Durango sits high in the mountains of Mexico, a languid, lonesome village some eight thousand feet above sea level at the eastern edge of the Sierra Madres. Immediately my father loved it—its hard blue skies and clear mountain air—but to me the place looked deadly dull. Durango had frozen dirt streets with no names, one horseshoe-shaped hotel, and one hole in the wall that everyone called a diner. A pampered product of Southern California, I took one look at my new home for the week and began counting the days.
At least Dean Martin was there. If any of my father’s friends could perk up Durango it had to be him. My dad never ran with the rest of the Rat Pack, but he and Mr. Martin really did enjoy one another. Perhaps Mr. Martin wore another face when he was alone with his own family, but whenever I saw him he seemed entirely secure inside his own skin. He had a zest for living, a carefree air about him that enlivened my father whenever they hung around. I never saw rivalry between them, or competition, or jealousy, or any need to impress. Back in Southern California, they often secured Hollywood movies before their release, then screened them at our house with my mother and Jeanne Martin. Those nights there was always a lot of laughter, a lot of cheerful noise.
On the set of Katie Elder, the two Hollywood stars did more than their share of drinking. Late, late one night the week I was in Durango, I was jolted awake by a racket outside our hotel room. Stumbling outside I saw cast, crew, writers, and paparazzi standing outside their own rooms waving and grinning. Down below in the dirt street, my father and Dean Martin marched arm-in-arm, singing their booze-soaked lungs out. I laughed because everyone else did, but I wasn’t sure I thought it was all that funny. My father was still a sick man.
Around the time my dad turned sixty, after we’d moved to Newport Beach, he cut his drinking back sharply. But in 1965, he was still being described as “one of Hollywood’s legendary drinkers.” Henry Fonda, after hitting Mexican bar after bar with John Ford and my father, said “John Wayne can outdrink any man.” I suspect my father took pride in that assessment. To men of his generation, the ability to drink hard was certification of manhood, and my father never shrank from demonstrating his own. He liked whiskey, but his favorite drink was straight tequila on ice, and always Commemorativo. He used to take his own bottle with him to parties, bestow it on the bartender with a generous tip, and tell him or her, “Here you go. This is what I drink. Pour this for me all night.” If my father met a person he liked, found that person engaging in the area of politics or moviemaking, he might sit with his new friend and smoke and drink for three straight days. After his companion left, though, he might not touch liquor for a month. My father enjoyed liquor’s effects. When he drank, he was apt to make it count. But alcohol never controlled his life.
A stickler on the issue of drinking and driving, his favorite place to indulge was on The Wild Goose. Sometimes the horseplay got out hand. Once, I’ve been told, my parents docked for the weekend off Catalina Island, while entertaining Claire Trevor Bren and her husband-manager Milton. In 1939, Claire starred with my dad in John Ford’s Stagecoach, playing Dallas the softhearted hooker to my father’s Ringo Kid. Claire remained very close with my dad, as did her husband Milton Bren, a small, caustic intellectual whom my father found amusing despite this odd fact: Milton Bren loved ridiculing John Wayne. This moonlit night on The Wild Goose, Milton started again on my father. By then my dad had had quite a few, and more than enough. Unzipping his pants, he turned on the jabbering Bren and urinated all over his shoes. As the story goes, for the first time in his life Milton Bren fell speechless.
I never saw my father so plainly smashed, and when he drank around me he was never abusive. On the contrary, there was a sweetness about him, an approachability—and that’s what annoyed me. He was always like that with his friends, and yet frequently closed or distracted around his children. Even before I understood liquor, I intuitively knew his mood change was unnatural. I wanted him to be open without drinking booze.
One of my worst and earliest memories of my father’s drinking is the Encino morning when I started leaving for school and he and his buddies were still embroiled in the same game of poker they’d played all night. I still remember John Ford’s stubbled, scowling face, one black eyepatch over black-framed glasses, gnawing the end of a fat cigar in the corner of his mouth. I don’t recall much about Mr. Ford, except he was always gentle with me, and I thought of him as my grandpa. But Mr. Ford also scared me. With that black eyepatch, he reminded me of death.
Nor did my father look too spry that bloodshot morning. There were maybe six loud men in our smoky card room, still puffing away and drinking, but even the wisecracks and clinking of glasses could not muffle my father’s thundering order.
“Hey Aissa! Give me a kiss before you go to school!”
Obediently, I pecked my father’s cheek. He wetly kissed me back on my own, and that’s when I smelled it. His whiskey breath smelled hot and stale. It smelled obnoxious.
Because of my father’s capacity to drink, because every morning when he was away on location he showed up first on a film set, wholly prepared for the day’s opening shot while his fellow drinkers lurched in looking pathetic, missing their marks, and blowing their lines, he was widely described by journalists as a man immune to getting hungover.
Nonsense.
When only his family could see him, his heart pounded so vehemently some mornings my father swore he was having a heart attack.
“My heart, my heart,” he’d bitch and yell. “Pilar, I’m gonna die. Pilar, where are you? Goddamn it! I will never drink again. Pilar!”
There was plenty of drinking that freezing week in Durango, and plenty of showboating by my father in front of the press. He wanted the world to believe he was still the invincible Duke, and clearly no sick and faltering man. As for the photographers and reporters, I’m sure some came to Durango for simply professional reasons—my father was news—and that many were pulling for his revival. Others, I think, came morbidly hoping to witness John Wayne’s demise. A few days before I left Durango, the ghoulish nearly got what they came for.
This January morning, while filming a pivotal fight scene, my father would be pulled from his horse, land in a mountain stream, then engage in a lengthy brawl with his three “brothers.” But the stream was ringed with ice, the weather near 10 degrees. Afraid my father could get pneumonia, my mom asked if he’d please use a double. My foolhardy father said no: the director, Henry Hathaway, was shooting the scene in close-up.
Mr. Hathaway yelled “Action.” On cue, my father got yanked into the stream. But he landed wrong, getting drenched to the waist instead of just to his knees. Horrified, my little brother Ethan yelled “Daddy, Daddy.” Henry Hathaway shot Ethan a glare and continued shooting. Chilled to the bone, operating on one good lung, my father completed the scene, but trudging out of the water he couldn’t stop coughing. His body convulsed and his lips turned a rubbery grayish-blue. The photographers closed in and took their pictures. Henry Hathaway, suddenly now my father’s protector, screamed “Get away, you sons of bitches! Can’t you see he needs air?” An aide rushed up with my father’s inhalator, fixing the oxygen mask over his ashen face.
The crisis passed, but I was still trembling. And angry.
My father is still in poor health. Why can’t he stop confirming his courage? Is he such a prisoner of his myth he’ll feed it at the risk of his very life?
I didn’t know, but the questions entered my mind as we all stood around watching my father breathe.