Part One: John Wayne: A Dude Who Sucked

I remember that coming in the bulletin from the State Security Service. Yeah, yeah, you want you want to plug your podcast even though there's only two. Yeah, but they're yeah. I mean, you know, once you get tired of b t B you go over to t b R the Bituation Room podcast and uh yeah, Situation Room. What what blessings that the regime has showered upon us that we get a podcast like the Bituation Room to choose to watch or listen to, because you can watch it too.

It's not just an audio podcast, No, it is a great blessing upon YouTube and twitch. Now, Francesco, how are you doing today? I don't know. I'm scared, already scared because we got a three partner and you said, oh my god, is this going to be about like Hitler or someone And no, Francesco, we're talking about someone much worse than Hitler. Much today are bastard is John Wayne. I was like going to go with Attila the Han.

But hell yeah, Wayne, I think that's fair to say John Wayne was responsible for more Vietnamese deaths than Attila the Hun or Hitler. That that's probably fair to say less deaths elsewhere. Like, but you know, so what do you know? What do you know about Mr J Dubs, John Lane, Francesca Um Spaghetti Westerns or whatever those are, right, he was definitely a lot of why I'm not an expert enough on western because those were the ones that were like filled in filmed in Italy, right, we keep

coming back to Italy. I think that's why they're spaghetti, yes, which is racist, by the way, super racist. I mean now that, yeah, we have other foods exactly, why can't it be a ravioli Western Western? Why not a one of those with the fish dishes that they cook on

the coast. You know, we got stuff. To be totally honest with you, I've never seen a single John Wayne film However, the thing that I know about him, and the thing that I repeat on some sort of snoopes whatever bs that I'm on or like, is is that he when he died, had something like fifty pounds of meat removed from his gut. That there was like an undigested amount of beef in his bottles, probably because the

man ate a tremendous quantity of meat. But but I think that's that's more of a uh an apocryphal tale. But like, the thing about John Wayne that's interesting is that he's whether or not you've seen any of his movies, and I think today a lot of most people probably haven't or at least haven't seen many. Maybe you've caught, like, um, True Grit, the Original True Grit, or something like The Shootiest, So there's a couple of movies that are still in circulation.

For the most part, He's just like a meme that has implanted itself in the background of our cultural consciousness. He is this kind of like ideal of hyper masculinity, of like white Christian masculinity that's still very pervasive in

US culture. Um, And that's kind of who John Wayne is, and that matters more at this point than what he actually did in any of his films because and it's interesting because we have a lot of there's a lot of other stars in that era, like Gary Cooper or whatever that we're huge in their day, and now a lot of most people on the street aren't. Couldn't really think of anything about them. You know, maybe you've heard the name Gary Cooper, but could you pick him out

of a lineup? Not unless you're really into old films. But if you see John Wayne's face somewhere, most people are gonna be like, oh, yeah, that's that's sucking John Wayne right, Like he's just he's just an icon of American manhood. You know. He also has like sort of a he's got a classic asshole face, like just very punchable and or you're gonna get punched when you see that face. Yeah, he's got this. He was this. He was this kind of stereoty, not even stereotypically, because the

stereotype exists because of him. But he will talk about this later. He didn't really get famous until he was like a middle aged, surly looking motherfucker um and a lot of his fame came from that. You know that that's part of why he remains so popular with like dads and grandpa's for forever is he was this this kind of ARCon of the old guy who will beat your ass, which they all want to believe they are. Um,

you know, he's just like us. Yeah, it's like you know, nowadays we get our movies like you know, the Equalizer from a few years back with Denzel You always want every couple of years have a movie with like a sixty year old man who beats the ship out of a bunch of twenty year olds. Um. Clinton Eastwood used to do these. John Wayne was like the motherfucking the Jesus Christ of that and and all later middle aged actors who beat up twenty year olds or his apostles.

But you know, we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Um. The thing that he had a very long career, and it was primarily, as you said, cowboy movies that made him famous and in fact, as Charles Silver of the Museum of Modern Art observed, Wayne made westerns for twice as long as it took to fight the Indian Wars.

He made westerns for about as long as it actually took to settle the continent west of the Missouri so for an idea like this period, He's part of why this Western period is still so like central to the American ideals or I like idea, particularly the right wing idea of how this country was quote unquote founded. And it's because he was in movies romanticizing that period for longer than it was ever real, which is neat yes, um, but always showed like the Native American perspective, right, Oh

for sure. No, that was one of the things they were famous of. That's why one of his chief co stars ironized Cody was absolutely a real Indigenous person and not an Italian pretending to be Native American. Hey, I'll have none of that in this three part no anti Italian slander. M hmm. Whatever roles we want, that's right, I mean we sure did, We absolutely did. I will I will say that there's there's gonna be a couple of cases of white dudes playing whatever the fuck roles

they want in these episodes. So this is the thing that sort of indoctrinated our parents into the idea that like you know, manifest destiny and that bullshit idea was always right, always justified. Because like for us, I feel like when I grew up it was more just like you watched Schoolhouse Rocks and there was a song called elbow Room, which was basically this explanation of like the like the settling of the West and the colonization of

the West. That was just like we just needed more room albow room, And I was like, what the fuck? Still again, very very very rose colored glasses. Yeah, that's like the sanitized version of the story that John Wayne told UM. And and that like was kind of being told through his body, Um, which is a big part of the role he has here. So this is gonna

be an interesting bastard. Now. That said, when we're talking about the things that are terrible that resulted from John Wayne, we are talking big picture stuff like how what his image has done. But as a person, don't worry. He was really unpleasant. So we'll get plenty of stories of a dude being shitty and old timey hall e would and I you know, no one was ever quite as good at being shitty as dudes in old timey Hollywood. It was really like it was like the renaissance for

being an asshole in America. Like you you, you just can't hit those heights anymore. Um, as much as Harvey tried. Ye. As much as Harvey tried, he was never but a

pale imitation of his of his ancestors. Um. So Yeah, one of the things that's interesting about John Wayne is that, you know, he's he's the image of manhood that he crafted in his films has proved to be so durable that, like, if you go to gun shows and kind of like big right wing events today, you'll see his face all over ships still, um, because that ideal hasn't really changed in any way since his death. Now, the story of John Wayne is more than anything, the story of American

Christian masculinity, which he embodied. So for the first I'm gonna talk a little bit about that history. For the first hundred and thirty or so years of the United States as a nation, Uh, most men in the country made their living one way or the other through hard physical labor. We're talking, of course, about men who were free, although men who were enslaved also made their existed through hard physical labor. Pretty Much everybody was like working physically,

like doing something that was difficult. Either they're farming, or they're in a factory, or they're shooting people who were standing where they wanted to build a farm or a factory, um, and so masculinity, like you didn't have to be super performative about your masculinity. Then it was pretty simple. You worked hard. Ideally you made enough money to start a small business. That was kind of like the goal for

every man wanting to take care of his family. Broadly speaking, if you were white, if you were a white dude, if you were not a white dude, then you you just worked without pay for that guy, and you were like in masculine Like the other side of my relatives were Chinese, so you know, building the railroads, like what a feminine activity. Well, yeah, that's exactly that's exactly right.

And again we are talking because John Wayne is the the avatar of white Christian manhood, right, we're not we're talking about masculinity in a narrow context, but in the one that is sort of societally dominant in the United States because you know, I've heard of this white Christian masculinity. Yeah, yeah, he helped invent it. So by the turn of the twentieth century, things had started to change rapidly. For one thing, the frontier didn't exist anymore. You know, white people had

made it all the way across. There was no longer these kind of open spaces on the map, so to speak. The economy was increasingly dominated by consumer goods, and now most people were working jobs that didn't require them to go out and farm in the middle of nowhere or cut down trees or you know, get into gunfights. They were living in cities, they were working in offices. Uh, toughness didn't really matter as much as like being able to sit in an office for the right amount of

hours while you slowly went mad from syphilis. So this creates kind of like a a psychological uh, what's the word, I'm looking for emergency for American white men, right, like the fact that all this change is suddenly they're like, well, what am I? How? What am I supposed to be doing?

