John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman Read Free Book Online

drugstore,” said Ruth Conrad. “I had a crush on him, but I don’t know whether he ever realized.”
    Duke’s only problem with women was shyness. “He was very bashful with girls in high school,” said Dorothy Hacker. “He was very popular, but as far as I know he didn’t date in those days.”

    The record, in the form of the 1924–1925 Glendale Union High School yearbook,
The Stylus,
reports that Duke Morrison was in serious training to be a big man on campus. He was on the sports staff of the school paper, one of the student assistants in the cafeteria, received a bronze pin for scholastic honors, was in the Boy’s G club. He also studied journalism, and that bore fruit in some breathless sports stories bylined “M.M.M.” in the
Explosion
—the Glendale High School newspaper:
    By winning today’s game from the Covina “Colts,” Glendale can cinch the league title. The fracas this afternoon will be the hardest league game because there is so much at stake and because the teams are so evenly matched.
    Both teams have nine lettermen back; both teams have about the same amount of avoirdupois to back up against. Glendale is noted for its end around play as ground gainers, likewise Covina has the same style plays.
    Other sports stories Duke Morrison wrote embodied much the same enthusiasm, not to mention a flamboyant vocabulary:
    Facing Alhambra today in the third league game of the season, Glendale will have much different opposition than she had last week, when she trounced the “Wildcats” 25–0. As in the case of the Citrus-Glendale game, the two opposing teams have never been beaten by a high school team; this alone insures a hard fight for honors in this afternoon’s tussle.
    Glendale’s varsity has more than the Alhambra team to fight when it enters the field today; it must also conquer overconfidence.
    The young man liked his semicolons, and apparently never turned down an extracurricular activity—he was also in charge of advertising for the school paper.
    In all of Duke’s reminiscences of his time in high school, he never pointed out his early interest in performing, because that would have run counter to his preferred narrative of falling into show business by accident. But he appeared in the school play—Marc Connelly’s
Dulcy
—in the role of Mr. Forbes; he appeared in the senior play as well—
The First Lady of the Land,
a historical drama about James and Dolley Madison and Aaron Burr.
    When he wasn’t in front of the footlights, he was behind the scenes, working on the stage crew. Wayne loved his drama teacher, so when she suggested that he give Cardinal Wolsey’s farewell speech with two days’ notice, he decided to go for it.
    “I studied like a son of a bitch,” he told me. He traveled to the Pasadena Playhouse, where the competition was taking place, to find a group of young actors who, as he put it, “were all so fucking Shakespearean. I felt like a goddamned fool up there.” He froze up.
    There was a similar contest for best essay, and young Duke won the contest for a piece he wrote on World War I. The award was the opportunity to recite the essay at the graduation ceremonies.
    There was a line in his essay that went, “The worst things the Germans had done . . .” but as Duke rehearsed, he kept forgetting the word “had.” His teacher was helping him rehearse, and she insisted over and over again that if he left out the word “had” he’d sound like an oaf, so he focused hard on that single word.
    Came the day when the essay was to be recited, Duke looked right at his teacher and said, “The worst thing the Germans HAD done . . .” and promptly went completely blank. After a few seconds of struggle, he simply bowed and walked off the stage.
    By this time Duke Morrison was a serious overachiever, more than comfortable academically, with a demonstrable bent for the public arena. There were also unconfirmed rumors that the parents of the attractive girls at