American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read Online Free PDF Page A

an amateur boxer, started giving Duke some lessons. The fireman knew more about fighting than Doc did, and he taught Duke how to defend himself so that the next time the other boy picked on him he would be able to take care of it. Soon enough, the bully started talking trash, in preparation of giving Duke another beating. Duke said nothing; then, before anyone knew it, he threw one carefully placed punch and flattened the boy. After that there would be no name-calling, no more finger poking, no more tough talking from big-boy bullies. After that, whenever anyone asked Marion how he had learned to fight, he always had the same answer: “Just call me Duke.”
    MEANWHILE, AS CLYDE CONTINUED TO struggle, he began drinking to ease his frustrations and to prefer the lively pool halls and straw-floor card-player bars to his proper living room at home. He usually lost at the card tables and, as was his nature, was always ready to help out a friend who needed a few extra bucks. He was still the same old Doc, the easy-touch, amiable fellow going nowhere fast. He soon ran out of money and lost the small house he had rented, and only the kindness of the owners of the Glendale Pharmacy saved the family from being thrown out into the street, by letting them move into a too-small apartment above the establishment, meant for one, not four and a dog.
    It wasn’t until 1920, when Mary literally pulled him up by his ears and threatened to leave him and this time for good, that Doc straightened out enough to get some work picking apricots and oranges in the orchards, and another job in a pharmacy, and eventually earned enough to put together a down payment on a new house. Soon enough, though, aces came up eights and he lost his new job and defaulted on his mortgage less than a year later. Doc was forced to find yet another place to rent. At one point there was so little money coming in they had to rely on Marion’s meager seven-days-a-week Los Angeles Examiner paperboy income to make ends meet. On Sundays, when the papers were too heavy, Clyde got up with him at dawn and helped the boy make his rounds. Mary felt terrible about having to depend upon Marion’s money for groceries and angry at Clyde for making her feel that way.
    That summer, Marion was able to give up the paper route when he found work in the thick and aromatic orange and lemon groves, bean patches, and hay fields that surrounded the San Fernando Valley. The base of the Sierra Madre foothills was lush with fields of fruit, and Duke didn’t mind working all through the long hot summer days. It felt good to be outside doing physical work in the warm California sun, with sweat running in rivulets down his bare muscled chest.
    Not everything was great for Marion. Mary insisted that when he had free time, he should take Robert along wherever he went. He was five years older and distinctly different from his younger brother. Duke was tough, Robert was tender. Marion loved the outdoors, Robert wanted to stay home with Mary and help her in the kitchen. The only place Marion could be completely alone, even from Robert, was when he snuck away by himself and went to the movies. As he later remembered, “Most of the Glendale small-fry were movie-struck because [we had a movie theater and], the Triangle Studios were located there.” Robert didn’t care for them, so it wasn’t a problem for Duke to spend some weekdays alone, where for a nickel he could see the silent serials. He enjoyed The Perils of Pauline, the “cliffhanger” that virtually invented the genre of the never-ending damsel in distress. But westerns were his favorite, like Paul Hurst and J. P. McGowan’s 1916 A Lass of the Lumberlands, or Edward Laemmle’s 1921 Winners of the West, two of hundreds that were made. 3 Film historian William K. Everson once noted, “There is a period in every child’s life when a cowboy on a galloping horse is the most exciting vision imaginable.”
    Marion loved movies so much, he