John Wayne

by Aissa Wayne

  I should have told him anyway, because many years later I still pay for my silence. At thirty-five, I still wake up many mornings feeling alarmed and frightened, the residue of being jarred awake throughout my childhood.

  I suppose it was all part of living with a man so zealous and forceful. No matter what his mood, my father overwhelmed me. His presence was so electric, our cavernous estate felt so much fuller and safer when he was at home, that when my father left I could not forget he was gone. My earliest and most exact memory of separation comes from when I was three years old. Knowing he was leaving, again, I wouldn’t stop whining and crying to my mom. “Mom, Daddy is really going. Daddy is really going.”

  My mother slapped my face. “Aissa,” she said, “don’t be ridiculous. Why do you keep going on and on? He’s just leaving for a little while.”

  A kind of shock came over me, and the moment her hand struck my cheek I shut off my emotions. After that when my father left, I kept my longing inside.

  My mother must have felt guilty and told him what happened. Because before he left for location, my dad did something new. He sat on my bed his final evening at home, dabbing away the dampness beneath my eyes. “Every night I’m gone, honey,” he said, “I want you to look at the stars. Wherever I am, I’ll look at them, too. And no matter how far apart we are, we’ll know we’ve looked at the same stars.”

  And so I did, that and each endless night thereafter, until my father returned. I went to my window and looked at the stars, brilliant in the blackness all around, and yearned for an arm so long I could touch the lights with my finger.

  4

  Too young to know it then, I realize now that my mother was under tremendous pressure during the time when she slapped me. At the end of the 1950s, the life of Mrs. John Wayne was far from picture perfect. Like me, my mother relied on him, felt secure when he was near, and could come undone when work stole him away. She also had an additional cross to bear. My Peruvian mother was still in cultural passage, adjusting to the racing pulse and swollen narcissism of Hollywood. Some of this was heady. Much of it left her displaced and insecure. Eventually, her glittering new life-style nearly cost my mother her life.

  By the time we moved to Newport Beach in 1965, my father rarely attended Hollywood parties. He still saw his old Hollywood friends—Claire Trevor, Maureen O’Hara, Dean Martin, John Ford, Henry Hathaway—but always in relaxed surroundings. When he did have to attend showy Hollywood functions, he often came home chafing, “Every one you go to, you see the same damn people, saying the same damn things. All that changes is the women’s dresses.” The older he became, the more my father hated flashiness. He even hounded my mother not to wear makeup. “I can’t stand women who wear all that crap on their face,” he would say. “A woman looks best in a pair of jeans, a white blouse, with her hair down. Pilar, why don’t you go without makeup today? You know how much I love you without makeup.”

  Our Encino days were much different. Then, my father still went to quite a few Hollywood soirees, and even threw some himself. He primarily did it to please and impress his new wife. Looking back, their lack of communication was unmistakable—my mother often felt uneasy at these parties, too. This was the moral, I suppose, of not just my parents’ marriage, but of our life as a family. Rather than having real communication, we all tried pleasing one another by pretending—and frequently wound up doing all the wrong things.

  At a party one night in Encino when I was still an infant, finally my mother did not hide her emotions. Instead she blew up, and threw Robert Mitchum out of our home. It was the first night they met, but as my dad explained it all to me later, my mom resented Mitchum even before that.

  According to my dad, in the early ’50s he’d launched a production company, wanting more control of his own films and increased overall clout within the industry. By 1954 his company was called Batjac, and its debut film was Blood Alley. Eager for Batjac to charge out of the gate, my father signed three impressive talents: Lauren Bacall and Robert Mitchum to play the leads, and director William Wellman (The High and the Mighty), whom James Mason once characterized as a “tough little bastard.” The third day of shooting, Wellman called my dad in a snit. He said Mitchum was drinking all night, sleeping through morning wakeup calls, making location life miserable for cast and crew. As producer, my father urged conciliation, but one day Mitchum stormed off the set and said he could not work for Wellman. Wellman insisted my father move into the starring role. Although my dad had once passed on the script, feeling the role needed Mitchum’s devil-may-care, he finally relented and took over the part.

