John Wayne

by Aissa Wayne

  They were! While I held my head regal and still, the pretty lady helped me on with a diamond necklace, diamond bracelet, diamond earrings, diamond broach, and a diamond tiara for my honey-colored hair. I could not believe my own reflection, and was eager to show off for my dad. When I resurfaced for the shooting, he looked as if his breath had been knocked out. He was thunderstruck, I suppose, by this new view of his little girl.

  Late that February the magazine hit the newsstands. My, how times and magazines change. It was not until 1965 that Helen Gurley Brown took over Cosmo and turned it upside down; now, its cover had nary a blurb about affairs with married men or the latest sexual trends. No sultry, pneumatic Cosmo Girl, as captured by Scavullo, graced the cover photography. Instead, on the the March 1961 issue of Cosmopolitan, the cover lines read: Winston Churchill. Hemingway. J. D. Salinger. Pearl S. Buck. Peeking out from beneath those intoxicating names was my smiling face. “John Wayne’s daughter, Aissa, wearing $850,000 in Cartier diamonds,” read the caption. When my mother showed it to me, it was my turn to feel breathless.

  Liking it too, my dad framed the cover and displayed it on his trophy room wall, where one day he’d place his coveted Oscar. He kept stopping at my cover, but he wasn’t looking at the jewels. “Your smile is brighter than any diamond, Aissa,” my father said. Now I have the cover on my wall, and I must admit the smile I wore that long ago day was appealing. Despite all my glamorous accessories, I wore the sweetly ingenuous smile of a child who believes her unblemished world will never change.

  When 1961 rolled in, my father starred in The Comancheros for Twentieth Century Fox. Though its cast was substantial—my father, Lee Marvin, Stuart Whitman, the young Ina Belin—the film was memorable only for what it portended. The Comancheros marked the first time in my father’s career that the script didn’t feature a love interest for his character. He was turning fifty-five; it was Stuart Whitman, twenty years younger, who romanced Ina Balin. This foreshadowed the toning down of my father’s sexual image on-screen, and led to a critical shift in his life and career.

  By the time The Comancheros was released, several Hollywood titans had recently passed away. Humphrey Bogart died in 1957, followed by Tyrone Power (1958), Errol Flynn (1959), Clark Gable (1960), and Gary Cooper (1961). Jimmy Cagney had already retired, and Cary Grant would quit in 1962. Of the celestial male stars who launched their careers in the ’30s and found stardom in the ’40s, only three were making movies at the close of the ’60s: Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and my father.

  In his own fifties and sixties, ages at which most leading men have either quit or been not-so-gently phased into minor roles, my father’s impact mushroomed. Except for well-paying cameos, he was still the star of all his movies. He still played archetypal American heroes: stubbornly self-reliant, fiercely individualistic, laconic-until-riled loners. But my father portrayed them less and less as romantic leads. Instead he played widowers, brothers, fathers, and grandfathers. He played patriarchal leaders of green but promising soldiers and cowboys. During this cinematic transformation, offscreen my dad waged losing fights with protruding paunch and thinning hair; his face turned craggy and lined; his nose grew more bulbous; and as often befalls heavy smokers, his piercing blue eyes became more lidded by excess skin.

  And most Americans only revered him more. In a world going slick and sensationalistic, my father offered them something as priceless as it was powerful—reassurance. As my father aged, he came to stand for maturity, commitment, normalcy, substance, and the way things used to be. For millions of Americans, as Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, John Wayne became “The almost perfect father figure.”

  His family saw him in a different light. My father was real to me, not a symbol, and I still have the psychic bruises to prove he was not a perfect father.

  And yet when I was still five years old, I too looked at my father with stars in my eyes. With the certainty of innocence, I believed what we had between us would never change. My father would never bully me, and I would never feel hateful. We would never lie to each other, never feel disappointment in one another, never punish the other with acts of evasion or meanness. As father and daughter, we would never sample the sweets and sours of love. Our love would only be sweet.

