John Wayne (14 page)

For the next few days, I felt so tired I told my father no when he asked if I wanted to watch him film out in the wild. The long ride on the plane and the shortness of sleep had worn me down, so I stayed behind with my mother. About the third or fourth afternoon, standing beneath a tree, I heard a screech, then felt something jump on my back. I screamed, flailing at my attacker, and a small monkey stopped clawing at my hair and scurried back up the tree it had dived from. I wasn't hurt or even knocked off my feet, only unnerved, but my wild animal problems were just beginning.

Told by the local residents how to thwart the malicious monkeys—don't stand under trees—I turned one morning to see a much odder creature: It had a long skinny bare neck, black-feathered-medicine-ball of a body, and long skinny bare legs. The ostrich was walking directly toward me, and I took off running. Unbeknownst to me, this was precisely how not to react; once human beings run, ostriches will give chase. Though my back was turned, I could feel the excited animal closing the gap with its massive stride. Then a little African boy, no taller than I, ran shouting right past me, and when I turned back the ostrich had taken flight in the other direction. While I tried to control my shaking I returned the shy smile of the little boy who'd saved me.

Making his movie, meanwhile, my father was having adventures of his own. Doing his own stunt work one day, he hung off the side of a moving Land Rover during a zebra-hunting scene. From the blind side of the jeep rushed an uninvited bull rhinocerous. The startled driver veered, the jeep bucked, almost flipping, and my father was nearly catapulted into what might have been a fatal landing. That night when he returned for dinner everyone seemed so caught up in his thrilling tale. So I didn't talk any more about the ostrich or monkeys.

Or the baby elephants. A few days into my visit, my father had introduced me to three of them; he and Howard Hawks were using them in their movie. The baby elephants really did seem friendly, especially when compared to the ostrich and monkeys. But my father did not take into account that, to me, “baby elephant” was a cruel misnomer. Silently angry and panicked—thinking,
Why are you making me do this?
—I allowed him to stick me on one of their backs while the cameras went
pop-pop-pop-pop
. Time, as it is apt to do during crises, started crawling as the leviathan baby took off. At that interminable moment, I sought nothing more out of life than my return to solid ground, and yet all I did was smile through clenched teeth. Because I could not talk to my father, because he sometimes treated me like an object instead
of a child, I rode in fear while he stood grinning and watching.

Later that week, a buzz came over the set from out in the Wild. A great male African elephant, typically easygoing, had gotten separated from his herd. Dangerous now, the outcast had charged the men on the film set, including my dad, and he and the men had killed it.

This much made sense to me. I'd seen the men on the sets holding high-caliber rifles, and by then I understood the Serengeti's peril. The men had killed the wild elephant to save their own lives. Much better the elephant than my father, I told myself, as my mother and I motored over the plains to the sight where the men were filming.

When we arrived the pieces stopped fitting. Except for its behemoth size and blood-darkened skin, the slain elephant looked a lot like the babies I'd been riding. All week long, the adults all told me the babies were my friends, so I'd started trying to think of them that way. Now, many of the Americans were taking pictures near the prone animal, and my father told my mother and me to go and stand in front of it. In the scorching African heat, the blood smell was so strong it filled my lungs and nose and I thought I might throw up. Although by standing perfectly still I managed not to gag, I felt so light I thought I might float off the earth. Sad, sick, and confused, I let my mother take me back to the car.

Stateside a few months later I turned seven years old and my parents staged my annual birthday party. Even my father, who deplored most of Hollywood's flashier tribal customs, relented when it came to my parties. Perhaps he knew I was starved for playtime with other children, seeing them so scarcely except at school. Perhaps, like so many stars, he felt trapped between the antagonistic demands of Hollywood and family, and felt he could tip back the scale by throwing me extravagant parties.

I do think my elaborate birthday parties were for my sake, and not for his. Publicity games were one thing; social-status
games my father roundly rejected, finding them both ridiculous and degrading. And to both my parents' credit, they never indulged in the hoariest Hollywood practice of all: inviting other movie stars' children, kids I didn't know, in the twisted hope that their famous mommies and daddies would also stop by for cake and ice cream, so my parties might enhance my parents' social reputation. Except for little Dean and Gina Martin, Dean and Jeanne's two children, both of whom I'd always liked, my parents invited only my classmates. I realize it's de rigueur for children of Hollywood to say they loathed their birthday parties, to describe the other industry kids as starched and nervous and grim faced, and to trash their movie star parents for putting them through them. But except for one, I enjoyed my parties immensely. In our backyard we had merry-go-rounds and “airplane” rides, bunches of multicolored balloons, brightly dressed men wielding cotton candy, and pretty ponies for rides across our green expanse of lawn. Had my guests been other star children, it all might have been oddly passé. But the children from my school, unjaded by Hollywood, were so dreamy-eyed at my parties it always infected me.

The one party I didn't like was this one when I turned seven following our trip to Africa. That spring morning, my mother told me to play in my room while she and my father put the finishing touches on our yard. Play? I was far too concerned with my appearance. My taste on such occasions ran to white. Though the party would not start for a couple of hours, I already had on my winter white organdy dress, my glittering white shoes and socks, and my white satin ribbons bedecking my dainty curls. Not long after she told me to go in and play, my mother interrupted my preening.

“Your father has a question about the party,” she said. “Can you come outside?”

