by Aissa Wayne
“I’ll never work again if they find out how sick I am,” he said over and over that long grim autumn. “If they think an actor is sick they just won’t hire him.” But first came the gossip and rumors, then the inquiries from the press, and my father saw he could no longer live out a lie. Four days after Christmas, he stood in front of our living room, packed with buzzing reporters.
“They told me to withhold my cancer operation from the public because it would hurt my image,” he started, they meaning his advisors. I knew that was not entirely forthright, since he’d been in full agreement, and since no one made John Wayne do what he himself did not want to. It was also the first time, and the last, I ever heard my father say the word cancer. Even fourteen or fifteen years later, when my father got cancer again, around me he would only call it “the Big C.”
“Here’s what I believe,” my father continued to tell the press. “Isn’t there a good image in John Wayne beating cancer? Sure, I licked the Big C.” As the stunned reporters scribbled their notes, my father announced he was leaving for Mexico next month, to star with his old friend Dean Martin in The Sons of Katie Elder.
The reporters filed out to work on what they knew would be major stories. My mother looked nonplussed, having pleaded with my dad to take far more time off than this. Exhausted, my father vanished upstairs and into his bedroom, back to his hospital bed by the wall, and the two green tanks of bottled oxygen. I returned to my own room, visualizing the gruesome scar, wondering how he could possibly ride a horse after doctors had cut him wide open. The first week of the new year, fourteen weeks after losing one rib and half of his lung, my father packed his bags and went south of the border.
18
Durango sits high in the mountains of Mexico, a languid, lonesome village some eight thousand feet above sea level at the eastern edge of the Sierra Madres. Immediately my father loved it—its hard blue skies and clear mountain air—but to me the place looked deadly dull. Durango had frozen dirt streets with no names, one horseshoe-shaped hotel, and one hole in the wall that everyone called a diner. A pampered product of Southern California, I took one look at my new home for the week and began counting the days.
At least Dean Martin was there. If any of my father’s friends could perk up Durango it had to be him. My dad never ran with the rest of the Rat Pack, but he and Mr. Martin really did enjoy one another. Perhaps Mr. Martin wore another face when he was alone with his own family, but whenever I saw him he seemed entirely secure inside his own skin. He had a zest for living, a carefree air about him that enlivened my father whenever they hung around. I never saw rivalry between them, or competition, or jealousy, or any need to impress. Back in Southern California, they often secured Hollywood movies before their release, then screened them at our house with my mother and Jeanne Martin. Those nights there was always a lot of laughter, a lot of cheerful noise.
On the set of Katie Elder, the two Hollywood stars did more than their share of drinking. Late, late one night the week I was in Durango, I was jolted awake by a racket outside our hotel room. Stumbling outside I saw cast, crew, writers, and paparazzi standing outside their own rooms waving and grinning. Down below in the dirt street, my father and Dean Martin marched arm-in-arm, singing their booze-soaked lungs out. I laughed because everyone else did, but I wasn’t sure I thought it was all that funny. My father was still a sick man.
Around the time my dad turned sixty, after we’d moved to Newport Beach, he cut his drinking back sharply. But in 1965, he was still being described as “one of Hollywood’s legendary drinkers.” Henry Fonda, after hitting Mexican bar after bar with John Ford and my father, said “John Wayne can outdrink any man.” I suspect my father took pride in that assessment. To men of his generation, the ability to drink hard was certification of manhood, and my father never shrank from demonstrating his own. He liked whiskey, but his favorite drink was straight tequila on ice, and always Commemorativo. He used to take his own bottle with him to parties, bestow it on the bartender with a generous tip, and tell him or her, “Here you go. This is what I drink. Pour this for me all night.” If my father met a person he liked, found that person engaging in the area of politics or moviemaking, he might sit with his new friend and smoke and drink for three straight days. After his companion left, though, he might not touch liquor for a month. My father enjoyed liquor’s effects. When he drank, he was apt to make it count. But alcohol never controlled his life.
