The one and only actor who refused to call John Wayne the ‘Duke’: “I don’t like nicknames”
Nobody called him by his real name, Marion Morrison, and nobody called him by his stage name, either. Instead, to the actors, directors, producers, crew members, and other colleagues who worked with the star throughout his legendary career, John Wayne went by another moniker: ‘The Duke’.
Whenever he was referred to in conversation, in passing, or retrospectively, it was as ‘Duke’ or ‘Duke Wayne’, never plain old John, and definitely not Marion. It was a nickname he’d acquired in childhood from the family dog, of all things, and it stuck to him like glue as he climbed up the Hollywood ladder.
Ironically, from almost the second he was officially rebranded as John Wayne, after a solitary credit as Duke Morrison in 1929’s musical comedy Words and Music, people stopped calling him that. Everywhere he went, no matter what movie he was making or who he was making it with, he was ‘The Duke’, and it became so commonplace that it began to feel strange hearing him called anything else.
Any recollections from industry figures, whether they were coming from friends like John Ford, Maureen O’Hara, Henry Hathaway, and Ward Bond, or people he didn’t get along with like Vera Ralston and Richard Fleischer, and even modern-day veterans who never worked with him but have always been fans, including Tommy Lee Jones, it’s always ‘Duke’, and never John.
However, there was one rule-breaker who wouldn’t call him anything other than his first name, and it’s worth wondering if that ever got under Wayne’s skin. After all, he referred to himself as ‘The Duke’, too, and even though there was a sense of respect between them, he and Kirk Douglas were never fast friends.
Existing at opposite ends of the political spectrum but united by their shared status as ‘Golden Age’ heavyweights and producers, the pair made three pictures together, although things were often frosty between them. Still, even though Douglas appreciated Wayne, and those feelings were reciprocated, he didn’t do what everyone else in Tinseltown did by calling him ‘Duke’.
When telling Michael Munn an anecdote about their third and final film together, The War Wagon, his reluctance was on full display. “When John was being interviewed by a reporter who said, ‘I hear Kirk Douglas is very good with a horse’, John answered, ‘Good with a horse! Hell, he can’t even get on a horse unless he uses a trampoline!'” Douglas recalled.
That led to a question of the utmost importance being asked: Why did he never call him ‘Duke’? “Everybody else called him ‘Duke’, but I called him John,” the actor explained. “I don’t like nicknames unless they mean something special. I didn’t know what ‘Duke’ meant, so John Wayne was always John to me.”
While it’s a little difficult to believe that Douglas didn’t know the backstory, since it was woven so deeply into Wayne’s mythology, it was a reasonable explanation, all things considered. He didn’t think ‘Duke’ had much meaning behind it, so he became the one and only Hollywood figure who didn’t use the term.
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