John Wayne Read online

  His glory days shockingly over, he sulked and received poor grades. At the end of his second semester, feeling nervous about his future, my father asked John Ford for a fulltime summer job at Fox. Planning to earn enough to pay his fall tuition, my dad never returned to college. He was twenty years old, the same age I was when I left USC nearly half a century later.

  At Fox my father did prop and stunt work. Rehabilitating his shoulder, he performed strenuous workouts at the old and famous Hollywood Athletic Club. Then in 1928, Hangman’s House was released. This John Ford movie had songs and the sound effects of bells and whistles, but the actors were silent and the dialogue was in subtitles. Directed by Ford and produced by Fox, Hangman’s House was my father’s first credited role. It was also the first time John Wayne’s face could clearly be seen on celluloid. He played an Irish peasant, a spectator at a horse race, who takes off his white cap at the end of a thrilling finish, busts down a white picket fence with some other fans, and sprints into the track. It was a turning point in his life. Seeing himself on-screen lifted my father out of his doldrums, gave new rise to his dreams.

  For better and worse, John Wayne was hooked on making movies.

  3

  John Wayne Presented Daughter by Third Wife

  Actor John Wayne’s wife presented him with a daughter yesterday at St. Joseph Hospital, Burbank, where both mother and the child were reported in good condition.

  —Hedda Hopper, April 1, 1956

  Duke Wayne got two hours’ sleep in 48. Pilar and he got to bed at 1 a.m. Saturday; she shook him awake at 3:30; he stayed with her till 2:07 that afternoon, at St. Joseph’s, when Aissa, 7 pounds 8 ounces, arrived. . . . Pilar was on the phone talking to a reporter 50 minutes after her birth. . . . “Aissa means absolutely nothing,” Pilar told us. “We’re calling her that because it goes well with Wayne.”

  —The Hollywood Reporter, April 2, 1956

  In 1950s Hollywood we were still called “show business families,” and I was a show biz baby. A cooing, flatulent, drooling public figure on diapered display for the flashbulbs and pens. I was a “celebrity offspring,” a now-and-future “Hollywood princess,” and mine would be a chronicled youth. My silken hair and green eyes would grace the cover of Cosmopolitan, the pages of Photoplay, and untold American newspaper readers saw me blubbering my hairless pink head off in a photo that ran over the wire service on the second day I drew breath. By then my father was Hollywood royalty, the industry’s top leading man using gross receipts as criteria. In the photograph that ran in the papers the day after I was born, I am cradled by a grinning, relaxed John Wayne, the embodiment of big American dreams.

  One day before, my successful father had not been so smooth. Despite having been through this white-knuckled process before—with Michael, Toni, Patrick, and Melinda, his children from his marriage to Josephine—my father wasn’t prepared when my mother woke in the night and announced that her water had broken. First he botched the dash to the hospital. As usual, my father drove too fast, this time down all the wrong streets. By the time he found St. Joseph’s my mother had gone into labor. It lasted through dawn and into the early afternoon. While she grunted and cried and prayed, he paced and exhorted and whistled—when my father was nervous he whistled—until finally growing so skittish he went down to greet other new babies. And so it turned out that my father was not in the room at the instant I was born. When they did usher him back in, he kissed my mother’s cheek, turned to me, his swaddled infant . . . and threw a volcanic fit.

  “The baby’s not breathing!” he screamed. “The baby’s not crying!”

  The pediatrician tried explaining I was normal and healthy.

  “She isn’t crying, goddamn it. Babies are supposed to cry!”

  He insisted I cry, demanding they prick my heel with a needle. Only when I wailed like a banshee did my father hush up and beam. Then he snatched me up in his arms, and the rest of my life I would feel my father’s obsessive grip.

  Everyone seeks redemption. When I was a baby, I think my father looked at me and saw a chance for his.

  Through all his public success before I was born, he was haunted by private failure. After he and his first wife divorced, he was not always around to raise their four children. Though they worked with him on some movies, though he saw them every Christmas, they mostly grew up in a fatherless home.

