It was a tangled evolution, coming in fits and starts. But my father was learning to let go.
The first breakthrough came when I graduated high school. By my junior year, I had quit smoking pot completely. It was fairly easy to do since I’d never enjoyed its effects in the first place, and having been scared to death by those two policemen tearing apart the older’s boy van—looking for drugs—the night I spent several hours in jail. I still knew plenty of kids who did drugs, but I stopped hanging around them, and became more involved with my school work. By my junior year I had done some maturing, and upon my graduation, my father, reassured by my grades my last two years, made no strident fuss when I said I wanted to work for a year before enrolling at USC. That March I turned eighteen and he allowed me to spend my birthday at home, in Newport, with friends, even though he was off on location. “You’re no longer a baby,” said the note my father sent from Seattle with a pungent bouquet of flowers. “You’ve flown the coop. Love, Dad.”
I decided to test his words that summer. He asked me to fly to London, where he was filming Brannigan, and I said I would love to, but first could I see parts of Europe, with Patrick Kelly, Debbie, and her boyfriend? The first surprise came when my father said yes; the next when the four of us joined him in London, and he didn’t say an embarrassing word about our sleeping arrangements the past two weeks. In London he did put up the boys in separate hotels, but then he picked up their tab, which the guys had planned on paying. It meant a great deal to me, unsure as I was about his feelings toward Patrick Kelly. An older boy, with long hair, Patrick never went out of his way to endear himself to my dad, remaining courteous but cool. But throughout our stay my father was warm and relaxed and gracious. Just who was doing the growing up here?
During this time my mother arrived in London, in what I presumed to be a final attempt to reconstruct their marriage. The week before leaving Newport, she’d telephoned London seeking my father and been told he was spending the weekend in Ireland—with Pat Stacy, his secretary. My mom was in London for only a couple days before she and my father fought. My mother left in a rage, certain her husband had started romancing his thirty-two-year-old secretary.
I don’t know if that was true, but I never saw Pat Stacy as any threat to the possibility of my parents reconciling. Born in Louisiana, Pat was a spiky-haired brunette with dark brown eyes and a cute petite figure. She’d been hired by my father’s secretary, Mary St. John, to be groomed as Mary’s successor when she retired. I liked Pat. Though at first I saw she was starstruck by my dad—everyone saw, since Pat made it impossible not to—I sensed as time went on that she honestly cared for him. While he was alive, I never felt Pat was out to exploit my dad.
About four years after he died I had second thoughts. Pat then had the gumption to write a book about herself and my father, glamorizing, romanticizing, hyperbolizing their “love affair.” Among other fanciful things, Pat said my father made no secret of his affection for her in front of myself and the other children. In truth, he was standoffish toward Pat when I was around. When they were alone, I’m sure he felt grateful for her company. With him and my mother estranged, she was a feminine soul when he needed one. And although my father groused when the tabloids got wind of their “romance,” blaming Pat for talking too much and too freely, he probably enjoyed it. An aging Hollywood star with a younger woman—it was good for his image. Despite his physical problems at that stage of his life, perhaps my father and Pat even made love on occasion.
But was he in love with Pat Stacy? And did they have the gushy romance Pat depicted in her book?
I don’t think so. Had my father felt about Pat the way she described, I think he would have married her. As Michael Wayne used to say, “John Wayne is the marrying kind,” and that was true: whether with Josephine, or Chata, or my mother, my dad was never loathe to admit when he was in love, and never shy about either divorce or marriage. Yet he never married Pat, even though my mother offered him a divorce. He never invited Pat to move in with him. Instead, to her annoyance, even after he moved her office into the house on Bayshores, where Pat did secretarial work by day, my father still rented a separate house for Pat to live in. That wasn’t his style when he was in love.
Had Pat not written that book, I’d have never mentioned any of this, but the book seemed so far removed from the truth I felt that I should.
My freshman year at USC I shared off-campus housing with Debbie, but neither one of us was equipped to live on our own. Our small apartment was littered with filthy dishes and soiled clothes. Rather than simply cleaning up, Debbie and I took out our bad moods on each other. In the first significant crisis of our friendship, I responded typically: instead of discussing it, addressing the real problem—our parents had spoiled us rotten when we were kids—I ate every night to dull my depression.
One weekend at Bayshores, my father noted my weight gain. He called me “fat” in front of his card-playing cronies, but he didn’t stop there. “You’re so fat!” he went on, with what sounded to me like glee. “Aissa, you’ve gotta do something about it! Look how you fat you are! How could you do that to yourself?”
Was this his idea of motivation?
They hadn’t been drinking; he couldn’t blame that.
Was he waiting for me to cry?
I rushed from the room silently cursing him. Hating him. I hated him for the rest of that day, refusing to answer my phone despite knowing who it was. What could his words do? They couldn’t change the humiliation I felt. They couldn’t change the past.
When I finally picked up the phone, I went right to it.
“Dad. You cannot talk to me like that. You made a fool out of me in front of all your friends. How could you do that to me?”
He was apologetic, giving me all that ancient crap about how much he loved me, how much I mattered. Please, could I just forgive him?
