John Wayne (18 page)

A stickler on the issue of drinking and driving, his favorite place to indulge was on
The Wild Goose
. Sometimes the horseplay got out hand. Once, I've been told, my parents docked for the weekend off Catalina Island, while entertaining Claire Trevor Bren and her husband-manager Milton. In 1939, Claire starred with my dad in John Ford's
Stagecoach
, playing Dallas the softhearted hooker to my father's Ringo Kid. Claire remained very close with my dad, as did her husband Milton Bren, a small, caustic intellectual whom my father found amusing despite this odd fact: Milton Bren loved ridiculing John Wayne. This moonlit night on
The Wild Goose
, Milton started again on my father. By then my dad had had quite a few, and more than enough. Unzipping his pants, he turned on the jabbering Bren and urinated all over his shoes. As the story goes, for the first time in his life Milton Bren fell speechless.

I never saw my father so plainly smashed, and when he drank around me he was never abusive. On the contrary, there was a sweetness about him, an approachability—and that's what annoyed me. He was
always
like that with his friends, and yet frequently closed or distracted around his children. Even before I understood liquor, I intuitively knew his mood change was unnatural. I wanted him to be open without drinking booze.

One of my worst and earliest memories of my father's drinking is the Encino morning when I started leaving for school and he and his buddies were still embroiled in the same game of poker they'd played all night. I still remember John Ford's stubbled, scowling face, one black eyepatch over black-framed glasses, gnawing the end of a fat cigar in the corner of his mouth. I don't recall much about Mr. Ford, except he was always gentle with me, and I thought of him as my grandpa. But Mr. Ford also scared me. With that black eyepatch, he reminded me of death.

Nor did my father look too spry that bloodshot morning.
There were maybe six loud men in our smoky card room, still puffing away and drinking, but even the wisecracks and clinking of glasses could not muffle my father's thundering order.

“Hey Aissa! Give me a kiss before you go to school!”

Obediently, I pecked my father's cheek. He wetly kissed me back on my own, and that's when I smelled it. His whiskey breath smelled hot and stale. It smelled obnoxious.

Because of my father's capacity to drink, because every morning when he was away on location he showed up first on a film set, wholly prepared for the day's opening shot while his fellow drinkers lurched in looking pathetic, missing their marks, and blowing their lines, he was widely described by journalists as a man immune to getting hungover.

Nonsense.

When only his family could see him, his heart pounded so vehemently some mornings my father swore he was having a heart attack.

“My heart, my heart,” he'd bitch and yell. “Pilar, I'm gonna die. Pilar, where are you? Goddamn it! I will
never
drink again. Pilar!”

There was plenty of drinking that freezing week in Durango, and plenty of showboating by my father in front of the press. He wanted the world to believe he was still the invincible Duke, and clearly no sick and faltering man. As for the photographers and reporters, I'm sure some came to Durango for simply professional reasons—my father was news—and that many were pulling for his revival. Others, I think, came morbidly hoping to witness John Wayne's demise. A few days before I left Durango, the ghoulish nearly got what they came for.

This January morning, while filming a pivotal fight scene, my father would be pulled from his horse, land in a mountain stream, then engage in a lengthy brawl with his three “brothers.” But the stream was ringed with ice, the weather near 10 degrees. Afraid my father could get pneumonia,
my mom asked if he'd please use a double. My foolhardy father said no: the director, Henry Hathaway, was shooting the scene in close-up.

Mr. Hathaway yelled “Action.” On cue, my father got yanked into the stream. But he landed wrong, getting drenched to the waist instead of just to his knees. Horrified, my little brother Ethan yelled “Daddy, Daddy.” Henry Hathaway shot Ethan a glare and continued shooting. Chilled to the bone, operating on one good lung, my father completed the scene, but trudging out of the water he couldn't stop coughing. His body convulsed and his lips turned a rubbery grayish-blue. The photographers closed in and took their pictures. Henry Hathaway, suddenly now my father's protector, screamed “Get away, you sons of bitches! Can't you see he needs air?” An aide rushed up with my father's inhalator, fixing the oxygen mask over his ashen face.

The crisis passed, but I was still trembling. And angry.

My father is still in poor health. Why can't he stop confirming his courage? Is he such a prisoner of his myth he'll feed it at the risk of his very life?

I didn't know, but the questions entered my mind as we all stood around watching my father breathe.

After we'd all returned to the states, my father surprised me one evening at dinner. “Your mother and I,” he said, “are thinking of moving to Newport Beach, not far from where the boat is. We want to know what you think. Would you like to move to Newport?”

For me it was easy. Partial to the cool climes of the beach, weary of living a life on a hill behind ten-foot walls, pleased that my father was solicitous of my feelings on such an important matter, I told him yes, moving sounded wonderful. In May 1965, having closed the sale of our estate to Walt Disney's eldest daughter, I had scant regret and great hope as we left behind our past for a future by the sea.

Before its lima bean fields were paved over with concrete,
Newport Beach in 1965 was a close-knit seaside village of 36,000 people, with few markets or restaurants, so anywhere you went you ran into people you knew. The crown jewel of Orange County, Newport back then was a collection of mansions and bungalows, yachts and dinghies, ship brokers and stockbrokers, pensioned retirees and golden-haired, brown-skinned surfers. Friends visited homes of friends in sailboats and motor boats, sidling up to the slip to indulge in sunset cocktails, until eyes swam in heads like ice cubes in tall glasses. Many of these beach houses were still weekend homes and summertime havens, to which monied and stressed Los Angelenos fled south in sports cars and sedans.

