John Wayne (11 page)

Ethan, Pilar, and Aissa (1963)

John and Marissa, his third child from his marriage with Pilar (1968)

It was a lovely myth but it couldn't endure. Unlike my father's movies, no one scripts real life, or real families, and little about them can be predicted. And so, one day on the Hollywood set of
The Comancheros
, my life with my dad began undergoing drastic change.

Another child might have more readily shrugged it off. But until that indelible morning, my father had never shouted at me. He'd never shaken me. The one time he'd nearly spanked me, he was not able to go through with it. I'd spoken disrespectfully back to my mother, my father had unexpectedly entered the room, and he told me to sit outside and contemplate my spanking, because he would be back in two minutes. Sitting on the edge of our cushioned patio chair, I was curiously uncowed. I'd been slapped a few times by my mother, spanked by Angela, our Peruvian maid, and yet I did not believe for an instant my father would hit me—not his little princess. It wasn't until he stepped back outside gripping a leather belt that my eyes filled with tears. When he turned me over his lap, my father raised his belt . . . but I was met with only silence. He suddenly helped me back to my feet, and I saw that my father was settling for a lecture.

Because of our past, I was unprepared for what came that day on the set of
The Comancheros
. Fittingly, for a child of Hollywood, it happened in front of strangers.

As he had in
The Alamo
, my dad had cast me again in one of his pictures. In what was not exactly a stretch for either one of us, he played Jake Cutter, a cantankerous but softhearted Texas Ranger, and I portrayed his adoring grandchild. I don't recall my lines—the scene ended up cut—but I was supposed to deliver them only after I'd fingered my father's neckerchief. As he held me in his arms on his front porch, I ruined the take, forgetting about his neckerchief. Veins in his neck bulging like cords, my father gripped me,
and shook me by my shoulders. “You're supposed to play with my tie!” he screamed. “You're supposed to play with my tie!”

My father stared straight at me, but did not seem to be seeing me. Always so focused, his glazed eyes made me frightened, and I felt my body stiffen inside his tensed hands. The kleig lights burned hot as acid churned in my stomach. I could feel the gazes of strangers, cast and crew I barely knew, and I felt deeply self-conscious. I didn't cry, my father released his grip, and somehow I finished the scene correctly. But my father's apologies couldn't slow down my system, or soothe my humiliation. The rest of that day when he came around, telling small jokes and lifting me in the air, I was furtive. Trying to smile and look normal, I did not understand what had happened. But intuitively I knew it meant trouble.

In 1961 my father's life was also changing, in intractable ways I was far too young to understand. It was not just the financial stress from
The Alamo
. In the course of two jarring and melancholic years, several of his oldest friends had died.

Grant Withers, a journeyman character actor, went first at the age of fifty-five. They'd been friends for thirty years, since the days when they'd broken in at Fox, then partied together on John Ford's yacht, the
Araner
. Part of Ford's band of colorful character actors, Grant Withers could always find work but could rarely restrain his behavior offscreen. Including one to Loretta Young, he had five failed marriages, largely due to his drinking. After many attempts at reform and rehabilitation—some of them aided by loans from John Ford and my father—Grant Withers ingested a bottle of tranquilizers and a quart of vodka. His suicide note asked his friends to, “forgive me for letting you down. It's better this way.” My mother says my father could not stop shaking when he read these words.

When Ward Bond died next in the winter of 1960, my dad took it much harder. The man I once called “Daddy” was also fifty-five, only two years older than my father, when he suffered
a massive heart attack in a Dallas hotel room. His whole life, my father said he had never found a closer friend.

Having met playing football at USC, they didn't become buddies until 1928 when they both worked on John Ford's
Salute
. Ford had asked my father to help him cast the movie with football players he knew at USC. My dad didn't ask Bond, considering him a loudmouth, but Bond showed up anyway as the cast was boarding a train to leave for location. Seeing his former teammate, my father called Bond “too ugly for making movies.” Bond replied, “Screw you.” Ford ordered them both to shut up and get on the train. From this telling moment sprung a three-way friendship only halted by death. My father was drawn to strong, spirited men, unintimidated by life or by John Wayne.

For thirty years, while Bond and my father called John Ford “Pappy” or “Coach,” the three men made movies, drank Irish whiskey, played cutthroat bridge, and cheated for pennies at poker. There was plenty of ragging and needling, and all three men were notorious practical jokers. Ford and my father often ganged up on Bond, whose pronounced rear end became their running foil. Once Ford and my dad had their picture taken while standing on either side of a horse's large rump. Bond soon received the snapshot with his pals' inscription: “Thinking of you.”

Ward Bond was a hulking physical man, like my father, but when together they were frequently childish. Around Ward Bond, my dad could find release from the pressures of stardom. According to family legend, one boozy night at John Ford's house Bond and my dad were spending the evening when Bond passed out in the bed assigned to my father. Wanting Bond to wake up so the party could continue, my dad poured vodka on his sleeping friend's chest. Igniting it, he then set Ward Bond's chest on fire.

The three men shared more than youthfully wild times. Their affection ran deep and was powerful. For several weeks after Ward Bond left them, my mom says his two friends' grief was unrelievable. The day of his funeral, Bond's body was placed in a flag-draped casket; my father,
his resonant voice cracking, spoke the eulogy: “We were the closest of friends, from school days right on through. This is just the way Ward would have wanted it—to look out on the faces of good friends. He was a wonderful, generous, big-hearted man.”

