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had a future as an actor,” he said. Fox gave him one more chance in Three Girls Lost, in which he costarred with his friend Loretta Young, who said, “I’d made a number of films and Duke was still new to it. I didn’t really know how to help him with his acting; I was still trying to learn to do it. But I encouraged him and told him not to give up. I told him that if he could make a real go at it, he’d be able to marry Josephine and live happily ever after. I was married to Grant Withers, and he and Duke became great friends.

Grant and I were only married for a year; it was a big mistake.

Duke said to me, ‘What was that about happily ever after?’ But Duke and I stayed friends, and Grant and I managed to stay on friendly terms. That was in large part due to Duke, who’d say,

‘Now then, you two, what’s the beef? We’re all friends.’ He hadn’t experienced divorce then—and when he did, he still saw no reason why he and his ex-wife couldn’t be friends.”

But it was the end of the line for Wayne at Fox. The studio did not take up the option of keeping him on for another year, and he was suddenly out of work.

There was a man who could have helped save Wayne’s career at the time, and that was John Ford. But Ford chose not to. He had not yet forgiven Duke.

The Saenz family still disapproved of Duke, having heard rumors of his drunken carousing and womanizing. Despite his brief affair with Marguerite Churchill, he never was what his friend Paul Fix called

“a mainstream womanizer.”

When I spoke to Fix by telephone in 1979, he explained, “Duke would occasionally stray, but he always felt so guilty about cheating on Josephine, he usually broke it off as quick as he could. He just wasn’t immoral enough to . . . let’s say ‘put it about,’ the way a lot of Hollywood leading men did. As for his drinking, yeah, he liked his liquor, and he enjoyed it mostly in the company of his male friends.

Josephine disapproved of both his friends and his drinking. I didn’t think they were well matched, but Duke was in love, for Christ’s sake.”

Loretta Young told me, “Jo and Duke were madly in love with each other, but they were poles apart in society. She came from a 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 33

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sophisticated and cultured background, while he was a former homesteader who had changed from being a shy, awkward, and anxious young man into a fun-loving man’s man. What he saw in Josephine was an exotic beauty whom he could respect, and he hoped that some of her sophistication would rub off on him. They were desperate to get married, but those plans had to be put on hold when he found himself out of work.”

Just as depression was setting in, he was put under contract at Columbia Pictures, a studio in a far healthier state than Fox, run by the tough Harry Cohn. As well as producing A-list quality films, Columbia also ran a production line of action-packed B pictures, and Cohn thought Wayne might be ideal as a star of some of the B

movies. Wayne recalled, “My first Columbia picture [in 1931] was Men Are Like That, playing a soldier who breaks up with his girlfriend, played by an actress called Laura LaPlante. You probably never heard of her. [I had, but I didn’t want to interrupt the Duke in full flow.] She very sensibly retired from pictures shortly after Men Are Like That.

“During filming, I was summoned to Cohn’s office where he accused me of playing around with his new girlfriend, a young actress he had under contract who will remain nameless. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he pounded the desk with his fist and yelled, ‘You keep your goddamn fly buttoned at my studio.’

“After that he always talked to me like I was little more than a mangy dog—or worse, like a rat that had crawled out of the fucking sewer. It was no wonder so many of his contract players loathed him.

You just couldn’t communicate with the son of a bitch.

“He then humiliated me in my second picture for that studio—a film called Deceiver in which the star of the picture, who was Ian Keith, ends up getting murdered.