Free John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman Page A

cowboy.”
    In January and February of 1929, Ford was shooting
The Black Watch
, and Duke Morrison was propping, but he was already part of Ford’s social circle; Myrna Loy, who was playing a femme fatale in
The Black Watch
, was invited to a party at Ford’s house where Morrison was lurking around the edges of the room, “young and handsome . . . and as shy as I was.” Loy understood what was happening: “Jack was grooming him.”
    In the late spring of 1929, Morrison was still propping for $35 a week when Ford asked for his help. He had been assigned a picture called
Salute
, which called for locations at the Naval Academy, and he wanted to use some of the USC football players in small parts. The studio’s liaison to USC wasn’t having any luck, so he asked Morrison if he wanted the job.
    Morrison set up a lunch for Howard Jones and Ford, which went well. The salaries on offer were from $50 to $75 a week, but the clincher for Jones seems to have been Morrison’s claim that the boys would have plenty of time to visit Washington, D.C., for on-site civics lessons. With that, a group of athletes and ex-athletes were freed up for six weeks of location shooting. One of the players—“a big ugly bastard” according to Morrison—was Ward Bond. Bond already had established a reputation as a drinker, so Morrison thought it best to keep him off the set, but the casting director liked him. Bond was hired.
    In
Salute
, Ford’s first, requisitely awkward talkie, Duke Morrison plays a naval cadet named Bill who razzes new recruits. Fox’s in-house paperwork bills him twelfth, six spots behind Ward Bond and right below Stepin Fetchit. Duke Morrison’s first line of spoken movie dialogue was only innocuous at the time: “He doesn’t mean the audience. What do the actors do, Mister?”
    As relentless weather molds obstinate stone, so John Ford began molding Duke Morrison. “Duke . . . was just a stick of wood when he came away from USC,” said the director Allan Dwan. “Jack gave him character.”
    A pattern was already forming: everything Ford gave Wayne to do, he did with alacrity. Ford again encountered Morrison’s game heart on the set of a submarine picture called
Men Without Women
, shot off Catalina Island. The scene called for some actors to disappear under the water, grab some air from a hose beneath the water, then come up gasping as if they were shipwrecked sailors.
    But the day was gray and unpleasant, the water was cold, the waves were high, and the actors were far from enthusiastic about their appointed task. Years later, Ford told his version of the story: “Our two blankety-blank stunt men who were supposed to come up in bubbles, like they’d been shot out of an escape hatch, said it was too rough to work. The blanks.
    “Well, Duke was standing up on the top deck of this boat we were on. He wasn’t supposed to go in the water at all, but I asked him if he’d try this stunt. He never said a word, except ‘Sure.’ Dove right into the water from that deck.
    “I knew right then that boy had the stuff and was going places.”
    “I could see,” said Ford, “that here was a boy who was working for something—not like most of the other guys, just hanging around to pick up a few fast bucks. Duke was really ambitious and willing to work.”
    Duke would always remember the years when the movies first beckoned, then receded, with nostalgia. This was in contrast to just a few years later, when he’d be starring in B westerns, a regimen he always regarded as demeaning. “You could operate in every department of pictures,” he reminisced in 1968. “You didn’t need a union card. I was a carpenter. I was a juicer. I rigged lights. I helped build sets. Carried props. Hauled furniture. I got to know the nuts and bolts of making pictures.” He concluded this reverie with the most crucial criterion of all: “More importantly, I was made to feel like I belonged.”
    The lonely boy was becoming less