John Wayne (30 page)

“Well,” said the brilliant, icy physician, “our suspicions were correct. Mr. Wayne does have a carcinoma. We have no option but to remove the entire stomach . . .”

After that the doctor said a few more words, but all I heard was murmuring. My father had cancer. He would learn he lost his stomach when he woke up. He'd given the doctors that right, but that would not blunt his horror.

That dreary afternoon the hours lagged on and on and carried us numbly into the night. While his stomach was removed, and a substitute stomach fashioned from his intestines, my father remained in surgery for another six hours. Meanwhile, our phony gall bladder story completely backfired. First told that John Wayne's operation was purely routine, somehow that night the press learned my father was still in surgery. As print and electronic media inundated UCLA, two colossal tabloid idiots even tried photographing my dad while he lay on the operating table. Somehow, they bypassed security and donned a pair of white lab coats. Hiding their camera, they tried sneaking up to the operating chamber. They were detected before they got in, but we were all furious. How recklessly perverse could the supermarket press get?

Nine hours after they took my father in,
nine hours
, his doctor resurfaced. They'd excised all the cancer they found, but could not confirm that they'd spotted it all. They would have to continue the biopsies. For now, though, my father was in “satisfactory condition.”

Even in my agony, I felt it was a beginning.

I didn't know it was also a finish in some way for me. Because from that conversation on, until my father died five months later, my direct contact with his doctors at UCLA was practically nonexistent. Every finding they made, they reported only to Michael Wayne, my forty-five-year-old half brother. Evidently, he and the doctors had forged a private agreement: they'd talk to him, and he'd inform the other six children. I knew we were a large and unwieldy group, and that doctors are busy people. But our Boston group was big, too, and the Mass General doctors were also stretched thin. At this pressing stage of my father's life, I wanted to hear about his cancer, his good turns as well as bad, from experts and not secondhand. Though the process burned me up, for many weeks I stifled myself and said nothing. At twenty-three years old, I was still sufficiently passive, still intimidated enough by my father's oldest son, Michael, to outwardly accept what inwardly enraged me.

In future weeks, taking shifts by our father's bedside, we all became punchy and exhausted. As the inexorability of his death dangled above us, instead of dealing with our stress, fear, and grief in even a semiopen, seminurturing way, the doctors and Michael kept meeting privately, the flow of information grew more and more muddled, and the tension between us mounted. From what I've learned since, we were a classic example of how families should not deal with cancer.

I should have expected to hear it this way, but I wasn't prepared when I did. Three days after the operation, while driving back to UCLA, I jabbed a button on my dashboard and a man on all-news radio detailed the local stories. He said an announcement was issued that morning by a UCLA Medical Center spokesman: “More cancer has been found in actor John Wayne. Lab tests show the cancer has metastasized into his gastric lymph nodes.”

My long deep breaths didn't help. I had to clench the
wheel to remain inside my lane.
Metastasized
is the bleakest word in the medical language of cancer. It meant my father's had spread; his surgeons had not found it all. Of course it was nobody's fault, but hearing it like this—in my car, on the radio, a report on my dad segueing into stocks, weather, and traffic—filled me at first with murderous indignation. They could not tell the whole family, first, before they went public? And who were “they” anyway? Who exactly was making these choices?

By a mile or so later my brain stopped screaming. My thoughts turned back to my father, what this new development meant to him. With radiation or chemotherapy, lymphatic cancer sometimes goes into remission. But far more often lymphatic cancer is fatal.

I drifted through traffic crying.

By Valentine's Day my dad was back home but too sick to eat much, and what he could ingest he could not keep down. As his weight dropped all the way to 170 pounds, his face became so gaunt I saw features to it I never knew existed. His upper body, once so robust, lay withered and wasted, deflated to half its normal size. By that Valentine's Day, only my father's eyes had not betrayed him. With his face shrunken they looked even bigger, and they still shone clear and calm and resolute. Even when I was deeply depressed, I could still lose myself for a time in his incandescent blue eyes. In my father's eyes, I could still see the same strong man who strode through my childhood.

That winter, my father received few visitors. Pat Stacy was often around, and for that I was grateful. My father,
remember, had a weakness few people knew about: he could not bear to be alone. By then, my mother was keeping her distance, not wanting to burden my dad, but also unsure of what his relationship with Pat had become. At this lonely time in his life, he and my mother spoke only on the phone, and even then only rarely.

That winter I went to his house nearly every day. And despite his departing flesh, my father's spirit slowly started advancing. Though he no longer spoke of Mexico, he vowed to get well, to begin radiation, to go to the Oscars that spring, and to resume his career that summer. By then I'd seen his X rays' blackened shadows, and yet when I heard him make these pronouncements, I found myself believing. My father had taken a stand, and once he took a stand it was always extremely hard to get him to yield it.

As spring neared he spent less time inside and more outside on the patio, basking in the sun and ocean air, gearing up for April's Oscars, which by then had become my father's holy grail. Early that March, rumors of John Wayne's imminent death had swept through Hollywood. One day he read an item about himself in the morning paper, and when I came over that afternoon he was sitting outside in his favorite spot, staring across the bay at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club. “I'll show those SOBs,” my father said, hellbent. “Those bastards think I'm dying. Nothing is happening to me!”