This doesn't feel right? And I'm man still yeah, And and rather than being like, maybe we are in the process of building a system that is like an anti human nightmare that forces people to labor in little boxes for like pitdling, and like everything everything that we have been working towards is horribly wrong, and we need to go back to a much earlier period in our development of what a society should be in your lifestyle an easier lifestyle, Robert, it is. It's a lot lazier for

for at least, well, I mean in some ways. But like also rather than you know, as many people kind of living a rural life and working on farms, a lot of them are like in coal mines choking to death, which is worse than farming. True. True, A lot of these guys are trying to figure out, like what does it mean to be a man anymore? Now that you know, we're in the modern era. Um. And while white men are kind of feeling increasingly domesticated by this office workship,

immigration from Eastern Europe is starting to search. And so also there's all this racism against like you know, Italians and Slabs and and folks who were like not yet quite white, um in the eyes of the people who are at the time definitely quite white. So all of this stuff is making men feel like edged in. You know, we've got these immigrants coming in to take our jobs. Our jobs aren't that great anyway. Uh. And then suddenly women start asking for a lot of wild things, like

the right to vote in bicycles. Bicycles, it's gonna only if you ride them. Side saddle. The moral panic over bicycles is still one of my favorite little history Jim's they were so scared of bicycles, we should bring that back, well, you know, because it breaks the hymen. Yeah, I mean we kind of half that America has never gotten over its hatred of bicycles. Now we just build trucks big

enough to crush them. You know, when you I was like, you know, when you're like twelve, you do you are like, yeah, but like riding a bike could like break your time. And there's a lot of weird Like I read it in Cosmo or like Why I Am, which was an old girl's magazine. Um about like the sanctity of anyway. We don't have to get into it. I mean I don't know because that was not a part of my education.

On the bicycle, well, suffice to say, I still don't know how to ride a bicycle, so oh it's I don't trust Well, Um, I think people were meant to travel on two feet or four wheels and nothing in between, so you're not missing anything. Devil machines. Yeah, I'm I'm on board with white people in the early nineteen hundreds, with the hatred of bicycles. Mine's just not a hatred

of bicycles for sexist reasons. I just don't think they're natural. Okay, So basically the walls are when of the walls not been closing in on the perception of white Christian masculinity like basically forever and let me just a quick check in with a with a white man um, although not in that time. But Robert, are you okay? Are you guys honestly? Well, actually no, because everything is bad, but

not for that reason. Everything's bad because of these people and their continual needs to preserve their power relations relative to everyone else. Like this idea of like white whiteness, uh,

and this this patriarchal kind of white Christian society. People come up with it over the course of a century or two and then have this kind of brief golden era where they feel like it's not at threat for like five years, and then up until the present day are actively trying to kill the entire planet in order to maintain it, even though they've been winning for so

for forever. Um. Basically, it's safe to say that this is a moment like if you were to actually pinpoint when America was quote unquote great in the minds of a lot of these Trumpers. Is that the John Wayne era. Yeah, that's I mean, that's a little later than where we are right now. But yeah, it's like the nineteen thirties through the nineteen like sixties, early sixties before like the Vietnam protest ship really got out of hand, and then we're in a hippie spitt and rambos face. That's right,

that's right. Um so, yeah, and again like that that's the golden era that are white Christian nationalists look back to. The white Christian nationalists in like nineteen hundred, the eighteen nineties, nineteen hundred, they're looking back at like thirty years earlier too, or fifty years earlier too, for a period that barely

ever existed. Um So, white Christian men are feeling emasculated by modernity and they start grappling for a new totem of manhood, like someone to kind of hang their images of masculinity on. And they find Teddy Roosevelt. Now not a bad pick, although kind of a surprising one given

his background. In the book Jesus and John Wayne, Kristen Cobbs Dumez writes, as a young man Roosevelt had been ridiculed for his high voice, tight pants, and fancy clothing, and to write it as a weakling and a punkin lily.

But Roosevelt wanted power. Determined to reinvent himself, he went West, rechristening himself the Cowboy of the Dakotas it was on the frontier that a new masculinity would be forged, a place where white men brought order to savagery, where men served as armed protectors and providers, where violence achieved a greater good. If the Wild West could mold the exquisite Mr. Roosevelt into a rugged masculine specimen, perhaps it could do

the same for American manhood generally. So the think he went or just shave your mustache, bro, No, they're never gonna do that. That's that mustache is how they keep you know, the Mexicans away or whatever. Can we just go back to punk in lily? Right, there's a pumpkin lily. It's not just a pup old West insult, Like what happens a lily grows on top of a pumpkin? As when you gotta cut that pumpkin down before it grows

a lily? Yeah, you don't want to grow. That's why we don't have pumpkins, because then we have lilies, which came first a pumpkin of the lily. Think it's just because it's fragile and pretty, and he was a fragile,

pretty boy by the standards of the time. So even as Roosevelt is kind of like out in the Dakota's doing outdoor ship and getting getting big and strong, uh, the fact that they're like the idea of a West at all is like starting to end um And so again, like this is he Roosevelt who kind of comes into prominence as this modern era is beginning, is a product of the era before, and everything that's kind of held up as an ideal about him as masculine is the

thing that's no longer possible for a lot of men to do. So one of the things Roosevelt's trying to figure out as he starts to become a prominent figure, and one of the things a lot of white dudes are trying to figure out is where are we going to make more hard white men you know? Next? Yeah, well, yeah, exactly, that's exactly what they're talking about. And Teddy decides, you know, who would be good to have a war with Spain. Um. And in fairness, it's a pretty good time to have

a war with Spain. They don't do good in this war, Uh, it doesn't. It does not go well for Spain as wars go. That the U. S has gotten involved in pretty pretty easy fight, not for like a lot of people in the Philippines, but for the US as a nation. It goes a lot better than for example, Vietnam. Um. So Teddy when the war happens, and he's like a huge backer. We're we'll talk about the Spanish American more and more and more detail one of these days. But

he's a part of why we get into it. And he volunteers to lead a cavalry union when it starts, and he actually fights in Cuba. He does a bunch of he has his charge up San Juan Hill. He gets in all of the newspapers. He's this big national hero, Teddy Roosevelt, the brave Imperial war leader, and all of these kind of soldiers who fight with him and become construct their own masculinity on the battlefields of Cuba, you know. Um, and under the guise of like, hey, we want to

pillage that island over there. Well, and they blew up our boat. They blew up our boat. We got a pillage that island and also several others got it. Yeah, I forgot about that boat. Yeah, there's that boat that blows up. Um. Sometimes it's you know, with the nine eleven of the late eighteen hundreds, that one boat exploded. I've I have forgotten as we will nine eleven one day. So Teddy Roosevelt, Uh, you know we this goes good for everybody. And uh, it's so popular going to war

with Spain. Teddy Roosevelt's partner that in nineteen o one he gets selected president. Um, and he's he's an interesting guy as president. Obviously a big part of him there's an element that's very Trumpian because he has to show himself as this ultra potent and tough man and and he's gotta like kind of he's he's constantly sort of showing himself as this like outdoorsy, rough writing son of

a bitch. But also a lot of that's true about Teddy Roosevelt, to his like credit, Unlike Trump, the potency stuff isn't entirely constructed. He is a dude who spends a lot of time outdoors. He famously gets shot once while giving a speech and just like keeps right on doing the thing. Um, So he's not you can see why people latch onto this dude, um. And some of

the ship he does as president is pretty dope. He establishes the National park system, um, although that's also tied into white supremacy, because a big part of the idea of national parks, in this idea of the wilderness that Roosevelt establishes, is these very white attitudes towards wildlife recreation, which are rooted in somewhat mythic ideas of wild and untamed lance, which, of course we're not wild or untamed and had been in most case is heavily heavily influenced

and basically gardened by indigenous people who have to be excised from the topic because these lands can't have indigenous people on them, they have to stay empty so white folks can hike in them, right, right, So there's problematic aspects, even though there's also positive aspects of the National Park System, which is that we didn't turn all of those parks

and the factors. Yeah, I mean, I I just love the images from Yellowstone from like the fifties when it's just like families feeding entire picnic baskets, like actual picnic baskets too. They're feeding picnic baskets to bears and they're like, I wonder why the bears are getting so up etty and crazy. Yeah, because you're feeding them twinkies straight up. I think that's something we I think one of the big places we went wrong in this country, Francesca is

we got rid of all the apex predators. I think we should never have made it legal to hunt them um, and we should always have fed them random food so they associated humans with food, and then we'd be getting cold regularly by wolves and bears in the like. It would be a better like if every week killed cold yeah yeah, yeah, if like every week in Santa Monica family got eaten by a bobcat, you know. Yeah yeah.

