John Wayne

by Aissa Wayne

  This was emotional, not political, and on a purely emotional level I started disliking the Vietnam War. It was a serious breakthrough for me, not because I was right and my father was wrong, but because I made up my mind on my own about something important. But I never told him, not then, not even after we pulled out our troops. When it came to the most divisive war in American history, my father had little patience for either debate or dissent. He was remarkably well read on foreign affairs, and had rubbed shoulders with generals; his knowledge alone was enough to intimidate me. Besides, he was John Wayne, and I wasn’t up to that challenge. I still recalled, too, what my father had told me throughout my childhood, and was still telling me in high school: “Don’t voice your opinion too much, and you won’t sound like a fool.”

  Since father knew best, I heeded his words. At home I ate, slept, bathed, and muffled my feelings. Away from my father I lived out my double life.

  25

  From doctoring my grades, I graduated to taking diet pills my second year in high school.

  Having inherited my mother’s compulsion to stay thin, I believed the ten pounds I’d gained in a year looked more like thirty. One day, sitting in ceramics class, two pretty and popular girls slid out a baggie of pills, a menagerie of reds, yellows, whites, and purples. I didn’t know the girls well, but I knew they were cheerleaders and belonged to a social group known as the “soshes.” I wanted them to befriend me, but more than that I wanted my body to look like theirs.

  “Try these, you’ll lose weight for sure,” one of the soshes said, in a voice sounding stuck on fast forward. I think she was already on one that morning. I took a handful of Dexedrine and dropped them into my purse. For one week of mornings prior to school, I locked our bathroom door and gulped my amphetamines. I lost a few pounds, but I also acquired teeth clenched so tight my jaw ached, and concentration so scattered my train of thought never left the station. That weekend I flushed the remaining dexies.

  Around this time, my father announced a new rule: every afternoon at five our family would gather for dinner. His intent was for us to be close, to try and subvert the forces pulling us apart, but no one wanted to be there other than he. Ethan and I had to run in off the beach to eat, one full hour before the rest of our friends. Even my mother seemed resentful; their marriage was failing and she had other places she’d rather be. Dinners were often the tensest part of our day. Although my father worked hard at controlling his temper, he could not quell his urge to dictate. Asking about our lives, he’d allow us to answer, but then he’d wind up issuing lectures. The worst nights, my father rode Ethan throughout our meal. Though my father never hit me, never even spanked me, he had no such qualms about his boy. He never struck Ethan at dinner, but my father’s furious looks carried with them the musk of violence.

  Once on our boat, my father asked Ethan if he’d just told a lie, and Ethan looked up and said “Yes.” When Marisa or I lied about something small, and then confessed, my father always said, “Well, I’m glad you didn’t lie twice—just don’t lie to me again.” But then, on the boat, because it was Ethan, my father smashed his face with the hard bony back of his heavy hand. The only other time I recall him hitting Ethan with real force, my father slapped him so hard that the kid flew across the room. I wanted to shout, cry out, demand that my father stop. But I dared not intervene. Not when he was like this.

  My father called Ethan “Big Stuff,” mostly with pride but sometimes with sarcasm. Even when Ethan was very young, he was not allowed to cry. Once, while my father sat playing bridge with three of his friends, I pushed open the kitchen door just as Ethan was rushing in sipping a Coke. The swinging door propelled the glass bottle into my brother’s mouth. My father didn’t see it, only saw his son crying, and hollered at Ethan in front of all the adults.

  “Go to your room and stay there!” he ordered. “Don’t you open your mouth! I don’t want to hear any crying out of you!”

  I meekly followed Ethan into his bedroom, where he sat alone on the edge of his bed, his front tooth knocked crooked, blood dripping down his chin from the wound in his gums. Rushing back to the card game, I told my father Ethan was really cut, his mouth was bleeding badly. The eyes of his friends were fixed on their cards. His own eyes clouded with bottomless guilt, my father excused himself and hurried to Ethan’s room.

  “Oh, God, Ethan,” my father said when he saw his child’s blood. “I’m so sorry for being so hard on you. I just don’t want you to cry.”