A stickler on the issue of drinking and driving, his favorite place to indulge was on The Wild Goose. Sometimes the horseplay got out hand. Once, I’ve been told, my parents docked for the weekend off Catalina Island, while entertaining Claire Trevor Bren and her husband-manager Milton. In 1939, Claire starred with my dad in John Ford’s Stagecoach, playing Dallas the softhearted hooker to my father’s Ringo Kid. Claire remained very close with my dad, as did her husband Milton Bren, a small, caustic intellectual whom my father found amusing despite this odd fact: Milton Bren loved ridiculing John Wayne. This moonlit night on The Wild Goose, Milton started again on my father. By then my dad had had quite a few, and more than enough. Unzipping his pants, he turned on the jabbering Bren and urinated all over his shoes. As the story goes, for the first time in his life Milton Bren fell speechless.
I never saw my father so plainly smashed, and when he drank around me he was never abusive. On the contrary, there was a sweetness about him, an approachability—and that’s what annoyed me. He was always like that with his friends, and yet frequently closed or distracted around his children. Even before I understood liquor, I intuitively knew his mood change was unnatural. I wanted him to be open without drinking booze.
One of my worst and earliest memories of my father’s drinking is the Encino morning when I started leaving for school and he and his buddies were still embroiled in the same game of poker they’d played all night. I still remember John Ford’s stubbled, scowling face, one black eyepatch over black-framed glasses, gnawing the end of a fat cigar in the corner of his mouth. I don’t recall much about Mr. Ford, except he was always gentle with me, and I thought of him as my grandpa. But Mr. Ford also scared me. With that black eyepatch, he reminded me of death.
Nor did my father look too spry that bloodshot morning. There were maybe six loud men in our smoky card room, still puffing away and drinking, but even the wisecracks and clinking of glasses could not muffle my father’s thundering order.
“Hey Aissa! Give me a kiss before you go to school!”
Obediently, I pecked my father’s cheek. He wetly kissed me back on my own, and that’s when I smelled it. His whiskey breath smelled hot and stale. It smelled obnoxious.
Because of my father’s capacity to drink, because every morning when he was away on location he showed up first on a film set, wholly prepared for the day’s opening shot while his fellow drinkers lurched in looking pathetic, missing their marks, and blowing their lines, he was widely described by journalists as a man immune to getting hungover.
Nonsense.
When only his family could see him, his heart pounded so vehemently some mornings my father swore he was having a heart attack.
“My heart, my heart,” he’d bitch and yell. “Pilar, I’m gonna die. Pilar, where are you? Goddamn it! I will never drink again. Pilar!”
There was plenty of drinking that freezing week in Durango, and plenty of showboating by my father in front of the press. He wanted the world to believe he was still the invincible Duke, and clearly no sick and faltering man. As for the photographers and reporters, I’m sure some came to Durango for simply professional reasons—my father was news—and that many were pulling for his revival. Others, I think, came morbidly hoping to witness John Wayne’s demise. A few days before I left Durango, the ghoulish nearly got what they came for.
This January morning, while filming a pivotal fight scene, my father would be pulled from his horse, land in a mountain stream, then engage in a lengthy brawl with his three “brothers.” But the stream was ringed with i
ce, the weather near 10 degrees. Afraid my father could get pneumonia, my mom asked if he’d please use a double. My foolhardy father said no: the director, Henry Hathaway, was shooting the scene in close-up.
Mr. Hathaway yelled “Action.” On cue, my father got yanked into the stream. But he landed wrong, getting drenched to the waist instead of just to his knees. Horrified, my little brother Ethan yelled “Daddy, Daddy.” Henry Hathaway shot Ethan a glare and continued shooting. Chilled to the bone, operating on one good lung, my father completed the scene, but trudging out of the water he couldn’t stop coughing. His body convulsed and his lips turned a rubbery grayish-blue. The photographers closed in and took their pictures. Henry Hathaway, suddenly now my father’s protector, screamed “Get away, you sons of bitches! Can’t you see he needs air?” An aide rushed up with my father’s inhalator, fixing the oxygen mask over his ashen face.
