John Wayne

by Aissa Wayne

  I understand my mother’s compulsion with looks. Women of her generation were more brainwashed than those of today; she also had no career, and she came to this country without much education. She was also married to John Wayne, who worked with scores of maturely beautiful women and lush ingenues. As a young girl, I never understood how my mother controlled her jealousies. I was only about four years old when my parents took me with them to a party thrown by the Foreign Press Association. All night long, a pretty, sad-eyed platinum blonde hung all over my father. I was more curious than resentful, until one of the woman’s shoulder straps floated off her alabaster shoulder. Her bosom was exposed! Feeling this could not go unreported, I pulled my mother toward a corner. “Mom, you know that pretty blonde who’s holding Dad’s arm? She has no brassiere on!”

  My mother glanced just for an instant. “That’s Marilyn Monroe, honey,” she said evenly. “She’s always been very fond of your daddy.”

  My father never worked with Miss Monroe, but I would see his old love scenes on TV, or his new ones when we screened movies at home, and wonder how my mom felt about them. One time I asked her. “Mom, how can you stand to watch him in all those love scenes, with all those gorgeous women?”

  “Your father is not a flirt,” she said. “He makes me feel like I’m the only one.”

  My mother was right. By nature, my father was not flirtatious, and back then he certainly kept his focus on my mom. Still, I wonder now if she was entirely in touch with how she felt. I wonder if she believed the best revenge was looking good, so she buried her real feelings and overcompensated in some other way—as we Waynes were all so prone to. Looking back, I realize how much stress my mother placed on womanly beauty, how extremely conscious she was of her fetching appearance, and how disproportionate was the time she spent maintaining it. One wrinkle, one pound, one false eyelash out of place, and my mother ingested even less calories, played more tennis, and spent even more narcissistic hours a day her in front of her lighted mirror inside her private dressing room. Subsequently, her impressionable young daughter bought hard into a misguided notion: women and girls were only as valuable as their surface. “There is nothing more important than being beautiful,” my mother told me.

  Of course she was not alone in sending this message. I also received it from Madison Avenue, and to some extent from my dad. He always emphasized grades, and that I should be decent to others, and to give people second chances, and for all of that I am thankful. But he also told me not to voice my opinions, and only sporadically praised me for something I’d said or done, while frequently commending my appearance. “You’re the prettiest girl in the world,” he said in just those words, and when he did, he was not the same man who stood stiffly over my report cards, giving me only grudging respect for studying hard and bringing home A’s. Times when I looked especially nice, my father seemed especially proud, loving, sanguine. I can see now how my values became distorted. My self-image was too closely bound with my looks, and too dependent on other people’s approval. Like many young girls, I had set myself up, and been set up by others, to lose my self-esteem. And lose it I did, at times to the point of self-loathing, when I entered a high school in Newport glutted with beauties, gained ten pounds in one year, saw the disapproval in my mother’s eyes, and the most important man in my life stopped telling me I was pretty.

  It wasn’t bad enough that so many girls at my Newport Beach high school were blond, thin, nubile, and tan. But my own mother emerged as a greater beauty in her forties than she’d ever been before. Her entire body hardened from ritual tennis, and her legs, already shapely, got even sexier with more definition. A more fully dimensional woman, but still relentless about staying trim, my mother made all too clear her dismay at her daughter’s budding plumpness. “You’re always eating lately. You’ve gained some weight, honey. I starve myself if I gain even one pound. All I eat is hard-boiled eggs—protein. I want you to read this diet book. You know that red outfit you want? I’ll bet you’d look good in it. I’ll buy it for you if you lose weight.”

