by Aissa Wayne
Shortly after, we flew to London, where the filmmakers shot some exterior scenes, then from London to Acapulco, where The Wild Goose and its crew had motored ahead according to plan. Our wretched vacation nearing its end, all that remained, we thought, was a simple cruise north to Newport Beach. But tragedy struck off the southernmost tip of Baja. On their night off, four of our crewmen rowed our ship’s fourteen-foot skiff into Cabo San Lucas. One was Eduardo Duran Zamora, twenty years old, a fabulous athlete and effortless swimmer. I loved Eduardo Zamora. With my father’s permission and trust, Eduardo had taught me how to water ski when I was only three.
By sunrise he and the other crewmen hadn’t returned. All that nervous morning I could not shake my feeling that something had gone horribly wrong. That afternoon, we learned three men had drowned. Really, all three were boys, the oldest among them just twenty-four. After drinking all night at a Cabo San Lucas Fiesta, they had started back for The Wild Goose, their skiff overturned, and they tried swimming the two miles to shore. The sole survivor was the only one who couldn’t swim, Efran, our houseman Fausto’s son. Efran had lashed himself to the skiff and been rescued by the crew of a passing boat.
As The Wild Goose started home my mind was mostly blank. When I thought at all, I could not accept Eduardo’s death. He swam like the fish, he even taught the adults things—now he was gone? Forever?
A blanket of gloom settled over my father as well. Except for meals, he spent most of the next few days high up at the bow, in front of the glass shielding the captain. When he did come down my father looked sick with self-reproach. The boys had drunk too much beer and tequila, and the deep black sea had taken them. But I think my father held himself responsible. All his abilities to lead, to protect, all his meticulous planning, and now three of his crew were dead. I desperately wanted to give my father some comfort, to take him in my arms and say Things will get better, Daddy, they always do. But I wasn’t sure they would, and I wasn’t sure my father would let me.
15
Just ten weeks after my family returned from our European disaster, we left for Hawaii. Kirk Douglas, Patricia Neal, and my father were starring in In Harm’s Way, directed by Otto Preminger. To Hollywood’s surprise, my father and Mr. Preminger had no blow-ups. Mr. Preminger, like Alfred Hitchcock, was a self-admitted hater of actors. While directing other pictures, he’d tried overpowering Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Lee J. Cobb. I knew that would never happen with my dad. Unless he was working with John Ford, my father would never be bullied by any director, or even lectured to. Having plied his craft by then for thirty-plus years, having worked again and again with not only Ford but Howard Hawks, my father felt his comprehension of cinema far transcended the standard actor’s. In fact, he was certain he understood moviemaking more deeply than many of his directors. As he told the Los Angeles Times, “I’ve worked with directors who couldn’t walk across the street without help.”
To everyone’s relief, he and Mr. Preminger earned each other’s respect. While I played with Mr. Preminger’s twins, our fathers behaved like perfect gentlemen. The only edginess I saw in Hawaii was between my parents. My father had never really stopped coughing since we left Spain. Even in the crystalline air of Hawaii, it became so torturous that some days he had to stop shooting his scenes. As she’d been doing for weeks, my mother insisted he see a physician; my obstinate father said no.
Before making In Harm’s Way, my dad had gone to the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla for the mandatory physical all stars had to pass to qualify for the expensive insurance movie companies carried for them. Since the well-respected Scripps staff pronounced him suitably healthy, he did not plan to return until late in the fall of 1964, in order to be cleared for The Sons of Katie Elder. Things changed when Mr. Preminger wrapped up In Harm’s Way early. Returning to Encino a few weeks before expected, during those broiling days of August my mother nagged my father into acquiescence.
Agreeing to move up the date of his next exam, my father drove south for La Jolla alone, in his customized Pontiac station wagon with the raised roof over the driver’s head and its special GM engine with 350 horsepower. My father adored that car, and drove it like he, and it, would last forever. Whenever we saw him sliding behind the wheel, instead of George Coleman who sometimes drove for him, my mother and I refused to sit in the front. Considering himself a terrific driver, my father brazenly zipped through traffic while my mother and I sat in back with our hands locked in death grips. He only drove slowly on our Sunday rides through the San Fernando Valley, when we had no destination, our only goal to try and relax.