  Aissa in her father’s embrace (1961)

  Aissa was a show-biz baby, the true Hollywood princess, fawned over and adored by loving parents (1956)

  Aissa at one year (1957)

  Aissa at six months (1956)

  Aissa at age two (1958)

  On her second birthday with her father (1958)

  Aissa with her mother, Pilar, at home in Encino (1958)

  With Pilar and a new bike, Christmas 1958

  John Wayne rose every morning before five-thirty, wired by energy and caffeine – he found satisfaction in a long, hard day’s work (1960)

  John (clutching a cocktail) with Aissa on the grounds of their five and a half-acre estate in Encino (1961)

  John, Aissa, and Pilar in 1959. He loved being surrounded by loved ones.

  Aissa’s seventh birthday (1963)

  Aissa was rarely allowed to play outside with other children out of fear of kidnapping. Her birthday parties were the exception to this rule (1963)

  Flocks of multicolored balloons, merry-go-rounds, airplane rides, and live animals were birthday highlights (1963)

  John Wayne staged this photo of Aissa (with cigarette) and Pilarsita (daughter of the Waynes’ housekeeper) playing chess – John’s favorite pastime (1963)

  As a child, Aissa felt a constant need to be near her father (1963)

  “John Wayne’s daughter, Aissa, and $850,000 in Cartier Diamonds,” Cosmopolitan, March 1961. Aissa was four years old

  John Wayne’s maternal grandfather, Robert Emmet Brown

  John Wayne’s maternal grandmother, Margaret Brown

  John Wayne attended USC on a football scholarship. After injuring his shoulder, he left college at age twenty (1925)

  He went on to become box office gold (1949)

  The Sands of Iwo Jima, 1949

  Rio Grande, 1950

  The Green Berets, 1967

  John Wayne with his first wife, Josephine Saenz; they married in 1933

  Their four children – from left to right – Toni, Patrick, Melinda, and Michael (1951)

  John with wife number two, Esperanza Bauer (Chata) in 1951

  John married Pilar Palette (Aissa’s mother) in 1954 in Hawaii

  John and Pilar. She was a petite 5′3″, 100 lbs, while he was a burly 6′4″, 230 lbs (1955)

  Aissa and brother Ethan. She was six when he was born and quickly appointed herself his protector (1963)

  Ethan, Pilar, and Aissa (1963)

  John and Marissa, his third child from his marriage with Pilar (1968)

  It was a lovely myth but it couldn’t endure. Unlike my father’s movies, no one scripts real life, or real families, and little about them can be predicted. And so, one day on the Hollywood set of The Comancheros, my life with my dad began undergoing drastic change.

  Another child might have more readily shrugged it off. But until that indelible morning, my father had never shouted at me. He’d never shaken me. The one time he’d nearly spanked me, he was not able to go through with it. I’d spoken disrespectfully back to my mother, my father had unexpectedly entered the room, and he told me to sit outside and contemplate my spanking, because he would be back in two minutes. Sitting on the edge of our cushioned patio chair, I was curiously uncowed. I’d been slapped a few times by my mother, spanked by Angela, our Peruvian maid, and yet I did not believe for an instant my father would hit me—not his little princess. It wasn’t until he stepped back outside gripping a leather belt that my eyes filled with tears. When he turned me over his lap, my father raised his belt . . . but I was met with only silence. He suddenly helped me back to my feet, and I saw that my father was settling for a lecture.

  Because of our past, I was unprepared for what came that day on
the set of The Comancheros. Fittingly, for a child of Hollywood, it happened in front of strangers.

  As he had in The Alamo, my dad had cast me again in one of his pictures. In what was not exactly a stretch for either one of us, he played Jake Cutter, a cantankerous but softhearted Texas Ranger, and I portrayed his adoring grandchild. I don’t recall my lines—the scene ended up cut—but I was supposed to deliver them only after I’d fingered my father’s neckerchief. As he held me in his arms on his front porch, I ruined the take, forgetting about his neckerchief. Veins in his neck bulging like cords, my father gripped me, and shook me by my shoulders. “You’re supposed to play with my tie!” he screamed. “You’re supposed to play with my tie!”

