John Wayne (15 page)

And then we were off! From the day we left the dock at Newport my father was never easier to be around. Before we were joined in the noisy ports of call by his party-loving comrades, I spent long hours alone with him, and was pleased to glimpse new sides of him. Out at sea, my father never seemed mired in preoccupations, and minor concerns could not provoke him. When I asked about the moon's hidden sway over the tides, why the sharks we spotted looked so essentially evil yet the dolphins spun and romped in the wake of our boat, why each sundown he searched for the evening star, and why he always called the ocean “she,” he not only heard my voice, my father heard my words, and he answered me eagerly and patiently.

But then, one early morning, when the sea was cobalt
blue and the coast only a long green line, my ever-changing father discombobulated me.

“When I die,” he said, “I don't want to miss the ocean. I want to stay here. That's why I don't want to be buried, I want to be cremated when I die. Then take me out and scatter me over the ocean, because that's where my heart is.”

My father, like that night in my bedroom, was not making any sense. Seven years old, I understood that some people die, but I'd certainly never considered that death could come for my dad. Sure, I had noted that he was much older than the fathers of all my girlfriends, but the fact had no weight. My father was not a normal man, so he could not be measured in normal terms. He personified power, and even the thinnest possibility of his death was so preposterous as to not be worth a moment of my time. His words seemed so strictly out of place, on this fine clear day, and yet stranger still was my father's expression. Though speaking of his death, he looked hopeful, even serene, wholly unlike a man who was daunted by life's limitations. In fact, I was starting to see, when our ship was underway and my father was feeling the tang of brisk, cool, salted air, there was little or nothing of life that did not excite and intrigue him.

This meant he was at his very best, and I thought the trip would be good for him. I felt confident the trip would be good for us all. Never was a confidence less justified.

The wickedest storm of the trip hit while we sat anchored at a Mediterrean port. I heard it first, a dull roll of faraway thunder. Then I saw lightning striking all around, lacerating the sky. Soon the thunder came in louder, sharper cracks and my parents' friends rushed to the stern. Over their heads I could see orange flames. A hillside home was burning, a man swore he had seen it struck by lightning, and a woman began to sob. Big drops of water pounded our deck and in moments everyone was wet.
The Wild Goose
spanned 136 feet, yet she rocked now like a toy boat in a rowdy child's bathtub. Whipped by the new moon, the ocean crashed inside our living room. When the sea rose again and drenched our downstairs cabin, all the adults looked nervously to my father. Even some of
the highly capable crew stood frozen in place, no one assuming leadership. The sobbing woman then became hysterical. “I've never been out in lightning! My God! I've never been out in it!” She chanted this over and over, until I felt vexed almost beyond the point of endurance. I knew she couldn't, but I felt like screaming “Stop!”

My father went to her then. He didn't touch her, and I couldn't make out his words through the heavy darkness and rain. She quit her sobbing, though, and soon started giggling in a high-pitched girlish tone. Several adults started laughing with her, and even one of the men made light of his own fear. The rain still fell in earnest, but the lightning strikes had receded and the storm appeared in retreat.

It wasn't. Later that evening the black clouds burst again. Though the sea stayed out of our ship, it battered her sides on and off through the night. By the time my father and I rose with the sun to survey the damage, the winds had died and the sea had flattened. The adults appeared topside around nine, looking puffy-faced and drowsy, but by mid-afternoon they had drunk, gambled, regained their vim. I could tell by their manner and conversation that they were pleased with themselves, as if the night before they had passed some collective test. I was pleased with my father, who had quietly shared his mettle.

I had never seen my father so flustered. What the savage storm couldn't do, Grace Kelly could.

With our ship moored in Monte Carlo, my father had planned a rare early night. I think he was still worn out by the visit of the William Holdens, who had just flown back to their home in Nairobi, Africa. My dad was extremely fond of Bill Holden, but from the moment they'd stepped on
The Wild Goose
, he and his wife Ardis had bickered nearly nonstop. Apparently Mr. Holden's marriage was not holding together, and a heavy drinker anyway, he started binging. Though not in the habit of imbibing day and night, my father and his old friend drank steadily for the better part of two weeks. When my father drank in front of me, he was prone
to act sloppier, sillier, more gregarious, never mean, but sometimes obnoxious. When Mr. Holden drank he seemed not to change at all: unerringly kind to everyone else, he fought constantly with his spouse.

Between the boozing and the tension between his guests, when the Holdens left my father sought little more than a private night with my mom in their master bedroom. But that night my parents were first disturbed by me—I couldn't sleep and crept to their bedroom—and several hours later by a member of our crew. “It's Princess Grace!” he announced. “It's Princess Grace! She's coming on board!”

It was after midnight. Running to the mirror, my father said “Jesus!” Though sleeping soundly I woke up quickly, desperately wanting to meet Princess Grace. My parents had met her earlier at a party hosted by movie mogul Jack Warner, honoring her engagement to Prince Rainier, when Grace Kelly was leaving Hollywood. I, on the other hand, had seen her only on TV and in my mother's magazines. Even there, her fresh pure skin looked aglow. She was the most radiant woman I'd ever seen, and I yearned to see her in person. My hopes were dashed by my father. “It's very late,” he said in a tone with no room for rebuttal. “You're a little girl, and we're in a hurry.”

