John Wayne

by Aissa Wayne

  One night I will never forget, my father nearly shot a boy I knew. Around ten P.M., I drove home from Pat Kelly’s, my first real boyfriend, with Pat’s roommate, Rick. My father collected 16 millimeter versions of his old movies, and we wanted to watch one on Rick’s and Pat’s projector. Thinking it was late and my father was sound asleep, I took Rick straight through our garage to the room behind our bookcase, where my father stored his reels. My dad must have heard us and feared that he had intruders. For what he called “security reasons,” he always kept several guns stashed around our house. Reaching inside his nightstand for his revolver, my father stole back to the bookcase.

  “Aissa?” he yelled.

  Not knowing my father was holding a gun, I didn’t reply. He had this rule about people taking his movies without his permission.

  “Aissa,” he yelled again.

  My father also had a monumental pet peeve: he went berzerk when his children did not respond the instant he called out their name.

  “Answer him!” Rick whispered. “Answer him!

  Too late. Pushing through the door, my father stuck his cocked gun in Rick’s face.

  “Look at this!” he screamed at Rick. “Do you see this gun? I almost blew your goddamn head off!” Rick shook and shivered and couldn’t speak.

  Trembling with outrage, my father started on me. “Don’t you ever come into this house without coming straight to my room and telling me you’re here!”

  “But I thought you were asleep!”

  “I don’t give a damn! I almost shot his head off!”

  After that ghastly night I practically shouted whenever I walked in the door. Rick never came back to the Wayne’s.

  I fell for Patrick Kelly at my senior prom. Tall and solidly built, at twenty years old Patrick was an official “older guy.” He was also another girl’s date that night. I’d come to prom with Johnny, a friend living at Bayshores, but Johnny had one critical failing: he wasn’t Patrick Kelly. It was tradition after Newport Harbor’s Senior Prom to stay out all night and bounce from party to party. Through some monumental miscommunication, I believed my father said I could sleep that night at a girlfriend’s.

  Patrick Kelly was having a party and said I could bring along Johnny, and Johnny at first was happy to go. But the more time I spent around Patrick, Johnny kept suggesting we check out some other parties. I finally told Johnny to take my car and pick me up later.

  That was my first mistake. Rather than buy me a car that March when I turned sixteen—customary parental behavior in Newport Beach—my father had waited nine months, until Christmas 1972. That December morning he gave me two modest presents. I tried seeming grateful but actually felt slighted, since this was so unlike him. Around five that afternoon he handed me a cigar box containing a pair of keys. With no emotion, he told me follow him out to our garage. Parked there was a glistening new yellow Porsche 914! After crying with happiness, I thought about what my less-privileged classmates might say. For a girl intent on fitting in, the sports car did not follow the plan. But who cared? I was human. After all those years of driving around in my father’s green station wagon, I fell in love with my sleek new wheels.

  My Porsche still smelled new the night I gave it to Johnny to take to the other party. By the time the sun rose on Patrick’s rented beach house, our group had drained many beers, blasted the Rolling Stones, and already returned from a bleary-eyed five A.M. breakfast. I was hungover and exhausted, but oh, was I happy. Patrick and I hadn’t kissed, but I told him I’d liked him for months, and Patrick said he liked me too, he just hadn’t known how to say so.

  Patrick had a message on his machine, left there by Johnny while we’d been out eating breakfast. Johnny said he wrecked my Porsche. It wasn’t driveable, so he left it there on the side of the road. I was terrified, terrified at the fit I knew my father would throw.

  “I have to get home,” I said to Patrick. “My father is going to kill me.”

  The sun that June morning was already hot. When Patrick climbed hastily into his car without his shirt on, I gave it no thought, my mind locked on the rampage I knew I was heading into. As we turned into my complex the full implication came over me: I am not in my own car, I’m not with my original date, and the boy I’m with has no shirt on.

  “That can’t be my father!” I said.

  It could. It was. As I later found out, my father stayed up all night in his silk pajamas, knocking on doors of gossipy neighbors and angrily pacing our driveway, because he thought I’d be home by two A.M.

  Now he was still in his pajamas, and nearly out to the street. Restraining his self and his temper, my father spoke in a tightly clipped voice. “We’ve been looking for you all night. Get in the house.”

  Knowing better than even to glance at Patrick Kelly, I said “bye” over my shoulder and hurried past my dad with eyes trained straight ahead. I waited, and waited, and waited, but my father never came into my room. For the next twenty-four hours he was cold and distant, barely speaking my name. When he finally came to my bedroom I told my father the story without any lies.

  “If I gave you what you deserved,” my father said, “I’d have to ground you forever. So let’s just forget it.” Except for growling once about the repair bill, my father never mentioned it again.

  That story shows my dad in all his formidable unpredictability. Like the time I was caught smoking pot, I was sure I’d be crucified for the Porsche, and each time my father took no punitive action. Each instance, the relief I felt was only surpassed by my shock and confusion. Today, I’m sure my father suppressed his rage for fear of driving his teenager daughter further away. Today, I can see that it all made textbook Wayne family sense. When the Wayne children did nothing wrong, that’s often when we were yelled at, and when we deserved real reproof we got off the hook. No wonder we were all such nervous kids. For children, erratic fathers are scary.