Although our own new waterfront home was still being remodeled, Newport Beach seemed lovely to me even from rented quarters. The springtime scents alone were enough to make me forget Encino: misted Pacific air and rain-dampened sand, creamy freesia and Spanish blueblood, orange blossoms and night-blooming jasmine. Most exhilarating of all, after living on five and a half secluded acres, my old childhood dream had actually come true. Unlike in Encino, other children now played directly outside on the street in front of our home. My father was off in Rome filming
Cast a Giant Shadow
with Kirk Douglas, and had not yet appeared at our rented home. With none of the other children suspecting who I was, how nice it felt to be treated as just one more neighborhood girl.

That September I entered fifth grade at Carden Hall, a small conservative private school. Each grade at Carden was dissected into Upper and Lower. After our first two sets of exams I was promptly kicked upstairs to Upper Fifth. That night I was flowing with pride, waiting for my father's daily phone call home from Rome. Although I'd been nervous about my school, I'd applied myself and accomplished something worthwhile, without my father's assistance. Knowing what emphasis he placed on grades, I was sure he'd be thrilled.

“Dad, I skipped lower fifth grade!” I said over the line. “My tests were so good my teachers moved me up!”

“What's so great about that?” my father replied. “Why didn't you skip the whole grade?”

“I don't know, Daddy. I just thought . . .”

“Next time skip the whole grade.”

Closing the subject, he asked for my mother. All I wanted was a little approbation. Instead I slinked to my bedroom crushed, never to mention it to him again.

When my father came home that fall we were all much more relaxed. The stress of remodeling behind us, we were relieved to finally move into our new home, a one-story, ten-room, seven-bath white ranch house with a pool, sitting right at the tip of Bayshore Drive, a plush subdivision in Newport. Although the front of our house could only be approached through a gated, guarded entrance, it was far less private than the hilltop house in Encino. Even in 1965, Newport waterfront property was at a premium and homes were jammed shoulder to shoulder on narrow plots of land. Despite the loss of privacy, my father loved our new house, especially our new patio. Built on a jutting point, it afforded a vast, spectacular view of Balboa Island, Lido Island, and foremost, the bay, with its channels of green and blue and hazel waters. Every chance he could, my dad sat outside and inhaled his sea-kissed surroundings. He felt so comfortable out in our yard, he remained unfazed even when the Balboa Island ferry cruised by, affording its shutter-happy tourists an intimate view of John Wayne.

My father seemed satisfied with his new life, but my own was about to radically change. Upon my dad's return from Rome, word spread that John Wayne had purchased a home in Newport. After that, seemingly overnight, going to school became catastrophic. In the halls, in class, at recess, my schoolmates now constantly watched me. The rare times I looked anyone in the eye, I saw envy, resentment, suspicion. Most of my new classmates had lived in Newport all their lives and grown up with one another. I was the stranger. Not
only the stranger, but “John Wayne's daughter,” obliterating any chance I might have had of hanging back and gradually shedding my status as an outsider. I felt wildly conspicuous. The more my peers stared and pointed and sneered, the more drastically I turned inward. “The only way for people to think you're a jerk,” my father had trained me, “is for you to open your mouth.” Avoiding conversations for fear of being scorned, I was quickly perceived and dismissed as a snob. It took weeks before anyone but a teacher spoke directly to me. Meanwhile, the whispers grew louder and more derisive, burning my ears and making me feel like a freak.

“There she is. John Wayne's daughter. She's such a bitch.”

“Look at her nose, it's stuck in the air.”

“She doesn't talk to anyone.”

“Who does she think she is?”

Before very long, I found myself frequently blurting “I'm sorry” to my parents and my brother, Ethan, at inappropriate times when I'd done nothing wrong. Even my voice changed, from one with at least a ring of self-assurance to one conveying anguished self-doubt. I was nine years old, and I hated the timid young girl I was becoming. I knew that I should be tougher. I
wanted
to be. But my coddled past had left me soft at the edges.

I finally turned to my mother. But I didn't reveal the extent of my alienation. “Mom,” I said in my tiny apologetic voice, “I'm shy now at school. I feel real shy with the other kids.”

My mother said, “Ah! You're not shy! Don't ever say that again!”

That was that. If my mother did not want to listen, I had nowhere to go with my feelings. My father was out of the question: I never felt my faults were anything he and I could discuss. My father never perceived me as scared or weak, as a little girl with any emotional problems. And I felt I must live up to his notion of who I was.

So I kept my pain and fear inside, secretly detesting my new environment. For as long as I could recall, I'd always
understood that my father was special. But only in the fish tank of Newport Beach did I comprehend the depth of his superstardom. Not only the children at Carden Hall, but the teachers, the parents, the entire community knew of my father's presence. Instead of cancer destroying his career and his image, it amplified them. When my father seemingly “licked the Big C” he acquired mythic dimensions. As my father's stardom advanced, it eclipsed my entire identity. Thinking about it now, I must have resented him for it, even at nine years old, and yet I recall blaming everyone else but him until my sophomore year in high school. Perhaps resenting my father was scary to me, in the face of everyone else's adoration. Perhaps I felt guilty for feeling it. So I hid it even from myself.

That first year in Newport, even my childhood dream betrayed me. Yes, the Bayshore complex teemed with children, but most were older than I, and even more affluent and noninclusive than the younger kids at my private school. The beach just behind our new house was the most threatening place of all, with its clusters of rich older teenagers. They never said a word to me, but I told myself they despised me. They
all
despise me, I thought.

One day after school, a short, olive-skinned girl approached me on one of the pathways running through Bayshore. Eyes fixed straight ahead I planned on rushing right by her.

“Hi,” she said, “I'm Debbie.”