John Wayne Read online

  JOHN

  WAYNE,

  MY FATHER

  JOHN

  WAYNE,

  MY FATHER

  Aissa Wayne

  with

  Steve Delsohn

  Copyright © 1998 by Aissa Wayne and Steve Delsohn

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means—including photocopying and electronic reproduction—without written permission from the publisher.

  Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

  An imprint of The Roman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200

  Lanham, Maryland 20706

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wayne, Aissa.

  John Wayne, my father / Aissa Wayne with Steve Delsohn.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: London: Robert Hale Limited, c1991.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 0-87833-959-0

  ISBN: 978-0-87833-959-4

  1. Wayne, John, 1907–1979. 2. Motion picture actors and

  actresses—United States—Biography. I. Delsohn, Steve.

  II. Title.

  PN2287.W454W38 1998

  791.43’028'092—dc21

  [B] 97–47322

  CIP

  Printed in the United States of America

  TO MY MOTHER, PILAR WAYNE,

  THE MOST GRACIOUS HUMAN BEING

  I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED.

  —AISSA WAYNE

  TO MY FATHER, NORMAN DELSOHN

  —STEVE DELSOHN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to my three beautiful children—Jennifer, Nicky and Anastasia—for their special love and also for once in a while tucking me in at night! Thanks to Mary St. John and Debbie Schweic-kert for reliving part of the past with me. Thanks to Lou Nelson, Frank Weimann, and David Rosenthal for their enthusiasm and support. And a special thanks to Steve Delsohn for being so extraordinarily sensitive and understanding.

  —Aissa Wayne

  My thanks to Mary St. John, Pilar Wayne, and Debbie Doner for sharing their lives and insights; to Lou Nelson and Cheryl Booth for their energetic and expert contributions; to Frank Weimann for his unstinting belief in the book and in me; to Joni Evans for her support and generous spirit.

  A special thanks goes to David Rosenthal, my kind and extraordinary editor.

  Thanks to my wife, Mary Kay, the best friend I’ve ever had and forever the love of my life.

  —Steve Delsohn

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Between pages 54 and 55

  1

  Aissa in her father’s embrace (1961)

  2

  The show-biz baby (1956)

  3

  Aissa at six months (1956)

  4

  Aissa at one year (1957)

  5

  Aissa at age two (1958)

  6

  On her second birthday with her father (1958)

  7

  Aissa and her mother, Pilar, at home in Encino (1958)

  8

  With Pilar and a new bike, Christmas 1958

  9

  Wayne rose every morning before 5.30, wired by energy and caffeine

  10

  Wayne with Aissa in Encino (1961)

  11

  Wayne, Aissa and Pilar in 1959

  12–14

  Aissa’s seventh birthday (1963)

  15

  A chess match (1963)

  16

  As a child, Aissa felt a constant need to be near her father (1963)

  17

  ‘John Wayne’s daughter, Aissa, and $850,000 in Cartier Diamonds’

  18

  John Wayne’s maternal grandfather

  19

  His maternal grandmother

  20

  Wayne attended USC on a football scholarship (1925)

  21

  He went on to become box office gold (1949)

  22

  The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)

  23

  Rio Grande (1950)

  24

  The Green Berets (1967)

  25

  Wayne with first wife, Josephine Saenz

  26

  Their four children (1951)

  27

  Wayne with wife number two, Esperanza Bauer (1951)

  28

  He married Pilar Palette in 1954

  29

  Wayne and Pilar (1955)

  30

  Aissa and brother Ethan (1963)

  31

  Ethan, Pilar and Aissa (1963)

  32

  Wayne and daughter Marissa (1968)

  Between pages 134 and 135

  33

  Aissa on the set of The Alamo (1959)

  34

  On the set of The Alamo with screen mother Joan O’Brien (1959)

  35

  With real mother, Pilar (1959)

  36

  Dancing on her father’s feet (1959)

  37

  With Wayne and Stuart Whitman on the set of Comancheros (1961)

  38

  On the set of Hatari, in her father’s chair (1964)

  39

  With one of the wild animals she discovered in Africa (1964)

  40

  Riding a baby elephant (1965)

  41–2

  The Alamo, Wayne’s first attempt at directing (1959)

  43

  Wayne and Mitchum, with mothers, on the set of El Dorado (1965)

  44

  Wayne after two operations to remove a cancerous lung (1964)

  45

  Back in action in The Sons of Katie Elder (1965)

  46

  Wayne in Oscar-winning form in True Grit (1970)

  47

  With Barbra Streisand at the 1970 Academy Awards

  48

  Wiping away a tear (1970)

  49

  Pilar and Aissa at home in Encino (1962)

  50–51

  Even while on location, Wayne kept in close contact with his family

  52

  Waterskiing in Acapulco (1970)

  53

  The Wayne’s home in Newport Beach

  54

  Wayne, Marissa and Pat Stacy on board the Wild Goose (1977)

  55

  Wayne’s seven children in 1982

  56

  John Wayne’s unmarked grave in Newport Beach, California (1979)

  JOHN

  WAYNE,

  MY FATHER

  PROLOGUE

  I am staring up at him in the cool delicious darkness of a theater, my father etched sixty feet high on a white-silver screen. My girlfriend nudges me. I pass our candy without shifting my gaze from the screen. It is 1963, I am seven years old, and today is a rare occasion. Almost always I see my father’s movies at home, in our projection room, with my mom and dad and our new baby, Ethan, and sometimes my father’s movie star friends.

