John Wayne (27 page)

“Honey,” he said, “your mother and I are having some serious problems. I love her so much, I love you, I love our family, but I have to work—you know I have to—to support us, and I know it's hard on your mother. She doesn't understand . . .”

His upper body rocking, his words spilling out between too many extra breaths, my father stopped speaking and started to cry. Once his tears unloosed, they came and they came. Tears. No sobbing or other sounds. Only tears. With no consideration of my actions, no thought of our future or past, I crossed to Marisa's bed and I held him. He made no effort to stop me and we sat on my sister's bed for several trembling moments, nothing withheld, my father and I as one, frozen in the sorrow and the still. I was seventeen. My father was sixty-six. We had crawled to this naked communion, this beautiful frightening point of no return, and why it had taken so long never entered my mind. Pulling him close, I knew we would never again be quite the same two people.

Now everything's out in the open. Our lives are more honest now
. I silently told myself that through the winter and spring, and at first our new arrangement suited me. After my mother moved out that December—by mutual accord, while my father was out of town—she and my dad were more friendly than when they had shared a home. Custody wasn't an issue since neither sought a divorce. They lived
five miles apart, no distance at all in Southern California, my dad in the house at Bayshores, my mom at our Big Canyon condo. I kept clothes and belongings with both and made sure my shuttles between them were even. But I selfishly preferred to stay with my mom. She was more lenient, and I was seventeen.

For me it was all fairly convenient and far less stressful, but as time passed, I started seeing that “honest lives” can hurt too. My parent's civil smiles when the family was all together would vanish the moment the other one left. I know they tried not to, but their bitterness often seeped out. My mother complained that he was irritable and stubborn about working and that she could not spend entire summers up in Alaska on our boat. Whenever I'd visit my dad he always spoke of other things first, then brought the conversation to her. “A woman should stay with her husband. Your mother gets mad because I have to work. Where the hell does she think we get our money?”

I hurt for them both and tried staying neutral, gently taking the side of whomever I was with. But I found myself feeling more pain for my father. My mother opened a restaurant, the Fernleaf Cafe, and was busy with that, while my dad was growing older, more tired, still working as hard but not nearly as often. I'd never seen him so torn up, nor so lonely. I was used to him needing our feeding; he always needed that. But I wasn't prepared to see his self-pity. If I missed a few days of visits, he charged that I didn't love him. “I know you don't love me, Aissa. If you loved me you'd spend more time here.”

As it did the night he cried in my arms, seeing my father like this filled me with more emotions than I was equipped to sort out. My mother was gone, he needed me now, and I wanted it. Still, I felt so awkward. My father talked about he and my mom, my turn came to speak, and all I could muster was something like “Dad, I know she still loves you,” or, “Dad, you should really try talking things out.” His disappointed eyes told me he wanted more, and sometimes that angered me. After all those years of treating me like his baby
girl—smile sweetly and don't have any opinions—he wanted to snap his fingers and have me turn into a woman.

Several months after my mother moved out, the more upset I saw her becoming, the more certain I felt she and my father would reunite. I think she realized her work, her new friends, her religion, her tennis, all gave her something worthwhile, but also that she still deeply loved her husband. One day she wrote him a long letter, and shortly after that they met at the Fernleaf Cafe. My mom never showed the letter to me and I never felt I should ask, but I was sure she'd return home and say she was moving back in. Instead she came back to the condo crying.

Without telling my mother, I jumped in my car and sped to the house on Bayshores, having no idea what I might say. My father sat outside on a lounge chair, an umbrella giving him shade. Sitting erect, he still looked sad, but no longer self-pitying. When I asked what happened, he spoke as he sometimes did about giving people chances.

“You give someone a chance,” he said, “and then you give them a second chance. But after two chances that's it. After that you start to lose your dignity, and that's where you have to draw the line.”

I didn't know what he meant, didn't know what had transpired the past days, weeks, months, years, between him and my mother. But I understood my father's tone and the language of his body. I felt my own muscles go flaccid, and suddenly feeling sleepy I went inside to lie down. For now, the marriage was through.

It was a tangled evolution, coming in fits and starts. But my father was learning to let go.

The first breakthrough came when I graduated high school. By my junior year, I had quit smoking pot completely. It was fairly easy to do since I'd never enjoyed its effects in the first place, and having been scared to death by those two policemen tearing apart the older's boy van—looking for drugs—the night I spent several hours in jail. I still knew plenty of kids who did drugs, but I stopped hanging around them, and became more involved with my school work. By my junior year I had done some maturing, and upon my graduation, my father, reassured by my grades my last two years, made no strident fuss when I said I wanted to work for a year before enrolling at USC. That March I
turned eighteen and he allowed me to spend my birthday at home, in Newport, with friends, even though he was off on location. “You're no longer a baby,” said the note my father sent from Seattle with a pungent bouquet of flowers. “You've flown the coop. Love, Dad.”

I decided to test his words that summer. He asked me to fly to London, where he was filming
Brannigan
, and I said I would love to, but first could I see parts of Europe, with Patrick Kelly, Debbie, and her boyfriend? The first surprise came when my father said yes; the next when the four of us joined him in London, and he didn't say an embarrassing word about our sleeping arrangements the past two weeks. In London he did put up the boys in separate hotels, but then he picked up their tab, which the guys had planned on paying. It meant a great deal to me, unsure as I was about his feelings toward Patrick Kelly. An older boy, with long hair, Patrick never went out of his way to endear himself to my dad, remaining courteous but cool. But throughout our stay my father was warm and relaxed and gracious. Just who was doing the growing up here?

