John Wayne (12 page)

As John Wayne's child, it was difficult to tell.

Making self-discovery even murkier, my childhood was filled with artifice. When my father and I were under the public stare, or on exhibit for the press, I found myself endlessly posturing. I might be famished or crabby, my parents might have just scolded me in the car, but I had to mask my emotions, smiling angelically for the clamoring paparazzi when invariably they said: “Stop, Duke. Let's take a picture of you and your family.” In moderation this was tolerable, even flattering, but paparazzi and moderation do not coexist.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop
. When one is an otherwise-sheltered child, the sound becomes a form of shell shock.

Inside our home, when we opened our doors to notebooks and cameras, my behavior had to be just as carefully modulated. As did most public figures, my father understood the value of the press and also the damage it could unleash. After his messy, highly public divorce to Chata, he had earned a reputation as a hard-drinking womanizer and hell-raiser. As a corrective, he had since worked very hard at rebuilding his all-American, family-man image. It was not all public relations, but there existed a sizeable gap between veneer and reality, between the beaming, nurturing clan we presented to the American public and family life as we actually lived it. Determined to keep this family picture pristine, my father took no chances. In the presence of the inquiring press, he forbade even a trace of domestic upheaval. As an appendage to his image, I was conditioned to wear my best clothes and most luminous smile and pretend that life as a Wayne was always idyllic. As instructed by my dad, I spoke politely only when spoken to, and never became expansive.

“If you don't open your mouth, Aissa, then you can't get in trouble,” he told me repeatedly throughout my childhood and, without fail, prior to any meeting with the press. “The
only way to get in trouble, the only way for people to think you're a jerk, is if you open your mouth.”

If this was fundamentally correct, perhaps it was not the best advice to an overdependent young girl who would one day become a woman and no longer have her father to orchestrate her life. Through my puberty, adolescence, and young womanhood, my father's strongly stated words stayed with me. Still playing Daddy's Little Girl, I tried to look pretty, shrunk from all confrontations, let my father solve my problems, kept my convictions to myself. After my father died and I had no choice but to try and grow up, even then I found it hard to express my opinions. I didn't
know
what I believed in. My Hollywood princess childhood, my controlling father—and my own willingness to be treated this way, long after I should have known better—had not prepared me to think and act for myself.

As a child, I hated most formalized photo sessions. Bad enough that the implicit threat of my father's authority was enough to make me nervous and censor my words. Bad enough that I acted so phony, more like some Hollywood cliché of a little girl—prim, poised, proper, and perfect—than a bonafide flesh-and-blood child. But on top of all that, the process itself numbed the childhood mind. Granted, some talented and considerate media and Hollywood studio photographers moved in and out and let us return to our lives. But others wanted every camera angle, against every backdrop on our estate, as insurance they would not squander their chance to photograph a major star. And instead of relieving the pressure, often my father turned it up.

“Come over here,” he'd mutter so only I could hear him. “Closer. Put your arm around me. Smile. Just pretend you love me, okay?”

Since I didn't have to pretend, I felt some resentment at having to prove to the world, to strangers, how much the Wayne family adored one another. Advertising our love seemed to make it less real, to diminish it.

In the way of many children of rich and famous parents, I suppose I wanted it both ways. At times I enjoyed conspiring
with my father in keeping his image bright and shining, and at times I felt sickened by all the calculation. I craved for people to love me the way they loved him, and I wanted to be left alone. I clung to my position on the pedestal, using my family name to meet important people, to get into USC without having the grades, and yet fantasized many nights about being a normal child.

The latter wasn't feasible, of course. Normal children did not go to the Academy Awards or meet Frank Sinatra. Their mothers did not come home happily sloshed from lunch because Liz Taylor had insisted on ordering two martinis per person, per round. And normal children did not stand in the wings at industry functions watching Hollywood wannabes and hangers-on literally standing in line, waiting to pay homage to their fathers. When his fans received their turn, they all but knelt at the shrine of John Wayne. They wooed him, flattered him, desperately tried to impress him with their wit. I'd watch my surrounded father at these affairs, pondering if he enjoyed it or if he abhorred it. Although they were all around him, it seemed to me they did not want to know him, but only to try and absorb the special light that shone on John Wayne.