The crisis passed, but I was still trembling. And angry.
My father is still in poor health. Why can’t he stop confirming his courage? Is he such a prisoner of his myth he’ll feed it at the risk of his very life?
I didn’t know, but the questions entered my mind as we all stood around watching my father breathe.
19
After we’d all returned to the states, my father surprised me one evening at dinner. “Your mother and I,” he said, “are thinking of moving to Newport Beach, not far from where the boat is. We want to know what you think. Would you like to move to Newport?”
For me it was easy. Partial to the cool climes of the beach, weary of living a life on a hill behind ten-foot walls, pleased that my father was solicitous of my feelings on such an important matter, I told him yes, moving sounded wonderful. In May 1965, having closed the sale of our estate to Walt Disney’s eldest daughter, I had scant regret and great hope as we left behind our past for a future by the sea.
Before its lima bean fields were paved over with concrete, Newport Beach in 1965 was a close-knit seaside village of 36,000 people, with few markets or restaurants, so anywhere you went you ran into people you knew. The crown jewel of Orange County, Newport back then was a collection of mansions and bungalows, yachts and dinghies, ship brokers and stockbrokers, pensioned retirees and golden-haired, brown-skinned surfers. Friends visited homes of friends in sailboats and motor boats, sidling up to the slip to indulge in sunset cocktails, until eyes swam in heads like ice cubes in tall glasses. Many of these beach houses were still weekend homes and summertime havens, to which monied and stressed Los Angelenos fled south in sports cars and sedans.
Although our own new waterfront home was still being remodeled, Newport Beach seemed lovely to me even from rented quarters. The springtime scents alone were enough to make me forget Encino: misted Pacific air and rain-dampened sand, creamy freesia and Spanish blueblood, orange blossoms and night-blooming jasmine. Most exhilarating of all, after living on five and a half secluded acres, my old childhood dream had actually come true. Unlike in Encino, other children now played directly outside on the street in front of our home. My father was off in Rome filming Cast a Giant Shadow with Kirk Douglas, and had not yet appeared at our rented home. With none of the other children suspecting who I was, how nice it felt to be treated as just one more neighborhood girl.
That September I entered fifth grade at Carden Hall, a small conservative private school. Each grade at Carden was dissected into Upper and Lower. After our first two sets of exams I was promptly kicked upstairs to Upper Fifth. That night I was flowing with pride, waiting for my father’s daily phone call home from Rome. Although I’d been nervous about my school, I’d applied myself and accomplished something worthwhile, without my father’s assistance. Knowing what emphasis he placed on grades, I was sure he’d be thrilled.
“Dad, I skipped lower fifth grade!” I said over the line. “My tests were so good my teachers moved me up!”
“What’s so great about that?” my father replied. “Why didn’t you skip the whole grade?”
“I don’t know, Daddy. I just thought . . .”
“Next time skip the whole grade.”
Closing the subject, he asked for my mother. All I wanted was a little approbation. Instead I slinked to my bedroom crushed, never to mention it to him again.
When my father came home that fall we were all much more relaxed. The stress of remodeling behind us, we were relieved to finally move into our new home, a one-story, ten-room, seven-bath white ranch house with a pool, sitting right at the tip of Bayshore Drive, a plush subdivision in Newport. Although the front of our house could only be approached through a gated, guarded entrance, it was far less private than the hilltop house in Encino. Even in 1965, Newport waterfront property was at a premium and homes were jammed shoulder to shoulder on narrow plots of land. Despite the loss of privacy, my father loved our new house, especially our new patio. Built on a jutting point, it afforded a vast, spectacular view of Balboa Island, Lido Island, and foremost, the bay, with its channels of green and blue and hazel waters. Every chance he could, my dad sat outside and inhaled his sea-kissed surroundings. He felt so comfortable out in our yard, he remained unfazed even when the Balboa Island ferry cruised by, affording its shutter-happy tourists an intimate view of John Wayne.
