In the fall of 1967, I went to work for Batjac Productions. It was a Monday-to-Friday job from around 3:30 in the afternoon—when I wasn’t in detention—until 6:30 or 7. The company had this 16-year-old Loyola High School senior photocopying scripts, answering fan mail, matching canceled checks to bank statements, running messages and film cans between Batjac’s offices at Paramount in Hollywood and Warner Bros. in Burbank, and, from time to time, driving John Wayne. The actor (and Batjac cofounder) always sat in the front passenger seat of his big, green Pontiac station wagon with the roof raised high to take all six foot four of him.
That work finished when I graduated, but in early August, I encountered Mr. Wayne in Miami during the Republican National Convention. The young woman from the airport rental car agency whom I was courting was impressed when she saw him stop and speak to me: “Charlie, what the hell are you doing here?” He didn’t wait for me to remind him that he had reprimanded me for putting a Nixon for President bumper sticker on the Pontiac without his permission. I wanted to tell him that this was my second convention as a party stalwart. Four years earlier, at the age of 13, I had been at the Cow Palace in Daly City when nominee Barry Goldwater declared, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” Let’s face it. I was a weird kid.
At the end of my last year at the University of Southern California, Mr. Wayne’s alma mater, I went back to Batjac. This time, I was promoted to be Mr. Wayne’s full-time driver in a newer-model Pontiac. He sometimes read scripts or newspapers, never bothering to tell me which route to take from his house on Bayshore Drive in Newport Beach to Paramount and Warners; NBC Studios in Burbank for appearances on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and The Tonight Show; meetings at the Beverly Hills Hotel with fellow cattlemen furious about President Richard Nixon’s wage and price controls that cut the price of beef (“I’ll call Nixon,” Mr. Wayne said, “and, by God, he’ll answer”); movie premieres with his wife, Pilar (the only times he sat in back rather than in front with me); parties (including one, at the Daisy, where I chanced upon Henry Kissinger in the men’s room); and dockside where he moored his boat, a converted minesweeper called the Wild Goose. Oh, I also collected his toupees from a wigmaker in Beverly Hills.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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My recollections of Mr. Wayne are mainly those of a 16- and then 21-year-old Californian. As an office messenger and driver, I was hardly a friend. Like everyone else who worked for him, I was an admirer.
I had first seen him in 1959, when my mother took me, at age eight, to see John Ford directing The Horse Soldiers, which her friend John Lee Mahin had coscripted. (I had a burning crush on his daughter, Maggi.) My mother’s father, a Thoroughbred owner, had left the family with a lot of Hollywood connections from the time when movie people wanted to be seen at the races. Ford was shooting a fireside scene with William Holden and John Wayne as mutually antagonistic Union army officers. Bing Russell, another family friend and the father of Kurt, had a small role as an enlisted man who lost his leg in battle. I liked Bing a lot and didn’t pay much attention to Wayne and Holden.
The next year, I saw Mr. Wayne again, but only on-screen as Davy Crockett in The Alamo. I went to the Carthay Circle Theatre (no one in Los Angeles called movie houses cinemas then) to watch it on my own every day for a week. Mr. Wayne directed and produced that epic, which depicted an American Thermopylae where, in 1836, brave men fought to take Texas from Mexico and died fighting for freedom. Or so I believed, until I read that one of the liberators’ first acts was to preserve slavery, which Mexico had begun abolishing in 1829.
That year, 1960, was an important marker in my life. I volunteered at the Nixon for President headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard, sending out mailers and canvassing door-to-door. I also went to my first bullfight, when my mother drove me to Tijuana for the races at Agua Caliente, planning, as she admitted later, to kill me at the same time that she killed herself. However, the only life she attempted to take was her own. I came back from horse riding along the beach to see her being wheeled into an ambulance. My sister and I went to live with one of my father’s girlfriends for a few weeks, until my mother came out of hospitals in Mexico and then California. In November, Nixon lost the election. And The Alamo, to my fury, lost the Best Picture Oscar to The Apartment with Jack Lemmon, whose girlfriend, then wife, Felicia Farr, was another of Mom’s friends.
Mom worked as a production assistant at Batjac in 1967, when Mr. Wayne was making the only movie about Vietnam produced in Hollywood during the war, The Green Berets. She persuaded his son Michael, another family friend and the head of Batjac, to hire me. Mr. Wayne was directing and starring as a Special Forces colonel at the unlikely age of 60. The film went over budget and, like the war itself, didn’t seem to have an ending.
Over Christmas break that year, my mother succeeded in taking her life. When I had nothing else to do, I’d wander around the soundstages and outdoor sets at Warners and Paramount. I lost myself in reveries of great movie moments on the back lot Western and New York streets.
I was watching a rough cut of The Green Berets in a Warners projection room in April 1968 when the screen suddenly went dark. The lights flashed on, and a voice made an announcement over the loudspeaker: Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. Mr. Wayne remained silent. Someone said, “ ’Bout time they got that n----r.”
One of the technical advisers, whom I more or less hero-worshipped, was a Special Forces major and ex–pro baseball player named Jerry Dodds. One night in a bar after filming at Warners, I asked him about his tours in Vietnam. He was drunk and grabbed my shirt: “You don’t know what we’re doing there. I kill people. I would kill anyone. I would kill your father if they told me to. I would kill you.” He was shaking. That was before I read about assassination programs like Phoenix and Speedy Express, before I moved to the Middle East and saw what U.S. weaponry could do to places I knew.
