by Aissa Wayne
One afternoon at his house, my father said he was leaving. Speaking quietly, but with conviction, he told me he was moving to Mexico.
“I have no reason to stay here. Your mother and I are busted up. The Mexican people love me, and I’m damn near about to give up on the USA. I’ll get a house, I’ll get a smaller boat. You can come down and stay with me. All the children can. There’s nothing quite like Baja.”
Initially I simply didn’t believe him. I knew he adored it down there, both the countryside and the Mexican people, especially Latin women. I knew he was frustrated and angry with the illnesses that plagued him for nearly three years. I also knew my father defied easy labeling, was not the two-dimensional man the myth machine had long made him out to be (often with his cooperation). However brash, a move to Mexico wasn’t beyond my dad.
And I still didn’t believe him.
I was sure he’d continue regaining his health, feel more positive toward his own self, and reembrace the country I knew he still fervently loved beneath his cynical words.
Later, first slowly and then in a flood, I started developing doubt. He certainly appeared serious. In preparation for the move, he began taking Spanish lessons, for the first time in his life, although all three of his wives had been Latin. Three times weekly, his tutor drove to the house and they’d huddle at the small table in the kitchen where Fausto ate his meals. I’d go over and see him, my father playing student, and I’d roll my eyes and he’d chuckle. For once, I thought with some pleasure, he cannot overshadow me. With a Peruvian mother and two Peruvian maids, Fd spoken Spanish fluently for years. My father sounded like . . . John Wayne speaking Spanish.
Though we never discussed potential reverberations, surely he knew they’d be great. U.S. News and World Report once wrote that John Wayne symbolized “the virtues and strengths that Americans like to believe are typical of their country.” It’s one thing for an elderly icon to criticize his troubled country. But had my father really become an expatriate—and told the world why—the shock waves might have been global.
For six months my father dutifully took his lessons, insisting that after the Oscars, after making Candy’s Man, he was packing his rods and reels and heading south for Baja’s rugged grandeur. Neither one of us ever found out if he’d back up his words. Cancer robbed my father’s bittersweet dream.
31
It happened on one of our morning walks. Hands clutching his stomach, abdominal pain etched on his face, in midstride my father doubled over. When he straightened back out he said he was fine, but later that week the burn in his stomach returned and my father consulted a doctor. A biopsy was taken. The doctors said there were no signs of cancer.
When my dad resumed his walks, the razor-sharp pain froze him in place again, again while I was with him. Later, back at the house, he told me it felt like jagged glass had been raked against the inside of his stomach.
“Aissa,” he said softly. “I know I have the Big C again.”
“It can’t be. They did biopsies. You don’t have the Big C. I know you don’t.”
“I have it, Aissa. I feel it inside my body.”
I was not telling my dad what I thought he wanted to hear. Since the doctors spotted no cancer, I thought his discomfort was coming from something else. Later, I learned that certain types of cancer cells can hide out, and my father’s had hidden deep inside the lining of his stomach. When at last they discovered it, the doctors said my father’s cancer was very slow and might have been inside him for months or even years. When first I heard this notion it made me physically ill. As it sank in—cancer might have been killing him, gradually, and nobody knew it—my squeamishness turned to a kind of hatred. Not at the doctors, but hatred at cancer itself, a fickle, cunning disease with phony retreats that foster hope, followed by brutal frontal advances. With cancer, I learned, no one ever really feels certain. Not patients, not family, not even superstar doctors.
By December my father could not stand the smell of most food and mostly ate fruit. He began dropping weight and the doctors urged further exploratory surgery. But Christmas was near, the holiday he so loved, and my dad insisted on being at home with family and friends. As he did every Christmas Eve, he invited a pair of Newport Beach couples, the DeFrancos and the Reafsnyders, to the Bayshores house for dinner. Most Christmas Eves the women cooked and sipped champagne while the men drank liquor and gabbed about sports and politics. This night, my father could not make it through our meal. Excusing himself, he fled the scent of liquor and food and went to lie down. By then, around me, he’d stopped concealing his weakness, but was still professing decent health around his friends. At this revealing moment, it hit me hard just how sick my father felt—too sick to pretend. As the Reafsnyders and DeFrancos left early, I wondered if he’d make it until the following Christmas.