I think about how much lower rent would be. It would be like I got a great deal on an apartment because this big cat broke in a native family. I mean, remember Hank the Tank and exactly I think it was. It was just a couple of weeks ago, Yeah, Hank the Tank, you know, rummaging through people's trash, and like terrorizing people was like hell, yeah, stay stay in line. Then a fox was in the Capitol building or around it was nipping the heels of concords. Were they euthanized

it anyway? M hmm, it's a tragedy. What we should have done is released more foxes into the halls of Congress with more rabies, a lot more rabies, I mean the filibuster people immediately. It would a lot of things would end, A lot of things would end that needed to end, and maybe would get to see Mitch McConnell tried to tear out the throat of Ted Cruz as he's mad with rabies, which would have been pretty funny. Vince that senators, Republican senators don't already have rabies. Yeah,

that's probably fair, although kind of unfair to rabies. What did it ever due to you, Francesca and save democracy? That's right. Rabies came to save us and we we spurned it. Um. So, by the early nineteen hundreds, Christian dudes, white Christian dudes in the United States had become enamored with a sort of performative masculinity um, which is the kind of like as as as many of the things that Roosevelt did as he did, he was also very much like a performer, right, Um, he's a he's a

dude who was very like media trained. He's a dude who's consciously manipulating his image. And so that becomes that kind of performative masculinity becomes dominant in the United States, and it probably would have looked pretty weird to the actual guys they were imitating, the dudes on the frontier, who, more than anything, probably would have been like, boy, it would be nice to have a desk job rather than freezing to death in the middle of Iowa alone, Like, yeah,

just get back there for everyone's dick sake. Yeah. Um. So yeah, this is these earlier kind of Victorian attitudes towards Christianity that had been dominant in that period start to feel a feminate um to a lot of men in this period. There's derision at the womanly virtues they

felt had dominated their religion. There's this idea that the dominant image of Christ was like feminine because he wanted to feed people and like help them and heal them, and that's like girl shit, rather than like going out and kicking in heads and and punching people like, that's the Jesus that people want, that white dudes want't this period, it's like a lepers some pumpkin lily bullshit. That is some pumpkin lily bullshit. You need to get yourself a

six gun Jesus Christ. So Kristen Dumaz argues that to do this, in order to like remake Christianity in a militant warlike image, they had to revive old pre war Southern ideals about what white Christian masculinity represented. And so they kind of go back to the South pre Civil War to this idea that the man's jobs that have sanctified aggression in order to maintain order. So men in the pre war South existed to protect white men, existed to protect white women and children from the danger of

slave uprisings, which they did with guns. Right. That's the idea that gets kind of reincorporated into the American mainstream in the early nineteen hundreds, and this new kind of much more aggressive strain of Christian masculinity becomes known as muscular Christianity. It's Jesus on H G H. Basically, you know, yeah, Joe Rogan up that christ a little bit you know, which is like not the hot Jesus that we all

know and love. You know, Jesus is hot because he's just like hipster you know, who took off his skinny jeans and you're like, oh my god, you should eat more. But he only can afford Roman because he's you know, just as a podcast or whatever. Oh Jesus would absolutely have a podcast today and it would be this one. Oh no, okay a little bit. So as this is where I announced to the listeners that I am the son of God. It's a three parter about how Robert

is Jesus. Yeah, that's that's that's Sophie's just not even listening. So we're going to get away with a lot here, Francesco um So as this is all happening, there's all been a lot of scenes setting um in winter set, Iowa. On nineteen o seven, Mary and Clyde Morrison had a baby. They named this baby Marian Robert Morrison. And this is the kid that's going to grow up to be John Wayne Maran Mary And oh yeah, wow, you think that's going to go good for him? In in in elementary school.

I'm not a very masculine name, not a very masculine name. Look, you go into first grade as a boy with the first name Mary in today, you're gonna take some ship. Right in nineteen oh seven, you're gonna take a lot more. It's gonna be a lot rougher. Um this is that is part of the story that we're building to. Um. So, Marian Morrison is born in a house in Winterset, Iowa. The house is a museum today, although we don't know that it was the house he was actually born in.

Our entire source that it was is like an old dude who told a biography or he remembered hearing about a baby being born there. Um so maybe not around here anyway, that'll be fifty Yeah. That that's like a lot of John Wayne's legacy where they're like, look, it might have been this house. So we're gonna put a museum up here with pictures of Trump and it too. Fuck you, it's winter Set, Iowa. We have done nothing else, you know. Huh. Um. Now we do know he was

born in winter Set, so at least there's that. We have a birth announcement from the local paper which read a thirteen pound son arrived at the Homely Morrison Monday. Yeah, that's a that's two babies. That is two babies and one baby. You must have ripped. I'm sorry, that's my mind like perennium. Yeah, me too, girl, that's that's that's yeah, that's that couldn't have been easy. That's way too big for a baby. That's a massive baby, massive by seven

eat two other babies as much. She might have eaten a couple of babies in there. They were triplets. And he ate that's such a big baby. And he will he will grow up. He's a huge guy. Like he as an adult, he's about he's six three, so he's like six three and half an inch or something like that, So he's about my height. But he's also like really really broad. I think he weighs probably like two fifties

something like that. As a girl, like, he's just a huge motherfucker's Yeah, he's a door and he he comes out as a certified chowed you know, um, just just hardcore Brandon, Yeah, right on that shoulder. So winter Set was a small city of less than three thousand people. In many ways, it would have resembled at the time Marian was born, the current right wing vision of like Paradise soda pop cost fifteen cents. The only religions represented

in town where Methodist, Catholic, and Baptist. Basically everybody was white. There were two black citizens who had names and we're on the city country or the city rolls. There was a third black man who lived in the city, but everyone just called him Inward John, only they did not use Inward, they used the you know, uh, he lived in a shack and was not included in the town census. So that is that is the kind of town that

John Wayne is born into. Christ Uh existence of that man, oh boy, Yeah, I don't know what was going on with that dude, but it can't have been easy, Like how do you not avoid dying every single day as the only black man in that town? Yeah, I mean I have you have to assume living kind of on the outskirts of town, but not being represented in the census, he had some role he played that was like picking up scrap or something, where as long as he's stuck to his area, it was you know that that would

be my assumption. But I don't probably found him from another town, brought him there to just make them feel superior, to have somebody to do a slurezze. Someone who looked down there knows that, yeah, it's it's it can't be a good story, right, whatever the truth is, it cannot possibly be good. We need that John's story later on. But anyway, this is about Marian. So yeah, that dude earned the name John. At least that has to have

been his name. Um. So, one pretty good BuzzFeed article that I found on John Wayne describes Marian's parents as quote an implacable woman married to a sweet ne'er do well. Now that's a little bit too friendly, and that that's broadly in line. So biographer Scott i'man kind of describes her. Similarly, Biographer Richard Douglas Jensen describes Marian's mother is straight up abusive. Um, probably physically abusive and definitely mentally abusive. That does seem

to be pretty accurate. Both Morrison's were part of what biographer Scott i'man describes as a nervous middle class of early early twentieth century America. These are the people we were talking about earlier on in the episode. These like folks who they're now doing these kind of more emasculating jobs. They're they're potentially having more like kind of wealth than Americans had before. But also there's this endless series of recessions and great depressions and ship that occurs in the

late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. So this sort of prosperity and this kind of easier life is married to the fact that, like everything can fall out from under you at any time because there's a run on the bank or whatever. So they're they're nervous right there there on paper, doing better than their ancestors, but they feel no sense of actual security. So she's they're just kind of like whittling her husband down to a little nub about like, how come you ain't got no more

callouses on your hands? Huh, Yes, that's exactly what's happening, Pumpkin, Lily pussy like that. Yeah, yeah, I think you've got her voice exactly. I mean, I liked I just like blaming the woman in this case. No, but it's look, we need some female villains, and for every male villain, you know, there's some of them have a lot of

mom issues, and I think those moms deserve credit. What's very progressive about this story, Francesca is that normally when we have a bastard and you go into their upbringing, it's like mom was super sweet and supportive, but then she like dies suddenly, and like their dad's beating the shit out of him, or like Hitler's dad, where he beats the ship out of him, but then he dies and it throws the family in the chaos. Here Clyde, he's kind of an alcoholic, but he's a sweet dude.

Nobody ever says anything bad about Clyde. He's a nice guy. Mama is a terrible person. It sounds like we're building to what a bad mom she is. Yes, maybe she was just angry at how big he was. Um, she can't poop right, I mean absolutely not, never the same, never the same, never the same. It's time for the first You know who else can't poop? Right, Francesco, I was hoping you would do that one. The products and services that support this podcast, not not a single one

of them, all horrible, horrible stomach problems, potentially fatal. That's everyone. We let's sponsor our podcasts. Are you actively dying? If not, you can't sponsor this show. That's that's the rule. That way, If you don't like an advertiser on the show. You'll know they're not long for this world. And that's the behind. The bastards guarantee got us the boredom out. That's what you got. You gotta buy now, you gotta buy now,

you gotta give all Right, here's ads. We're back. So we're talking about Clyde Morrison, John Wayne's dad, although John Wayne is just merrying at this point. So Clyde fucking Clyde. Uh, you know, born too late to conquer the frontier. He's got a series of shitty desk jobs. He'd attended college on a football scholarship, but he didn't do great and he wound up getting a job as a pharmacist. Um.

