John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [128]
In February 1962, Pilar gave birth to John Ethan, adding to Duke’s second family. Publicly, he was able to maintain the image of a father with his loving children all about him. But the image was not all it appeared to be. Aissa wrote that her father told her to regard her older siblings not as half brothers and half sisters, but as full brothers and sisters. She said that she never knew if their warmth toward her was real or merely a show put on to please their father. She said that although it was always cordial between them all, it was also
“superficial.” Because their father was not a man to share his true feelings and virtually discouraged others from ever doing so, Aissa never really knew, as a child, what Michael, Pat, Toni, and Melinda really thought of her.
Aissa believed that because of her father’s stubborn refusal to manifest his true inner feelings in an unending attempt to maintain the image of a happy family, his torment and guilt often manifested itself in a rage that terrified all the children.
Wayne came close to spanking Aissa only once, and that was because she was speaking disrespectfully to her mother just as her father came into the room. He told Aissa to go and sit outside and think about the spanking he was going to give her. When he stepped outside with a leather belt in his hand, she began to cry. He bent her 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 240
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over his lap and raised the belt, but was unable to go through with it.
Instead, he stood her up and gave her a sound lecture on how she should never again speak to her mother that way.
Michael said that his father could be strict, “but that was because he just wanted you to do what was right. If you kept your nose clean, you didn’t hear from him. He wasn’t the kind of father who constantly preached at you, but if you did something wrong, the punishment was swift. He didn’t have to hit us. He just sometimes gave a few taps with the belt, just to let you know you’d done something bad. Usually, he just reached for his belt and you knew you were in trouble, and that fear was punishment enough.”
Aissa wrote that on the occasions when he did display a fit of anger at home, it was explosive but always short-lived. He invariably blamed himself for his sudden burst of temper, and he was always quick to apologize. Aissa came to suspect that Wayne’s insecurities as a father forced him to get control of his temper and apologize with all the sincerity he could muster. She wrote that it was as though he was thinking, I’ve scared them and now they won’t love me. She was sure he often asked himself, Did they ever love me?
When punishment was dealt out by Wayne the father, it was usually spontaneous and effective. George Sherman told me, “When Duke’s eldest girl, Toni, was a teenager, he caught her smoking at the dinner table. He said to her, ‘Do you like to smoke?’ She said she did, so he said, ‘That’s good,’ and he shoved it into her mouth. As far as he knew, that was the end of her smoking.”
Wayne’s concerns about being loved as a father increased during the 1960s. By 1974, nothing had obviously changed, although I was not aware just how insecure he was when he told me, “I love all my kids. I hope to God they love me as much as I love all of them.”
There was no doubt that he did truly love his children.
There must have been many answers to life’s mysteries that were never cleared up for some, if not all, of his children. Like every child of a big movie star, Aissa missed out on a normal childhood. She lived a permanent existence within the ten-foot-high walls of the Encino estate. When she was young, she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t play outside the house. She was not allowed to go to sleep-over parties at friends’ houses, and she was told not to even look at 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 241
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strangers, let alone talk to