During this time my mother arrived in London, in what I presumed to be a final attempt to reconstruct their marriage. The week before leaving Newport, she'd telephoned London seeking my father and been told he was spending the weekend in Ireland—with Pat Stacy, his secretary. My mom was in London for only a couple days before she and my father fought. My mother left in a rage, certain her husband had started romancing his thirty-two-year-old secretary.

I don't know if that was true, but I never saw Pat Stacy as any threat to the possibility of my parents reconciling. Born in Louisiana, Pat was a spiky-haired brunette with dark brown eyes and a cute petite figure. She'd been hired by my father's secretary, Mary St. John, to be groomed as Mary's successor when she retired. I liked Pat. Though at first I saw she was starstruck by my dad—everyone saw, since Pat made it impossible not to—I sensed as time went on that she honestly cared for him. While he was alive, I never felt Pat was out to exploit my dad.

About four years after he died I had second thoughts. Pat then had the gumption to write a book about herself and my father, glamorizing, romanticizing, hyperbolizing their “love affair.” Among other fanciful things, Pat said my father made no secret of his affection for her in front of myself and the other children. In truth, he was standoffish toward Pat when I was around. When they were alone, I'm sure he felt grateful for her company. With him and my mother estranged, she was a feminine soul when he needed one. And although my father groused when the tabloids got wind of their “romance,” blaming Pat for talking too much and too freely, he probably enjoyed it. An aging Hollywood star with a younger woman—it was good for his image. Despite his physical problems at that stage of his life, perhaps my father and Pat even made love on occasion.

But was he in love with Pat Stacy? And did they have the gushy romance Pat depicted in her book?

I don't think so. Had my father felt about Pat the way she described, I think he would have married her. As Michael Wayne used to say, “John Wayne is the marrying kind,” and that was true: whether with Josephine, or Chata, or my mother, my dad was never loathe to admit when he was in love, and never shy about either divorce or marriage. Yet he never married Pat, even though my mother offered him a divorce. He never invited Pat to move in with him. Instead, to her annoyance, even after he moved her office into the house on Bayshores, where Pat did secretarial work by day, my father still rented a separate house for Pat to live in. That wasn't his style when he was in love.

Had Pat not written that book, I'd have never mentioned any of this, but the book seemed so far removed from the truth I felt that I should.

My freshman year at USC I shared off-campus housing with Debbie, but neither one of us was equipped to live on our own. Our small apartment was littered with filthy dishes and soiled clothes. Rather than simply cleaning up, Debbie and I took out our bad moods on each other. In the first significant
crisis of our friendship, I responded typically: instead of discussing it, addressing the real problem—our parents had spoiled us rotten when we were kids—I ate every night to dull my depression.

One weekend at Bayshores, my father noted my weight gain. He called me “fat” in front of his card-playing cronies, but he didn't stop there. “You're so fat!” he went on, with what sounded to me like glee. “Aissa, you've gotta do something about it! Look how you fat you are! How could you do that to yourself?”

Was this his idea of motivation?

They hadn't been drinking; he couldn't blame that.

Was he waiting for me to cry?

I rushed from the room silently cursing him. Hating him. I hated him for the rest of that day, refusing to answer my phone despite knowing who it was. What could his words do? They couldn't change the humiliation I felt. They couldn't change the past.

When I finally picked up the phone, I went right to it.

“Dad. You cannot talk to me like that. You made a fool out of me in front of all your friends. How could you do that to me?”

He was apologetic, giving me all that ancient crap about how much he loved me, how much I mattered. Please, could I just forgive him?

Forgive him? To break the chain, to get him to see past himself and look at who you were, you
couldn't
forgive him. Why had it taken me so long to understand that?

“Dad!” I cut him off, surprising myself. “Don't ever talk like that to me. I'm serious.”

“I won't,” my father said, after a long pregnant pause. “I swear it, Aissa, I won't.”

It was a start.

Back in the sixties my father was churning out hits, every studio sought him, and his family's spending was a minor concern. But by the mid-seventies, money for my father approached an obsession. Like many Depression-shaped
children made good, in his wallet he still carried thick wads of big bills. He still owned a home and a condominium, lucrative livestock and ranch land in southern Arizona, and had part ownership of several other financial interests. Still, this seemingly gave him no peace. Increasingly he fretted over the 1RS, the huge expense of owning a boat, his exorbitant medical insurance, his ebbing cash flow, how severely he'd been mismanaged in the years before turning to Michael Wayne to run his financial affairs. After starting to do commercials for Datril and Great Western Savings, he told me one of his friends asked him why John Wayne would go on TV and peddle aspirin.

“The truth is, Aissa,” he said, “I'm doing it for the money. I'm not broke or anything like that, but I've spent too much, and trusted too many people. If Michael had been old enough to manage my money from the start, I'd never have had these problems. You've gotta find something you can fall back on, Aissa. If I get sick, I don't know what will happen to you kids. It's not what you think it is, Aissa.”

My second year at USC I was put on an allowance of $200 a month. Though barely getting by, I was reluctant to ask for more. For two reasons: I was striving for my independence, and by then, asking my dad for extra cash was to court a three-minute discourse on frugality. One night that semester, I walked into his house and he handed me an already-opened envelope. My father said, “Here, it's a three-hundred-dollar dentist bill. Pay it. You're making your choices now. Start paying your own bills.”