The year was 1953. Truce had been reached in Korea, and if that peace was uneasy, the country nevertheless was not at war. Bumper stickers announced I LIKE IKE, and trust ran high for the reassuring first-year president. Still a youthful medium, television had superceded radio and already had motion pictures reeling. One of TV’s new, top-rated programs, Ozzie and Harriet, and many other shows like it, painted a placid picture: American home lives free of complication.
It was illusion. In Hollywood, where illusion was manufactured, no one knew this better than John Wayne. That fall, my father was wrapped in domestic scandal.
In November 1954, he would marry my mother, Pilar, and his third and final marriage would endure for the next two decades. In 1956 my parents would have me.
But now, in late October 1953, his second marriage was ending, wildly, and reporters tripped over each other to detail the sordid news. The gossip mavens gushed, and even the restrained Los Angeles Times called it “The steamy divorce trial of the towering screen actor John Wayne.” All the while the public was enrapt. In 1950s Hollywood, the public images of private hell-raisers—and back then that included my dad—were honed, shined, and sanitized to keep negative press at a minimum. Still, there is no hiding hostile divorce, not when it’s John Wayne’s, and the trial for my dad was an embarrassing mark on a soaring career.
My father was then forty-six, already had twenty-five years in the business. After a long, arduous climb to the top of his profession, he was finally box office gold. In 1951, producer Howard Hughes had paid him $301,000 to star in Flying Leathernecks, and this was called the highest one-film salary ever given to an actor. Between 1948 and 1953 my hard-working father starred in fifteen films, most notably Fort Apache, Red River, Sands of Iwo Jima, Rio Grande, and The Quiet Man. His role in Sands of Iwo Jima, as Marine Sergeant John M. Stryker, won him more than an Oscar nomination; it had stunning impact on people who saw it. When my father charged up Iwo Jima Hill, only to be cut down by sniper fire just steps from the top, people wept in their seats. Their tears did not go unnoted by the czars ruling Hollywood. With the film industry ailing, its income and stature diminished by the rise of TV, the power brokers came to view my dad as a rare and critical asset. “There’s nothing wrong with Hollywood,” a producer told Cosmopolitan, “that a dozen John Waynes couldn’t cure.”
Privately, what needed fixing was his second marriage. Back in 1944, his first marriage, to Josephine Saenz, the mother of his first four children, had ended in divorce. My father remarried in 1946. He met his next wife in Mexico, a country he loved second only to this one. On the night Ray Milland introduced my father to Esperanza Bauer, who called herself Chata, she claimed to be a part-time actress. In truth, Chata was a dark, voluptuous, high-priced call girl. By the time my father discovered the facts of her life, he’d fallen in love.
Not surprisingly, my father never spoke to me about Chata. I never heard about her until after he died, and at first I was shocked and disbelieving. But then I learned more. Evidently, Chata told my father she desperately sought a new life, to escape her past and marry a man she loved. I also learned that my father’s first marriage, to Josephine, had had little physical contact its last several years, and that Chata Bauer was blatantly sexual. At that stage of his life, perhaps Chata was who my father needed. Besides, he said he loved her, and when John Wayne fell in love he tended to marry. Those who knew him well always called my father “the marrying kind.”
Nevertheless, when he brought Chata back to the States and later wed her in Long Beach, his close friends said he was making a dire mistake. John Ford, the director my father most often worked with, came down harder, shunning my dad for nearly two years. By then the lives and careers of Ford and my father were tightly linked, and my dad once told me that Ford was the only man he had ever feared. An expert manipulator of actors, Ford’s machinations often continued offscreen. But he never swayed my father as much as their mutual fans believe, for my father was simply too willful. And Ford’s hostility notwithstanding, my father and Chata set out to make their unlikely marriage work.
They could and then they couldn’t. For the seven stormy years they stayed married they separated numerous times. When the marriage finally shattered, the allegations made for a lurid trial. Too much angry suspicion, too much hard liquor, and not enough fidelity—these were the mutual charges.
