Was I like the rest of his fans, mesmerized by his image? Or was my father truly larger than life? He was, in fact, an incredible man. Before we left Boston, Dr. DeSanctis told my dad he could live another fifteen years with his new, improved heart. If my father did not believe, he wasn’t showing it. Back only weeks in Newport, he purchased several pairs of new cotton sweat clothes and a new cushy pair of gleaming white gym shoes. Every morning at six, he walked a slow one-mile lap around the complex at Bayshores. A few mornings a week I dragged myself out of bed and strolled the one mile with him, my dad telling me stories, saying hello to fellow habitual walkers, noting changes in his neighbor’s familiar homes.
“See those begonias,” he’d say to me. “See how much they’ve perked up the front of that house?”
I enjoyed those lazy walks, and for all my concern I had to confess he looked good, fantastic really, for a seventy-year-old guy who’d just endured open-heart surgery. Having shed thirty pounds he didn’t want or need, his stamina returned, his dizzy spells passed, and even his voice returned to normal.
Why then was my father so irate?
And he was irate. No sooner would we conclude our morning walks than he would commence attacking “those dirty bastards.” In the past, when he railed at the liberal press and politicians, I never felt too threatened, not even those two or three times he hurled objects through our TV sets. As long as he fumed at The Washington Post or Ted Kennedy, the heat was off of us and on someone else.
But this winter his tirades gave me the jitters. Who “those dirty bastards” were was not always clear, and often my father seemed mad at the “whole damn country.” He was outraged at the talk of gun control, since criminals could still obtain firearms while law-abiding citizens went unprotected. He was sick about and appalled by Jim Jones and the mass death in Guyana. Most of all, he was disenchanted with the Carter administration. My father liked Jimmy Carter personally. Although my dad supported his old friend, Ronald Reagan, in 1976, when Carter won the election my father accepted his invitation to appear at the White House inaugural. In 1977, he even backed Carter on the Panama Canal, helping to push the new treaty through Congress. Through his relationship with Tony Arias, my godfather and his business partner before Mr. Arias’s fatal plane crash, my father knew the Panamanians well. He said Panama had “sided with us in every international emergency since its existence. We made a commitment to Panama, and we must live up to it.” This outraged my father’s conservative fans, and put him at odds with Ronald Reagan, but my father stood firm. For all his blustery ways, he always said he prided himself on looking at issues one by one.
By 1978, though, despite that he’d just been allied with Carter one year ago, my father was calling him an “uninspiring leader, an ineffectual president.” As long as Carter remained in the White House, my father predicted that winter, Americans would continue losing their confidence, our economy would stay in its tailspin, and this country would be emasculated even more as a world power. “The United States is losing its balls and its spirit,” my father said. “It’s gotten so crappy here, I can’t stand to see it.”
One afternoon at his house, my father said he was leaving. Speaking quietly, but with conviction, he told me he was moving to Mexico.
“I have no reason to stay here. Your mother and I are busted up. The Mexican people love me, and I’m damn near about to give up on the USA. I’ll get a house, I’ll get a smaller boat. You can come down and stay with me. All the children can. There’s nothing quite like Baja.”
Initially I simply didn’t believe him. I knew he adored it down there, both the countryside and the Mexican people, especially Latin women. I knew he was frustrated and angry with the illnesses that plagued him for nearly three years. I also knew my father defied easy labeling, was not the two-dimensional man the myth machine had long made him out to be (often with his cooperation). However brash, a move to Mexico wasn’t beyond my dad.
And I still didn’t believe him.
I was sure he’d continue regaining his health, feel more positive toward his own self, and reembrace the country I knew he still fervently loved beneath his cynical words.
Later, first slowly and then in a flood, I started developing doubt. He certainly appeared serious. In preparation for the move, he began taking Spanish lessons, for the first time in his life, although all three of his wives had been Latin. Three times weekly, his tutor drove to the house and they’d huddle at the small table in the kitchen where Fausto ate his meals. I’d go over and see him, my father playing student, and I’d roll my eyes and he’d chuckle. For once, I thought with some pleasure, he cannot overshadow me. With a Peruvian mother and two Peruvian maids, Fd spoken Spanish fluently for years. My father sounded like . . . John Wayne speaking Spanish.
Though we never discussed potential reverberations, surely he knew they’d be great. U.S. News and World Report once wrote that John Wayne symbolized “the virtues and strengths that Americans like to believe are typical of their country.” It’s one thing for an elderly icon to criticize his troubled country. But had my father really become an expatriate—and told the world why—the shock waves might have been global.
For six months my father dutifully took his lessons, insisting that after the Oscars, after making Candy’s Man, he was packing his rods and reels and heading south for Baja’s rugged grandeur. Neither one of us ever found out if he’d back up his words. Cancer robbed my father’s bittersweet dream.