John Wayne (5 page)

Like most fathers, mine was also capable of jealousy. As I am told by my family, about the time I began to utter familiar sounds, we were visited at our home by his two closest friends, John Ford and the character actor Ward Bond. I craned my neck at Mr. Bond and called him “Da da.” Saying nothing, my father managed a feeble smile, and Ford and Bond both caught it. After that, my mother says, they never
allowed John Wayne to forget the pained expression he wore the day his baby called another man daddy.

In those days he loved showing me off, and naturally everyone indulged him; to praise me was to praise John Wayne. But truth be told, with my green eyes and sandy hair I was a pretty little girl, but I was no knockout—for one thing, my father's big nose looked better on him than on me. Still, I quickly understood that my status carried far greater weight than my looks. While all children learn to manipulate adults, as a movie star's daughter I saw how I could take even further advantage. In the presence of my father and other grown-ups, I could get cookies, money, compliments—anything. One of Dad's friends used to press a hundred-dollar bill into my tiny pink hand the three or four times he saw me each year. At the start of adult parties, my father always carried me on his shoulders, where I was fawned on by his admirers, basking in their attention as long as they cared to heap it. Throughout my early childhood, I was told by a chorus of older voices what a cute, cute,
cute
little girl I was, and so intelligent too! And why should I disbelieve their sugary words? As long as my father stood next to me, I could not be found lacking, picked on, or threatened. Even later, no matter how afraid I ever became of my dad, the world without him was scarier.

Like many Hollywood children, my fears began at a very early age. On the surface our celebrity childhoods glowed with privilege and glitter, but sometimes the fairy tale twisted. Ever since the Lindbergh child had been abducted and murdered in 1932, threats of kidnapping and extortion were common among the famous and rich. They were rampant in Hollywood, though not always reported to the media, and there was not an industry parent who at times did not feel dread that someone was stalking his or her child. My own parents could not afford to ignore their vulnerability, and so they exerted stringent control over me.

I was not to play outside in front of our house.

I might get kidnapped.

I could never spend the night at a girlfriend's, never experience the giddiness of a slumber party.

I might get kidnapped.

Everyone knew who John Wayne's kid was. I was instructed not to talk to or glance at strangers.

I
would
get kidnapped.

This was drummed into my head, primarily by my mom, until a corner of my brain started to burn with it. Alone, I imagined gruesome scenarios:
If men in masks did come over the walls and take me away, then asked for a million dollars, would my father pay it?
I'd decide that my father would—of course he would!—but my mind would not let the matter go and my stomach would clench back up:
What if he doesn't? He always says he never has enough money. He doesn't
have
a million dollars!

My father also warned me about the possibility of kidnapping, but not nearly as often or as vehemently as my mother. Perhaps because she was foreign born, my mother took a harder measure of Americans than my father did. Raising a movie star's daughter, in a country prone to violence, she seemed stone certain that something or someone rotten lay waiting for me Out There.

Perhaps I'd have been less afraid if our house was not at the top of a hill, or if we'd lived closer to the street or other families. As things were, I rarely woke up where I had gone to sleep. In the dead of night, I would stumble into my parents' bedroom, where I would be lulled back to sleep by my father's rhythmic snoring. My own room at night was too spooky. Outside my bedroom window stood a California pepper tree, a robust, lovely tree chock full of singing birds by day. At night, on my bedroom wall, the tree cast bony, hideous shadows. As a child I began fearing my own imagination, which turned every whistling wind, each creaking hall, into something vague and eerie.

Even during the day I often felt resentful of my physical surroundings. Not that thçy weren't splendid. Our house was a two-story white colonial with high pillars, allowing us a view of the whole sprawling San Fernando Valley. Winters,
pomegranates and oranges hung red and orange from our private orchard. In spring, the mountain face beyond our pepper tree exploded with shiny pink moss. In the late '50s, while the rest of the Valley was building homes at a dizzying pace, the hills of Encino was still a languid, undeveloped area with numerous ranches, horses, and orchards. The only thing our estate lacked was other children for me to play with. Just as my father had been, I was a terribly lonely child.

Without other kids, our compound could feel like a prison. For days or weeks at a time, I would go off with my father to witness the world—Africa, Spain, London—then be whisked back to my oversheltered existence. Wanting to cut the odds of danger, my parents kept strict tabs on my “free” time. Mostly I played by myself, or with our four dogs, in locked isolation behind our walls and gate. Sadly, as a result, I learned to prefer the company of adults rather than other children. Emboldened by their blanket praise, I was confident and lively around adults. With other kids, I was a very different little girl. Encountering them only at school, and even then held apart by my father's fame, I often felt awkward and ill at ease.

The few girlfriends I had I rarely saw out of school, as 1 was not allowed to walk home with them, not even a block, when the school day ended. Instead, the schoolbus driver picked me up and dropped me off at the bottom of our driveway. For the first day or so it made me feel special. After that, what I felt was alienation. Instead of telling my parents, I characteristically kept my feelings suppressed.

Weekends were more relaxed, but still served as reminders of how different I was. Saturdays and Sundays, a man named Fausto drove me down the hill to go ice-skating. Fausto worked around our house for years; I liked him, and I always went ice-skating willingly. I loved gliding over the ice in my little skirt, and the tightness I felt from my thick socks and skates. And yet I disliked skating alone, and afterwards hardly tasted the skating rink's little pizzas. I was distracted by my envy, as I watched the chattering packs of “normal” children. As a young girl I actually dreamed of
walking out my front door and playing with kids from our street. A simple dream, it would never be realized.