  She didn’t do it maliciously, but this didn’t assuage the hurt. I wanted to be petite, wanted to look smashing in a tennis dress, wanted all the rewards of beauty. But it wasn’t happening for me. I wasn’t my mother and never would be. Meanwhile, my father had not yet mentioned my burgeoning weight; he no longer spoke at all about my appearance. All that superficial praise I’d received as a child, almost always for my looks, returned to haunt me in adolescence. I don’t know how much I believe in epiphanies—I’m not sure life is that clear and well structured—but I distinctly remember my feelings the year I turned thirteen: I am not pretty; I’m fat. I am not smart in school; I’m stupid. I am not fun to be with; I’m too self-conscious. I am none of the things I thought I once was, none of the things the adults in my life once told me I was. My life has been a lie.

  An oversensitive girl to begin with, my self-image plunged. During this time of cynicism and angst I was all raw nerves, reappraising not only myself, but nearly every dictum and every person, including my father. Surely all along he’d seen straight through my childhood “popularity.” Surely he knew it was all about him, John Wayne, and I was just one means to ingratiation. If my father had lied about why people liked me, or if he had only misjudged things, perhaps he had lied or been wrong about others and other things too.

  Perhaps smoking marijuana did not “lead to heroin.”

  Perhaps boys with long hair did not all look “ridiculous.”

  Perhaps every liberal wasn’t “gutless,” and perhaps the Vietnam War was not such a worthy thing.

  Maybe, I told myself as the ’60s boiled and screeched to their turbulent end, I had better start finding out for myself.

  24

  It was a mystery. At fourteen years old, I sensed that breaking away, examining life as unfiltered through John Wayne, was not just what I wanted but something I drastically needed. Why, then, did I feel so perplexed? I was a sophomore in high school, my father still had me literally sitting on his lap, and part of me still wanted to be there, content and protected. Other times when we were out in public, my father’s smallest act could fill me with embarrassment, and I couldn’t wait to escape him.

  It was a mystery.

  I suspect it was just as confusing for him. Like so many fathers, mine did not quite know how to emancipate his children, and did not entirely want to. That this was 1970 only roughened the waters. It was a radically shifting world, and even John Wayne could not deny it.

  But he could certainly still run affairs inside his own home. Older than the rest of my girlfriends’ fathers, he believed in old-fashioned strictures. While my girlfriends all ate dinner at six and could stay out weekend nights until one, I had to eat dinner at five and be home weekend nights by eleven, making me the group dullard who always had to leave everywhere first. I could not walk barefoot out of our house, not even to go to the beach, which was only two doors from our home. That all the kids at Bayshores went barefoot to the beach made no impact on him.

  “My daughter doesn’t walk barefoot,” my father ordered. “My children wear shoes and socks.”

  It seems nitpicky now, but felt important back then to a young teenager, with my shoes and socks just one more glaring sign to the other kids that I didn’t belong. The rare times I mustered the nerve to protest, my father yelled until I cried, then upbraided me for my tears.

  “Why do you cry when I yell at you? What the hell are you crying for? Because you can’t go out with bare feet? Jesus Christ.”

  I was crying about my life. But he couldn’t see that and I couldn’t say so. And moments later, when he was prepared for contrition, I had better be ready as well. Because he was directing every family scene, each familiar beat of it.

  No proponent of youthful self-expression, he once ordered me back to my bedroom when I appeared with too much white makeup lining my eyelids.

  “You look like a clown,” he decided. “Get that goddamn stuff off yo
ur face or you’re not leaving the house.”

  Today I look at old pictures and realize my father was right, I did look clownish beneath all that liner. But, again, at the time I felt steamrolled. In 1970 makeup ran to extremes. For once, I just wanted to blend in.

  Too afraid of him to openly mount a rebellion, I did what teenagers do: I started sneaking around. First, I covertly bought a lavender bikini. I suppose I should have just asked him, but if John Wayne’s daughter could not show her feet in public . . . besides, my father denounced them all—bikinis, hot pants, miniskirts—whenever he saw them on women in commercials. Sophomore year, a girlfriend lived on a house on the cliff and weekends we would go swimming and sunning in her backyard. At the end of the day, some of the other fathers picked up their daughters, still wearing their skimpy suits under their towels. But I’d leave our house in the morning wearing a one-piece, my bikini stuffed into my bag. Before returning home that night, I’d slip into my girlfriend’s bedroom and back into my one-piece. It made me the butt of their jokes, but better that than the object of his rage.