He's a really nice guy. He's known as like people will say, if he had four bits in his pocket, he'd buy a beer with one and give the rest to you so that you could like sit and talk. Um this guy, he's a nice guy. Um. He's also kind of a pushover and his wife is very ambitious and hard charging. She was if not straight out abusive as Jensen claims, then everyone seems to agree pretty casually. Kind of crue when his when Marion's younger brother was born,

she decided, and his younger brother's named Robert. He's born when Marrion's about three. She decides she likes his younger brother better, and she gives him Marion's name. Because Marion's middle name had initially been Robert, so she takes his his name, and she gives it to his younger brother, and she gives him a new middle name, Mitchell Um.

In the book John Wayne The Life and Legend, Scott i'man explains all of this sloppy switching happened in earl Ham, where the family moved to nineteen ten, and where Marion's younger brother, Robert, was born in December nineteen eleven. Using a child's name is the p and and now you see it, now you don't. Shell game was only the

beginning of Marion's ragged childhood. What probably happened is that his mother, a formidably strong willed, read borderline unpleasant woman born Mary Brown in eighteen eighty five and Lincoln, Nebraska, simply appropriated the older boys middle name for the preferred new arrival. So she takes his name because she likes his little brother better, like which is Rother the most redeeming part of his name. Robert, thank you for saying that. Yeah,

gives it. Mitchell, what a ship name. You're never gonna be nothing but an eminem's Mary and Mitchell, Mary and Mitchell. Get down here, Mary and Mitchell Morrison. That's what it stands for. Now, Robert, you can come over here. You don't got to do chores today. Yeah, that's more or less what goes on. So Molly Morrison was famed for

her frequent rages, where again Clyde's pretty retiring. So as he grows up, Marian comes to vastly prefer hanging out with his dad while his brother Robert becomes a mama's boy, which suited Mama just fine because she only likes her

little boy. So winter Set, Iowa, to this day has not really gotten over John Wayne, but he gets over his hometown basically immediately right the family moves to Nebraska when he's like three or four, and he later tells an interviewer, just about all I remember about winter Set is riding horses, playing football, and the time I thought I discovered electricity. And there's more to that quote, but I'm not going to read it because it's funnier if

I don't. So Marian's really need to know more about when he thought he discovered it's it's not as funny. He's just letting your imagination go. He's like, when I actively tried to kill myself because my mom was driving me nuts. Yeah, I mean essentially, yes, And I stood out in a storm. Yeah, I mean you you have literally grasped it. Yes, Okay, Okay, I like it. I like the interview something out. Yeah, it's cute kids stuff. Right, He's just a kid at this point. So his early

life is very unstable. The family moves constantly. They've moved like a bunch of times by the time he's seven or eight, which is not super common for this period. Right. You know my early life, we moved a bunch, but like you had cars, you know, it wasn't hard. Right. Um, So he's moving in a period of time where that's a real trauma. Uh. Clyde is bad with money. He declares bankruptcy, he loses his pharmacy. Um, he's like moving

around taking up ship jobs. Uh. This pattern repeats itself a couple of times until in nineteen thirteen, when Marian is six, the family moves to des Moines with Molly's fit to live with Molly's family while Clyde tries to get back on his feet. So they're living in des Moines. Nineteen fourteen comes around, World War One kicks off, you know over in Europa stand yes, make more men, Make more men. Oh yeah, well that's gonna have an impact

on the story. But if initially the US hasn't involved in World War One, although guys like Teddy Roosevelt Shure want us to be. And while this is all kind of building up, Clyde's father, uh, you know, Marian's grandpa buys a parcel of land in California and asks if his son wouldn't mind like working it. Um like, hey, you guys, wanna nothing else has worked? Want to try farming in California? Uh? So Clyde has no experience doing this, he's not particularly apt for farm life, but he's like, sure,

we'll give it a shot. So the family moves across the country to live with their grandparents and try to make it go with a farm. So here's the problem, Francesca. The place where Clyde Sr. Purchases eighty acres is Palmdale, California. You ever been to Palmdale, I don't think so. No. So it is right next to the Mojave. It gets about four inches of rain in a good year, which is slightly more than Portland's got the day before I wrote this episode. So most things do not grow well

in palm Dale. If you are able to divert tremendous water resources from elsewhere in the state, you can make a pretty good go of avocado farming there right now. That was not really happening at this point, and it's not. It's not a good place for agriculture. And the specific thing they try to grow there initially is corn, which does not do well in a climate like this. No. Yeah, Palmdale's where I'm I'm looking at it. All the poppies are people, you know, there's definitely unsers go and take

photos of themselves on the poppies. It's beautiful. It's a lovely part of the part of the state. Grow there. Yeah, I think you could grow opium there if you wanted to, but um, you know, it's not a great place to be a farmer unless you're being a very specific kind of farmer. And they decided to grow corn, and again, like Ukraine, is one of the countries in the world that grows the most corn. Think of the climate of Ukraine versus a town right on the edge of the Mojave.

You know. Um, So the Morrisons start trying to grow ship and their whole plot is kind of a land scam. There was some rules with the government where if they could develop all eighty acres, the government would give them another five hundred something acres. So it's they're they're trying to like game the government to to to make it rich. But they are going to have to be better at farming than they wind up being to do that. So the only house on the property is what John Wayne

later later called a glorified shack. It was unpowered, unheeded, and it had no running water. Uh yeah. Marian later called the terrain as barren deserted country. Um. But he and his dad set to work trying to make the desert bloom. So while they're struggling to farm, Muscular Christianity in the United States is reaching its apex. When World War One kicks off, Teddy Roosevelt himself repeatedly urged the US to get involved, right like, we're just being a

bunch of a bunch of girls. If we don't get involved in this war and feed our sons to machine guns. Um and Woodrow Wilson, who gets to be the president, campaigns on not doing that. He's like, it seems like a bad idea World War One. Maybe we should stay out of that. Obviously, he's not going to stick to his guns. Um So, Teddy Roosevelt and him are kind of having this big public spat over whether or not

the US should get involved. Um and and and Teddy is not the only one really pushing the United States for involvement. There's a whole culture that grows up on the right wing urging intervention in World War One. And I'm gonna read another quote from Jesus and John Wayne here.

Former professional baseball player Billy Sunday preached this new muscular Christianity with unrivaled zeal Wanting nothing to do with the sissy lily livered piety, Sunday preferred to pack his old muscle loading gospel gun with ipocac, buttermilk, rough on, rats, rock, salt, and whatever else came in handy and let it fly. In the spring of nineteen seventeen, with America's injury into

the First World War, Sunday's militancy went beyond metaphor. He had no time for pacifists or draft dodgers, God forsaken months, or apparently for nuance of any kind. And these days all our patriots or traitors to your country and the cause of Jesus Christ. An evangelist for war, Sunday was known to leap atop his pulpit waiving the American flag. Now I read that quote because this is a guy who's prominence in the US right way. When John Wayne is a kid. Later on, our boy Marion is going

to grow up to become this man. You know, essentially, this is what he does during Vietnam. Um causes the problem when you conflate nation building with like Jesus and religion. This is the problem when you when you have like ch shin settler colonialism is when you've stopped settling, when you've stopped killing one set of people, you are existentially like in a crossroads, your bankrupt. You're like, who I am? You know anything to do? If we're not killing people? Yeah? Right?

And then you think and then you think that Jesus and your God just wants you to kill more people and that will then prove yourself. Yeah. It's like it's like you know, you you, you know, you have these guys who like work their whole life at some sort of horrible financial industry job and they're able to retire, which a lot of people don't get to do anymore. But then once they retire, one of two things happens. They either die immediately because they don't have anything to do,

or they get real into cryptocurrency. Um, and we're in America's like cryptocurrency phase, our first one right here, right that that's what World War one is is like board apes for for the United States. It's the other way for us to chase those highs. Yeah, it's like our midlife crisis. Yeah. So um yeah, our boy marian Um at this point, he's a little kid with a girl's first name, which causes him a lot of problems. So

he goes to a public school. Uh, there are no busses back then, so he has to ride a horse miles every day to and from class. And today this would make you the toughest son of a bit in second grade. But this is rural California in nineteen fourteen, so it's not an uncommon thing to be doing. Um, but he does get mocked constantly because again his name is Marian. Other kids asked him why his mom didn't send him to school in skirts biographer Scott i'man rights.

