The least of my family’s problems, Circus World itself was well on its way to failure. In 1963, Rita Hayworth was only forty-five, but her once-soaring career was in decline. My father had never worked with her, and never hoped to again. A consummate professional, he did not comprehend why a veteran actress arrived chronically late, without knowing her lines, only to start acting surly to peers. Alienating him further, when he and my mother dined out with Miss Hay worth near the onset of filming, she was nasty and condescending to waiters and busboys. That was anathema to my father. “Never lose the common touch,” he told me throughout my life. “Never think anyone is better than you, but never assume you’re superior to anyone else. Try and be decent to everyone, until they give you reason not to.”
My father’s opinion of Rita Hayworth notwithstanding, neither he nor his leading lady tried keeping their children from playing together. While our parents made bad chemistry on-screen and off, I cavorted on the sidelines with Rita’s young daughter, Yasmin. Near the end of her mother’s life, when Miss Hayworth tragically got Alzheimer’s disease, it was Yasmin who put her own life on hold to caretake her mother.
Late that November, as filming lagged on and on, we learned that someone had shot President Kennedy. In Spain, even more so than back in America, the early reports were conflicting, making it unclear whether Kennedy was dead or only wounded. When the confusion finally abated, we heard the sickening truth: John F. Kennedy was assassinated. That we were not home to experience our shock and grief with other Americans only made this obscenity more disturbing.
I have been told that my father had great dislike for all the Kennedy men, but the only ill will I witnessed myself was toward Teddy. Even before Chappaquiddick in 1969, my father watched Ted Kennedy on TV and branded him a liar and a phony. “This guy says he only cares about issues. Bullshit. He cares about getting power, and he’ll say and do whatever he has to to get it—just like every other politician. If he’d just admit he’s like everyone else. Ted Kennedy’s so fake he makes me sick.”
After the opaque events of Chappaquiddick, my father was incredulous then outraged. An evening news junkie, a religious reader of Time and Newsweek, he habitually groused at the curious predilections of certain public servants, but until Chappaquiddick I’d never seen him so worked up. One night after dinner, watching yet another report, my father went ballistic.
“Jesus Christ, it’s a cover-up!” he ranted. “Anyone else would at least get indicted! They’re letting him off because he’s a Kennedy. That family’s got too much goddamn pull!” As the televised story continued, I could see my father becoming hotter and hotter. He snatched a metal paperweight, hurling it straight at Ted Kennedy’s visage, shattering our expensive TV. My father, I surmised, was not a rational man when it came to the senator from Massachusetts.
If John Wayne bore such animus for Ted’s older brother Jack, he never revealed it to me. Although he deplored his politics, although he voted for Nixon, my father gave JFK high marks for presidential leadership. After John Kennedy’s sudden and senseless murder, my parents were more forlorn than I’d seen them in years.
We were all depressed and displaced. We needed to finish this movie, go home to California, and the balm of familiar surroundings. Instead we were still abroad, living in rented quarters, on a trip that now seemed doomed.
Late one night in my bed, yawning and tired but unable to sleep, I heard angry sounds emanating through the wall separating my room from my parents’. They were fighting. I was unprepared—back then their fights were still infrequent—and this only heightened my terror. In the past when they had fought, my father had done the shouting, my mother had lapsed into sullen, silent indifference. Though my mother knew she could not compete with his volume, her silence had not been submissive. She knew nothing annoyed my father more than when people simply ignored him.
Now, my mother was screaming back, and the sound through the wall kept building and building. My father sounded malicious, out of control. He was swearing, the first time I’d heard him cursing my mother. For the only time in my life I feared he might strike her.
I lay there flinching, obsessively hugging Ava Gardner’s pillow, hating my life, wishing that I was in my own bed. In my bedroom at home, during my parents’ rare bad fights like this one, I sometimes imagined I was elsewhere. I pretended now I was way up in the moonglow, vaulting from star to star. But I kept missing the star by inches, and my brakes were not working. Dropping through space again and again faster and faster, I kept falling back to my parents’ hostile voices. Finally they stopped yelling, and I sat in the darkness taking deep breaths until the hours got small and I fell asleep.