That August morning, too, I suspect my father stopped racing and took his time. Between Encino and La Jolla, long stretches back then were still undeveloped, the road winding south astride jutting cliffs and crying seagulls, curving golden beaches and white-capped turquoise water. God, how my father loved the California coastline. Besides, he was driving to a hospital, and in his fifty-eight years he had learned to hate them. He always said he hated the loss of privacy most of all, but he also loathed the bottles and tubes and needles and blipping machines.
This time they kept my father at Scripps for five days, probing, draining, injecting, inserting, and possibly saving his life. Because something inside his body was out of control.
16
That September 1964, a tumor approximating the shape and size of a golf ball was detected on my father’s smoke-damaged lung. There was little question what caused it. As my father said, “When I started smoking I was just a kid.”
From the day he began, sometime during the 1920s, my father smoked cigarettes in earnest. During an addiction spanning four decades, he rarely consumed less than three packs a day, or more than six. When diagnosed with lung cancer, his habit was five packs daily. Always my father smoked Camel nonfilters: high tar, high nicotine.
A chain-smoker to the extreme, he used one match a day to spark the morning’s first cigarette. Until he slept that evening, my father lit the rest with the one he was just finishing. At the house in Encino, our ashtrays overflowed with bashed, wormy white butts. As are most heavy smokers, my father was Pavlovian: when the telephone rang and it was for him, he immediately lit a cigarette. He loved smoking. It was part of his identity. He even had his own distinctive mannerism. Most people held their cigarettes higher, just above their knuckles. My father held his deep inside the cleft of his fingers, close to his palm. When he puffed, his huge hands obscured the whole bottom of his face. “See,” he would say, “other people smoke this way. Except I smoke like this.”
My father had large appetites. In those days, when he wasn’t in front of the camera, I rarely saw him without a cocktail, a cigarette, some food. Today we know that one key to a healthy life is moderation. Moderation was never attractive to my father. Jimmy Stewart once described him as having “the enthusiasm for life that would make a high school football star envious.” My father loved that quote, and I think he took it to heart. He may have turned the corner of middle age, may have been through many travails, but he still thought of himself as that young jock, still indulging his youthful habits long after it was physically prudent. He knew he smoked much too heavily, at times overdrank, but he was still John Wayne, the Duke, America’s emblem of manhood—nothing could touch him. In the two weeks between his diagnostic visit to Scripps and his scheduled surgery at Good Samaritan Hospital, I never saw my dad without a cigarette in his hand. Part of that, I’m sure, was his body craving tobacco, a substance with a grip as merciless as heroin. Part of it was probably this: If I do have cancer, why stop now? It’s a little late after forty years. And part of the mixture was hubris, my immortal-feeling father saying “screw you” to his disease.
Besides, my father believed much more deeply in luck than he ever did in doctors or medicine. One afternoon before we’d left for Spain, we’d been walking along a sidewalk in the Valley and I’d veered toward the curb, to walk it like a tightrope as children will. When a light pole came between us, my
father said, “Bread and butter.” He explained as I started asking: “Anytime we have to walk around different sides of things, I have to say bread and butter. Or you do. Otherwise we’ll stay divided.” Although he smiled when I did, my father looked every bit serious.
As a girl I delighted in his superstitions, for they made him seem childlike, like me, and because sharing his quirky beliefs was a rite, and rites with my father I never passed up. Now that I’m older, I wonder about them sometimes, about their hold over him. Was he trying to distance himself from death, in the only way he deigned to? Because if good luck could enhance a man’s life, surely bad luck could end it. And so for years while my father drank tequila, smoked Camels, and later smoked thin cigars, even after getting lung cancer, he opened umbrellas outside, refused salt unless it was placed on the table, circled his chair three times when a poker card flipped upright, and threw apoplectic fits at the sight of a hat on a bed. Just about his whole life, my father was willing to defy medical science. Yet he was never so bold as to challenge the fates.