By the end of 1961, death was more than a dismal abstract for my father. It had stolen his friends and darkened his world.

With reflection, I know now that the early '60s were a watershed in my father's personal life and in my own life with him. For it was around this time, and increasingly over the next several years as sickness ravaged his patience, that it became harder and harder to salve his insecurities, avoid his temper, and sate his urgent need for his family's attention and love.

It was also the time that I began fearing him. More and more in our home, my father insisted I demonstrate my affection. It might have related to the mortality he must have been feeling. Or perhaps it went all the way back to his relationship with his mother, his sense that she never loved him as much as his younger brother. But I think it mostly had to do with the guilt he suffered after divorcing Josephine, and not being present to raise their four children. “He's still angry at me,” my dad warned my mother before she first met Michael Wayne and his other kids with Josephine. “I'm afraid he always will be. It breaks my heart. I let those kids down.” He also told my mother, “Don't expect too much from them at first. They haven't forgiven me yet.” When my mother said the divorce had been ten years ago, perhaps the children were over it by now, my father just sadly shook his head.

Whatever the cause, he now required ongoing proof of my love. For nearly the next ten years, if he was in a room and I entered it, I could not pass by without kissing him and telling him I loved him. “If you're going through the room, Aissa, come up and give me a kiss,” he would say. “You have to kiss me before you can cross by.” Our relationship had
always been physical, so at first his words seemed harmless. But when it changed from a habit into a rule, I began feeling uneasy, resentful, and threatened. We were not a normal family, remember. We rarely went out to a movie, a dinner, or to Disneyland when we needed some added space from each other, because we knew that people would see John Wayne and we might be mobbed. Now, in supposedly the sanctuary of home life, I felt scrutinized and pressured by my own father. My affection for him, expressed so spontaneously when I was a little girl, sprung from fear and obligation as much as free will. Because if his family failed the test, if my father did not feel smothered in our love, he might erupt. It would never happen right then—he was too prideful and too repressed to admit why he was mad—but several claustrophobic minutes later, and then often triggered by something with scant significance. When my brooding father ignited, his eyes became smaller, harder, darker—almost a steel blue. Since his rage was always delayed and indirect, it all became so unfathomable, so disquieting, trying to decipher what might set him off. So I learned to be cautious of my actions and words. I learned to walk small around my father.

His explosions were not reserved for us. I've been told that he once shoved Richard Widmark up against a wall, on the
Alamo
set, when the actor constantly called into question my father's directing decisions. I only learned of that after he died, but as a child I saw him rage at other people on his film sets. It was awful to witness. Though he never cursed at his family, when my father yelled at adults he peppered his speech with obscenities. I'd cringe and hold my breath until it was over, a tightness inside my throat. I never saw him put his hands on anyone, but he was a powerful man, and I knew he could hurt someone if he chose to. Even today I hate to hear grown men yelling. Even if I know it won't involve me, or can sense it will not end in violence, the yelling makes me jumpy, because sometimes I still hear my father's voice inside their own.

Fortunately, my father's fits of anger had a short life and
no middle ground, extinguishing just as suddenly as they flared. At home, he never sat afterwards and simmered, or transferred the onus to us by claiming we were to blame. His desire to calm me back down, to let me know the mean man inside him had gone, always felt sincere. After every episode, my father immediately, fervently apologized. “Oh my God,” he'd always say, “I'm so sorry. I love you, Aissa. I'm so sorry.” As I became older and understood more, I could practically see him thinking:
Oh no. I've scared them and now they won't love me. Did they ever?
Then he'd always try winning the love back.

Still, this hardly cured everything. He was not a normal-sized man and his voice was loud to begin with. When his body and voice were charged with hostility, my father shrunk the scale of everything around him. At times I felt so tiny I thought he might shout me into the floor. No matter how earnest, no amount of contrition could undo all that.

No one can say for sure what makes human beings act as they do, what fills them with such ire, but I don't think my father ever
intended
to hurt us or frighten us. I don't think he blew up with premeditation, or took pleasure from the cringing expressions we wore on our faces. It is, I think, a common trait among men whose psyches crash back and forth between pride and insecurity: my father lashed out when he felt himself getting weak.

When I was in kindergarten, one of the local television affiliates dubbed Tuesday evenings “John Wayne Night.” For the sake of his fans in Los Angeles County, they faithfully aired
Red River
, or
The Searchers
, or
The Wings of Eagles
, or my personal favorite,
The Quiet Man
. Watching cartoons one weekend morning with my mother's girlfriend's daughter, I turned to her and said, “My daddy's on TV every Tuesday night. What night is your daddy on TV?”

If a child's purity provides its own best protection, it's all too brief and fragile. More so, perhaps, if the child is born to a man called Duke, a man on a first-name basis with America. Throughout my abnormal childhood, in layers and by degrees, the special burdens and blessings of inherited fame
revealed themselves to me. As the daughter of a Hollywood superstar, I frequently basked in the aura of being called “Wayne.” But sometime I wanted out from beneath the weight of my father's gigantic stature, out from inside his shadow, where I could just be myself, whoever that might be.