At such strange moments I'd always feel some loneliness myself, some jealousy and deprivation.
Who were these unctuous strangers and why was he paying more attention to them?
Nevertheless, these incidents paled when held next to what happened in Madrid when I was seven years old.

In 1963, my family accompanied my father to Spain for the filming of
Circus World
. With my dad working fourteen-hour days for director Henry Hathaway, I was thrilled when he awoke one day and said his morning was free: How would I like to stroll, only the two of us, through a village on the outskirts of Madrid? On days off like this, when my father felt guilty about working long hours, I often asked him for presents. I tried not to, knowing it was wrong, but I couldn't help myself. My father said yes when I asked him that morning, but the festive-looking storefronts weren't quite open for business. That was fine with me. In between the shops on
either side, the red-brick courtyard was dotted by pretty trees and fountains. It was a cloudless immaculate day and no one had noticed my father. How buoyant life felt at that moment.

As if to prove that life never comes as advertised, and that even sunny days can turn horrific, our trouble started then. I saw three men trotting in our direction, smiling and surely friendly, yet I felt my father's hand close tighter around my own. He began moving faster, away from the stores, toward the more spacious middle of the courtyard, and now the people were screaming: “HEY JOHN WAYNE! HEY JOHN WAYNE! DUKE—DUKE!” Quickly there were more than three men. There were several, then dozens, then so many I couldn't count them. The throng was mostly men, yet even some women and children seemed angry. I didn't understand. Spain was so beatific, and the Spanish so loved my dad. They especially flocked to his Westerns and for years took pride when the Spanish press reported that all three Mrs. John Waynes had been Latins.

Then the crush of human bodies came upon us. A man ripped at my father's shirt and the rest of the pack grew braver. Hands clawed at my father's pants, his hair, his neck, and then people were
jabbing, jabbing, jabbing
, pointed pens and autograph books, inches from my father's crimson face. Still clutching my left hand, he was shoved ahead of me—I felt a yanking pain in the socket of my left shoulder.

“Get off, get off!” my father screamed. “Get the fuck
off
!” With one hand he reeled me back to him; with the other he reached for the cards in his pocket. Knowing his allure to the Europeans, before we'd left America my father had had cards printed bearing his name and autograph. Before that morning in Madrid, the other times that we'd appeared in public, his cards had appeased the crowds of fans who gathered to see America's John Wayne. In fact, he had grown so dependent on his cards, he'd become paranoid the few times he'd forgotten them.

This time the cards could not help us. I saw no reverence in this morning's faces; some faces looked contorted in fury. A skinny man with bugging eyes tried swiping the stack of
cards from my father's hand and a bigger man threw a looping punch at the first. My dad flung the cards high in the air and behind him, and some people broke off to fight for the cards. Through the churning feet and legs, I saw an old man bend down to snatch a card and be kicked in the face by a boy. The back of my legs gone numb, I was struck in the small of my back by what felt like a pointed knee and my breath rushed out as my hand was torn from my father's. Shoved and turned and smothered, now I was on the ground screaming: “DADDY! DADDY! DADDY!”

I couldn't see him. “DADDY!”

“AISSA? AISSA? GODDD-DAMMMIT!”

I heard my father's voice, stood up, tried to locate it. Thank God he was tall—as the mob surged back toward the storefronts, I saw only the top of his head poking out above the swarm. The sight of him, surrounded, flooded my system with so much adrenaline my body started trembling, and I felt my terror mixing with hatred. Running and thrashing to get myself back to my dad, I overran the pack, then flung myself back into it. Still screaming “DADDY,” I felt sickened by the stink of perspiration. Somehow my father did the rest. Barking “Aissa!” he grabbed my wrist as a door flew open. We stumbled inside and a small mustachioed man slammed the door behind us, hurried and locked it. Seeing it myself made it no more believable: people pressed their faces into the shopkeeper's glass. They banged with fists and scratched with fingernails. The three of us stared at the humans gone haywire, then the shopkeeper yelled, “
Policia, policia
,” and my father pulled me away toward the back of the store. Still wheezing and red faced, still screaming “bastards,” my father appeared unharmed, having lost nothing more than his poise. Turning me around so my back faced the mob, he said, “It's over, honey, it's over now.” But I couldn't stop crying and stuttering. Waiting for the police, I asked no questions, and my father had no explanations. I wished we had never set foot in Spain. I wished that my father was not so monstrously famous.

