John Wayne (29 page)

Was I like the rest of his fans, mesmerized by his image? Or was my father truly larger than life? He was, in fact, an incredible man. Before we left Boston, Dr. DeSanctis told my dad he could live another fifteen years with his new, improved heart. If my father did not believe, he wasn't showing it. Back only weeks in Newport, he purchased several pairs of new cotton sweat clothes and a new cushy pair of gleaming white gym shoes. Every morning at six, he walked a slow one-mile lap around the complex at Bayshores. A few mornings a week I dragged myself out of bed and strolled the one mile with him, my dad telling me stories, saying hello to fellow habitual walkers, noting changes in his neighbor's familiar homes.

“See those begonias,” he'd say to me. “See how much they've perked up the front of that house?”

I enjoyed those lazy walks, and for all my concern I had to confess he looked good, fantastic really, for a seventy-year-old guy who'd just endured open-heart surgery. Having shed thirty pounds he didn't want or need, his stamina returned, his dizzy spells passed, and even his voice returned to normal.

Why then was my father so irate?

And he
was
irate. No sooner would we conclude our morning walks than he would commence attacking “those dirty bastards.” In the past, when he railed at the liberal press and politicians, I never felt too threatened, not even those two or three times he hurled objects through our TV sets. As long as he fumed at
The Washington Post
or Ted Kennedy, the heat was off of us and on someone else.

But this winter his tirades gave me the jitters. Who “those dirty bastards” were was not always clear, and often my father seemed mad at the “whole damn country.” He was outraged at the talk of gun control, since criminals could still obtain firearms while law-abiding citizens went unprotected. He was sick about and appalled by Jim Jones and the mass death in Guyana. Most of all, he was disenchanted with the Carter administration. My father liked Jimmy Carter personally. Although my dad supported his old friend, Ronald Reagan, in 1976, when Carter won the election my father accepted his invitation to appear at the White House inaugural. In 1977, he even backed Carter on the Panama Canal, helping to push the new treaty through Congress. Through his relationship with Tony Arias, my godfather and his business partner before Mr. Arias's fatal plane crash, my father knew the Panamanians well. He said Panama had “sided with us in every international emergency since its existence. We made a commitment to Panama, and we must live up to it.” This outraged my father's conservative fans, and put him at odds with Ronald Reagan, but my father stood firm. For all his blustery ways, he always said he prided himself on looking at issues one by one.

By 1978, though, despite that he'd just been allied with Carter one year ago, my father was calling him an “uninspiring leader, an ineffectual president.” As long as Carter remained in the White House, my father predicted that winter, Americans would continue losing their confidence, our economy would stay in its tailspin, and this country would be emasculated even more as a world power. “The United States is losing its balls and its spirit,” my father said. “It's gotten so crappy here, I can't stand to see it.”

One afternoon at his house, my father said he was leaving. Speaking quietly, but with conviction, he told me he was moving to Mexico.

“I have no reason to stay here. Your mother and I are busted up. The Mexican people love me, and I'm damn near about to give up on the USA. I'll get a house, I'll get a smaller boat. You can come down and stay with me. All the children can. There's nothing quite like Baja.”

Initially I simply didn't believe him. I knew he adored it down there, both the countryside and the Mexican people, especially Latin women. I knew he was frustrated and angry with the illnesses that plagued him for nearly three years. I also knew my father defied easy labeling, was not the two-dimensional man the myth machine had long made him out to be (often with his cooperation). However brash, a move to Mexico wasn't beyond my dad.

And I still didn't believe him.

I was sure he'd continue regaining his health, feel more positive toward his own self, and reembrace the country I knew he still fervently loved beneath his cynical words.

Later, first slowly and then in a flood, I started developing doubt. He certainly appeared serious. In preparation for the move, he began taking Spanish lessons, for the first time in his life, although all three of his wives had been Latin. Three times weekly, his tutor drove to the house and they'd huddle at the small table in the kitchen where Fausto ate his meals. I'd go over and see him, my father playing student, and I'd roll my eyes and he'd chuckle. For once, I thought with some pleasure, he cannot overshadow me. With a
Peruvian mother and two Peruvian maids, Fd spoken Spanish fluently for years. My father sounded like . . . John Wayne speaking Spanish.

Though we never discussed potential reverberations, surely he knew they'd be great.
U.S. News and World Report
once wrote that John Wayne symbolized “the virtues and strengths that Americans like to believe are typical of their country.” It's one thing for an elderly icon to criticize his troubled country. But had my father really become an expatriate—and told the world why—the shock waves might have been global.

For six months my father dutifully took his lessons, insisting that after the Oscars, after making
Candy's Man
, he was packing his rods and reels and heading south for Baja's rugged grandeur. Neither one of us ever found out if he'd back up his words. Cancer robbed my father's bittersweet dream.

It happened on one of our morning walks. Hands clutching his stomach, abdominal pain etched on his face, in midstride my father doubled over. When he straightened back out he said he was fine, but later that week the burn in his stomach returned and my father consulted a doctor. A biopsy was taken. The doctors said there were no signs of cancer.

