Speaker 1: Uh, it is, once again, behind the Bastards, the only podcast,
Speaker 1: which is why you're listening. You have no other choice. Um.
Speaker 1: All other podcasts have been banned by the new regime,
Speaker 1: which is why I'm here to talk with my guest today,
Speaker 1: Francesca Fiorentini. Francesco, how are we doing? Um, I'm good,
Speaker 1: I'm very very good. There is another podcast, Robert. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's the only other one that is allowed by the
Speaker 1: new regime, and that is mine. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: I remember that coming in the bulletin from the State
Speaker 1: Security Service. Yeah, yeah, you want you want to plug
Speaker 1: your podcast even though there's only two. Yeah, but they're yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, once you get tired of b
Speaker 1: t B you go over to t b R the
Speaker 1: Bituation Room podcast and uh yeah, Situation Room. What what
Speaker 1: blessings that the regime has showered upon us that we
Speaker 1: get a podcast like the Bituation Room to choose to
Speaker 1: watch or listen to, because you can watch it too.
Speaker 1: It's not just an audio podcast, No, it is a
Speaker 1: great blessing upon YouTube and twitch. Now, Francesco, how are
Speaker 1: you doing today? I don't know. I'm scared, already scared
Speaker 1: because we got a three partner and you said, oh
Speaker 1: my god, is this going to be about like Hitler
Speaker 1: or someone And no, Francesco, we're talking about someone much
Speaker 1: worse than Hitler. Much today are bastard is John Wayne.
Speaker 1: I was like going to go with Attila the Han.
Speaker 1: But hell yeah, Wayne, I think that's fair to say
Speaker 1: John Wayne was responsible for more Vietnamese deaths than Attila
Speaker 1: the Hun or Hitler. That that's probably fair to say
Speaker 1: less deaths elsewhere. Like, but you know, so what do
Speaker 1: you know? What do you know about Mr J Dubs,
Speaker 1: John Lane, Francesca Um Spaghetti Westerns or whatever those are, right,
Speaker 1: he was definitely a lot of why I'm not an
Speaker 1: expert enough on western because those were the ones that
Speaker 1: were like filled in filmed in Italy, right, we keep
Speaker 1: coming back to Italy. I think that's why they're spaghetti, yes,
Speaker 1: which is racist, by the way, super racist. I mean
Speaker 1: now that, yeah, we have other foods exactly, why can't
Speaker 1: it be a ravioli Western Western? Why not a one
Speaker 1: of those with the fish dishes that they cook on
Speaker 1: the coast. You know, we got stuff. To be totally
Speaker 1: honest with you, I've never seen a single John Wayne
Speaker 1: film However, the thing that I know about him, and
Speaker 1: the thing that I repeat on some sort of snoopes
Speaker 1: whatever bs that I'm on or like, is is that
Speaker 1: he when he died, had something like fifty pounds of
Speaker 1: meat removed from his gut. That there was like an
Speaker 1: undigested amount of beef in his bottles, probably because the
Speaker 1: man ate a tremendous quantity of meat. But but I
Speaker 1: think that's that's more of a uh an apocryphal tale.
Speaker 1: But like, the thing about John Wayne that's interesting is
Speaker 1: that he's whether or not you've seen any of his movies,
Speaker 1: and I think today a lot of most people probably
Speaker 1: haven't or at least haven't seen many. Maybe you've caught, like, um,
Speaker 1: True Grit, the Original True Grit, or something like The Shootiest,
Speaker 1: So there's a couple of movies that are still in circulation.
Speaker 1: For the most part, He's just like a meme that
Speaker 1: has implanted itself in the background of our cultural consciousness.
Speaker 1: He is this kind of like ideal of hyper masculinity,
Speaker 1: of like white Christian masculinity that's still very pervasive in
Speaker 1: US culture. Um, And that's kind of who John Wayne is,
Speaker 1: and that matters more at this point than what he
Speaker 1: actually did in any of his films because and it's
Speaker 1: interesting because we have a lot of there's a lot
Speaker 1: of other stars in that era, like Gary Cooper or
Speaker 1: whatever that we're huge in their day, and now a
Speaker 1: lot of most people on the street aren't. Couldn't really
Speaker 1: think of anything about them. You know, maybe you've heard
Speaker 1: the name Gary Cooper, but could you pick him out
Speaker 1: of a lineup? Not unless you're really into old films.
Speaker 1: But if you see John Wayne's face somewhere, most people
Speaker 1: are gonna be like, oh, yeah, that's that's sucking John
Speaker 1: Wayne right, Like he's just he's just an icon of
Speaker 1: American manhood. You know. He also has like sort of
Speaker 1: a he's got a classic asshole face, like just very
Speaker 1: punchable and or you're gonna get punched when you see
Speaker 1: that face. Yeah, he's got this. He was this. He
Speaker 1: was this kind of stereoty, not even stereotypically, because the
Speaker 1: stereotype exists because of him. But he will talk about
Speaker 1: this later. He didn't really get famous until he was
Speaker 1: like a middle aged, surly looking motherfucker um and a
Speaker 1: lot of his fame came from that. You know that
Speaker 1: that's part of why he remains so popular with like
Speaker 1: dads and grandpa's for forever is he was this this
Speaker 1: kind of ARCon of the old guy who will beat
Speaker 1: your ass, which they all want to believe they are. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, he's just like us. Yeah, it's like you know,
Speaker 1: nowadays we get our movies like you know, the Equalizer
Speaker 1: from a few years back with Denzel You always want
Speaker 1: every couple of years have a movie with like a
Speaker 1: sixty year old man who beats the ship out of
Speaker 1: a bunch of twenty year olds. Um. Clinton Eastwood used
Speaker 1: to do these. John Wayne was like the motherfucking the
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ of that and and all later middle aged
Speaker 1: actors who beat up twenty year olds or his apostles.
Speaker 1: But you know, we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Um.
Speaker 1: The thing that he had a very long career, and
Speaker 1: it was primarily, as you said, cowboy movies that made
Speaker 1: him famous and in fact, as Charles Silver of the
Speaker 1: Museum of Modern Art observed, Wayne made westerns for twice
Speaker 1: as long as it took to fight the Indian Wars.
Speaker 1: He made westerns for about as long as it actually
Speaker 1: took to settle the continent west of the Missouri so
Speaker 1: for an idea like this period, He's part of why
Speaker 1: this Western period is still so like central to the
Speaker 1: American ideals or I like idea, particularly the right wing
Speaker 1: idea of how this country was quote unquote founded. And
Speaker 1: it's because he was in movies romanticizing that period for
Speaker 1: longer than it was ever real, which is neat yes, um,
Speaker 1: but always showed like the Native American perspective, right, Oh
Speaker 1: for sure. No, that was one of the things they
Speaker 1: were famous of. That's why one of his chief co
Speaker 1: stars ironized Cody was absolutely a real Indigenous person and
Speaker 1: not an Italian pretending to be Native American. Hey, I'll
Speaker 1: have none of that in this three part no anti
Speaker 1: Italian slander. M hmm. Whatever roles we want, that's right,
Speaker 1: I mean we sure did, We absolutely did. I will
Speaker 1: I will say that there's there's gonna be a couple
Speaker 1: of cases of white dudes playing whatever the fuck roles
Speaker 1: they want in these episodes. So this is the thing
Speaker 1: that sort of indoctrinated our parents into the idea that
Speaker 1: like you know, manifest destiny and that bullshit idea was
Speaker 1: always right, always justified. Because like for us, I feel
Speaker 1: like when I grew up it was more just like
Speaker 1: you watched Schoolhouse Rocks and there was a song called
Speaker 1: elbow Room, which was basically this explanation of like the
Speaker 1: like the settling of the West and the colonization of
Speaker 1: the West. That was just like we just needed more
Speaker 1: room albow room, And I was like, what the fuck?
Speaker 1: Still again, very very very rose colored glasses. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: like the sanitized version of the story that John Wayne
Speaker 1: told UM. And and that like was kind of being
Speaker 1: told through his body, Um, which is a big part
Speaker 1: of the role he has here. So this is gonna
Speaker 1: be an interesting bastard. Now. That said, when we're talking
Speaker 1: about the things that are terrible that resulted from John Wayne,
Speaker 1: we are talking big picture stuff like how what his
Speaker 1: image has done. But as a person, don't worry. He
Speaker 1: was really unpleasant. So we'll get plenty of stories of
Speaker 1: a dude being shitty and old timey hall e would
Speaker 1: and I you know, no one was ever quite as
Speaker 1: good at being shitty as dudes in old timey Hollywood.
Speaker 1: It was really like it was like the renaissance for
Speaker 1: being an asshole in America. Like you you, you just
Speaker 1: can't hit those heights anymore. Um, as much as Harvey tried. Ye.
Speaker 1: As much as Harvey tried, he was never but a
Speaker 1: pale imitation of his of his ancestors. Um. So Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of the things that's interesting about John Wayne is that,
Speaker 1: you know, he's he's the image of manhood that he
Speaker 1: crafted in his films has proved to be so durable that, like,
Speaker 1: if you go to gun shows and kind of like
Speaker 1: big right wing events today, you'll see his face all
Speaker 1: over ships still, um, because that ideal hasn't really changed
Speaker 1: in any way since his death. Now, the story of
Speaker 1: John Wayne is more than anything, the story of American
Speaker 1: Christian masculinity, which he embodied. So for the first I'm
Speaker 1: gonna talk a little bit about that history. For the
Speaker 1: first hundred and thirty or so years of the United
Speaker 1: States as a nation, Uh, most men in the country
Speaker 1: made their living one way or the other through hard
Speaker 1: physical labor. We're talking, of course, about men who were free,
Speaker 1: although men who were enslaved also made their existed through
Speaker 1: hard physical labor. Pretty Much everybody was like working physically,
Speaker 1: like doing something that was difficult. Either they're farming, or
Speaker 1: they're in a factory, or they're shooting people who were
Speaker 1: standing where they wanted to build a farm or a factory, um,
Speaker 1: and so masculinity, like you didn't have to be super
Speaker 1: performative about your masculinity. Then it was pretty simple. You
Speaker 1: worked hard. Ideally you made enough money to start a
Speaker 1: small business. That was kind of like the goal for
Speaker 1: every man wanting to take care of his family. Broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: if you were white, if you were a white dude,
Speaker 1: if you were not a white dude, then you you
Speaker 1: just worked without pay for that guy, and you were
Speaker 1: like in masculine Like the other side of my relatives
Speaker 1: were Chinese, so you know, building the railroads, like what
Speaker 1: a feminine activity. Well, yeah, that's exactly that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: And again we are talking because John Wayne is the
Speaker 1: the avatar of white Christian manhood, right, we're not we're
Speaker 1: talking about masculinity in a narrow context, but in the
Speaker 1: one that is sort of societally dominant in the United
Speaker 1: States because you know, I've heard of this white Christian masculinity. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he helped invent it. So by the turn of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, things had started to change rapidly. For one thing,
Speaker 1: the frontier didn't exist anymore. You know, white people had
Speaker 1: made it all the way across. There was no longer
Speaker 1: these kind of open spaces on the map, so to speak.
Speaker 1: The economy was increasingly dominated by consumer goods, and now
Speaker 1: most people were working jobs that didn't require them to
Speaker 1: go out and farm in the middle of nowhere or
Speaker 1: cut down trees or you know, get into gunfights. They
Speaker 1: were living in cities, they were working in offices. Uh,
Speaker 1: toughness didn't really matter as much as like being able
Speaker 1: to sit in an office for the right amount of
Speaker 1: hours while you slowly went mad from syphilis. So this
Speaker 1: creates kind of like a a psychological uh, what's the word,
Speaker 1: I'm looking for emergency for American white men, right, like
Speaker 1: the fact that all this change is suddenly they're like, well,
Speaker 1: what am I? How? What am I supposed to be doing?
