THE WAYNE FAMILY : LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF THE DUKE

He was the biggest box office attraction in motion picture history, his heroic screen image already gaining mythic proportions when John Wayne and his family moved to Newport Beach in 1965.

Harbor tour boats would regularly stop in front of the sprawling Wayne house, passengers straining to catch a glimpse of the aging Ringo Kid sitting out on his patio. And while he would privately grouse, “Hell, I have to wear my wig--I can’t even come out in my front yard,” he’d always wave and shout hello.

Although he was a member of Hollywood royalty, the Duke never lost the common touch. Contrary to his tough-guy image, he would often take his young children--Aissa, Marisa and Ethan--to school and pick them up.

Or he’d take them for drives along Coast Highway in his olive-green station wagon with the custom roof raised to accommodate his 6-foot-4 stature, frequently stopping at a Sav-On drugstore where, as always, he would graciously oblige requests for autographs as he shopped.

A decade after his death in 1979 at age 72, the man eulogized as a genuine American folk hero still casts a bigger-than-life shadow--a shadow that hovers over the lives of the Wayne family, the keepers of the legend.

It’s the allure of the Wayne name that caused the international media to focus on Aissa Wayne, 33, when she and her then-boyfriend, millionaire financier Roger Luby, were brutally attacked by two gunmen who threatened to kill them inside Luby’s gated Newport Beach home in October, 1988.

The media undoubtedly will turn out in force again in March when Aissa Wayne is scheduled to testify at the trial of her ex-husband, Dr. Thomas A. Gionis, who is accused of ordering the attack.

She and Gionis, a Pomona orthopedic surgeon, were embroiled in a bitter custody dispute over their young daughter at the time. The unusual nature of the crime--”hit men” in Newport Beach--and the draw of the Wayne name also prompted “several people” to approach her about writing a book about the attack. But, she insists, “there is no way I’d ever write about that.”

Ethan Wayne, 27, who is following in his father’s profession, must endure the inevitable comparisons with him that his half-brother, Patrick Wayne, faced early in his acting career.

And it’s the attraction of the Wayne name, in part, that prompted publicity-shy Ethan Wayne, currently co-starring in a remake of the “Adam 12” television series, to elope to Prescott, Ariz., in December with his longtime girlfriend, flight attendant Gina Rivadeneyra.

“We didn’t want any sort of news coverage,” he said. “I mean it’s not like Sean Penn and Madonna, but we didn’t want it to even be in the paper.”

Marisa Wayne, 23, the child of John and Pilar Wayne who maintains the lowest public profile, abandoned her acting after five years of on-and-off study and is now married to former Olympic skier Jace Romick. They live on a 42-acre ranch in Steamboat Springs, Colo., where he owns a small furniture company and she is a health and fitness major at Colorado Mountain College.

And then there’s Peruvian-born Pilar Wayne, the late actor’s third wife, who amicably separated from her husband in 1973 after 19 years of marriage, a relationship she chronicled in her 1987 book “John Wayne: My Life With the Duke.”

Although Pilar’s house is now the primary Wayne home in Newport Beach, tour boats continue to stop at the old “John Wayne house,” which has changed hands twice since it was sold in 1980.

It is, as one tour boat captain said, “still probably the most popular point of interest in Newport.”

She calls it La Roca (the rock), from a biblical passage referring to the importance of living life with a solid foundation of faith.

Pilar Wayne’s opulent two-story French country home, complete with a tennis court reached via a spiral staircase, sits at the end of a cul-de-sac overlooking upper Newport Bay, a bird sanctuary with a primeval look despite the expensive homes ringing its steep cliffs.

Framed family pictures, many of John Wayne with his children, accent the spacious living room, which overlooks a spa and narrow lap pool. But it is the oak-accented den off the home’s grand, marble-floored entry where friends and family usually gather.

Dressed in a leather skirt and bright yellow blouse, Pilar Wayne entered the den with Gucci, her talkative green Amazon parrot, perched on her hand. She put the bird in an ornate antique brass cage near a window and sat down next to the marble and oak fireplace to talk of her family.

At least she tried to talk. Gucci, who has cages in nearly every room of the house and follows “mommy” everywhere, immediately began talking non-stop in the background.

“He wants to join in the conversation,” Pilar said, no sooner scolding the bird when Thor, her 3-month-old Norwegian elkhound, padded into the room and started yapping.

“I can’t live without a dog,” she said, digging into a tin on the glass coffee table and dropping a handful of popcorn on the floor for Thor. “Sometimes, Duke and I had four.”

References to her husband turn up constantly in Pilar Wayne’s conversation, and the den is filled with various John Wayne mementos: a portrait of him in his trademark cowboy garb, a bronze bust, and a commemorative John Wayne Winchester rifle and Colt revolver.

