John Wayne (19 page)

Debbie Doner saved my life. At least that's how it felt. My energy level rose just from being around her, and slowly my confidence, too. Sincere and perceptive, Debbie never asked about my father, unless it related to my father and me. Gently, without any rancor for my parents, Debbie encouraged me to think about my family life as we truly lived it. An outward, adventurous girl, Debbie had none of my newfound reticence. Soon we were screaming our throats raw at the California Angels, swishing our hair and singing along to the Beatles, sneaking out at night from her bedroom window, purely to see if we could escape detection. Alone with my best
friend Debbie, I felt safe from the awkwardness and pressure I felt around nearly everyone else. When I found another girlfriend, Lea Hilgren, I was starting to almost feel human again.

Then our dog limped home with a shattered leg.

My dad, you see, had also found a faithful new comrade. Frosty, a rock-chested white Samoyed, had my father manipulated even as a puppy. Every morning my dad took his coffee and food out to our breakfast nook facing the bay, and every morning Frosty growled and pawed on the sliding glass window, demanding to be let in. My father would slide open the glass, pull out a chair, and let Frosty jump up and join him for breakfast. Mornings when I couldn't sleep, I'd climb out of bed before my father could jar me awake, and catch him feeding Frosty strips of bacon. My father would look embarrassed, almost childlike. Years later, I can still see them eating breakfast together, can still remember that scene with such sweet pleasure.

That first year in Newport, Frosty was not quite a year old when he vaulted our fence one afternoon while I was at school, running out on the ominous beach where the rich older teenagers made fun of Debbie and Lea and me whenever they saw us. When I came home from school, my mother told me Frosty had broken her leg. Frosty already had a cast on her right hind leg, and her tail was bent down behind her in utter depression. Even after I cried myself out, for several days my heart sunk each time Frosty took a tender step. Paranoid, or prescient, I asked Debbie and Lea to ask around. About a week later a girl from the complex told me she'd seen what happened, but that she would not name names.

The teenager boys saw Frosty down on the beach, the girl said. They called her name, beckoning her to come close, and the girl thought they were going to throw their Frisbee to her. A boy broke Frosty's leg with one cruel accurate throw.

I was incensed, and then frightened. Had we moved somewhere evil? Only a monster out of a nightmare would do such a thing to our dog.

I never told my family what happened, afraid of my
father's reaction. I feared he would storm the beach in a murderous rage, cursing and screaming, and what would the older boys do to me then? After that, I'd see them around the complex or down on the sand, the neighborhood teenage boys, knowing one had brutalized Frosty. I took what they did as an insult intended for me, a spiteful warning that I was still not wanted.

I was twelve years old when my parents stopped sleeping together.

The more silent and strained their marriage became, the more I found myself revisiting my early childhood, when even the music filling our home reinforced my parents' belief in conjugal love. As a young girl in Encino, I'd sometimes discover them dancing, swaying across the living room lost in each other and lost in the romantic sounds of their favorite crooners: Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra, Kaye Starr, Bobby Darin, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

In front of their children back then, my parents were never ashamed to show their affection. Whenever my father returned from location, he could not get enough of my
mother's caresses and kisses. Warm nights after dinner, first my father and I would stroll alone through the grounds of our estate, both holding our carved African canes that we'd brought home from the set of
Hatari!
After my father and I had walked and talked, he and my mother slipped on their fins and masks and swam twilight laps in our heated pool. On Friday and Saturday nights, when there were no Hollywood functions or parties, they often went straight from dinner to bed, sometimes as early as seven. How my parents loved their huge wooden bed, and how the Hollywood press loved writing about its vastness. A reporter in
Photoplay
described it as an “Early American settle bed built on the foundation of a tremendous Old English bench on which Yorkshire farmers had smoked more than two hundred yams at a time. It had been really modernized: arm rests on the sides which could be raised and lowered; a cigarette compartment for him; a pull-down book rack; a control panel for television, radio, several telephone lines—by just flicking a switch you could turn on the lights downstairs or even open the front gate; and a slide-out backgammon tray fitted into the headboard.” The article went on to quote my mother “gayly” comparing her bed to a “football field.”

As a child that bed was a powerful symbol for me, and I wrapped it in romance and dreams. Lying together in silk, my mom in her robe and he in pajamas, my parents used to read mysteries out loud, roar at Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason, smoke their cigarettes, nibble hors d'oeuvres, and sip their martinis. I still recall snuggling between them, my mouth puckered from eating the baby onions inside their martinis. I can still shrink back into little girlhood whenever I think of those nights.

Their marriage lost its enchantment in Newport Beach. Until then, the lengthy separations intrinsic to show business marriages, their disparity in age, my father's slumping health and narrowing patience, had not yet become insurmountable. But coming to Newport Beach was my mother's idea at least as much her husband's, and I think she moved south seeking far more than a house by the ocean. After too
many years hearing herself called “John Wayne's wife,” too many years of hosting his friends and staving off his boredom, I think my mother wanted a life that felt like her own.