Speaker 1: This doesn't feel right? And I'm man still yeah, And
Speaker 1: and rather than being like, maybe we are in the
Speaker 1: process of building a system that is like an anti
Speaker 1: human nightmare that forces people to labor in little boxes
Speaker 1: for like pitdling, and like everything everything that we have
Speaker 1: been working towards is horribly wrong, and we need to
Speaker 1: go back to a much earlier period in our development
Speaker 1: of what a society should be in your lifestyle an
Speaker 1: easier lifestyle, Robert, it is. It's a lot lazier for
Speaker 1: for at least, well, I mean in some ways. But
Speaker 1: like also rather than you know, as many people kind
Speaker 1: of living a rural life and working on farms, a
Speaker 1: lot of them are like in coal mines choking to death,
Speaker 1: which is worse than farming. True. True, A lot of
Speaker 1: these guys are trying to figure out, like what does
Speaker 1: it mean to be a man anymore? Now that you know,
Speaker 1: we're in the modern era. Um. And while white men
Speaker 1: are kind of feeling increasingly domesticated by this office workship,
Speaker 1: immigration from Eastern Europe is starting to search. And so
Speaker 1: also there's all this racism against like you know, Italians
Speaker 1: and Slabs and and folks who were like not yet
Speaker 1: quite white, um in the eyes of the people who
Speaker 1: are at the time definitely quite white. So all of
Speaker 1: this stuff is making men feel like edged in. You know,
Speaker 1: we've got these immigrants coming in to take our jobs.
Speaker 1: Our jobs aren't that great anyway. Uh. And then suddenly
Speaker 1: women start asking for a lot of wild things, like
Speaker 1: the right to vote in bicycles. Bicycles, it's gonna only
Speaker 1: if you ride them. Side saddle. The moral panic over
Speaker 1: bicycles is still one of my favorite little history Jim's
Speaker 1: they were so scared of bicycles, we should bring that back, well,
Speaker 1: you know, because it breaks the hymen. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: we kind of half that America has never gotten over
Speaker 1: its hatred of bicycles. Now we just build trucks big
Speaker 1: enough to crush them. You know, when you I was like,
Speaker 1: you know, when you're like twelve, you do you are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but like riding a bike could like break your time.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of weird Like I read it
Speaker 1: in Cosmo or like Why I Am, which was an
Speaker 1: old girl's magazine. Um about like the sanctity of anyway.
Speaker 1: We don't have to get into it. I mean I
Speaker 1: don't know because that was not a part of my education.
Speaker 1: On the bicycle, well, suffice to say, I still don't
Speaker 1: know how to ride a bicycle, so oh it's I
Speaker 1: don't trust Well, Um, I think people were meant to
Speaker 1: travel on two feet or four wheels and nothing in between,
Speaker 1: so you're not missing anything. Devil machines. Yeah, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: on board with white people in the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: with the hatred of bicycles. Mine's just not a hatred
Speaker 1: of bicycles for sexist reasons. I just don't think they're natural. Okay,
Speaker 1: So basically the walls are when of the walls not
Speaker 1: been closing in on the perception of white Christian masculinity
Speaker 1: like basically forever and let me just a quick check
Speaker 1: in with a with a white man um, although not
Speaker 1: in that time. But Robert, are you okay? Are you
Speaker 1: guys honestly? Well, actually no, because everything is bad, but
Speaker 1: not for that reason. Everything's bad because of these people
Speaker 1: and their continual needs to preserve their power relations relative
Speaker 1: to everyone else. Like this idea of like white whiteness, uh,
Speaker 1: and this this patriarchal kind of white Christian society. People
Speaker 1: come up with it over the course of a century
Speaker 1: or two and then have this kind of brief golden
Speaker 1: era where they feel like it's not at threat for
Speaker 1: like five years, and then up until the present day
Speaker 1: are actively trying to kill the entire planet in order
Speaker 1: to maintain it, even though they've been winning for so
Speaker 1: for forever. Um. Basically, it's safe to say that this
Speaker 1: is a moment like if you were to actually pinpoint
Speaker 1: when America was quote unquote great in the minds of
Speaker 1: a lot of these Trumpers. Is that the John Wayne era. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's I mean, that's a little later than where we
Speaker 1: are right now. But yeah, it's like the nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: through the nineteen like sixties, early sixties before like the
Speaker 1: Vietnam protest ship really got out of hand, and then
Speaker 1: we're in a hippie spitt and rambos face. That's right,
Speaker 1: that's right. Um so, yeah, and again like that that's
Speaker 1: the golden era that are white Christian nationalists look back to.
Speaker 1: The white Christian nationalists in like nineteen hundred, the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred, they're looking back at like thirty years earlier too,
Speaker 1: or fifty years earlier too, for a period that barely
Speaker 1: ever existed. Um So, white Christian men are feeling emasculated
Speaker 1: by modernity and they start grappling for a new totem
Speaker 1: of manhood, like someone to kind of hang their images
Speaker 1: of masculinity on. And they find Teddy Roosevelt. Now not
Speaker 1: a bad pick, although kind of a surprising one given
Speaker 1: his background. In the book Jesus and John Wayne, Kristen
Speaker 1: Cobbs Dumez writes, as a young man Roosevelt had been
Speaker 1: ridiculed for his high voice, tight pants, and fancy clothing,
Speaker 1: and to write it as a weakling and a punkin lily.
Speaker 1: But Roosevelt wanted power. Determined to reinvent himself, he went West,
Speaker 1: rechristening himself the Cowboy of the Dakotas it was on
Speaker 1: the frontier that a new masculinity would be forged, a
Speaker 1: place where white men brought order to savagery, where men
Speaker 1: served as armed protectors and providers, where violence achieved a
Speaker 1: greater good. If the Wild West could mold the exquisite Mr.
Speaker 1: Roosevelt into a rugged masculine specimen, perhaps it could do
Speaker 1: the same for American manhood generally. So the think he
Speaker 1: went or just shave your mustache, bro, No, they're never
Speaker 1: gonna do that. That's that mustache is how they keep
Speaker 1: you know, the Mexicans away or whatever. Can we just
Speaker 1: go back to punk in lily? Right, there's a pumpkin lily.
Speaker 1: It's not just a pup old West insult, Like what
Speaker 1: happens a lily grows on top of a pumpkin? As
Speaker 1: when you gotta cut that pumpkin down before it grows
Speaker 1: a lily? Yeah, you don't want to grow. That's why
Speaker 1: we don't have pumpkins, because then we have lilies, which
Speaker 1: came first a pumpkin of the lily. Think it's just
Speaker 1: because it's fragile and pretty, and he was a fragile,
Speaker 1: pretty boy by the standards of the time. So even
Speaker 1: as Roosevelt is kind of like out in the Dakota's
Speaker 1: doing outdoor ship and getting getting big and strong, uh,
Speaker 1: the fact that they're like the idea of a West
Speaker 1: at all is like starting to end um And so again,
Speaker 1: like this is he Roosevelt who kind of comes into
Speaker 1: prominence as this modern era is beginning, is a product
Speaker 1: of the era before, and everything that's kind of held
Speaker 1: up as an ideal about him as masculine is the
Speaker 1: thing that's no longer possible for a lot of men
Speaker 1: to do. So one of the things Roosevelt's trying to
Speaker 1: figure out as he starts to become a prominent figure,
Speaker 1: and one of the things a lot of white dudes
Speaker 1: are trying to figure out is where are we going
Speaker 1: to make more hard white men you know? Next? Yeah, well, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what they're talking about. And Teddy decides, you know,
Speaker 1: who would be good to have a war with Spain. Um.
Speaker 1: And in fairness, it's a pretty good time to have
Speaker 1: a war with Spain. They don't do good in this war, Uh,
Speaker 1: it doesn't. It does not go well for Spain as
Speaker 1: wars go. That the U. S has gotten involved in
Speaker 1: pretty pretty easy fight, not for like a lot of
Speaker 1: people in the Philippines, but for the US as a nation.
Speaker 1: It goes a lot better than for example, Vietnam. Um.
Speaker 1: So Teddy when the war happens, and he's like a
Speaker 1: huge backer. We're we'll talk about the Spanish American more
Speaker 1: and more and more detail one of these days. But
Speaker 1: he's a part of why we get into it. And
Speaker 1: he volunteers to lead a cavalry union when it starts,
Speaker 1: and he actually fights in Cuba. He does a bunch
Speaker 1: of he has his charge up San Juan Hill. He
Speaker 1: gets in all of the newspapers. He's this big national hero,
Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt, the brave Imperial war leader, and all of
Speaker 1: these kind of soldiers who fight with him and become
Speaker 1: construct their own masculinity on the battlefields of Cuba, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: and under the guise of like, hey, we want to
Speaker 1: pillage that island over there. Well, and they blew up
Speaker 1: our boat. They blew up our boat. We got a
Speaker 1: pillage that island and also several others got it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I forgot about that boat. Yeah, there's that boat that
Speaker 1: blows up. Um. Sometimes it's you know, with the nine
Speaker 1: eleven of the late eighteen hundreds, that one boat exploded.
Speaker 1: I've I have forgotten as we will nine eleven one day.
Speaker 1: So Teddy Roosevelt, Uh, you know we this goes good
Speaker 1: for everybody. And uh, it's so popular going to war
Speaker 1: with Spain. Teddy Roosevelt's partner that in nineteen o one
Speaker 1: he gets selected president. Um, and he's he's an interesting
Speaker 1: guy as president. Obviously a big part of him there's
Speaker 1: an element that's very Trumpian because he has to show
Speaker 1: himself as this ultra potent and tough man and and
Speaker 1: he's gotta like kind of he's he's constantly sort of
Speaker 1: showing himself as this like outdoorsy, rough writing son of
Speaker 1: a bitch. But also a lot of that's true about
Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt, to his like credit, Unlike Trump, the potency
Speaker 1: stuff isn't entirely constructed. He is a dude who spends
Speaker 1: a lot of time outdoors. He famously gets shot once
Speaker 1: while giving a speech and just like keeps right on
Speaker 1: doing the thing. Um, So he's not you can see
Speaker 1: why people latch onto this dude, um. And some of
Speaker 1: the ship he does as president is pretty dope. He
Speaker 1: establishes the National park system, um, although that's also tied
Speaker 1: into white supremacy, because a big part of the idea
Speaker 1: of national parks, in this idea of the wilderness that
Speaker 1: Roosevelt establishes, is these very white attitudes towards wildlife recreation,
Speaker 1: which are rooted in somewhat mythic ideas of wild and
Speaker 1: untamed lance, which, of course we're not wild or untamed
Speaker 1: and had been in most case is heavily heavily influenced
Speaker 1: and basically gardened by indigenous people who have to be
Speaker 1: excised from the topic because these lands can't have indigenous
Speaker 1: people on them, they have to stay empty so white
Speaker 1: folks can hike in them, right, right, So there's problematic aspects,
Speaker 1: even though there's also positive aspects of the National Park System,
Speaker 1: which is that we didn't turn all of those parks
Speaker 1: and the factors. Yeah, I mean, I I just love
Speaker 1: the images from Yellowstone from like the fifties when it's
Speaker 1: just like families feeding entire picnic baskets, like actual picnic
Speaker 1: baskets too. They're feeding picnic baskets to bears and they're like,
Speaker 1: I wonder why the bears are getting so up etty
Speaker 1: and crazy. Yeah, because you're feeding them twinkies straight up.
Speaker 1: I think that's something we I think one of the
Speaker 1: big places we went wrong in this country, Francesca is
Speaker 1: we got rid of all the apex predators. I think
Speaker 1: we should never have made it legal to hunt them um,
Speaker 1: and we should always have fed them random food so
Speaker 1: they associated humans with food, and then we'd be getting
Speaker 1: cold regularly by wolves and bears in the like. It
Speaker 1: would be a better like if every week killed cold
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, yeah, if like every week in Santa Monica
Speaker 1: family got eaten by a bobcat, you know. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: I think about how much lower rent would be. It
Speaker 1: would be like I got a great deal on an
Speaker 1: apartment because this big cat broke in a native family.
