John Wayne

by Aissa Wayne

  “We’re using another actress,” my father said. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “That’s okay, Dad.”

  What bullshit that was. I was devastated. By my own father I felt betrayed. And to make matters worse, I then had to go with my family to Mammoth Lakes, California, for part of True Grit’s filming. To justify my not getting the part, I wanted Kim Darby to be gorgeous and gifted and friendly. Instead I thought, This mousy, insolent girl is who they used over me? From her first day on the set, Kim Darby was brusque and rude to all. Whenever she acted in scenes with my father, I made sure I was somewhere else.

  Apparently my irritation was starting to show. One night at the end of shooting, my father led me off where we could be alone, surely, I thought, to talk about us. To talk about it. Instead he told me a story about his eldest daughter Toni. Today Toni has eight children, and she’s still a classical beauty. Tall and slender with clean perfect features, Toni also once dreamed of following her father into acting.

  “Toni had wonderful talent, Aissa,” my father started. “She studied drama and acted in plays in high school. She had wonderful bone structure, and she could have been a fine actress. I considered it all . . . and decided not to help her.”

  Inside, I was fuming. I felt sure we would talk about me.

  “There’s some awful people in this business,” my father said. “I didn’t want to see Toni get hurt. You know what I told her? I told her she should get married, and have a whole bunch of children. And that’s what Toni did.”

  My anger faded into deep disappointment. There would be no more parts in his movies, not even any near-misses. This conversation had nothing to do with Toni. My father was telling me to forget about acting.

  That night I felt wounded, not destroyed. After coming so close to getting True Grit—or so I’d thought—then missing out, I’d already started believing I’d lost my final chance. Today, I don’t regret giving up the idea of acting. Even trying to live up to John Wayne’s legacy would have meant falling drastically short, and I found the road to womanhood rocky enough without all of that. As for my father’s role, I’m still not sure I’ve sorted out all my feelings. I never told him I wanted to act, so perhaps he never knew how much I once wanted it. I also believe he meant what he said that night in Mammoth Lakes, about not wanting his children injured by Hollywood. My father knew better than I the incredible odds against success, and I’m sure he wanted to shield me from all the dismissal I likely faced.

  Given all that, when it came to his family working in Hollywood, I wonder if he was mostly paternalistic or mostly just chauvinistic. I can honestly understand him not encouraging me, since I never had Toni’s looks or dramatic training. Perhaps because I lived beneath the same roof with my dominating father for twenty-three years—much longer than Toni—I also lacked her plucky self-assurance. But my father squelched Toni’s ambitions, too, all but insisting she stick to hearth and home, even while opening Hollywood doors for his two oldest boys, Patrick and Michael, and even his brother Bob. When I see Toni today she seems happy, very much pleased with her life. But with all that potential, I imagine our father’s double standard must have hurt.

  22

  It’s been frequently written that John Wayne was so secure in his work he never even kept track of his reviews. It isn’t true. My father read practically all the major reviews. Those he did not lay eyes on himself, he had read to him over the phone by Mary St. John, his confidante and longtime secretary. As for the bad reviews, my father himself tried selling the notion they never upset him. After The New York Times, Life magazine, The Washington Post, and others had ripped The Green Berets, my dad told the Chicago Sun-Times’s Roger Ebert, “A little clique back in the East has taken great satisfaction in reviewing my politics instead of my pictures. And they’ve drawn up a caricature of me, which doesn’t bother me: their opinions don’t matter to the people who go to the movies.”