  How funny people can be. Because for all of my father’s flaws, for many years I was drawn to boys and men in his image. Boys and men with big voices, big bodies, big gestures, boys and men who wanted to make all my choices and regulate my life. That’s how I related to males, because that’s the way I related to my dad. When I realized this unflattering truth about myself, at first I was deeply ashamed. Since I thought no other father on earth could influence another woman the way my father did me, I believed that I was uniquely, emotionally, defective. I eventually learned that many, many other women have similar feelings about their fathers. Even today, I am still not entirely free of my father’s control. But I know I’m not alone.

  27

  By the end of 1973—the year my parents split up—my main emotion was relief. Seventeen, I’d long given up the fantasy of the perfect home life. Their marriage, in fact, was a wreck, and at least for the moment beyond working out. Though they rarely fought, the tension between them was making everyone skittish.

  Thanksgiving was near, and my father and I had still not discussed his problems with my mom. In addition, I had still never seen him cry about the prospect of losing my mother. Like so many American men of his generation, my father believed if a man was to call himself a man, he must wear a kind of armor, male and indestructible, that concealed his fears and deepest feelings from his family. Particularly to John Wayne, showing fear and pain was for women and children.

  With time and circumstance people can change, even patriarchal fathers born in 1907. And something changed that winter between my father and me. One night after an awful fight with my mother, he entered my bedroom and sat on my sister’s bed. Marisa was not around, or he never would have come in there. As my father sat down I could see tears inching down his stubbled face. When first he saw me looking he turned away. Then with the side of one thick finger, my father wiped his cheeks, turning his wet and unashamed eyes back to me.

  “Honey,” he said, “your mother and I are having some serious problems. I love her so much, I love you, I love our family, but I have to work—you know I have to—t
o support us, and I know it’s hard on your mother. She doesn’t understand . . .”

  His upper body rocking, his words spilling out between too many extra breaths, my father stopped speaking and started to cry. Once his tears unloosed, they came and they came. Tears. No sobbing or other sounds. Only tears. With no consideration of my actions, no thought of our future or past, I crossed to Marisa’s bed and I held him. He made no effort to stop me and we sat on my sister’s bed for several trembling moments, nothing withheld, my father and I as one, frozen in the sorrow and the still. I was seventeen. My father was sixty-six. We had crawled to this naked communion, this beautiful frightening point of no return, and why it had taken so long never entered my mind. Pulling him close, I knew we would never again be quite the same two people.

  Now everything’s out in the open. Our lives are more honest now. I silently told myself that through the winter and spring, and at first our new arrangement suited me. After my mother moved out that December—by mutual accord, while my father was out of town—she and my dad were more friendly than when they had shared a home. Custody wasn’t an issue since neither sought a divorce. They lived five miles apart, no distance at all in Southern California, my dad in the house at Bayshores, my mom at our Big Canyon condo. I kept clothes and belongings with both and made sure my shuttles between them were even. But I selfishly preferred to stay with my mom. She was more lenient, and I was seventeen.

  For me it was all fairly convenient and far less stressful, but as time passed, I started seeing that “honest lives” can hurt too. My parent’s civil smiles when the family was all together would vanish the moment the other one left. I know they tried not to, but their bitterness often seeped out. My mother complained that he was irritable and stubborn about working and that she could not spend entire summers up in Alaska on our boat. Whenever I’d visit my dad he always spoke of other things first, then brought the conversation to her. “A woman should stay with her husband. Your mother gets mad because I have to work. Where the hell does she think we get our money?”

  I hurt for them both and tried staying neutral, gently taking the side of whomever I was with. But I found myself feeling more pain for my father. My mother opened a restaurant, the Fernleaf Cafe, and was busy with that, while my dad was growing older, more tired, still working as hard but not nearly as often. I’d never seen him so torn up, nor so lonely. I was used to him needing our feeding; he always needed that. But I wasn’t prepared to see his self-pity. If I missed a few days of visits, he charged that I didn’t love him. “I know you don’t love me, Aissa. If you loved me you’d spend more time here.”

  As it did the night he cried in my arms, seeing my father like this filled me with more emotions than I was equipped to sort out. My mother was gone, he needed me now, and I wanted it. Still, I felt so awkward. My father talked about he and my mom, my turn came to speak, and all I could muster was something like “Dad, I know she still loves you,” or, “Dad, you should really try talking things out.” His disappointed eyes told me he wanted more, and sometimes that angered me. After all those years of treating me like his baby girl—smile sweetly and don’t have any opinions—he wanted to snap his fingers and have me turn into a woman.

  Several months after my mother moved out, the more upset I saw her becoming, the more certain I felt she and my father would reunite. I think she realized her work, her new friends, her religion, her tennis, all gave her something worthwhile, but also that she still deeply loved her husband. One day she wrote him a long letter, and shortly after that they met at the Fernleaf Cafe. My mom never showed the letter to me and I never felt I should ask, but I was sure she’d return home and say she was moving back in. Instead she came back to the condo crying.

