In 1969, the Waynes were anything but immune to the confusing forces tearing apart American parents and children.
To complicate matters, that was the year I entered a public high school. By then, nearly all the children I knew had scratched the surface of self-sufficiency. They had been allowed to make their own errors, to see that to struggle or fail does not mean to be worthless, to form their own opinions, and to assume some responsibility for their own lives. As a catered-to Hollywood princess, entirely bypassing many of the normal, bruising-but-essential rites of growing up, I had no such street smarts. It didn’t help that I was the youngest girl in my freshman class—having skipped lower fifth grade and started kindergarten early—and far younger than that in terms of maturity. Though I turned thirteen in 1969, I was as sheltered, naïve, and impressionable as if I were eight years old.
The population at Newport Harbor High, the oldest high school in town, was about ten times the size of my private elementary school, and countless times more lawless. Still perceiving me as his unprecocious angel, my father had no inkling what type of high school parties I went to. To this day Newport Beach is a cocktail-minded town, and there was reckless, mindless, damn-the-repercussions drinking among my classmates. While Newport adults were off skiing the Alps, Newport offspring flung open their parents’ beveled glass doors to frenzied, keg-swilling rich kids who gleefully trashed the decors created by exorbitant interior designers. There were drugs at my new school, too. Newport Harbor High, if not exactly a center of social upheaval, did not go unstirred by the fumes of the ’60s. Most of our football players smoked pot, as did our apple-cheeked cheerleaders. Our debutante girls popped diet pills as if they were M&Ms, and our honors students had visions on LSD. At Newport Harbor, like so many high schools back then, it was difficult discerning who belonged to what clique. Eventually, my mistake would be trying to be liked by all of them.
Although my corruption was still months off, the stage was set by my freshman troubles. By the time I’d graduated eighth grade, my schoolmates and I had at least become acquainted. With my imposing last name, I still felt apart, but I no longer felt like an alien. At Newport Harbor, the pointing, the whispering, the staring started anew. It had taken me three years to replenish my fickle self-confidence. In just several weeks of high school I lost much of it again.
Feeling totally lost in a large public school, for the first time in my life I earned poor grades. For all their strict ways, my private school teachers had deeply believed in the value of education. Some teachers at our public high school did too, but others all but admitted they saw themselves as underpaid baby-sitters. Unfamiliar with all this liberty, I became lazy, waiting for instruction that never came.
Stunned by my first set of tests, I was horrified by my grades. Whenever I brought home report cards in grade school, my father was stern, formal, inscrutable. A man whose drive to excel was nearly pathological, my dad expected straight A’s and all my life I mostly made sure I received them. I knew my B’s would be unsatisfactory, my Cs grounds for angry chastisement. This time I’d gotten a couple of D’s, and felt sure the man who could blow other actors off the screen would blow sky high at me.
To my amazement, my father was sympathetic. He said he understood how different private and public schools were, and that he was sure I would improve the next time. Then came the caveat: “You better,” he threatened.
On top of my problems in class, I gained ten pounds by the end of my second semester. On my father’s side of our family we all have my dad’s legs, and mine grew even thicker as I discovered fast-food lunches of tacos and chips and burgers and fries. Ten pounds is a traumatic one-year weight gain for any girl of thirteen, and to me it felt disastrous. My mother, like many women back when I was a child, taught me that being a perfect women meant being beautifully thin.
I understand my mother’s compulsion with looks. Women of her generation were more brainwashed than those of today; she also had no career, and she came to this country without much education. She was also married to John Wayne, who worked with scores of maturely beautiful women and lush ingenues. As a young girl, I never understood how my mother controlled her jealousies. I was only about four years old when my parents took me with them to a party thrown by the Foreign Press Association. All night long, a pretty, sad-eyed platinum blonde hung all over my father. I was more curious than resentful, until one of the woman’s shoulder straps floated off her alabaster shoulder. Her bosom was exposed! Feeling this could not go unreported, I pulled my mother toward a corner. “Mom, you know that pretty blonde who’s holding Dad’s arm? She has no brassiere on!”
My mother glanced just for an instant. “That’s Marilyn Monroe, honey,” she said evenly. “She’s always been very fond of your daddy.”