  The years passed and Ethan grew up, but not quickly enough for my dad. The more his own health deteriorated, the more swiftly he saw his own life nearing its end, the faster he rushed Ethan through his childhood. But how does a boy prepare to become the man of the house when the man of the house is John Wayne? There was no room, and besides, my brother was just a boy, unprepared for that type of responsibility. Helplessly, I watched them grow further apart. On the sets of films, I could see that Ethan was drawn not to my dad, but always to the younger, rowdier, more energetic stunt men. Ethan went to them to whip around a football, to watch them ride their motorcycles—it ate my father up.

  But it wasn’t only Hollywood stunt men: my father became enraged at the thought of his children growing close to any older man except himself. His dearest friend at the time was a man named Chick Iverson. In his middle forties, Chick owned a sports-car dealership in Newport, and was fast friends with John Derek. John and his wife, Linda Evans, were still on friendly terms with Ursula Andress, John’s ex, and the glamorous trio appeared at several of Chick Iverson’s parties. A child of Holly wood, raised to admire physical beauty, I was struck by their sheer perfection, especially Ursula’s and John’s. By virtue of his dazzling friends alone, I decided Chick Iverson must be an exceptional person.

  My junior year, I’d just started dating Chick Jr., Chick Iverson’s seventeen-year-old son. One rainy Newport weekend I cancelled our date, feeling fluish and weak. Later that night while driving home, Chick’s car skidded down a rain-slick ravine. Chick Jr. died three days later.

  His father could not bear it. He and his son had been extremely close, and now his boy was gone. Although we could never replace him, from the day Chick Jr. died, I think his father saw Ethan and me as his surrogate teenage children. Helping him cope with his loss, I learned that for all his slick sophistication, Chick was also a very intelligent man. He was older, he knew things, and yet he listened. I found I could talk to Chick about almost anything, even boys. At his invitation, my brother and I went to see Chick about three times a week at his office.

  One day my father found out.

  Please understand, my father loved Chick Iverson. Their greatest bond was a passion for the sea, and that each could make the other man laugh. After the car wreck, while Chick Jr. lay in his coma, my father went to the hospital and held Chick Sr. in his arms.

  Now, he was infuriated at Ethan and me.

  “You go to my best friend when you have a problem? You don’t come and talk to me? He’s not your father. I’m your father.”

  “Dad,” I said, trying somehow to downplay. “Mr. Iverson’s just a good friend, like an uncle. We go to the car lot. The sports cars are neat.”

  “He’s not your father!”

  The friendship between my father and Chick survived. But within it, after this, ran currents of loss and pain. Ethan and I promised my dad that next time we’d turn to him. Seeing how badly we hurt him, at the time I think we both meant it. But we were still the same children, he the same father, and “next time” turned out to be empty words.

  *

  Sophomore and junior year I felt pressure jut in from both sides. Pressure from people my age to party, pressure from my father not to publicly shame him. Though he still looked at me and saw innocence, drugs was too blaring an issue for him to simply pretend his teenage daughter would never confront them. Newport Beach had money, and its children the wherewithal to buy drugs.

  Although he danced around the word drugs, my father
was plain on potential repercussions. “I worked fifty years for my reputation,” he warned me. “I worked damn hard. If you get caught doing something wrong, or if you’re with other kids who are doing things wrong, it will go right in the papers. You’ll ruin fifty years of my hard work. You’ll ruin my name. So really think about it, before you do anything stupid.”

  I did think about his reputation, not enough to stop me, but enough for my pot-smoking peers to brand me as paranoid. Each time I bolted up at the smallest sound, they told me, “You’re just paranoid. And the only reason you can’t smoke pot without getting paranoid is that you don’t have a strong personality.” In ways they were right, but not for the reasons they thought. Had I been a stronger person, I’d have never smoked pot in the first place. My father’s warnings aside, I never liked pot’s effects. I felt groggy and lethargic, and I thought the other kids were laughing at me. Still, I smoked anyway. It wasn’t enough for me to be liked by some of my peers—everyone had to accept me. I was exactly the opposite of the typical young kid who runs around smoking and drinking and getting in trouble to try and grab some attention. I had too much attention, too many stares from too many eyes. All I sought now was to be seen as the girl next door, and this was the early ’70s. The girl next door was smoking marijuana, perhaps dropping LSD.

