After we’d all returned to the states, my father surprised me one evening at dinner. “Your mother and I,” he said, “are thinking of moving to Newport Beach, not far from where the boat is. We want to know what you think. Would you like to move to Newport?”
For me it was easy. Partial to the cool climes of the beach, weary of living a life on a hill behind ten-foot walls, pleased that my father was solicitous of my feelings on such an important matter, I told him yes, moving sounded wonderful. In May 1965, having closed the sale of our estate to Walt Disney’s eldest daughter, I had scant regret and great hope as we left behind our past for a future by the sea.
Before its lima bean fields were paved over with concrete, Newport Beach in 1965 was a close-knit seaside village of 36,000 people, with few markets or restaurants, so anywhere you went you ran into people you knew. The crown jewel of Orange County, Newport back then was a collection of mansions and bungalows, yachts and dinghies, ship brokers and stockbrokers, pensioned retirees and golden-haired, brown-skinned surfers. Friends visited homes of friends in sailboats and motor boats, sidling up to the slip to indulge in sunset cocktails, until eyes swam in heads like ice cubes in tall glasses. Many of these beach houses were still weekend homes and summertime havens, to which monied and stressed Los Angelenos fled south in sports cars and sedans.
Although our own new waterfront home was still being remodeled, Newport Beach seemed lovely to me even from rented quarters. The springtime scents alone were enough to make me forget Encino: misted Pacific air and rain-dampened sand, creamy freesia and Spanish blueblood, orange blossoms and night-blooming jasmine. Most exhilarating of all, after living on five and a half secluded acres, my old childhood dream had actually come true. Unlike in Encino, other children now played directly outside on the street in front of our home. My father was off in Rome filming Cast a Giant Shadow with Kirk Douglas, and had not yet appeared at our rented home. With none of the other children suspecting who I was, how nice it felt to be treated as just one more neighborhood girl.
That September I entered fifth grade at Carden Hall, a small conservative private school. Each grade at Carden was dissected into Upper and Lower. After our first two sets of exams I was promptly kicked upstairs to Upper Fifth. That night I was flowing with pride, waiting for my father’s daily phone call home from Rome. Although I’d been nervous about my school, I’d applied myself and accomplished something worthwhile, without my father’s assistance. Knowing what emphasis he placed on grades, I was sure he’d be thrilled.
“Dad, I skipped lower fifth grade!” I said over the line. “My tests were so good my teachers moved me up!”
“What’s so great about that?” my father replied. “Why didn’t you skip the whole grade?”
“I don’t know, Daddy. I just thought . . .”
“Next time skip the whole grade.”
Closing the subject, he asked for my mother. All I wanted was a little approbation. Instead I slinked to my bedroom crushed, never to mention it to him again.
When my father came home that fall we were all much more relaxed. The stress of remodeling behind us, we were relieved to finally move into our new home, a one-story, ten-room, seven-bath white ranch house with a pool, sitting right at the tip of Bayshore Drive, a plush subdivision in Newport. Although the front of our house could only be approached through a gated, guarded entrance, it was far less private than the hilltop house in Encino. Even in 1965, Newport waterfront property was at a premium and homes were jammed shoulder to shoulder on narrow plots of land. Despite the loss of privacy, my father loved our new house, especially our new patio. Built on a jutting point, it afforded a vast, spectacular view of Balboa Island, Lido Island, and foremost, the bay, with its channels of green and blue and hazel waters. Every chance he could, my dad sat outside and inhaled his sea-kissed surroundings. He felt so comfortable out in our yard, he remained unfazed even when the Balboa Island ferry cruised by, affording its shutter-happy tourists an intimate view of John Wayne.
My father seemed satisfied with his new life, but my own was about to radically change. Upon my dad’s return from Rome, word spread that John Wayne had purchased a home in Newport. After that, seemingly overnight, going to school became catastrophic. In the halls, in class, at recess, my schoolmates now constantly watched me. The rare times I looked anyone in the eye, I saw envy, resentment, suspicion. Most of my new classmates had lived in Newport all their lives and grown up with one another. I was the stranger. Not only the stranger, but “John Wayne’s daughter,” obliterating any chance I might have had of hanging back and gradually shedding my status as an outsider. I felt wildly conspicuous. The more my peers stared and pointed and sneered, the more drastically I turned inward. “The only way for people to think you’re a jerk,” my father had trained me, “is for you to open your mouth.” Avoiding conversations for fear of being scorned, I was quickly perceived and dismissed as a snob. It took weeks before anyone but a teacher spoke directly to me. Meanwhile, the whispers grew louder and more derisive, burning my ears and making me feel like a freak.
“There she is. John Wayne’s daughter. She’s such a bitch.”
“Look at her nose, it’s stuck in the air.”
“She doesn’t talk to anyone.”
“Who does she think she is?”
Before very long, I found myself frequently blurting “I’m sorry” to my parents and my brother, Ethan, at inappropriate times when I’d done nothing wrong. Even my voice changed, from one with at least a ring of self-assurance to one conveying anguished self-doubt. I was nine years old, and I hated the timid young girl I was becoming. I knew that I should be tougher. I wanted to be. But my coddled past had left me soft at the edges.
I finally turned to my mother. But I didn’t reveal the extent of my alienation. “Mom,” I said in my tiny apologetic voice, “I’m shy now at school. I feel real shy with the other kids.”
My mother said, “Ah! You’re not shy! Don’t ever say that again!”
That was that. If my mother did not want to listen, I had nowhere to go with my feelings. My father was out of the question: I never felt my faults were anything he and I could discuss. My father never perceived me as scared or weak, as a little girl with any emotional problems. And I felt I must live up to his notion of who I was.
So I kept my pain and fear inside, secretly detesting my new environment. For as long as I could recall, I’d always understood that my father was special. But only in the fish tank of Newport Beach did I comprehend the depth of his superstardom. Not only the children at Carden Hall, but the teachers, the parents, the entire community knew of my father’s presence. Instead of cancer destroying his career and his image, it amplified them. When my father seemingly “licked the Big C” he acquired mythic dimensions. As my father’s stardom advanced, it eclipsed my entire identity. Thinking about it now, I must have resented him for it, even at nine years old, and yet I recall blaming everyone else but him until my sophomore year in high school. Perhaps resenting my father was scary to me, in the face of everyone else’s adoration. Perhaps I felt guilty for feeling it. So I hid it even from myself.
That first year in Newport, even my childhood dream betrayed me. Yes, the Bayshore complex teemed with children, but most were older than I, and even more affluent and noninclusive than the younger kids at my private school. The beach just behind our new house was the most threatening place of all, with its clusters of rich older teenagers. They never said a word to me, but I told myself they despised me. They all despise me, I thought.
One day after school, a short, olive-skinned girl approached me on one of the pathways running through Bayshore. Eyes fixed straight ahead I planned on rushing right by her.
“Hi,” she said, “I’m Debbie.”
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.