Free John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman

chaperoning Polly Ann Young, Loretta’s sister, who had a date with a Fox executive. On the way to the Ambassador Hotel, the executive said, “I just happen to have a bottle of really good Scotch . . .” Morrison recognized the fake label. The executive wondered why he looked so unhappy.
    Wayne was becoming acclimated to the movie business—its perpetual excitement, its neuroses, its personalities: the roughnecks, the wranglers, the stuntmen, and the far more sophisticated Ford, who enjoyed playing the part of a roughneck. “He was a labored learned man,” Wayne would say of his mentor, who “absorbed everything—mood, wine, lines, everything.”
    The sojourns at MGM and Warners were for extra pocket money; Fox was for living expenses, and Morrison was beginning to rethink his plan to head back to USC. “Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.
    “But at the same time I was getting such enthusiasm out of working with Jack Ford and with the people that were in the movie business in those days—the prop men, the grips, the cameramen. The attitude was that it was our picture, everybody was working for the picture, there were no departmental heads and union bosses telling us what we could and couldn’t do. And luckily for me Jack Ford needed a prop man.”
    Wayne’s obvious worship of Ford led him to initially think of becoming a director, or at least work in the production side of the business. “I just looked up to this man Ford—he was a big hero to me. He was intelligent and quick-thinking. Had great initiative. It was just wonderful to be around him. He kept you alive and on your toes. Of course, I started watching what he was doing, how he was working on people.”
    Morrison had grown up in a poverty further afflicted by Mary Morrison’s shanty-Irish pretensions. In comparison, Duke liked the rough-and-tumble honesty of a comfortably blue-collar environment.
    “There were a lot of tough guys around in those days, working in the picture business,” he would reminisce to a friend years later.
    Some of them were really tough. Their idea of a Saturday night was to go over to Pickwick Stables and look for a fight. They wanted a fight and if they couldn’t find one they’d start one. That was a big thing for them, to knock somebody around.
    Probably the toughest of all those guys was a guy by the name of Art Acord, who was also a leading man in cheap westerns. Acord was really tough. He bit a guy’s ear off in a fight once—that’s the kind of tough he was. With that kind of tough you’re going to make some enemies along the line. He made a lot of them. And some of them tried to do him in. Hell, they shot him, they stabbed him, finally killed him. The only way they could kill him was to poison him. They finally did it, they poisoned him. He was the toughest son of a bitch I ever saw.
    Acord died in Mexico under mysterious circumstances in 1931, and Duke’s version of his demise is widely believed to be accurate. He also casually mentioned knowing Wyatt Earp, as well as Stuart Lake, Earp’s first biographer. There’s no independent confirmation, but it’s certain that Tom Mix was a pallbearer at Earp’s 1930 funeral, and Earp was also an acquaintance of Ford’s. It’s possible that Ford could have introduced the young prop man to the fabled lawman.
    The stuntman Yakima Canutt believed that Wayne’s behind-the-scenes exposure to such authentically hard men played a major part in his screen character. Wayne, says Canutt, “thrived on working with the cowboys. He never pretended he was a real cowboy, just a screen cowboy, but he picked up on what those men were like, and he’d find ways of bringing those things out in his pictures. That’s partly why Wayne was so realistic as a