During his first battle with cancer, no one sat me down and explained that he had cancer. My parents, I’m sure, knowing an eight-year-old child can only intellectualize so much, did not want to scare me and burden me, did not want the notion of my father’s death to even enter my mind. As far as I can recall, my dad and I never once spoke of his illness. When I asked my mother why Daddy was going to the hospital, she said my father was ill, he was having an operation, but he was fine. Whenever she left me to go to Good Samaritan, I’d rearrange drawers, play with dolls I’d outgrown, pass time any way I could, but I was never able to lose my feelings of resentment, fear, and confusion. Why was no one giving me real explanations? Why was no one telling me the whole story? It made me mad then, but I don’t blame either one of my parents. Even now, with so much more available information, when families discover cancer they often don’t tell one another the truth.
We were all making believe. When the spot on his lung was first identified, my father told my mom he probably had “valley fever.” The two jittery weeks before his biopsy, my family engaged in an unspoken conspiracy of denial. Smoking harder than ever, my father was a whirlwind, taking almost no rest and laboring long hours over a national television spot he planned doing for Barry Goldwater. Meanwhile, I voiced none of my anxieties, and did not ask any penetrating questions. Even when I was not in the room, my mother says she and my dad discussed the election, the Dodgers, the cold war, the weather, everything but my father’s serious predicament. Neither one of them ever said the word cancer.
I suppose they couldn’t bring themselves to. In 1964, as the newspapers printed advance reports of the surgeon general’s imminent report on heavy smoking, Americans got confirmed what they grimly suspected: a diagnosis of lung cancer was practically a death sentence. Even today, lung cancer’s five-year survival rate is only 13 percent, regardless of what stage the cancer is in when detected. Lung cancer still kills more than 140,000 Americans a year, recently making it the leading cause of cancer deaths among both women and men. Stricken with lung cancer, and given how hard he smoked, my father surviving five years was unusual. Living another fifteen, and performing in eighteen more movies, bordered on supernormal.
My father, the fighter, was gurneyed into surgery on September 17, 1964. My mother and my older brothers and sisters, by then adults, gathered in the waiting room while I was at school. The malignant growth on his left lung was so large the surgeon had to enter through my dad’s back, affording him fuller view of any tentacles that might have grown out from the tumor. After the doctor removed two ribs on his left side and the entire upper lobe of his left lung, my father awoke to find he had one functioning lung.
The price, while very high, could have been final. Although malignant, the cancer had not yet metastasized: the murderous cells had not broken away from the tumor and spread through his lymph or blood systems. It had taken them six hours, but the doctors were calling the operation a triumph. There had not been complications, a Dr. Jones told my mother. Her husband had “come through it in good shape.”
My mother asked if her husband’s cancer was “cured.”
“These things aren’t cut and dried,” Dr. Jones said. “I removed all the cancer, but we don’t call it a ‘cure’ for five years. If the cancer doesn’t recur, there’s no reason why your husband can’t live a relatively normal life.”
At hearing “relatively normal” my mother says she wanted to scream.
I felt like screaming a few days after the surgery. Finally allowed to visit my father, at the eleventh hour I was not admitted to his room. Like many moments regarding my father’s first cancer, I cannot recall this one vividly. I don’t recall who stopped me, the nurses or my mother. All that comes back to me now is my racking worry for my dad, my helplessness, and most of all my rage. He was right there, on the other side of the door, and someone again was pushing me into darkness.
Several years later I learned what happened. The night before my aborted visit, there had, after all, been complications. Edema had distended my father’s face to elephantine proportions, swelling his right eyelid until it covered both eyes and part of his forehead. In this condition someone, correctly, did not want me to see him.