Speaker 1: I mean, remember Hank the Tank and exactly I think
Speaker 1: it was. It was just a couple of weeks ago, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Hank the Tank, you know, rummaging through people's trash, and
Speaker 1: like terrorizing people was like hell, yeah, stay stay in line.
Speaker 1: Then a fox was in the Capitol building or around
Speaker 1: it was nipping the heels of concords. Were they euthanized
Speaker 1: it anyway? M hmm, it's a tragedy. What we should
Speaker 1: have done is released more foxes into the halls of
Speaker 1: Congress with more rabies, a lot more rabies, I mean
Speaker 1: the filibuster people immediately. It would a lot of things
Speaker 1: would end, A lot of things would end that needed
Speaker 1: to end, and maybe would get to see Mitch McConnell
Speaker 1: tried to tear out the throat of Ted Cruz as
Speaker 1: he's mad with rabies, which would have been pretty funny.
Speaker 1: Vince that senators, Republican senators don't already have rabies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's probably fair, although kind of unfair to rabies. What
Speaker 1: did it ever due to you, Francesca and save democracy?
Speaker 1: That's right. Rabies came to save us and we we
Speaker 1: spurned it. Um. So, by the early nineteen hundreds, Christian dudes,
Speaker 1: white Christian dudes in the United States had become enamored
Speaker 1: with a sort of performative masculinity um, which is the
Speaker 1: kind of like as as as many of the things
Speaker 1: that Roosevelt did as he did, he was also very
Speaker 1: much like a performer, right, Um, he's a he's a
Speaker 1: dude who was very like media trained. He's a dude
Speaker 1: who's consciously manipulating his image. And so that becomes that
Speaker 1: kind of performative masculinity becomes dominant in the United States,
Speaker 1: and it probably would have looked pretty weird to the
Speaker 1: actual guys they were imitating, the dudes on the frontier, who,
Speaker 1: more than anything, probably would have been like, boy, it
Speaker 1: would be nice to have a desk job rather than
Speaker 1: freezing to death in the middle of Iowa alone, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: just get back there for everyone's dick sake. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this is these earlier kind of Victorian attitudes
Speaker 1: towards Christianity that had been dominant in that period start
Speaker 1: to feel a feminate um to a lot of men
Speaker 1: in this period. There's derision at the womanly virtues they
Speaker 1: felt had dominated their religion. There's this idea that the
Speaker 1: dominant image of Christ was like feminine because he wanted
Speaker 1: to feed people and like help them and heal them,
Speaker 1: and that's like girl shit, rather than like going out
Speaker 1: and kicking in heads and and punching people like, that's
Speaker 1: the Jesus that people want, that white dudes want't this period,
Speaker 1: it's like a lepers some pumpkin lily bullshit. That is
Speaker 1: some pumpkin lily bullshit. You need to get yourself a
Speaker 1: six gun Jesus Christ. So Kristen Dumaz argues that to
Speaker 1: do this, in order to like remake Christianity in a
Speaker 1: militant warlike image, they had to revive old pre war
Speaker 1: Southern ideals about what white Christian masculinity represented. And so
Speaker 1: they kind of go back to the South pre Civil
Speaker 1: War to this idea that the man's jobs that have
Speaker 1: sanctified aggression in order to maintain order. So men in
Speaker 1: the pre war South existed to protect white men, existed
Speaker 1: to protect white women and children from the danger of
Speaker 1: slave uprisings, which they did with guns. Right. That's the
Speaker 1: idea that gets kind of reincorporated into the American mainstream
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen hundreds, and this new kind of
Speaker 1: much more aggressive strain of Christian masculinity becomes known as
Speaker 1: muscular Christianity. It's Jesus on H G H. Basically, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan up that christ a little bit you know,
Speaker 1: which is like not the hot Jesus that we all
Speaker 1: know and love. You know, Jesus is hot because he's
Speaker 1: just like hipster you know, who took off his skinny
Speaker 1: jeans and you're like, oh my god, you should eat more.
Speaker 1: But he only can afford Roman because he's you know,
Speaker 1: just as a podcast or whatever. Oh Jesus would absolutely
Speaker 1: have a podcast today and it would be this one.
Speaker 1: Oh no, okay a little bit. So as this is
Speaker 1: where I announced to the listeners that I am the
Speaker 1: son of God. It's a three parter about how Robert
Speaker 1: is Jesus. Yeah, that's that's that's Sophie's just not even listening.
Speaker 1: So we're going to get away with a lot here,
Speaker 1: Francesco um So as this is all happening, there's all
Speaker 1: been a lot of scenes setting um in winter set, Iowa.
Speaker 1: On nineteen o seven, Mary and Clyde Morrison had a baby.
Speaker 1: They named this baby Marian Robert Morrison. And this is
Speaker 1: the kid that's going to grow up to be John
Speaker 1: Wayne Maran Mary And oh yeah, wow, you think that's
Speaker 1: going to go good for him? In in in elementary school.
Speaker 1: I'm not a very masculine name, not a very masculine name. Look,
Speaker 1: you go into first grade as a boy with the
Speaker 1: first name Mary in today, you're gonna take some ship.
Speaker 1: Right in nineteen oh seven, you're gonna take a lot more.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be a lot rougher. Um this is that
Speaker 1: is part of the story that we're building to. Um. So,
Speaker 1: Marian Morrison is born in a house in Winterset, Iowa.
Speaker 1: The house is a museum today, although we don't know
Speaker 1: that it was the house he was actually born in.
Speaker 1: Our entire source that it was is like an old
Speaker 1: dude who told a biography or he remembered hearing about
Speaker 1: a baby being born there. Um so maybe not around
Speaker 1: here anyway, that'll be fifty Yeah. That that's like a
Speaker 1: lot of John Wayne's legacy where they're like, look, it
Speaker 1: might have been this house. So we're gonna put a
Speaker 1: museum up here with pictures of Trump and it too.
Speaker 1: Fuck you, it's winter Set, Iowa. We have done nothing else,
Speaker 1: you know. Huh. Um. Now we do know he was
Speaker 1: born in winter Set, so at least there's that. We
Speaker 1: have a birth announcement from the local paper which read
Speaker 1: a thirteen pound son arrived at the Homely Morrison Monday. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a that's two babies. That is two babies and
Speaker 1: one baby. You must have ripped. I'm sorry, that's my
Speaker 1: mind like perennium. Yeah, me too, girl, that's that's that's yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that couldn't have been easy. That's way too big
Speaker 1: for a baby. That's a massive baby, massive by seven
Speaker 1: eat two other babies as much. She might have eaten
Speaker 1: a couple of babies in there. They were triplets. And
Speaker 1: he ate that's such a big baby. And he will
Speaker 1: he will grow up. He's a huge guy. Like he
Speaker 1: as an adult, he's about he's six three, so he's
Speaker 1: like six three and half an inch or something like that,
Speaker 1: So he's about my height. But he's also like really
Speaker 1: really broad. I think he weighs probably like two fifties
Speaker 1: something like that. As a girl, like, he's just a
Speaker 1: huge motherfucker's Yeah, he's a door and he he comes
Speaker 1: out as a certified chowed you know, um, just just
Speaker 1: hardcore Brandon, Yeah, right on that shoulder. So winter Set
Speaker 1: was a small city of less than three thousand people.
Speaker 1: In many ways, it would have resembled at the time
Speaker 1: Marian was born, the current right wing vision of like
Speaker 1: Paradise soda pop cost fifteen cents. The only religions represented
Speaker 1: in town where Methodist, Catholic, and Baptist. Basically everybody was white.
Speaker 1: There were two black citizens who had names and we're
Speaker 1: on the city country or the city rolls. There was
Speaker 1: a third black man who lived in the city, but
Speaker 1: everyone just called him Inward John, only they did not
Speaker 1: use Inward, they used the you know, uh, he lived
Speaker 1: in a shack and was not included in the town census.
Speaker 1: So that is that is the kind of town that
Speaker 1: John Wayne is born into. Christ Uh existence of that man,
Speaker 1: oh boy, Yeah, I don't know what was going on
Speaker 1: with that dude, but it can't have been easy, Like
Speaker 1: how do you not avoid dying every single day as
Speaker 1: the only black man in that town? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I have you have to assume living kind of on
Speaker 1: the outskirts of town, but not being represented in the census,
Speaker 1: he had some role he played that was like picking
Speaker 1: up scrap or something, where as long as he's stuck
Speaker 1: to his area, it was you know that that would
Speaker 1: be my assumption. But I don't probably found him from
Speaker 1: another town, brought him there to just make them feel superior,
Speaker 1: to have somebody to do a slurezze. Someone who looked
Speaker 1: down there knows that, yeah, it's it's it can't be
Speaker 1: a good story, right, whatever the truth is, it cannot
Speaker 1: possibly be good. We need that John's story later on.
Speaker 1: But anyway, this is about Marian. So yeah, that dude
Speaker 1: earned the name John. At least that has to have
Speaker 1: been his name. Um. So, one pretty good BuzzFeed article
Speaker 1: that I found on John Wayne describes Marian's parents as
Speaker 1: quote an implacable woman married to a sweet ne'er do well.
Speaker 1: Now that's a little bit too friendly, and that that's
Speaker 1: broadly in line. So biographer Scott i'man kind of describes her. Similarly,
Speaker 1: Biographer Richard Douglas Jensen describes Marian's mother is straight up abusive. Um,
Speaker 1: probably physically abusive and definitely mentally abusive. That does seem
Speaker 1: to be pretty accurate. Both Morrison's were part of what
Speaker 1: biographer Scott i'man describes as a nervous middle class of
Speaker 1: early early twentieth century America. These are the people we
Speaker 1: were talking about earlier on in the episode. These like
Speaker 1: folks who they're now doing these kind of more emasculating jobs.
Speaker 1: They're they're potentially having more like kind of wealth than
Speaker 1: Americans had before. But also there's this endless series of
Speaker 1: recessions and great depressions and ship that occurs in the
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. So this sort
Speaker 1: of prosperity and this kind of easier life is married
Speaker 1: to the fact that, like everything can fall out from
Speaker 1: under you at any time because there's a run on
Speaker 1: the bank or whatever. So they're they're nervous right there
Speaker 1: there on paper, doing better than their ancestors, but they
Speaker 1: feel no sense of actual security. So she's they're just
Speaker 1: kind of like whittling her husband down to a little
Speaker 1: nub about like, how come you ain't got no more
Speaker 1: callouses on your hands? Huh, Yes, that's exactly what's happening, Pumpkin,
Speaker 1: Lily pussy like that. Yeah, yeah, I think you've got
Speaker 1: her voice exactly. I mean, I liked I just like
Speaker 1: blaming the woman in this case. No, but it's look,
Speaker 1: we need some female villains, and for every male villain,
Speaker 1: you know, there's some of them have a lot of
Speaker 1: mom issues, and I think those moms deserve credit. What's
Speaker 1: very progressive about this story, Francesca is that normally when
Speaker 1: we have a bastard and you go into their upbringing,
Speaker 1: it's like mom was super sweet and supportive, but then
Speaker 1: she like dies suddenly, and like their dad's beating the
Speaker 1: shit out of him, or like Hitler's dad, where he
Speaker 1: beats the ship out of him, but then he dies
Speaker 1: and it throws the family in the chaos. Here Clyde,
Speaker 1: he's kind of an alcoholic, but he's a sweet dude.
Speaker 1: Nobody ever says anything bad about Clyde. He's a nice guy.
Speaker 1: Mama is a terrible person. It sounds like we're building
Speaker 1: to what a bad mom she is. Yes, maybe she
Speaker 1: was just angry at how big he was. Um, she
Speaker 1: can't poop right, I mean absolutely not, never the same,
Speaker 1: never the same, never the same. It's time for the
Speaker 1: first You know who else can't poop? Right, Francesco, I
Speaker 1: was hoping you would do that one. The products and
Speaker 1: services that support this podcast, not not a single one
Speaker 1: of them, all horrible, horrible stomach problems, potentially fatal. That's everyone.
