John Wayne (16 page)

In the morning my parents were shy around me, feeling me out to see how much I'd heard. My father lit another cigarette and the smoke curled up around him. “We're starting back home soon, babe,” he said. “Just a few more weeks of shooting, then we're starting home.” I nodded, leaving him coughing there in the kitchen.

I wasn't allowed on the set for the final days of shooting. The
Circus World
script called for a hazardous, spectacular, pyrotechnic climax. Playing an American cowboy and circus owner barnstorming through Europe with his troupe, my father would be caught inside his big tent as it went up in flames. The action called for him to rescue the caged animals and spectators by chopping down seats and poles with an axe, setting up a fire barrier. As usual, my father chose to perform his own stunt in this critical scene, feeling he owed that to his fans, who went to John Wayne movies expecting credibility. For five straight days my father ate smoke, from artificial fires and real fires, set and put out and set again. “I'll be fine,” he promised my mother each night. “Once the fire scene is finished I'll be fine. This is what they pay me for.”

The last day of shooting in Spain, my father's penchant for working and working and working, until he heard the word
cut
, could have killed him. Wearing fireproof underwear, a fireman's helmet beneath his hat, and wielding an axe, he began chopping his seats and poles, working close to the fire. An unexpected breeze fanned the blaze even closer to his turned back. Fragments of glowing wood swirling around him, he kept swinging his axe through the black smoke, rather than do the dangerous take again. He could not see that everyone else had fled, including Henry Hathaway, his director, as the fire exceeded their control. Assuming John Wayne would run, tpo, no one screamed “Cut!” and my father stayed where he was, he and the fire, until he could not withstand the smoke and heat. Seeing that he was alone,
he angrily chucked down his axe and raced from the blistering tent.

That night, my father stormed in with the red-streaked eyes of a drunkard, but he hadn't been drinking. He barely spoke and until I fell asleep I heard him viciously coughing.

Shortly after, we flew to London, where the filmmakers shot some exterior scenes, then from London to Acapulco, where
The Wild Goose
and its crew had motored ahead according to plan. Our wretched vacation nearing its end, all that remained, we thought, was a simple cruise north to Newport Beach. But tragedy struck off the southernmost tip of Baja. On their night off, four of our crewmen rowed our ship's fourteen-foot skiff into Cabo San Lucas. One was Eduardo Duran Zamora, twenty years old, a fabulous athlete and effortless swimmer. I loved Eduardo Zamora. With my father's permission and trust, Eduardo had taught me how to water ski when I was only three.

By sunrise he and the other crewmen hadn't returned. All that nervous morning I could not shake my feeling that something had gone horribly wrong. That afternoon, we learned three men had drowned. Really, all three were boys, the oldest among them just twenty-four. After drinking all night at a Cabo San Lucas Fiesta, they had started back for
The Wild Goose
, their skiff overturned, and they tried swimming the two miles to shore. The sole survivor was the only one who couldn't swim, Efran, our houseman Fausto's son. Efran had lashed himself to the skiff and been rescued by the crew of a passing boat.

As
The Wild Goose
started home my mind was mostly blank. When I thought at all, I could not accept Eduardo's death. He swam like the fish, he even taught the adults things—now he was gone? Forever?

A blanket of gloom settled over my father as well. Except for meals, he spent most of the next few days high up at the bow, in front of the glass shielding the captain. When he did come down my father looked sick with self-reproach. The boys had drunk too much beer and tequila, and the deep black sea had taken them. But I think my father held himself
responsible. All his abilities to lead, to protect, all his meticulous planning, and now three of his crew were dead. I desperately wanted to give my father some comfort, to take him in my arms and say Things will get better, Daddy, they always do. But I wasn't sure they would, and I wasn't sure my father would let me.

Just ten weeks after my family returned from our European disaster, we left for Hawaii. Kirk Douglas, Patricia Neal, and my father were starring in
In Harm's Way
, directed by Otto Preminger. To Hollywood's surprise, my father and Mr. Preminger had no blow-ups. Mr. Preminger, like Alfred Hitchcock, was a self-admitted hater of actors. While directing other pictures, he'd tried overpowering Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Lee J. Cobb. I knew that would never happen with my dad. Unless he was working with John Ford, my father would never be bullied by any director, or even lectured to. Having plied his craft by then for thirty-plus years, having worked again and again with not only Ford but Howard Hawks, my father felt his comprehension of cinema far transcended the standard
actor's. In fact, he was certain he understood moviemaking more deeply than many of his directors. As he told the
Los Angeles Times
, “I've worked with directors who couldn't walk across the street without help.”

To everyone's relief, he and Mr. Preminger earned each other's respect. While I played with Mr. Preminger's twins, our fathers behaved like perfect gentlemen. The only edginess I saw in Hawaii was between my parents. My father had never really stopped coughing since we left Spain. Even in the crystalline air of Hawaii, it became so torturous that some days he had to stop shooting his scenes. As she'd been doing for weeks, my mother insisted he see a physician; my obstinate father said no.

Before making
In Harm's Way
, my dad had gone to the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla for the mandatory physical all stars had to pass to qualify for the expensive insurance movie companies carried for them. Since the well-respected Scripps staff pronounced him suitably healthy, he did not plan to return until late in the fall of 1964, in order to be cleared for
The Sons of Katie Elder
. Things changed when Mr. Preminger wrapped up
In Harm's Way
early. Returning to Encino a few weeks before expected, during those broiling days of August my mother nagged my father into acquiescence.

