January 10, 1979, my father entered UCLA Medical Center, located on the college campus in Westwood. The smokescreen was already erected: since he was in fine physical shape, since he had no immediate obligations, John Wayne decided this was the perfect time to treat a chronic gall bladder problem.
After two days of tests the doctors operated, strongly supposing they’d locate the cancer once they cut inside the inner stomach. For three hours we waited without a word in our ninth-floor room at UCLA. It was almost noon when the doctor appeared. “I want the Wayne family,” he said, “just the Wayne family, please.”
No, I thought, it can’t be. My father is not dead. Through the haze in my brain I heard someone say, “What is it? What is it?”
The doctor, his face a hard blank slate, did not reply, only gestured to the door, and I felt my hostility rising. Going in, my father had been so weak . . . it was such a grueling delicate operation . . . just say it, damn it. Tell us if he has cancer. Tell us if he survived.
By the time the doctor led us out of the waiting room, down the corridor, into my father’s private room, I had convinced myself the dreaded moment had come. My father’s death. We had not even said goodbye.
“Well,” said the brilliant, icy physician, “our suspicions were correct. Mr. Wayne does have a carcinoma. We have no option but to remove the entire stomach . . .”
After that the doctor said a few more words, but all I heard was murmuring. My father had cancer. He would learn he lost his stomach when he woke up. He’d given the doctors that right, but that would not blunt his horror.
That dreary afternoon the hours lagged on and on and carried us numbly into the night. While his stomach was removed, and a substitute stomach fashioned from his intestines, my father remained in surgery for another six hours. Meanwhile, our phony gall bladder story completely backfired. First told that John Wayne’s operation was purely routine, somehow that night the press learned my father was still in surgery. As print and electronic media inundated UCLA, two colossal tabloid idiots even tried photographing my dad while he lay on the operating table. Somehow, they bypassed security and donned a pair of white lab coats. Hiding their camera, they tried sneaking up to the operating chamber. They were detected before they got in, but we were all furious. How recklessly perverse could the supermarket press get?
Nine hours after they took my father in, nine hours, his doctor resurfaced. They’d excised all the cancer they found, but could not confirm that they’d spotted it all. They would have to continue the biopsies. For now, though, my father was in “satisfactory condition.”
Even in my agony, I felt it was a beginning.
I didn’t know it was also a finish in some way for me. Because from that conversation on, until my father died five months later, my direct contact with his doctors at UCLA was practically nonexistent. Every finding they made, they reported only to Michael Wayne, my forty-five-year-old half brother. Evidently, he and the doctors had forged a private agreement: they’d talk to him, and he’d inform the other six children. I knew we were a large and unwieldy group, and that doctors are busy people. But our Boston group was big, too, and the Mass General doctors were also stretched thin. At this pressing stage of my father’s life, I wanted to hear about his cancer, his good turns as well as bad, from experts and not secondhand. Though the process burned me up, for many weeks I stifled myself and said nothing. At twenty-three years old, I was still sufficiently passive, still intimidated enough by my father’s oldest son, Michael, to outwardly accept what inwardly enraged me.
In future weeks, taking shifts by our father’s bedside, we all became punchy and exhausted. As the inexorability of his death dangled above us, instead of dealing with our stress, fear, and grief in even a semiopen, seminurturing way, the doctors and Michael kept meeting privately, the flow of information grew more and more muddled, and the tension between us mounted. From what I’ve learned since, we were a classic example of how families should not deal with cancer.
I should have expected to hear it this way, but I wasn’t prepared when I did. Three days after the operation, while driving back to UCLA, I jabbed a button on my dashboard and a man on all-news radio detailed the local stories. He said an announcement was issued that morning by a UCLA Medical Center spokesman: “More cancer has been found in actor John Wayne. Lab tests show the cancer has metastasized into his gastric lymph nodes.”
My long deep breaths didn’t help. I had to clench the wheel to remain inside my lane. Metastasized is the bleakest word in the medical language of cancer. It meant my father’s had spread; his surgeons had not found it all. Of course it was nobody’s fault, but hearing it like this—in my car, on the radio, a report on my dad segueing into stocks, weather, and traffic—filled me at first with murderous indignation. They could not tell the whole family, first, before they went public? And who were “they” anyway? Who exactly was making these choices?
By a mile or so later my brain stopped screaming. My thoughts turned back to my father, what this new development meant to him. With radiation or chemotherapy, lymphatic cancer sometimes goes into remission. But far more often lymphatic cancer is fatal.
I drifted through traffic crying.