Not surprisingly, in later years he didn't particularly like to talk about his childhood. His last wife said that the stories came out only in fragments during their twenty years together. Mainly he felt unloved by his mother and was quietly distressed by his father's ineffectuality. So kind of a sympathetic kid at this point. A little bit yeah, a little bit of um, you know, making of a mass shooter. Yeah, yeah, you can see a few places this to go right.

So a lot of negative left wing coverage of John Wayne will note his upbringing in suburban Glendale, which is where he winds up after this, and that he's like a surf bomb as a young man, to kind of make the case that his cowboy mystique was all a lie. I don't really think that's fair, because again, he does spend years on a farm in the middle of nowhere in a pretty rugged terrain, like riding a horse to

and from school every day. One of his jobs on the farm is to stand in the field with a rifle looking for snakes while his dad works the field, because like, if his dad gets bitten by a snake out in the middle of the desert, he's going to die. So this is actually like the source of a lot of trauma for John Wayne because he's he's standing out there with a gun trying to shoot spot and shoot snakes in time to stop his dad from getting bitten.

And he just constantly has these fucking nightmares when he goes to sleep at night of like being too late and his dad getting bitten by a snake. Um, that's a lot to put on like a seven year old kid. His mom would never let him live that one down. But like I'm also imagining a kid who's all so bored to tears standing there absolutely and then just imagining like you know, you know, hordes of Indians on the plane, you know, just coming over the mountain, and like just

very in his imagination. He definitely is, And he spends when he's like riding his horse to and from school and ship, he spends a lot of time imagining cowboy fights and being attacked by bandits and ship which you get very normal ship for a seven year old or whatever in this situation. Um, And he notes that like even though he has all these nightmares, he he never talks about it, Like he's he's constantly dreaming about like

thousands of snakes coming to attack him and his dad. Um. But he he doesn't feel like he can say anything, like you're not allowed to talk about being afraid of things as a young man in this period, so he just kind of keeps it bottled up inside. Now being a kid. Um. Yeah, like I said, he's he's got all these different fantasies and stuff, and it seems like some of the happier moments in his childhood at this period are the time he spends on a horse kind

of lost in fantasies, riding to and from school. And at least according to Scott, i'man he loves this horse. Uh. Jinny is her name, um, and she's his, she's his, his, his, his buddy out there. But she's also got some sort of chronic stomach illness that makes it impossible for her to put on weight. So no matter how well the Morrison's feed her, she looks like she's starving. Now, if you know California Francesca, you know, it's full of people

who are bad at minding their own damn business. And a neighbor calls the Humane Society to claim that Marian is abusing this horse. Wow, that's like the next door of the early ninety it's just like a skinny horse. This little kid in this little horse. I feel like he's not feeding it enough. Yeah, so Scott, i'man rights Marian stoutly insisted he was always feeding his horse, that he carried oats for the horse, even on their daily commute to and from school. His teacher and his parents

stood up for him. The county vet examined the horse and diagnosed the wasting disease, but a sense of outrage over being falsely accused never left him. I learned you can't always judge up her Sonora situation by the way it appears on the surface. He remembered, you have to look deeply into things before you're in a position to make a proper decision. So they tried to cancel him. Try to cancel him. Cancel culture came for John Wayne because of his ragged ass horse of some nosy lib

was like, that horse needs more food. Shut the funk. Up, and he does have his he has his old yellow moment because this horse never gets better and they have to shoot it. Yeah, you know, it's what happened to horse that I do not know. Possibly, although I kind of I would. I think maybe his dad would be the kind of dude to not put that on his kids. I don't really know. Um, horse, Maryan, you're shooting your horse. You're shooting your best friend, Jenny. Shoot your best friend Jenny.

Then we're eating her because we're poorous shit. So, despite trying very hard, Clyde and Marian are terrible at farming um and the hundred and eighteen degree summers very quickly forced Clyde's ailing parents to flee for the cooler climates of Los Angeles. When they leave, they tell their son like, hey, we made a bad call with this farm. You guys should probably get the funk out of here too, write like,

doesn't seem like Palm Dale going anywhere good? Maybe move to l A. It's it seems like it'll always be affordable and a good place to live. Citrus trees at this point, but citrus trees at this point. Yeah, there's like forty people there, So Clyde tries for a little while more to farm this this plot of land. But when the horse dies, Marian has to walk or hitch my hike like an eight mile round trip to school

every day. Um. It's just a brutal way for a kid to live, Like, he's got to get up hours before he starts this hike to do his chores because you know it's a farm. Um. But he's also he does really well in school. Still, he's a good student, and he distracts himself self from the realities of his life by obsessively reading and rereading catalogs, particularly Sears catalogs, and just like underlining all the things he's going to buy one day when he somehow gets money. Um. Classic

poor kids shit. Uh, pretty pretty normal behavior. So after about two years, his parents can barely stand to be in the same room as each other. Farming kind of destroys the marriage and they have no money. All of their crops keep getting eaten by jack rabbits, so like a lot of Meanwhile, what's Robert doing, Rombers just like sitting there and like fucking useless pieces of ship. Robert Morrison, motherfucker. Yeah,

maybe we should call him John Lame. Um. So they decide farming is not gonna work, and like a whole bunch of Armenians are going to do a few years from this point, the Morrison's leave home and they move to Glendale, California. Um, now, well, yeah, I like we got the brand mall over there. You've got you. You have the pets coffee that sells one in every other city is the tantalizing Turkish coffee blend. But in Glenda Dale they call it, uh something else without the word.

I think that's just the tantalizing blend because you you don't want to have Turkish in the name of a coffee that you're selling in little Armenia. Not really a good call Armenia. It's it is, it is. It is verging on the size of regular Armenia. Now it's a big, big place. I love Lyndale. Actually it's very pretty, very nice town. Um, and today it is like a sizeable Like it's not a small city. I mean, obviously, like all of Los Angeles is a bunch of separate cities,

but also kind of one big gas city. Um, that's not really the case. When the Morrison's moved to Glendale, it is kind of like it's separate little town on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I think it's like eight thousand people, um, which is way it's kind of like like Octopole in population. In a couple of years after they moved there, like it, it blows up big time, right, Um. But at this point it's kind of a sleepy suburb. Um. So Marian is nine when they moved to the Los

Angeles burbs. Uh. And you know, at this point he has finally made it more or less to the city that's going to make him famous. Uh. So they move in, they get used to l a life. They get a dog, an Airdale they named Big Duke. Um. The name of this dog is borrowed from the movie Dog of a fake cowboy named Tom Mix, who is like one of the most popular cowboys of the day we'll be talking about in a bit. And maryan he's like Marian's idol. So, like you know, obviously, as a little kid in this period,

he's watching cowboy movies every chance he gets. And Tom mixes the big cowboy. Um. And so his Tom Mix and then Duke was the name of the big dog of the dog in the Cowboy movie. And then Duke becomes John Wayne's nickname. That's right, that's how this is how this happens. So his dog, Big Duke, has a habit of chasing fire engines. Incredibly stereotypical upbringing this kid has, so Marian winds up chasing after his dog a lot,

and often to the fire station. And so local firefighters start to know this kid and his dog and they kind of adopt them. They realize like his family super poor, so they'll give him milk and they'll say like, oh, hey, this is for like your cat at home, but really

it's for the family because they're too poor to buy milk. Um. Very nice firefighters, and they'll they'll hang out with Marian and because his dogs Big Duke, and is apparently quite a personality as a dog, they just start calling both of them Duke and eventually start calling Mary and little Duke um. And that's how he gets his nickname. That's how he became becomes the Duke is These firefighters start nicknaming him based on his dog manly Men. Yeah, renamed

the Manliest Man. They did from Maryan and he he as soon as these firefighters give him a nickname, he stops going by Marian and starts going by Duke and he will all his life. That's what his friends call him is thank God. Yeah, I mean absolutely you would pick Duke over Mary It. Yeah, it's like, oh, you can just pick a name. You could just have a name, like you can make it anything you want. Huh. Yeah,

welcome to Hollywood, kid. I was kind of surprised because, you know, you hear his nickname is the Duke, and you figure it's generally when someone has a nickname that's hyper masculine, you assume there's a very sad story about how they picked it for themselves. And no, this is actually kind of a sweet story. He got adopted by firefighters. That's nice. Yeah, no, and it's actually cute. I mean, the real Duke was the dog. But the real Duke was the dog. He is nickname. He is like Indiana

Jones named for the dog, little Duke, Little Duke. So you know, the Morrison's bounced around a handful of small homes in their early years in l A. Clyde is never able to keep a job well enough to build up, you know, the kind of savings necessary to stay in a place for long. He keeps on giving people with him and drinking. I don't want to go home to my wife. Yeah, that is a big part of it.