My father seemed satisfied with his new life, but my own was about to radically change. Upon my dad’s return from Rome, word spread that John Wayne had purchased a home in Newport. After that, seemingly overnight, going to school became catastrophic. In the halls, in class, at recess, my schoolmates now constantly watched me. The rare times I looked anyone in the eye, I saw envy, resentment, suspicion. Most of my new classmates had lived in Newport all their lives and grown up with one another. I was the stranger. Not only the stranger, but “John Wayne’s daughter,” obliterating any chance I might have had of hanging back and gradually shedding my status as an outsider. I felt wildly conspicuous. The more my peers stared and pointed and sneered, the more drastically I turned inward. “The only way for people to think you’re a jerk,” my father had trained me, “is for you to open your mouth.” Avoiding conversations for fear of being scorned, I was quickly perceived and dismissed as a snob. It took weeks before anyone but a teacher spoke directly to me. Meanwhile, the whispers grew louder and more derisive, burning my ears and making me feel like a freak.
“There she is. John Wayne’s daughter. She’s such a bitch.”
“Look at her nose, it’s stuck in the air.”
“She doesn’t talk to anyone.”
“Who does she think she is?”
Before very long, I found myself frequently blurting “I’m sorry” to my parents and my brother, Ethan, at inappropriate times when I’d done nothing wrong. Even my voice changed, from one with at least a ring of self-assurance to one conveying anguished self-doubt. I was nine years old, and I hated the timid young girl I was becoming. I knew that I should be tougher. I wanted to be. But my coddled past had left me soft at the edges.
I finally turned to my mother. But I didn’t reveal the extent of my alienation. “Mom,” I said in my tiny apologetic voice, “I’m shy now at school. I feel real shy with the other kids.”
My mother said, “Ah! You’re not shy! Don’t ever say that again!”
That was that. If my mother did not want to listen, I had nowhere to go with my feelings. My father was out of the question: I never felt my faults were anything he and I could discuss. My father never perceived me as scared or weak, as a little girl with any emotional problems. And I felt I must live up to his notion of who I was.
So I kept my pain and fear inside, secretly detesting my new environment. For as long as I could recall, I’d always understood that my father was special. But only in the fish tank of Newport Beach did I comprehend the depth of his superstardom. Not only the children at Carden Hall, but the teachers, the parents, the entire community knew of my father’s presence. Instead of cancer destroying his career and his image, it amplified them. When my father seemingly “licked the Big C” he acquired
mythic dimensions. As my father’s stardom advanced, it eclipsed my entire identity. Thinking about it now, I must have resented him for it, even at nine years old, and yet I recall blaming everyone else but him until my sophomore year in high school. Perhaps resenting my father was scary to me, in the face of everyone else’s adoration. Perhaps I felt guilty for feeling it. So I hid it even from myself.
That first year in Newport, even my childhood dream betrayed me. Yes, the Bayshore complex teemed with children, but most were older than I, and even more affluent and noninclusive than the younger kids at my private school. The beach just behind our new house was the most threatening place of all, with its clusters of rich older teenagers. They never said a word to me, but I told myself they despised me. They all despise me, I thought.
One day after school, a short, olive-skinned girl approached me on one of the pathways running through Bayshore. Eyes fixed straight ahead I planned on rushing right by her.
“Hi,” she said, “I’m Debbie.”
Debbie Doner saved my life. At least that’s how it felt. My energy level rose just from being around her, and slowly my confidence, too. Sincere and perceptive, Debbie never asked about my father, unless it related to my father and me. Gently, without any rancor for my parents, Debbie encouraged me to think about my family life as we truly lived it. An outward, adventurous girl, Debbie had none of my newfound reticence. Soon we were screaming our throats raw at the California Angels, swishing our hair and singing along to the Beatles, sneaking out at night from her bedroom window, purely to see if we could escape detection. Alone with my best friend Debbie, I felt safe from the awkwardness and pressure I felt around nearly everyone else. When I found another girlfriend, Lea Hilgren, I was starting to almost feel human again.