Shortly after we moved, she befriended a woman who belonged to the church of Christian Science. Still believing in God, but losing her faith in Catholicism, my mom converted a few days after she met her new companion. Since my father never entirely trusted doctors, her new religion's belief in self-healing was never an issue between them. But suddenly, after all the years, my mother could not join my dad for a drink or a smoke. Now she frequently withdrew into our guest room, needing solitude to digest her religion's complex books on positive thinking and mind over matter. In an effort to connect, my mother tried convincing my father to join her at church. Trying to show her he loved her he finally agreed. But my father had no personal use for organized religion, and could certainly not endorse one that forbade drinking or smoking. He only went once, and my mother said he fidgeted throughout the service. “I hated sitting still that long,” he told her the moment they stepped outside. My father told me Christian Science was “too extreme,” and wondered aloud what my mother was looking for.
Herself, Dad
, I wanted to say.
She's looking for herself. If I can see that, why can't you? Or why won't you?

Of course, they still were at odds over his work. We moved to Newport just one year after his coughing, convulsing retreat from that frozen stream in Durango. My mother had not wanted my dad to work that soon in the first place. As she agonizingly watched, my mother said part of herself, and part of her marriage, died inside that icy stream. Perhaps she knew it was futile, but in Newport my mother kept saying, slow down, slow down. My father, whose parents had been so poor, kept replying, “We need the money.”

If work and religion carried the greatest weight, by then small things divided them too. Both in Peru and in Encino, my mother had never perceived herself as athletic. The morning a girlfriend asked her to fill in at mixed doubles, my
mother had never stepped onto a tennis court. That day, she discovered the joy of breaking a sweat and of pounding her anxieties into a yellow Wilson. Just as promptly as she got hooked, my father resented his wife's latest passion. Even when he was a younger and healthier man, my father's sports were football and surfing. He never jogged—back then few people did—never liked golf or tennis. Besides, tennis, like Christian Science, took my mother away from him; each time she left our house he found something to pick at her for. Usually it was her dresses.

“Are you actually going out like that?” my father grumbled, referring to her short hemline. Though for many years he dominated us both, my mother did not fear my father as I did. In response to his diatribes as she left, she stopped only long enough to explain that times had changed, that tennis dresses no longer came down past women's knees. Eventually my father accepted my mother's outfits, but I'm not sure I can say the same for her independence. At times he seemed so threatened and insecure.

By 1968, my father was sixty-one years old and most of his old friends were gone. Those still alive, like Dean Martin and John Ford, still lived an hour north in Los Angeles County. He would soon make new male friends, but my father had no way of knowing that. In 1968 my mother turned forty. Her mid-life was not without sadness, but in her forties my mother's self-confidence grew. As she became more interested in herself, her tennis, her new circle of young and churchgoing friends, she found less time to dote on her husband. More and more when he wasn't working, my father spent mornings and afternoons without her aboard
The Wild Goose
, reading scripts in the sun, chatting up the crew, catching sand dabs, then frying them up the next day for breakfast. At least in front of me, their physical contact decreased until little was left but pecks on cheeks and hands on shoulders. Meanwhile, over at my best Mend Debbie's, her father still came home every night and flirted with Debbie's mom. Some nights while the Doners kissed and hugged in
their kitchen, I thought about what my parents were doing. I wondered if they were talking. Were they even in the same room?

One day when I was twelve, without any confrontation or visible anger, my mother and father stopped sleeping together. My mom left all her belongings where they were, in the master bedroom and in her private dressing room. But every night, she retired to our guest room. My parents still loved each other. I'm certain of that. They still played bridge, still exchanged pleasantries, and if anything their bickering decreased.

Then why did their new arrangement fill me with such longing, a longing I could never quite define when I was twelve years old, and yet never quite get rid of? In the bed that meant so much to my family once, why was my dad sleeping alone? He was a big man, but their bed looked empty without my mother.

It was their marriage. It was their estrangement. Still, I was their daughter and hoped for some volunteered answers. My father left it unmentioned. My mother merely said she needed her sleep, and my father's heavy snoring was making that hard. Even at twelve I did not fully believe it. My father snored, loudly, throughout our entire lives. And yet I let their new situation drop. We all let it drop, thinking, perhaps, that our silence at least would let us get on with our lives. Looking back, I can see we were like so many other American families. In the Wayne house, when we felt awful we lied and said we felt fine, and when we were scared we walked around looking brave, because of that Wayne family pride, and because keeping our problems a secret—even among ourselves—was less frightening and painful than dragging them into the light and trying to solve them.

Father snored; mother needed her sleep.

Although film critics were rarely kind to my father until late in his life, I don't think even he was prepared for the maelstrom of bad press that whipped up around him in the tumultuous summer of 1968. Just that February, the Viet Cong had launched the Tet Offensive. By the time American and South Vietnamese troops had beaten back the surprise attack, one senator probably spoke for a large number of bewildered Americans: “What happened? I thought we were winning this war?” Four months later, the antiwar movement gaining fervor and size, my father came out with his staunchly pro-Vietnam war movie,
The Green Berets
. Predictably, the late '60s press attacked both him and the film with a vengeance.