Even the game table in the den’s windowed alcove, where Pilar plays bridge with friends twice a week, is a reminder of Wayne, who taught her how to play shortly after they moved to Newport.

When he wasn’t working, John Wayne loved to play chess, bridge and backgammon. He also liked to watch football on television and, true to legend, drink with cronies. His widow, however, downplays his reputation as a carouser.

“Duke was the kind who would love a good argument, a good cognac and a good cigar,” she recalled. But at that stage of his life he mostly enjoyed the kids, she said. “He was a very good family man.”

An old-fashioned husband--in her book she calls him her “beautiful 19th-Century man who couldn’t adapt to the ‘70s”--John Wayne loved making movies and often made one after another, usually in distant locations. It was his insistence that his wife and children accompany him on location, despite being uprooted from their home and friends, that led to their separation in 1973.

Pilar Wayne moved out of the waterfront house in the exclusive Bayshores section of Newport Beach, which she likened to “living in a fishbowl,” and into a condominium they owned in nearby Big Canyon.

Although they lived apart the last six years of John Wayne’s life, she makes a point of saying “there was not a legal separation or anything, and we were certainly friends until the bitter end.”

She is, she acknowledged, proud of the Wayne name.

“Oh, yes, absolutely,” she said. “It meant more to me not that he was big and famous and everything else, but he was such a wonderful human being. That man maybe was not perfect, but he was about 80% perfect. I liked the way he handled himself. I liked the way he treated people.”

Still a key figure in the society columns, Pilar Wayne lends her name to numerous charity events.

Although not as politically active as her notoriously outspoken late husband, she agreed to let the Republican Party of Orange County use her home for a $1,000-per-couple, fund-raising cocktail reception last night for U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson in his campaign for governor.

“Duke and I have always supported the Republican Party, like most of Orange County, I guess,” she explained. For their part, local Republicans were not about to miss a chance to make political hay from the enduring appeal of the film star’s name, announcing that the reception would be held “in the beautiful upper Newport Bay home of Mrs. John Wayne.”

With income from the interest on a trust established for her during their marriage, she doesn’t need to work. But staying active is important to Pilar Wayne, who owned a small restaurant in Corona del Mar for five years in the ‘70s and has written one cookbook and is working on two more.

She was married briefly in 1984 to Municipal Judge Stephen Stewart (a “two-week mistake,” she has called it) but is not currently dating anyone steadily. “There’s nothing serious in my life right now except Thor and Gucci,” she said. At this point in her life, she has no intention of marrying again.

“No way,” she said with a laugh. “I really don’t think marriage for me is necessary. I had a wonderful marriage with the Duke and he was a complete gentleman. It was a long marriage. We have three very beautiful children. They’re great kids.”

She visits Marisa in Colorado frequently, and both Ethan and Aissa, who have homes within a mile of their mother, stop to see her several times a week.

Pilar, who revealed that her son eloped shortly after all three of her children--and 200 friends--gathered at her house for a Christmas party last month, admits that she was “really hurt” when he didn’t tell her that he was getting married. “But he married a beautiful girl, so we’re very happy for him,” she said.

“All kids have to find themselves. I’ve been very lucky with all my three kids.

“Marisa is married and very happy. Ethan, I never knew what he was going to do, but he is 27 years old now and he has settled down. He cares about the family and he comes over and he calls. Then my oldest daughter went through that thing--that Gionis thing, which is still pending. She came through that very nicely, very strong.”

Pilar describes the 1987 attack on her daughter and Roger Luby as “terrible, terrible. I can’t imagine anybody doing a thing like that.”

During the attack inside Luby’s garage, the two gunmen struck Luby in the head with a handgun, bound him and slashed one of his Achilles tendons. Aissa Wayne’s forehead was bashed against the garage floor, her hands bound behind her and a gun held to her head.

After the attack, Aissa Wayne moved into her mother’s house and stayed with her for three months. “I wouldn’t leave her alone for a second,” Pilar Wayne said.

Police originally speculated that the attack was a warning directed at Luby. It wasn’t until six months after the incident that Gionis was arrested, investigators maintaining that his intense fear of having to give up his and Aissa Wayne’s daughter, Anastasia, drove him to direct the attack as a warning. At his arraignment, Gionis entered a plea of not guilty.

Ironically, Gionis, who had proposed to Aissa under her father’s statue at John Wayne Airport, had been granted custody of his daughter a few months before his arrest. Since the arrest, he has been granted monitored visitations with Anastasia, who now lives with her mother. Custody of the child will be reviewed after Gionis’ criminal trial.

Aissa Wayne, who shares custody of her two older children from a previous marriage to tennis pro Lornie Kuhl of Del Mar, said she experienced nightmares and sleepless nights after the attack and has talked to a therapist “about the fear part of it.” She said she wasn’t “really scared” immediately after the incident, “but as time has gone on I’m more and more scared. I don’t know why. They say it sometimes takes a while for something to really hit you.”