  Later, my dad discovered that William Wellman drove Robert Mitchum to quit (though not necessarily to drink). The TV show This Is Your Life had once profiled Wellman. When the show’s producers asked the acclaimed director for a list of people to interview, Wellman included Mitchum, whose stalled career Wellman had boosted in 1946 by casting Mitchum as the lead in The Story of GI Joe. Mitchum told the producers, no, he didn’t have time to talk about William Wellman. When Wellman found out, he was livid. When the two men worked on Blood Alley, he took his revenge by badgering Mitchum around the clock.

  At the time, my mother knew none of this back history either. All she saw was her husband packing for yet another location, for one more separation—and all because of Robert Mitchum. After Blood Alley came out, I imagine it was my dad and not my mom who invited Robert and Dorothy Mitchum to my parents’ formal party. Dressed in a low-cut gown, my mother greeted Robert Mitchum without any rancor. He and his wife were guests in her home, and my mother intended to treat them with kindness. Unfortunately she was not paid back in kind.

  “Boy,” Robert Mitchum said, peering down my mother’s dress, “do you need a new bra.”

  The bra was new; Mitchum had probably already started drinking. Nevertheless, my insulted mother demanded he leave that instant. The Mitchums walked out before my father had even said hello. When my mother told him why the Mitchums had gone, my father was careful not to crack the thinnest smile. As I’ve been told by old friends of my family, even John Wayne was wary of his new wife’s toughness. It was also one of the reasons my father adored her.

  Her fiestiness was so endearing, my dad may have overlooked my mother’s fragility. Over the years I think we all did. In the way that husbands and children become too self-absorbed, we were blind to the anxieties my mother must have felt as a woman, a mother, a superstar’s wife. My mother was strong, not unbreakable.

  The facade she maintained began splintering in 1959. With very little formal education, she secretly felt inadequate around my father’s gaggle of famous friends. In Peru she had never even considered meeting Hollywood glitterati; now, in her halting English, she was expected to trade witty American banter. Within her own family, my mother was torn between marriage and motherhood, between following around her globe-trotting husband and rushing back to Encino to be with me. The stresses took their toll. With fraying nerves, wilting self-esteem, and insomnia, my mother looked up a Beverly Hills physician noted among insiders for treating Hollywood wives. The man prescribed Seconals. That evening my mother slept peacefully. Within months, she was taking pills every day. To sleep. To combat depression. Before Hollywood parties. She took them then in lieu of liquor, to try and loosen up, to mask her insecurities, in the face of her husband’s hard-drinking fast-track crowd.

  My mother later told me what her drug addiction was like, the nightmare she went through. Even after the pills had grabbed her by the throat, she never believed she’d become addicted, never thought it could happen to her, until the day her barbiturates ran out. On location with my dad in Louisiana, she experienced the terror of drug withdrawal. Her mouth went dry. She could not take a good breath. Her heart tried exploding out of her chest. She panicked. She hallucinated. She tried slashing her wrists.

  Something inside her forced her to stop, and we did not lose my mother. After my father hired a private plane and sent her home with two nurses, sh
e woke up in a California hospital, remembering little of it. “Your father did the only thing he could,” my mother told me years later. “Thank God he put me in a hospital where I could get some help. Because I did not know what was happening to me.”

  I was three years old at the time of the crisis, much too little to comprehend what was going on. For many years, neither my mother nor father spoke of it. Then, when I turned thirteen, my mother sat me down and told me the story, and neither of us tried choking back our tears. It was all so sad and desperate, so radically unlike the image I’d crafted of my mom. That image was strictly of a mother. I never saw her beyond that role, with a life separate from her husband and children’s. I never saw her as a woman, with a unique place in the world, and a unique set of troubles.