My favorite playmate then was still my father. When he was in town, even going to sleep had its pleasures. At night my dad was more serene, and I knew that was the time to make a play for softness. I used to say, “Daddy, help me sleep.” For a man with such thick, powerful hands, my father was extremely deft. Using his fingertips, he caressed my mouth, my nose, my shutting eyes. The instant he stopped I would wiggle, until he had put his hands back on me.

I had good reason to stretch those moments. By morning, my father's gentle touch was nowhere to be found. Mornings, my dad was a slave to his energy. It was extraordinary, and it exhausted even his children. To watch my careening father attack a new day, to try and keep pace with him, was to feel very old, and very, very lazy, before our time. He never slept late. Ever. When away on location, he always rose by four-thirty or five
A.M
. Even at home in his own bed, his eyes popped open by dawn. Any time at all, my father hated being alone. Mornings, wired by energy and caffeine, he hated it doubly, and could not stand for others to sleep after he'd gotten up. If his family was not out of bed by seven sharp, my father woke us—with all the finesse of one of his onscreen drill sergeants.

Every morning he'd barge into my bedroom, practically shouting, “It's time to get up! It's seven o'clock in the morning! Come on!”

When I was a child this irritated me. As a teenager, often out late the night before, it became positively loathsome. I should have told my father, but never did: at that time I still feared him, and rarely told him my true feelings. Besides, had I told my father I hated the way he woke me, he would have stopped, but his feelings would have been bruised; somehow, I would have paid for it later.

I should have told him anyway, because many years later I still pay for my silence. At thirty-five, I still wake up many mornings feeling alarmed and frightened, the residue of being jarred awake throughout my childhood.

I suppose it was all part of living with a man so zealous and forceful. No matter what his mood, my father overwhelmed me. His presence was so electric, our cavernous estate felt so much fuller and safer when he was at home, that when my father left I could not forget he was gone. My earliest and most exact memory of separation comes from when I was three years old. Knowing he was leaving, again, I wouldn't stop whining and crying to my mom. “Mom, Daddy is really going. Daddy is really going.”

My mother slapped my face. “Aissa,” she said, “don't be ridiculous. Why do you keep going on and on? He's just leaving for a little while.”

A kind of shock came over me, and the moment her hand struck my cheek I shut off my emotions. After that when my father left, I kept my longing inside.

My mother must have felt guilty and told him what happened. Because before he left for location, my dad did something new. He sat on my bed his final evening at home, dabbing away the dampness beneath my eyes. “Every night I'm gone, honey,” he said, “I want you to look at the stars. Wherever I am, I'll look at them, too. And no matter how far apart we are, we'll know we've looked at the same stars.”

And so I did, that and each endless night thereafter, until my father returned. I went to my window and looked at the stars, brilliant in the blackness all around, and yearned for an arm so long I could touch the lights with my finger.

Too young to know it then, I realize now that my mother was under tremendous pressure during the time when she slapped me. At the end of the 1950s, the life of Mrs. John Wayne was far from picture perfect. Like me, my mother relied on him, felt secure when he was near, and could come undone when work stole him away. She also had an additional cross to bear. My Peruvian mother was still in cultural passage, adjusting to the racing pulse and swollen narcissism of Hollywood. Some of this was heady. Much of it left her displaced and insecure. Eventually, her glittering new life-style nearly cost my mother her life.

By the time we moved to Newport Beach in 1965, my father rarely attended Hollywood parties. He still saw his old
Hollywood friends—Claire Trevor, Maureen O'Hara, Dean Martin, John Ford, Henry Hathaway—but always in relaxed surroundings. When he did have to attend showy Hollywood functions, he often came home chafing, “Every one you go to, you see the same damn people, saying the same damn things. All that changes is the women's dresses.” The older he became, the more my father hated flashiness. He even hounded my mother not to wear makeup. “I can't stand women who wear all that crap on their face,” he would say. “A woman looks best in a pair of jeans, a white blouse, with her hair down. Pilar, why don't you go without makeup today? You know how much I love you without makeup.”

Our Encino days were much different. Then, my father still went to quite a few Hollywood soirees, and even threw some himself. He primarily did it to please and impress his new wife. Looking back, their lack of communication was unmistakable—my mother often felt uneasy at these parties, too. This was the moral, I suppose, of not just my parents' marriage, but of our life as a family. Rather than having real communication, we all tried pleasing one another by pretending—and frequently wound up doing all the wrong things.

At a party one night in Encino when I was still an infant, finally my mother did not hide her emotions. Instead she blew up, and threw Robert Mitchum out of our home. It was the first night they met, but as my dad explained it all to me later, my mom resented Mitchum even before that.

According to my dad, in the early '50s he'd launched a production company, wanting more control of his own films and increased overall clout within the industry. By 1954 his company was called Batjac, and its debut film was
Blood Alley
. Eager for Batjac to charge out of the gate, my father signed three impressive talents: Lauren Bacall and Robert Mitchum to play the leads, and director William Wellman
(The High and the Mighty)
, whom James Mason once characterized as a “tough little bastard.” The third day of shooting, Wellman called my dad in a snit. He said Mitchum was drinking all night, sleeping through morning wakeup calls,
making location life miserable for cast and crew. As producer, my father urged conciliation, but one day Mitchum stormed off the set and said he could not work for Wellman. Wellman insisted my father move into the starring role. Although my dad had once passed on the script, feeling the role needed Mitchum's devil-may-care, he finally relented and took over the part.