Who did she think she was kidding? For one thing, my parents planned my parties with painstaking precision. Except for making out my guest list and vetoing clowns—I thought they looked sinister—my input had never been solicited. For another thing, both she and I knew that my father
was always full of surprises. It was one of his special charms. Once, on a lengthy, potentially endless-seeming plane ride from Los Angeles to Europe, he purchased the entire first class for him and my mother, making it unforgettably romantic. On the morning of one of my earliest birthdays, he'd come into my room and drawn my bedroom drapes, revealing a life-size playhouse in our backyard. While I'd slept during the night, my father had snuck in the workers to construct it.

Prepared to be surprised by my special gift, I was flabbergasted anyway. Outside in front of our pool, three feet from my dad, stood one of my African “friends.”

A baby elephant.

As if still on Howard Hawks's cue, it stuck its trunk in the pool and sprayed water all over the deck and my dad.

When I first saw the gray animal I was speechless, overcome by all these
feelings
. First, I was astounded. Then I felt queasy, the movie screen of my mind flashing back on the wild elephant, lying rotting and dead among the flies and the stench that horrible day in the African plains. Then I considered the baby elephant and my father. As he had so many times back there, he'd make me ride the elephant today, in front of all the children from my school. I'd smile prettily for all and my dad would still not see I was frightened. This last thought disheartened me: my own father could not tell my counterfeit smiles from my real ones.

My mother cleared her throat, my signal to speak. I focused again on my dad, standing in front of our pool in the white morning sunlight. Where the baby elephant doused him, his formerly clean pressed clothes were wet and mildly rumpled. He wasn't scowling or fuming or raising his voice, though. He was smiling at me and although his tears never spilled I could see his eyes welling with happiness. He had no idea what was going through my head.

But it didn't mean he didn't love me; that he loved me was never in doubt. Without feeling I had to, I ran and squeezed him and let him hold me as long as he wanted.

Returning inside, though, I promised myself I would not
ride the baby elephant. Not in front of my classmates, not on my birthday, no matter how much trouble he must have gone to. For just this one day, I would not sublimate myself, while he treated me like a possession. I would not do whatever my father wanted me to, and pretend it made me sublimely happy.

That afternoon I rode the baby elephant.

In 1963 I missed second grade entirely when my father decided to take his dream trip, on his dream ship, in what looked at first like our dream family vacation.

Around the time Ethan was born my father had purchased
The Wild Goose
with the money he earned from Paramount. It was not his first boat, but the first befitting my father's own bigness.
The Wild Goose
was 136 feet of converted World War II minesweeper, with the finest engines and navigational equipment. Once my father remodeled, her accomodations included an oak-paneled master salon with a wet bar, a wood-burning fireplace, a motion picture projector and screen, and a teleprinter receiving UPI, AP, and weather bureau reports; a luxurious master suite and three guest staterooms, each with its own bath; a dining
room that comfortably sat ten; a sixty-foot afterdeck for sunning and playing cards; a cast-iron barbecue; a washer-dryer; a liquor locker; and a wine cellar.

When my father wasn't working,
The Wild Goose
had a strong psychic pull for him. In the winter, we took it to Acapulco; most summers we cruised to Alaska. For my father and other famous leading men, yachting was a venerable tradition. In many ways enslaved by their outlandish celebrity, stars like Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, and Errol Flynn all found asylum on the sea. By the summer of 1963, my father had launched a love affair with
The Wild Goose
that would continue unabated until his final years. By then we'd already taken
The Goose
from Newport Beach to the Baja coast, but these trips had been leisurely. To challenge his brawny new ship, my father was eager to find a stiffer test. When Henry Hathaway asked him to star with Rita Hayworth in
Circus World
, a film he planned shooting in Spain, my father found his crucible. He told Hathaway yes, he would be in Madrid that September, delivered there by
The Wild Goose
.

As my father breathlessly explained it, leaning over the maps spread on the desk in his trophy room, we would start down for Acapulco, then steam around the Mexican coast and on through the Panama Canal. From there we'd traverse the Gulf of Mexico and dock in Bermuda, where Ethan, my mother, and I would disembark. Feeling this leg of the trip too jeopardous for his wife and young children, he and a crew of eight would strike out alone across the Atlantic. We'd rejoin them on the Portuguese coast, lingering at several ports up to and beyond the tip of Spain.

When the notion took hold of me, I was giddy with the prospect of flight and adventure. An entire year away from our compound, much of it in Spain, and no school except for a tutor! Spain sounded gay and sunny, and having a Latin mother and two Latin maids, I already spoke Spanish. I also sensed that my father needed this badly. In the final weeks before we set off, he'd started behaving erratically. One moment he'd be animated and loquacious, detailing the newest
wrinkle in our itinerary or his latest renovation to
The Goose
, and the next moment he'd be somber and mute. On the queerest night of all, my father had entered my bedroom and pulled me to his chest without speaking.

“Aissa?” he'd finally said, a stiffness to his voice that told me something wasn't right.

“Yes, Daddy?

“When you get older and you realize I'm not as strong as you think I am, will you still love me?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

Always with my father it was “Yes, Daddy,” and I said it that moment by rote. In truth I was disconcerted. Why was he acting so unlike himself, the dynamic self I relied on so utterly—even more, it sometimes seemed, than water and air?

I knew he was hurting inside. Every day his smoker's hack sounded uglier and more raw. And I'd seen the wadded tissues littering his side of their bed, the tissues at times streaked reddish-yellow, what I knew was his blood mixed with phlegm. At some subconscious level, I understood these things threatened me, but I didn't add them together, and so did not yet know the sum of my fears. Hating when things were obscure to me, I felt increasingly eager to launch our trip.