by Donald Shepherd and Robert Slatzer with Dave Grayson
Grayson was the Duke's makeup man. Slatzer is a producer who wrote a biography of Marilyn Monroe and collaborated with Shepherd on a book about Bing Crosby. In this book's opening scene, "An Evening With the Duke," the aging actor drinks his future biographers under the table. They admired him for that, among other things. Duke had a football scholarship to USC and worked on movie sets while in school. Director Raoul Walsh saw him moving a prop and thought he looked right for a role as a wagon train scout in a big Western. Wayne then spent years grinding out B Westerns and serials, developing a kind of love-hate relationship with director John Ford, who gave Duke his second break as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach. The authors make no apologies for their subject, who comes off as driven, petulant, sourly dutiful on occasion and a sensualist: "He wasn't quite as discreet about his drinking as he was about his sexual liaisons," they explain. His personal morality was at odds with his onscreen image, and there is a wealth of gossip about actresses and his three stormy marriages. Duke, at the time the father of four, did not fight in World War II, and it is suggested that this is because he was afraid his absence from the screen would destroy his career. He was obsessive about his work and never believed he had enough money. When he was dying painfully of cancer, his son Patrick and his secretary each refused to bring him a gun in the hospital after he said, "I want to blow my brains out." At the end, it was reported that he had converted to Catholicism; friends were puzzled, since he had not been religious and blamed priests for ruining his first marriage. He also spoke of having his ashes strewn at sea, but instead he lies buried in an unmarked grave in a Newport Beach, Calif, cemetery. (Doubleday, $16.95)
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