Five days after his first operation, my fifty-eight-year-old dad went back into surgery. As they drained the accumulation of fluid from the edema, and treated both his severed stitches and the damaged tissue surrounding his mutilated lung, this time the procedure lasted six and a half hours. Following this second operation, my father drifting in and out of sedation, another thread of despair ran through his ordeal. He learned that his brother had lung cancer too.
Uncle Bob was around us a lot. Whatever contentious feelings my father once had for his younger brother, it seemed to me he had reconciled them. If I’m right about this, it speaks well of my dad. As a child, forever hearing his mother say “Bobby this” and “Bobby that,” he had felt like the older, unwanted sibling. By the time both boys became men, their father had died and their mother had remarried. When my father found stardom, virtually every week he received a call from his mother posing a similar question: “What are you doing for Bobby?”
For both her and his little brother, John Wayne was doing a lot. In a way that I knew was heartfelt, my dad often spoke to me about “second chances,” how everyone deserved “at least one.” For all his macho preening, forgiving was intrinsic to my dad’s nature. Though unwilling or unable to ever forget his childhood, he understood that life is too special a thing to be spent in recrimination.
Instead, John Wayne persuaded industry friends to give his brother jobs. He put Uncle Bob on the payroll at Batjac, and bailed him out of financial quagmires. Unlike his ambitious older brother, my Uncle Bob was not self-driven. Chatty and charming, Uncle Bob was also smaller and less imposing than my father, consistent while he was mercurial, opportunistic while he was steadfast, drawn to the glitz of Hollywood while my father cared about filmmaking. Other than some facial resemblance, all Uncle Bob and my father ostensibly shared was a weakness for steak and cigarettes. But my father’s brotherly love was easy for us to see.
Uncle Bob would not survive the five years, lung cancer victim’s supposedly critical juncture. He would die in 1970, after my father returned from filming Rio Lobo, Howard Hawks’ final picture. Not long before Uncle Bob’s death, my father took me to see him in the hospital. On the otherwise quiet ride over, once my father spoke harshly, “You know what your uncle did? He’s got a tube in his throat, and the stupid sonofabitch is inhaling cigarettes through that.”
When we entered Uncle Bob’s room, the torpid air had the odor of illness. I was thirteen years old; looking at my uncle, looking into the eyes of his wife, I understood he would die soon. When my father saw his gaunt, grayed younger brother, his anger at Uncle Bob, at cancer, at life and at death, blew away like a summer storm. We all smiled and hugged and gossiped and teased—my father and his brother teased each ot
her a lot—then we left so my uncle could rest. The last time I saw my sweet Uncle Bob, he was fighting with his wife, demanding cigarettes.
17
Early that October 1964, my father came home pale and wan, the life whipped out of him by two major surgeries. Over the years, the unyielding assault of cigarette smoke on the cells lining his bronchial tubes had enlarged other mucus-secreting cells. A full, healthy breathing apparatus can cleanse itself to some extent, but with one lung removed and the other harmed by smoke, my father found breathing a constant and frightening struggle. Some days he sounded like he was choking on phlegm.
He placed most of the blame on his high-priced doctors, however. “I’ve only got one lung,” he kept complaining, “and the damn doctors go and twist my windpipe. They twisted it on their goddamn way out. How the hell is a man supposed to breathe with one lung and a twisted windpipe?”
Those first tenuous days he would mostly lie in bed, staring at the ceiling. I would catch glimpses of him as I walked by his open bedroom door, wondering when he would show me the scar. He had promised to let me see it as soon as he stripped off his heavy abdominal bandage. I awaited this with a mixture of trepidation and curiosity, and then one night he summoned me into his room. Purple and raised and violent, the scar ran from his left breast, swinging beneath his armpit, back up to his left shoulder blade. I didn’t mean to wince but I was alarmed. I realized only then how deeply my father had been in trouble.
After initially hiding his cancer, in late December my father called a press conference to tell the country the truth. For several weeks he and his managers had carefully misled the public, distributing phony releases, for fear of the cancer tainting my father’s career. It was not so much his fans he was worried about, but the Hollywood men who employed him.