  My father stared straight at me, but did not seem to be seeing me. Always so focused, his glazed eyes made me frightened, and I felt my body stiffen inside his tensed hands. The kleig lights burned hot as acid churned in my stomach. I could feel the gazes of strangers, cast and crew I barely knew, and I felt deeply self-conscious. I didn’t cry, my father released his grip, and somehow I finished the scene correctly. But my father’s apologies couldn’t slow down my system, or soothe my humiliation. The rest of that day when he came around, telling small jokes and lifting me in the air, I was furtive. Trying to smile and look normal, I did not understand what had happened. But intuitively I knew it meant trouble.

  In 1961 my father’s life was also changing, in intractable ways I was far too young to understand. It was not just the financial stress from The Alamo. In the course of two jarring and melancholic years, several of his oldest friends had died.

  Grant Withers, a journeyman character actor, went first at the age of fifty-five. They’d been friends for thirty years, since the days when they’d broken in at Fox, then partied together on John Ford’s yacht, the Araner. Part of Ford’s band of colorful character actors, Grant Withers could always find work but could rarely restrain his behavior offscreen. Including one to Loretta Young, he had five failed marriages, largely due to his drinking. After many attempts at reform and rehabilitation—some of them aided by loans from John Ford and my father—Grant Withers ingested a bottle of tranquilizers and a quart of vodka. His suicide note asked his friends to, “forgive me for letting you down. It’s better this way.” My mother says my father could not stop shaking when he read these words.

  When Ward Bond died next in the winter of 1960, my dad took it much harder. The man I once called “Daddy” was also fifty-five, only two years older than my father, when he suffered a massive heart attack in a Dallas hotel room. His whole life, my father said he had never found a closer friend.

  Having met playing football at USC, they didn’t become buddies until 1928 when they both worked on John Ford’s Salute. Ford had asked my father to help him cast the movie with football players he knew at USC. My dad didn’t ask Bond, considering him a loudmouth, but Bond showed up anyway as the cast was boarding a train to leave for location. Seeing his former teammate, my father called Bond “too ugly for making movies.” Bond replied, “Screw you.” Ford ordered them both to shut up and get on the train. From this telling moment sprung a three-way friendship only halted by death. My father was drawn to strong, spirited men, unintimidated by life or by John Wayne.

  For thirty years, while Bond and my father called John Ford “Pappy” or “Coach,” the three men made movies, drank Irish whiskey, played cutthroat bridge, and cheated for pennies at poker. There was plenty of ragging and needling, and all three men were notorious practical jokers. Ford and my father often ganged up on Bond, whose pronounced rear end became their running foil. Once Ford and my dad had their picture taken while standing on either side of a horse’s large rump. Bond soon received the snapshot with his pals’ inscription: “Thinking of you.”

  Ward Bond was a hulking physical man, like my father, but when together they were frequently childish. Around Ward Bond, my dad could find release from the pressures of stardom. According to family legend, one boozy night at John Ford’s house Bond and my dad were spending the evening when Bond passed out in the bed assigned to my father. Wanting Bond to wake up so the party could continue, my dad poured vodka on his sleeping friend’s chest. Igniting it, he then set Ward Bond’s chest on fire.

  The three men shared more than youthfully wild times. Their affection ran deep and was powerful. For several weeks after Ward Bond left them, my mom says his two friends’ grief was unrelievable. The day of his funeral, Bond’s body was placed in a flag-draped casket; my father, his resonant voice cracking, spoke the eulogy: “We were the closest of friends, from school days right on through. This is just the way Ward would have wanted it—to look out on the faces of good friends. He was a wonderful, generous, big-hearted man.”