  Aissa appeared in four movies with her father: The Alamo, The Comancheros, Donovan’s Reef, and McClintock (1959)

  Aissa on the set of The Alamo with movie “mom”, Joan O’Brien (1959)

  With real mom, Pilar (1959)

  And with Chill Wills, dancing on her father’s feet (1959)

  John, Aissa, and Stuart Whitman on the set of Comancheros (1961)

  Aissa on the set of Hatari, in her father’s chair (1964)

  With one of the wild animals she discovered in Africa (1964)

  Atop a baby elephant. John later had one of these elephants delivered to the estate for Aissa’s ninth birthday party (1965)

  The Alamo, John’s first try at directing. He also starred in the movie (1959)

  Opposite: John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, with their respective mothers, on the set of El Dorado (1965)

  In October 1964, John was released from Good Samaritan Hospital after undergoing two operations to remove a cancerous lung

  By March of 1965, John was back in action, here crawling out of the frigid water after a river fight in The Sons of Katie Elder; the scene almost killed him

  John as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, the film role that won him an Oscar for Best Actor in 1970

  With Barbra Streisand at the 1970 Academy Awards

  Wiping away a tear (1970)

  Pilar and Aissa at home in Encino, taken by John himself (1962)

  This photograph of Aissa waterskiing in Acapulco was framed on John’s coffee table (1970)

  The Waynes’ Newport Beach home where John lived from 1966 until his death in 1979

  John, Marissa, and Pat Stacy (his personal secretary and close friend) in Alaska on board the Wild Goose (1977)

  John Wayne’s seven children in 1982. He lived to see twenty-one grandchildren before his death

  John Wayne’s unmarked grave site in Newport Beach, California (1979)

  In one respect that was accurate. For all its harsh notices, The Green Berets ranked tenth among 1968’s most popular movies. While the critics railed, enough “people who go to the movies” made The Green Berets one of my father’s top-grossing films. But bad reviews did bother my father, or he’d have never reacted with such emotion. “That son of a bitch,” he would howl after reading his work defiled in print. “I’ve been in this goddamn business for fifty years. He’s never been in front of a camera in his life. What the hell does he know about acting?” Oddly enough, I never heard him berate The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, although perhaps no major critic ever panned my father so meanly or so persistently. Of Rooster Cogburn, my father’s spinoff of True Grit, Ms. Kael observed, “The two principal subjects of the script’s attempts at humor are Wayne’s gut and (Katharine) Hepburn’s age, which is to say that the the film tries to make jokes of what it can’t hide.” Ms. Kael also wrote of my father, “It never Waynes, but it bores.” That famous and clever and nasty line must have stung him. I know it, even though he would never admit such a thing.

  When the glowing early reviews came in for True Grit in the summer of 1969, only one year after the critical barrage on The Green Berets, my father read every last one with elation. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it one of “the year’s best films, a major accomplishment.” In The Village Voice, Andrew Sarris, one of his biggest public admirers, wrote, “There is talk of an Oscar for Wayne after forty years of movie acting and after thirty years of damn good movie acting.” My dad loved the Sarris review—doubly so, I think, because it appeared in the left-leaning Voice—and felt very proud of his work in True Grit. But early on, and even after he won the nomination, he did not believe it would bring him an Oscar. I was sitting next to him when he saw True Grit in one of its earliest, roughest forms. Afterwards a man from Paramount told him, “Duke, this is the one. This one’s gonna get you the award,” His eyes filled with old broken hopes, my dad only nodded his head as if to say thank you.

  By playing Rooster Cogburn, an aging drunken lout whom Robert Duvall called “a one-eyed fat” man, and who’d bellowed back at Duvall, “Fill your hands
, you son of a bitch!” my father poked humorous holes in both his professional and personal image. But even when the Eastern critics joined the applause, he felt fairly certain he’d wind up disappointed. He’d been nominated just once in his long career, for his stirring portrayal of Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima. On that night in 1949, my father lost to Broderick Crawford for All the King’s Men. Twenty years and no nominations later, he predicted he’d once again play bridesmaid.