  At the time of the telling, I didn’t ask too many questions. Of course I went on loving her, and my respect for my mother grew. I knew it could have been her secret, stashed in a cranny of her past. My father’s PR people hushed it up, the press never found out, so there was never any danger of my reading it, or hearing it regurgitated at school. Even if my dad had been the type of man to discuss such things with his children—human frailty, human emotion—I doubt he would have told me about my mother’s near-suicide. Knowing my father, he’d have rightly felt that decision belonged to her.

  Why did my mother tell me? After asking myself that question and finding no answers, one day I put it to her. I was her daughter, she simply said. She felt I had a right to know.

  5

  Belying his black-and-white public image, in real life my dad was a warm shade of gray.

  As a child he had once felt spurned by his mother. As a Hollywood star many years later, I believe he still craved love and acceptance. Unlike a Marlon Brando or Warren Beatty, John Wayne aimed to please, not to be mysterious. He gave the fans, the press, America, precisely what he knew they wanted: the Duke, a man of action and not ideas.

  In fact, my father was a physical creature. But contrary to his simplified image—the taciturn, uneducated Westerner living on a ranch with all his horses—he also cherished art, his collection ranging from Renoir to Remington, the distinguished Western artist; greatly preferred the sea to the plains; had little affection for horses, viewing them as little more than tools of his trade; played chess compulsively; wrote and rewrote many of his own speeches; read four newspapers a day when in between movies; and read thousands of books during his lifetime.

  For pure escape, my father favored mysteries: Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, and Raymond Chandler. He was also a fan of Hemingway, more as a novelist than as a man. My dad once told a close friend he considered Hemingway self-important and ostentatious. To my knowledge my father and Hemingway never met, but I do know they had at least one indirect encounter. In 1957, when Hollywood adapted The Sun Also Rises, a script was first sent to my father. Would he consider playing Jake Barnes, the American expatriate whose genitals had been shot off during the war? Amused, my father said, “I respect Hemingway’s work, and I’m honored they want me. But do they really think I could play this part? Even if I wanted to, no one would let me.”

  Other than Hemingway, mysteries, and novels he thought might translate well to the screen, he stuck mostly to nonfiction: political histories, military biographies, anything at all by Winston Churchill, the public figure my father most revered. In an interview with Playboy in 1971, when his questioner asked him who he would most like to spend time with, my father replied, “That’s easy: Winston Churchill. He’s the most terrific fella of our century. He took a nearly beaten nation and kept their dignity for them. Churchill was unparalleled.”

  When my father spoke to me of his Hollywood peers, he also had more good words than bad. Though he never regarded them as his models or idols, he had heartfelt respect for Jimmy Stewart, Richard Burton, Spencer Tracy, and George C. Scott, whose work in Patton my dad singled out as a tour de force. He also praised the restrained and honest acting of Gary Cooper, and yet he never liked Cooper’s High Noon, still widely hailed as a Western classic. My father didn’t criticize Cooper’s performance, but the movie’s central premise. In an entire American town, only one man has the nerve to confront the bully. Any American town, my father said, would have more than one brave soul. Finding the scenario implausible, he said it undermined the whole movie.

  Although he did not appear on TV until late in his life, I never heard him disparage it, or imply that its actors were any less skilled than those working in feature films. He was especially fond of Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy, Hal Linden in Barney Miller, and Jackie Gleason, both in the Honeymooners and The Jackie Gleason Show. Saturday nights in the late 1960s, at the end of each Jackie Gleason show, when Gleason came out and drank his coffee and smoked his cigarette, my dad always said it was the only time he really missed smoking.

  When it came to his contemporaries in film, I only heard him speak once with any real venom. Gene Hackman could never appear on-screen without my father skewering his performance. I wish I could tell you why he so harshly criticized Hackman, but he never went into detail. Although it’s pure speculation, had my father lived to see more of his work, I think his view of Mr. Hackman would have changed. Back then, however, my father called Hackman “the worst actor in town. He’s awful.”