  Unless I am with my parents, or at school, I do not leave the house much at all. We live in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, and our white colonial house sits at the top of a steep mountain rise, high above five rolling acres, all enclosed by ten-foot walls. At the bottom of our twisting driveway is a camera, fixed on our tall electric gate. Though sometimes we call it “the compound,” our estate is lovely as well as confining, precisely what my parents desire. They are frightened I might get kidnapped, especially my mother, who comes from Peru, but knows about the evil that can descend on Hollywood’s children.

  Today I am free. It is Saturday, late afternoon, and I am sitting in a theater with my girlfriend and her mother, surrounde
d by anonymous people. Up on the screen my father makes a joke, not even a joke, just a stoic remark, but it’s in his familiar drawl and the smiling strangers around me murmur their approval. I feel a trace of pride and a pinch of resentment, that all these faceless people think my father is such a charming man.

  The movie is over and I’m glad. It’s another Western, and I’m a little sick of them. My eyes still set for blackness, on the street I am blinded by sunlight, and the sticky summer air curls my golden brown hair. On the ride home my girlfriend and her mother discuss my dad and the movie. They are animated, and I know by their glances they want me to join in, but I just don’t. Like my father I am prone to silent moods. Politely saying good-bye, I watch their shrinking car leaving our driveway, wondering if I should have asked them in, to see my father, and if they are mad, and whether the whole ride home they’ll talk behind my back. I am not all that paranoid—I don’t think—but sometimes I can’t tell who likes me only for me.

  He isn’t home anyway. My dad is again working late this weekend, over the mountain pass in the peculiar place called Hollywood. Usually, when my father is in town, he’s always home for dinner. The second he bursts in our front door, he always says, “HELLO THE HOUSE!” He booms it, and the air in our house crackles with his energy. Then I run down the stairs and jump off the last one, into my father’s outstretched arms. I am not as little as I once was, but it hasn’t stopped our ritual. We’ve been doing it for years, and no one else is invited.

  Tonight my father misses dinner, and there is no “hello the house.” Tonight he’s in my room before I can climb off my bed to greet him. Inside my bedroom, my father is a giant in a dollhouse. When he sits on my bed now, it sags and groans under his weight. I need to know why he’s so late, want to tell him how striking he looked on the full-size screen, but I don’t get the chance—my father wraps me in his arms and pulls me to his chest. I can smell his Camel cigarettes, his Neutrogena soap and Listerine. I start feeling edgy. My father always talks before he hugs.

  When my dad releases me, he cups my chin in his hand. I am lost for a moment inside his ice-blue eyes. My father has the bluest, lightest eyes I have ever seen.

  “Aissa?”

  There is a tightness to his voice. Now I know something is wrong. All I say is, “Yes, Daddy?”

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

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  Always with my father, it is “Yes, Daddy”; by now I say it out of reflex. Really, though, I am puzzled. My father is the strongest man on earth. At seven years old I do not know everything, but this I know utterly and positively. I want to ask why he’d say something so silly, but now he is looking outside my window and just that quickly I lose my nerve. Maybe my dad is only tired. Maybe his violent smoker’s cough will not let him think straight.

  As he always does when he is in town, my father curls the bottom of my blanket under my feet and leans back in to kiss me goodnight. He holds me close again, then I shut my eyes and pretend to be sleepy. I peek at his broad back as he leaves, then lie unsettled in darkness for what seems like hours. The following morning, and for many days after, his strange words echo again and again through my mind.

  Sipping bitter coffee in a chilled hotel room, I stare outside at a listless Western morning. It is June 11,1979, and the doctors say today will be the day. Today my father will die of cancer.

  I do not weep. Instead I feel frozen, pinned here in my chair by grief and memory. It’s ironic, I suppose, that my relationship with my movie star father has somehow played out in three stages. Or, as it is said in Hollywood, three acts.

  When I was a little girl, I looked at him through idolatrous eyes. I saw only the good and pretended about the rest. Around the time I turned six, my fear of my father set in, and I was intimidated by him for more than ten years. What we had between us began transforming again when I was nearing eighteen. As I started asserting some independence, as my father was losing his health and also losing my mother—and began turning more and more to me—most of my fear of him dissolved. For so many years, my real words had gone away whenever my father and I had gotten alone. And then, I could finally talk to my father.

