According to Michael Wayne’s plan, no outsiders could learn that our father had died yet.
To ensure his death not turn into a media sideshow, we were all told to conceal our grief, to pretend this was just another ordinary Friday. The facade went up even before we shuffled out of my father’s ninth-floor room. Michael had hired a security guard to sit at the door and fend off the press and visitors, so we cleaned up our tears and nonchalantly walked out by the guard one at a time, smiling, saying, “See you in fifteen minutes,” or “See you after lunch.” Most of us then returned to the Westwood Marquis, where we checked out in staggered shifts to allay any suspicions.
“My sister and I are going home for the weekend,” I told the clerk, squeezing back tears, feeling like a liar and a fool. “We’ll be back on Monday morning.”
At the time it felt bizarre, but looking back I can see the flawless symmetry. The same day my father the Hollywood star died, I was still performing, sterilizing and masking my real feelings, concerned only with how things appeared.
Days before the funeral, I received phone calls from several friends and relatives. Had I seen the morning paper? My father, a news story alleged, had died a Catholic. He was baptized by a priest, according to the report, while he lay dying at UCLA. Knowing my father, how he felt about religion, I couldn’t believe it.
I’d also been standing right there the alleged day. That morning, Michael Wayne said the Archbishop of Panama would be coming in to see our dad; there was no mention, to me, of any conversion. I knew my father had met the archbishop before, and that his relationship was warm with Panama’s Catholic church. But friendship is one thing, religious belief entirely another. I knew firsthand how my father felt about Catholicism. I was raised a Catholic, and my father took no interest at all, never once attending church with me and my mom. Our entire lives, he showed no inclination toward organized religion of any type.
“I don’t belong to any church,” my father said. “I believe in God and Jesus Christ, and I pray. If anything, I guess I’m a Presby-goddamn-terian.”
He said this with mischief in his voice, and it epitomized his offhanded feelings toward organized religion: more power to those who take it seriously, but I’m not one of them.
By the day the archbishop came to see him, my father was heavily drugged on intravenous morphine. He mostly drifted in and out of sleep, and even when awake not did appear coherent, but rather in some sort of dream state. When my father’s eyes opened that day, the priest began reciting prayers in Latin. Under the bedcovers, I saw my father slightly nodding his head.
Was he converting to Catholicism on his death bed by this small movement of his head?
In my opinion, absolutely not. I believe he was only acknowledging that a priest was in his presence, and that they were praying together. My father never said a word about wanting to convert, or wanting to be buried instead of cremated. Frankly, I think he was too drugged up to know a conversion was even being attempted. It may comfort certain people to believe John Wayne died a Catholic, but I was a witness and I don’t think so.
Remember, my father disliked funerals. Ward Bond’s in particular had been sorrowful and drawn out, dismal and punishing for those in attendance. For himself, my dad preferred a memorial reflecting his life and his spirit. He asked to be cremated, and his ashes strewn over the channel between Newport Beach and Catalina Island. He so treasured that stretch of sea, it gave him so much peace during his lifetime, he wanted it for his final resting place. Fiercely superstitious, my father also heard tales of human scratching inside of caskets. “I want to be cremated,” he said. “Just don’t put me in a box.” At their more sardonic moments, he and my mom used to joke that someone should slit their wrists after they “died.” That way they couldn’t be trapped alive.
After his ashes were scattered to sea, he wanted his family and friends to return to his Bayshores house for a lively Irish-style wake. “When I die,” he told my mother more than once, “I want you to have a big party, and I want everyone to get DRUNK! Let everyone eat and drink and talk and remember the good times.”
Unfortunately, he made no such provision in his will, and Michael Wayne made other arrangements. In the days after my father’s demise, national tribute poured in from statesmen and entertainers, many of whom my father considered his friends, but none were invited to his funeral. Most of his friends, in fact, Hollywood or otherwise, were not invited to pay their respects. This included Joe DeFranco, my father’s business associate and perhaps his closest friend at the time of his death.
Since everything was arranged in elaborate secrecy, even I wasn’t informed of the funeral’s time and setting until one day before. Only then did I learn that my father would not be cremated, but buried. He’d also receive no headstone, supposedly in the fear that his body could later be stolen by grave robbers. To keep things further obscured, the Catholic service would be held at 5:45 in the morning.
This whole thing stinks, I recall thinking. This is not the valedictory my father desired, or the one he remotely deserves. Let his old friends lavish him today with love and affection; allow them to miss him now, not just after he is gone; this is not the time to hoard him; this is when John Wayne should be shared; I hate it, all of it, and my father would hate it too.
All that, and still I mounted no protest. I told myself it was too late, there was no time, I was twenty-three years old and had never planned a funeral. Instead of even talking about it to Michael, I merely stood back and fumed, watching my father denied a fitting farewell. At that stage of my life, it was a classic Aissa Wayne nonreaction.
On June 15 I woke at four A.M., then drove half asleep to a Newport Beach church, where the same archbishop performed a Catholic service. The predawn gathering was small: the seven Wayne children, my mother, Pat Stacy, a few of my father’s friends. Later, I rode to Pacific View Memorial Park, where the summer sun was contemplating rising over the graveyard. It’s dawn, I said to myself, at least you’d like that, Dad—you always loved the dawn. Encased in a shiny coffin, my father’s body was lowered into an unmarked grave. The words were said, the dirt shoveled over him. And then he was gone from my sight. My father. Into the earth. Fatherless now? That was all? Over so fast?
Chick Iverson came to me then. He said he had been a fine and big-hearted man. Together, Chick and I wept. His son, Chick Jr., lay in a grave only yards from where we stood. So much sadness in this life. I walked next to Chick from the grassy knoll out toward the gates and the cars. It was warm now but I was trembling.
Following the burial, my mother held a short and subdued and awkward reception. Even more so because of the funeral, which my mother knew my dad never wanted, her relations with Michael were strained. When most of the mourners had gone, I gazed at my mother across her dining room, recalling how much my father loved her. I remembered how he loved zipping her up as she dressed for a party, how on those Encino nights they always looked so young and carefree. I remembered their huge, safe, warm bed, and my climbing between them mornings when I was a child. “Three together,” I used to say. “Three together always.”
I felt a soft smile on my face for the first time that dark day.
My father was gone.
And would not be coming back.
But memories, I knew, wield a magic, a power, a comfort, a resiliency, all their own.
In memories, my father would always burn bright.