by Aissa Wayne
Thank goodness he liked babies. A man who lived to see twenty-one of his grandchildren, there were few things that lifted his spirits the way one more little Wayne did. And at six in the morning on February 22, 1962, my father found solace in perhaps the only place he really could, from his family, when my mother gave birth to a second child.
My mother bore John Ethan Wayne after agonizing through another protracted labor, this one nearly as long as when she had me. But my brother was born without complications, a godsend in light of my mother’s harrowing past. In the six years since she had bore me, my mother had suffered three miscarriages. One, in 1959, was made public by an overeager confidant of my dad who revealed my mother’s pregnancy prematurely—to Louella Parsons. That spring, the gossip columnist printed that my parents were expecting. Several days later, my father had to announce that his wife had lost the baby. As part of the price for being Mrs. John Wayne, my mother’s intensely private loss became a public event.
In 1961, the doctors confirmed my mom was once again pregnant, but for all their powers could not guarantee she would carry to term. The next several months she alternated between elation and fear. One night, she and I sat alone on my parents’ bed and my mother spoke in almost a whisper about “my history,” and “past complications.” Vaguely aware of her meaning, there was no mistaking the anguish in her eyes.
But this time it was all worth it. Through the miracle of life, a family of three was now four. Six years old when Ethan was born, I recall no feelings of jealousy. Though losing my status as an only child, all I remember is my excitement, that our estate would now contain another small person, and perhaps I would not feel so lonesome. My mother recalls it differently. When Ethan was born, she says my first words upon seeing him in the hospital were, “Look, Mommy, I hurt my finger.”
When my little brother came home with his red wriggling body and my father’s blue-lagoon eyes, I anointed myself his protector. I rocked him and fed him and hushed his bawling, surprised myself with the mother in me. The second day we had him, my parents allowed me to burp our new baby. Ethan spit up on my shoulder, and all of us started laughing, even my dad. I had not heard that sound in so many weeks I’d feared it had left our lives forever.
Not long after Ethan’s birth, my father again fell prone to bouts of depression. Perhaps receiving one new life reminded him of the death of his friends. Slowly, however, Ethan reminded my dad that he needed to keep moving forward. For his entire adulthood, my father had felt a need to provide, to accomplish, to prove himself. Finally, these needs of my father came back, and he dove once again into making pictures.
Still recovering from the cost of The Alamo and a few soured investments, what he needed now wasn’t meetings or memos or concepts or promises—“Hollywood blah blah blah,” as he called it. With a wife, an ex-wife, six children from two different families and a pair of grandkids (Michael’s Alicia and Toni’s Anita) he needed money, and needed it quickly. First he closed a crucial negotiation with Paramount Pictures. They would pay him $600,000 a movie for ten movies. This was at least $100,000 under his current price, but the contract was nonexclusive, and Paramount agreed to pay much of the $6 million up front. This meant erasing old debts, revitalizing Batjac, feeding mouths, and paying employees—a prospect my father could not resist. Despite a downbeat, much-discussed profile that ran that year in the Saturday Evening Post—“The Woes of Box Office King John Wayne”—in truth my dad had embarked on financial resurrection.
Economic help came next from an improbable source—Darryl Zanuck. Only one year before, in 1961, he and my father had publicly collided. A onetime screenwriter, Darryl Zanuck had gotten his break in the 1920s, penning the adventures of a fearless German shepherd. After writing stories for Rin Tin Tin, Zanuck later founded the company that would become Twentieth Century Fox. Firmly entrenched as a Hollywood “mogul,” the megalomaniacal, cigar-chomping Zanuck came courting my father in 1962. Six years earlier, he’d resigned his post at Fox and moved to Europe, triggering the once-vaunted studio’s slide to the edge of ruin. Returning to Fox as president, Zanuck’s plan for saving it hinged around his pet project, The Longest Day, the epic depicting the D-Day invasion of France. Normally, my father was anxious to pay tribute on-screen to American soldiers, but when Zanuck inquired he flatly refused to star in The Longest Day. He was still too angry for what Zanuck had done to him just two years earlier.
