John Wayne

by Aissa Wayne

  One weekend at Bayshores, my father noted my weight gain. He called me “fat” in front of his card-playing cronies, but he didn’t stop there. “You’re so fat!” he went on, with what sounded to me like glee. “Aissa, you’ve gotta do something about it! Look how you fat you are! How could you do that to yourself?”

  Was this his idea of motivation?

  They hadn’t been drinking; he couldn’t blame that.

  Was he waiting for me to cry?

  I rushed from the room silently cursing him. Hating him. I hated him for the rest of that day, refusing to answer my phone despite knowing who it was. What could his words do? They couldn’t change the humiliation I felt. They couldn’t change the past.

  When I finally picked up the phone, I went right to it.

  “Dad. You cannot talk to me like that. You made a fool out of me in front of all your friends. How could you do that to me?”

  He was apologetic, giving me all that ancient crap about how much he loved me, how much I mattered. Please, could I just forgive him?

  Forgive him? To break the chain, to get him to see past himself and look at who you were, you couldn’t forgive him. Why had it taken me so long to understand that?

  “Dad!” I cut him off, surprising myself. “Don’t ever talk like that to me. I’m serious.”

  “I won’t,” my father said, after a long pregnant pause. “I swear it, Aissa, I won’t.”

  It was a start.

  Back in the sixties my father was churning out hits, every studio sought him, and his family’s spending was a minor concern. But by the mid-seventies, money for my father approached an obsession. Like many Depression-shaped children made good, in his wallet he still carried thick wads of big bills. He still owned a home and a condominium, lucrative livestock and ranch land in southern Arizona, and had part ownership of several other financial interests. Still, this seemingly gave him no peace. Increasingly he fretted over the 1RS, the huge expense of owning a boat, his exorbitant medical insurance, his ebbing cash flow, how severely he’d been mismanaged in the years before turning to Michael Wayne to run his financial affairs. After starting to do commercials for Datril and Great Western Savings, he told me one of his friends asked him why John Wayne would go on TV and peddle aspirin.

  “The truth is, Aissa,” he said, “I’m doing it for the money. I’m not broke or anything like that, but I’ve spent too much, and trusted too many people. If Michael had been old enough to manage my money from the start, I’d never have had these problems. You’ve gotta find something you can fall back on, Aissa. If I get sick, I don’t know what will happen to you kids. It’s not what you think it is, Aissa.”

  My second year at USC I was put on an allowance of $200 a month. Though barely getting by, I was reluctant to ask for more. For two reasons: I was striving for my independence, and by then, asking my dad for extra cash was to court a three-minute discourse on frugality. One night that semester, I walked into his house and he handed me an already-opened envelope. My father said, “Here, it’s a three-hundred-dollar dentist bill. Pay it. You’re making your choices now. Start paying your own bills.”

  Too childlike to understand he was trying to teach me responsibility, I actually felt unloved. “I can’t believe it,” I whined to Debbie. “I’m still in school and my father is making me pay my own bills.”

  That summer I tagged along with my mom when she began real estate school. I quickly discovered I not only understood them, I was fascinated by how these transactions worked. As home values went rocketing, knowing that agents across Orange County were getting rich didn’t hurt either. Seeking financial freedom, I made a choice, as my father had fifty years before, to drop out of college and enter the work force. The dilemma was, how do I break it to him?

  I didn’t, not yet. I waited instead until I finished the real estate course and passed the exam and knew I’d be granted my license. I didn’t inform my dad of my fait accompli until just two weeks before USC fall classes.

  He was offended: I’d taken the course on the sly. “If you love me,” he’d always say, “then I’m not the last to know. If you love me you’ll tell me things first.”

  He was displeased: his daughter would not earn her college degree.

  But then he quieted down and looked me dead in the eye and saw something new there—determination. He spoke the basic words I waited a long time to hear.

  “You started something,” he said, “and you saw it through. Now you have something that’s yours. I wish you all the success in the world. I’ve never been prouder of you.”