Two weeks later, Barbara Walters arrived at the Bayshores house to interview my dad for one of her prime-time ABC specials. I was struck by how pretty she looked off-camera, and how genuine she seemed. Though weakening day by day, my father had made the deal with Miss Walters’s office several months earlier, and he was determined to honor it. Miss Walters didn’t know, since no one told her, he would start taking tests for cancer the very next morning.
At one point in their talk my father did say he’d be hospitalized the following day, but he owed it to gall bladder trouble. In truth, gallstones had once been discussed as the possible problem, but the theory had been discarded. By then we all feared he had cancer. My father himself told his doctors, “Get rid of anything you find. I don’t care what you have to do. Get it out.” The gall bladder story, one we’d all been instructed to stick to, was contrived for the press. I could see my father started liking Barbara Walters the moment he met her; I could also see how uneasy he felt at leading her on.
If he did have cancer again, the doctors had two prevailing theories. It might have been triggered by his heart surgery, since such a radical jolt to the system can sometimes enliven previously dormant cells. Or it might have been all that hot smoke, passing through my father’s lungs and into his stomach. When I heard that, I felt a pang in my own insides. It makes no difference, remember, how long or how much a person has smoked: the moment they stop they reduce their chances for cancer. But my dad, even after losing one lung to cancer in 1964, had not quit smoking. Oh, he stopped smoking Camels, but first he started chewing tobacco, then he infrequently smoked cigars, then he was smoking cigars all the time.
“I’m not inhaling,” he always said, but he was and all of us knew it. I, for one, never made any real effort to stop him. I dropped a few benign hints but I never said, “I don’t want to lose you—why can’t you stop?” My reluctance came partly from fear and deference, partly because I was smoking myself by the time I entered high school. I smoked behind my parents’ backs, with my girlfriends, struggling to look cool and adult, coughing my brains out, then drowning the scent of Virginia Slims with gum and Binaca. Who knows? Perhaps I was also emulating my father, self-ruinous habits and all.
It’s one more reason I’ll always feel some sorrow that I was afraid of him for so many years. Had I been less hesitant, we might have been free all that time to discuss meaningful things. I’ll never know, but maybe I could have pushed him to give up his cigars. My mother tried to when she quit smoking and drinking herself when we moved to Newport. My father said no, but at least she gave it an honest shot. I just sat there watching him smoke.
32
January 10, 1979, my father entered UCLA Medical Center, located on the college campus in Westwood. The smokescreen was already erected: since he was in fine physical shape, since he had no immediate obligations, John Wayne decided this was the perfect time to treat a chronic gall bladder problem.
After two days of tests the doctors operated, strongly supposing they’d locate the cancer once they cut inside the inner stomach. For three hours we waited without a word in our ninth-floor room at UCLA. It was almost noon when the doctor appeare
d. “I want the Wayne family,” he said, “just the Wayne family, please.”
No, I thought, it can’t be. My father is not dead. Through the haze in my brain I heard someone say, “What is it? What is it?”
The doctor, his face a hard blank slate, did not reply, only gestured to the door, and I felt my hostility rising. Going in, my father had been so weak . . . it was such a grueling delicate operation . . . just say it, damn it. Tell us if he has cancer. Tell us if he survived.
By the time the doctor led us out of the waiting room, down the corridor, into my father’s private room, I had convinced myself the dreaded moment had come. My father’s death. We had not even said goodbye.
“Well,” said the brilliant, icy physician, “our suspicions were correct. Mr. Wayne does have a carcinoma. We have no option but to remove the entire stomach . . .”
