Something is wrong with me, Aissa. Something is really wrong.”
Three weeks after bidding the public farewell, my father keeled over next to his kitchen stove. The calendar said May 2, 1970, and that night we would rush him to not one, but two different hospitals. My dad never came home again.
We took him first to Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, where X rays revealed an intestinal blockage. His doctor at Hoag instructed us to drive him to UCLA, for an emergency surgery the following morning. My father’s pain was so severe he couldn’t sit up, so we folded down his station wagon’s back seat, spread out some blankets, and laid him gently back there. Ethan drove the wagon and Marisa and I followed him in my car. As we pulled into UCLA, I could not see the emergency entrance for all the camera equipment and bodies. In the short time since we’d left Hoag, someone had tipped off the press.
Mimicking Ethan’s U-turn, I sped behind him around the near corner, screeching to a stop at the hospital’s backside. Still bent over, my father came out of the wagon cursing. “That chickenshit nurse at Hoag, I know she was the one. How dare she degrade me like this. I know that son of a bitch called the press.”
After two guards snuck him in through a service entrance, he was admitted into his room. Thinking it might calm him down, we pressed on the TV. Platinum-haired Jerry Dunphy, a longtime local newsman whom my father counted a friend, was informing greater Los Angeles County that John Wayne had been rushed to UCLA for unknown reasons. In seconds my dad was on the phone to ABC, and five minutes after the newscast Dunphy returned the call.
“You bastard!” my father screamed. “I thought you were a friend! You put me on the news five minutes after I check in? Goddamn it, Jerry! Now I won’t have a moment’s peace.”
Sadly, my father was right, though not solely for the reasons he meant. Wednesday morning, surgeons removed a large part of his colon: new cancerous cells were found in the excised tissue. Further tests showed the cells had multiplied and spread throughout my father’s body. The radiation treatments hadn’t worked.
Once UCLA released its findings, it was bombarded by phone calls and visitors. Most were screened or turned away by Pat Stacy, on orders from Michael Wayne, who in turn had conferred with the doctors. I understood their reasoning: though all of his callers and visitors meant well, what little strength my father had left he needed to hoard to fight off the cancer. What I never understood was the rhyme or reason behind who did and who didn’t get in. Joe DeFranco, Barry Goldwater, James Bacon, all old friends of my father, were refused entry when they tried seeing him. Henry Fonda only said good-bye to my dad because he swore he would sit at the hospital all night, and even talk to the doctors if that’s what it took. Frank Sinatra, meanwhile, was deemed a suitable guest, despite that he and my father had never been close.
Although it was no real fault of his own, I found Mr. Sinatra’s visit especially upsetting. The day he arrived with his wife, my father wasn’t prepared yet to see them, so Barbara and Frank chatted with us in the waiting room next door. Mr. Sinatra was upbeat, and definitely “on.”
“Nice to meet ya,” he said. “How you doin’? You know, I haven’t seen your dad in a while.”
When told my father was ready, the Sinatras stepped next door into room 948. When they returned to our room a few minutes later, Sinatra the performer had been replaced by a shaken man with tears in his eyes.
“I am so sorry,” he said. “I had no idea your father was that sick. If there’s anything I can do . . .”
His shock and emotion were real, and that’s what frightened me. Having been near my father’s side day after day after day, his ravaged appearance no longer seemed peculiar. Mr. Sinatra’s reaction recalled a lingering fact I still preferred denying.
I suppose guilt is always a potent sensation, but perhaps never more than when someone we love faces death. I cannot say when my own guilt feelings ended, or if to this day they entirely have, yet I precisely recall their beginnings. After my father’s radiation failed, the doctors tried immunotherapy, a fairly new treatment in which chemicals were injected into his body in the hopes of stimulating his immune system. Waiting to hear the results of the treatment one morning, I thought Pat Stacy said the immunotherapy had slowed the advance of my father’s cancerous cells. With cancer, sometimes you feel like nothing is being done, that the cancer just keeps creeping. This was the best news I’d heard in several weeks. Brimming with new inspiration, I rushed into see my father. He looked like he’d just been dozing.
“Dad,” I said softly, “I’m glad you’re improving. I’m so glad you’re feeling a little bit better.”
His blue eyes opened slightly wider, and then he closed them and went back to sleep smiling.
That afternoon, Michael Wayne pulled me aside.
“Did you tell him he was getting better? Where do you get off giving him that information?”
“I heard it, from Pat. Isn’t he?”
“No! He’s not getting better. You shouldn’t have done that. You gave him false hope.”
Michael was right. And after that rotten day, almost everything I did felt in some way inadequate. By then I’d moved into the Westwood Marquis Hotel, a few blocks from UCLA, and was seeing my father every day. Nevertheless, if Pat Stacy spent a night on the couch in the waiting room on my father’s floor, I thought, Why can’t I be like her? She’s there and I’m in my hotel room. If I felt the urge to drive back home for one night, to briefly escape cancer wards and hotel rooms, the dejection and uncertainty ruling our lives, I also took this as proof that I was a shabby excuse for a daughter. I didn’t know how to behave when someone I loved was dying. In my father’s presence, I never knew what to confront and to avoid, what to feel and what to repress. Should I ever say the word cancer? Should I broach the chance of his death, family things he might wish me to do, when he had left them unmentioned? I understand now that many families dealing with cancer face similar problems, but in 1979 I did not. Mostly that final year I ate, and ate, and ate. While my father lost all interest in food for the first time in his life, I gained forty pounds. Since he couldn’t eat, I’d touch nothing in front of him, then gorge myself when I was alone. God, was I screwed up.
By early June, we were all staying in shifts at UCLA, and the strain was also telling on Michael. If someone was five minutes late for a shift, Michael would chew them out, especially hard if the person late was my brother Ethan. One day I began hating it all—hating my fat, guilt-ridden self, hating my controlling brother Michael, hating the doctors who told me nothing, hating the cancer destroying my dad. When I returned that afternoon from lunch, Michael said, “Where the hell have you been?” I went crazy, shouting and crying and running to the elevator and right out the hospital door. I sprinted through campus until I found a bench, oblivious to the students striding in every direction around me. Just as my mind turned to them—Why do they look so young and full of purpose while my father is dying? Michael appeared as if out of nowhere.
“Get away from me,” I said.
“Aissa.”
“Get away from me. I can’t take this anymore. I have to know what’s happening.”
“Look, I’m telling you everything. Nobody knows what’s going on.”
To an extent, I knew this was true. Even doctors can not predict cancer. But this anger had festered inside me ever since my father entered UCLA. All my life to that point, I had only heard Michael and my dad talk about money and business. I’d never once heard Michael ask my dad out to dinner, or to go to a ball game. Those final years in Newport Beach, we barely saw Michael at all. My father loved Michael Wayne and Michael loved him. But Michael knew it as well as I did: my father and I were always much closer, and even when things became strained during high school at least I was there. And yet now, after all those arms-length years, that was Michael’s father in there, and not only I, but all the other children came second.
“Why can’t we speak to the doctors?” I said.
Now Michael’s manner was soothing. “I know how you feel,” he said. “But there’s eight people involved. And doctors and reporters and everyone else. We have to stay organized. Let me handle this thing.”
“No! I demand to speak to the doctors!”
As Michael explained his side again I tuned him out, suddenly feeling so drowsy I felt I could nap right there on the bench. The summer sun felt mild and the manicured grass smelled freshly green. The campus was really a pretty place when you saw it from off that ninth floor. Just handle it all, big brother, I thought, feeling oddly drained. Go ahead and handle it all.