  Now I am twenty-three, and he and I have never been closer. I hate that it took so long, but I believe I am finally seeing him clearly. My father is vast, endearing, courageous, caring, tenacious, and vital. Still, he is not the faultless hero who strode through my early childhood. He has deep fears of his own. He has demons, self-doubt, and towering rage. John Wayne is not invincible, and soon he will not be around to protect me.

  Over the years, learning the truth about him has been stunning. At times, it has thrown my entire childhood into question: Was it ever really what I once believed it to be? Was he?

  Still, learning the truth has also made me love my father harder, the father who exists, not the image we once both created, then clung to so fiercely together for so many years. Even more than I once loved that dream, I love my real father with all his imperfections. I want him to know this. More than anything in the world I want him to know. But today my father will leave me, and now our time has run out.

  I am not writing this book as a love letter to my father. Neither am I intent on destroying his public image, as some Hollywood children have done to their parents. When my father was still alive I was constantly asked by the press, “What is it like to be John Wayne’s daughter? How does it feel?” I never knew how to succinctly respond to such a complex subject, so mostly I issued stock answers. In the past several years, my own three children have started to ask me: “What was our grandfather like? What was John Wayne like?” For my kids, but also for my own cathartic reasons, I wanted to put down on paper the life I shared with my father.

  When I was eight weeks old, my father turned forty-nine. He was nearly sixty when I was ten. I viewed him through my own childhood lens: the notion that he’d been scarred and shaped by events I knew nothing about rarely crossed my mind. He was a grown-up. He sat at the head of our table. I figured his story pretty much started there.

  I’ve done some looking into his past in order to come to grips with myself and with my dad, and to understand where John Wayne was in his life when he fathered me.

  1

  The year was 1953. Truce had been reached in Korea, and if that peace was uneasy, the country nevertheless was not at war. Bumper stickers announced I LIKE IKE, and trust ran high for the reassuring first-year president. Still a youthful medium, television had superceded radio and already had motion pictures reeling. One of TV’s new, top-rated programs, Ozzie and Harriet, and many other shows like it, painted a placid picture: American home lives free of complication.

  It was illusion. In Hollywood, where illusion was manufactured, no one knew this better than John Wayne. That fall, my father was wrapped in domestic scandal.

  In November 1954, he would marry my mother, Pilar, and his third and final marriage would endure for the next two decades. In 1956 my parents would have me.

  But now, in late October 1953, his second marriage was ending, wildly, and reporters tripped over each other to detail the sordid news. The gossip mavens gushed, and even the restrained Los Angeles Times called it “The steamy divorce trial of the towering screen actor John Wayne.” All the while the public was enrapt. In 1950s Hollywood, the public images of private hell-raisers—and back then that included my dad—were honed, shined, and sanitized to keep negative press at a minimum. Still, there is no hiding hostile divorce, not when it’s John Wayne’s, and the trial for my dad was an embarrassing mark on a soaring career.

  My father was then forty-six, already had twenty-five years in the business. After a long, arduous climb to the top of his profession, he was finally box office gold. In 1951, producer Howard Hughes had paid him $301,000 to star in Flying Leathernecks, and this was called the highest one-film salary ever given to an actor. Between 1948 and 1953 my hard-working father starred
in fifteen films, most notably Fort Apache, Red River, Sands of Iwo Jima, Rio Grande, and The Quiet Man. His role in Sands of Iwo Jima, as Marine Sergeant John M. Stryker, won him more than an Oscar nomination; it had stunning impact on people who saw it. When my father charged up Iwo Jima Hill, only to be cut down by sniper fire just steps from the top, people wept in their seats. Their tears did not go unnoted by the czars ruling Hollywood. With the film industry ailing, its income and stature diminished by the rise of TV, the power brokers came to view my dad as a rare and critical asset. “There’s nothing wrong with Hollywood,” a producer told Cosmopolitan, “that a dozen John Waynes couldn’t cure.”

  Privately, what needed fixing was his second marriage. Back in 1944, his first marriage, to Josephine Saenz, the mother of his first four children, had ended in divorce. My father remarried in 1946. He met his next wife in Mexico, a country he loved second only to this one. On the night Ray Milland introduced my father to Esperanza Bauer, who called herself Chata, she claimed to be a part-time actress. In truth, Chata was a dark, voluptuous, high-priced call girl. By the time my father discovered the facts of her life, he’d fallen in love.

  Not surprisingly, my father never spoke to me about Chata. I never heard about her until after he died, and at first I was shocked and disbelieving. But then I learned more. Evidently, Chata told my father she desperately sought a new life, to escape her past and marry a man she loved. I also learned that my father’s first marriage, to Josephine, had had little physical contact its last several years, and that Chata Bauer was blatantly sexual. At that stage of his life, perhaps Chata was who my father needed. Besides, he said he loved her, and when John Wayne fell in love he tended to marry. Those who knew him well always called my father “the marrying kind.”