“He’s always portrayed as this tough cowboy, but he also had a tremendous heart,” his youngest daughter, Marisa, 50, tells Closer, adding that the father she knew was a softie who adored his children, liked to shop from catalogs and had a big sweet tooth.
“He used to keep a stash of Abba-Zaba taffy in his drawer,” she reveals, adding that he taught his children to play cutthroat games of gin rummy and shared his love of books with them.
“Pretty much every weekend we would go to Catalina, and on holidays, we’d go to Mexico,” Marisa recalls. “In the summertime, we’d sail up to Canada to go fishing.”
When he was filming, he often brought the whole family along. “We got to travel all over the world with him. In Africa, when he did Hatari!, we got to ride elephants together,” recalls Aissa, 60. “It was quite a childhood.”
During the holidays, he gathered all seven kids, their spouses, 21 grandchildren and other relatives together for a huge Thanksgiving celebration at his ranch in Arizona and Christmas in Newport Beach, Calif. “There would be like 40 of us,” Marisa says. “He was happiest when he was around his children. There was such a twinkle in his eye.”
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