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Six-Foot-Three or Over. It was tough, one-eyed Director Raoul Walsh who gave Duke his first real part. Walsh was casting a western called The Big Trail, and he couldn't find the lead he wanted. "They'd been sending a raft of New York stage actors out to the Coast because sound had just come in," he explains, "but none of them was right. Then I took one look at this guy walking across the set with a broom, and I got him on a horse right away." Fortunately, Duke had learned to ride when he was a kid. Walsh was ecstatic. "Dammit," he says in the pure argot of the Hollywood artist, "the son of a bitch looked like a man. To be a cowboy star, you gotta be 6 ft. 3 or over; you gotta have no hips and a face that looks right under a sombrero." The new actor, rechristened John Wayne by Walsh, put aside his broom and the $35 weekly that went with it.
The Big Trail, expensively filmed as an experiment on 44-mm. "grandeur" film (wider than ordinary film), was a monumental flop. Caught between a national depression and still unpaid bills for expensive new sound equipment, few theater managers in the early '30s were inclined to buy still more new equipment to show the wide film. Nonetheless, John Wayne was launched as an actor. His starting pay was $75 a week.
For close to a decade after that, Wayne appeared in one quickie western after another. He was usually on horseback—and most of the horses were white and named Duke. "Everything bad that can happen to you in pictures happens in those," says Wayne. Sometimes he was working in as many as seven pictures at once. Everybody pitched in to do whatever chore needed doing: hustling props, handling stock, playing one part with face to the camera and another with back turned. Wayne loved these rough & tumble makeshifts. His contentment was not even spoiled by a dismal period when he became "Singing Sandy," the movies' first crooning cowboy (another voice was dubbed in on the sound track to replace Wayne's toneless groans). "They don't have the best actors in the world in horse operas," says Wayne, "but they're mostly damn fine men, rough and tough, and they teach you a lot."
Most of Duke's closest friends today—e.g., Ward Bond (6 ft. 3 in.) and Grant Withers (6 ft. 4 in.)—are the big, rough pals of this period (John Ford is a comparative midget—6 ft. 1 in.). Yakima Canutt, a top rodeo hand turned movie stuntman, served Wayne as a model for his rolling walk and drawling cowboy accent. Yak also taught Duke such useful tricks as the right, relaxed way to fall off a horse in the midst of a stampede.
In 1939, when Producer Walter Wanger happened on the set of Stagecoach and saw his new star climbing to the top of a careening coach to fire at pursuing Indians, he screamed: "Get that guy off there before he kills himself!" "Hell," grins Wayne, "he didn't know I'd been doin' stunts like that for years, just to eat."