  He was also harsh toward the fabled star of Gone With the Wind. Clark Gable, he told me, is “extremely handsome in person. That’s one guy that doesn’t need Hollywood to make him look good. But Gable’s an idiot. You know why Gable’s an actor? It’s the only thing he’s smart enough to do.” My dad called Gable handsome but dumb at least four or five times, and now I wonder if it had something to do with my father’s friend, John Ford. During the filming of Mogambo, Ford and Gable had clashed again and again and the subsequent feud had simmered for years. In my father’s way of thinking, disloyalty to allies, support in any fashion for their enemies, was expressly forbidden. If Clark Gable took on John Ford, my father’s code demanded that John Wayne stand by his old pal.

  Perhaps my father’s comment—Gable acts because it’s the only thing he’s smart enough to do—also pointed to his own ambivalent feelings toward actors and acting. While he always said he “loved the goddamn business,” he thought of himself as more of a star than an actor. “How many times do I gotta tell you,” he frequently told the press in one of his most famous quotes, “I don’t act at all, I react.” My father explained, “In a bad picture, you see them acting all over the place. In a good picture, they react in a logical way to a situation they’re in, so the audience can identify with them.” He also said, “All I do is sell sincerity, and I’ve been selling the hell out of that since I started. . . . I was never one of the little theatre boys. That arty crowd has only surface brilliance anyway. Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity—and I don’t mean simple—it’ll be good and the public will know it.”

  As Katharine Hepburn once said of him, my father had an “extraordinary gift. An unself-consciousness in front of the camera, a unique naturalness, developed by movie actors who just happened to become actors.” Ms. Hepburn was right. My dad had dreamed of becoming a lawyer, and even after he stumbled into acting, he always eschewed Hollywood terms like “my craft,” or “my motivation.” Like two of his mentors, John Ford and Howard Hawks, he considered filmmaking a job, and not an art form.

  My father enjoyed the money, awards, and acclaim. But working hard, simply working hard, also brought him real satisfaction. When it came to working longer and more strenuously than anyone else on a film set, he needed no director’s prodding. I think it had more to do with his physical constitution than with his ego. The same life force that brought him bursting into my bedroom every morning at seven A.M. enabled him to perform at peak efficiency when exhausted actors half his age were entering scenes on wobbling legs. My father made more than 200 movies, spanning five decades. To survive that long in Hollywood, an industry that has always devoured its own, perhaps most of all a person mus
t keep going. With all that adrenaline surging through him, I’m not sure my father had any choice.

  As for his mixed feelings about his profession, he always said he felt honored whenever he received a script, and he said it ingenuously. I know that he loved the medium, loved movie making. But on some emotional level, I think he felt embarrassed to be an actor. George Bernard Shaw once said, “An actress is something more than a woman. An actor is something less than a man.” While my father would never evaluate such a notion with me, I’m quite sure he knew the quote. And while he never castigated actresses, and respected specific male actors, male actors as a group were open season. Most Hollywood actors lacked depth, my father told me. He called them decadent, weak-willed, effeminate. Or as he said, “faggy.” Being an actor himself, especially after bearing the childhood stigma of having a feminine name, could be one reason why he always seemed so hellbent on displaying his machismo. That, and his days as a singing cowboy.

  In truth, my father could not sing at all, nor play the guitar. So while Hollywood dubbed it—two men would stand off-camera, one singing, one strumming—my father faked it. For a short series of 1930s B Westerns, he was reluctantly billed as a crooning cowpoke named Singin’ Sandy. In those days, my father said, Hollywood cowboys were “pretty,” with their snow-white Stetsons, their uncreased faces, their tender, mellifluous voices. One of his favorite stories revolved around one of his earliest casting calls. While he and another cowboy actor read lines at an audition, the manicured-looking man said, “What do you expect? I’ve been working all day out in the field.” Stepping out of character, my father turned to the producer and director. “I’m supposed to react to that line?” he said. “Look at his hands. Those are field hands? They’ve never worked a day in his life.” When the Hollywood big shots roared, my dad won the part and shortly after became Singin’ Sandy.