American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read Free Page B

took over the bookkeeping, and the business’s margin of profit slowly improved, but it was soon apparent to her that it was too expensive to run and would never be able to break even. Five years after Marion’s birth and two years after they had relocated to Earlham, the pharmacy that had once held such financial promise failed. On December 30, 1911, only a year after Doc had opened the store with such grand vision and hopes, and one day after their new baby was born—another healthy, but not as big a boy, who didn’t rip up Mary’s insides the way Marion had, who came forth with the help of a local midwife—the Morrisons were forced into bankruptcy.
    For a while, Doc worked as a clerk for the new owner, eking out a living. Almost in the next breath, though, Mary kicked Doc out of the small house they were now renting and told him not to come back until he had a real job. His search for more lucrative employment led him to Keokuk, at the southeastern end of the state. There he could only find menial work, but the hard truth was that for all intents and purposes, he and Mary had separated.
    In his absence, Mary raised the two boys by herself. The second boy she named Robert Emmett Morrison. Robert was her favorite name, and she had always called Marion Bobby, until her second baby was born. She then gave him Marion’s middle name and had his birth certificate changed from Marion Robert Morrison to Marion Michael Morrison, so that there would be no confusion between the two boys.
    Her newest baby was also her favorite. Mary believed he was destined for greatness. The fawning favoritism she showered on Robert instigated a lifelong sibling rivalry between the two sons. From the start, young Marion wanted to be his mother’s favorite but knew it would never happen. It turned the boy distant and sullen. According to Pilar Wayne, “The happiest part of Duke’s childhood ended the day his brother was born.”
    His missing father, whose presence would have likely been the solution to Marion’s emotional conflict, made the turbulence that grew out of this Oedipal conflict worse. Marion’s jealousy of his younger brother continued to cause problems between the two boys until one day with no advance warning Mary packed up Marion’s things and shipped the boy off to Keokuk to live with his father. Marion had no complaints. Doc’s presence more than made up for the separation from his mother and helped to restore some stability to the psychological merry-go-round he had had to endure.
    IT WAS ALWAYS DIFFICULT FOR Marion to make new friends with a name like that. Despite his size, the other children at school picked on him because of it. In the local schoolyard they wanted to know why he had a girl’s name, if he really was a girl, if he had snuck out of his house wearing boys’ clothes instead of girls’. How, they asked, tauntingly, could anyone with a girl’s name be a real boy? Marion decided the way to stop the teasing was to punch the biggest boy, the leader of the bullies. He did, got beaten up by the others, and came home covered in blood.
    Doc was naturally strong and athletic but not a tough guy, a charmer rather than a fighter. He had taken up boxing as a teenager and after he cleaned the boy up, he showed him a few moves. Doc quickly realized that his boy had a natural athleticism about him that led Doc to dream that one day Marion would honor the family by attending Annapolis and playing football for the Naval Academy. But he also wanted his boy to grow up morally straight; otherwise Annapolis would have no place for him. As Wayne later recalled, “Doc gave me advice on any and all problems. He never had an unkind thought in his mind and rarely spoke harshly to me or anyone else. He never lectured me. But I remember three rules he taught me for living: Always keep your word, a gentleman never insults anybody intentionally, don’t go around looking for trouble, but if you ever get in a fight, make sure you