John Wayne (4 page)

He turned back to football, and the University of Southern California, which had offered him a scholarship to play offensive line. Grabbing it, my father enrolled in pre-law. Just as he was about to go home at the end of his freshman year, he discovered his parents' marriage was ending. He was not exactly surprised, but divorce in 1920s America was hardly the commonplace it is today, and my father felt shamed and scandalized. In retreat from the two angry voices of his childhood, he distanced himself from both parents. Rather than go home and take sides, he asked his coach, Howard Jones, to help him secure a job for the summer. Jones sent my dad right to the lot at Fox, and told him to ask for Tom Mix, the cowboy star who loved USC football, and for whom Jones provided box seats for all USC home games. In return, Mix had promised Jones he'd give summer jobs to his players.

Mix took my dad to his favorite bar, where the actor and athlete got drunk. Mix promised my father
two
jobs—one as his personal trainer, one as an extra in the star's next movie. But when my father reported to work, he had a job moving furniture and props from set to set. “I was also a grip,” my father used to recall. “Around the rest of the country, they call that a janitor.”

One day at Fox my father spotted Tom Mix, resplendent in the red-leather backseat of a limousine, its black doors embossed with his gold initials. Reintroducing himself, my
dad politely reminded Mix of their meeting. Deadpan, the actor turned away without a word, dismissing my fuming father. Perhaps this first ugly impression later had something to do with my father's disdain for industry liars and phonies. “There's some real SOB's in this business,” my father used to tell me.

That summer, working as a prop man on the set of
Mother Machree
, he first encountered John Ford, thirty-one years old and already supremely gifted. In those days Ford was in the habit of hiring the USC football team as extras for his cavalry movies. My dad worked on a few, unbilled, sometimes never making the final cut. Regardless, the Fox directors saw my father on film and sensed his raw appeal. “Dammit,” said the legendary director Raoul Walsh, “the son of a bitch looked like a man.”

As the nation inched nearer to the Depression, my father plunged into a malaise of his own. His second year at USC, spanning 1926 and 1927, was one of life's critical junctures after which nothing is ever the same. First, he was fixed up with a girl named Carmen Saenz, but fell madly in love with her dark-haired sister Josephine (who would someday become his first wife). His sophomore year he also made varsity football, part of a celebrated team that captivated Los Angeles. That November, the season practically over, my father went bodysurfing one morning, and was pounded into the shoreline by a late-cresting wave. With his right shoulder muscle ripped, he kept going to practice all week, traumatizing the tissue even more. Though my father stayed on the roster and received his varsity letter, his shoulder would not allow him to play football. Unable to perform, my dad would lose his scholarship.

His glory days shockingly over, he sulked and received poor grades. At the end of his second semester, feeling nervous about his future, my father asked John Ford for a fulltime summer job at Fox. Planning to earn enough to pay his fall tuition, my dad never returned to college. He was twenty years old, the same age I was when I left USC nearly half a century later.

At Fox my father did prop and stunt work. Rehabilitating his shoulder, he performed strenuous workouts at the old and famous Hollywood Athletic Club. Then in 1928,
Hangman's House
was released. This John Ford movie had songs and the sound effects of bells and whistles, but the actors were silent and the dialogue was in subtitles. Directed by Ford and produced by Fox,
Hangman's House
was my father's first credited role. It was also the first time John Wayne's face could clearly be seen on celluloid. He played an Irish peasant, a spectator at a horse race, who takes off his white cap at the end of a thrilling finish, busts down a white picket fence with some other fans, and sprints into the track. It was a turning point in his life. Seeing himself on-screen lifted my father out of his doldrums, gave new rise to his dreams.

For better and worse, John Wayne was hooked on making movies.

John Wayne Presented Daughter by Third Wife

Actor John Wayne's wife presented him with a daughter yesterday at St. Joseph Hospital, Burbank, where both mother and the child were reported in good condition.

—Hedda Hopper, April 1, 1956

Duke Wayne got two hours' sleep in 48. Pilar and he got to bed at 1 a.m. Saturday; she shook him awake at 3:30; he stayed with her till 2:07 that afternoon, at St. Joseph's, when Aissa, 7 pounds 8 ounces, arrived. . . . Pilar was on the phone talking to a reporter 50 minutes after her birth. . . . “Aissa means absolutely nothing,” Pilar told us. “We're calling her that because it goes well with Wayne.”

—The Hollywood Reporter
, April 2, 1956

In 1950s Hollywood we were still called “show business families,” and I was a show biz baby. A cooing, flatulent, drooling public figure on diapered display for the flashbulbs and pens. I was a “celebrity offspring,” a now-and-future “Hollywood princess,” and mine would be a chronicled youth. My silken hair and green eyes would grace the cover of
Cosmopolitan
, the pages of
Photoplay
, and untold American newspaper readers saw me blubbering my hairless pink head off in a photo that ran over the wire service on the second day I drew breath. By then my father was Hollywood royalty, the industry's top leading man using gross receipts as criteria. In the photograph that ran in the papers the day after I was born, I am cradled by a grinning,
relaxed John Wayne, the embodiment of big American dreams.

One day before, my successful father had not been so smooth. Despite having been through this white-knuckled process before—with Michael, Toni, Patrick, and Melinda, his children from his marriage to Josephine—my father wasn't prepared when my mother woke in the night and announced that her water had broken. First he botched the dash to the hospital. As usual, my father drove too fast, this time down all the wrong streets. By the time he found St. Joseph's my mother had gone into labor. It lasted through dawn and into the early afternoon. While she grunted and cried and prayed, he paced and exhorted and whistled—when my father was nervous he whistled—until finally growing so skittish he went down to greet other new babies. And so it turned out that my father was not in the room at the instant I was born. When they did usher him back in, he kissed my mother's cheek, turned to me, his swaddled infant . . . and threw a volcanic fit.