  By the end of 1961, death was more than a dismal abstract for my father. It had stolen his friends and darkened his world.

  With reflection, I know now that the early ’60s were a watershed in my father’s personal life and in my own life with him. For it was around this time, and increasingly over the next several years as sickness ravaged his patience, that it became harder and harder to salve his insecurities, avoid his temper, and sate his urgent need for his family’s attention and love.

  It was also the time that I began fearing him. More and more in our home, my father insisted I demonstrate my affection. It might have related to the mortality he must have been feeling. Or perhaps it went all the way back to his relationship with his mother, his sense that she never loved him as much as his younger brother. But I think it mostly had to do with the guilt he suffered after divorcing Josephine, and not being present to raise their four children. “He’s still angry at me,” my dad warned my mother before she first met Michael Wayne and his other kids with Josephine. “I’m afraid he always will be. It breaks my heart. I let those kids down.” He also told my mother, “Don’t expect too much from them at first. They haven’t forgiven me yet.” When my mother said the divorce had been ten years ago, perhaps the children were over it by now, my father just sadly shook his head.

  Whatever the cause, he now required ongoing proof of my love. For nearly the next ten years, if he was in a room and I entered it, I could not pass by without kissing him and telling him I loved him. “If you’re going through the room, Aissa, come up and give me a kiss,” he would say. “You have to kiss me before you can cross by.” Our relationship had always been physical, so at first his words seemed harmless. But when it changed from a habit into a rule, I began feeling uneasy, resentful, and threatened. We were not a normal family, remember. We rarely went out to a movie, a dinner, or to Disneyland when we needed some added space from each other, because we knew that people would see John Wayne and we might be mobbed. Now, in supposedly the sanctuary of home life, I felt scrutinized and pressured by my own father. My affection for him, expressed so spontaneously when I was a little girl, sprung from fear and obligation as much as free will. Because if his family failed the test, if my father did not feel smothered in our love, he might erupt. It would never happen right then—he was too prideful and too repressed to admit why he was mad—but several claustrophobic minutes later, and then often triggered by something with scant significance. When my brooding father ignited, his eyes became smaller, harder, darker—almost a steel blue. Since his rage was always delayed and indirect, it all became so unfathomable, so disquieting, trying to decipher what might set him off. So I learned to be cautious of my actions and words. I learned to walk small around my father.

  His explosions were not reserved for us. I’ve been told that he once shoved Richard Widmark up against a wall, on the Alamo set, when the actor constantly called into question my father’s directing decisions. I only learned of that after he died, but as a child I saw him rage at other people on his film sets. It was awful to witness. Though he never cursed at his family, when my father yelled at adults he peppered his speech with obscenities. I’d cringe and hold my breath until it was over, a tightness inside my throat. I never saw him put his hands on
anyone, but he was a powerful man, and I knew he could hurt someone if he chose to. Even today I hate to hear grown men yelling. Even if I know it won’t involve me, or can sense it will not end in violence, the yelling makes me jumpy, because sometimes I still hear my father’s voice inside their own.

  Fortunately, my father’s fits of anger had a short life and no middle ground, extinguishing just as suddenly as they flared. At home, he never sat afterwards and simmered, or transferred the onus to us by claiming we were to blame. His desire to calm me back down, to let me know the mean man inside him had gone, always felt sincere. After every episode, my father immediately, fervently apologized. “Oh my God,” he’d always say, “I’m so sorry. I love you, Aissa. I’m so sorry.” As I became older and understood more, I could practically see him thinking: Oh no. I’ve scared them and now they won’t love me. Did they ever? Then he’d always try winning the love back.

  Still, this hardly cured everything. He was not a normal-sized man and his voice was loud to begin with. When his body and voice were charged with hostility, my father shrunk the scale of everything around him. At times I felt so tiny I thought he might shout me into the floor. No matter how earnest, no amount of contrition could undo all that.