I don't recall when I first became mischievous. But I know it happened early, and that I was intensely circumspect around my dad. Still, this did not deter me from misbehaving when he was not around. As an acolyte to a carefully scrutinized Hollywood emperor, my chances to be naughty were too temptingly rare. During my adolescence in Newport Beach in the early '70s, my rebellions would grow bolder with the recklessness of the times. Unknown to the press or my dad, I experimented with diet pills, marijuana, and getting arrested. As a child in Encino, I settled for terrorizing our maids.

Aside from my father's exalted celebrity, his financial need and mental compulsion to work hard and often, he and my mother back then were still very social creatures. There
were charity events, dinner parties, movie openings, Republican fundraisers. To attend to the housework and aid with my supervision, my mother hired two Peruvian maids. Consuela and Angela Saldana were dark-haired sisters, brought from Latin America to Southern California while both were in their twenties. They were part of the fabric of my childhood, and I did horrible things to each of them.

Consuela was younger and more credulous; for the first few years I could always fool her. I performed evil acts when she wasn't looking, then, when confronted, I resumed being the Good Aissa, and sweetly naïve Consuela believed my paper-thin lies. Even after I began tormenting her openly, Consuela did not have it in her to inform on me to my parents. One evening my parents entertained friends for late dinner, and I disobeyed Consuela when she told me it was bedtime. Feeling I had a better idea, I ran from my upstairs bedroom into my parents', jumping up and down on their enormous bed. Consuela followed, leaning toward me and gently explaining why a young girl needed her rest. I stopped leaping and startled both of us, reaching out and grabbing Consuela's midnight-black hair.

“I am not going to bed!” I hissed. Fixated on my own balled fist, I unpried my fingers.

Rubbing her scalp as she moved for the door, Consuela said softly, “This time, I am telling your father.”

That wouldn't do.

My father had never seen the other Aissa, the Bad Aissa. Part of me wanted to know: Could he see this unpleasant side of me and still love me? Fearful the answer might be no, I scrambled off my parents' bed and into the hallway.

Watching Consuela wind calmly down our spiral staircase, still maintaining her dignity, prompted me to entirely surrender mine. Inexplicably furious, I leaned over the railing and spit. For a moment Consuela stood still as a picture, then she turned back upstairs with a near imperceptible glance at the saliva on her blue cotton blouse. Avoiding my eyes, she looked not incensed but profoundly unhappy. Considering an excuse, I bolted instead for my room and started
whimpering. How cruel she was for making me do what I did.

Consuela never snitched. Though from time to time I still abused her, something had altered between us, and I found myself drifting to her older sister. Slightly built and completely self-contained, Angela Saldana never wore lipstick or makeup. Her one arresting feature—her scuplted cheekbones—were made to look severe by her paper-fine cropped-off black hair. Having hired Angela first, and then Consuela in the wake of her older sister's excellence, my parents trusted Angela unconditionally, and gave her permission to treat me as she saw fit. Back in Encino, in some ways it was Angela who raised me. At that point in my life, my parents were still like fairy tale characters to me: grand, beautiful characters whom I loved, but characters living refracted lives, which I had to share with many others. Mornings, it was Angela who dressed me and bathed me. At night, Angela stood guard while I brushed my teeth, then ensured that I flick off my flashlight and stop sneak-reading books under my covers. Unlike Consuela, there was no duping the older sister. From the beginning, Angela Saldana saw right through me. That she knew who I was and still seemed approving made me love her madly.