  My father had married Josephine Saenz in 1933, after a lengthy courtship begun his last year at USC. Except for physical beauty, they had seemed to be opposites. The daughter of a prominent doctor, Josephine was a product of wealth and religion, most secure in the presence of socialites or priests. My father’s parents had barely scraped by, and my own father was always politely indifferent to church. As a young man, I am told, my dad was earthy, hot-blooded, sexual. Apparently Josephine was reserved and far more chaste.

  They fell in love regardless, and rapidly had four children. Legally, the marriage lasted ten years, until 1943, but they’d fallen out of love years before that. People tend to take sides in divorces, and those sympathetic to my dad have mostly laid the blame with Josephine. They say she was overly patrician, overly prudish, too intensely Catholic. My father, on the other hand, the one time he spoke of it to me, blamed only himself. Many years later, when my own parents were splitting up, my dad began confiding in me for the first time in my life. I was eighteen years old when he came into my room and said he’d never been unfaithful to my mother.

  “But I destroyed my first marriage, Aissa,” my father said, referring to Josephine. “I was a different man back then. I was much more selfish.” He then let his voice trail off, all but confessing old infidelities.

  In 1944, Josephine gave my father a divorce at his repeated insistence. “Because of my religion,” she announced in a statement to the press, “I regard divorce as a purely civil action, in no way affecting the moral status of my marriage.” Josephine raised their first four children alone, instructing them in her strict Catholic ways. As for my father, he never stopped sending money to her and his older children. Until his death, he always said he was proud of Josephine for raising the kids alone and so well. He helped Michael become a film producer, relied on him to handle part of his business, and gave Patrick his first break as an actor.

  As for me, my dad told me to love the older kids as brothers and sisters, not as half-brothers and -sisters. I tried to, but I never knew if their warmth was real or merely a show to placate my dad. It was all very cordial between us, and superficial. Taking our cue from our father, we never talked about real feelings, so I don’t really know what they thought back then of me or my dad. Today our relationships are more comfortable, but when I was younger I barely knew my half-brothers and sisters.

  Evidently, my father also felt he never knew his older children as much as he should have. Because he had not hung in there, because he had hurt their mother, my father told my mom, he always felt his other kids never truly forgave him. Although he never confessed it to me, I think he suffered tremendous guilt over this, while never shedding the grim fear that his first four kids did not love him. One day that guilt and fear would manifest itself on my brother and sister and me: my father thirsted so hard for our love, sometimes he left us no room to breathe.

  Now I can better understand why. His childhood had been hurtful. So had his first attempt at having a family. Whatever blessings my father found later in life could not mend all those wounds. What made living with my father hard, and unnerving, was that he mostly suppressed what was churning inside him. To his family, he rarely expressed his inner feelings, or even admitted he had them. With all that bottled emotion, its release often came in the form of misdirected rage. Even today, I’m still surprised when other women tell me they were never scared of their fathers.

  But that all came later. When I was born in 1956, my father was nearly fifty. I not only made him feel young and virile, I gave him a second chance to do right by his children. When I was an infant, my mother said my dad was
not a diaper changer. In all other ways, however, she said he behaved like an “idiot father. It was a beautiful thing to watch. I’ve never seen a man so entranced by a child.”

  And I, in turn, was addicted to daddy’s attention.

  *

  My dad was shaving in his silk pajamas. My parents both had private dressing rooms, and this morning I was in his, peeking through the mist at his image in the mirror. He always left several bars of Neutrogena soap on the brick ledge of his sauna, and they’d melted and dripped over the rocks, perfuming the wafting air with my father’s sweetest smell. Wonderment in my three-year-old eyes, I just stood there and stared while he stroked the stubble from his whiskers.

  I stared at my father constantly. My attraction for him—emotionally, physically, psychologically—was very, very strong. If my father was around I felt compelled to be near him, and just as intense was his need to shield me from suffering. One day, when I was six, I saw just how powerful my hold over him was.