In the morning my parents were shy around me, feeling me out to see how much I’d heard. My father lit another cigarette and the smoke curled up around him. “We’re starting back home soon, babe,” he said. “Just a few more weeks of shooting, then we’re starting home.” I nodded, leaving him coughing there in the kitchen.
I wasn’t allowed on the set for the final days of shooting. The Circus World script called for a hazardous, spectacular, pyrotechnic climax. Playing an American cowboy and circus owner barnstorming through Europe with his troupe, my father would be caught inside his big tent as it went up in flames. The action called for him to rescue the caged animals and spectators by chopping down seats and poles with an axe, setting up a fire barrier. As usual, my father chose to perform his own stunt in this critical scene, feeling he owed that to his fans, who went to John Wayne movies expecting credibility. For five straight days my father ate smoke, from artificial fires and real fires, set and put out and set again. “I’ll be fine,” he promised my mother each night. “Once the fire scene is finished I’ll be fine. This is what they pay me for.”
The last day of shooting in Spain, my father’s penchant for working and working and working, until he heard the word cut, could have killed him. Wearing fireproof underwear, a fireman’s helmet beneath his hat, and wielding an axe, he began chopping his seats and poles, working close to the fire. An unexpected breeze fanned the blaze even closer to his turned back. Fragments of glowing wood swirling around him, he kept swinging his axe through the black smoke, rather than do the dangerous take again. He could not see that everyone else had fled, including Henry Hathaway, his director, as the fire exceeded their control. Assuming John Wayne would run, tpo, no one screamed “Cut!” and my father stayed where he was, he and the fire, until he could not withstand the smoke and heat. Seeing that he was alone, he angrily chucked down his axe and raced from the blistering tent.
That night, my father stormed in with the red-streaked eyes of a drunkard, but he hadn’t been drinking. He barely spoke and until I fell asleep I heard him viciously coughing.
Shortly after, we flew to London, where the filmmakers shot some exterior scenes, then from London to Acapulco, where The Wild Goose and its crew had motored ahead according to plan. Our wretched vacation nearing its end, all that remained, we thought, was a simple cruise north to Newport Beach. But tragedy struck off the southernmost tip of Baja. On their night off, four of our crewmen rowed our ship’s fourteen-foot skiff into Cabo San Lucas. One was Eduardo Duran Zamora, twenty years old, a fabulous athlete and effortless swimmer. I loved Eduardo Zamora. With my father’s permission and trust, Eduardo had taught me how to water ski when I was only three.
By sunrise he and the other crewmen hadn’t returned. All that nervous morning I could not shake my feeling that something had gone horribly wrong. That afternoon, we learned three men had drowned. Really, all three were boys, the oldest among them just twenty-four. After drinking all night at a Cabo San Lucas Fiesta, they had started back for The Wild Goose, their skiff overturned, and they tried swimming the two miles to shore. The sole survivor was the only one who couldn’t swim, Efran, our houseman Fausto’s son. Efran had lashed himself to the skiff and been rescued by the crew of a passing boat.
As The Wild Goose started home my mind was mostly blank. When I thought at all, I could not accept Eduardo’s death. He swam like the fish, he even taught the adults things—now he was gone? Forever?
A blanket of gloom settled over my father as well. Except for meals, he spent most of the next few days high up at the bow, in front of the glass shielding the captain. When he did come down my father looked sick with self-reproach. The boys had drunk too much beer and tequila, and the deep black sea had taken them. But I think my father held himself responsible. All his abilities to lead, to protect, all his meticulous planning, and now three of his crew were dead. I desperately wanted to give my father some comfort, to take him in my arms and say Things will get better, Daddy, they always do. But I wasn’t sure they would, and I wasn’t sure my father would let me.