On Monday, April 9, I did not accompany him to the Academy Awards. There was a shortage of tickets that year for presenters, and my father had promised Marisa, who'd only been three when he won for
True Grit
, that one day he'd take her with him to the Oscars. Perhaps he believed this would be his last chance.

The afternoon of the show I stopped in at my father's suite at the Bonaventure Hotel, a short drive from the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles, the venue for that night's telecast. To appear less emaciated, by then he'd begun wearing loose-fitting clothes around the house and extra layers of clothing the few times he went out in public. For the Oscars,
he had ordered a smaller tuxedo, but kept losing weight in the interim. That afternoon, his new tux already too large, he put on a wet suit beneath it to make himself look heavier.

Along with his weight, he felt anxious about the best picture award he'd been chosen to present. He did not want to mangle names, which even at his best my father was prone to do. He was most concerned about Warren Beatty, the producer-star of
Heaven Can Wait
. Warren Beatty, my father said, hated it when people called him Warren
Beety
. Determined to say it correctly, my father practiced again and again in the mirror: “Warren
Beatty
. Warren
Beatty
. Warren
Beatty.”

Late that afternoon I drove back to Newport alone to make it home in time for the show, but a part of me was hoping my dad would decide on a last-minute cancellation. For all I knew this night meant to him, when I left him he looked peaked. For several weeks he'd had trouble merely standing for any extended duration, and now he was sick and the Oscars was such a long show and best picture award always came at the very end. I was scared he might be exhausted by then, walk out, and collapse on national TV. Even if he recovered, I knew what that would do to my father's pride.

My father, of course, showed up, and by then I had changed my mind. He'd been so dead set on making this engagement, to miss it now could debilitate him even more than sticking it out could. That evening I watched the awards on TV with a handful of friends, and the show ran long as usual. Finally, the producers ran a clip of Bob Hope, pulled from the Oscar one year before, when my father was bedridden at Massachusetts General.

“Duke, we miss you tonight,” Bob Hope said. “We expect to see you amble out here in person next year, because nobody else can walk in John Wayne's boots.”

From the image of Mr. Hope, the camera swung back to Johnny Carson, this evening's emcee. “Ladies, Gentleman,” Johnny Carson said, “Mr. John Wayne.”

By the time my father reached the Music Center stage,
the industry crowd rose as one and its standing ovation swelled to a human crescendo. They clapped so heartfelt and long—for the voice, the walk, the classic lines and scenes, his bravery and his will—my father could not start his speech. Watching at home I barely breathed. Pride welled in my throat, and my heart said,
Keep on clapping forever, let it wash over him, he needs your love, it will give him strength
. But my rational mind said,
Stop, he can't stand up, stop and let him get off, can't you see he's not going to make it?

The camera panned the seats as the Hollywood people cried. My own tears came as they zoomed back in for another close-up. He was perspiring now, and he looked so deathly thin. It was like watching him walk a tightrope.

When the clapping finally died, my father spoke in a shaking voice: “That's just about the only medicine a fella'd ever really need. Believe me when I tell you that I'm mighty pleased that I can amble down here tonight. Oscar and I have something in common. Oscar came to the Hollywood scene in 1928—so did I. We're both a little weatherbeaten, but we're still here, and plan to be around a whole lot longer. My job here tonight is to identify your five choices for the outstanding picture of the year and announce the winner, so let's move 'em out.”

My father kept on, announcing the nominees, and then he came to Warren Beatty. And my father could not say it right. Still, even then, John Wayne got it wrong uniquely: he didn't stumble on Beatty, but my father called him “Warner.” I let out a nervous laugh and one of my girlfriends said, “What?” I was so absorbed in my father I'd forgotten I wasn't alone.

The Deer Hunter
won best picture, and when my dad presented the Oscar to its director, Michael Cimino, he called him Michael “Camino.” I cried and laughed then, too, but when it was over a few mispronounced names meant nothing at all, except perhaps to my stubborn dad. For the rest of us watching that indelible night, I think we all felt honored
and moved, and that we had all shared in something resoundingly special. It was his final appearance in public, John Wayne's last public battle. I won't say he won—he was still dying of cancer—but, oh, what a fight my courageous father put up.

Something is wrong with me, Aissa. Something is really wrong.”

Three weeks after bidding the public farewell, my father keeled over next to his kitchen stove. The calendar said May 2, 1970, and that night we would rush him to not one, but two different hospitals. My dad never came home again.

We took him first to Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, where X rays revealed an intestinal blockage. His doctor at Hoag instructed us to drive him to UCLA, for an emergency surgery the following morning. My father's pain was so severe he couldn't sit up, so we folded down his station wagon's back seat, spread out some blankets, and laid him gently back there. Ethan drove the wagon and Marisa and I followed
him in my car. As we pulled into UCLA, I could not see the emergency entrance for all the camera equipment and bodies. In the short time since we'd left Hoag, someone had tipped off the press.