American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read Online Free PDF

often cut classes at school and went to them during the week (there were no truancy laws in Glendale in those years). Sometimes, he recalled, “I went, on average, four or five times a week.”
    IN LITTLE MORE THAN A decade, motion pictures had developed from the novelty of the individual viewer nickelodeon, approximately the size and shape of today’s stand-alone ATM machines, to a booming industry with elaborate theaters that offered plush seats, live orchestra accompaniment, and big silver screens that played to packed houses of all ages and genders in every town with enough residents to support one. Smaller burgs eager to see movies rented out halls and hung sheets to see the latest releases. Going to the movies had become the latest craze, not just in America but around the world. At one point in the second decade of the twentieth century, Charlie Chaplin’s creation, “the Little Tramp,” was the single most recognizable image on Earth.
    Glendale had gotten its first real movie theater in 1910, the Glendale, and four years later, the grander Jensen’s Palace, and both were filled to capacity from the first day they opened. Duke’s favorite screen cowboys were the romantic, if stoic, save-the-damsel-in-distress William S. Hart; the flamboyant, athletic Tom Mix; rodeo-star-turned-actor Hoot Gibson; and most of all the reticent, unaffected dusty-clothed, manly but homely Harry Carey, whose lined face and worn-out hat translated on-screen into high moral heroism. Throughout his decades-long career, Carey, who always wore his gun without a holster, tucked into his pants belt, never once played a villain. Years later, when John Wayne was himself a big cowboy star, he said, “I copied Harry Carey. That’s where I learned to talk like I do; that’s where I learned many of my mannerisms.” One of Carey’s signature poses was to stand with his right hip slightly out, and his left arm crossed over and holding on to the upper part of his right. Wayne would one day pay homage to Carey by repeating the gesture in John Ford’s The Searchers .
    FILMS, BY DEFINITION, ARE ARTIFACTS of nostalgia; they chronicle the past. From Jesus to Jesse James, from Pearl Harbor to the Twin Towers, cinematic reenactment always follows hard-edged reality. In Hollywood’s early years, as the novelty of the nickelodeon exploded into a big-screen million-dollar industry, nothing was more popular than the filmed reenactments of the “wild” West, the expansionist period following the Civil War glorified in the movies by gun-slinging “heroes,” made more heroic by the convenient presence of “villains,” who also almost always ran the saloon and the prostitutes upstairs (sanitized in films as “singers” or “dancers”) and of course the interchangeable one-lump tribe of “Indians,” almost always played by white actors.
    The Sierra Madre foothills that encircled Glendale and the nearly always sunny climate made it easy for directors to shoot outdoors there and make today’s West look like yesterday on-screen. Many Hollywood studios had separate Glendale operations specifically for shooting cowboy movies. Their indoor facilities had pullback roofs so they could utilize natural light to shoot indoors. By 1919, seven hundred feature films a year were being made in or near Glendale.
    That was where the twelve-year-old Duke, imagining himself a real-life amalgam of Hart, Mix, and Carey, joined the baddest gang at Glendale High School, whose “posse” only a year or so earlier had regularly beaten him up; now, membership was an emblem of his heroic stature. The only thing he didn’t like was the burden of still having to take his little brother, Robert, along whenever invited to a party by the other gang members. If he didn’t especially like his little brother, he was still fiercely protective of him. If somebody made a disparaging remark or wanted him thrown out of the party, Duke always came to his defense. At one such soiree,