“The baby's not breathing!” he screamed. “The baby's not crying!”

The pediatrician tried explaining I was normal and healthy.

“She isn't crying, goddamn it. Babies are supposed to cry!”

He insisted I cry, demanding they prick my heel with a needle. Only when I wailed like a banshee did my father hush up and beam. Then he snatched me up in his arms, and the rest of my life I would feel my father's obsessive grip.

Everyone seeks redemption. When I was a baby, I think my father looked at me and saw a chance for his.

Through all his public success before I was born, he was haunted by private failure. After he and his first wife divorced, he was not always around to raise their four children. Though they worked with him on some movies, though he
saw them every Christmas, they mostly grew up in a fatherless home.

My father had married Josephine Saenz in 1933, after a lengthy courtship begun his last year at USC. Except for physical beauty, they had seemed to be opposites. The daughter of a prominent doctor, Josephine was a product of wealth and religion, most secure in the presence of socialites or priests. My father's parents had barely scraped by, and my own father was always politely indifferent to church. As a young man, I am told, my dad was earthy, hot-blooded, sexual. Apparently Josephine was reserved and far more chaste.

They fell in love regardless, and rapidly had four children. Legally, the marriage lasted ten years, until 1943, but they'd fallen out of love years before that. People tend to take sides in divorces, and those sympathetic to my dad have mostly laid the blame with Josephine. They say she was overly patrician, overly prudish, too intensely Catholic. My father, on the other hand, the one time he spoke of it to me, blamed only himself. Many years later, when my own parents were splitting up, my dad began confiding in me for the first time in my life. I was eighteen years old when he came into my room and said he'd never been unfaithful to my mother.

“But I destroyed my first marriage, Aissa,” my father said, referring to Josephine. “I was a different man back then. I was much more selfish.” He then let his voice trail off, all but confessing old infidelities.

In 1944, Josephine gave my father a divorce at his repeated insistence. “Because of my religion,” she announced in a statement to the press, “I regard divorce as a purely civil action, in no way affecting the moral status of my marriage.” Josephine raised their first four children alone, instructing them in her strict Catholic ways. As for my father, he never stopped sending money to her and his older children. Until his death, he always said he was proud of Josephine for raising the kids alone and so well. He helped Michael become a film producer, relied on him to handle part of his business, and gave Patrick his first break as an actor.

As for me, my dad told me to love the older kids as brothers and sisters, not as half-brothers and -sisters. I tried to, but I never knew if their warmth was real or merely a show to placate my dad. It was all very cordial between us, and superficial. Taking our cue from our father, we never talked about real feelings, so I don't really know what they thought back then of me or my dad. Today our relationships are more comfortable, but when I was younger I barely knew my half-brothers and sisters.

Evidently, my father also felt he never knew his older children as much as he should have. Because he had not hung in there, because he had hurt their mother, my father told my mom, he always felt his other kids never truly forgave him. Although he never confessed it to me, I think he suffered tremendous guilt over this, while never shedding the grim fear that his first four kids did not love him. One day that guilt and fear would manifest itself on my brother and sister and me: my father thirsted so hard for our love, sometimes he left us no room to breathe.

Now I can better understand why. His childhood had been hurtful. So had his first attempt at having a family. Whatever blessings my father found later in life could not mend all those wounds. What made living with my father hard, and unnerving, was that he mostly suppressed what was churning inside him. To his family, he rarely expressed his inner feelings, or even admitted he had them. With all that bottled emotion, its release often came in the form of misdirected rage. Even today, I'm still surprised when other women tell me they were never scared of their fathers.

But that all came later. When I was born in 1956, my father was nearly fifty. I not only made him feel young and virile, I gave him a second chance to do right by his children. When I was an infant, my mother said my dad was not a diaper changer. In all other ways, however, she said he behaved like an “idiot father. It was a beautiful thing to watch. I've never seen a man so entranced by a child.”

And I, in turn, was addicted to daddy's attention.

*

My dad was shaving in his silk pajamas. My parents both had private dressing rooms, and this morning I was in his, peeking through the mist at his image in the mirror. He always left several bars of Neutrogena soap on the brick ledge of his sauna, and they'd melted and dripped over the rocks, perfuming the wafting air with my father's sweetest smell. Wonderment in my three-year-old eyes, I just stood there and stared while he stroked the stubble from his whiskers.

I stared at my father constantly. My attraction for him—emotionally, physically, psychologically—was very, very strong. If my father was around I felt compelled to be near him, and just as intense was his need to shield me from suffering. One day, when I was six, I saw just how powerful my hold over him was.

At the Warner Brothers studio, my dad kept an old goofy bicycle, with thick tires and wide-spread handlebars. He used to ride me around on the lot while people smiled at us and waved. One day he propped me up on the handlebars and we went to visit Lee Marvin, to whom Warners had also given an office. A man appeared in our path from behind a building, my father roughly braked and I flew forward, landing heavily on my face. When my blood began trickling my father shuddered, a twitch running through his neck and shoulders. As he picked me off the concrete he looked sick to his stomach. “Oh my God,” he kept frantically saying. “Oh my God, Aissa, are you okay?” The rest of the day he kept watching me and stroking my hair. In the morning, the red bruise stretched from my upper lip to cheekbone. After that we walked or drove in cars.