  Too scared of LSD to even experiment, in countless other respects I mimicked my peers. Though my father gave me and my mother charge cards from several exclusive dress shops, I completely stopped using them. When girls and guys at parties downed beer from their bottles, I drank beer from mine; only a spoiled Hollywood bitch would request a glass. I conformed and conformed and conformed, and I even “got high”—despite secretly hating the feeling, despite secretly feeling panicked. I could never confess this uncoolness, so instead I’d accept the joint, take a deep, defiant drag—who’s a priss now?—meanwhile praying the cops would not smash down the door, followed by reporters, followed by fire-and-brimstone headlines besmirching our family name, followed by . . . my father.

  My father!

  “You’re just paranoid,” one of the other girls said. I was in the midst of a pot-smoking party, and I’d just heard a sudden noise outside the bedroom. There were seven or eight of us, teenage girls, in a smoke-filled beachfront bedroom, coughing on joints rolled in red-white-and-blue papers resembling American flags.

  “I heard the garage door!” I said.

  “You’re just paranoid.”

  “No, I’m telling you—”

  My girlfriend’s mother burst in.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, her nose pointed up and sniffing the smoky air. She was young, and newly single.

  “Smoking cigarettes.”

  Cigarettes didn’t come papered in red, white, and blue, and I knew she would tell all our parents.

  The only way to save myself, the only conceivable way to circumvent my father, was deviously. In a few subtle places I unhooked and unplugged our telephones. Though I still don’t understand how, for one night and a day my scheme went undetected, but the very afternoon our phones went back on their hooks and into their walls, my girlfriend’s mother rang through.

  I came in from school and my father said, “We need to talk.” Petrified, bracing, I skulked behind him into the kitchen. “Aissa,” he said without raising his voice. “I love you very much. The people that give you that stuff, they don’t love you the way that I do. You can take their word that this stuff is good, or you can listen to me when I tell you it’s bad. The stuff is bad, Aissa. Now whose word are you going to take, someone who’s known you and loved you all your life, or someone you met two days ago?”

  Actually, I thought, I’ve known most of the girls for years.

  “Are you listening, Aissa? Whose word are you going to take?”

  “Your’s, Dad. I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.”

  My father had called me no names. Had not used rage or self-righteousness. Had not invoked his public image, his fifty years of hard work.

  He must have a motive.

  Yet he seemed sincere.

  For the next several days I toyed with a farfetched notion: perhaps he isn’t the enemy.

  One night about three months later, in the shag-carpeted back of an older boy’s van, I sat drinking beer from a can with a few of his friends and two of my girlfriends. Sure, it was after curfew, but we thought we played it safe by parking the van on a dark, drowsy side street and shutting all the curtains. First came a beam of refracted light, then a sharp rap on metal.

  “Everyone out!” a male voice shouted outside.

  We scurried outside the van to the sight of flashlight-wielding policemen. For ninety minutes, the two uniformed patrolmen stripped apart the boy’s van, presumably searching for drugs. We’d only been drinking beer, the officers found no drugs. They led us back to their car and drove us down to the station.

  The police saw my last name, but did not seem to know I was John Wayne’s daughter, and I didn’t volunteer the information. There were no mug shots, no fingerprints, no clanging cell doors, no Good Cop/Bad Cop scene out of a movie. The police didn’t even charge us. But they did detain us long into the night, long enough for us to contemplate ourselves and our glum surroundings. One officer took the boys into one room, while my girlfriends and I sat blinking at the gun-metal gray walls of another.

  What am I doing here? Next time, there really may be drugs, and maybe I’ll find out how it feels to spend time caged up behind bars. Why am I using drugs anyway? I’m not jittery and mixed up enough when I’m straight? And that’s what I am—I’m straight I am straight, and I don’t want to screw up my life, and no amount of pot or untouched charge cards or fraying jeans will ever change the person I am at heart So who am I trying to seem?

