d known what I know now, I’d have put a patch on my eye thirty-five years ago.” In 1972 John Ford died of cancer and Duke was devastated. He had already lost his brother, Robert, to the disease. He was alone, living apart from Pilar and the children. During the filming of “McQ” he lived on his boat. His mood swings were supposedly the reason for the separation after 19 years of marriage. Never comfortable being alone for any length of time, Wayne began a relationship with Pat Stacy, his secretary that continued until his death. Duke’s last picture “The Shootist” wrapped in April of 1976. No one realized it would be his last and Wayne left in July for a personal appearance tour to publicize the picture. He also agreed to do some television specials but for the next 3 years he was sick most of the time. By 1977 he wasn’t up to anything longer than some television commercials. In 1979 cancer was discovered in his stomach. The entire stomach was removed and radiation treatments were prescribed. He was able to attend the 1978 Oscars ceremony in the spring of 1979 but on May 2nd, 1979 the cancer struck again. This time Duke had no more strength left to fight it. On June 9th, he called in the Archbishop of Panama and made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Two days later, John Wayne died. He was 72 years old. Headlines around the world acknowledged his death. In Tokyo, the banner headline read “Mr. America Passes On”. But Duke had chosen his own epitaph..”Feo, fuerte, y formal”….”He was ugly, he was strong but he had dignity”. Read more about John Wayne, his films and his life on the set and off in Arabella’s Notes. You will find his complete filmography at www.imdb.com