After the deaths of Grant Withers and Ward Bond, John Ford sought comfort in the church, rediscovering the Irish Catholic religion of his childhood. For my less-spiritual father, no such retreat was possible. Though believing in Jesus Christ and God, my father never once went with my mother and me to our Catholic church, and was skeptical as a rule toward organized religion. When asked, he used to refer to himself with a grin as a “Presby-goddamn-terian.”
At the beginning of 1962, my father could muster none of his good humor. For such a large man, John Ford once said of him, “John Wayne moves with the grace of a dancer.” But during my father’s severe depression, a time when life seemed little more than a series of bereavements, he moved slowly, almost ploddingly. He was so filled with sadness for his friends, even immersing himself in work could not dispel the heaviness that came over him. Watching my dad at home, I had never seen him so inactive. He looked, at times, to be struggling to merely get out of his chair.
Thank goodness he liked babies. A man who lived to see twenty-one of his grandchildren, there were few things that lifted his spirits the way one more little Wayne did. And at six in the morning on February 22, 1962, my father found solace in perhaps the only place he really could, from his family, when my mother gave birth to a second child.
My mother bore John Ethan Wayne after agonizing through another protracted labor, this one nearly as long as when she had me. But my brother was born without complications, a godsend in light of my mother’s harrowing past. In the six years since she had bore me, my mother had suffered three miscarriages. One, in 1959, was made public by an overeager confidant of my dad who revealed my mother’s pregnancy prematurely—to Louella Parsons. That spring, the gossip columnist printed that my parents were expecting. Several days later, my father had to announce that his wife had lost the baby. As part of the price for being Mrs. John Wayne, my mother’s intensely private loss became a public event.
In 1961, the doctors confirmed my mom was once again pregnant, but for all their powers could not guarantee she would carry to term. The next several months she alternated between elation and fear. One night, she and I sat alone on my parents’ bed and my mother spoke in almost a whisper about “my history,” and “past complications.” Vaguely aware of her meaning, there was no mistaking the anguish in her eyes.
But this time it was all worth it. Through the miracle of life, a family of three was now four. Six years old when Ethan was born, I recall no feelings of jealousy. Though losing my status as an only child, all I remember is my excitement, that our estate would now contain another small person, and perhaps I would not feel so lonesome. My mother recalls it differently. When Ethan was born, she says my first words upon seeing him in the hospital were, “Look, Mommy, I hurt my finger.”
When my little brother came home with his red wriggling body and my father’s blue-lagoon eyes, I anointed myself his protector. I rocked him and fed him and hushed his bawling, surprised myself with the mother in me. The second day we had him, my parents allowed me to burp our new baby. Ethan spit up on my shoulder, and all of us started laughing, even my dad. I had not heard that sound in so many weeks I’d feared it had left our lives forever.
Not long after Ethan’s birth, my father again fell prone to bouts of depression. Perhaps receiving one new life reminded him of the death of his friends. Slowly, however, Ethan reminded my dad that he needed to keep moving forward. For his entire adulthood, my father had felt a need to provide, to accomplish, to prove himself. Finally, these needs of my father came back, and he dove once again into making pictures.
Still recovering from the cost of The Alamo and a few soured investments, what he needed now wasn’t meetings or memos or concepts or promises—“Hollywood blah blah blah,” as he called it. With a wife, an ex-wife, six children from two different families and a pair of grandkids (Michael’s Alicia and Toni’s Anita) he needed money, and needed it quickly. First he closed a crucial negotiation with Paramount Pictures. They would pay him $600,000 a movie for ten movies. This was at least $100,000 under his current price, but the contract was nonexclusive, and Paramount agreed to pay much of the $6 million up front. This meant erasing old debts, revitalizing Batjac, feeding mouths, and paying employees—a prospect my father could not resist. Despite a downbeat, much-discussed profile that ran that year in the Saturday Evening Post—“The Woes of Box Office King John Wayne”—in truth my dad had embarked on financial resurrection.
Economic help came next from an improbable source—Darryl Zanuck. Only one year before, in 1961, he and my father had publicly collided. A onetime screenwriter, Darryl Zanuck had gotten his break in the 1920s, penning the adventures of a fearless German shepherd. After writing stories for Rin Tin Tin, Zanuck later founded the company that would become Twentieth Century Fox. Firmly entrenched as a Hollywood “mogul,” the megalomaniacal, cigar-chomping Zanuck came courting my father in 1962. Six years earlier, he’d resigned his post at Fox and moved to Europe, triggering the once-vaunted studio’s slide to the edge of ruin. Returning to Fox as president, Zanuck’s plan for saving it hinged around his pet project, The Longest Day, the epic depicting the D-Day invasion of France. Normally, my father was anxious to pay tribute on-screen to American soldiers, but when Zanuck inquired he flatly refused to star in The Longest Day. He was still too angry for what Zanuck had done to him just two years earlier.
During the pre-Oscar uproar over The Alamo, the man called DFZ had stung him. Speaking to a reporter in Paris, but knowing his biting words would reverberate all through Hollywood, Zanuck blasted Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, Richard Widmark, and most prominently John Wayne. All were actors who’d formed their own production companies. Like many of Hollywood’s old guard, Zanuck felt actors, even famous, bankable actors, should still be treated by the studios as attractive pieces of merchandise. When my father starred, directed, and produced The Alamo, Zanuck felt it akin to inmates running the asylum.
“I’ve got a great affection for Duke Wayne,” Zanuck was quoted in Paris, “but what right has he to write, direct, and produce a motion picture? Look at poor old Duke now. He’s never going to see a nickel, and he put all his money into finishing The Alamo.”
Infuriated at the patronizing tone—poor old Duke?—my father fired back. “It’s SOB’s like Zanuck that made me become a producer. Who the hell does he think he is, asking what right I have to make a picture? What right does he have to make one?” In reality, my father respected him. He said Zanuck truly loved movies, not just profit, and unlike many executives, always had the guts to trust his own hunches. Still, when Zanuck phoned from Europe in 1962 regarding The Longest Day, my father coldly said he had no interest. Zanuck, like my dad, unaccustomed to being told no, only doubled his transatlantic hounding, upping his price each phone call. Finally, my father agreed to perform a cameo, and even that with a stipulation: his price tag for those few days was a quarter of a million dollars. Certain he’d driven his price to unmeetable heights, my father was shocked when Zanuck met it. Proudly, but not blindly, my dad jetted to Europe, went before the camera for only four days, and earned nearly ten times more for his cameo than Henry Fonda, Sean Connery, and Richard Burton did for their own.
The prescient Zanuck didn’t mind. Boosted by my father’s box office pull, and in tandem with Fox’s The Sound of Music, The Longest Day returned the flailing studio into the black.
“It was highway robbery,” my father later admitted privately. “But I needed the money at the time, and that bastard Zanuck had it coming.”