My father never worked with Miss Monroe, but I would see his old love scenes on TV, or his new ones when we screened movies at home, and wonder how my mom felt about them. One time I asked her. “Mom, how can you stand to watch him in all those love scenes, with all those gorgeous women?”
“Your father is not a flirt,” she said. “He makes me feel like I’m the only one.”
My mother was right. By nature, my father was not flirtatious, and back then he certainly kept his focus on my mom. Still, I wonder now if she was entirely in touch with how she felt. I wonder if she believed the best revenge was looking good, so she buried her real feelings and overcompensated in some other way—as we Waynes were all so prone to. Looking back, I realize how much stress my mother placed on womanly beauty, how extremely conscious she was of her fetching appearance, and how disproportionate was the time she spent maintaining it. One wrinkle, one pound, one false eyelash out of place, and my mother ingested even less calories, played more tennis, and spent even more narcissistic hours a day her in front of her lighted mirror inside her private dressing room. Subsequently, her impressionable young daughter bought hard into a misguided notion: women and girls were only as valuable as their surface. “There is nothing more important than being beautiful,” my mother told me.
Of course she was not alone in sending this message. I also received it from Madison Avenue, and to some extent from my dad. He always emphasized grades, and that I should be decent to others, and to give people second chances, and for all of that I am thankful. But he also told me not to voice my opinions, and only sporadically praised me for something I’d said or done, while frequently commending my appearance. “You’re the prettiest girl in the world,” he said in just those words, and when he did, he was not the same man who stood stiffly over my report cards, giving me only grudging respect for studying hard and bringing home A’s. Times when I looked especially nice, my father seemed especially proud, loving, sanguine. I can see now how my values became distorted. My self-image was too closely bound with my looks, and too dependent on other people’s approval. Like many young girls, I had set myself up, and been set up by others, to lose my self-esteem. And lose it I did, at times to the point of self-loathing, when I entered a high school in Newport glutted with beauties, gained ten pounds in one year, saw the disapproval in my mother’s eyes, and the most important man in my life stopped telling me I was pretty.
It wasn’t bad enough that so many girls at my Newport Beach high school were blond, thin, nubile, and tan. But my own mother emerged as a greater beauty in her forties than she’d ever been before. Her entire body hardened from ritual tennis, and her legs, already shapely, got even sexier with more definition. A more fully dimensional woman, but still relentless about staying trim, my mother made all too clear her dismay at her daughter’s budding plumpness. “You’re always eating lately. You’ve gained some weight, honey. I starve myself if I gain even one pound. All I eat is hard-boiled eggs—protein. I want you to read this diet book. You know that red outfit you want? I’ll bet you’d look good in it. I’ll buy it for you if you lose weight.”
She didn’t do it maliciously, but this didn’t assuage the hurt. I wanted to be petite, wanted to look smashing in a tennis dress, wanted all the rewards of beauty. But it wasn’t happening for me. I wasn’t my mother and never would be. Meanwhile, my father had not yet mentioned my burgeoning weight; he no longer spoke at all about my appearance. All that superficial praise I’d received as a child, almost always for my looks, returned to haunt me in adolescence. I don’t know how much I believe in epiphanies—I’m not sure life is that clear and well structured—but I distinctly remember my feelings the year I turned thirteen: I am not pretty; I’m fat. I am not smart in school; I’m stupid. I am not fun to be with; I’m too self-conscious. I am none of the things I thought I once was, none of the things the adults in my life once told me I was. My life has been a lie.
An oversensitive girl to begin with, my self-image plunged. During this time of cynicism and angst I was all raw nerves, reappraising not only myself, but nearly every dictum and every person, including my father. Surely all along he’d seen straight through my childhood “popularity.” Surely he knew it was all about him, John Wayne, and I was just one means to ingratiation. If my father had lied about why people liked me, or if he had only misjudged things, perhaps he had lied or been wrong about others and other things too.
Perhaps smoking marijuana did not “lead to heroin.”
Perhaps boys with long hair did not all look “ridiculous.”
Perhaps every liberal wasn’t “gutless,” and perhaps the Vietnam War was not such a worthy thing.
Maybe, I told myself as the ’60s boiled and screeched to their turbulent end, I had better start finding out for myself.