Top Man—John Wayne

One summer afternoon, back in 1927, a hulking young USC football player called Duke Morrison plied a broom repetitiously on a Hollywood set, and found the going very monotonous indeed.

All day, while an exacting director named John Ford tried vainly for a tricky emotional scene, he had tossed brown paper leaves across the camera, then stepped in and swept them up to toss them all over again. Duke was earning money to get back to college and play varsity tackle, and what furrowed his rugged brow was not the art of the screen drama, but the fast Notre Dame fullback he’d have to stop next season. That camera crew tempers were short as firecracker fuses and John Ford anxiously chewing his handkerchief to confetti didn’t register on Duke a bit.

So when he heard, “Action!” again he chucked in his leaves and never noticed the rapt “This one’s it!” expression on the director’s face. Automatically, Duke ambled forward and started sweeping. Only when the air turned blue with outraged curses did he notice that the camera was still whirring. When he swivelled his startled mug into the lens he knew he had committed a sin in Hollywood as mortal as murdering your own grandmother. He had ruined a perfect “take.”

That chagrined stare on the set of Four Sons was the first performance John Wayne, as he’s known today, ever played in Hollywood. Needless to state, it never saw the light of a theater screen, nor did he get a nickel for the realistic job. But he did win an award.

After indignant huskies had grabbed him, “pantsed” him, and goosestepped him around the set, they decorated him with an iron cross twisted from ten-penny nails and bent him over double. From a running start, John Ford aimed a kick at his sittsfleisch and scored a goal. Duke didn’t get fired, but it wasn’t exactly an auspicious start in the picture business.

In the 24 years since that dismal day, a lot of movie film has spun through Hollywood cameras, and plenty of it has captured the rugged features and personality of John Wayne, the ex-prop boy turned actor. And as 1951 spins into 1952, he has won another award, this time one considerably more substantial: The readers of MODERN SCREEN have just named John Wayne the most popular male star of 1951, the walk-away winner of MODERN SCREEN’S famous Popularity Poll. And today things are very different for Duke all around.

John married Esperanza in 1946; she was: a movie star in Mexico.

Only a few months ago, Howard Hughes, who bosses RKO studios, buzzed for his production chief, “Tev” Tevlin. He explained that he was determined to star John Wayne in Flying Leathernecks, but that the star was shaking his head reluctantly. He liked the script fine, but after a man-killing schedule he was tired and wanted a vacation. So Howard Hughes had a question:

“What’s the highest price ever paid a Hollywood actor for one picture?” he inquired.

Tevlin did some quick mental research and came back with a rough answer—“Something slightly over $200,000.”

“Offer John Wayne $250,000 to make lying Leathernecks on a six weeks’ schedule,” Hughes ordered, “with a $17,000 guarantee for each day it runs over.”

Since Flying Leathernecks ran three lays past deadline, John Wayne collected $301,000, which is a lot of money even in Hollywood. But then John Wayne is a lot of man—in Hollywood or anywhere else. Howard Hughes, who is a shrewd operator, knew what he was buying. He was buying the biggest male box-office attraction in the whole world.

At 44, when most Hollywood heroes are fading fast or long since shoved out of the running, John Wayne is at the crest of his amazing career, which towers over all other he-man careers in Hollywood. In all the word implies, he’s the movies’ top man, unrivalled, nonpareil. But if you believe the people he works with, he has no more ego than a potato.

Duke calls his wife “Chata.” He has four children by a former marriage.

Last year when the nation’s theater exhibitors picked him as the biggest boxoffice draw in their annual “Fame Poll,” Duke was down in Mexico. His agent thought that the news rated a long distance call so he telephoned South of the Border the minute he learned it early one morning.

“Congratulations!” he enthused. “You’re head man of Hollywood! You’ve just won the ‘Fame Poll’!”

“What the hell’s that?” came back Duke. Then added grumpily, “You woke me up.”