One night, Dodds, a few other Green Beanies, and some Vietnamese extras took me to the kind of seedy downtown poolroom I thought existed only in Raymond Chandler books. After negotiating with a pimp, the guys drove me to a brothel, a shabby apartment building near MacArthur Park on Burlington Avenue. I pretended not to be—as my Jesuit education had imposed—a virgin. I went to confession the next day.
It wasn’t long afterward that Esquire published an article about the film production, with the headline “The Spokesman: 1968” and a full-page cartoon of an outsize Mr. Wayne in a blue cavalry uniform and a green beret, astride a stagecoach. A tiny Ho Chi Minh shot arrows at him from horseback. Above the illustration was a quote from Michael Wayne, the film’s producer:
I’m not making a picture [The Green Berets] about Vietnam, I’m making a picture about good against bad. I happen to think that that’s true about Vietnam, but even if it isn’t as clear as all that, that’s what you have to do to make a picture. It’s all right, because we’re in the business of selling tickets.
It’s the same thing as the Indians. Maybe we shouldn’t have destroyed all those Indians, I don’t know, but when you’re making a picture, the Indians are the bad guys.
I clipped it out, and Michael signed it: “Charlie, It wasn’t said quite like this! Michael.” To which his father appended, “Oh, yes it was, Charlie! With a son like him you don’t need an enemy. John Wayne.”
Still, Michael, then only 33, had a sense of humor that kept up my spirits. When John Ford came to Warners one day to observe Mr. Wayne on set directing The Green Berets, I asked Michael if he wanted to see the great director. I did, but he didn’t. All he said was “I’ve been insulted enough in my life without looking for it.” On another occasion, I told Michael that his father’s cigar smoking—I had taken up cigars when I was 13 and still smoke them—was a lot better than the cigarettes that had caused him to lose a lung to cancer in 1964. “Sure, great,” Michael said, “if he didn’t inhale them.” Many years later, when he was visiting London, where I lived then, with his wife, Gretchen, and their daughter Josie, I invited Josie to a nightclub. As Josie and I were leaving their hotel, Michael took me aside: “If anything happens, Charlie, you have to marry her.” Nothing happened.
The offices at Warners and Paramount were clubhouses for the Batjac brigade: story editor Tom Kane, chief accountant Bob Shuster, personal assistant Mary St. John, a secretary named Dawn Forrester, Mr. Wayne’s brother, Emmett, job unspecified to me. Mrs. St. John, the office mother superior (and always Mrs. St. John to me), taught me to forge Mr. Wayne’s signature on 8-by-10 glossy photos to send to fans.
The atmosphere was collegial, a tone undoubtedly set by Mr. Wayne and Michael. One of Mr. Wayne’s biographers quoted a friend from his USC Trojan days: “He could have been a great football player, but he never wanted to hurt anybody.” Kane told me that when he and Mr. Wayne once saw five-foot-six actor Alan Ladd walking toward them, Mr. Wayne hid to avoid embarrassing Ladd in front of his fans. I witnessed a similar incident in the lobby at the Beverly Hills Hotel when Cesar Romero was signing autographs for a group of middle-aged women. When John Wayne approached, they forgot all about Romero. The once-celebrated actor, deprived of his audience, said without enthusiasm, “Hi, Duke.” Mr. Wayne praised Romero and made sure the ladies knew that the old “Latin lover” was still a big star—as indeed he had been when Mr. Wayne was stuck in cowboy B-movie hell.
By the summer of 1972, my politics had evolved from conventional Taft-Goldwater conservative to libertarian under the influence of my philosophy professor, John Hospers. Hospers, who became the Libertarian Party’s first presidential candidate, taught that crimes without victims were not criminal at all. Many then-criminalized activities—from homosexual behavior to drug consumption—needed to be legalized. My conversion produced an uncomfortable exchange with Mr. Wayne as I drove him along Melrose Avenue one afternoon. We were passing Goliath’s, a homosexual bar, whose exterior featured silhouettes of naked men. Mr. Wayne grimaced, but I ventured to suggest that it was the men’s right. The conversation went no further. On another drive, I asked him which of the new generation of actors he thought were good. His answer surprised me: “I kinda like that Clint Eastwood.” Eastwood was known then for Sergio Leone’s anti-Westerns, as the antithesis of Mr. Wayne’s cowboy heroes.
Whenever we walked to the car in some part of Los Angeles, people stopped him and asked for autographs. He always obliged. Older men, and there were many, said, “Mr. Wayne, I joined the Marines because of you.” He leaned back as if a punch were about to follow, and the vets laughed. I never told him that when I was 16 and working for him on The Green Berets, I had tried to enlist in the army. I told the recruiting sergeant I was 18. When I left, he called my mother. By the time I drove home, my military career was over. •
Born in Los Angeles, Charles Glass left the city in 1972 and has since lived in Beirut, London, Ireland, Provence, and Tuscany. He served as ABC News’s chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993 and is the author of more than a dozen books, including Americans in Paris and Soldiers Don’t Go Mad.
