" . . . he wasn't a rich man," Marion Mitchell Morrison (a.k.a., "John Wayne") laments to Warner Bros. Presents host Gig Young in the first of two appearances on this show to promote his flick co-starring Lauren Bacall (who is shown in clips from the movie here), BLOOD ALLEY. Wayne discloses that at one time his dad was in business driving a horse-drawn ice cream wagon. He further reveals that the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., was his boyhood idol, but his own first job on a Hollywood movie set was less glamorous than most of Doug's Tinseltown experiences. The director "Jack Ford" had hired Wayne to toss leaves from the "flies" onto the actors in a film scene set in the Bavarian Autumn, but the future Duke screwed up and was promptly chewed out by his eventual director in DONOVAN'S REEF. Wayne also discloses that Hollywood had once tried to cast him as a singing cowboy (but that also got squelched, since he did not have many musical bones in his body; even his "Whistling Dan" character in THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY had to have his tunes "looped in" by an off-screen lip-purser).
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