  At the Warner Brothers studio, my dad kept an old goofy bicycle, with thick tires and wide-spread handlebars. He used to ride me around on the lot while people smiled at us and waved. One day he propped me up on the handlebars and we went to visit Lee Marvin, to whom Warners had also given an office. A man appeared in our path from behind a building, my father roughly braked and I flew forward, landing heavily on my face. When my blood began trickling my father shuddered, a twitch running through his neck and shoulders. As he picked me off the concrete he looked sick to his stomach. “Oh my God,” he kept frantically saying. “Oh my God, Aissa, are you okay?” The rest of the day he kept watching me and stroking my hair. In the morning, the red bruise stretched from my upper lip to cheekbone. After that we walked or drove in cars.

  Like most fathers, mine was also capable of jealousy. As I am told by my family, about the time I began to utter familiar sounds, we were visited at our home by his two closest friends, John Ford and the character actor Ward Bond. I craned my neck at Mr. Bond and called him “Da da.” Saying nothing, my father managed a feeble smile, and Ford and Bond both caught it. After that, my mother says, they never allowed John Wayne to forget the pained expression he wore the day his baby called another man daddy.

  In those days he loved showing me off, and naturally everyone indulged him; to praise me was to praise John Wayne. But truth be told, with my green eyes and sandy hair I was a pretty little girl, but I was no knockout—for one thing, my father’s big nose looked better on him than on me. Still, I quickly understood that my status carried far greater weight than my looks. While all children learn to manipulate adults, as a movie star’s daughter I saw how I could take even further advantage. In the presence of my father and other grown-ups, I could get cookies, money, compliments—anything. One of Dad’s friends used to press a hundred-dollar bill into my tiny pink hand the three or four times he saw me each year. At the start of adult parties, my father always carried me on his shoulders, where I was fawned on by his admirers, basking in their attention as long as they cared to heap it. Throughout my early childhood, I was told by a chorus of older voices what a cute, cute, cute little girl I was, and so intelligent too! And why should I disbelieve their sugary words? As long as my father stood next to me, I could not be found lacking, picked on, or threatened. Even later, no matter how afraid I ever became of my dad, the world without him was scarier.

  Like many Hollywood children, my fears began at a very early age. On the surface our celebrity childhoods glowed with privilege and glitter, but sometimes the fairy tale twisted. Ever since the Lindbergh child had been abducted and murdered in 1932, threats of kidnapping and extortion were common among the famous and rich. They were rampant in Hollywood, though not always reported to the media, and there was not an industry parent who at times did not feel dread that someone was stalking his or her child. My own parents could not afford to ignore their vulnerability, and so they exerted stringent control over me.

  I was not to play outside in front of our house.

  I might get kidnapped.

  I could never spend the night at a girlfriend’s, never experience the giddiness of a slumber party.

  I might get kidnapped.

  Everyone knew who John Wayne’s kid was. I was instructed not to talk to or glance at strangers.

  I would get kidnapped.

  This was drummed into my head, primarily by my mom, until a corner of my brain started to burn with it. Alone, I imagined gruesome scenarios: If men in masks did come over the walls and take me away, then asked for a million dollars, would my father pay it? I’d decide that my father would—of course he would!—but my mind would not let the matter go and my stomach would clench back up: What if he doesn’t? He always says he never has enough money. He doesn’t have a million dollars!

  My father also warned me about the possibility of kidnapping, but not nearly as often or as vehemently as my mother. Perhaps because she was foreign born, my mother took a harder measure of Americans than my father did. Raising a movie star’s daughter, in a country prone to violence, she seemed stone certain that something or someone rotten lay waiting for me Out There.