  After that, I stopped by his house every day, to tell him about new listings, new escrows, a newly learned trick of the trade. “Aissa,” he said one early morning, “say hello, how are you.”

  “What?”

  “Say hello, how are you.”

  “Hello, how are you?” I said in a girlish voice.

  “No, no, no,” he corrected. “If you’re going to sell real estate, you can’t talk like that anymore, that voice. You have to say, ‘Hello! How are you?’ You have to be a businesswoman now.”

  We went back and forth—”Hello! How are you?”—but it didn’t strike me until I was alone that night. With my friends and my clients, I did speak assertively. Only my father could still make me feel ten years old.

  That I was twenty and selling real estate did not make me unique in 1970s Newport Beach. That my father was John Wayne did. No longer embarrassed about my last name, and now having my own mortgage to pay, I put my name to good use, earning enough that first year to purchase a one-bedroom home in nearby Costa Mesa. My father, the expert on everything, would often drive over and tell me where to position my sofa, the value of planting perennials—except now his lectures were cherished. I felt so proud that he liked my new little house.

  One night that summer we barbecued outside, just he and I in the Bayshores backyard. It was a warm and gently breezy Pacific night, and as we chatted and ate and admired the copper sky, he shifted his gaze from the afterglow to me.

  “I know that you really love me,” he said. “I know you’ve always loved me, Aissa.”

  All my words went away. I couldn’t speak, but knew I didn’t have to. What I felt was filling my eyes.

  After that perfect night, in that special summer, when my father stopped demanding my love, most of my fear of him dissolved. For the last five years of his life, when I told my father “I love you,” I did not mean, “See, Dad, I’m bucking you up again.” When he said he loved me, he did not seem to mean, “Now you must tell me back, and tell me again and again, because today I am feeling weak.” I still lament that it took so long, that we both played so fast and loose with our time together in life, and yet when my father died, our relationship was closer, stronger, less panicked than I’d ever dreamt it could be. I think he approved of me when he left, and saw without my words how much his love meant. I’ll always have certain regrets, but our resolution has left me feeling blessed.

  29

  In the new winter of 1976, I flew to Nevada to visit my dad, who was making The Shootist with Jimmy Stewart, Lauren Bacall, and Ronnie Howard. In light of his health, I was nearly sure it would be his final movie.

  As much as he admired Jimmy Stewart and Lauren Bacall, I think my father enjoyed Ronnie Howard most of all. He always said Ronnie was the most talented young actor he’d ever worked with, a pretty big compliment coming from a man whose career spanned fifty years. Until very near his death, my father clung to the dream of making a script called Candy’s Man. Whenever he spoke of it, he always said he wanted to make it with Ronnie Howard.

  His affection for his costars notwithstanding, making The Shootist was a gloomy experience. Prior to filming my father contracted pneumonia, and was shorter of breath than I’d seen him in many years. Several mornings before he could start work, we had to lay him face down across a table, where a physical therapist pounded my father’s back to try and dislodge the fluid clogging his lung.

 
The Shootist, I felt, was a solid picture, richer and more compelling than anything my father had done since True Grit. It felt just right, my dad going out with a Western.

  Still, when the film was complete I found I could barely watch it. John Bernard Books, his character, is a legendary gunfighter coming to terms with his death. I had watched my father die in seven other movies. But he always died for a cause, usually noble. In this film he was dying of cancer, and that was extremely unnerving. If not quite a family curse, for us the spectre of cancer had never entirely faded. By the time of The Shootist, the disease had killed my Uncle Bob, and I’d lived ever since with the fear that cancer would come again for my dad. Though his cancer would not be diagnosed for two more years, when he made The Shootist I think my father had similar apprehensions. When The Shootist came out, what I saw on-screen in my father’s eyes did not seem to be acting. The loneliness there looked real.

