John Wayne (17 page)

We were all making believe. When the spot on his lung was first identified, my father told my mom he probably had
“valley fever.” The two jittery weeks before his biopsy, my family engaged in an unspoken conspiracy of denial. Smoking harder than ever, my father was a whirlwind, taking almost no rest and laboring long hours over a national television spot he planned doing for Barry Goldwater. Meanwhile, I voiced none of my anxieties, and did not ask any penetrating questions. Even when I was not in the room, my mother says she and my dad discussed the election, the Dodgers, the cold war, the weather, everything but my father's serious predicament. Neither one of them ever said the word
cancer
.

I suppose they couldn't bring themselves to. In 1964, as the newspapers printed advance reports of the surgeon general's imminent report on heavy smoking, Americans got confirmed what they grimly suspected: a diagnosis of lung cancer was practically a death sentence. Even today, lung cancer's five-year survival rate is only 13 percent, regardless of what stage the cancer is in when detected. Lung cancer still kills more than 140,000 Americans a year, recently making it the leading cause of cancer deaths among both women and men. Stricken with lung cancer, and given how hard he smoked, my father surviving five years was unusual. Living another fifteen, and performing in eighteen more movies, bordered on supernormal.

My father, the fighter, was gurneyed into surgery on September 17, 1964. My mother and my older brothers and sisters, by then adults, gathered in the waiting room while I was at school. The malignant growth on his left lung was so large the surgeon had to enter through my dad's back, affording him fuller view of any tentacles that might have grown out from the tumor. After the doctor removed two ribs on his left side and the entire upper lobe of his left lung, my father awoke to find he had one functioning lung.

The price, while very high, could have been final. Although malignant, the cancer had not yet metastasized: the murderous cells had not broken away from the tumor and spread through his lymph or blood systems. It had taken them six hours, but the doctors were calling the operation a triumph. There had not been complications, a Dr. Jones told
my mother. Her husband had “come through it in good shape.”

My mother asked if her husband's cancer was “cured.”

“These things aren't cut and dried,” Dr. Jones said. “I removed all the cancer, but we don't call it a ‘cure' for five years. If the cancer doesn't recur, there's no reason why your husband can't live a relatively normal life.”

At hearing “relatively normal” my mother says she wanted to scream.

I felt like screaming a few days after the surgery. Finally allowed to visit my father, at the eleventh hour I was not admitted to his room. Like many moments regarding my father's first cancer, I cannot recall this one vividly. I don't recall who stopped me, the nurses or my mother. All that comes back to me now is my racking worry for my dad, my helplessness, and most of all my rage. He was right
there
, on the other side of the door, and someone again was pushing me into darkness.

Several years later I learned what happened. The night before my aborted visit, there had, after all, been complications. Edema had distended my father's face to elephantine proportions, swelling his right eyelid until it covered both eyes and part of his forehead. In this condition someone, correctly, did not want me to see him.

Five days after his first operation, my fifty-eight-year-old dad went back into surgery. As they drained the accumulation of fluid from the edema, and treated both his severed stitches and the damaged tissue surrounding his mutilated lung, this time the procedure lasted six and a half hours. Following this second operation, my father drifting in and out of sedation, another thread of despair ran through his ordeal. He learned that his brother had lung cancer too.

Uncle Bob was around us a lot. Whatever contentious feelings my father once had for his younger brother, it seemed to me he had reconciled them. If I'm right about this, it speaks well of my dad. As a child, forever hearing his mother say “Bobby this” and “Bobby that,” he had felt like
the older, unwanted sibling. By the time both boys became men, their father had died and their mother had remarried. When my father found stardom, virtually every week he received a call from his mother posing a similar question: “What are you doing for Bobby?”

For both her and his little brother, John Wayne was doing a lot. In a way that I knew was heartfelt, my dad often spoke to me about “second chances,” how everyone deserved “at least one.” For all his macho preening, forgiving was intrinsic to my dad's nature. Though unwilling or unable to ever forget his childhood, he understood that life is too special a thing to be spent in recrimination.

Instead, John Wayne persuaded industry friends to give his brother jobs. He put Uncle Bob on the payroll at Batjac, and bailed him out of financial quagmires. Unlike his ambitious older brother, my Uncle Bob was not self-driven. Chatty and charming, Uncle Bob was also smaller and less imposing than my father, consistent while he was mercurial, opportunistic while he was steadfast, drawn to the glitz of Hollywood while my father cared about filmmaking. Other than some facial resemblance, all Uncle Bob and my father ostensibly shared was a weakness for steak and cigarettes. But my father's brotherly love was easy for us to see.

Uncle Bob would not survive the five years, lung cancer victim's supposedly critical juncture. He would die in 1970, after my father returned from filming
Rio Lobo
, Howard Hawks' final picture. Not long before Uncle Bob's death, my father took me to see him in the hospital. On the otherwise quiet ride over, once my father spoke harshly, “You know what your uncle did? He's got a tube in his throat, and the stupid sonofabitch is inhaling cigarettes through
that
.”

When we entered Uncle Bob's room, the torpid air had the odor of illness. I was thirteen years old; looking at my uncle, looking into the eyes of his wife, I understood he would die soon. When my father saw his gaunt, grayed younger brother, his anger at Uncle Bob, at cancer, at life and at
death, blew away like a summer storm. We all smiled and hugged and gossiped and teased—my father and his brother teased each other a lot—then we left so my uncle could rest. The last time I saw my sweet Uncle Bob, he was fighting with his wife, demanding cigarettes.