Um so. And yeah, he's from a pretty young age, Like the time he's nine, his dad can't afford to buy him clothes, so he has to get jobs in order to like keep himself in clothing. Um. Again, not an easy childhood, although not out of step with a lot of kids in this period. Again, these are not like he's not like the only kid with this upbringing in the neighborhood. Right, everybody's trying to fucking poor, you know. Um So, he's tinned. By the time the United States

makes the decision to get into w W one. Um. Obviously Roosevelt big advocate of World War One being a thing for the US to get involved in. Um, everyone's very excited. The muscular Christianity side crowd is super into the war when it starts, But it does not go the way Americans had hoped, as europe had already learned. Modern warfare is a pretty nasty thing. Old West style heroism gets you mowed down in rows by machine gun fire. A hundred and sixteen thousand Americans will die in the

war in just like a year's time. Uh. And one of these Americans is Quentin Roosevelt, the President's son, which really fucks him up forever. Um might have been a bad call, Teddy, damn back then when presidents actually say their kids to war. Three of his sons, I think will fight in World War One. He was. He was not. He was a lot of things, but he was not about this at least he was not a hypocrite like

and he actually tries desperately to to fight himself. He attempts to like raise a volunteer regiment and go fight in World War One. But the president at the President Wilson is like, Teddy, you are a former US president. You're not going to go fight in World War One. Like, absolutely not. I'm not going to let you do that. That's that's nuts. We'll send your kids, Yeah, we'll send

you kids. Um. And the fact that World War One is this it just kind of ends as this horrible meat grinder um as it began, does a lot of damage to the concepts of muscular Christianity, just kind of like, you know, there's versions of this going on in Europe that get torn apart in the fields of Flanders and whatnot. Christin Cobbs Dumez rites. When the war came to a close, no amount of patriotism could obscure the fact that it had been fought at great cost and with little apparent gain.

Roosevelt model of masculinity had been found Wanting the war, it seemed, had presented Americans with the horror of having myths about blood and fire and mutilation and blindness come true. For liberal Protestant internationalists, the disillusionment was especially Keen. Sherwood Eddie, a leading Liberal Protestant proponent of the war, expressed dismay

at his pro war activism. I believed it was a war to end war, to protect womanhood, to destroy militarism and autocracy, and to make a new world fit for heroes to live in. He confessed, the carnage and horrors

of warfare put an end to all that. So one of the things that happens here, this muscular Christian movement that gets us into World War one splinters because a chunk of the US folks who want to get into World War one are liberals who are like, maybe if we do this war, it will put an end to like these autocratic dictatorships that have been doing all this horrible ship around the world for years and engaging in constant brinksmanship with each other, and the other chunk of

it is just dudes who are like masculinity is all about fighting, and they kind of split at this point, and one of those chunks is going to become the conservatives we know and are actively preparing to fight today. You know. Um good times. No, I was just gonna say, I mean, it's like, yeah, that's the part of going to war is the death part. Like that's the part of the muscular We must always be fighting. God is on our side, Like oh maybe maybe God's not ours,

So maybe maybe he's not on any side. It's not real. Um yeah, I know. But it's just like what did you think was going to happen? Um, I mean, it's it's a hard lesson. We never really learned the lesson. I guess it was learned for a while and then there was like deep isolationism in the in the country,

and um, World War two obviously it installed our intervention there. Um, we never learned any of the right lessons, which is like, don't don't trust anyone who tells you any of the who don't trust anyone who makes violence seem like a way to learn anything. Um, it's it's it's a it's an occasionally necessary thing, but it doesn't make you into anything other than a traumatized person. Yeah, You're dick will not grow. Your dick does not grow. Um, but it

might get blown off by shrapnel. Um, like in the classic anti war song the Wang pre Bang, which is about us involvement in LAO. Pretty good song anyway. Uh so you know what else? Will blow your testicles off? Oh wait, Sophie, are we is that good? Should we do? That? Is that how we leave into an ad break? Sumping was one thing, but blowing testicles off if you want to get gelded by white hot shrapnel. Um, listen to these ads. God, I hope it's a fucking Washington stap,

So do I, Sophie, God hear it? Uh we're back. So you know all this this this kind of collapse of one of the things that happens. We've talked about how kind of the Christian muscular Christianity splinters after World War One, the one chunk of it kind of turns into super capitalist and business oriented, right being ra rai imperialism in war didn't really work out for us. What if we make Jesus into a businessman, you know, like

a like a two fisted businessman. And we've talked about this in a couple of episodes, including Our two Partner and how they're all the rich eight Christianity. Um. And while this is worth noting because of what comes next, I don't know that any of this really this is all happening in the background when Marian as a kid. I don't know that he. I think he certainly must be taking some of this in through osmosis, especially a lot of these more militant attitudes towards Christianity, which are

reflected in the movies he's watching. Um, because he he loves himself some cowboy movies. UM. And he does grow up kind of obsessed with the nascent film industry in Los Angeles. There's only a couple of studios in Glendale, but they're shooting a bunch of cowboy movie is where he lives, because it's kind of the outskirts of town at this point. So he spent a lot of watching that ship. Yeah, exactly. He's way into this stuff. Um. He's also super into sports, pretty normal stuff. His parents

marriage gets worse and worse. His mother increasingly attacks and at least mentally abuses both him and his dad. Biographer Richard Jensen writes in When the Legend Became Fact The True Life of John Wayne Quote, Marion's dysfunctional parents filled the Morrison home with strife. Marian became a neurotic kid,

unable to sleep normally without nightmares. Like all children growing up in a household filled with abuse, he internalized the strain of the abuse and blamed himself for their unhappiness. The movies where his respite from reality. Marian dreamed of being a cowboy, of being a sword wielding pirate, of being a movie star. So it all feels fairly I mean, is is hard, but fairly normal, fairly normal, not an uncommon tale, right, Um No, it's not like he's he's

very much much embodies. I think there's some degrees to which it's abnormal. I think like the kind of scale. Like one of the things that's weird is shortly after this, his parents divorce, which is abnormal, and his his mom takes Robert and he stays with his dad. Um, and that is god. Robert was not kid out of here Molly is coming back around in the third installation, Mark my words, people, Robert knows, but I don't Molly's gonna come crawling back asking for money. You just wait, I

mean probably right, Um, definitely when when John Wayne gets rich. Right, remember how good I was to you. I only dropped you a few times on purpose. I gave you that whole new name. So Mitchell Marian spends as much time away from his house as he possibly can, because it sucks there, Jensen continues. Duke was a rambunctious kid, athletic and imaginative. He was also restless. He stayed away from home as much as possible. He learned to be rough

and tumbled. He learned to smoke cigarettes and taste alcohol. Years later, when Duke was diagnosed with lung cancer, he admitted to his family he'd smoked since I was just a kid. So it's like a chain smoking ten year old in Glendale, California. You know, story as old as time. Um, watching the movie sets, just just just pulling on a Marlborough watching people shoot at Cowboy Flick downtown. I'm just the Duke, my trusty dog. So once it's probably his

dog's got a cigarette too, you have to assume. Um. Now. Once he hits high school, Marion develops an interest in theater and drama, but his chief obsession is sports of all kinds. The broad gist of his next few years is that he gets a football scholarship to play for the University of Southern California. Most Wayne bios will claim that he was a star player who enjoyed body surfing

in his spare time. Um, he gets into surfing, but like poor people surfing where you're just kind of like throwing yourself into a wave and getting pushed to shore. Good old body surfing. Yeah, bodies serving, which sounds fun. Uh, he's real into the ladies. Uh. Since he was very tall, he grows up again to be huge, and he's muscular

and athletic. As a young man, he's considered very handsome. Um. This is also the period, you know, the time when he is a teenager and a young man is when like you got your flapper era, women are starting to get liberated. There's a lot more girls are willing to like go out on dates, and casual sex starts to become a thing in mainstream American culture in a way it really hadn't been for a while. Um, and he comes of age during that period of time. He also