Aissa, who is studying to renew her real estate license, said her mother has been “my best support in the whole world. She’s real strong.”

But Aissa said that throughout the ordeal she often wondered what it would have been like if she still had her father to turn to. She said that at times “when I really want to talk to him,” such as when “the judge gave Anastasia to her dad and I was just lost,” she has visited her father’s unmarked hilltop grave in Pacific View Memorial Park in Corona del Mar.

Aissa said that as she was growing up “he was always the one that got us out of jams and protected us and everything. He was security for all of us and if we needed help at school or something, my dad always had good, sound advice.”

Aissa remembers that when she was a teen-ager her father was strict. “He sat down and really talked to us, but he wasn’t so unreasonable that you couldn’t even talk to him about something.

“He was a real support day-to-day, so you never got too out of line,” she laughed, “because he was around.

“One thing my dad used to say was, ‘I worked 50 years for my reputation,’ so I was always really scared if we’d go out and sneak a beer or something. I would be really scared (and say) ‘we’ve got to make sure the cops aren’t going to come.’ ”

Ethan said that when he was a teen-ager his father “knew if we had been drinking or doing something. I did a lot of stuff--you just do silly things when you’re a teen-ager.

“But I think he knew it was like a phase you were going through. He’d come in and look at me and say, ‘God, kid, you’re a mess.’ . . . He didn’t have to say much more than that. He got his point across.”

The “Adam 12” star, who has done several public service announcements against drugs and alcohol, said his father’s way of getting the message across worked: “I’m certainly not involved in anything like that. I’m pretty health-conscious.”

Although Ethan made his screen debut at 8 playing his father’s kidnaped grandson in “Big Jake,” he never considered an acting career until after his father died and stuntman friends of his father, who knew Ethan raced motorcycles, asked him to work on a picture.

From stunt work he slowly made the transition into acting, and after appearing in several low-budget films he landed a recurring role in the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful.” Last fall he began filming “Adam 12.”

Although Pilar Wayne said she sees some of her husband’s screen mannerisms in her son, Ethan doesn’t view his career as a case of following in his dad’s sizable boot steps.

“We’re very different,” he said. “I don’t know how many people compare Lloyd Bridges with Jeff Bridges. They’re just different.”

Having grown up witnessing the great attention his father received wherever he went, Ethan wants nothing to do with that aspect of celebrity. He remembers times when his father couldn’t buy a tube of toothpaste without being stopped repeatedly for autographs.

And he remembers the tour boats that would pull up to their house.

“If he was outside he’d wave, but I sit here and start to think: ‘Man, it’s ridiculous what people do. I don’t know how they (celebrities) put up with it.’ With me, it’s on such a small scale. I’m still kind of a private person. I don’t go out a lot. It’s hard to get me to talk even.

“I like the acting business, but that’s the hard thing. I want to be famous for making good movies, not for having people hang around.”

Now that he’s older and involved with “people that are in an upward race to make money and have a Porsche or Mercedes or some bull like that, I think back and my dad could have had whatever he wanted.

“But he’d have been just as happy on a farm or ranch--or on the boat. He was just down to earth. He loved that green station wagon that was so ugly. He didn’t get involved in any of the hype. He knew he was a good person, and he was comfortable with that and he didn’t need to have the first spot at the (Balboa) Bay Club. He didn’t let himself get caught up.”

Although Ethan stayed with Patrick Wayne last fall while working on “Adam 12,” and Patrick has visited Marisa in Colorado, John Wayne’s four older children from a previous marriage seldom get together with his three children by Pilar.

While John and Pilar Wayne’s children said they are grateful that they can still see their father in his old movies, it is the man, not the legend, that they remember.

“He was a great dad,” said Marisa, recalling times that he would take her to the Balboa Fun Zone to ride the Ferris wheel and bumper cars.

Although she was 13 when he died, she said that “the 13 years I had with him were great years and good memories. A lot of people think because I was so young I wouldn’t remember him. But I think in the back of his mind he realized that he might die when I was young and compensated by spending more time with me.”

When Ethan remembers his father, he usually thinks of the times that the family would take trips to Alaska and Mexico on the Wild Goose, John Wayne’s 136-foot, converted World War II minesweeper.

“He was just so happy, just to be able to relax,” Ethan recalled. “He had to put up with so much in town, it was his place he could be himself.”

Ethan said his fondest memories are of standing on the bow of the Wild Goose, his arm around his dad.

“We’d just stand out there, going out on the ocean,” he said. “The ocean looked like ‘Victory at Sea.’ We’d just hang out there and look around. I miss that.”