American Titan: Searching for John Wayne by Marc Eliot Read Free Book Online Page B

That sealed the deal for them. She said they forbid her to ever see him again.
    Morose and lonely, Duke drowned his sorrow in eighty-proof self-pity. All of it hurt like hell. As he later recalled, “They don’t tell you that love hurts. They never tell you how much it hurts. They don’t tell you it hurts from the start and I guess it never stops hurting . . . why don’t they tell you how much it hurts?”
    That May, still afflicted with lovesickness, he drifted up to San Francisco, and when he heard of a steamer about to leave for Honolulu, he decided to stow away and steal himself a free trip to Hawaii. Soon enough, with nothing to eat and unable to sleep, he turned himself in to the captain, in the hopes he would at least feed him. He did, after throwing him in the brig. A month later, when the ship returned to San Francisco, the captain handed Wayne over to the San Francisco Police Department. They declined to press criminal charges and put him on a train back to Los Angeles.
    Flat broke and despondent, Duke sought out John Ford at Fox, confided in him, and sought comfort from the director as if he were his father.
    Ford felt sorry for him and let Duke hang around the studio and during downtimes on-set, taught him the card game “Pitch,” or, as what Pappy’s friends liked to call it, “Claiming Low,” an old New England game Ford had learned as a child, a version of “High/Low,” where each side bets, draws a card, and the high one wins.
    As Wayne later remembered, that wasn’t the only thing the director showed him. “In the years to come, Ford would teach me everything I knew about filmmaking.”

Chapter 3
    For the next two years, Duke worked at Fox as a low-paid nonunion property man, putting in a lot of overtime to help his brother stay in school and send whatever was left over to his mother. Through hard work, and toughness, he gradually made himself a valuable team player, mostly under the supervision of “Pappy” John Ford, as good on a movie set as Coach Jones was on a football field. “In those days,” Wayne later remembered, “you could operate in every department of pictures. You didn’t need a union card. I was a carpenter. I was a juicer [electrician], I rigged lights. I helped build sets, carried props, hauled furniture. I got to know the nuts and bolts of making pictures . . . at the time I had no ambition beyond becoming the best property man on the Fox lot, [because] a chief property man was getting a hundred and fifty a week . . .”
    In 1928, not long after Mother Machree was released, Duke made his next appearance on-screen, as an unbilled walk-on in Ford’s Four Sons, a melodrama about the agonies suffered by the mother of four boys in Germany during World War I. 14 Ford later remembered this incident that happened during one of the most important scenes in the film, an outdoor shot done within the confines of a Fox studio: “John Wayne was the second or third assistant prop man, and I remember we had one very dramatic scene in which the mother had just received notice that one of her sons had died, and she had to break down and cry. It was autumn; the leaves were falling, the woman sitting on a bench in the foreground—a very beautiful scene. We did it two or three times and finally we were getting the perfect take when suddenly in the background comes Wayne, sweeping the leaves up. After a moment, he stopped and looked up with horror. He saw the camera going, dropped the broom, and started running for the gate. We were laughing so damn hard—‘Go get him, bring him back.’
    “They finally caught up with him and he came back sheep-faced. I said, ‘All right, it was just an accident.’ We were laughing so much we couldn’t work the rest of the day. It was so funny—beautiful scene and this big oaf comes in sweeping the leaves up.”
    Work continued to come Duke’s way. He made two unbilled appearances in Ford’s Hangman’s House, a Foreign Legion epic starring