According to my father’s testimony, Chata’s mother had quickly moved in with the newlyweds, and he would often come home to find drunken wife and in-law, entwined in each other’s arms, lying out cold on a bed. Chata, he also testified, once threatened to kill him.
During the making of Angel and the Badman, Chata had convinced herself that my father was sleeping with Gail Russell. My father’s handpicked costar, Miss Russell was then twenty-three, emotionally fragile, and dazzlingly beautiful. My father told the court that on the evening of the movie’s wrap party, when he arrived home at one-thirty A.M., “My wife refused to let me in. I could hear her and her mother talking about me loudly. I rang the bell but they wouldn’t open the door. Then I broke a glass panel, reached in, and opened it myself. Chata and her mother, they came charging out. Chata had a forty-five in her hand. She and her mother were fighting over it.”
Under oath, Chata said she thought my father was a burglar; that’s why she ran out clutching the gun. My father told a different story. He said his wife had been drunk and hysterical, demanding to know if he’d just come from a motel with Gail Russell. Insisting he betrayed her, she turned the loaded pistol on him, threatening to end her husband’s life. When his attorney asked my father if there had been any affair with Miss Russell, and a trip to any motel, my father said, “Absolutely not.” He said he and Miss Russell had shared only friendship.
By the end of the week, Chata had accused my father of twenty-two acts of physical cruelty, repeating again and again that John Wayne had “clobbered” her. My father had sworn he never struck his wife, just protected himself from her boozy rages, and he countered with thirty-one charges of his own. A girl waved an enormous sign on the jammed steps of the courthouse: JOHN WAYNE, YOU CAN CLOBBER ME ANY TIME YOU WANT.
When it became clear how grotesque things were becoming, both sides opted to settle. The trial ended abruptly, after three days in Superior Court. The judge intervened, granting the Waynes an uncommon divorce, reserved for California cases where neither party concedes the other’s charges. If they chose, in one year both could remarry. In the interim, my father retained his Encino estate. He agreed to pay Chata $150,000, all her current debts, and $50,000 per year for the next six years.
No one claimed victory. Only the lawyers escaped un-bloodied.
Chata died late the following year in a Mexico City hotel room, thirty-eight and an alcoholic. The newspapers said she died alone, of a heart attack. Her sad little room was strewn with empty bottles.
My father, who had once loved her, did not ride off into the sunset. He did not live happily ever after.
But he did find a deeper love.
In 1952, his marriage to Chata without hope and the lawyers preparing for court, my father flew to South America. He was scouting locations for The Alamo, an epic Western he one day intended to act in, produce, and direct. When he arrived in Peru, my father was told to look up Richard Weldy, who worked for Pan American Airways when he wasn’t leading tours up the waters of the Amazon. Though he never planned it, Richard Weldy also led John Wayne to his future wife.
Weldy took my dad to the small jungle town of Tingo Maria, where a Peruvian film crew was squarely in the midst of shooting a scene. By the time of their arrival the afternoon sun was dying. By firelight, a young Latin actress danced barefoot for the camera, her long hair dark and unruly, her legs thin and sculpted. This was the vision that charmed my father the first time he saw my mother.
In a photo taken moments after they met, my mother’s flowered dress is cut to fall off one milky white shoulder. Her full red lips and exotic dark eyes are aimed up and at my father, whose shirttail hangs out. His hair is cut boyishly short, and his massive left hand dwarfs what is likely a cocktail. His downward gaze on my mother is fixed like a laser.
She must have been an interesting girl. The daughter of a Peruvian senator, Pilar Palette had been expected to marry a Latin aristocrat. As a child, her Catholic mother had used God and religion as bludgeons, filling her small daughter’s head with scorched and anguished images of hell, where little Pilar would truly be damned and burn should she fail to toe her mother’s concrete line. After the death of her father, my mother finally rebelled. She didn’t marry a Latin blue blood, but Richard Weldy, the raucous Irish-American.