  Perhaps I’d have been less afraid if our house was not at the top of a hill, or if we’d lived closer to the street or other families. As things were, I rarely woke up where I had gone to sleep. In the dead of night, I would stumble into my parents’ bedroom, where I would be lulled back to sleep by my father’s rhythmic snoring. My own room at night was too spooky. Outside my bedroom window stood a California pepper tree, a robust, lovely tree chock full of singing birds by day. At night, on my bedroom wall, the tree cast bony, hideous shadows. As a child I began fearing my own imagination, which turned every whistling wind, each creaking hall, into something vague and eerie.

  Even during the day I often felt resentful of my physical surroundings. Not that thçy weren’t splendid. Our house was a two-story white colonial with high pillars, allowing us a view of the whole sprawling San Fernando Valley. Winters, pomegranates and oranges hung red and orange from our private orchard. In spring, the mountain face beyond our pepper tree exploded with shiny pink moss. In the late ’50s, while the rest of the Valley was building homes at a dizzying pace, the hills of Encino was still a languid, undeveloped area with numerous ranches, horses, and orchards. The only thing our estate lacked was other children for me to play with. Just as my father had been, I was a terribly lonely child.

  Without other kids, our compound could feel like a prison. For days or weeks at a time, I would go off with my father to witness the world—Africa, Spain, London—then be whisked back to my oversheltered existence. Wanting to cut the odds of danger, my parents kept strict tabs on my “free” time. Mostly I played by myself, or with our four dogs, in locked isolation behind our walls and gate. Sadly, as a result, I learned to prefer the company of adults rather than other children. Emboldened by their blanket praise, I was confident and lively around adults. With other kids, I was a very different little girl. Encountering them only at school, and even then held apart by my father’s fame, I often felt awkward and ill at ease.

  The few girlfriends I had I rarely saw out of school, as 1 was not allowed to walk home with them, not even a block, when the school day ended. Instead, the schoolbus driver picked me up and dropped me off at the bottom of our driveway. For the first day or so it made me feel special. After that, what I felt was alienation. Instead of telling my parents, I characteristically kept my feelings suppressed.

  Weekends were more relaxed, but still served as reminders of how different I was. Saturdays and Sundays, a man named Fausto drove me down the hill to go ice-skating. Fausto worked around our house for years; I liked him, and I always went ice-skating willingly. I loved gliding over the ice in my little skirt, and the tightness I felt from my thick socks and skates. And yet I disliked skating alone, and afterwards hardly tasted the skating rink’s little pizzas. I was distracted by my envy, as I watched the chattering packs of “normal” children. As a young girl I a
ctually dreamed of walking out my front door and playing with kids from our street. A simple dream, it would never be realized.

  My favorite playmate then was still my father. When he was in town, even going to sleep had its pleasures. At night my dad was more serene, and I knew that was the time to make a play for softness. I used to say, “Daddy, help me sleep.” For a man with such thick, powerful hands, my father was extremely deft. Using his fingertips, he caressed my mouth, my nose, my shutting eyes. The instant he stopped I would wiggle, until he had put his hands back on me.

  I had good reason to stretch those moments. By morning, my father’s gentle touch was nowhere to be found. Mornings, my dad was a slave to his energy. It was extraordinary, and it exhausted even his children. To watch my careening father attack a new day, to try and keep pace with him, was to feel very old, and very, very lazy, before our time. He never slept late. Ever. When away on location, he always rose by four-thirty or five A.M. Even at home in his own bed, his eyes popped open by dawn. Any time at all, my father hated being alone. Mornings, wired by energy and caffeine, he hated it doubly, and could not stand for others to sleep after he’d gotten up. If his family was not out of bed by seven sharp, my father woke us—with all the finesse of one of his onscreen drill sergeants.

  Every morning he’d barge into my bedroom, practically shouting, “It’s time to get up! It’s seven o’clock in the morning! Come on!”

  When I was a child this irritated me. As a teenager, often out late the night before, it became positively loathsome. I should have told my father, but never did: at that time I still feared him, and rarely told him my true feelings. Besides, had I told my father I hated the way he woke me, he would have stopped, but his feelings would have been bruised; somehow, I would have paid for it later.