A hurry? He was positively rattled. Rushing to peel off his pajamas, his thick fingers fumbling at little buttons, he finally cursed and quit in exasperation. While my mother lagged behind a little longer, John Wayne marched out to greet the Princess of Monaco wearing his silk pajamas hidden beneath his clothes.

Several days later, in Portofino, still feeling pouty over not meeting my first authentic princess, it barely registered when my father was called to work. Henry Hathaway was prepared to shoot
Circus World
, so we flew directly to Madrid, where my parents had rented a villa belonging to Ava Gardner. During their tempestuous affair, Miss Gardner had shared this home with Frank Sinatra. Now, behind the actress' villa, an unheated pool was cracked and dirty, and squawking chickens tromped through Ava Gardner's
tomatoes. I found it kind of neat, and bohemian; hating it, my mother called it “barely livable.” Already working long hours for Henry Hathaway, my father did not seem to care either way. Exhausted, all he wanted at night was food and a bed.

It was only a few days later that my father and I were mobbed near Madrid. Despite this trauma, I don't recall hearing my parents discuss it. Then again, they were not talking much about anything. I could tell they were not getting along well; I wanted to go home. But our trip was still young, the mobbing only prelude to the nightmare.

The least of my family's problems,
Circus World
itself was well on its way to failure. In 1963, Rita Hayworth was only forty-five, but her once-soaring career was in decline. My father had never worked with her, and never hoped to again. A consummate professional, he did not comprehend why a veteran actress arrived chronically late, without knowing her lines, only to start acting surly to peers. Alienating him further, when he and my mother dined out with Miss Hay worth near the onset of filming, she was nasty and condescending to waiters and busboys. That was anathema to my father. “Never lose the common touch,” he told me throughout my life. “Never think anyone is better than you, but never assume you're superior
to anyone else. Try and be decent to everyone, until they give you reason not to.”

My father's opinion of Rita Hayworth notwithstanding, neither he nor his leading lady tried keeping their children from playing together. While our parents made bad chemistry on-screen and off, I cavorted on the sidelines with Rita's young daughter, Yasmin. Near the end of her mother's life, when Miss Hayworth tragically got Alzheimer's disease, it was Yasmin who put her own life on hold to caretake her mother.

Late that November, as filming lagged on and on, we learned that someone had shot President Kennedy. In Spain, even more so than back in America, the early reports were conflicting, making it unclear whether Kennedy was dead or only wounded. When the confusion finally abated, we heard the sickening truth: John F. Kennedy was assassinated. That we were not home to experience our shock and grief with other Americans only made this obscenity more disturbing.

I have been told that my father had great dislike for all the Kennedy men, but the only ill will I witnessed myself was toward Teddy. Even before Chappaquiddick in 1969, my father watched Ted Kennedy on TV and branded him a liar and a phony. “This guy says he only cares about issues. Bullshit. He cares about getting power, and he'll say and do whatever he has to to get it—just like every other politician. If he'd just admit he's like everyone else. Ted Kennedy's so fake he makes me sick.”

After the opaque events of Chappaquiddick, my father was incredulous then outraged. An evening news junkie, a religious reader of
Time
and
Newsweek
, he habitually groused at the curious predilections of certain public servants, but until Chappaquiddick I'd never seen him so worked up. One night after dinner, watching yet another report, my father went ballistic.

“Jesus Christ, it's a cover-up!” he ranted. “Anyone else would at least get indicted! They're letting him off because he's a Kennedy. That family's got too much goddamn pull!” As the televised story continued, I could see my father
becoming hotter and hotter. He snatched a metal paperweight, hurling it straight at Ted Kennedy's visage, shattering our expensive TV. My father, I surmised, was not a rational man when it came to the senator from Massachusetts.

If John Wayne bore such animus for Ted's older brother Jack, he never revealed it to me. Although he deplored his politics, although he voted for Nixon, my father gave JFK high marks for presidential leadership. After John Kennedy's sudden and senseless murder, my parents were more forlorn than I'd seen them in years.

We were all depressed and displaced. We needed to finish this movie, go home to California, and the balm of familiar surroundings. Instead we were still abroad, living in rented quarters, on a trip that now seemed doomed.

Late one night in my bed, yawning and tired but unable to sleep, I heard angry sounds emanating through the wall separating my room from my parents'. They were fighting. I was unprepared—back then their fights were still infrequent—and this only heightened my terror. In the past when they had fought, my father had done the shouting, my mother had lapsed into sullen, silent indifference. Though my mother knew she could not compete with his volume, her silence had not been submissive. She knew nothing annoyed my father more than when people simply ignored him.

Now, my mother was screaming back, and the sound through the wall kept building and building. My father sounded malicious, out of control. He was swearing, the first time I'd heard him cursing my mother. For the only time in my life I feared he might strike her.

I lay there flinching, obsessively hugging Ava Gardner's pillow, hating my life, wishing that I was in my own bed. In my bedroom at home, during my parents' rare bad fights like this one, I sometimes imagined I was elsewhere. I pretended now I was way up in the moonglow, vaulting from star to star. But I kept missing the star by inches, and my brakes were not working. Dropping through space again and again faster and faster, I kept falling back to my parents' hostile
voices. Finally they stopped yelling, and I sat in the darkness taking deep breaths until the hours got small and I fell asleep.