In the new winter of 1976, I flew to Nevada to visit my dad, who was making The Shootist with Jimmy Stewart, Lauren Bacall, and Ronnie Howard. In light of his health, I was nearly sure it would be his final movie.
As much as he admired Jimmy Stewart and Lauren Bacall, I think my father enjoyed Ronnie Howard most of all. He always said Ronnie was the most talented young actor he’d ever worked with, a pretty big compliment coming from a man whose career spanned fifty years. Until very near his death, my father clung to the dream of making a script called Candy’s Man. Whenever he spoke of it, he always said he wanted to make it with Ronnie Howard.
His affection for his costars notwithstanding, making The Shootist was a gloomy experience. Prior to filming my father contracted pneumonia, and was shorter of breath than I’d seen him in many years. Several mornings before he could start work, we had to lay him face down across a table, where a physical therapist pounded my father’s back to try and dislodge the fluid clogging his lung.
The Shootist, I felt, was a solid picture, richer and more compelling than anything my father had done since True Grit. It felt just right, my dad going out with a Western.
Still, when the film was complete I found I could barely watch it. John Bernard Books, his character, is a legendary gunfighter coming to terms with his death. I had watched my father die in seven other movies. But he always died for a cause, usually noble. In this film he was dying of cancer, and that was extremely unnerving. If not quite a family curse, for us the spectre of cancer had never entirely faded. By the time of The Shootist, the disease had killed my Uncle Bob, and I’d lived ever since with the fear that cancer would come again for my dad. Though his cancer would not be diagnosed for two more years, when he made The Shootist I think my father had similar apprehensions. When The Shootist came out, what I saw on-screen in my father’s eyes did not seem to be acting. The loneliness there looked real.
From The Shootist on, he was almost continuously sick. By March 1978, even his voice was failing, a condition my father hated even more than his wheezing or dizziness; without his voice he could not continue working. For a while he tried hiding it, refusing interviews with press, speaking only to those who were not in the business of making movies. When he finally saw a doctor, a defective valve was discovered inside his heart. Evidently due to all his violent coughing, he’d ripped a “string” in his mitral valve, which controls the flow of blood between the left atrium and and the left ventricle of the heart. The cardiologist said this was actually decent news: rather than a generally failing heart, my father had a single, isolated, correctible flaw. A successful operation, they said, could return his heart to full strength.
But, my father was not a young or healthy man. Seventy years old, his weight had ballooned to the range of 250. The doctors feared he might not be well enough to survive the trauma of open-heart surgery, and my father was also reluctant, albeit for typically bullheaded reasons. He was determined to star in Candy’s Man, and to fulfill his commercial obligation to Great Western Savings. For the time, in the hope of getting by despite his damaged valve, he would only agree to take medication.
That hope was ruined one night in March 1978, when I stepped outside my old bedroom. In the same hall he once paced after fights with my mom, my father stood motionless, his sturdy head bowed.
“I’m so dizzy,” he said. “Aissa, I don’t know what is happening to me.”
An angiogram, a heart X ray projecting a clear picture of the cardiac area, provided the answer. His mitral valve must be replaced, and it must be done promptly. On March 29, 1978, accompanied by my father, Michael and Patrick Wayne, and Pat Stacy, I flew to Boston, where specialists at Massachusetts General Hospital would replace my father’s valve with one from the heart of a pig.
On the private plane ride east my father mostly napped. When he awoke, there were plenty of oinking and pig jokes. “Make sure I don’t have a curly tail when they bring me out of surgery,” my father cracked. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll still be able to oink with the best of them.” Always considered “the serious one,” I could never see the black humor in sickness the way my father and his older kids could. I never especially liked that about myself. But that’s who I was, and I felt too fearful now to even feign laughter.
Upon first inspection, the Eastern hospital only deepened the chill I’d felt from the instant I’d heard my father’s heart was not right. Used to the bright, pastel, wall-papered hospitals of Southern California, I was anxious about the dismal brown corridors and faded tile floors of Massachusetts General. My father’s spartan room had an iron bed, a chair, a nightstand, a closet, and no air conditioning. At first I felt horrendously depressed: this is a place where people come to die.
It was, in fact, a marvelous place, where wonderful doctors help people keep living. Unlike UCLA, which had all the proper cosmetics, and where my father’s doctors were cold and obtuse, his Boston doctors were direct, friendly and patient. Contrary to UCLA, where, later, no one ever said, This is how cancer works, this is where it is now in your dad, this is where we hope it doesn’t spread, the Boston doctors detailed every stage of the coming ordeal. Using the valve of a pig, they explained, sounded peculiar but was widely considered the safest and most efficient procedure. The critical juncture would come about ninety minutes into the three-hour operation. My father’s heart would then be removed from his chest and placed on a pump while the doctors switched valves. When his heart came back off the pump, it was crucial that it resume beating. Due to my father’s age and chronic bronchitis, the risk factor was roughly 10 percent. Dr. Roman DeSanctis, the serene, devoted lung specialist, and Dr. Mortimer Buckley, the tall, elegant heart surgeon, said we had every reason to be optimistic.
The night before surgery, DeSanctis and Buckley allowed my father to join us for dinner. By then all my brothers and sisters and a few of my father’s close friends had flown east. My mother stayed in Newport, waiting for my phone calls. By that point in their lives, both she and my dad had agreed he was too physically weak to withstand the emotional strain of even trying to get back together. The rest of us met in a private room at Maison Robert, a restaurant in old Boston, taking our seats as my father assumed his place at the head of the table. To no one’s surprise he ordered a drink. When we protested he argued, until one of my brothers left the room to phone the doctors. The verdict returned—he could have one drink but no more—my father ordered the “largest martini your bartender can make. That’s one drink, isn’t it?” There was a lot of clearing of throats but nobody spoke. With this crowd the Duke was still the boss.
The waiter brought it out in a wine glass. Swishing around his martini, my father rose and toasted his family and friends. “To the last supper,” he said, and then he winked. He was referring to the churchlike decor of the room, its stained glass windows and heavy wooden tables. But of course we all saw through him. As it had all of ours, my father’s death had been crossing his mind.
The next morning, exactly as promised, Dr. DeSanctis entered our crowded room about ninety minutes into my father’s surgery. DeSanctis entered holding his thumb straight up, sparing us that agonizing instant when families must try and decipher their doctor’s vacant expression. “The heart came off the pump perfectly,” DeSanctis said. “Everything’s going fine. Your father should be fine.” I ran to a phone and called my mother in California, grinning so broadly I looked like another girl. My rock of a dad was alive. He’d defeated open-heart surgery, just as so many years ago he’d vanquished cancer.
Despite being forewarned by Dr. DeSanctis, I was humbled and shaken when I saw my dad that afternoon. Wired up, strapped down, a respiratory tube running gruesomely into his swollen throat, he looked bleached and battered, and the tubing kept him from speaking although he was awake. I wanted to squeeze him, but did not even touch him for fear of touching too hard.