Early that October 1964, my father came home pale and wan, the life whipped out of him by two major surgeries. Over the years, the unyielding assault of cigarette smoke on the cells lining his bronchial tubes had enlarged other mucus-secreting cells. A full, healthy breathing apparatus can cleanse itself to some extent, but with one lung removed and the other harmed by smoke, my father found breathing a constant and frightening struggle. Some days he sounded like he was choking on phlegm.

He placed most of the blame on his high-priced doctors, however. “I've only got one lung,” he kept complaining, “and the damn doctors go and twist my windpipe. They twisted it
on their goddamn way out. How the hell is a man supposed to breathe with one lung and a twisted windpipe?”

Those first tenuous days he would mostly lie in bed, staring at the ceiling. I would catch glimpses of him as I walked by his open bedroom door, wondering when he would show me the scar. He had promised to let me see it as soon as he stripped off his heavy abdominal bandage. I awaited this with a mixture of trepidation and curiosity, and then one night he summoned me into his room. Purple and raised and violent, the scar ran from his left breast, swinging beneath his armpit, back up to his left shoulder blade. I didn't mean to wince but I was alarmed. I realized only then how deeply my father had been in trouble.

After initially hiding his cancer, in late December my father called a press conference to tell the country the truth. For several weeks he and his managers had carefully misled the public, distributing phony releases, for fear of the cancer tainting my father's career. It was not so much his fans he was worried about, but the Hollywood men who employed him.

“I'll never work again if they find out how sick I am,” he said over and over that long grim autumn. “If they think an actor is sick they just won't hire him.” But first came the gossip and rumors, then the inquiries from the press, and my father saw he could no longer live out a lie. Four days after Christmas, he stood in front of our living room, packed with buzzing reporters.

“They told me to withhold my cancer operation from the public because it would hurt my image,” he started,
they
meaning his advisors. I knew that was not entirely forthright, since he'd been in full agreement, and since no one made John Wayne do what he himself did not want to. It was also the first time, and the last, I ever heard my father say the word
cancer
. Even fourteen or fifteen years later, when my father got cancer again, around me he would only call it “the Big C.”

“Here's what
I
believe,” my father continued to tell the press. “Isn't there a good image in John Wayne beating cancer?
Sure, I licked the Big C.” As the stunned reporters scribbled their notes, my father announced he was leaving for Mexico next month, to star with his old friend Dean Martin in
The Sons of Katie Elder
.

The reporters filed out to work on what they knew would be major stories. My mother looked nonplussed, having pleaded with my dad to take far more time off than this. Exhausted, my father vanished upstairs and into his bedroom, back to his hospital bed by the wall, and the two green tanks of bottled oxygen. I returned to my own room, visualizing the gruesome scar, wondering how he could possibly ride a horse after doctors had cut him wide open. The first week of the new year, fourteen weeks after losing one rib and half of his lung, my father packed his bags and went south of the border.

Durango sits high in the mountains of Mexico, a languid, lonesome village some eight thousand feet above sea level at the eastern edge of the Sierra Madres. Immediately my father loved it—its hard blue skies and clear mountain air—but to me the place looked deadly dull. Durango had frozen dirt streets with no names, one horseshoe-shaped hotel, and one hole in the wall that everyone called a diner. A pampered product of Southern California, I took one look at my new home for the week and began counting the days.

At least Dean Martin was there. If any of my father's friends could perk up Durango it had to be him. My dad never ran with the rest of the Rat Pack, but he and Mr. Martin really did enjoy one another. Perhaps Mr. Martin
wore another face when he was alone with his own family, but whenever I saw him he seemed entirely secure inside his own skin. He had a zest for living, a carefree air about him that enlivened my father whenever they hung around. I never saw rivalry between them, or competition, or jealousy, or any need to impress. Back in Southern California, they often secured Hollywood movies before their release, then screened them at our house with my mother and Jeanne Martin. Those nights there was always a lot of laughter, a lot of cheerful noise.

On the set of
Katie Elder
, the two Hollywood stars did more than their share of drinking. Late, late one night the week I was in Durango, I was jolted awake by a racket outside our hotel room. Stumbling outside I saw cast, crew, writers, and paparazzi standing outside their own rooms waving and grinning. Down below in the dirt street, my father and Dean Martin marched arm-in-arm, singing their booze-soaked lungs out. I laughed because everyone else did, but I wasn't sure I thought it was all that funny. My father was still a sick man.

Around the time my dad turned sixty, after we'd moved to Newport Beach, he cut his drinking back sharply. But in 1965, he was still being described as “one of Hollywood's legendary drinkers.” Henry Fonda, after hitting Mexican bar after bar with John Ford and my father, said “John Wayne can outdrink any man.” I suspect my father took pride in that assessment. To men of his generation, the ability to drink hard was certification of manhood, and my father never shrank from demonstrating his own. He liked whiskey, but his favorite drink was straight tequila on ice, and always Commemorativo. He used to take his own bottle with him to parties, bestow it on the bartender with a generous tip, and tell him or her, “Here you go. This is what I drink. Pour this for me all night.” If my father met a person he liked, found that person engaging in the area of politics or moviemaking, he might sit with his new friend and smoke and drink for three straight days. After his companion left, though, he might not touch liquor for a month. My father enjoyed liquor's
effects. When he drank, he was apt to make it count. But alcohol never controlled his life.