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

“After the cake and ice cream and punch was served . . . some wise guy said ‘Get that little jerk out of here [meaning Robert].’ I took a poke at this character and the party almost broke up in a free-for-all.”
    Just like in the movies.
    IN JUNE 1921, FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD DUKE graduated from Wilson Intermediate School, where he had lost his desire to be a loner and became a popular, good-looking student with real academic promise. In Glendale Union High School, he blossomed even further. He was president of the Shakespeare Club, cocaptain of the football team, a member of the French Club and the Drama Club, a winning member of the chess team, an effective leader of the debating team, and a first-class bridge player; and he maintained consistently high grades that earned him honor pins. He was also an active participant in putting together Stylus, his senior class’s yearbook. Because of all his good work, Marion was chosen class valedictorian.
    He was also Glendale Union’s best football player. In his junior year, as a running guard Wayne led Glendale Union to the state championship against Long Beach. Glendale lost the big game 15 to 8, but it didn’t matter that much to Duke, because his superior playing had gained the attention of regional scouts, including one from the University of Southern California.
    In 1925, his senior year, Glendale won the state championship. They not only went undefeated but were unscored on for the entire season, a record that would live in local lore as the greatness of the “Glendale Eleven.” Duke graduated with an overall grade average of 94 (out of 100), and from two hundred seniors he was chosen class salutatorian. USC offered him a football scholarship. Duke was thrilled, so was Doc, and so, even, was Mary, but for a different reason. USC was in the process of building a new law school.
    That fall, full of hopes and dreams of one day playing professional football, Duke became a USC Trojan, a full-fledged member of the legendary Thundering Herd.

Chapter 2
    Soon after starting classes and attending practice at the University of Southern California, the reality of a limited football scholarship soon set in. As Wayne later remembered, “In September 1925, I entered USC. The scholarship just covered tuition. I washed dishes in the fraternity house for my meals [and waited on tables at mealtime]. That left me a little short of money for such things as shoes, suits, laundry, and buying pretty girls ice cream sodas at the corner drugstore. I got work from the phone company. They called me a map plotter and I charted where the old telephone lines ran. I never did find out the purpose of this job.
    “Meanwhile, Dad’s newest drugstore failed. He opened an ice cream company and this failed. He opened another drugstore and after that a paint manufacturing company. This didn’t do well either. When he could afford it, he would send me five dollars a week.”
    Duke gave his dad free tickets to games. They cost $25 apiece, and for at least the first year, he had to pay for them out of his own pocket. And then things got worse, financially: “At the end of my freshman year I got bad news from the phone company. Seems they had run out of maps to plot. I desperately needed money.”
    He found handyman work at Warner Bros in Hollywood, and at MGM in Culver City, a bus ride a few miles to the west of the USC campus. He made a few extra dollars doing whatever they assigned him, as an assistant property man, an electrician’s helper, a gofer, an animal herder, and even as an extra or as it was called at the time, “wallpaper.” Sometimes on-screen, mostly off, whatever they needed him to do he did it.
    Wayne’s first recorded appearance in a motion picture was as a stand-in for Francis X. Bushman, the popular silent screen star, in MGM’s 1926 release Brown of Harvard . Directed by Jack Conway, it was a love triangle set among football players at the Ivy institution. 4 College football