Speaker 1: We let's sponsor our podcasts. Are you actively dying? If not,
Speaker 1: you can't sponsor this show. That's that's the rule. That way,
Speaker 1: If you don't like an advertiser on the show. You'll
Speaker 1: know they're not long for this world. And that's the behind.
Speaker 1: The bastards guarantee got us the boredom out. That's what
Speaker 1: you got. You gotta buy now, you gotta buy now,
Speaker 1: you gotta give all Right, here's ads. We're back. So
Speaker 1: we're talking about Clyde Morrison, John Wayne's dad, although John
Speaker 1: Wayne is just merrying at this point. So Clyde fucking Clyde. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, born too late to conquer the frontier. He's
Speaker 1: got a series of shitty desk jobs. He'd attended college
Speaker 1: on a football scholarship, but he didn't do great and
Speaker 1: he wound up getting a job as a pharmacist. Um.
Speaker 1: He's a really nice guy. He's known as like people
Speaker 1: will say, if he had four bits in his pocket,
Speaker 1: he'd buy a beer with one and give the rest
Speaker 1: to you so that you could like sit and talk.
Speaker 1: Um this guy, he's a nice guy. Um. He's also
Speaker 1: kind of a pushover and his wife is very ambitious
Speaker 1: and hard charging. She was if not straight out abusive
Speaker 1: as Jensen claims, then everyone seems to agree pretty casually.
Speaker 1: Kind of crue when his when Marion's younger brother was born,
Speaker 1: she decided, and his younger brother's named Robert. He's born
Speaker 1: when Marrion's about three. She decides she likes his younger
Speaker 1: brother better, and she gives him Marion's name. Because Marion's
Speaker 1: middle name had initially been Robert, so she takes his
Speaker 1: his name, and she gives it to his younger brother,
Speaker 1: and she gives him a new middle name, Mitchell Um.
Speaker 1: In the book John Wayne The Life and Legend, Scott
Speaker 1: i'man explains all of this sloppy switching happened in earl Ham,
Speaker 1: where the family moved to nineteen ten, and where Marion's
Speaker 1: younger brother, Robert, was born in December nineteen eleven. Using
Speaker 1: a child's name is the p and and now you
Speaker 1: see it, now you don't. Shell game was only the
Speaker 1: beginning of Marion's ragged childhood. What probably happened is that
Speaker 1: his mother, a formidably strong willed, read borderline unpleasant woman
Speaker 1: born Mary Brown in eighteen eighty five and Lincoln, Nebraska,
Speaker 1: simply appropriated the older boys middle name for the preferred
Speaker 1: new arrival. So she takes his name because she likes
Speaker 1: his little brother better, like which is Rother the most
Speaker 1: redeeming part of his name. Robert, thank you for saying that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: gives it. Mitchell, what a ship name. You're never gonna
Speaker 1: be nothing but an eminem's Mary and Mitchell, Mary and Mitchell.
Speaker 1: Get down here, Mary and Mitchell Morrison. That's what it
Speaker 1: stands for. Now, Robert, you can come over here. You
Speaker 1: don't got to do chores today. Yeah, that's more or
Speaker 1: less what goes on. So Molly Morrison was famed for
Speaker 1: her frequent rages, where again Clyde's pretty retiring. So as
Speaker 1: he grows up, Marian comes to vastly prefer hanging out
Speaker 1: with his dad while his brother Robert becomes a mama's boy,
Speaker 1: which suited Mama just fine because she only likes her
Speaker 1: little boy. So winter Set, Iowa, to this day has
Speaker 1: not really gotten over John Wayne, but he gets over
Speaker 1: his hometown basically immediately right the family moves to Nebraska
Speaker 1: when he's like three or four, and he later tells
Speaker 1: an interviewer, just about all I remember about winter Set
Speaker 1: is riding horses, playing football, and the time I thought
Speaker 1: I discovered electricity. And there's more to that quote, but
Speaker 1: I'm not going to read it because it's funnier if
Speaker 1: I don't. So Marian's really need to know more about
Speaker 1: when he thought he discovered it's it's not as funny.
Speaker 1: He's just letting your imagination go. He's like, when I
Speaker 1: actively tried to kill myself because my mom was driving
Speaker 1: me nuts. Yeah, I mean essentially, yes, And I stood
Speaker 1: out in a storm. Yeah, I mean you you have
Speaker 1: literally grasped it. Yes, Okay, Okay, I like it. I
Speaker 1: like the interview something out. Yeah, it's cute kids stuff. Right,
Speaker 1: He's just a kid at this point. So his early
Speaker 1: life is very unstable. The family moves constantly. They've moved
Speaker 1: like a bunch of times by the time he's seven
Speaker 1: or eight, which is not super common for this period. Right.
Speaker 1: You know my early life, we moved a bunch, but
Speaker 1: like you had cars, you know, it wasn't hard. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: So he's moving in a period of time where that's
Speaker 1: a real trauma. Uh. Clyde is bad with money. He
Speaker 1: declares bankruptcy, he loses his pharmacy. Um, he's like moving
Speaker 1: around taking up ship jobs. Uh. This pattern repeats itself
Speaker 1: a couple of times until in nineteen thirteen, when Marian
Speaker 1: is six, the family moves to des Moines with Molly's
Speaker 1: fit to live with Molly's family while Clyde tries to
Speaker 1: get back on his feet. So they're living in des Moines.
Speaker 1: Nineteen fourteen comes around, World War One kicks off, you
Speaker 1: know over in Europa stand yes, make more men, Make
Speaker 1: more men. Oh yeah, well that's gonna have an impact
Speaker 1: on the story. But if initially the US hasn't involved
Speaker 1: in World War One, although guys like Teddy Roosevelt Shure
Speaker 1: want us to be. And while this is all kind
Speaker 1: of building up, Clyde's father, uh, you know, Marian's grandpa
Speaker 1: buys a parcel of land in California and asks if
Speaker 1: his son wouldn't mind like working it. Um like, hey,
Speaker 1: you guys, wanna nothing else has worked? Want to try
Speaker 1: farming in California? Uh? So Clyde has no experience doing this,
Speaker 1: he's not particularly apt for farm life, but he's like, sure,
Speaker 1: we'll give it a shot. So the family moves across
Speaker 1: the country to live with their grandparents and try to
Speaker 1: make it go with a farm. So here's the problem, Francesca.
Speaker 1: The place where Clyde Sr. Purchases eighty acres is Palmdale, California.
Speaker 1: You ever been to Palmdale, I don't think so. No.
Speaker 1: So it is right next to the Mojave. It gets
Speaker 1: about four inches of rain in a good year, which
Speaker 1: is slightly more than Portland's got the day before I
Speaker 1: wrote this episode. So most things do not grow well
Speaker 1: in palm Dale. If you are able to divert tremendous
Speaker 1: water resources from elsewhere in the state, you can make
Speaker 1: a pretty good go of avocado farming there right now.
Speaker 1: That was not really happening at this point, and it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not a good place for agriculture. And the specific
Speaker 1: thing they try to grow there initially is corn, which
Speaker 1: does not do well in a climate like this. No. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Palmdale's where I'm I'm looking at it. All the poppies
Speaker 1: are people, you know, there's definitely unsers go and take
Speaker 1: photos of themselves on the poppies. It's beautiful. It's a
Speaker 1: lovely part of the part of the state. Grow there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you could grow opium there if you wanted to,
Speaker 1: but um, you know, it's not a great place to
Speaker 1: be a farmer unless you're being a very specific kind
Speaker 1: of farmer. And they decided to grow corn, and again,
Speaker 1: like Ukraine, is one of the countries in the world
Speaker 1: that grows the most corn. Think of the climate of
Speaker 1: Ukraine versus a town right on the edge of the Mojave.
Speaker 1: You know. Um, So the Morrisons start trying to grow
Speaker 1: ship and their whole plot is kind of a land scam.
Speaker 1: There was some rules with the government where if they
Speaker 1: could develop all eighty acres, the government would give them
Speaker 1: another five hundred something acres. So it's they're they're trying
Speaker 1: to like game the government to to to make it rich.
Speaker 1: But they are going to have to be better at
Speaker 1: farming than they wind up being to do that. So
Speaker 1: the only house on the property is what John Wayne
Speaker 1: later later called a glorified shack. It was unpowered, unheeded,
Speaker 1: and it had no running water. Uh yeah. Marian later
Speaker 1: called the terrain as barren deserted country. Um. But he
Speaker 1: and his dad set to work trying to make the
Speaker 1: desert bloom. So while they're struggling to farm, Muscular Christianity
Speaker 1: in the United States is reaching its apex. When World
Speaker 1: War One kicks off, Teddy Roosevelt himself repeatedly urged the
Speaker 1: US to get involved, right like, we're just being a
Speaker 1: bunch of a bunch of girls. If we don't get
Speaker 1: involved in this war and feed our sons to machine guns.
Speaker 1: Um and Woodrow Wilson, who gets to be the president,
Speaker 1: campaigns on not doing that. He's like, it seems like
Speaker 1: a bad idea World War One. Maybe we should stay
Speaker 1: out of that. Obviously, he's not going to stick to
Speaker 1: his guns. Um So, Teddy Roosevelt and him are kind
Speaker 1: of having this big public spat over whether or not
Speaker 1: the US should get involved. Um and and and Teddy
Speaker 1: is not the only one really pushing the United States
Speaker 1: for involvement. There's a whole culture that grows up on
Speaker 1: the right wing urging intervention in World War One. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read another quote from Jesus and John Wayne here.
Speaker 1: Former professional baseball player Billy Sunday preached this new muscular
Speaker 1: Christianity with unrivaled zeal Wanting nothing to do with the
Speaker 1: sissy lily livered piety, Sunday preferred to pack his old
Speaker 1: muscle loading gospel gun with ipocac, buttermilk, rough on, rats, rock, salt,
Speaker 1: and whatever else came in handy and let it fly.
Speaker 1: In the spring of nineteen seventeen, with America's injury into
Speaker 1: the First World War, Sunday's militancy went beyond metaphor. He
Speaker 1: had no time for pacifists or draft dodgers, God forsaken months,
Speaker 1: or apparently for nuance of any kind. And these days
Speaker 1: all our patriots or traitors to your country and the
Speaker 1: cause of Jesus Christ. An evangelist for war, Sunday was
Speaker 1: known to leap atop his pulpit waiving the American flag.
Speaker 1: Now I read that quote because this is a guy
Speaker 1: who's prominence in the US right way. When John Wayne
Speaker 1: is a kid. Later on, our boy Marion is going
Speaker 1: to grow up to become this man. You know, essentially,
Speaker 1: this is what he does during Vietnam. Um causes the
Speaker 1: problem when you conflate nation building with like Jesus and religion.
Speaker 1: This is the problem when you when you have like
Speaker 1: ch shin settler colonialism is when you've stopped settling, when
Speaker 1: you've stopped killing one set of people, you are existentially
Speaker 1: like in a crossroads, your bankrupt. You're like, who I am?
Speaker 1: You know anything to do? If we're not killing people? Yeah? Right?
Speaker 1: And then you think and then you think that Jesus
Speaker 1: and your God just wants you to kill more people
Speaker 1: and that will then prove yourself. Yeah. It's like it's
Speaker 1: like you know, you you, you know, you have these
Speaker 1: guys who like work their whole life at some sort
Speaker 1: of horrible financial industry job and they're able to retire,
Speaker 1: which a lot of people don't get to do anymore.
Speaker 1: But then once they retire, one of two things happens.