  My breath was getting short and something tight and oppressive fluttered inside my chest. I thought I might hyperventilate.

  By the time the police called everyone’s parents, my mother, I knew, would be sitting home terrorized, all her fears that some Hollywood-stalking crazy had kidnapped or hurt me triggered again by the shrill late-night ring of the phone. My dad, thank God, was out of town on business.

  Since there’d been no arrest reports made, the press never found out I’d been taken in. Neither did my father. As we drove home from the station at three A.M., my tired and livid mother was not in the mood to talk. She said we’d discuss this in the morning, and that she would not tell my father, not this time, and there better not be a next time. As my mother drove home in the darkness I noticed my hands were quivering.

  26

  The summer before my junior year, on the Southwestern set of The Undefeated, I stood on the side with my dad watching Rock Hudson perform a scene.

  “Look at that face,” my father said admiringly, without turning to look at me. “What a waste of a face on a queer. You know what I coulda done with that face?”

  I was staggered, for two reasons. First, that Rock Hudson, who I thought gorgeous, was homosexual. Back then, it never occurred to me that a good-looking man could be gay. Secondly, that my father had spoken to me, his daughter, in a manner he always reserved for men. Crude or not, this was Boy Talk, a party I’d never been privy to. Since my father did not seem to want any reply, I merely stood there, dumbfounded and mute.

  That was about as close as we ever came to discussing sex. Not surprisingly back then, both my parents found it difficult to talk about sexual behavior with their children. My mother was very good at explaining my period, but that was as far as she went, and since my high school had no sex education, I learned the facts of life from other young girls. This naturally led to distortions.

  When I was twelve, a girl three years older spent the weekend with her parents on our boat. One night as we curled up in our sleeping bags, the Turtles’ “Hello, I Love You” came over the radio. My sage older friend turned up the music so no one could eavesdrop, and began explaining to me the mechanics of sex, what part of the husband’s anatomy wen
t where on the wife. But what she said and what I perceived were not at all the same thing. I thought she said the man peed inside the woman, and that’s how people made babies.

  “What?” I said. “That’s awful. It’s the grossest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I knew it,” she replied. “You’re too young, I never should have told you. Promise me you won’t tell your parents.”

  I gave her my word, and for one year I went nowhere with my confusion. When I turned thirteen, my understanding of sex was still sketchy at best, but that year I got my first real kiss. Only a freshman, I somehow revealed my crush to the sophomore boy who’d been stirring all these new feelings inside me all year. By then my girlfriends and I had read parts of that book—Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask—but it all became a blur when my lips met the sophomore boy’s on the dance floor. I was in love and felt that we should get married.

  By the end of the following school week, the boy’s critique got back to me. He told all his friends I was a terrible kisser, the worst he’d ever met.

  I was humiliated to tears, and after this I had even more than the normal teenage girl’s fear of discovering sex: fear of kissing badly, fear of being called slut, fear of pregnancy, fear of boys getting fresh not because they liked me, or even because they thought I was pretty, but so they could run lying and boasting to other boys that they just had their way with John Wayne’s daughter. I was so embarrassed by my sexuality, I even felt timid the first week I wore my training bra, certain my father would notice and disapprove. I was intensely relieved when he didn’t.

  My fear of sex was reinforced by all the talk around our house about the new eroticism in Hollywood movies: that it was “repulsive” and “bad.” To back up his code of sexual beliefs, my dad did not allow me to date until my senior year. Even then he seemed uncomfortable, tossing out mild but skeptical comments about my potential suitors, especially those with long hair. One day some young local Marines awarded my father a plaque at our house. When they left my dad told me, “That’s the kind of boy I can see you with, Aissa.” They seemed like nice boys, but they all had crew cuts, and I didn’t care for the look. My supreme fear my senior year was that some long-haired boy I really liked would come to pick me up and my law-laying father would grill and bombard him. So even after my father said I could date, I usually lied, meeting the boys in town and telling my dad I was out for a night with my girlfriends.