  I also became deceitful regarding my grades. Freshman year I’d been stunned when I’d faltered at school, but when it happened again the next year I felt disheartened. I told myself that I didn’t care, and this was only partly untrue. Unlike so many teenagers, I was never consumed with anxiety over my future. If anything, I was too blasé. Why fret over the shape of things to come when my rich and famous father would always be holding my hand? The matter of grades was hardly resolved, though. My father was still into excellence, not excuses. I might be indifferent, but he would be irate. So I intercepted our mail and altered my D’s to B’s, puzzled but pleased that our teachers used pencils, then praying that my parents would never consult them. Somehow, no one ever found out.

  Privacy also became an issue. Even when teenagers have some, they tell themselves and their friends they don’t. I, in reality, had next to none. I didn’t mind sharing a bedroom with my little sister, Marisa. There was too much silence and separation in our house already. But my father hated closed doors, and expressly forbade that his children’s be shut unless we were dressing or taking showers. Unable to hide from him even inside my bedroom, I started fleeing our house at the slimmest opportunity. I regret much of this now, because it injured him, and perhaps because that’s what I intended.

  It wasn’t rebellion, however, merely because rebellion was in the air (though that was attractive). For years, when my father went off to make a movie, I watched him pack up his bags, put on his Irish hat and walk out the door, then return a few months later feeling fulfilled, get rapidly crazed with boredom, and expect us to drop whatever we had going on and spin again in his orbit. In the past I’d done it, sometimes gladly, but now I was meeting boys, listening to rock and roll, cementing my friendships with girlfriends. I didn’t want to go to Africa and Utah and Texas anymore. Ill-prepared to confront him, and not wanting him to know too much about my private life, I lied when he asked me to go on location, or spend a weekend with him on The Wild Goose. I always had bountiful excuses, but no substantial reasons, and my transparency pained my father even more.

  “Oh, okay,” he said, his giant voice now reduced. “You’d rather be at your friend’s house than be with me. I’m home from making a movie and you’d rather be there. You don’t care that I’m here, do you? You just don’t care.”

  Hugging my father, reiterating my love, I felt such terrible . . . guilt?

  Yes . . . and no. Mixed in with my guilt was the anger of all those repressive years. If still too cowed by him to show it, I was self-aware enough now to recognize that anger inside myself—and to recognize my father’s manipulations. For the first time, my sole ambition in life was no longer to please him.

  Still, I had no excuses and no recourse on my sixteenth birthday, when my father insisted I spend it with him on location in Durango. In his eyes, this was too major a milestone for me to beg out of. Knowing it, I didn’t even try. Too bad my father and I could never really talk: I could have said this birthday was more precious to me than to him, being my Sweet Sixteen, and that getting marooned in beyond-forlorn Durango, without a single person my age, was the last way on earth I wanted to spend it. The film was The Train Robbers. The night of my party, my father brought out a cake and a few of the cast and crew sang happy birthday. He poured champagne all around, including a goblet for a reporter, and another goblet for me.

  “Well, everybody,” he said, “my daughter is sixteen years old. I guess it’s about time she took her first sip of champagne.”

  Smiling as if I were having the time of my life, I lifted my glass as I might a foreign object, the picture of schoolgirl innocence.

  In truth, I yearned for my own home and the camaraderie of my girlfriends. I’d also been drinking on weekends for nearly two years, and had long ago sampled champagne.

  A few months later, Good Housekeeping ran a profile on my father, the family man and the Hollywood star, on location in Durango. My sixteen birthday, it said, was a blissful event for all.

  The incendiary feelings did not come overnight. They had, in fact, been percolating for years, but now they seemed to possess me:

  I don’t want his fame. I don’t want praise from adults whom I’ve never met—I haven’t done anything—and I don’t want contempt from people my age. I’m exhausted with constantly being prejudged, purely through the prism of my father. All my life it has always been, This is John Wayne’s daughter. It has never been. This is Aissa.