Speaker 1: They either die immediately because they don't have anything to do,
Speaker 1: or they get real into cryptocurrency. Um, and we're in
Speaker 1: America's like cryptocurrency phase, our first one right here, right
Speaker 1: that that's what World War one is is like board
Speaker 1: apes for for the United States. It's the other way
Speaker 1: for us to chase those highs. Yeah, it's like our
Speaker 1: midlife crisis. Yeah. So um yeah, our boy marian Um
Speaker 1: at this point, he's a little kid with a girl's
Speaker 1: first name, which causes him a lot of problems. So
Speaker 1: he goes to a public school. Uh, there are no
Speaker 1: busses back then, so he has to ride a horse
Speaker 1: miles every day to and from class. And today this
Speaker 1: would make you the toughest son of a bit in
Speaker 1: second grade. But this is rural California in nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 1: so it's not an uncommon thing to be doing. Um,
Speaker 1: but he does get mocked constantly because again his name
Speaker 1: is Marian. Other kids asked him why his mom didn't
Speaker 1: send him to school in skirts biographer Scott i'man rights.
Speaker 1: Not surprisingly, in later years he didn't particularly like to
Speaker 1: talk about his childhood. His last wife said that the
Speaker 1: stories came out only in fragments during their twenty years together.
Speaker 1: Mainly he felt unloved by his mother and was quietly
Speaker 1: distressed by his father's ineffectuality. So kind of a sympathetic
Speaker 1: kid at this point. A little bit yeah, a little
Speaker 1: bit of um, you know, making of a mass shooter. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can see a few places this to go right.
Speaker 1: So a lot of negative left wing coverage of John
Speaker 1: Wayne will note his upbringing in suburban Glendale, which is
Speaker 1: where he winds up after this, and that he's like
Speaker 1: a surf bomb as a young man, to kind of
Speaker 1: make the case that his cowboy mystique was all a lie.
Speaker 1: I don't really think that's fair, because again, he does
Speaker 1: spend years on a farm in the middle of nowhere
Speaker 1: in a pretty rugged terrain, like riding a horse to
Speaker 1: and from school every day. One of his jobs on
Speaker 1: the farm is to stand in the field with a
Speaker 1: rifle looking for snakes while his dad works the field,
Speaker 1: because like, if his dad gets bitten by a snake
Speaker 1: out in the middle of the desert, he's going to die.
Speaker 1: So this is actually like the source of a lot
Speaker 1: of trauma for John Wayne because he's he's standing out
Speaker 1: there with a gun trying to shoot spot and shoot
Speaker 1: snakes in time to stop his dad from getting bitten.
Speaker 1: And he just constantly has these fucking nightmares when he
Speaker 1: goes to sleep at night of like being too late
Speaker 1: and his dad getting bitten by a snake. Um, that's
Speaker 1: a lot to put on like a seven year old kid.
Speaker 1: His mom would never let him live that one down.
Speaker 1: But like I'm also imagining a kid who's all so
Speaker 1: bored to tears standing there absolutely and then just imagining
Speaker 1: like you know, you know, hordes of Indians on the plane,
Speaker 1: you know, just coming over the mountain, and like just
Speaker 1: very in his imagination. He definitely is, And he spends
Speaker 1: when he's like riding his horse to and from school
Speaker 1: and ship, he spends a lot of time imagining cowboy
Speaker 1: fights and being attacked by bandits and ship which you
Speaker 1: get very normal ship for a seven year old or
Speaker 1: whatever in this situation. Um, And he notes that like
Speaker 1: even though he has all these nightmares, he he never
Speaker 1: talks about it, Like he's he's constantly dreaming about like
Speaker 1: thousands of snakes coming to attack him and his dad. Um.
Speaker 1: But he he doesn't feel like he can say anything,
Speaker 1: like you're not allowed to talk about being afraid of
Speaker 1: things as a young man in this period, so he
Speaker 1: just kind of keeps it bottled up inside. Now being
Speaker 1: a kid. Um. Yeah, like I said, he's he's got
Speaker 1: all these different fantasies and stuff, and it seems like
Speaker 1: some of the happier moments in his childhood at this
Speaker 1: period are the time he spends on a horse kind
Speaker 1: of lost in fantasies, riding to and from school. And
Speaker 1: at least according to Scott, i'man he loves this horse. Uh.
Speaker 1: Jinny is her name, um, and she's his, she's his, his, his,
Speaker 1: his buddy out there. But she's also got some sort
Speaker 1: of chronic stomach illness that makes it impossible for her
Speaker 1: to put on weight. So no matter how well the
Speaker 1: Morrison's feed her, she looks like she's starving. Now, if
Speaker 1: you know California Francesca, you know, it's full of people
Speaker 1: who are bad at minding their own damn business. And
Speaker 1: a neighbor calls the Humane Society to claim that Marian
Speaker 1: is abusing this horse. Wow, that's like the next door
Speaker 1: of the early ninety it's just like a skinny horse.
Speaker 1: This little kid in this little horse. I feel like
Speaker 1: he's not feeding it enough. Yeah, so Scott, i'man rights
Speaker 1: Marian stoutly insisted he was always feeding his horse, that
Speaker 1: he carried oats for the horse, even on their daily
Speaker 1: commute to and from school. His teacher and his parents
Speaker 1: stood up for him. The county vet examined the horse
Speaker 1: and diagnosed the wasting disease, but a sense of outrage
Speaker 1: over being falsely accused never left him. I learned you
Speaker 1: can't always judge up her Sonora situation by the way
Speaker 1: it appears on the surface. He remembered, you have to
Speaker 1: look deeply into things before you're in a position to
Speaker 1: make a proper decision. So they tried to cancel him.
Speaker 1: Try to cancel him. Cancel culture came for John Wayne
Speaker 1: because of his ragged ass horse of some nosy lib
Speaker 1: was like, that horse needs more food. Shut the funk. Up,
Speaker 1: and he does have his he has his old yellow
Speaker 1: moment because this horse never gets better and they have
Speaker 1: to shoot it. Yeah, you know, it's what happened to
Speaker 1: horse that I do not know. Possibly, although I kind
Speaker 1: of I would. I think maybe his dad would be
Speaker 1: the kind of dude to not put that on his kids.
Speaker 1: I don't really know. Um, horse, Maryan, you're shooting your horse.
Speaker 1: You're shooting your best friend, Jenny. Shoot your best friend Jenny.
Speaker 1: Then we're eating her because we're poorous shit. So, despite
Speaker 1: trying very hard, Clyde and Marian are terrible at farming
Speaker 1: um and the hundred and eighteen degree summers very quickly
Speaker 1: forced Clyde's ailing parents to flee for the cooler climates
Speaker 1: of Los Angeles. When they leave, they tell their son like, hey,
Speaker 1: we made a bad call with this farm. You guys
Speaker 1: should probably get the funk out of here too, write like,
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like Palm Dale going anywhere good? Maybe move
Speaker 1: to l A. It's it seems like it'll always be
Speaker 1: affordable and a good place to live. Citrus trees at
Speaker 1: this point, but citrus trees at this point. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: like forty people there, So Clyde tries for a little
Speaker 1: while more to farm this this plot of land. But
Speaker 1: when the horse dies, Marian has to walk or hitch
Speaker 1: my hike like an eight mile round trip to school
Speaker 1: every day. Um. It's just a brutal way for a
Speaker 1: kid to live, Like, he's got to get up hours
Speaker 1: before he starts this hike to do his chores because
Speaker 1: you know it's a farm. Um. But he's also he
Speaker 1: does really well in school. Still, he's a good student,
Speaker 1: and he distracts himself self from the realities of his
Speaker 1: life by obsessively reading and rereading catalogs, particularly Sears catalogs,
Speaker 1: and just like underlining all the things he's going to
Speaker 1: buy one day when he somehow gets money. Um. Classic
Speaker 1: poor kids shit. Uh, pretty pretty normal behavior. So after
Speaker 1: about two years, his parents can barely stand to be
Speaker 1: in the same room as each other. Farming kind of
Speaker 1: destroys the marriage and they have no money. All of
Speaker 1: their crops keep getting eaten by jack rabbits, so like
Speaker 1: a lot of Meanwhile, what's Robert doing, Rombers just like
Speaker 1: sitting there and like fucking useless pieces of ship. Robert Morrison, motherfucker. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe we should call him John Lame. Um. So they
Speaker 1: decide farming is not gonna work, and like a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of Armenians are going to do a few years
Speaker 1: from this point, the Morrison's leave home and they move
Speaker 1: to Glendale, California. Um, now, well, yeah, I like we
Speaker 1: got the brand mall over there. You've got you. You
Speaker 1: have the pets coffee that sells one in every other
Speaker 1: city is the tantalizing Turkish coffee blend. But in Glenda
Speaker 1: Dale they call it, uh something else without the word.
Speaker 1: I think that's just the tantalizing blend because you you
Speaker 1: don't want to have Turkish in the name of a
Speaker 1: coffee that you're selling in little Armenia. Not really a
Speaker 1: good call Armenia. It's it is, it is. It is
Speaker 1: verging on the size of regular Armenia. Now it's a big,
Speaker 1: big place. I love Lyndale. Actually it's very pretty, very
Speaker 1: nice town. Um, and today it is like a sizeable
Speaker 1: Like it's not a small city. I mean, obviously, like
Speaker 1: all of Los Angeles is a bunch of separate cities,
Speaker 1: but also kind of one big gas city. Um, that's
Speaker 1: not really the case. When the Morrison's moved to Glendale,
Speaker 1: it is kind of like it's separate little town on
Speaker 1: the outskirts of Los Angeles. I think it's like eight
Speaker 1: thousand people, um, which is way it's kind of like
Speaker 1: like Octopole in population. In a couple of years after
Speaker 1: they moved there, like it, it blows up big time, right, Um.
Speaker 1: But at this point it's kind of a sleepy suburb. Um.
Speaker 1: So Marian is nine when they moved to the Los
Speaker 1: Angeles burbs. Uh. And you know, at this point he
Speaker 1: has finally made it more or less to the city
Speaker 1: that's going to make him famous. Uh. So they move in,
Speaker 1: they get used to l a life. They get a dog,
Speaker 1: an Airdale they named Big Duke. Um. The name of
Speaker 1: this dog is borrowed from the movie Dog of a
Speaker 1: fake cowboy named Tom Mix, who is like one of
Speaker 1: the most popular cowboys of the day we'll be talking
Speaker 1: about in a bit. And maryan he's like Marian's idol. So,
Speaker 1: like you know, obviously, as a little kid in this period,
Speaker 1: he's watching cowboy movies every chance he gets. And Tom
Speaker 1: mixes the big cowboy. Um. And so his Tom Mix
Speaker 1: and then Duke was the name of the big dog
Speaker 1: of the dog in the Cowboy movie. And then Duke
Speaker 1: becomes John Wayne's nickname. That's right, that's how this is
Speaker 1: how this happens. So his dog, Big Duke, has a
Speaker 1: habit of chasing fire engines. Incredibly stereotypical upbringing this kid has,
Speaker 1: so Marian winds up chasing after his dog a lot,
Speaker 1: and often to the fire station. And so local firefighters
Speaker 1: start to know this kid and his dog and they
Speaker 1: kind of adopt them. They realize like his family super poor,
Speaker 1: so they'll give him milk and they'll say like, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: this is for like your cat at home, but really
Speaker 1: it's for the family because they're too poor to buy milk. Um.