At that point, nine of John Wayne’s pictures were playing simultaneously in these United States and in one city two theaters, cat-a-cornered from each other, both blazed out twin John Wayne bills on their marquees. That year he earned well over a half-million dollars, and looking over his starring commitments realized he was booked up clear into 1951. Duke’s reaction to all this was, “I guess I’m having a long string of luck.”

That modest theory, of course, is patently absurd. Duke Wayne has traveled a long and often rocky road to his fame. What got him there was that he traveled it the hard, straight way and stayed, as John Ford says, “always looking, always learning, until he mastered everything he ran into.”

By now John Wayne has run into 151 picture parts, and he’s starred in every one. He’s made them in three days, from start to finish, and in three years, which Jet Pilot will probably take, start to finish. His price has risen from $1,000 a movie to the big six-figured bait which Howard Hughes dangled to snare him for Flying Leathernecks. But the battered old beaver hat which Duke Wayne swiped years ago from John Ford has never become too small for his level head.

His acting made him top box-office star, but John produces hits, too.

Duke’s basic contract is still at Republic, but it’s really no contract at all—only a handshake with his boss, Herbert Yates. His agreement with John Ford is even less legal than that—just an unspoken understanding that whenever Ford wants Duke for a picture all he has to tell him is when.

In all his years spent in dog-eat-dog Hollywood John Wayne has never stooped to polish an apple, or play the movietown political or social game. In all his years around a prying, gossip-mad community he has never landed-in any scandal, although he’s never played it cozy or cautious. On the contrary, Duke’s had a ton of rogue male fun, with bottles and sometimes belles, when he was on the loose before and in between his marriages. But he’s had his sport like a gentleman and never hurt anybody, including himself. He’s made millions of dollars and while he’s still not a rich man, he’s met all his obligations and helped a lot of his less lucky friends meet theirs.

Along the way, he has never trumpeted his own horn or played to the grandstand, professionally or in private. Bev Barnett, his press agent of 13 years, still confesses, “I don’t know why he hires me.” Duke never notices whether his name’s in the papers or not. He hasn’t had an interview in over a year. He doesn’t prod any highly organized fan club to plug him. And not for a minute has he kowtowed to pressure or opinion of any kind.

Duke went through the divorce from his first wife, Josephine Saenz, a Catholic, knowing he might draw hurtful censure from religious groups; and he married his present wife, Esperanza, also a Catholic, in the Presbyterian church of his own faith. He took on the presidency of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, to fight Communism in Hollywood at a time when some influential circles in Hollywood were pink as sunsets and yelling “Fascist!” at everyone who called a Red a Red.

He’ll never outgrow Westerns. Fans like these kids won’t ever let him.

The day that Duke assumed his second term at that patriotic post, was the same day that a notorious Commie writer got the heave-ho at RKO, where Duke was making Leathernecks. Somehow the ousted scribbler coupled the coincidence, and figured it was John Wayne’s doing. That night in his dressing room Duke found a note.

“Dear Rat,” it read. “Congratulations on being named head rat of the Motion Picture Association of Rats.” And it went on phrased in the kind of raw, unsubtle insults a schoolboy might pen. It was signed with the writer’s name, but Duke thought it must be a gag. “No writer wrote that,” he reasoned, “it’s too crude.” However, a signature check proved it was real and Duke began to burn. “What’s this guy like?” he asked James Edward Grant, his favorite writer, who was there too. Jimmy saw the making of a rib. He thought he’d throw a scare into Duke.

“Why, he’s about your build, Duke,” he advised, “only a lot huskier—and considerably younger. In fact, if I remember right, he was Golden Gloves champ back in Chicago a few years ago.” But Duke was already yanking on his coat. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to find that guy and beat the living hell out of him,” stormed Wayne. He might have, too, if Ward Bond hadn’t breezed in at that moment, learned the score and protested, “Duke—hold it. You can’t hit that jerk. Why he’s only five feet tall, wears glasses, and can’t punch his way out of an ice cream cone!”