  I’ve had enough. I do not want to be John Wayne’s daughter.

  I was surprised to find the thought inside my brain, and yet each time I pushed it out it kept coming disturbingly back. For nearly my whole sophomore year, I played a bizarre game of denial, meeting new people and fabricating last names. I’d introduce myself as Aissa Brooks, Aissa Smith, Aissa Johnson, feigning confusion when I was scoffed at. “Aissa Wayne? Me, John Wayne’s daughter? Sorry. You’ve got me mixed up with some other girl.”

  Of course my ruse rarely worked. Other girls could escape their parents by traipsing out their front door, but I could never outdistance John Wayne. Definitely not in Newport Beach, where I felt his palpable presence wherever I went, but nowhere more than at school.

  “You must be a right-wing nut,” I was flatly told several times by older boys with long hair. “You must be for the war. You’re John Wayne’s daughter.”

  I was also a teenager. Having other kids my age call me “right wing” left me speechless and made me sick. Not yet fifteen, too turned off by politics to firmly grasp the complicated tempest of Vietnam, I was old enough to know that reactionaries were out, and that this rendered my dad—and myself by association—so far out as to be obsolete. I didn’t know how common, how nearly predetermined it is, for children to feel embarrassment toward their parents, whether their parents advocate bigger wars or saving the dolphins. I never considered my long-haired accusers’ home lives, never stopped to think that perhaps when they saw their parents smoking pot, or heard them chanting “Make Love, Not War,” they felt the same twinge I did when my father prattled on about “Commies,” or plastered another bumper sticker— “The Marines are looking for a few good men”—on the fender of his green Pontiac station wagon. Lacking this perspective, certain I must be a rotten person and daughter, I confided my feelings in no one. I did not even tell Debbie, and yet there it was again, my dark deep secret; I was embarrassed to be my father’s daughter.

  As if to magnify my dilemma, to illustrate the gap between myself and the rest of my generation, the Hollywood press came along. First a fan magazine sent a crew out to our house to photograph the John Waynes—“Aissa, you’re dressing for an interview”—and that day we all went through our paces. That my parents no longer shared a bedroom, that I was walking around Newport Beach denying my last name was Wayne, that my father had started slapping my brother Ethan from time to time, did not so much as peek through our sunny veneer. This was our form o
f work, what Hollywood families did. We were old hands at “being on” for the press.

  The instant the photo session ended, I peeled off my knee-length skirt, my fluffy white sweater and cordovan loafers, and forgot about it. When I saw the printed issue several weeks later, it was Oscar night all over again. On the opposite page from our photos the magazine ran a spread on the Elizabeth Taylors. Not only her children, but Liz herself, were all tie-dyed and punked out, while we Waynes seemed mired in the Eisenhower America. The fanzine people, of course, had not said we’d be juxtaposed with Liz and her kids, and I’m sure to many readers the dichotomy was amusing. Even I find it funny, today. Then, it was not exactly the way I envisioned myself appearing in the national press.

  But that was only my vanity. By my sophomore year, my doubts about my father’s conservatism, his high-profile pro-Vietnam stance, had started cutting more deeply. First, when I’d be with my girlfriends and they’d point to older Newport boys I’d never met and say, “That guy just got drafted,” I’d respond with interest, but interest tempered by distance. I didn’t know them, and I didn’t know if they’d ever actually go to war. Then a boy named Rick, a friend of Debbie’s older brother, received his notice. Having a bit of a secret crush on him, I became nervous at the notion of Rick’s fighting. It started me thinking new thoughts, and one day it hit me: “My brother. What about my brother?” Ethan was only nine. His going to Vietnam was a long shot. But if what the commentators kept saying was true, this war started back at the end of the 1950s, and was still looking brutally endless in 1970, then Ethan could go, and then what might befall him? At fifteen, I was adept at telling lies, but the answer I gave myself carried with it the chill of truth: my little brother could die.