  From The Shootist on, he was almost continuously sick. By March 1978, even his voice was failing, a condition my father hated even more than his wheezing or dizziness; without his voice he could not continue working. For a while he tried hiding it, refusing interviews with press, speaking only to those who were not in the business of making movies. When he finally saw a doctor, a defective valve was discovered inside his heart. Evidently due to all his violent coughing, he’d ripped a “string” in his mitral valve, which controls the flow of blood between the left atrium and and the left ventricle of the heart. The cardiologist said this was actually decent news: rather than a generally failing heart, my father had a single, isolated, correctible flaw. A successful operation, they said, could return his heart to full strength.

  But, my father was not a young or healthy man. Seventy years old, his weight had ballooned to the range of 250. The doctors feared he might not be well enough to survive the trauma of open-heart surgery, and my father was also reluctant, albeit for typically bullheaded reasons. He was determined to star in Candy’s Man, and to fulfill his commercial obligation to Great Western Savings. For the time, in the hope of getting by despite his damaged valve, he would only agree to take medication.

  That hope was ruined one night in March 1978, when I stepped outside my old bedroom. In the same hall he once paced after fights with my mom, my father stood motionless, his sturdy head bowed.

  “I’m so dizzy,” he said. “Aissa, I don’t know what is happening to me.”

  An angiogram, a heart X ray projecting a clear picture of the cardiac area, provided the answer. His mitral valve must be replaced, and it must be done promptly. On March 29, 1978, accompanied by my father, Michael and Patrick Wayne, and Pat Stacy, I flew to Boston, where specialists at Massachusetts General Hospital would replace my father’s valve with one from the heart of a pig.

  On the private plane ride east my father mostly napped. When he awoke, there were plenty of oinking and pig jokes. “Make sure I don’t have a curly tail when they bring me out of surgery,” my father cracked. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll still be able to oink with the best of them.” Always considered “the serious one,” I could never see the black humor in sickness the way my father and his older kids could. I never especially liked that about myself. But that’s who I was, and I felt too fearful now to even feign laughter.

  Upon first inspection, the Eastern hospital only deepened the chill I’d felt from the instant I’d heard my father’s heart was not right. Used to the bright, pastel, wall-papered hospitals of Southern California, I was anxious about the dismal brown corridors and faded tile floors of Massachusetts General. My father’s spartan room had an iron bed, a chair, a nightstand, a closet, and no air conditioning. At first I felt horrendously depressed: this is a place where people come to die.

  It was, in fact, a marvelous place, where wonderful doctors help people keep living. Unlike UCLA, which had all the proper cosmetics, and where my father’s doctors were cold and obtuse, his Boston doctors were direct, friendly and patient. Contrary to UCLA, where, later, no one ever said, This is how cancer works, this is where it is now in your dad, this is where we hope it doesn’t spread, the Boston doctors detailed every stage of the coming ordeal. Using the valve of a pig, they explained, sounded peculiar but was widely considered the safest and most efficient procedure. The critical juncture would come about ninety minutes into the three-hour operation. My father’s heart would then be removed from his chest and placed on a pump while the doctors switched valves. When his heart came back off the pump, it was crucial that it resume beating. Due to my father’s age and chronic bronchitis, the risk factor was roughly 10 percent. Dr. Roman DeSanctis, the serene, devoted lung specialist, and Dr. Mortimer Buckley, the tall, elegant heart surgeon, said we had every reason to be optimistic.

  The night before surgery, DeSanctis and Buckley allowed my father to join us for dinner. By then all my brothers and sisters and a few of my father’s close friends had flown east. My mother stayed in Newport, waiting for my phone calls. By that point in their lives, both she and my dad had agreed he was too physically weak to withstand the emotional strain of even trying to get back together. The rest of us met in a private room at Maison Robert, a restaurant in old Boston, taking our seats as my father assumed his place at the head of the table. To no one’s surprise he ordered a drink. When we protested he argued, until one of my brothers left the room to phone the doctors. The verdict returned—he could have one drink but no more—my father ordered the “largest martini your bartender can make. That’s one drink, isn’t it?” There was a lot of clearing of throats but nobody spoke. With this crowd the Duke was still the boss.