During the pre-Oscar uproar over The Alamo, the man called DFZ had stung him. Speaking to a reporter in Paris, but knowing his biting words would reverberate all through Hollywood, Zanuck blasted Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, Richard Widmark, and most prominently John Wayne. All were actors who’d formed their own production companies. Like many of Hollywood’s old guard, Zanuck felt actors, even famous, bankable actors, should still be treated by the studios as attractive pieces of merchandise. When my father starred, directed, and produced The Alamo, Zanuck felt it akin to inmates running the asylum.
“I’ve got a great affection for Duke Wayne,” Zanuck was quoted in Paris, “but what right has he to write, direct, and produce a motion picture? Look at poor old Duke now. He’s never going to see a nickel, and he put all his money into finishing The Alamo.”
Infuriated at the patronizing tone—poor old Duke?—my father fired back. “It’s SOB’s like Zanuck that made me become a producer. Who the hell does he think he is, asking what right I have to make a picture? What right does he have to make one?” In reality, my father respected him. He said Zanuck truly loved movies, not just profit, and unlike many executives, always had the guts to trust his own hunches. Still, when Zanuck phoned from Europe in 1962 regarding The Longest Day, my father coldly said he had no interest. Zanuck, like my dad, unaccustomed to being told no, only doubled his transatlantic hounding, upping his price each phone call. Finally, my father agreed to perform a cameo, and even that with a stipulation: his price tag for those few days was a quarter of a million dollars. Certain he’d driven his price to unmeetable heights, my father was shocked when Zanuck met it. Proudly, but not blindly, my dad jetted to Europe, went before the camera for only four days, and earned nearly ten times more for his cameo than Henry Fonda, Sean Connery, and Richard Burton did for their own.
The prescient Zanuck didn’t mind. Boosted by my father’s box office pull, and in tandem with Fox’s The Sound of Music, The Longest Day returned the flailing studio into the black.
“It was highway robbery,” my father later admitted privately. “But I needed the money at the time, and that bastard Zanuck had it coming.”
11
In 1962, his year of rebirth and renewal, my dad was also recruited by Howard Hawks, the distinguished director of Bringing Up Baby, Sergeant York, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Hawks asked him to join him in Africa, to star as a big-game hunter in Hatari! His faith in Hawks unequivocal, my father said yes without hesitation.
They’d worked together once before, in 1947, when Hawks made Red River, starring my dad as Thomas Dunston and Montgomery Clift as his son. Clift’s first screen role and Howard Hawks’s first Western, Red River was a great commercial and artistic success. Playing a myopic sadistic cattle baron who relentlessly drives his men to mutiny, my father showed acting skills much broader than perhaps even he suspected. If John Ford’s Stagecoach proved John Wayne could carry a major motion picture, Hawks’ Red River made him a star. What’s more, Howard Hawks came to Red River a novice to Westerns, unable to discern healthy cattle from those half dead, or true Western actors and stuntmen from big-talking pretenders. Montgomery Clift, straight out of the theatre, said he arrived on the set not knowing how to ride a horse or shoot a gun or walk in cowboy boots. Without condescending, my father coached them both. When the movie came out and kudos poured in for all three talented men, Howard Hawks kept telling the press, “I couldn’t have made Red River without John Wayne.”
It was this gentlemanly quality, and his respect for Hawks’s work, that prompted my dad to
fly to the distant side of the world in late 1962. When he invited my mother and me to join him, I was delighted. Not giving our destination much further thought, I soon learned what Hollywood meant by “exotic location.”
