The California town that turned John Wayne into ‘The Duke’: “I was glad to be rid of the goddamn name”
Stage names have been part and parcel of cinema since its earliest days, and you could make the argument that few benefitted more from altering their moniker than John Wayne.
Would he have become a Hollywood icon, the face of the western genre, and one of the most indelible stars the industry has ever seen, had he tried to make it as plain old Marion Morrison? It can’t be definitively ruled out, but in those days, a man called Marion would always face an uphill battle.
Not that anybody called him John, either, because he also adopted one of Tinseltown’s most recognisable nicknames. He was marketed as ‘The Duke’, audiences knew and referred to him as ‘The Duke’, while his friends, colleagues, and contemporaries flitted between ‘Duke’ or ‘Duke Wayne’, never his first name.
Apart from Kirk Douglas, who was the only person in the business who called him John, simply because he wasn’t the biggest fan of nicknames in general. Ironically, Kirk Douglas wasn’t the name printed on his birth certificate, so he knew a thing or two about answering to a handle that wasn’t his own, even if he changed his before enlisting in World War II, not for the silver screen.
As you’d expect from a child growing up in the early years of the 20th century, Wayne wasn’t best pleased with being called Marion, with the other kids his age making a point of repeatedly informing him that it was a woman’s name. Fortunately, when the Morrison family moved to Glendale, California, in 1916, the newest addition to the clan changed his life forever, not that he’d realise it at the time.
It’s a city these days, with a population of almost 200,000, making it one of the most inhabited cities in Los Angeles County. It was a town when Wayne and his family first settled down, though, with the 1920 census listing the number of residents as 13,536. To help him acclimatise, he got a dog, and anyone who knows anything about the actor will know what it was called.
“I loved that dog,” he said of his faithful canine companion, Duke. “He went with me everywhere, except to school and church. I used to go by the town’s fire station, where the firefighters began calling me ‘Big Duke’ and the dog ‘Little Duke’. So everyone started calling me Duke, except my mother.”
If the Waynes hadn’t moved to Glendale, then he wouldn’t have gotten the dog. If he hadn’t gotten the dog, then he wouldn’t have been able to call it Duke. If he didn’t have the dog called Duke, then he wouldn’t have been branded ‘Big Duke’, and he wouldn’t have carried it with him into the movies, with The Big Trail christening him Duke Morrison, before he was finally rebranded as John Wayne.
Another plus was that nobody called him Marion anymore, apart from his old dear. “I tell ya,” he reflected. “I was real glad to be rid of that goddamn name.” Just like that, Marion Morrison was effectively no more, and ‘The Duke’ had arrived, although it would be another two decades before he became a big-screen star.
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