Speaker 1: Very nice firefighters, and they'll they'll hang out with Marian
Speaker 1: and because his dogs Big Duke, and is apparently quite
Speaker 1: a personality as a dog, they just start calling both
Speaker 1: of them Duke and eventually start calling Mary and little
Speaker 1: Duke um. And that's how he gets his nickname. That's
Speaker 1: how he became becomes the Duke is These firefighters start
Speaker 1: nicknaming him based on his dog manly Men. Yeah, renamed
Speaker 1: the Manliest Man. They did from Maryan and he he
Speaker 1: as soon as these firefighters give him a nickname, he
Speaker 1: stops going by Marian and starts going by Duke and
Speaker 1: he will all his life. That's what his friends call
Speaker 1: him is thank God. Yeah, I mean absolutely you would
Speaker 1: pick Duke over Mary It. Yeah, it's like, oh, you
Speaker 1: can just pick a name. You could just have a name,
Speaker 1: like you can make it anything you want. Huh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: welcome to Hollywood, kid. I was kind of surprised because,
Speaker 1: you know, you hear his nickname is the Duke, and
Speaker 1: you figure it's generally when someone has a nickname that's
Speaker 1: hyper masculine, you assume there's a very sad story about
Speaker 1: how they picked it for themselves. And no, this is
Speaker 1: actually kind of a sweet story. He got adopted by firefighters.
Speaker 1: That's nice. Yeah, no, and it's actually cute. I mean,
Speaker 1: the real Duke was the dog. But the real Duke
Speaker 1: was the dog. He is nickname. He is like Indiana
Speaker 1: Jones named for the dog, little Duke, Little Duke. So
Speaker 1: you know, the Morrison's bounced around a handful of small
Speaker 1: homes in their early years in l A. Clyde is
Speaker 1: never able to keep a job well enough to build up,
Speaker 1: you know, the kind of savings necessary to stay in
Speaker 1: a place for long. He keeps on giving people with
Speaker 1: him and drinking. I don't want to go home to
Speaker 1: my wife. Yeah, that is a big part of it.
Speaker 1: Um so. And yeah, he's from a pretty young age,
Speaker 1: Like the time he's nine, his dad can't afford to
Speaker 1: buy him clothes, so he has to get jobs in
Speaker 1: order to like keep himself in clothing. Um. Again, not
Speaker 1: an easy childhood, although not out of step with a
Speaker 1: lot of kids in this period. Again, these are not
Speaker 1: like he's not like the only kid with this upbringing
Speaker 1: in the neighborhood. Right, everybody's trying to fucking poor, you know.
Speaker 1: Um So, he's tinned. By the time the United States
Speaker 1: makes the decision to get into w W one. Um.
Speaker 1: Obviously Roosevelt big advocate of World War One being a
Speaker 1: thing for the US to get involved in. Um, everyone's
Speaker 1: very excited. The muscular Christianity side crowd is super into
Speaker 1: the war when it starts, But it does not go
Speaker 1: the way Americans had hoped, as europe had already learned.
Speaker 1: Modern warfare is a pretty nasty thing. Old West style
Speaker 1: heroism gets you mowed down in rows by machine gun fire.
Speaker 1: A hundred and sixteen thousand Americans will die in the
Speaker 1: war in just like a year's time. Uh. And one
Speaker 1: of these Americans is Quentin Roosevelt, the President's son, which
Speaker 1: really fucks him up forever. Um might have been a
Speaker 1: bad call, Teddy, damn back then when presidents actually say
Speaker 1: their kids to war. Three of his sons, I think
Speaker 1: will fight in World War One. He was. He was not.
Speaker 1: He was a lot of things, but he was not
Speaker 1: about this at least he was not a hypocrite like
Speaker 1: and he actually tries desperately to to fight himself. He
Speaker 1: attempts to like raise a volunteer regiment and go fight
Speaker 1: in World War One. But the president at the President
Speaker 1: Wilson is like, Teddy, you are a former US president.
Speaker 1: You're not going to go fight in World War One. Like,
Speaker 1: absolutely not. I'm not going to let you do that.
Speaker 1: That's that's nuts. We'll send your kids, Yeah, we'll send
Speaker 1: you kids. Um. And the fact that World War One
Speaker 1: is this it just kind of ends as this horrible
Speaker 1: meat grinder um as it began, does a lot of
Speaker 1: damage to the concepts of muscular Christianity, just kind of like,
Speaker 1: you know, there's versions of this going on in Europe
Speaker 1: that get torn apart in the fields of Flanders and whatnot.
Speaker 1: Christin Cobbs Dumez rites. When the war came to a close,
Speaker 1: no amount of patriotism could obscure the fact that it
Speaker 1: had been fought at great cost and with little apparent gain.
Speaker 1: Roosevelt model of masculinity had been found Wanting the war,
Speaker 1: it seemed, had presented Americans with the horror of having
Speaker 1: myths about blood and fire and mutilation and blindness come true.
Speaker 1: For liberal Protestant internationalists, the disillusionment was especially Keen. Sherwood Eddie,
Speaker 1: a leading Liberal Protestant proponent of the war, expressed dismay
Speaker 1: at his pro war activism. I believed it was a
Speaker 1: war to end war, to protect womanhood, to destroy militarism
Speaker 1: and autocracy, and to make a new world fit for
Speaker 1: heroes to live in. He confessed, the carnage and horrors
Speaker 1: of warfare put an end to all that. So one
Speaker 1: of the things that happens here, this muscular Christian movement
Speaker 1: that gets us into World War one splinters because a
Speaker 1: chunk of the US folks who want to get into
Speaker 1: World War one are liberals who are like, maybe if
Speaker 1: we do this war, it will put an end to
Speaker 1: like these autocratic dictatorships that have been doing all this
Speaker 1: horrible ship around the world for years and engaging in
Speaker 1: constant brinksmanship with each other, and the other chunk of
Speaker 1: it is just dudes who are like masculinity is all
Speaker 1: about fighting, and they kind of split at this point,
Speaker 1: and one of those chunks is going to become the
Speaker 1: conservatives we know and are actively preparing to fight today.
Speaker 1: You know. Um good times. No, I was just gonna say,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like, yeah, that's the part of going
Speaker 1: to war is the death part. Like that's the part
Speaker 1: of the muscular We must always be fighting. God is
Speaker 1: on our side, Like oh maybe maybe God's not ours,
Speaker 1: So maybe maybe he's not on any side. It's not real.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, I know. But it's just like what did
Speaker 1: you think was going to happen? Um, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's a hard lesson. We never really learned the lesson.
Speaker 1: I guess it was learned for a while and then
Speaker 1: there was like deep isolationism in the in the country,
Speaker 1: and um, World War two obviously it installed our intervention there. Um,
Speaker 1: we never learned any of the right lessons, which is like,
Speaker 1: don't don't trust anyone who tells you any of the
Speaker 1: who don't trust anyone who makes violence seem like a
Speaker 1: way to learn anything. Um, it's it's it's a it's
Speaker 1: an occasionally necessary thing, but it doesn't make you into
Speaker 1: anything other than a traumatized person. Yeah, You're dick will
Speaker 1: not grow. Your dick does not grow. Um, but it
Speaker 1: might get blown off by shrapnel. Um, like in the
Speaker 1: classic anti war song the Wang pre Bang, which is
Speaker 1: about us involvement in LAO. Pretty good song anyway. Uh
Speaker 1: so you know what else? Will blow your testicles off?
Speaker 1: Oh wait, Sophie, are we is that good? Should we do? That?
Speaker 1: Is that how we leave into an ad break? Sumping
Speaker 1: was one thing, but blowing testicles off if you want
Speaker 1: to get gelded by white hot shrapnel. Um, listen to
Speaker 1: these ads. God, I hope it's a fucking Washington stap,
Speaker 1: So do I, Sophie, God hear it? Uh we're back.
Speaker 1: So you know all this this this kind of collapse
Speaker 1: of one of the things that happens. We've talked about
Speaker 1: how kind of the Christian muscular Christianity splinters after World
Speaker 1: War One, the one chunk of it kind of turns
Speaker 1: into super capitalist and business oriented, right being ra rai
Speaker 1: imperialism in war didn't really work out for us. What
Speaker 1: if we make Jesus into a businessman, you know, like
Speaker 1: a like a two fisted businessman. And we've talked about
Speaker 1: this in a couple of episodes, including Our two Partner
Speaker 1: and how they're all the rich eight Christianity. Um. And
Speaker 1: while this is worth noting because of what comes next,
Speaker 1: I don't know that any of this really this is
Speaker 1: all happening in the background when Marian as a kid.
Speaker 1: I don't know that he. I think he certainly must
Speaker 1: be taking some of this in through osmosis, especially a
Speaker 1: lot of these more militant attitudes towards Christianity, which are
Speaker 1: reflected in the movies he's watching. Um, because he he
Speaker 1: loves himself some cowboy movies. UM. And he does grow
Speaker 1: up kind of obsessed with the nascent film industry in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. There's only a couple of studios in Glendale,
Speaker 1: but they're shooting a bunch of cowboy movie is where
Speaker 1: he lives, because it's kind of the outskirts of town
Speaker 1: at this point. So he spent a lot of watching
Speaker 1: that ship. Yeah, exactly. He's way into this stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: He's also super into sports, pretty normal stuff. His parents
Speaker 1: marriage gets worse and worse. His mother increasingly attacks and
Speaker 1: at least mentally abuses both him and his dad. Biographer
Speaker 1: Richard Jensen writes in When the Legend Became Fact The
Speaker 1: True Life of John Wayne Quote, Marion's dysfunctional parents filled
Speaker 1: the Morrison home with strife. Marian became a neurotic kid,
Speaker 1: unable to sleep normally without nightmares. Like all children growing
Speaker 1: up in a household filled with abuse, he internalized the
Speaker 1: strain of the abuse and blamed himself for their unhappiness.
Speaker 1: The movies where his respite from reality. Marian dreamed of
Speaker 1: being a cowboy, of being a sword wielding pirate, of
Speaker 1: being a movie star. So it all feels fairly I mean,
Speaker 1: is is hard, but fairly normal, fairly normal, not an
Speaker 1: uncommon tale, right, Um No, it's not like he's he's
Speaker 1: very much much embodies. I think there's some degrees to
Speaker 1: which it's abnormal. I think like the kind of scale.
Speaker 1: Like one of the things that's weird is shortly after this,
Speaker 1: his parents divorce, which is abnormal, and his his mom
Speaker 1: takes Robert and he stays with his dad. Um, and
Speaker 1: that is god. Robert was not kid out of here
Speaker 1: Molly is coming back around in the third installation, Mark
Speaker 1: my words, people, Robert knows, but I don't Molly's gonna
Speaker 1: come crawling back asking for money. You just wait, I
Speaker 1: mean probably right, Um, definitely when when John Wayne gets rich. Right,
Speaker 1: remember how good I was to you. I only dropped
Speaker 1: you a few times on purpose. I gave you that
Speaker 1: whole new name. So Mitchell Marian spends as much time
Speaker 1: away from his house as he possibly can, because it
Speaker 1: sucks there, Jensen continues. Duke was a rambunctious kid, athletic
Speaker 1: and imaginative. He was also restless. He stayed away from
Speaker 1: home as much as possible. He learned to be rough
Speaker 1: and tumbled. He learned to smoke cigarettes and taste alcohol.
Speaker 1: Years later, when Duke was diagnosed with lung cancer, he
Speaker 1: admitted to his family he'd smoked since I was just
Speaker 1: a kid. So it's like a chain smoking ten year
Speaker 1: old in Glendale, California. You know, story as old as time. Um,
Speaker 1: watching the movie sets, just just just pulling on a
Speaker 1: Marlborough watching people shoot at Cowboy Flick downtown. I'm just
Speaker 1: the Duke, my trusty dog. So once it's probably his
Speaker 1: dog's got a cigarette too, you have to assume. Um. Now.
Speaker 1: Once he hits high school, Marion develops an interest in
Speaker 1: theater and drama, but his chief obsession is sports of
Speaker 1: all kinds. The broad gist of his next few years
Speaker 1: is that he gets a football scholarship to play for
Speaker 1: the University of Southern California. Most Wayne bios will claim
Speaker 1: that he was a star player who enjoyed body surfing
Speaker 1: in his spare time. Um, he gets into surfing, but
Speaker 1: like poor people surfing where you're just kind of like
Speaker 1: throwing yourself into a wave and getting pushed to shore.