becomes an alcoholic pretty early on. He's famous for drinking until he passes out at parties. Uh. He develops a passion for drag racing, and for the rest of his life he would drive so fast it frightened everyone in the car with him. Um. And was usually drunk while driving. Um. Yeah, that's forever He's getting up to be like just an average college douche bag, just a normal dude in the twenties. Yeah, just drunk, driving, puke and at parties hitting on girls

body surfing um. Which. Tragically, he has a body serving accident that injures his shoulder and that cuts his football career short. That's at least the traditional narrative of why his football career fails. It may not be entirely true. Um. There are some prominent people who doubt that he failed at football because he heard himself, and one of them was would He Strode Wood. He was the first black

action movie star in US film history. He was also a former professional football player with the Rams, which are a Los Angeles team at this point. Uh. And it was his opinion that Duke was always bad at football. He was not a good runner, and he probably wouldn't have succeeded at football. Now there's some debate about whether or not Strode is accurate in this assessment, because wood he Strode fucking hated John Wayne, and he had a

good reason to hate John Wayne. The two starred in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valets together in nineteen sixty one. Uh and Strode was apparently shocked by how much of a bully John Wayne was to the cast and crew. He claims that Wayne Wayne like made a particular show of mocking Woody in front of everyone else for not being athletic. And again, Woody is a professional athlete. Um like John Way, it's very funny that he would choose to do this blade for the ramps. So yeah, so

it's clearly his own insecurity. Insecurity, yeah, or like maybe he just ran funny, Maybe he did run. He did run Funny. Jensen, his biographer, analyzes his running a bunch and it's like he did kind of run funny. I mean, yeah, you're you were meant for a horse kid. Yeah. And part of it is like one of the things that this shoulder injury he has, he kind of winds up, always stooped a little bit forward to one side, which gives him this kind of this awkward uneven gate. But

that's part of what makes him so iconic. Yeah, yeah, this like gangster sort of lean and he kind of strides into these gunfights. It's it's a very distinctive walk. Um somebody surfing accident, Yeah, it's It's worth noting probably a lot of racism is also involved, because think John Wayne is insecure about the fact that Woody Strode is a real athlete and also is just a white supremacist

um and apparently on the man who shot Liberty Valance. Um. Wayne's taunting of Strode is bad enough that Jimmy Stewart has to take him aside and be like, dude, you gotta fucking cool off here, or Strode is going to beat your ass. Like this isn't okay. My money is on Strode on the big fellaw cut that out. He's a real football player. You know, we're not in Palm Dale anymore, oh, Jimmy. But like and and also he must have been older, because this is I don't know

when it was like, yeah, he's like shot something. Yeah, that is kind of like the height of his career. But yeah, um exactly, come on, John Wayne anyway, So whatever the truth is about why he gives up on his hoop dreams, that's what you call wanting to play football, right, So she's saying yes. So Marian decides to look for work in the film industry, which is splouting in the nineteen twenties. He gets a job with Fox Film working as a prop man, and this was the site of

his first clearly documented example of being a huge dick. Right, this is where we have our heel turn for John Wayne. And he's firmly a band in the on the props team, on the prop team. So he gets his first gig in the film industry because of that famous cowboy actor Tom Mix. Uh. Now Tom is at this point in time in the late twenties, Tom is like the biggest star in the country. He is making as a cowboy movie star. He is making seventeen thousand dollars a week.

So that's like pretty damn good money today. You know, like you're pretty rich if you're making that today. This is like nineteen fucking twenties something like he is crazy. That is all of the money in the United States. Tom Mix is getting for baby very handsome time. He was a good looking guy. He was a real ass cowboy. Tom Mix had been not just like that. He had farmed and ship. He had been as a younger man,

was a marshal in the Old West who got into gunfights. Um, so he was not like it was not acting for Tom Mix. He had done some stuff. Um. Yeah, and he's Maryan's like obviously Marian idolizes this dude. Um. So the two meet, like they contrive a meeting and they hang out briefly while Duke is in college. Um, and Mix is impressed by marrying enough that he calls George Marshall, a film director, and he gets Mary in that first prop job on his first movie. How doubt did he

manufacture that meeting? That's so hard. It's not like it is like today celebrities there's this wall between them and the rest of the world. For a bunch of back in those days, it was not uncommon like they just be walking around town filming like celebrity. M Yeah, I just walked up to him and ship, you know, Um, it wasn't his heart. He might have seen him on

set at this point. Yeah, And he's, he's, he's. They're kind of in and around the same areas, and yeah, they wind up talking and mix does him a real So, like, that's a pretty cool thing to do for a kid, is just to be like, you got some potential kid, Why I'll get you a prop job. Maybe that'll help you move into the industry. Um. Now, most sources you will find, like casual sources will say, like, this is a job that didn't pay well, it was menial, shitty work.

That is not true. Biographer Scott i'man will point out that this was crucial and why he was successful later because he's a very diligent and skilled prop man. Working in props teaches him how things look on screen. He learns how to like like because he thinks a lot about how does this not just like does this look right? But will this look right on camera? Um, which is an important thing for an actor to be thinking about.

If you're going to be a successful actor, you always need to be thinking about how does shi it look when it's filmed as opposed to you know, how does it just like look in the real world. Um. And because of the skills he builds as a prop man, he's going to be a lot more successful as an actor and eventually a director in the future. And Jensen, his other biographer, points out that he was really well paid.

He's getting thirty five dollars a week at a time when a lot of people didn't make that in a month um as a college gig. So this is a really good job that Tom Mix had set him up with. Most people would consider this a huge solid but for the rest of his life, Duke would claim that Tom Mixed promised him an on screen job as a cowboy and then screwed him with the prop job. This is

an obvious lie. For one thing, Tom Mix had a group of actual cowboys that he had with him on the set at any given time to do stunts and ship people that like, knew how to ride and knew how to rope, and we're real good at all the cowboys stuff. He was not known for just hiring random people to his crew, because he had folks he was. He was the top of the game. He didn't just pick up college kids. You know, Marion watched snakes, Robert, Okay,

that's real world experience. He didn't know how to lasso, you know, ship at it um that is that is something people will point out he sucked at lasso It so um, he sucked at one of the main things, that one of the big right, And that's part of why Jensen will be like, there's no way Tom Mix wanted to give this kid a job as a major on screen cowboy. He didn't know how to do any of that ship and Tom Mix had a crew of

people he'd been working with for years. It seems like entitlement and like also sort of like ego of a movie star in development. Yes, it seems like what has happened is that Tom Mix did this kid an incredible solid and got him a good paying industry job, and then Duke spent the rest of his life hating his hero for it. Why Here's what Jen Synthora rises. The story is interesting because it is the first glimpse into Duke's little known narcissistic streak and propensity for viewing himself

as the victim. It is the first time we see Duke's propensity for viewing his glasses half empty rather than half full, his penchant for thinking himself as lucky, perhaps as unlucky. Perhaps Duke believed after spending an entire year among the sons of privilege in college that he was entitled to special treatment. Perhaps it is a tale born of public relations. When Duke was cast in his first starring role in The Big Trail, he told every reporter who would listen that he'd beaten out Tom Mix for

the role. Now this was again a lie, right, Uh. Mix wasn't even working with the same studio. And it said that when John, like when Maryan got his first like on camera gigs, he winds up on set with Tom Mix and he like confronts him about the fact that Mix screwed him out of a job, and Mix, being an actual cowboy quote, stared at the ungrateful young duke with a glare so cold that the chill was palpable. It's just like the funk are you saying? Like yeah,

best response the two never talk against. That's what you did to your hero, This dude who does like that's like imagine that happening to anyone today. I still getting you a gig in the industry just because of a casual conversation like but also like a little bit of respect, like like I would I am such a like sort of like grateful, sick of fan I'd be like, oh, yes, give me and I'll take anything. I would never stop

saying nice shit about mix, you know, but not John Wayne. Um. So he starts working as a prop boy and he serves as an extra like for side, Cash and Ship, just because the film needs it and because he wants to get on screen. His first role on screen is probably an anonymous Yale football player. There's some debate about this. Uh, He's uncredited and at least thirteen more roles over the

next few years. Uh. During this period of time, while he's propping it up, um, he gets married to a young woman named Josephine Sands s A E. N Z. She's the daughter of a Spanish diplomat. All of his wives are going to be Hispanic or Latin American. Um Marian describes this as love at first sight, but he also slept around on her from the beginning. His justification before Christianity kind of well, it's even it's shadier than that, is that like, she's Catholic, right, and she can't fuck

until marriage. So he he decides it's okay for me to sleep around prior to marriage because she can't have sex with me prior to marriage. Obviously, I need to have sex, so this is fine. That's why he dated like Catholic like Latina's Well I don't know about that. Um. Yeah, so he uh, he does this, Uh, he cheats around

on her constantly. Um. And then when they get married, it turns out she doesn't have much of a sex drive his words, right, we don't know anything about her attitude towards this, but he decides that because she doesn't have much of a sex drive, it's again okay for him to cheat on her constantly, even while he makes four children with her. Um. So John Wayne, you know, just John wayning it up. Although he's not John Wayne yet.

