She grew up thinking that life was a fairy tale.
”When I was a little girl, I was treated very much like a princess,”
says Aissa Wayne. ”Everything seemed very magical.”
Why wouldn`t it? After all, her father was John Wayne. The man who saved the Alamo. The big-screen embodiment of true grit. The strong, silent hunk of machismo that men wanted to be like and women wanted to be with.
Growing up with a larger-than-life, red-white-and-blue film legend does not ensure domestic tranquillity from start to finish, but as a child, Aissa Wayne, now 35, saw her father as a source of enormous affection.
”He was definitely my hero,” she says. ”Yet he wasn`t this tough, macho person that you couldn`t talk to. He was tender and loving, and he had a big heart. That`s what`s heroic to me.”
This is the relationship that Aissa, oldest child of her father`s last marriage, sets out to reveal in her recent memoir, ”John Wayne, My Father”
(Random House, $20). Written with the help of writer Steve Delsohn, the book is the story of the ”Duke” in his domain: third wife and Peruvian firebrand Pilar; adoring daughters Aissa and Marisa and son Ethan; movie sets, box-office names, an Oscar; and a final bout with lung cancer.
”I wanted to put our relationship down in a book,” Wayne says. ”I wanted to pass that on to my children, who never got to meet their granddad.” Although she doesn`t come straight out and say it, it also is clear that Wayne wanted to hold on to this relationship with her father for her own sake. ”It`s hard to put into words, but it was something special between us,” she says.
”As I`m promoting the book, one of the things that I hear over and over is, `I`m really glad this isn`t a `Daddy Dearest` sort of book.` I mean, nobody wants to hear bad things about John Wayne.”
Clearly, she didn`t have any bad things to say. Rather, Wayne`s book is filled with the heart-warming stories of being a Hollywood baby, a much-doted- upon, second-lease-on-life child.
John Wayne`s first marriage, to socialite Josephine Saenz, had produced four children and a tense, disputed divorce. With his second wife, Chata Bauer, Wayne had engaged in drinking bouts, brawls and a messy charge-countercharge divorce.
In 1954 he married Pilar Palette, a Peruvian actress. She was 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 100 pounds; he was 6 feet 4 inches and weighed more than 230 pounds. He believed in good old American values; she had a mind of her own and the nerve to speak it. They separated eventually and at the end of his life, he was close to his secretary, Pat Stacy. Aissa writes in her book that although she believes her father was grateful for Stacy`s affection, he wasn`t in love with her because he didn`t marry her.
When Aissa (pronounced eye-EES-ah) was born in 1956, Wayne was almost 50. In his career he already had coursed Red River, saved Ft. Apache and charged through the sands of Iwo Jima.
”Everyone seeks redemption,” Wayne writes in her book. ”When I was a baby, I think my father looked at me and saw a chance for his.”
”Redemption-seeker” is not John Wayne`s most prevalent image. But his daughter is adamant in this view.
”I think that he felt haunted by failures-failure of his other marriages, failure toward his other family. He was in many ways a very insecure person. He wanted constant reassurance that he was loved. And I believe that when I was born, he viewed this as a second chance to do the right thing.”
And so the fairy tale began. Aissa and Pilar traveled with Wayne while he worked. Aissa appeared in four of her father`s movies: ”The Alamo,” ”The Comancheros,” ”Donovan`s Reef” and ”McClintock.” She was on the set for ”Hatari”; her father brought one of the movie`s baby elephants home to California for Aissa`s 9th birthday. She appeared on the March 1961 cover of Cosmopolitan magazine wearing $850,000 worth of Cartier diamonds. She was four years old.
”I don`t know when I realized who my dad was,” she says. ”From the beginning, he was a star and I knew it.”
Recently she was shown an old film clip: Aissa sitting on her father`s lap, asking, ”What`s TV?” And Wayne answers, ”It`s the little-bitty screen.”
”My father, of course, was always on the big screen,” she says.
Such fame and fortune always extracts a price. Aissa and her siblings led sheltered, lonely lives. Because of a rampant Hollywood fear of kidnapping, the Wayne children never were allowed out of sight to play with other children. Aissa saw the few friends she had only at school.
”It`s funny because we were very protected and guarded. And yet one of the main things my father taught us kids was that we were nothing special.
”In fact, maybe he said it too many times,” she says with a laugh.
”I`m a little insecure at times. One of his mottos was, `Don`t ever put yourself above anybody, but never let anybody put you beneath them, either.`
”
According to Aissa Wayne, she also learned from her father the value of following through.
”He always emphasized this,” she says, ”so much so that when I quit the University of Southern California, which was his school, I was really scared. But I wanted to work. So I went out and got my real estate license and then, about two weeks before school started, I finally said, `Dad, I`m quitting college.` At first he was speechless. But then he told me that he was really proud of me because I had followed through on something.”
By this time, Aissa Wayne had distanced herself considerably from her father.
”He was so conservative, so against liberals, so gung-ho for the Vietnam War,” she says. ”He was making the movie `The Green Berets.` ” She shrugs the shrug of distant battles. ”It strained our relationship. There were never any discussions or anything. I just kind of moved away.”
At that point, she explains, ”I didn`t want to be John Wayne`s daughter anymore. I wanted to be, say, Aissa Smith. Just anyone else. Being Aissa Wayne meant that I believed in the war, all of that stuff.”
It wasn`t easy because no one who has elephants prancing in the back yard or who poses for magazine covers in Cartier jewels has been raised to be just a normal person. But she tried. By the time her father died, in 1979, she had patched up their political differences.
But then there were other problems.
”When my dad died, my whole life-well, decisions had always been made for me. My mind was not used to making decisions. And I think I misunderstood men-big men, who were loud and strong-willed. I was always attracted to that. So I made a couple of mistakes. I`ve been divorced twice.”
Now she has been on her own, with her three children, ages 4, 8 and 9 for about five years. Having eventually resumed her education, she now is attending law school. This book tour came in the middle of her second year at Western State University College of Law in Los Angeles.
”This way, getting my law degree, I`ve always got my kids protected. That`s another thing my dad taught me: Always have something to fall back on.”
She says she has advanced her education about men, too.
”There was a period when every man I looked for had to be like my dad. But now I realize that the man doesn`t have to be big or loud to be strong. I`ve come to see that there is such a thing as quiet strength, also.”
Quiet strength is something she has found in herself as well.
”Over time, through mistakes, I learned that I`m a lot stronger than I give myself credit for.
”I was raised thinking that I needed a man; I think most women are, and, to some degree, we`ll always have that little knee-jerk feeling inside. But not being dependent is a nice feeling.”
Such talk brings Aissa Wayne back to why she wrote the book and what she learned in the process.
”If you have a fairy tale when you`re growing up, then you want a fairy tale when you`re an adult. But it`s not going to be a fairy tale. You have to work through things.”
And, says Aissa Wayne, that`s how princesses find their happy endings.