“Aw nuts,” Duke cooled down. “I never have any fun.”

Because Duke is a big man—he’s six-feet-four, 210 pounds and sleeps in an oversized bed—and because he leads a rock ’em and sock ’em life on the screen, a lot of legends swirl around his head as they swirl around any hero’s. One of them is that John Wayne is a truculent bruiser always itching for a fight. Actually, if he’d gone through with mopping up that fabricated Commie husky, it would have made exactly the third real scrap Duke has had since he started in pictures.

The first took place some years ago outside the Coronado Hotel, near San Diego, where Duke was on location. For his role he sported hair that lapped his shoulders.

He was dancing with a pretty girl, when a wise guy, noticing Duke’s long hair, sidled up. “Woo! Woo!” he sneered. “Have no fears about that big pansy, honey, he’s harmless!”

Something about the situation made Duke see red, so he invited the guy and his friends outside and dusted them all off. But it was quick and without much fuss.

The second battle, down in Mexico more recently, was even shorter. In a bar one night a tequila-happy Mexican got abusive about gringos and slapped Duke, who just gave him a shove and sent him reeling across the room. But he bounced back with a knife, and this time Duke picked him up and tossed him out of the joint like a basketball. He didn’t come back.

There was a time, of course, when Duke and Ward Bond, Preston Foster, Johnny Weissmuller, and some other Hollywood giants engaged in beautiful brannigans around the Hollywood Athletic Club and aboard John Ford’s yacht as members of the fabulous “Emerald Bay Yacht Club,” a seagoing beer bust society. Doors were smashed off hinges, floors sagged, and people got pushed overboard in the roughhouse fun—but that’s what it was, fun—and nobody got mad. As long ago as those shillies were, they still boost Duke’s local fame as a brawler, and his pictures take care of his reputation in the outcountry.

Actually, Duke Wayne gets all the scrapping he wants out of his job. He can remember few movie parts where he hasn’t wound up swinging his fists and, no mistake, he’s good at that. “Nobody walks up from behind and slaps Duke on the back on our set,” his makeup man, Webb ‘He’s always on the ready, he whirls like a cat, and he just might let go.” But it would be automatic, not angry. In fact, with Yakima Canutt, Duke invented the modern technique of movie fist fights. Screen sluggers used to sock each other on the shoulders u Duke and Yak evolved the present method of narrow, timed misses past the jaw with the camera at a trick angle to make it look real, and the “sock” dubbed in later.

“There’s no star who knows his job better,” John Ford’ll tell you. “Duke’s a natural reactor. He works from the inside out. He knows himself and he makes it his business to know exactly what dramatic spot he’s in. He studies it painstakingly until he has it dead right. Then he figures what he would do in that spot and does it. What comes through is a real man in a vital dramatic situation. There’s no finer kind of male performance.”

And James Edward Grant, who has written so many of John Wayne’s scripts and directed a couple, snorts, “People think in cliches. Because John Wayne is a big ox, doesn’t twist his face all around, they think he’s stolid and dumb. Duke can spot a hole in a script quicker than I can. He’s an expert on western history, and costume, an expert on camera lenses, lighting, and all the technical business of picture making. He’s always looking around. If an extra’s wearing the wrong kind of uniform Duke spots it. If something breaks down he’s jumping in to help fix it. If a stunt man won’t work a stunt, Duke will. On every set he’s got the whole shooting situation well in hand.”

Grant Withers backs that up. Grant’s a long-time buddy and has worked in dozens of John Wayne westerns. “Duke,” he says, “always plays a scene looking out of the corners of his eyes at the rest of the cast. When something they do rings false to him he says, ‘Woop—I muffed it!’ and stops the scene. Then he asks them to talk it over and help straighten him out. What he’s really doing is straightening them out.”