After that the doctor said a few more words, but all I heard was murmuring. My father had cancer. He would learn he lost his stomach when he woke up. He’d given the doctors that right, but that would not blunt his horror.
That dreary afternoon the hours lagged on and on and carried us numbly into the night. While his stomach was removed, and a substitute stomach fashioned from his intestines, my father remained in surgery for another six hours. Meanwhile, our phony gall bladder story completely backfired. First told that John Wayne’s operation was purely routine, somehow that night the press learned my father was still in surgery. As print and electronic media inundated UCLA, two colossal tabloid idiots even tried photographing my dad while he lay on the operating table. Somehow, they bypassed security and donned a pair of white lab coats. Hiding their camera, they tried sneaking up to the operating chamber. They were detected before they got in, but we were all furious. How recklessly perverse could the supermarket press get?
Nine hours after they took my father in, nine hours, his doctor resurfaced. They’d excised all the cancer they found, but could not confirm that they’d spotted it all. They would have to continue the biopsies. For now, though, my father was in “satisfactory condition.”
Even in my agony, I felt it was a beginning.
I didn’t know it was also a finish in some way for me. Because from that conversation on, until my father died five months later, my direct contact with his doctors at UCLA was practically nonexistent. Every finding they made, they reported only to Michael Wayne, my forty-five-year-old half brother. Evidently, he and the doctors had forged a private agreement: they’d talk to him, and he’d inform the other six children. I knew we were a large and unwieldy group, and that doctors are busy people. But our Boston group was big, too, and the Mass General doctors were also stretched thin. At this pressing stage of my father’s life, I wanted to hear about his cancer, his good turns as well as bad, from experts and not secondhand. Though the process burned me up, for many weeks I stifled myself and said nothing. At twenty-three years old, I was still sufficiently passive, still intimidated enough by my father’s oldest son, Michael, to outwardly accept what inwardly enraged me.
In future weeks, taking shifts by our father’s bedside, we all became punchy and exhausted. As the inexorability of his death dangled above us, instead of dealing with our stress, fear, and grief in even a semiopen, seminurturing way, the doctors and Michael kept meeting privately, the flow of information grew more and more muddled, and the tension between us mounted. From what I’ve learned since, we were a classic example of how families should not deal with cancer.
I should have expected to hear it this way, but I wasn’t prepared when I did. Three days after the operation, while driving back to UCLA, I jabbed a button on my dashboard and a man on all-news radio detailed the local stories. He said an announcement was issued that morning by a UCLA Medical Center spokesman: “More cancer has been found in actor John Wayne. Lab tests show the cancer has metastasized into his gastric lymph nodes.”
My long deep breaths didn’t help. I had to clench the wheel to remain inside my lane. Metastasized is the bleakest word in the medical language of cancer. It meant my father’s had spread; his surgeons had not found it all. Of course it was nobody’s fault, but hearing it like this—in my car, on the radio, a report on my dad segueing into stocks, weather, and traffic—filled me at first with murderous indignation. They could not tell the whole family, first, before they went public? And who were “they” anyway? Who exactly was making these choices?
By a mile or so later my brain stopped screaming. My thoughts turned back to my father, what this new development meant to him. With radiation or chemotherapy, lymphatic cancer sometimes goes into remission. But far more often lymphatic cancer is fatal.
I drifted through traffic crying.
33
By Valentine’s Day my dad was back home but too sick to eat much, and what he could ingest he could not keep down. As his weight dropped all the way to 170 pounds, his face became so gaunt I saw features to it I never knew existed. His upper body, once so robust, lay withered and wasted, deflated to half its normal size. By that Valentine’s Day, only my father’s eyes had not betrayed him. With his face shrunken they looked even bigger, and they still shone clear and calm and resolute. Even when I was deeply depressed, I could still lose myself for a time in his incandescent blue eyes. In my father’s eyes, I could still see the same strong man who strode through my childhood.
