What’s in a Name: On Duke, Marion, and John
He carried three names over the course of his life, and each one tells a different part of the story.
Marion
He was born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, in 1907, the son of a pharmacist. Later in life the middle name was formally changed to Mitchell, and Marion Mitchell Morrison is the name that appears on his death certificate. It was never a name he was fond of. By his own account, he was glad to be rid of it once Hollywood gave him something else to go by. Mostly it was his mother who kept using it.
Duke
The name that actually stuck came from a dog. When the Morrison family moved to Glendale, California, around 1916, they brought along an Airedale terrier named Duke. The dog walked young Marion to school every morning, past the local firehouse, and the firemen there started calling the boy “Little Duke” after his constant companion. The nickname outlasted the dog by decades. It was the name his friends used, the name that followed him into his early working life at Fox Film Corporation, and the name he was actually credited under on screen in his earliest film work. In the 1929 musical Words and Music, he appeared in the cast list as Duke Morrison, playing a small role called Pete Donahue. Some filmographies list a second early credit under the same name, in Cheer Up and Smile (1930), around the same period he was still working as a prop man between bit parts. Duke Morrison was, briefly, an actual screen name, not just a private nickname.
John
That changed in 1930, when director Raoul Walsh cast him in the lead role of The Big Trail. The studio did not think either “Marion Morrison” or “Duke Morrison” would work for a leading man. Walsh first proposed “Anthony Wayne,” after the Revolutionary War general “Mad” Anthony Wayne, but studio chief Winfield Sheehan rejected it as sounding too foreign. Walsh then suggested pairing “Wayne” with “John,” reportedly because the two names had a good rhythm together. Sheehan agreed. Morrison was not in the room for the discussion and had no say in the outcome. He learned about his new name the way the rest of the world would: as a decision already made.
Who’s on first; What’s on second
Marion was the name he was first handed and didn’t want. John Wayne was something else again: a piece of cinematic masculinity, built broad and abstract on purpose, all steadiness and flatness, a silhouette designed to read the same way from the back row of any theater in the country. It was a costume, and probably a fairly fun one to wear, given how far it stood from anything real. Duke Morrison was the actual man underneath it, the one who read seriously, who danced well enough that Katharine Hepburn noticed his footwork, who told other men on set to be graceful rather than stiff. That is authentic masculinity, not the performance but the person who had the range to perform it and still come home from it. Playing John Wayne may have been the best thing that ever happened to Duke Morrison, not because the character was who he was, but because it wasn’t.
The cartoonish version of manhood, a paper doll cut out, could never exist in the real world. Real life contains all different types and quality of men. It is the expression of the real that gives the many variations of masculinity a place to be.