He's about to become that though, because in nine Duke Morrison meets John Ford, the man who is going to make his career now. Ford was and still is a legendary director. A lot of most film nerds will agree he was a genius, like just one of these guys who helps invent the language of cinema in a lot of ways. Um. And Ford is also a hard son of a bitch. His dad had been a rum runner and a saloon owner. He was a proud Irish Catholic

and a violent profoundly abusive man. John Wayne worked as his first worked as his prop man on a movie called Mother McCree, and his primary job to was to wrangle geese. During one particularly difficult scene, Ford decided to break the tension by mocking his newest employee, Duke. He asked this new kid if it was true he'd played football at USC. Marian says yes, and then Ford asks him to show the crew his technique. So Marian crouches down into position and for kicks his hands out from

under him, so he falls forward on his face. Wow, that's just like the ship that goes down on a John Ford set. And Marian just you know, toxic Hollywood very much so. And so you know, Marian, this is actually a very John Wayne moment, gets back in position and tells the director, why don't you try that again? Uh? And then when Ford tries it again, John Wayne kicks his austin the chest and knocks him down. Um. And this is apparently what starts their friendship. Now, oh, this

may not be true, um. Jensen, his biographer, doubts this story is at least entirely true. For one thing, Ford and Wayne are the only people who ever told this story despite there being other folks on the set. Um, it's more likely that like Ford hit Wayne uh and maybe like you know, something happened there. But but this is just a little bit too perfectly masculine of a Hollywood story to be real. Um. I imagine him just like covered with like geese ship to trying to not

fun wrangling. But they had to create it. If Ford is any good at creating stars, Yeah, you have to build this kind of myth of these of these guys and their relationship, whatever the truth is. Shortly after this point, John Ford, who's a pretty powerful director at this point, brings unknown prop boy Duke Morrison into his inner circle. Now he doesn't put him in pictures, we'll talk about that in a second, but he brings him in socially.

And if the picture Jensen paints is accurate, this group that Duke starts hanging out with are quite quite a bunch of fellows. Quote. Duke insisted that he reveled in the masculine company affords drinking buddies. They formed a group called the Young Men's Purity, Total Abstinence and Yachting Association, whose goal was, in their words, the promuligation of the cause of alcoholism. They succeeded in their stated goal. Every

member became a confirmed alcoholic of monumental proportions. The men often sailed on men's only cruises on Ford's yacht, the Rainer to mazat Land and stayed in the Belmar Hotel, a brothel. The owner had a pet python, and whenever someone passed out from drink, the python was placed on the supine drunkard's chest. Henry Fonda once passed out on the floor and awoke screaming in terror as he realized

the snake at him in his clutches. So they're like sail into Mexico getting snake drunk, Like I like, I love this for them, Like everyone around them handed the ship it out of them. This is just must have been insufferable all the me too stories like these guys show up at the brothel and everyone's like shit, like yesh, shit, oh they're already drunk. They might not make it to sure.

Fuck well, I mean that's I guess that's an easy job though, if they're already drunk and they're just kind of like you know, I mean, you know, what are you gonna do? Arrive? Limptic with a python. You're like, Okay, they'll pay me anyway. Their Hollywood stars. Yeah, you just tell them you did it when they wake back up and they'll feel yeah it was great. Wow you were incredible. Yeah you lasted forever. Oh my god. This is so Also it's like very and this is this is later

but like it's very Kavanaugh. It's very like little Bretty Kavanaugh in his day. Yeah, this is like, this is what all of these guys want to be because you know, we're talking about the first era here. You know, with these we're rotting Alcoholics Club, they're on yachts, they're out acoholics, all of them become famous. You know, this is like the toxic masculine dream. And I hate all of these people, like, yeah,

they're all they're all not not nice people. Marino movie that I feel like Quentin Tarantino should have made in terms of needs to still be a movie. Um Marino. Harra, who was Ford's number one leading lady at this point. Very Famous Star, claims that John Ford probably adopted Duke because he was hot and Ford was super bisexual. Um. It is unclear if this was true. Also, the term bisexual gets used a lot by Jensen because his biography is pretty old and he's not up on his terms.

Some people would just say that Ford was gay. It's really unclear what the truth is. Ford was married and he beat the ship out of his wife constantly and in public. Um, that doesn't necessarily mean one thing or the other about his sexuality. You can abuse your wife and be bisexual. But it's worth noting that he pretty much exclusively hung out with hot dudes. Um, who knows what's going on there. Probably a few things are going

on there, you know. Now, this definitely has to be a movie, and like you know, of course anyone can beat there. No, obviously that doesn't say anything about sexuality, but the performativeness of hitting a woman in public, there's just a level of misogyny, which like, who is this for for? For the idea of how abusive Ford is. Men in the twenties are like that dude hits women

a lot. That dude hits women a lot, and like it is the twenties, you know, Um, it would not be accurate to call John Ford a good friend to to marry in the duke in this period. Jensen argues that he quote continuously held duke back for years. Rather than casting him in any of his many films, He let Wayne struggle on as an extra and prop boy for almost a decade, and it's alleged that he also slandered marry into other directors when they considered casting him.

Interest so super controlling, very controlling, very much like I want you around me, but I don't want to let you get successful enough that you can leave me, you know, right, good stuff, cool dude. So, after years of struggle, uh, Marian Duke Morrison gets cast as a major character in his first movie for the first time. Now. This is called Words in Music in nineteen thirty nine. It's a campus musical. It is not a good movie. Fox buries it with a one day opening run in New York alone.

Very wisely, Uh. He goes by Marian, goes by his nickname Duke in Hollywood, like his his screen name is Duke Morrison rather than Marian Um. Certainly a good call. The film makes no impact, but afterwards he gets another prop job on another forward film, Born Reckless, and this is where he comes under the eye of Rool Walsh, who was in the process of casting for a western. He had a clear idea of the kind of cowboy

actor he wanted. Quote a true replica of the pioneer type, somewhat diffident with women, being unused to them, but a bear cat among the men of the planes. So this is like it's important for him to be big and tough, but also awkward around women. Like that's what you want in a male, Yeah, you don't want The masculine ideal at this point is not a guy who's a player.

It's a guy who's like attractive to women but kind of uncomfortable around them because he spend so much time in the woods, you know, doing manly stuff right, impenetrable, yes, um, and a little bit you know that, a little bit unavailable, you know, because that's hot. Uh. So, oddly enough, this fits Mary into a t He's a big guy, he's clearly physically competent. He can at least portray the image

of hard one life experience, but he is awkward around women. Uh. John Wayne would claim later that he never chased women. This is a lie, but biographer Scott I am A notes that his friends agree. Quote pushy Dame's really scared him, um, which I think means like women who knew what they wanted. Yes, he tends to go for inexperienced women. This is gonna eventually lead to him marrying a teenager, so heads up to where things are headed. But you know who won't

well pity women slash women my age? Yeah, yeah, you don't wanna. You don't wanna marry people who can stand up for themselves because they're as old as you and have an understanding of what it means to an adult. Um. I wouldn't want to get in on this. So all right, you know that's probably a good point to end in part one. We got a couple more to go. Francesco, what do you what do you? What do you? What

do you got to plug here? Ah? Um? Yeah, everybody check out the Bituation Room podcast um on where we get your podcasts and we stream on YouTube and Twitch and it's you know, news, comedy, all the things. Um, not a lot of John Wayne. So if you need a break from one of the two podcasts A Loud under the biden Um Administration one of the two currently legal podcasts, um so yeah, enjoy our new glorious Bidenist regime.

Uh and remember, folks, if you hear about a podcast other than this one, or the bituation Room, call the FBI immediately, immediately. And if people don't want to listen to a podcast that can always read your book, Robert, Oh, no, not under the new junta. That's very very They can't pre order it from a k Press, none of that. No, they cannot. They can listen to these two podcasts, or they can watch reruns of Frasier. Everything else is illegal.

Cheers is not legal, absolutely not No, No, Frasier still legal. Cheers very much banned. All right, God, I don't want to live in this world. Biden hates Woody Harrelson. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.