On the fateful day he led my father to Tingo Maria, Weldy and my mom were already estranged. He wanted her back, so Weldy showed up with John Wayne, a famous American film star. My mother was duly impressed, but not by Weldy. When my father sought to charm, few could resist him. He was more than tall, handsome, wealthy, and famous. He had that stride, that voice. The moment she met him my mother said she was smitten.
But Richard Weldy had eyes. He took my mother aside and told her he needed her back. My mother wanted to scream. Weldy had cheated on her; she’d discovered it and been crushed. While she wondered where John Wayne had slipped off to, my mother told Weldy the marriage was over. When she asked if he’d started divorce proceedings, Weldy said no and stalked off.
Under an inky sky, that night my parents shared dinner. With the cast and crew around they were hardly alone, and yet they felt that they were. My mother was nervous, my father patient. He was forty-five, she was barely twenty. She stood five feet three inches tall and weighed at most 100 pounds. A grizzly bear of a man, six feet four and 230 pounds, he must have seemed twice her size. Unaware that his first two wives had also been Latin, my mom was surprised at his knowledge of Latin custom. In fractured English, my mother told him he’d been wonderful in For Whom the Bell Tolls. My dad grinned his lopsided grin and explained that she must mean his pal Gary Cooper. In their first intimacy, he took her delicate hands in his own and my mother blushed. Too soon the dinner was ending. My father stood up and said, “I guess this is good-bye.”
My mom went to bed feeling flushed, vaguely aware she had suffered a loss. My father went to his own room, leaving the next day at first light.
My dad was deeply superstitious. He bellowed whenever he saw a hat on a bed. For a man who once had been a poor boy, this was not bad luck but disaster—a hat on a bed meant no work. On rare rainy days in Southern California, my mother preferred opening her umbrella before she stepped outside, and my dad would see her and cringe. When my parents played poker, and a playing card turned face up, its owner had to stand and circle his or her chair three times. At dinner, my father never let anyone hand him the salt. Instead we had to place the salt on the table. If anyone handed my father the salt, he said they’d be passing him their bad luck.
Believing as he did in fate, perhaps my father was not amazed to find himself face-to-face with my mother again, this time back in America. As my parents always told it, it happened on a Monday, just a few months after they’d met in Tingo Maria. Scared but excited, my mom had been flown from Lima to Hollywood, to Warner Brothers studios, to dub some dialogue for the movie she’d made in Peru. At the end of her grueling first day, she started for the stage door. As she leaned on its bulky frame, the door opened up from the opposite side.
It was pushed by my father.
Two years later they married.
When my parents ventured into Hollywood, it was not only my dad who commanded attention. My Peruvian mother was not only stunning, she was uncommon, and this multiplied her appeal. One day at Warner Brothers, Marlon Brando was crouched over a commissary table, checking out John Wayne and the young woman sitting with him at a table across the room. Though my father respected his talent, he and Brando weren’t friends. Once John Ford wanted Brando and my dad for a potential film, and Ford asked my father to approach him. When my father called, Brando said, “Who is going to direct?” and my father said “John Ford.” Brando said, “He’s not my kind of director.” My father didn’t belabor it—that was never his style—and neither man filled the silence. From that point on they were only acquaintances.
Now Marlon Brando was eyeing my mother. Maybe he didn’t hear they’d recently been married, perhaps he had and didn’t care. Brando was barely thirty, gorgeous and arrogant, sizzling with success after coming off The Wild One and On the Waterfront Brando sent over a friend to ask John Wayne if Marlon Brando could meet his alluring companion.
My father said one word: “No!”
That evening at home, my dad went into a jealous rage. It was my mom’s first glimpse of his dark side. She realized, only then, that my father was not the characters he played on the screen, men who did not just have self-assurance, they reeked of it. He was more complicated than that, and more conflicted. He was driven by pride, but also by insecurity, and a troubled past he could never completely take flight from.