Duke keeps 11 people on his personal payroll, and that’s the sort of thing that gives Duke’s business manager, Bo Roos, high blood pressure.

“How am I ever going to make you a rich man,” he’s constantly growling, “when you’ve got half of Hollywood around your neck?” To which Duke shrugs and replies, “What’s money stacked up against friends?” and obviously that’s the way he feels about it.

Once on location in the High Sierra, Duke and his picture crew got in a red hot poker session. Wayne’s terrific at cards, especially deadly at poker and bridge. This night he killed off 10 or 12 of the gamblers until only Grant Withers was left. But let Grant tell it—

“I’d been playing poker too much,” he recalls. “I. couldn’t afford it, and Duke knew I couldn’t. It was table stakes this night, and after everyone was knocked out they ran pretty high. Finally there were several thousand dollars in the pot and I was sweating. If I didn’t win it I was going to be pretty broke, and for a long time.

“I laid down three kings finally and Duke flipped over three aces. Then he swept in the mountain of chips and tossed there all up in the air, to rattle down like hail.

“I’ve been laying for you!’ he said. ‘Are you cured?’ And he wouldn’t collect for one chip. I’ve never played a hand of poker since.”

You pick up stories on Duke Wayne like that everywhere you look.

In more ways than money Duke Wayne is generous with everyone but himself. Right now the most precious commodity he owns is time, and what spare moments he has between pictures go to two things—promoting Hollywood, and fighting Communism. Between The Quiet Man and The Sea Chase he took on a COMPO tour of 21 cities. He made personal appearances to plug Hollywood’s “Movietime USA” campaign, and to speak at the American Legion Convention. Yet he’s still shy and personals are still painful. Every night when he climbs in bed, Duke carries a stack of books with him to study up on current events for the MPA post. He’ll let no one else write his speeches for that; he takes the job very seriously and is militant in his war on the Kremlin.

All of these activities have constricted most of Duke Wayne’s sporting hobbies and changed his leisure life, if you can call it that, completely. He owns part of a tennis club but he doesn’t play. He owned part of a golf links, too, but never got around to traveling the course.

Even the deer and quail hunting and marlin fishing trips he used never to miss in season are out, and have been for the past several years. Sometimes Duke manages a day of “skin fishing” off the Isthmus at Catalina, and then he soaks in the water six and eight-hours at a stretch. But instead of taking off with his old spear diving pals, like Johnny Weissmuller or Ward Bond, he takes the kids along. “To tell the truth,” Duke has admitted, “that’s how I like things now—family style. Maybe I’m just getting old.” But that’s not necessarily so.

Duke has always been a worshipping, and worshipped, father, and despite the divided home his kids have, he’s unusually close to them. The two boys, Michael and Pat, have even worked in a couple of his pictures. With their sisters, Toni and Melinda, they spend every week-end at his place in Encino. Of them all, Michael, the eldest, is the nearest thing to a carbon copy of his dad—tall, manly and quiet.

Wherever he is, Duke stuffs his pockets with gifts for the kids, but he doesn’t spoil them. The oldest girl, Toni, is enrolled at Immaculate Heart Conservatory in Hollywood; Patrick and Melinda go to Cathedral Chapel; and Michael goes to Loyola. It’s a long run from their home in Hancock Park where they live with their mother, and Michael needs a car. Last spring the heap he had started to come apart. Duke took up the matter of a new car.

“I’ll give you all the dough for another second-hand one,” he offered, “or I’ll give you part of the price of a new Chevvy, if you’ll work out the rest yourself.” He could get Michael a summer job running errands for Bo Roos at the Beverly Hills Management, he explained. “I’ll take the job and the new car,” Michael decided, which made Duke smile because that’s what ‘he’d have done.

