John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [12]
Loretta Young recalled, “Although Josephine was a devout Catholic and a part of high society, she found Duke to be sincere and earnest, and a fresh change from the usual rich young men who tried to date her. Her family, however, did not approve of lowly Duke Morrison when he began dating their daughter. So they had to meet in secret, and despite her parents’ objections, they became engaged.”
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JOHN WAYNE
According to virtually everything I’ve read about John Wayne, his dream of becoming an all-American ended with a shoulder injury.
Some accounts say it happened while playing football; others that he hurt it surfing. Woody Strode, who appeared opposite Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (but is probably best remembered as the black gladiator Draba in Spartacus), played for the Los Angeles Rams before becoming an actor. He was of the opinion Duke Morrison had no chance of ever becoming an all-American. When I interviewed him in London in 1976 (where he was visiting briefly while en route to making a film in Italy), he told me, “Wayne was never a great football player, but somehow he got into the USC’s hall of fame. I guess becoming the greatest movie star in the world will do that for you.”
Coach Jones tried Duke first as a guard, which meant he had to be fast, but Duke never could run fast, so Jones moved him to tackle.
When he failed at that too, he was dropped from the team at the end of the first year, and he lost his scholarship.
He may well have received a shoulder injury, but as Strode said,
“It’s unlikely, almost unthinkable, that a good coach would drop a promising all-American because of one injury. Duke just was not good enough to stay on the team.”
George Sherman told me, “I don’t know if Duke ever had a shoulder injury. All I can tell you is that when we first worked together, he never showed any sign of a weakened shoulder. But by 1939 he was already becoming less agile. For one thing, he suffered with back pain. My feeling is that if Duke said he hurt his shoulder, then it was true, but I don’t believe that was the reason he was dropped from the college football team. He never could run particularly fast, and if you look at pictures of Wayne up to the time he made The Big Trail [in 1930], you can see that he was tall but not well built, which means he was never going to be a star football player. But it looked good to the fans in those early days to say he was, and it was something Duke was never going to dispute.”
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Call Him Wayne
With the football scholarship no longer available, Duke was unable to continue going to college. So he went back to Fox in the spring of 1927 to work in the property department, where he was well liked by the people he worked with for his casual and pleasant manner.
“When John Ford [then in his early thirties] needed an extra propman on Mother Machree [in 1928], I was given a very important job.” Wayne laughed as he recalled, “My very important job was to release a gaggle of geese from their pens and herd them into camera shot. Now the coach was a pretty large man with a ferocious temper, and every time he called, ‘Action!’ the geese went everywhere. Well, that just made Pappy lose his temper with me, and I just stood there flustered and embarrassed as he told me that I was the most awkward fucking propman he’d ever known.
“So I got mad at him for yelling at me and cussing me, and I yelled and cussed right back. He said, ‘You’re a football player, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘Do you think you could block me?’
and I said, ‘Yes.’ So he said, ‘Get down on your three-point stance,’
which is where you have one hand on the ground and the other in front of you. So I got down, and he kicked my hand away, and I went facedown in the dirt.
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“Pappy and everyone just laughed, but I