John Wayne: The Life and Legend Read Online Free PDF

alfalfa, but corn and wheat needed more water than he had. With a lot of work, the plants might sprout, but the jackrabbits ate everything. Then there was the heat—118 degrees in the summer, 90 degrees in the house. Further complicating the literal hothouse atmosphere was the fact that Molly’s parents were living with them, making sure no harm befell their little girl. Finally, they bailed out for Los Angeles, after strongly advising their daughter and son-in-law to do the same.
    For a couple of years, the Morrisons barely got by. “Mostly we ate potatoes or beans in one form or another,” he remembered. “One Halloween, Mom gave us a big treat—frankfurters.”
    The Morrisons couldn’t afford a replacement for Jenny, so Marion began to walk to school, or hitch a ride on another family’s wagon. In any case, he had to get up at five in the morning in order to finish his chores before he could go to school, where once again he was taunted because of his name. Nevertheless, he was well behaved and a good student—he would always be a good student.
    He learned lessons that weren’t taught in school, mainly admonitions from his father about self-reliance. “Never expect anything from anybody,” his father told him. “Don’t take things for granted. The world doesn’t owe you a living. You have to work for everything you get; nobody’s coming around with plums on a silver platter.” The lessons took, and in later years formed the core of his conservative political philosophy.
    In later years, he asserted that the two years the family spent in the desert were too much for his mother and too much for the marriage. Clyde Morrison had one decent corn harvest before the market plunged. He had failed yet again, and Mary Morrison wouldn’t let him forget it. She berated him in front of his sons, branding him a failure and enumerating the myriad ways in which he had disappointed his children. Increasingly, she doted on her younger son. Wayne’s daughter Aissa believed that her father first resented his mother, then became bitter about her.
    The boy was frankly miserable, and had to content himself with reading the Sears Roebuck catalogues every farming family lived with. He read them cover to cover, over and over again, and would circle all the things he wanted but couldn’t afford. “I used to dream that someday I’d have enough dollars to order everything in that damn catalogue. Catalogues became an obsession with me.”
    Catalogues would stay an obsession with him, and when he was rich and famous he would do a great deal of his shopping from mail-order catalogues, which always signified the height of luxury.
    The fights between Mary and Clyde became ugly, and the marriage, never solid to begin with, became irreparable. A generalized anxiety began to beset the boy; in one of his few admissions of fear, young Morrison remembered patrolling their land with a rifle while his father worked the corn. His job was to shoot any rattlesnakes that appeared.
    On the upside, it taught him to be a good rifle shot. On the downside, if he missed, his father could die. “Shooting those snakes also gave me many sleepless nights—visions of thousands of slithering snakes coming after me. I used to wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, but my dad, or my family, never knew it. I kept my fears to myself.”
    Clyde’s father began suffering from the onset of dementia, as well as tuberculosis. Clyde had to commit him to a sanitarium in Glendale for a few weeks, after which he was transferred to a veterans hospital. Clyde and his family visited his father a couple of times in Glendale, and Molly began agitating for a move.
    Young Morrison remembered that the last straw came in the unprepossessing form of black-eyed peas. “We had five acres of greenery going, beautiful tender young shoots,” he remembered. “We went away for a weekend, and when we came back, they’d been completely eaten by rabbits. . . . That