Finding family and a hero while serving as John Wayne’s chauffeur during the production of The Green Berets.
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…
Read the full article in the Alta Journal. Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.