That winter, my father received few visitors. Pat Stacy was often around, and for that I was grateful. My father, remember, had a weakness few people knew about: he could not bear to be alone. By then, my mother was keeping her distance, not wanting to burden my dad, but also unsure of what his relationship with Pat had become. At this lonely time in his life, he and my mother spoke only on the phone, and even then only rarely.
That winter I went to his house nearly every day. And despite his departing flesh, my father’s spirit slowly started advancing. Though he no longer spoke of Mexico, he vowed to get well, to begin radiation, to go to the Oscars that spring, and to resume his career that summer. By then I’d seen his X rays’ blackened shadows, and yet when I heard him make these pronouncements, I found myself believing. My father had taken a stand, and once he took a stand it was always extremely hard to get him to yield it.
As spring neared he spent less time inside and more outside on the patio, basking in the sun and ocean air, gearing up for April’s Oscars, which by then had become my father’s holy grail. Early that March, rumors of John Wayne’s imminent death had swept through Hollywood. One day he read an item about himself in the morning paper, and when I came over that afternoon he was sitting outside in his favorite spot, staring across the bay at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club. “I’ll show those SOBs,” my father said, hellbent. “Those bastards think I’m dying. Nothing is happening to me!”
On Monday, April 9, I did not accompany him to the Academy Awards. There was a shortage of tickets that year for presenters, and my father had promised Marisa, who’d only been three when he won for True Grit, that one day he’d take her with him to the Oscars. Perhaps he believed this would be his last chance.
The afternoon of the show I stopped in at my father’s suite at the Bonaventure Hotel, a short drive from the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles, the venue for that night’s telecast. To appear less emaciated, by then he’d begun wearing loose-fitting clothes around the house and extra layers of clothing the few times he went out in public. For the Oscars, he had ordered a smaller tuxedo, but kept losing weight in the interim. That afternoon, his new tux already too large, he put on a wet suit beneath it to make himself look heavier.
Along with his weight, he felt anxious about the best picture award he’d been chosen to present. He did not want to mangle names, which even at his best my father was prone to do. He was most concerned about Warren Beatty, the producer-star of Heaven Can Wait. Warren Beatty, my father said, hated it when people called him Warren Beety. Determined to say it correctly, my father practiced again and again in the mirror: “Warren Beatty. Warren Beatty. Warren Beatty.
”
Late that afternoon I drove back to Newport alone to make it home in time for the show, but a part of me was hoping my dad would decide on a last-minute cancellation. For all I knew this night meant to him, when I left him he looked peaked. For several weeks he’d had trouble merely standing for any extended duration, and now he was sick and the Oscars was such a long show and best picture award always came at the very end. I was scared he might be exhausted by then, walk out, and collapse on national TV. Even if he recovered, I knew what that would do to my father’s pride.
My father, of course, showed up, and by then I had changed my mind. He’d been so dead set on making this engagement, to miss it now could debilitate him even more than sticking it out could. That evening I watched the awards on TV with a handful of friends, and the show ran long as usual. Finally, the producers ran a clip of Bob Hope, pulled from the Oscar one year before, when my father was bedridden at Massachusetts General.
“Duke, we miss you tonight,” Bob Hope said. “We expect to see you amble out here in person next year, because nobody else can walk in John Wayne’s boots.”
From the image of Mr. Hope, the camera swung back to Johnny Carson, this evening’s emcee. “Ladies, Gentleman,” Johnny Carson said, “Mr. John Wayne.”
By the time my father reached the Music Center stage, the industry crowd rose as one and its standing ovation swelled to a human crescendo. They clapped so heartfelt and long—for the voice, the walk, the classic lines and scenes, his bravery and his will—my father could not start his speech. Watching at home I barely breathed. Pride welled in my throat, and my heart said, Keep on clapping forever, let it wash over him, he needs your love, it will give him strength. But my rational mind said, Stop, he can’t stand up, stop and let him get off, can’t you see he’s not going to make it?