  The waiter brought it out in a wine glass. Swishing around his martini, my father rose and toasted his family and friends. “To the last supper,” he said, and then he winked. He was referring to the churchlike decor of the room, its stained glass windows and heavy wooden tables. But of course we all saw through him. As it had all of ours, my father’s death had been crossing his mind.

  The next morning, exactly as promised, Dr. DeSanctis entered our crowded room about ninety minutes into my father’s surgery. DeSanctis entered holding his thumb straight up, sparing us that agonizing instant when families must try and decipher their doctor’s vacant expression. “The heart came off the pump perfectly,” DeSanctis said. “Everything’s going fine. Your father should be fine.” I ran to a phone and called my mother in California, grinning so broadly I looked like another girl. My rock of a dad was alive. He’d defeated open-heart surgery, just as so many years ago he’d vanquished cancer.

  Despite being forewarned by Dr. DeSanctis, I was humbled and shaken when I saw my dad that afternoon. Wired up, strapped down, a respiratory tube running gruesomely into his swollen throat, he looked bleached and battered, and the tubing kept him from speaking although he was awake. I wanted to squeeze him, but did not even touch him for fear of touching too hard.

  30

  Was I like the rest of his fans, mesmerized by his image? Or was my father truly larger than life? He was, in fact, an incredible man. Before we left Boston, Dr. DeSanctis told my dad he could live another fifteen years with his new, improved heart. If my father did not believe, he wasn’t showing it. Back only weeks in Newport, he purchased several pairs of new cotton sweat clothes and a new cushy pair of gleaming white gym shoes. Every morning at six, he walked a slow one-mile lap around the complex at Bayshores. A few mornings a week I dragged myself out of bed and strolled the one mile with him, my dad telling me stories, saying hello to fellow habitual walkers, noting changes in his neighbor’s familiar homes.

  “See those begonias,” he’d say to me. “See how much they’ve perked up the front of that house?”

  I enjoyed those lazy walks, and for all my concern I had to confess he looked good, fantastic really, for a seventy-year-old guy who’d just endured open-heart surgery. Having shed thirty pounds he didn’t want or need, his stamina returned, his dizzy spells passed, and even his voice returned to normal.

  Why then was my father so
irate?

  And he was irate. No sooner would we conclude our morning walks than he would commence attacking “those dirty bastards.” In the past, when he railed at the liberal press and politicians, I never felt too threatened, not even those two or three times he hurled objects through our TV sets. As long as he fumed at The Washington Post or Ted Kennedy, the heat was off of us and on someone else.

  But this winter his tirades gave me the jitters. Who “those dirty bastards” were was not always clear, and often my father seemed mad at the “whole damn country.” He was outraged at the talk of gun control, since criminals could still obtain firearms while law-abiding citizens went unprotected. He was sick about and appalled by Jim Jones and the mass death in Guyana. Most of all, he was disenchanted with the Carter administration. My father liked Jimmy Carter personally. Although my dad supported his old friend, Ronald Reagan, in 1976, when Carter won the election my father accepted his invitation to appear at the White House inaugural. In 1977, he even backed Carter on the Panama Canal, helping to push the new treaty through Congress. Through his relationship with Tony Arias, my godfather and his business partner before Mr. Arias’s fatal plane crash, my father knew the Panamanians well. He said Panama had “sided with us in every international emergency since its existence. We made a commitment to Panama, and we must live up to it.” This outraged my father’s conservative fans, and put him at odds with Ronald Reagan, but my father stood firm. For all his blustery ways, he always said he prided himself on looking at issues one by one.

  By 1978, though, despite that he’d just been allied with Carter one year ago, my father was calling him an “uninspiring leader, an ineffectual president.” As long as Carter remained in the White House, my father predicted that winter, Americans would continue losing their confidence, our economy would stay in its tailspin, and this country would be emasculated even more as a world power. “The United States is losing its balls and its spirit,” my father said. “It’s gotten so crappy here, I can’t stand to see it.”