Speaker 1: Good old body surfing. Yeah, bodies serving, which sounds fun. Uh,
Speaker 1: he's real into the ladies. Uh. Since he was very tall,
Speaker 1: he grows up again to be huge, and he's muscular
Speaker 1: and athletic. As a young man, he's considered very handsome. Um.
Speaker 1: This is also the period, you know, the time when
Speaker 1: he is a teenager and a young man is when
Speaker 1: like you got your flapper era, women are starting to
Speaker 1: get liberated. There's a lot more girls are willing to
Speaker 1: like go out on dates, and casual sex starts to
Speaker 1: become a thing in mainstream American culture in a way
Speaker 1: it really hadn't been for a while. Um, and he
Speaker 1: comes of age during that period of time. He also
Speaker 1: becomes an alcoholic pretty early on. He's famous for drinking
Speaker 1: until he passes out at parties. Uh. He develops a
Speaker 1: passion for drag racing, and for the rest of his
Speaker 1: life he would drive so fast it frightened everyone in
Speaker 1: the car with him. Um. And was usually drunk while driving. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's forever He's getting up to be like just an
Speaker 1: average college douche bag, just a normal dude in the twenties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just drunk, driving, puke and at parties hitting on girls
Speaker 1: body surfing um. Which. Tragically, he has a body serving
Speaker 1: accident that injures his shoulder and that cuts his football
Speaker 1: career short. That's at least the traditional narrative of why
Speaker 1: his football career fails. It may not be entirely true. Um.
Speaker 1: There are some prominent people who doubt that he failed
Speaker 1: at football because he heard himself, and one of them
Speaker 1: was would He Strode Wood. He was the first black
Speaker 1: action movie star in US film history. He was also
Speaker 1: a former professional football player with the Rams, which are
Speaker 1: a Los Angeles team at this point. Uh. And it
Speaker 1: was his opinion that Duke was always bad at football.
Speaker 1: He was not a good runner, and he probably wouldn't
Speaker 1: have succeeded at football. Now there's some debate about whether
Speaker 1: or not Strode is accurate in this assessment, because wood
Speaker 1: he Strode fucking hated John Wayne, and he had a
Speaker 1: good reason to hate John Wayne. The two starred in
Speaker 1: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valets together in nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 1: Uh and Strode was apparently shocked by how much of
Speaker 1: a bully John Wayne was to the cast and crew.
Speaker 1: He claims that Wayne Wayne like made a particular show
Speaker 1: of mocking Woody in front of everyone else for not
Speaker 1: being athletic. And again, Woody is a professional athlete. Um
Speaker 1: like John Way, it's very funny that he would choose
Speaker 1: to do this blade for the ramps. So yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's clearly his own insecurity. Insecurity, yeah, or like maybe
Speaker 1: he just ran funny, Maybe he did run. He did
Speaker 1: run Funny. Jensen, his biographer, analyzes his running a bunch
Speaker 1: and it's like he did kind of run funny. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're you were meant for a horse kid. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: part of it is like one of the things that
Speaker 1: this shoulder injury he has, he kind of winds up,
Speaker 1: always stooped a little bit forward to one side, which
Speaker 1: gives him this kind of this awkward uneven gate. But
Speaker 1: that's part of what makes him so iconic. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this like gangster sort of lean and he kind of
Speaker 1: strides into these gunfights. It's it's a very distinctive walk.
Speaker 1: Um somebody surfing accident, Yeah, it's It's worth noting probably
Speaker 1: a lot of racism is also involved, because think John
Speaker 1: Wayne is insecure about the fact that Woody Strode is
Speaker 1: a real athlete and also is just a white supremacist
Speaker 1: um and apparently on the man who shot Liberty Valance. Um.
Speaker 1: Wayne's taunting of Strode is bad enough that Jimmy Stewart
Speaker 1: has to take him aside and be like, dude, you
Speaker 1: gotta fucking cool off here, or Strode is going to
Speaker 1: beat your ass. Like this isn't okay. My money is
Speaker 1: on Strode on the big fellaw cut that out. He's
Speaker 1: a real football player. You know, we're not in Palm
Speaker 1: Dale anymore, oh, Jimmy. But like and and also he
Speaker 1: must have been older, because this is I don't know
Speaker 1: when it was like, yeah, he's like shot something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is kind of like the height of his career.
Speaker 1: But yeah, um exactly, come on, John Wayne anyway, So
Speaker 1: whatever the truth is about why he gives up on
Speaker 1: his hoop dreams, that's what you call wanting to play football, right,
Speaker 1: So she's saying yes. So Marian decides to look for
Speaker 1: work in the film industry, which is splouting in the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties. He gets a job with Fox Film working
Speaker 1: as a prop man, and this was the site of
Speaker 1: his first clearly documented example of being a huge dick. Right,
Speaker 1: this is where we have our heel turn for John Wayne.
Speaker 1: And he's firmly a band in the on the props team,
Speaker 1: on the prop team. So he gets his first gig
Speaker 1: in the film industry because of that famous cowboy actor
Speaker 1: Tom Mix. Uh. Now Tom is at this point in
Speaker 1: time in the late twenties, Tom is like the biggest
Speaker 1: star in the country. He is making as a cowboy
Speaker 1: movie star. He is making seventeen thousand dollars a week.
Speaker 1: So that's like pretty damn good money today. You know,
Speaker 1: like you're pretty rich if you're making that today. This
Speaker 1: is like nineteen fucking twenties something like he is crazy.
Speaker 1: That is all of the money in the United States.
Speaker 1: Tom Mix is getting for baby very handsome time. He
Speaker 1: was a good looking guy. He was a real ass cowboy.
Speaker 1: Tom Mix had been not just like that. He had
Speaker 1: farmed and ship. He had been as a younger man,
Speaker 1: was a marshal in the Old West who got into gunfights. Um,
Speaker 1: so he was not like it was not acting for
Speaker 1: Tom Mix. He had done some stuff. Um. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: he's Maryan's like obviously Marian idolizes this dude. Um. So
Speaker 1: the two meet, like they contrive a meeting and they
Speaker 1: hang out briefly while Duke is in college. Um, and
Speaker 1: Mix is impressed by marrying enough that he calls George Marshall,
Speaker 1: a film director, and he gets Mary in that first
Speaker 1: prop job on his first movie. How doubt did he
Speaker 1: manufacture that meeting? That's so hard. It's not like it
Speaker 1: is like today celebrities there's this wall between them and
Speaker 1: the rest of the world. For a bunch of back
Speaker 1: in those days, it was not uncommon like they just
Speaker 1: be walking around town filming like celebrity. M Yeah, I
Speaker 1: just walked up to him and ship, you know, Um,
Speaker 1: it wasn't his heart. He might have seen him on
Speaker 1: set at this point. Yeah, And he's, he's, he's. They're
Speaker 1: kind of in and around the same areas, and yeah,
Speaker 1: they wind up talking and mix does him a real So, like,
Speaker 1: that's a pretty cool thing to do for a kid,
Speaker 1: is just to be like, you got some potential kid,
Speaker 1: Why I'll get you a prop job. Maybe that'll help
Speaker 1: you move into the industry. Um. Now, most sources you
Speaker 1: will find, like casual sources will say, like, this is
Speaker 1: a job that didn't pay well, it was menial, shitty work.
Speaker 1: That is not true. Biographer Scott i'man will point out
Speaker 1: that this was crucial and why he was successful later
Speaker 1: because he's a very diligent and skilled prop man. Working
Speaker 1: in props teaches him how things look on screen. He
Speaker 1: learns how to like like because he thinks a lot
Speaker 1: about how does this not just like does this look right?
Speaker 1: But will this look right on camera? Um, which is
Speaker 1: an important thing for an actor to be thinking about.
Speaker 1: If you're going to be a successful actor, you always
Speaker 1: need to be thinking about how does shi it look
Speaker 1: when it's filmed as opposed to you know, how does
Speaker 1: it just like look in the real world. Um. And
Speaker 1: because of the skills he builds as a prop man,
Speaker 1: he's going to be a lot more successful as an
Speaker 1: actor and eventually a director in the future. And Jensen,
Speaker 1: his other biographer, points out that he was really well paid.
Speaker 1: He's getting thirty five dollars a week at a time
Speaker 1: when a lot of people didn't make that in a
Speaker 1: month um as a college gig. So this is a
Speaker 1: really good job that Tom Mix had set him up with.
Speaker 1: Most people would consider this a huge solid but for
Speaker 1: the rest of his life, Duke would claim that Tom
Speaker 1: Mixed promised him an on screen job as a cowboy
Speaker 1: and then screwed him with the prop job. This is
Speaker 1: an obvious lie. For one thing, Tom Mix had a
Speaker 1: group of actual cowboys that he had with him on
Speaker 1: the set at any given time to do stunts and
Speaker 1: ship people that like, knew how to ride and knew
Speaker 1: how to rope, and we're real good at all the
Speaker 1: cowboys stuff. He was not known for just hiring random
Speaker 1: people to his crew, because he had folks he was.
Speaker 1: He was the top of the game. He didn't just
Speaker 1: pick up college kids. You know, Marion watched snakes, Robert, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's real world experience. He didn't know how to lasso,
Speaker 1: you know, ship at it um that is that is
Speaker 1: something people will point out he sucked at lasso It
Speaker 1: so um, he sucked at one of the main things,
Speaker 1: that one of the big right, And that's part of
Speaker 1: why Jensen will be like, there's no way Tom Mix
Speaker 1: wanted to give this kid a job as a major
Speaker 1: on screen cowboy. He didn't know how to do any
Speaker 1: of that ship and Tom Mix had a crew of
Speaker 1: people he'd been working with for years. It seems like
Speaker 1: entitlement and like also sort of like ego of a
Speaker 1: movie star in development. Yes, it seems like what has
Speaker 1: happened is that Tom Mix did this kid an incredible
Speaker 1: solid and got him a good paying industry job, and
Speaker 1: then Duke spent the rest of his life hating his
Speaker 1: hero for it. Why Here's what Jen Synthora rises. The
Speaker 1: story is interesting because it is the first glimpse into
Speaker 1: Duke's little known narcissistic streak and propensity for viewing himself
Speaker 1: as the victim. It is the first time we see
Speaker 1: Duke's propensity for viewing his glasses half empty rather than
Speaker 1: half full, his penchant for thinking himself as lucky, perhaps
Speaker 1: as unlucky. Perhaps Duke believed after spending an entire year
Speaker 1: among the sons of privilege in college that he was
Speaker 1: entitled to special treatment. Perhaps it is a tale born
Speaker 1: of public relations. When Duke was cast in his first
Speaker 1: starring role in The Big Trail, he told every reporter
Speaker 1: who would listen that he'd beaten out Tom Mix for
Speaker 1: the role. Now this was again a lie, right, Uh.
Speaker 1: Mix wasn't even working with the same studio. And it
Speaker 1: said that when John, like when Maryan got his first
Speaker 1: like on camera gigs, he winds up on set with
Speaker 1: Tom Mix and he like confronts him about the fact
Speaker 1: that Mix screwed him out of a job, and Mix,
Speaker 1: being an actual cowboy quote, stared at the ungrateful young
Speaker 1: duke with a glare so cold that the chill was palpable.
Speaker 1: It's just like the funk are you saying? Like yeah,
Speaker 1: best response the two never talk against. That's what you
Speaker 1: did to your hero, This dude who does like that's
Speaker 1: like imagine that happening to anyone today. I still getting
Speaker 1: you a gig in the industry just because of a
Speaker 1: casual conversation like but also like a little bit of respect,
Speaker 1: like like I would I am such a like sort
Speaker 1: of like grateful, sick of fan I'd be like, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: give me and I'll take anything. I would never stop
Speaker 1: saying nice shit about mix, you know, but not John Wayne. Um.