Agreeing to move up the date of his next exam, my father drove south for La Jolla alone, in his customized Pontiac station wagon with the raised roof over the driver's head and its special GM engine with 350 horsepower. My father adored that car, and drove it like he, and it, would last forever. Whenever we saw him sliding behind the wheel, instead of George Coleman who sometimes drove for him, my mother and I refused to sit in the front. Considering himself a terrific driver, my father brazenly zipped through traffic while my mother and I sat in back with our hands locked in death grips. He only drove slowly on our Sunday rides through the San Fernando Valley, when we had no destination, our only goal to try and relax.

That August morning, too, I suspect my father stopped
racing and took his time. Between Encino and La Jolla, long stretches back then were still undeveloped, the road winding south astride jutting cliffs and crying seagulls, curving golden beaches and white-capped turquoise water. God, how my father loved the California coastline. Besides, he was driving to a hospital, and in his fifty-eight years he had learned to hate them. He always said he hated the loss of privacy most of all, but he also loathed the bottles and tubes and needles and blipping machines.

This time they kept my father at Scripps for five days, probing, draining, injecting, inserting, and possibly saving his life. Because something inside his body was out of control.

That September 1964, a tumor approximating the shape and size of a golf ball was detected on my father's smoke-damaged lung. There was little question what caused it. As my father said, “When I started smoking I was just a kid.”

From the day he began, sometime during the 1920s, my father smoked cigarettes in earnest. During an addiction spanning four decades, he rarely consumed less than three packs a day, or more than six. When diagnosed with lung cancer, his habit was five packs daily. Always my father smoked Camel nonfilters: high tar, high nicotine.

A chain-smoker to the extreme, he used one match a day to spark the morning's first cigarette. Until he slept that evening, my father lit the rest with the one he was just finishing.
At the house in Encino, our ashtrays overflowed with bashed, wormy white butts. As are most heavy smokers, my father was Pavlovian: when the telephone rang and it was for him, he immediately lit a cigarette. He loved smoking. It was part of his identity. He even had his own distinctive mannerism. Most people held their cigarettes higher, just above their knuckles. My father held his deep inside the cleft of his fingers, close to his palm. When he puffed, his huge hands obscured the whole bottom of his face. “See,” he would say, “other people smoke this way. Except
I
smoke like this.”

My father had large appetites. In those days, when he wasn't in front of the camera, I rarely saw him without a cocktail, a cigarette, some food. Today we know that one key to a healthy life is moderation. Moderation was never attractive to my father. Jimmy Stewart once described him as having “the enthusiasm for life that would make a high school football star envious.” My father loved that quote, and I think he took it to heart. He may have turned the corner of middle age, may have been through many travails, but he still thought of himself as that young jock, still indulging his youthful habits long after it was physically prudent. He knew he smoked much too heavily, at times overdrank, but he was still John Wayne, the Duke, America's emblem of manhood—nothing could touch him. In the two weeks between his diagnostic visit to Scripps and his scheduled surgery at Good Samaritan Hospital, I never saw my dad without a cigarette in his hand. Part of that, I'm sure, was his body craving tobacco, a substance with a grip as merciless as heroin. Part of it was probably this:
If I do have cancer, why stop now? It's a little late after forty years
. And part of the mixture was hubris, my immortal-feeling father saying “screw you” to his disease.

Besides, my father believed much more deeply in luck than he ever did in doctors or medicine. One afternoon before we'd left for Spain, we'd been walking along a sidewalk in the Valley and I'd veered toward the curb, to walk it like a tightrope as children will. When a light pole came between us, my father said, “Bread and butter.” He explained
as I started asking: “Anytime we have to walk around different sides of things, I have to say bread and butter. Or you do. Otherwise we'll stay divided.” Although he smiled when I did, my father looked every bit serious.

As a girl I delighted in his superstitions, for they made him seem childlike, like me, and because sharing his quirky beliefs was a rite, and rites with my father I never passed up. Now that I'm older, I wonder about them sometimes, about their hold over him. Was he trying to distance himself from death, in the only way he deigned to? Because if good luck could enhance a man's life, surely bad luck could end it. And so for years while my father drank tequila, smoked Camels, and later smoked thin cigars, even after getting lung cancer, he opened umbrellas outside, refused salt unless it was placed on the table, circled his chair three times when a poker card flipped upright, and threw apoplectic fits at the sight of a hat on a bed. Just about his whole life, my father was willing to defy medical science. Yet he was never so bold as to challenge the fates.

During his first battle with cancer, no one sat me down and explained that he
had
cancer. My parents, I'm sure, knowing an eight-year-old child can only intellectualize so much, did not want to scare me and burden me, did not want the notion of my father's death to even enter my mind. As far as I can recall, my dad and I never once spoke of his illness. When I asked my mother why Daddy was going to the hospital, she said my father was ill, he was having an operation, but he was fine. Whenever she left me to go to Good Samaritan, I'd rearrange drawers, play with dolls I'd outgrown, pass time any way I could, but I was never able to lose my feelings of resentment, fear, and confusion. Why was no one giving me real explanations? Why was no one telling me the whole story? It made me mad then, but I don't blame either one of my parents. Even now, with so much more available information, when families discover cancer they often don't tell one another the truth.