Most of the film was shot on the Serengeti Plain of Tanganyika (Tanzania), at the base of Mount Meru, the gargantuan twin of Kilimanjaro. On my first day on the high plains of the Serengeti, it must have soared past 100 degrees, and I felt so hot I thought I would never be cool again. That night I realized I’d been wrong—with sunset came some relief—but that’s also when the plains became extraordinarily noisy. Lying in my bed beneath a suspended mesh net, I was safe from the bloodthirsty bugs, but could not tune out the strange sounds of screaming, yowling, jabbering, honking African beasts. To me, every animal’s sound meant another threat.
For the next few days, I felt so tired I told my father no when he asked if I wanted to watch him film out in the wild. The long ride on the plane and the shortness of sleep had worn me down, so I stayed behind with my mother. About the third or fourth afternoon, standing beneath a tree, I heard a screech, then felt something jump on my back. I screamed, flailing at my attacker, and a small monkey stopped clawing at my hair and scurried back up the tree it had dived from. I wasn’t hurt or even knocked off my feet, only unnerved, but my wild animal problems were just beginning.
Told by the local residents how to thwart the malicious monkeys—don’t stand under trees—I turned one morning to see a much odder creature: It had a long skinny bare neck, black-feathered-medicine-ball of a body, and long skinny bare legs. The ostrich was walking directly toward me, and I took off running. Unbeknownst to me, this was precisely how not to react; once human beings run, ostriches will give chase. Though my back was turned, I could feel the excited animal closing the gap with its massive stride. Then a little African boy, no taller than I, ran shouting right past me, and when I turned back the ostrich had taken flight in the other direction. While I tried to control my shaking I returned the shy smile of the little boy who’d saved me.
Making his movie, meanwhile, my father was having adventures of his own. Doing his own stunt work one day, he hung off the side of a moving Land Rover during a zebra-hunting scene. From the blind side of the jeep rushed an uninvited bull rhinocerous. The startled driver veered, the jeep bucked, almost flipping, and my father was nearly catapulted into what might have been a fatal landing. That night when he returned for dinner everyone seemed so caught up in his thrilling tale. So I didn’t talk any more about the ostrich or monkeys.
Or the baby elephants. A few days into my visit, my father had introduced me to three of them; he and Howard Hawks were using them in their movie. The baby elephants really did seem friendly, especially when compared to the ostrich and monkeys. But my father did not take into account that, to me, “baby elephant” was a cruel misnomer. Silently angry and panicked—thinking, Why are you making me do this?—I allowed him to stick me on one of their backs while the cameras went pop-pop-pop-pop. Time, as it is apt to do during crises, started crawling as the leviathan baby took off. At that interminable moment, I sought nothing more out of life than my return to solid ground, and yet all I did was smile through clenched teeth. Because I could not talk to my father, because he sometimes treated me like an object instead of a child, I rode in fear while he stood grinning and watching.
Later that week, a buzz came over the set from out in the Wild. A great male African elephant, typically easygoing, had gotten separated from his herd. Dangerous now, the outcast had charged the men on the film set, including my dad, and he and the men had killed it.
This much made sense to me. I’d seen the men on the sets holding high-caliber rifles, and by then I understood the Serengeti’s peril. The men had killed the wild elephant to save their own lives. Much better the elephant than my father, I told myself, as my mother and I motored over the plains to the sight where the men were filming.
When we arrived the pieces stopped fitting. Except for its behemoth size and blood-darkened skin, the slain elephant looked a lot like the babies I’d been riding. All week long, the adults all told me the babies were my friends, so I’d started trying to think of them that way. Now, many of the Americans were taking pictures near the prone animal, and my father told my mother and me to go and stand in front of it. In the scorching African heat, the blood smell was so strong it filled my lungs and nose and I thought I might throw up. Although by standing perfectly still I managed not to gag, I felt so light I thought I might float off the earth. Sad, sick, and confused, I let my mother take me back to the car.
Stateside a few months later I turned seven years old and my parents staged my annual birthday party. Even my father, who deplored most of Hollywood’s flashier tribal customs, relented when it came to my parties. Perhaps he knew I was starved for playtime with other children, seeing them so scarcely except at school. Perhaps, like so many stars, he felt trapped between the antagonistic demands of Hollywood and family, and felt he could tip back the scale by throwing me extravagant parties.
