John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [6]
He eyed me as if to say, “That took you by surprise, didn’t it?”
I decided it was prudent to let him think it did and I asked him what he meant. He went on to explain how he had heard about it from Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk when making Waterloo in 1970.
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Through all this hearsay, Welles knew how, why, and when Stalin had made the decision to have Wayne killed. Had it not been for the fact that I already knew about the plot, I most certainly would have taken Welles’s storytelling with a generous pinch of salt.
But now I had what I consider to be as full an account of the Communist plot to kill John Wayne as I’m ever likely to get.
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From Marion to Duke
“John Wayne was born Marion Michael Morrison,” Claire Trevor told me.
The question of Wayne’s real name was one I put to many who knew him, and Claire Trevor’s mistake was a common one.
“Marion Michael Morrison was the name he was born with,” said Henry Fonda.
“His parents must have had an odd sense of humor ’cos they named him Marion,” said Yakima Canutt.
“But what was his middle name?” I asked Canutt.
“Michael.”
“Marion Michael Morrison,” said director George Sherman.
“Marion Mitchell Robinson,” said actor John Carradine.
“They called him Marion, that’s for sure,” said Ken Curtis, “and his middle name was Michael.”
All of them got it wrong, and it isn’t surprising. Much of Wayne’s life and work is shrouded in myth and legend, even to those who knew him best.
The confusion is understandable. John Wayne told me, “My parents named me after my grandfather, Marion Mitchell Morrison.
Only my middle name wasn’t Mitchell. It was Robert. And that’s the 7
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name on my birth certificate. My parents changed my middle name to Michael because they wanted my younger brother to be called Robert.”
The legend is further complicated by the fact that in the 1925
Glendale High Yearbook, Wayne’s picture, for reasons Wayne could never remember, bears the name Marion Mitchell Morrison, which has caused some film historians and biographers to mistakenly state his original name as being Marion Mitchell.
But Marion Robert it was when he was born on 26 May 1907
in Winterset, Iowa. And when his brother Robert was born on 8 December 1911, four-year-old Marion’s middle name got unofficially changed to Michael, which is why Wayne’s oldest son was called Michael.
“Well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to name my firstborn Marion,”
Wayne told me with that famous crooked smile. “Any kid called Marion’s gonna have a rough ride. And I should know.”
Wayne’s memories of his childhood are not particularly happy ones. He hated being called Marion, he couldn’t understand why his middle name had to change just because he had a younger brother, and he resented his mother because for some reason Robert, not the firstborn son, became the apple of her eye.
Mother was Mary Brown—but always called Molly—born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1885. She was of Irish descent and known for being a dynamic, sometimes harping, and quick-tempered woman.
Father was mild mannered, generous, and trusting Clyde Morrison from Monmouth, Illinois, of Scottish descent. His father was Marion Mitchell Morrison, apparently a hero of the American Civil War.
Just a few years after Clyde’s birth in 1884, his family moved to Iowa where he grew up and served an apprenticeship as a pharmacist in Waterloo. It was there that he met Molly, who worked as a telephone operator. They were married on 29 September 1906, just eight months before Marion was born. No one knows, or cares to reveal, whether Marion was born prematurely, or if Molly was already pregnant when she and Clyde married. But no one who knew them could ever claim they were a match made in heaven.
By the time Marion came into the world, Clyde was working as a pharmacist’s clerk at a drugstore in Winterset. It seems there