  Along with him, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight were nominated for Midnight Cowboy; Peter O’Toole for The Lion in Winter; and Richard Burton for Anne of the Thousand Days. “At least I keep damn fine company,” my father said. “But one of them is bound to win.” After screening the other three movies at our home, he started leaning toward Dustin Hoffman. “His performance was so big, so brilliant,” he said. “It’s not my kind of picture, but I know a great actor when I see one.” With its explicit violence and homosexuality, it really wasn’t his kind of picture. Normally my father would never have seen it, or else stomped out on it very early. Typically, if my father screened a movie he began to perceive as “perverted”—he once told Playboy both Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider fit this bill—he would storm out at the first scene he found offensive. “Why can’t we get a decent movie?” my father would growl. “How can that son of a bitch make this type of crap!” It always felt clumsy for his guests and family, but at least my father never shut off the projector. Instead of playing Hollywood dictator, he’d just leave the room, allowing the rest of us to judge the movie ourselves. Most of the time, that is. When we screened Last Tango in Paris, my father made sure he dragged me out with him. To see the rest of that one I had to sneak out to the theatre.

  Oscar night came that year on April 13, 1970. After our limo crawled its way through the black line of stretch limousines bound for the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, I stepped outside with my family but felt the urge to dive back in. Flocks of deafening fans started shrieking and whistling the instant they spotted John Wayne. “DUKE, DUKE, DUKE, DUKE!” “I LOVE YOU DUKE.” “HEY, DUKE, OVER HERE!” Safely inside the auditorium, Ethan and I were seated toward the back of the hall with our older brothers and sisters, while my parents were escorted to front center seats for the nominees and spouses. Looking around at the beautiful people milling inside, I recall feeling horribly embarrassed by my appearance. The Hollywood crowd all looked so exotically sexy. In dreadful contrast, I looked that night as if I were thirteen going on grandmother.

  Oscar night was my first formal affair, and at first my mother said I could pick out my dress with my girlfriends. But my father overheard and overruled. “What do you mean you’re going with your girlfriends? I can’t believe this. I always thought I would be the one to go with you to pick out your first formal dress. I’m your father.” Precisely the point, I thought. You’re the last person I want to go shopping for a dress with. I’m nearly fourteen. I’d like to go with my girlfriends.

  “All right daddy,” I said.

  I still could not stand up to him. I’d acquiesced. Again.

  “You’re dressing for an interview,” my father always warned me before we met with the press, and both of us knew the translation: dress like Miss Goody Two Shoes. As Oscar night neared, I feared he’d make me purchase a dress I would never pick out myself, and of course my fear was confirmed. Its teal blue color was pretty, but its turtleneck collar, wrist-length sleeves and floor-length hem, all topped off by my hair, tightly balled up in a repressive bun, made me look boring and backwards and sober and terminally unhip. I should have been glad just to be there, but I was thirteen, and it was 1970. At that self-conscious point of my life, in that permissive era, on that auspicious evening, I still looked like daddy’s little girl. At first, I felt so out of place I wished I was dead.

  As all the acceptance speeches and music and glitz and glamour got going, I became less self-involved. I was really at the Oscars! And I was sure my father was going to win. When I told him that before, over and over during the last several months, I wasn’t sure if I meant it. Dustin Hoffman was pretty terrific in Midnight Cowboy. Still, though I’m not sure why, when Barbra Streisand sauntered to the podium to present the award for Best Actor, all my doubt dissolved. I recall thinking, Oh my God, this is perfect. Barbra Streisand, my heroine, anointing my father’s crowning moment. Then she tore the envelope, withdrew the folded sheet, smiled, held it to her chest, and said, “I’m not going to tell you,” and the thought occurred that I might have to run up and wring my heroine’s neck.

  “And the winner is . . . John Wayne for True Grit.”

  Truth be told, my recollection of the rest of that dreamy moment is very slight. My memory of my father’s final Oscar appearance, two months before his death, is really much more vivid. Still, I do recall Barbra Streisand saying the magic words, and me grabbing my brother Ethan so hard I startled him; desperately wishing I was sitting up with my mother and father so I could see the joy in their eyes; rising and cheering and laughing when my father said from up on the podium, speaking of his protracted standing ovation, “Wow, if I’d have known that, I’d have put on that eyepatch thirty-five years ago.”