I do think my elaborate birthday parties were for my sake, and not for his. Publicity games were one thing; social-status games my father roundly rejected, finding them both ridiculous and degrading. And to both my parents’ credit, they never indulged in the hoariest Hollywood practice of all: inviting other movie stars’ children, kids I didn’t know, in the twisted hope that their famous mommies and daddies would also stop by for cake and ice cream, so my parties might enhance my parents’ social reputation. Except for little Dean and Gina Martin, Dean and Jeanne’s two children, both of whom I’d always liked, my parents invited only my classmates. I realize it’s de rigueur for children of Hollywood to say they loathed their birthday parties, to describe the other industry kids as starched and nervous and grim faced, and to trash their movie star parents for putting them through them. But except for one, I enjoyed my parties immensely. In our backyard we had merry-go-rounds and “airplane” rides, bunches of multicolored balloons, brightly dressed men wielding cotton candy, and pretty ponies for rides across our green expanse of lawn. Had my guests been other star children, it all might have been oddly passé. But the children from my school, unjaded by Hollywood, were so dreamy-eyed at my parties it always infected me.
The one party I didn’t like was this one when I turned seven following our trip to Africa. That spring morning, my mother told me to play in my room while she and my father put the finishing touches on our yard. Play? I was far too concerned with my appearance. My taste on such occasions ran to white. Though the party would not start for a couple of hours, I already had on my winter white organdy dress, my glittering white shoes and socks, and my white satin ribbons bedecking my dainty curls. Not long after she told me to go in and play, my mother interrupted my preening.
“Your father has a question about the party,” she said. “Can you come outside?”
Who did she think she was kidding? For one thing, my parents planned my parties with painstaking precision. Except for making out my guest list and vetoing clowns—I thought they looked sinister—my input had never been solicited. For another thing, both she and I knew that my father was always full of surprises. It was one of his special charms. Once, on a lengthy, potentially endless-seeming plane ride from Los Angeles to Europe, he purchased the entire first class for him and my mother, making it unforgettably romantic. On the morning of one of my earliest birthdays, he’d come into my room and drawn my bedroom drapes, revealing a life-size playhouse in our backyard. While I’d slept during the night, my father had snuck in the workers to construct it.
Prepared to be surprised by my special gift, I was flabbergasted anyway. Outside in front of our pool, three feet from my dad, stood one of my African “friends.”
A baby elephant.
As if still on Howard Hawks’s cue, it stuck its trunk in the pool and sprayed water all over the deck and my dad.
When I first saw the gray animal I was speechless, overcome by all these feelings.
First, I was astounded. Then I felt queasy, the movie screen of my mind flashing back on the wild elephant, lying rotting and dead among the flies and the stench that horrible day in the African plains. Then I considered the baby elephant and my father. As he had so many times back there, he’d make me ride the elephant today, in front of all the children from my school. I’d smile prettily for all and my dad would still not see I was frightened. This last thought disheartened me: my own father could not tell my counterfeit smiles from my real ones.
My mother cleared her throat, my signal to speak. I focused again on my dad, standing in front of our pool in the white morning sunlight. Where the baby elephant doused him, his formerly clean pressed clothes were wet and mildly rumpled. He wasn’t scowling or fuming or raising his voice, though. He was smiling at me and although his tears never spilled I could see his eyes welling with happiness. He had no idea what was going through my head.
But it didn’t mean he didn’t love me; that he loved me was never in doubt. Without feeling I had to, I ran and squeezed him and let him hold me as long as he wanted.
Returning inside, though, I promised myself I would not ride the baby elephant. Not in front of my classmates, not on my birthday, no matter how much trouble he must have gone to. For just this one day, I would not sublimate myself, while he treated me like a possession. I would not do whatever my father wanted me to, and pretend it made me sublimely happy.
That afternoon I rode the baby elephant.