Speaker 1: So he starts working as a prop boy and he
Speaker 1: serves as an extra like for side, Cash and Ship,
Speaker 1: just because the film needs it and because he wants
Speaker 1: to get on screen. His first role on screen is
Speaker 1: probably an anonymous Yale football player. There's some debate about this. Uh,
Speaker 1: He's uncredited and at least thirteen more roles over the
Speaker 1: next few years. Uh. During this period of time, while
Speaker 1: he's propping it up, um, he gets married to a
Speaker 1: young woman named Josephine Sands s A E. N Z.
Speaker 1: She's the daughter of a Spanish diplomat. All of his
Speaker 1: wives are going to be Hispanic or Latin American. Um
Speaker 1: Marian describes this as love at first sight, but he
Speaker 1: also slept around on her from the beginning. His justification
Speaker 1: before Christianity kind of well, it's even it's shadier than that,
Speaker 1: is that like, she's Catholic, right, and she can't fuck
Speaker 1: until marriage. So he he decides it's okay for me
Speaker 1: to sleep around prior to marriage because she can't have
Speaker 1: sex with me prior to marriage. Obviously, I need to
Speaker 1: have sex, so this is fine. That's why he dated
Speaker 1: like Catholic like Latina's Well I don't know about that. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he uh, he does this, Uh, he cheats around
Speaker 1: on her constantly. Um. And then when they get married,
Speaker 1: it turns out she doesn't have much of a sex
Speaker 1: drive his words, right, we don't know anything about her
Speaker 1: attitude towards this, but he decides that because she doesn't
Speaker 1: have much of a sex drive, it's again okay for
Speaker 1: him to cheat on her constantly, even while he makes
Speaker 1: four children with her. Um. So John Wayne, you know,
Speaker 1: just John wayning it up. Although he's not John Wayne yet.
Speaker 1: He's about to become that though, because in nine Duke
Speaker 1: Morrison meets John Ford, the man who is going to
Speaker 1: make his career now. Ford was and still is a
Speaker 1: legendary director. A lot of most film nerds will agree
Speaker 1: he was a genius, like just one of these guys
Speaker 1: who helps invent the language of cinema in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways. Um. And Ford is also a hard son
Speaker 1: of a bitch. His dad had been a rum runner
Speaker 1: and a saloon owner. He was a proud Irish Catholic
Speaker 1: and a violent profoundly abusive man. John Wayne worked as
Speaker 1: his first worked as his prop man on a movie
Speaker 1: called Mother McCree, and his primary job to was to
Speaker 1: wrangle geese. During one particularly difficult scene, Ford decided to
Speaker 1: break the tension by mocking his newest employee, Duke. He
Speaker 1: asked this new kid if it was true he'd played
Speaker 1: football at USC. Marian says yes, and then Ford asks
Speaker 1: him to show the crew his technique. So Marian crouches
Speaker 1: down into position and for kicks his hands out from
Speaker 1: under him, so he falls forward on his face. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's just like the ship that goes down on a
Speaker 1: John Ford set. And Marian just you know, toxic Hollywood
Speaker 1: very much so. And so you know, Marian, this is
Speaker 1: actually a very John Wayne moment, gets back in position
Speaker 1: and tells the director, why don't you try that again? Uh?
Speaker 1: And then when Ford tries it again, John Wayne kicks
Speaker 1: his austin the chest and knocks him down. Um. And
Speaker 1: this is apparently what starts their friendship. Now, oh, this
Speaker 1: may not be true, um. Jensen, his biographer, doubts this
Speaker 1: story is at least entirely true. For one thing, Ford
Speaker 1: and Wayne are the only people who ever told this
Speaker 1: story despite there being other folks on the set. Um,
Speaker 1: it's more likely that like Ford hit Wayne uh and
Speaker 1: maybe like you know, something happened there. But but this
Speaker 1: is just a little bit too perfectly masculine of a
Speaker 1: Hollywood story to be real. Um. I imagine him just
Speaker 1: like covered with like geese ship to trying to not
Speaker 1: fun wrangling. But they had to create it. If Ford
Speaker 1: is any good at creating stars, Yeah, you have to
Speaker 1: build this kind of myth of these of these guys
Speaker 1: and their relationship, whatever the truth is. Shortly after this point,
Speaker 1: John Ford, who's a pretty powerful director at this point,
Speaker 1: brings unknown prop boy Duke Morrison into his inner circle.
Speaker 1: Now he doesn't put him in pictures, we'll talk about
Speaker 1: that in a second, but he brings him in socially.
Speaker 1: And if the picture Jensen paints is accurate, this group
Speaker 1: that Duke starts hanging out with are quite quite a
Speaker 1: bunch of fellows. Quote. Duke insisted that he reveled in
Speaker 1: the masculine company affords drinking buddies. They formed a group
Speaker 1: called the Young Men's Purity, Total Abstinence and Yachting Association,
Speaker 1: whose goal was, in their words, the promuligation of the
Speaker 1: cause of alcoholism. They succeeded in their stated goal. Every
Speaker 1: member became a confirmed alcoholic of monumental proportions. The men
Speaker 1: often sailed on men's only cruises on Ford's yacht, the
Speaker 1: Rainer to mazat Land and stayed in the Belmar Hotel,
Speaker 1: a brothel. The owner had a pet python, and whenever
Speaker 1: someone passed out from drink, the python was placed on
Speaker 1: the supine drunkard's chest. Henry Fonda once passed out on
Speaker 1: the floor and awoke screaming in terror as he realized
Speaker 1: the snake at him in his clutches. So they're like
Speaker 1: sail into Mexico getting snake drunk, Like I like, I
Speaker 1: love this for them, Like everyone around them handed the
Speaker 1: ship it out of them. This is just must have
Speaker 1: been insufferable all the me too stories like these guys
Speaker 1: show up at the brothel and everyone's like shit, like yesh, shit,
Speaker 1: oh they're already drunk. They might not make it to sure.
Speaker 1: Fuck well, I mean that's I guess that's an easy
Speaker 1: job though, if they're already drunk and they're just kind
Speaker 1: of like you know, I mean, you know, what are
Speaker 1: you gonna do? Arrive? Limptic with a python. You're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: they'll pay me anyway. Their Hollywood stars. Yeah, you just
Speaker 1: tell them you did it when they wake back up
Speaker 1: and they'll feel yeah it was great. Wow you were incredible.
Speaker 1: Yeah you lasted forever. Oh my god. This is so
Speaker 1: Also it's like very and this is this is later
Speaker 1: but like it's very Kavanaugh. It's very like little Bretty
Speaker 1: Kavanaugh in his day. Yeah, this is like, this is
Speaker 1: what all of these guys want to be because you know,
Speaker 1: we're talking about the first era here. You know, with
Speaker 1: these we're rotting Alcoholics Club, they're on yachts, they're out acoholics,
Speaker 1: all of them become famous. You know, this is like
Speaker 1: the toxic masculine dream. And I hate all of these people, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all they're all not not nice people. Marino movie
Speaker 1: that I feel like Quentin Tarantino should have made in
Speaker 1: terms of needs to still be a movie. Um Marino. Harra,
Speaker 1: who was Ford's number one leading lady at this point.
Speaker 1: Very Famous Star, claims that John Ford probably adopted Duke
Speaker 1: because he was hot and Ford was super bisexual. Um.
Speaker 1: It is unclear if this was true. Also, the term
Speaker 1: bisexual gets used a lot by Jensen because his biography
Speaker 1: is pretty old and he's not up on his terms.
Speaker 1: Some people would just say that Ford was gay. It's
Speaker 1: really unclear what the truth is. Ford was married and
Speaker 1: he beat the ship out of his wife constantly and
Speaker 1: in public. Um, that doesn't necessarily mean one thing or
Speaker 1: the other about his sexuality. You can abuse your wife
Speaker 1: and be bisexual. But it's worth noting that he pretty
Speaker 1: much exclusively hung out with hot dudes. Um, who knows
Speaker 1: what's going on there. Probably a few things are going
Speaker 1: on there, you know. Now, this definitely has to be
Speaker 1: a movie, and like you know, of course anyone can
Speaker 1: beat there. No, obviously that doesn't say anything about sexuality,
Speaker 1: but the performativeness of hitting a woman in public, there's
Speaker 1: just a level of misogyny, which like, who is this
Speaker 1: for for? For the idea of how abusive Ford is.
Speaker 1: Men in the twenties are like that dude hits women
Speaker 1: a lot. That dude hits women a lot, and like
Speaker 1: it is the twenties, you know, Um, it would not
Speaker 1: be accurate to call John Ford a good friend to
Speaker 1: to marry in the duke in this period. Jensen argues
Speaker 1: that he quote continuously held duke back for years. Rather
Speaker 1: than casting him in any of his many films, He
Speaker 1: let Wayne struggle on as an extra and prop boy
Speaker 1: for almost a decade, and it's alleged that he also
Speaker 1: slandered marry into other directors when they considered casting him.
Speaker 1: Interest so super controlling, very controlling, very much like I
Speaker 1: want you around me, but I don't want to let
Speaker 1: you get successful enough that you can leave me, you know, right,
Speaker 1: good stuff, cool dude. So, after years of struggle, uh,
Speaker 1: Marian Duke Morrison gets cast as a major character in
Speaker 1: his first movie for the first time. Now. This is
Speaker 1: called Words in Music in nineteen thirty nine. It's a
Speaker 1: campus musical. It is not a good movie. Fox buries
Speaker 1: it with a one day opening run in New York alone.
Speaker 1: Very wisely, Uh. He goes by Marian, goes by his
Speaker 1: nickname Duke in Hollywood, like his his screen name is
Speaker 1: Duke Morrison rather than Marian Um. Certainly a good call.
Speaker 1: The film makes no impact, but afterwards he gets another
Speaker 1: prop job on another forward film, Born Reckless, and this
Speaker 1: is where he comes under the eye of Rool Walsh,
Speaker 1: who was in the process of casting for a western.
Speaker 1: He had a clear idea of the kind of cowboy
Speaker 1: actor he wanted. Quote a true replica of the pioneer type,
Speaker 1: somewhat diffident with women, being unused to them, but a
Speaker 1: bear cat among the men of the planes. So this
Speaker 1: is like it's important for him to be big and tough,
Speaker 1: but also awkward around women. Like that's what you want
Speaker 1: in a male, Yeah, you don't want The masculine ideal
Speaker 1: at this point is not a guy who's a player.
Speaker 1: It's a guy who's like attractive to women but kind
Speaker 1: of uncomfortable around them because he spend so much time
Speaker 1: in the woods, you know, doing manly stuff right, impenetrable, yes, um,
Speaker 1: and a little bit you know that, a little bit unavailable,
Speaker 1: you know, because that's hot. Uh. So, oddly enough, this
Speaker 1: fits Mary into a t He's a big guy, he's
Speaker 1: clearly physically competent. He can at least portray the image
Speaker 1: of hard one life experience, but he is awkward around women. Uh.
Speaker 1: John Wayne would claim later that he never chased women.
Speaker 1: This is a lie, but biographer Scott I am A
Speaker 1: notes that his friends agree. Quote pushy Dame's really scared him, um,
Speaker 1: which I think means like women who knew what they wanted. Yes,
Speaker 1: he tends to go for inexperienced women. This is gonna
Speaker 1: eventually lead to him marrying a teenager, so heads up
Speaker 1: to where things are headed. But you know who won't
Speaker 1: well pity women slash women my age? Yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't wanna. You don't wanna marry people who can stand
Speaker 1: up for themselves because they're as old as you and
Speaker 1: have an understanding of what it means to an adult. Um.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't want to get in on this. So all right,
Speaker 1: you know that's probably a good point to end in
Speaker 1: part one. We got a couple more to go. Francesco,
Speaker 1: what do you what do you? What do you? What
Speaker 1: do you got to plug here? Ah? Um? Yeah, everybody
Speaker 1: check out the Bituation Room podcast um on where we
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Speaker 1: to a podcast that can always read your book, Robert, Oh, no,
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Speaker 1: they can watch reruns of Frasier. Everything else is illegal.
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