John Wayne (20 page)

A few years later, my father's conservative views would
intrude on my own life, as long-haired boys at my high school called me “right wing” because my last name was Wayne. But the summer I saw
The Green Berets
, I was twelve years old and my concerns were only for him. Beneath his public bravado, his self-esteem was always tender, and this was an especially difficult time. Although he fired back at his critics, referring to them as a “little clique back East” of “doctrinaire liberals,” “not in touch with the American people,” at home my father privately brooded. Unknown to the public, he and my mother were increasingly locking into separate lives. In his professional life, the genre my father so commanded—the Hollywood Western—was said to be nearing extinction.
The Green Berets
was getting skewered. My father still talked tough around the house; until his death that would never change. But some days perhaps even he thought: 1968 is not the best time to be John Wayne.

Then my father met Rooster Cogburn, the fictional sheriff in Charles Portis's novel,
True Grit
. When Henry Hathaway sent him an early peek at the novel while still in its galleys, my father instantly phoned my half-brother Michael, then at the helm of Batjac.

“Buy it,” he said to Michael. “Don't dicker, buy it.”

Though Paramount, not Batjac, wound up making
True Grit
, there was no industry doubt about which veteran actor would play the paunchy, grizzled, aging, hard-drinking Cogburn, a man at once heroic and flawed.
True Grit
's director and my father's old friend, Henry Hathaway called my father the same day the deal was completed. “This Cogburn fellow is a man who wenches when he wants, gets drunk when he wants, and fights when he's in the mood. He's as much sinner as saint—and you, Duke, old friend, are going to play him that way.” Hathaway also told him to play Cogburn broadly, as a mean old man indifferent to his appearance, and so not to bother dieting. This was like telling my dad he did not have to pay that year's federal taxes.

As he got older and less physically active, my father increasingly battled his weight, most acutely during the weeks before shooting a movie. One time he even sought medical
help. I was surprised: He dreaded taking pills, resisting even aspirin during his hangovers. The pharmaceutical diet didn't last long, though. Prescribed a color-coded phalanx of pills, my father mistakenly took his morning pill—his “upper”—at night. Within minutes the speed kicked in. First he woke my mother, then pleaded with her. “Help me. I took the wrong goddamn pill,” my father said. “I'll be up all night. As long as you're awake too, I might as well teach you how to play bridge.” Although she had not been awake, my mother took pity. She spent the next eight hours learning her wired husband's favorite card game.

The rest of the time he lost the weight more naturally, somehow curtailing his urges to eat and drink as each new movie approached. Right after wrapping the movie, however, my father almost always gained it all back. I used to catch him late at night, padding from the refrigerator to the kitchen table in his silk pajamas, a long, hard salami in one hand, his miniature axe in the other. Salami, baloney, bacon, any kind of heavy red meat—my father craved them all. I know that eating like this was something he loved, but when I think of it now it breaks my heart. Back then, no one knew all those foods can combine to generate cancer. No one realized, either, that anything burnt is also carcinogenic. Late lunches and dinners, barbecued steaks were my father's idea of heaven; he ate every one charred nearly black.

Mornings, he sometimes concocted what he called “Milktoast.” He'd toast a piece of white bread, dip it in milk, put a fried egg on the soggy toast, and drown it all with sugar. It's miraculous, really, when you put it all together—the cholesterol, the Camels, the red meat, the hard liquor—that my life-gorging father lived to be seventy-two. Most people who live as he did drop dead closer to forty.

When my father did shed weight, he always took enormous pride in announcing it to our family. “Well,” he'd boom out, “this morning I'm 236!” The heaviest he'd ever get was about 260 pounds, and this usually happened between Halloween and Christmas. Every Halloween, he'd drive by himself to the Smart N' Final and load up on discounted candy,
ostensibly for all the trick-or-treaters. Except he always bought all his favorites—black and red licorice, Tootsie Rolls, and especially Abba-Zabas, an orgy of toffee and peanut butter—and he'd buy enough for three Halloweens. In the weeks before Christmas I'd catch him sneaking them from a stack of candy stashed in his trophy room cabinet. Though I knew he'd regret it tomorrow, it was somehow nice seeing my father at such moments. Sneaking candy, looking over his shoulder just like the rest of us, my father seemed less formidable, in some way easier to love.

Although I appeared in four of his pictures—
The Alamo, The Comancheros, Donovan's Reef
, and
McClintock
—my roles were so brief that I've never considered myself a onetime “child actress.” I was only six when
McClintock
was made in 1963, and an end came to my “career.”

But my dream kept living. For the next three years, I harbored a secret wish to one day become a real actress. Acting was a bridge to my father's work, a bridge to him. I also knew at an early age that my father was special, and I felt through acting that I could be special too. I distinctly recall riding one New Year's Day in the Rose Parade, cruising in a long white convertible next to my father as thousands of people cheered us. All that adulation and affirmation: the sensation was very seductive.

