Too young to know it then, I realize now that my mother was under tremendous pressure during the time when she slapped me. At the end of the 1950s, the life of Mrs. John Wayne was far from picture perfect. Like me, my mother relied on him, felt secure when he was near, and could come undone when work stole him away. She also had an additional cross to bear. My Peruvian mother was still in cultural passage, adjusting to the racing pulse and swollen narcissism of Hollywood. Some of this was heady. Much of it left her displaced and insecure. Eventually, her glittering new life-style nearly cost my mother her life.
By the time we moved to Newport Beach in 1965, my father rarely attended Hollywood parties. He still saw his old Hollywood friends—Claire Trevor, Maureen O’Hara, Dean Martin, John Ford, Henry Hathaway—but always in relaxed surroundings. When he did have to attend showy Hollywood functions, he often came home chafing, “Every one you go to, you see the same damn people, saying the same damn things. All that changes is the women’s dresses.” The older he became, the more my father hated flashiness. He even hounded my mother not to wear makeup. “I can’t stand women who wear all that crap on their face,” he would say. “A woman looks best in a pair of jeans, a white blouse, with her hair down. Pilar, why don’t you go without makeup today? You know how much I love you without makeup.”
Our Encino days were much different. Then, my father still went to quite a few Hollywood soirees, and even threw some himself. He primarily did it to please and impress his new wife. Looking back, their lack of communication was unmistakable—my mother often felt uneasy at these parties, too. This was the moral, I suppose, of not just my parents’ marriage, but of our life as a family. Rather than having real communication, we all tried pleasing one another by pretending—and frequently wound up doing all the wrong things.
At a party one night in Encino when I was still an infant, finally my mother did not hide her emotions. Instead she blew up, and threw Robert Mitchum out of our home. It was the first night they met, but as my dad explained it all to me later, my mom resented Mitchum even before that.
According to my dad, in the early ’50s he’d launched a production company, wanting more control of his own films and increased overall clout within the industry. By 1954 his company was called Batjac, and its debut film was Blood Alley. Eager for Batjac to charge out of the gate, my father signed three impressive talents: Lauren Bacall and Robert Mitchum to play the leads, and director William Wellman (The High and the Mighty), whom James Mason once characterized as a “tough little bastard.” The third day of shooting, Wellman called my dad in a snit. He said Mitchum was drinking all night, sleeping through morning wakeup calls, making location life miserable for cast and crew. As producer, my father urged conciliation, but one day Mitchum stormed off the set and said he could not work for Wellman. Wellman insisted my father move into the starring role. Although my dad had once passed on the script, feeling the role needed Mitchum’s devil-may-care, he finally relented and took over the part.
Later, my dad discovered that William Wellman drove Robert Mitchum to quit (though not necessarily to drink). The TV show This Is Your Life had once profiled Wellman. When the show’s producers asked the acclaimed director for a list of people to interview, Wellman included Mitchum, whose stalled career Wellman had boosted in 1946 by casting Mitchum as the lead in The Story of GI Joe. Mitchum told the producers, no, he didn’t have time to talk about William Wellman. When Wellman found out, he was livid. When the two men worked on Blood Alley, he took his revenge by badgering Mitchum around the clock.
At the time, my mother knew none of this back history either. All she saw was her husband packing for yet another location, for one more separation—and all because of Robert Mitchum. After Blood Alley came out, I imagine it was my dad and not my mom who invited Robert and Dorothy Mitchum to my parents’ formal party. Dressed in a low-cut gown, my mother greeted Robert Mitchum without any rancor. He and his wife were guests in her home, and my mother intended to treat them with kindness. Unfortunately she was not paid back in kind.
“Boy,” Robert Mitchum said, peering down my mother’s dress, “do you need a new bra.”
The bra was new; Mitchum had probably already started drinking. Nevertheless, my insulted mother demanded he leave that instant. The Mitchums walked out before my father had even said hello. When my mother told him why the Mitchums had gone, my father was careful not to crack the thinnest smile. As I’ve been told by old friends of my family, even John Wayne was wary of his new wife’s toughness. It was also one of the reasons my father adored her.
Her fiestiness was so endearing, my dad may have overlooked my mother’s fragility. Over the years I think we all did. In the way that husbands and children become too self-absorbed, we were blind to the anxieties my mother must have felt as a woman, a mother, a superstar’s wife. My mother was strong, not unbreakable.
The facade she maintained began splintering in 1959. With very little formal education, she secretly felt inadequate around my father’s gaggle of famous friends. In Peru she had never even considered meeting Hollywood glitterati; now, in her halting English, she was expected to trade witty American banter. Within her own family, my mother was torn between marriage and motherhood, between following around her globe-trotting husband and rushing back to Encino to be with me. The stresses took their toll. With fraying nerves, wilting self-esteem, and insomnia, my mother looked up a Beverly Hills physician noted among insiders for treating Hollywood wives. The man prescribed Seconals. That evening my mother slept peacefully. Within months, she was taking pills every day. To sleep. To combat depression. Before Hollywood parties. She took them then in lieu of liquor, to try and loosen up, to mask her insecurities, in the face of her husband’s hard-drinking fast-track crowd.
My mother later told me what her drug addiction was like, the nightmare she went through. Even after the pills had grabbed her by the throat, she never believed she’d become addicted, never thought it could happen to her, until the day her barbiturates ran out. On location with my dad in Louisiana, she experienced the terror of drug withdrawal. Her mouth went dry. She could not take a good breath. Her heart tried exploding out of her chest. She panicked. She hallucinated. She tried slashing her wrists.
Something inside her forced her to stop, and we did not lose my mother. After my father hired a private plane and sent her home with two nurses, she woke up in a California hospital, remembering little of it. “Your father did the only thing he could,” my mother told me years later. “Thank God he put me in a hospital where I could get some help. Because I did not know what was happening to me.”
I was three years old at the time of the crisis, much too little to comprehend what was going on. For many years, neither my mother nor father spoke of it. Then, when I turned thirteen, my mother sat me down and told me the story, and neither of us tried choking back our tears. It was all so sad and desperate, so radically unlike the image I’d crafted of my mom. That image was strictly of a mother. I never saw her beyond that role, with a life separate from her husband and children’s. I never saw her as a woman, with a unique place in the world, and a unique set of troubles.
At the time of the telling, I didn’t ask too many questions. Of course I went on loving her, and my respect for my mother grew. I knew it could have been her secret, stashed in a cranny of her past. My father’s PR people hushed it up, the press never found out, so there was never any danger of my reading it, or hearing it regurgitated at school. Even if my dad had been the type of man to discuss such things with his children—human frailty, human emotion—I doubt he would have told me about my mother’s near-suicide. Knowing my father, he’d have rightly felt that decision belonged to her.
Why did my mother tell me? After asking myself that question and finding no answers, one day I put it to her. I was her daughter, she simply said. She felt I had a right to know.