American Titan: Searching for John Wayne by Marc Eliot

Victor McLaglen, in a fantasy sequence of a man about to be hanged and again as a spectator at a horse race who gets so excited he breaks down the fence (only one scene survived the final cut). He also worked on Michael Curtiz’s Noah’s Ark, in which Duke and a young and slim Andy Devine did stunt swimming. He then found himself back with Ford for Strong Boy (1929), again starring McLaglen. Duke did props and worked as an unbilled extra. 15 For Benjamin Stoloff’s Speakeasy (1929) he once again did props. 16
    James Tinling, a former Fox prop man himself turned director, gave Duke his first on-screen credit, “Duke Morrison.” He had seen him around the lot, liked his looks, and cast him in a frat-boy musical, Words and Music, about college students competing for the attention of coeds, a film Fox made to show off its newly developed ability to make films that could talk and sing and appeal to young ticket-buying audiences. 17 In it, Duke played an undergraduate. He wore a tuxedo and danced the fox-trot with Lois Moran, an actress who could not make the transition to sound films and soon after retired. (F. Scott Fitzgerald later fell in love with Moran and described her as “the most beautiful girl in Hollywood.” She was the model for Rosemary Hoyt in Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night. )
    Duke followed his work in that movie with Ford’s The Black Watch (1929), the director’s first all-talking film, a British-army-in-India saga again starring McLaglen. 18 Duke was put in charge of props and did an unbilled walk-on, along with the then-unknown Randolph Scott. For Ford’s 1929 Salute, an Army-Navy football film, he did props and extra work on the field, along with some members of USC’s 1929 football team, each of whom was paid $50 a week (up from the $35 they were offered, after Duke successfully argued with the studio for the extra $15 for him and each member of the team). 19
    One of USC’s players was Wardell (Ward) Bond, whom Ford liked because he was strong-looking with a face like a bulldog, and Ford thought it would make Bond stand out. Upon reviewing the team Ford yelled out, “I want the big ugly guy.” Bond, however, was nearly fired during filming for exceeding his daily food allowance of $20 a day. He was a big eater, especially when the food was (almost) free. When Duke stood up for Bond, he was fired instead; he was rehired only after Bond organized a strike among the football players and Ford, in a move of solidarity, purposely exceeded his own food per diem, daring the studio to fire him too. Duke was quietly rehired and the strike went away. Ford liked both boys: “Ward Bond and Wayne were both so perfectly natural, so when I needed a couple of fellows to speak some lines, I picked them and they ended up with [unbilled] parts.”
    Duke and the entire USC team went directly into Eddie Cline’s footballer, The Forward Pass, followed by A. F. Erickson’s The Lone Star Ranger, an oater in which he served as a horse wrangler, stunt double, and bit player. John Ford then directed a film called Men Without Women (during production known as Submarine ), the story of fourteen men trapped in a disabled submarine, noteworthy among other things as the first collaboration between Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols. 20 Men Without Women starred George O’Brien, and to give Duke a chance to earn more money, Ford hired him to perform several stunts during the film’s diving sequences, and to act in two uncredited parts, a sailor in the doomed submarine and a radio operator on the rescue ship.
    With the assistance of the U.S. Navy, which loaned the production the use of a fleet submarine, Ford wanted to shoot a scene on location both on and near the island of Santa Catalina that required a stuntman to jump from the ship into the sea. A yacht was anchored offshore with an air pump ready to agitate the waters for the duration of the shoot, but it wasn’t needed because a storm had churned up the