From the time I was six until I was roughly nine, I yearned to act in my father's movies. But I never confided in him, possibly for fear of his rejection. For three years I heard about upcoming pictures, warned myself not to hope or care, then secretly felt depressed when I was passed by. I wondered what I'd done wrong, why he had stopped including me. Too young to understand that even minor casting is not that rudimentary, that even John Wayne cannot control every facet of every film, about the time I turned ten I let the dream die. It was clearly not going to happen.

In fall 1968, three weeks prior to shooting, an actress bowed out of her key part in
True Grit
. My father asked me
to play the young girl who hires Rooster Cogburn to find her father's killer! Not just to say a couple lines and sayonara, the way it had been when I was small, but to costar with him in a full-blooded role, in a major picture I knew he believed could restore his flagging career.

Did my father mean it? He couldn't.

Could he?

“Uh, Aissa,” my father said two days after he told me to start reading the script.

“Yes, Dad?”

“I'm real sorry, honey. I didn't mean to build your hopes up, but we're using another actress in the movie. Her name is Kim Darby. I'm not the director, honey. I'm really sorry.”

“What?” I couldn't believe it. The dream had only just sparked again in the past two days, but for those two delicious days the dream had been dreamed sincerely.

“We're using another actress,” my father said. I'm terribly sorry.”

“That's okay, Dad.”

What bullshit that was. I was devastated. By my own father I felt betrayed. And to make matters worse, I then had to go with my family to Mammoth Lakes, California, for part of
True Grit
's filming. To justify my not getting the part, I wanted Kim Darby to be gorgeous and gifted and friendly. Instead I thought, This mousy, insolent girl is who they used over me? From her first day on the set, Kim Darby was brusque and rude to all. Whenever she acted in scenes with my father, I made sure I was somewhere else.

Apparently my irritation was starting to show. One night at the end of shooting, my father led me off where we could be alone, surely, I thought, to talk about us. To talk about
it
. Instead he told me a story about his eldest daughter Toni. Today Toni has eight children, and she's still a classical beauty. Tall and slender with clean perfect features, Toni also once dreamed of following her father into acting.

“Toni had wonderful talent, Aissa,” my father started. “She studied drama and acted in plays in high school. She
had wonderful bone structure, and she could have been a fine actress. I considered it all . . . and decided not to help her.”

Inside, I was fuming. I felt sure we would talk about me.

“There's some awful people in this business,” my father said. “I didn't want to see Toni get hurt. You know what I told her? I told her she should get married, and have a whole bunch of children. And that's what Toni did.”

My anger faded into deep disappointment. There would be no more parts in his movies, not even any near-misses. This conversation had nothing to do with Toni. My father was telling me to forget about acting.

That night I felt wounded, not destroyed. After coming so close to getting
True Grit
—or so I'd thought—then missing out, I'd already started believing I'd lost my final chance. Today, I don't regret giving up the idea of acting. Even trying to live up to John Wayne's legacy would have meant falling drastically short, and I found the road to womanhood rocky enough without all of
that
. As for my father's role, I'm still not sure I've sorted out all my feelings. I never told him I wanted to act, so perhaps he never knew how much I once wanted it. I also believe he meant what he said that night in Mammoth Lakes, about not wanting his children injured by Hollywood. My father knew better than I the incredible odds against success, and I'm sure he wanted to shield me from all the dismissal I likely faced.

Given all that, when it came to his family working in Hollywood, I wonder if he was mostly paternalistic or mostly just chauvinistic. I can honestly understand him not encouraging me, since I never had Toni's looks or dramatic training. Perhaps because I lived beneath the same roof with my dominating father for twenty-three years—much longer than Toni—I also lacked her plucky self-assurance. But my father squelched Toni's ambitions, too, all but insisting she stick to hearth and home, even while opening
Hollywood doors for his two oldest boys, Patrick and Michael, and even his brother Bob. When I see Toni today she seems happy, very much pleased with her life. But with all that potential, I imagine our father's double standard must have hurt.

It's been frequently written that John Wayne was so secure in his work he never even kept track of his reviews. It isn't true. My father read practically all the major reviews. Those he did not lay eyes on himself, he had read to him over the phone by Mary St. John, his confidante and longtime secretary. As for the bad reviews, my father himself tried selling the notion they never upset him. After
The New York Times, Life
magazine,
The Washington Post
, and others had ripped
The Green Berets
, my dad told the Chicago
Sun-Times
's Roger Ebert, “A little clique back in the East has taken great satisfaction in reviewing my politics instead of my pictures. And they've drawn up a caricature of me, which doesn't bother me: their opinions don't matter to the people who go to the movies.”

Aissa appeared in four movies with her father:
The Alamo, The Comancheros, Donovan's Reef
, and
McClintock
(1959)