  Without telling my mother, I jumped in my car and sped to the house on Bayshores, having no idea what I might say. My father sat outside on a lounge chair, an umbrella giving him shade. Sitting erect, he still looked sad, but no longer self-pitying. When I asked what happened, he spoke as he sometimes did about giving people chances.

  “You give someone a chance,” he said, “and then you give them a second chance. But after two chances that’s it. After that you start to lose your dignity, and that’s where you have to draw the line.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, didn’t know what had transpired the past days, weeks, months, years, between him and my mother. But I understood my father’s tone and the language of his body. I felt my own muscles go flaccid, and suddenly feeling sleepy I went inside to lie down. For now, the marriage was through.

  28

  It was a tangled evolution, coming in fits and starts. But my father was learning to let go.

  The first breakthrough came when I graduated high school. By my junior year, I had quit smoking pot completely. It was fairly easy to do since I’d never enjoyed its effects in the first place, and having been scared to death by those two policemen tearing apart the older’s boy van—looking for drugs—the night I spent several hours in jail. I still knew plenty of kids who did drugs, but I stopped hanging around them, and became more involved with my school work. By my junior year I had done some maturing, and upon my graduation, my father, reassured by my grades my last two years, made no strident fuss when I said I wanted to work for a year before enrolling at USC. That March I turned eighteen and he allowed me to spend my birthday at home, in Newport, with friends, even though he was off on location. “You’re no longer a baby,” said the note my father sent from Seattle with a pungent bouquet of flowers. “You’ve flown the coop. Love, Dad.”

  I decided to test his words that summer. He asked me to fly to London, where he was filming Brannigan, and I said I would love to, but first could I see parts of Europe, with Patrick Kelly, Debbie, and her boyfriend? The first surprise came when my father said yes; the next when the four of us joined him in London, and he didn’t say an embarrassing word about our sleeping arrangements the past two weeks. In London he did put up the boys in separate hotels, but then he picked up their tab, which the guys had planned on paying. It meant a great deal to me, unsure as I was about his feelings toward Patrick Kelly. An older boy, with long hair, Patrick never went out of his way to endear himself to my dad, remaining courteous but cool. But throughout our stay my father was warm and relaxed and gracious. Just who was doing the growing up here?

  During this time my mother arrived in London, in what I presumed to be a final attempt to reconstruct their marriage. The week before leaving Newport, she’d telephoned London seeking my father and been told he was spending the weekend in Ireland—with Pat Stacy, his secretary. My mom was in London for only a couple days before she and my father fought. My mother left in a rage, certain her husband had started romancing his thirty-two-year-old secretary.

  I don’t know if that was true, but I never saw Pat Stacy as any threat to the possibility of my parents reconciling. Born in Louisiana, Pat was a spiky-haired brunette with dark brown eyes and a cute petite figure. She’d been hired by my father’s secretary, Mary St. John, to be groomed as Mary’s successor when she retired. I liked Pat. Though at first I saw she was starstruck by my dad—everyone saw, since Pat made it impossible not to—I sensed as time went on that she honestly cared for him. While he was alive, I never felt Pat was out to exploit my dad.

  About four years after he died I had second thoughts. Pat then had the gumption to write a book about herself and my father, glamorizing, romanticizing, hyperbolizing their “love affair.” Among other fanciful things, Pat said my father made no secret of his affection for her in front of myself and the other children. In truth, he was standoffish toward Pat when I was around. When they were alone, I’m sure he felt grateful for her company. With him and my mother estranged, she was a feminine soul when he needed one. And although my father groused when the tabloids got wind of their “romance,” blaming Pat for talking too much and too freely, he probably enjoyed it. An aging Hollywood star with a younger woman—it was good for his image. Despite his physical problems at
that stage of his life, perhaps my father and Pat even made love on occasion.

  But was he in love with Pat Stacy? And did they have the gushy romance Pat depicted in her book?

  I don’t think so. Had my father felt about Pat the way she described, I think he would have married her. As Michael Wayne used to say, “John Wayne is the marrying kind,” and that was true: whether with Josephine, or Chata, or my mother, my dad was never loathe to admit when he was in love, and never shy about either divorce or marriage. Yet he never married Pat, even though my mother offered him a divorce. He never invited Pat to move in with him. Instead, to her annoyance, even after he moved her office into the house on Bayshores, where Pat did secretarial work by day, my father still rented a separate house for Pat to live in. That wasn’t his style when he was in love.

  Had Pat not written that book, I’d have never mentioned any of this, but the book seemed so far removed from the truth I felt that I should.

  My freshman year at USC I shared off-campus housing with Debbie, but neither one of us was equipped to live on our own. Our small apartment was littered with filthy dishes and soiled clothes. Rather than simply cleaning up, Debbie and I took out our bad moods on each other. In the first significant crisis of our friendship, I responded typically: instead of discussing it, addressing the real problem—our parents had spoiled us rotten when we were kids—I ate every night to dull my depression.