When my dad resumed his walks, the razor-sharp pain froze him in place again, again while I was with him. Later, back at the house, he told me it felt like jagged glass had been raked against the inside of his stomach.

“Aissa,” he said softly. “I know I have the Big C again.”

“It can't be. They did biopsies. You don't have the Big C. I know you don't.”

“I have it, Aissa. I feel it inside my body.”

I was not telling my dad what I thought he wanted to hear. Since the doctors spotted no cancer, I thought his discomfort was coming from something else. Later, I learned that certain types of cancer cells can hide out, and my father's had hidden deep inside the lining of his stomach. When at last they discovered it, the doctors said my father's cancer was very slow and might have been inside him for months or even years. When first I heard this notion it made me physically ill. As it sank in—cancer might have been killing him, gradually, and nobody knew it—my squeamishness turned to a kind of hatred. Not at the doctors, but hatred at cancer itself, a fickle, cunning disease with phony retreats that foster hope, followed by brutal frontal advances. With cancer, I learned, no one ever really feels certain. Not patients, not family, not even superstar doctors.

By December my father could not stand the smell of most food and mostly ate fruit. He began dropping weight and the doctors urged further exploratory surgery. But Christmas was near, the holiday he so loved, and my dad insisted on being at home with family and friends. As he did every Christmas Eve, he invited a pair of Newport Beach couples, the DeFrancos and the Reafsnyders, to the Bayshores house for dinner. Most Christmas Eves the women cooked and sipped champagne while the men drank liquor and gabbed about sports and politics. This night, my father could not make it through our meal. Excusing himself, he fled the scent of liquor and food and went to lie down. By then, around me, he'd stopped concealing his weakness, but was still professing decent health around his friends. At this revealing moment, it hit me hard just how sick my father felt—too sick to pretend. As the Reafsnyders and DeFrancos left early, I wondered if he'd make it until the following Christmas.

Two weeks later, Barbara Walters arrived at the Bayshores house to interview my dad for one of her prime-time ABC specials. I was struck by how pretty she looked off-camera, and how genuine she seemed. Though weakening
day by day, my father had made the deal with Miss Walters's office several months earlier, and he was determined to honor it. Miss Walters didn't know, since no one told her, he would start taking tests for cancer the very next morning.

At one point in their talk my father did say he'd be hospitalized the following day, but he owed it to gall bladder trouble. In truth, gallstones had once been discussed as the possible problem, but the theory had been discarded. By then we all feared he had cancer. My father himself told his doctors, “Get rid of anything you find. I don't care what you have to do. Get it out.” The gall bladder story, one we'd all been instructed to stick to, was contrived for the press. I could see my father started liking Barbara Walters the moment he met her; I could also see how uneasy he felt at leading her on.

If he did have cancer again, the doctors had two prevailing theories. It might have been triggered by his heart surgery, since such a radical jolt to the system can sometimes enliven previously dormant cells. Or it might have been all that hot smoke, passing through my father's lungs and into his stomach. When I heard
that
, I felt a pang in my own insides. It makes no difference, remember, how long or how much a person has smoked: the moment they stop they reduce their chances for cancer. But my dad, even after losing one lung to cancer in 1964, had not quit smoking. Oh, he stopped smoking Camels, but first he started chewing tobacco, then he infrequently smoked cigars, then he was smoking cigars all the time.

“I'm not inhaling,” he always said, but he was and all of us knew it. I, for one, never made any real effort to stop him. I dropped a few benign hints but I never said, “I don't want to lose you—why can't you stop?” My reluctance came partly from fear and deference, partly because I was smoking myself by the time I entered high school. I smoked behind my parents' backs, with my girlfriends, struggling to look cool and adult, coughing my brains out, then drowning the scent of Virginia Slims with gum and Binaca. Who knows? Perhaps I was also emulating my father, self-ruinous habits and all.

It's one more reason I'll always feel some sorrow that I was afraid of him for so many years. Had I been less hesitant, we might have been free all that time to discuss meaningful things. I'll never know, but maybe I could have pushed him to give up his cigars. My mother tried to when she quit smoking and drinking herself when we moved to Newport. My father said no, but at least she gave it an honest shot. I just sat there watching him smoke.

January 10, 1979, my father entered UCLA Medical Center, located on the college campus in Westwood. The smokescreen was already erected: since he was in fine physical shape, since he had no immediate obligations, John Wayne decided this was the perfect time to treat a chronic gall bladder problem.

After two days of tests the doctors operated, strongly supposing they'd locate the cancer once they cut inside the inner stomach. For three hours we waited without a word in our ninth-floor room at UCLA. It was almost noon when the doctor appeared. “I want the Wayne family,” he said, “just the Wayne family, please.”

No, I thought, it can't be. My father is not dead. Through
the haze in my brain I heard someone say, “What is it? What is it?”

The doctor, his face a hard blank slate, did not reply, only gestured to the door, and I felt my hostility rising. Going in, my father had been so weak . . . it was such a grueling delicate operation . . . just say it, damn it. Tell us if he has cancer. Tell us if he survived.

By the time the doctor led us out of the waiting room, down the corridor, into my father's private room, I had convinced myself the dreaded moment had come. My father's death. We had not even said goodbye.