His present wife, Esperanza—whom he calls Chata—took the Wayne brood over to Ireland this year to visit their dad making The Quiet Man there. The main reason Duke went for the $140,000 Encino place was to entertain his kids. Before, he and Chata lived comfortably enough in a small Van Nuys ranch house, with one bedroom and a converted den with a day bed. But there wasn’t anything to keep kids busy there, and no place to sleep, especially when Chata’s mother was up visiting from Mexico.

The new place, on four wooded acres, has a vast sloping lawn, swimming pool, stables, and a riding ring where horses soon will gallop around with the Wayne crew aboard—and inside the big country style house there’s plenty of bunk room.

Duke first met Esperanza Baur on a Business trip to Mexico City where he’d gone planning to buy a theater. But the minute he looked into her dark eyes at The Reforma he forgot business and concentrated on romance. He never bought the theater, but by the time he left there wasn’t any question about what the 20-year-old senorita had done to his heart. Chata and her mother came to Hollywood on a six months’ visa, and they carried on their courtship there. They were married January 17, 1946 in a church in Long Beach where Duke’s mother had said her vows.

After the rites, he fumbled desperately around in the pockets, which he’d forgotten to fill, and finally had to whisper over his shoulder to Grant Withers, his best man, “Hey, give the preacher a hundred bucks, will you? I’m broke!” Chata thought the whole thing screamingly funny, and still rags Duke about it.

Duke and Chata flew to Honolulu on their honeymoon, about the most beautiful spot for romance you can find in the world. But what they saw of that tropical paradise was little more than the inside of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. In fact, for 20 days of their 21-day stay it rained constantly, and the newlywed Waynes camped right in their hotel room, which most brides and grooms will admit is a constructive way to spend a honeymoon, although no sightseeing tour.

Today there are absolutely no rules in John Wayne’s castle—and a man’s castle it certainly is. At home, as most other places, he’s the boss and Mrs. W. likes it that way. In fact, she works it that way. Whenever Duke comes home, that’s dinner time; whenever he gets up, that’s when the day begins; and whenever he decides to go to bed it ends, whether it’s eight o’clock or four in the morning. When Duke works up a yen for enchiladas and chile relleno, Chata can cook them as no one else can—although they have a Mexican cook. The rest of the time she sees that the steaks are thick and red rare. There isn’t a stick of furniture in the whole house where lazy legs or a number 12 shoe can’t park without a protest, and a highball can’t sit. All of Duke’s friends are welcome whenever they show up, and they’re met out on the drive, as Duke always is, rain or shine; and sometimes they get the hug he rates—but not the kiss. A guy can’t share everything.

The Waynes have arguments now and then, usually they’re noisy, but always about something pretty tiny, like who played what card like a dummy, or who’ll drive the car. Once, Duke came home to find the furniture shifted around and his favorite reading chair in the wrong place. He raised a rumpus as any man has a right to do when his wife does something outrageous like that. But all in all, there have never been any serious storm signals hoisted over their house since they were married. They’ve had second, third, and fourth honeymoons to Hawaii, South America, and Mexico, too, and when Chata flies down there alone to see her family there aren’t any divorce rumors.

So right now things couldn’t be rosier for Duke Wayne. He has a cozy home, a quartet of handsome kids, a worshipping wife, money enough to make all of them happy, and a career which could use six John Waynes if Hollywood had them around. Unfortunately, if you believe the people who worship Duke, they smashed the mold when they made him.

And even if John Wayne eventually becomes president of the United States, one thing seems certain. Hell still be just “Duke,” the greatest guy in the world to his friends—as they all are to him.

At home Grant Withers prizes a picture that Duke gave him once, and on it is scribbled—“You can count ‘em on your fingers, Grant. Count me in!”

Everybody who knows Duke Wayne and loves him would like to scribble the same thing right back. In fact, in a way, that’s exactly what MODERN SCREEN’S readers have just done this very month to their favorite star.

THE END

—BY KIRTLEY BASKETTE

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE JANUARY 1952