  For all of us who loved my dad, it was a night of sublime satisfaction. There had never been any doubt of my father’s bankability, but this validated his acting, and we all knew how much that secretly meant to him. Later that night, when I briefly saw my dad at our bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he was still floating on Oscar’s rarified air.

  “I love you, Daddy. I’m so happy for you.”

  I meant every word. My father just hugged me and beamed. Look at me, Aissa, his gleaming blue eyes seemed to be saying. Look at what they think of your old man.

  23

  In 1969, the Waynes were anything but immune to the confusing forces tearing apart American parents and children.

  To complicate matters, that was the year I entered a public high school. By then, nearly all the children I knew had scratched the surface of self-sufficiency. They had been allowed to make their own errors, to see that to struggle or fail does not mean to be worthless, to form their own opinions, and to assume some responsibility for their own lives. As a catered-to Hollywood princess, entirely bypassing many of the normal, bruising-but-essential rites of growing up, I had no such street smarts. It didn’t help that I was the youngest girl in my freshman class—having skipped lower fifth grade and started kindergarten early—and far younger than that in terms of maturity. Though I turned thirteen in 1969, I was as sheltered, naïve, and impressionable as if I were eight years old.

  The population at Newport Harbor High, the oldest high school in town, was about ten times the size of my private elementary school, and countless times more lawless. Still perceiving me as his unprecocious angel, my father had no inkling what type of high school parties I went to. To this day Newport Beach is a cocktail-minded town, and there was reckless, mindless, damn-the-repercussions drinking among my classmates. While Newport adults were off skiing the Alps, Newport offspring flung open their parents’ beveled glass doors to frenzied, keg-swilling rich kids who gleefully trashed the decors created by exorbitant interior designers. There were drugs at my new school, too. Newport Harbor High, if not exactly a center of social upheaval, did not go unstirred by the fumes of the ’60s. Most of our football players smoked pot, as did our apple-cheeked cheerleaders. Our debutante girls popped diet pills as if they were M&Ms, and our honors students had visions on LSD. At Newport Harbor, like so many high schools back then, it was difficult discerning who belonged to what clique. Eventually, my mistake would be trying to be liked by all of them.

  Although my corruption was still months off, the stage was set by my freshman troubles. By the time I’d graduated eighth grade, my schoolmates and I had at least become acquainted. With my imposing last name, I still felt apart, but I no longer felt like an alien. At Newport Harbor, the pointing, the whispering, the staring started anew. It had taken me three years to replenish my fickle s
elf-confidence. In just several weeks of high school I lost much of it again.

  Feeling totally lost in a large public school, for the first time in my life I earned poor grades. For all their strict ways, my private school teachers had deeply believed in the value of education. Some teachers at our public high school did too, but others all but admitted they saw themselves as underpaid baby-sitters. Unfamiliar with all this liberty, I became lazy, waiting for instruction that never came.

  Stunned by my first set of tests, I was horrified by my grades. Whenever I brought home report cards in grade school, my father was stern, formal, inscrutable. A man whose drive to excel was nearly pathological, my dad expected straight A’s and all my life I mostly made sure I received them. I knew my B’s would be unsatisfactory, my Cs grounds for angry chastisement. This time I’d gotten a couple of D’s, and felt sure the man who could blow other actors off the screen would blow sky high at me.

  To my amazement, my father was sympathetic. He said he understood how different private and public schools were, and that he was sure I would improve the next time. Then came the caveat: “You better,” he threatened.

  On top of my problems in class, I gained ten pounds by the end of my second semester. On my father’s side of our family we all have my dad’s legs, and mine grew even thicker as I discovered fast-food lunches of tacos and chips and burgers and fries. Ten pounds is a traumatic one-year weight gain for any girl of thirteen, and to me it felt disastrous. My mother, like many women back when I was a child, taught me that being a perfect women meant being beautifully thin.