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

Glendale High didn’t want their daughters to date him because they thought he ran with a fast crowd. Members of that crowd stoutly denied the charge.
    “He was just a good, clean-cut guy,” remembered his best friend, Ralf Eckles. “We were raised that way.” But rambunctious exuberance was beginning to be a prominent feature of Morrison’s personality. One day the pranks got a little out of hand. Eckles and Morrison spread asafetida, a gum resin used as an antispasmodic, around the halls and classrooms of Glendale High. It was a fairly vile chemical and everybody within smelling distance got nauseated.
    A chemistry professor found the bottle and took it to Clyde Morrison, who asked his son to spell asafetida. Duke spelled it out exactly as it was on the label of the bottle, which misspelled the word. Clyde turned his son in, and both Eckles and Duke had to apologize in front of the entire school.
    The yearbook had a fanciful preview of what the various students would be doing in the year 1940. The crystal ball for Duke Morrison involved him being president of the Glendale Ice Cream Company and authoring a book entitled
The Most Famous Men Have Humble Beginnings.
    His peers regarded him as a leader. “He was mature and conservative,” said Bob Hatch, who was vice president to Morrison’s president for the graduating class of 1925. “He had confidence and maturity that most of us didn’t have . . . he was a good leader.” Even his teachers liked him; Park Turrell, who taught chemistry, remembered Morrison as a “fine student who got an A in [the] course.”
    As nearly as Ralf Eckles could recall, the boys met in fifth grade. Eckles remembered his friend as always in control of himself, “never in trouble and not looking for it.” The closest the two boys came to juvenile delinquency was trying to sneak into the Palace Grand movie theater. On the other hand, Saturday nights could get a little dull in Glendale.
    “Our Saturday night pastime,” remembered Eckles, “was to get a case of rotten eggs or old tomatoes, and take my father’s car, which had a rumble seat. The old streetcars used to have an open section at the rear that people would stand on during the summer. We had lots of fun peppering them with eggs and tomatoes.”
    The boys’ other casual pastimes involved greasing the tracks of the Eagle Rock–Glendale streetcar and watching it slide backward downhill. One time a classmate took his father’s Reo automobile, which came with balloon tires. Morrison and Eckles deflated the tires and crossed a train trestle with the car. “There were five or six of us in that car and the trestle was a little narrow, but we made it.”
    The same group rented a cabin in Big Bear and got stuck in a snowstorm. “Duke and I were outside the car, trying to find the road. Some rangers came by and started yelling at us. They told us we were on the lake. We could have gone right through the ice!”
    Another close friend was a diminutive young man named Bob Bradbury, whose father was a film director who would make a dozen or so films with young Morrison. Bob Bradbury would change his name to Bob Steele and become a western star, not to mention nearly a lifelong presence around his high school buddy.
    By the time Duke graduated from high school in 1925, he was president of the senior class, president of the Latin Society, president of the Lettermen’s Club, on the staff of the school newspaper, chairman of the Senior Dance, chairman of the Ring Committee, and a member of the debate team. He remembered that he graduated with a 94 average.
    This man who would excel at playing outsiders was as a boy a consummate insider, popular with his classmates, obviously destined for great things. In the years to come, he would be amused by the gap between his image—which, it must be pointed out, he strenuously cultivated—and the man he started out to be. “This so-called last of the cowboys,” he would say with an amused