Forgive him? To break the chain, to get him to see past himself and look at who you were, you couldn’t forgive him. Why had it taken me so long to understand that?
“Dad!” I cut him off, surprising myself. “Don’t ever talk like that to me. I’m serious.”
“I won’t,” my father said, after a long pregnant pause. “I swear it, Aissa, I won’t.”
It was a start.
Back in the sixties my father was churning out hits, every studio sought him, and his family’s spending was a minor concern. But by the mid-seventies, money for my father approached an obsession. Like many Depression-shaped children made good, in his wallet he still carried thick wads of big bills. He still owned a home and a condominium, lucrative livestock and ranch land in southern Arizona, and had part ownership of several other financial interests. Still, this seemingly gave him no peace. Increasingly he fretted over the 1RS, the huge expense of owning a boat, his exorbitant medical insurance, his ebbing cash flow, how severely he’d been mismanaged in the years before turning to Michael Wayne to run his financial affairs. After starting to do commercials for Datril and Great Western Savings, he told me one of his friends asked him why John Wayne would go on TV and peddle aspirin.
“The truth is, Aissa,” he said, “I’m doing it for the money. I’m not broke or anything like that, but I’ve spent too much, and trusted too many people. If Michael had been old enough to manage my money from the start, I’d never have had these problems. You’ve gotta find something you can fall back on, Aissa. If I get sick, I don’t know what will happen to you kids. It’s not what you think it is, Aissa.”
My second year at USC I was put on an allowance of $200 a month. Though barely getting by, I was reluctant to ask for more. For two reasons: I was striving for my independence, and by then, asking my dad for extra cash was to court a three-minute discourse on frugality. One night that semester, I walked into his house and he handed me an already-opened envelope. My father said, “Here, it’s a three-hundred-dollar dentist bill. Pay it. You’re making your choices now. Start paying your own bills.”
Too childlike to understand he was trying to teach me responsibility, I actually felt unloved. “I can’t believe it,” I whined to Debbie. “I’m still in school and my father is making me pay my own bills.”
That summer I tagged along with my mom when she began real estate school. I quickly discovered I not only understood them, I was fascinated by how these transactions worked. As home values went rocketing, knowing that agents across Orange County were getting rich didn’t hurt either. Seeking financial freedom, I made a choice, as my father had fifty years before, to drop out of college and enter the work force. The dilemma was, how do I break it to him?
I didn’t, not yet. I waited instead until I finished the real estate course and passed the exam and knew I’d be granted my license. I didn’t inform my dad of my fait accompli until just two weeks before USC fall classes.
He was offended: I’d taken the course on the sly. “If you love me,” he’d always say, “then I’m not the last to know. If you love me you’ll tell me things first.”
He was displeased: his daughter would not earn her college degree.
But then he quieted down and looked me dead in the eye and saw something new there—determination. He spoke the basic words I waited a long time to hear.
“You started something,” he said, “and you saw it through. Now you have something that’s yours. I wish you all the success in the world. I’ve never been prouder of you.”
After that, I stopped by his house every day, to tell him about new listings, new escrows, a newly learned trick of the trade. “Aissa,” he said one early morning, “say hello, how are you.”
“What?”
“Say hello, how are you.”
“Hello, how are you?” I said in a girlish voice.
“No, no, no,” he corrected. “If you’re going to sell real estate, you can’t talk like that anymore, that voice. You have to say, ‘Hello! How are you?’ You have to be a businesswoman now.”
We went back and forth—”Hello! How are you?”—but it didn’t strike me until I was alone that night. With my friends and my clients, I did speak assertively. Only my father could still make me feel ten years old.
That I was twenty and selling real estate did not make me unique in 1970s Newport Beach. That my father was John Wayne did. No longer embarrassed about my last name, and now having my own mortgage to pay, I put my name to good use, earning enough that first year to purchase a one-bedroom home in nearby Costa Mesa. My father, the expert on everything, would often drive over and tell me where to position my sofa, the value of planting perennials—except now his lectures were cherished. I felt so proud that he liked my new little house.
One night that summer we barbecued outside, just he and I in the Bayshores backyard. It was a warm and gently breezy Pacific night, and as we chatted and ate and admired the copper sky, he shifted his gaze from the afterglow to me.
“I know that you really love me,” he said. “I know you’ve always loved me, Aissa.”
All my words went away. I couldn’t speak, but knew I didn’t have to. What I felt was filling my eyes.
After that perfect night, in that special summer, when my father stopped demanding my love, most of my fear of him dissolved. For the last five years of his life, when I told my father “I love you,” I did not mean, “See, Dad, I’m bucking you up again.” When he said he loved me, he did not seem to mean, “Now you must tell me back, and tell me again and again, because today I am feeling weak.” I still lament that it took so long, that we both played so fast and loose with our time together in life, and yet when my father died, our relationship was closer, stronger, less panicked than I’d ever dreamt it could be. I think he approved of me when he left, and saw without my words how much his love meant. I’ll always have certain regrets, but our resolution has left me feeling blessed.