Read John Wayne: The Life and Legend for Free Online Page A

Conan Doyle. “He was well-dressed and intelligent, but very shy and retiring,” remembered a classmate.
    Clyde had been forced to learn the piano as a young boy, so he told Duke that he could choose any musical instrument he wanted to play. Duke chose the banjo. His teacher was a boy named Fat Stockbridge, who was a year or two older. But all of Duke’s extracurricular activities meant that he didn’t have any time for practice. When he and Stockbridge would get together, Duke would have made no progress, so Stockbridge would amuse himself by playing dirty songs on the banjo. A few years later, Morrison pawned his banjo to pay for a fraternity weekend at Lake Arrowhead. “That was the end of my musical career,” he would observe.
    Money was tight—money would be tight for decades. Recreation had to be grabbed in an impromptu fashion. He learned to swim in the legendarily shallow Los Angeles River and recalled raucous weekends on the waterfront.
    “Me and a bunch of kids would come down to the Balboa Peninsula to do some ‘poor boy sailing’ in these round bottom boats. I remember we all used to go over to this big mud flat over there and do surf dives in the mud.”
    A surf dive?
    A surf dive, he would explain, was accomplished by following a wave back to the ocean and then diving, belly down, into a long slide on the slippery mud. “It was a lot of fun. And then we’d go over to the flat by the pier and do the same thing there until we were just covered with this mud. And then we’d run over to the pier and run all the girls off while yelling and jumping around in this dried mud.”
    It was a simpler time. But the purity of these pastimes, which had probably been practiced since the Civil War, never left him. Nor would the scalding humiliation implied by the term “poor boy sailing.”
    One of his father’s failed pharmacies was in the Jensen Building in Glendale, which also housed a movie theater. The man who ran the theater was a friend of Clyde’s, so he let his movie-struck son go to the movies as often as possible. Duke remembered seeing
The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
twice a day for the entire week it played in Glendale, although, in common with most of young America, his favorite actor was not Rudolph Valentino but Douglas Fairbanks. “I admired his dueling, his stunts, his fearlessness in the face of danger, and his impish grin when he was about to kiss his lady-love.”
    After Fairbanks, Duke’s favorite actor was Harry Carey, because, he remembered, “he looked real.” In time, Duke would replace Harry Carey as John Ford’s equally real man of the West, and Carey would become an important influence on Wayne’s sense of acting, although the two had very different backgrounds. 1
    The neighborhood kids played cowboys and Indians, but they also played “movies”; that is, the kids would pretend to be actors, or a director, or even a cameraman—the camera was made out of a cigar box. When it was young Morrison’s turn to be the hero, he would usually mimic Fairbanks, and once he remembered leaping out of a second-story window while holding on to some grape vines. “I ruined a beautiful grape arbor,” he said.
    The
Glendale Evening News
reported in the summer of 1922 that young Morrison was part of a large delegation of boys from the local YMCA to attend a camp on Catalina Island. As 1923 got under way, Clyde Morrison rated a small article in the local paper: “To C. L. Morrison falls the honor and responsibility of the management of the Jensen’s Palace Grand drug store. Mr. Morrison is a well known drug store man to Glendalians . . . he has conducted a business of his own and has also been connected with the Roberts and Echols drug stores.”
    Early in 1923, Duke took another YMCA cruise, this time to the Santa Cruz Islands. By 1923, young Morrison was a fledgling football star, playing at 155 pounds for an excellent Glendale High team. In November, Glendale High came from behind