One of the coolest dudes that I had the pleasure to hang out with quite a bit was James Arness.
He was the dude who played Marshal Matt Dillon on the popular television show “Gunsmoke.” I know a lot of you are not old enough to remember that show, but it ran for 20 years and Jim, as he went by to his friends, was quite a big star.
Once you got to know him though, it was easy to forget how famous he was due to the fact that he was actually one of the more down-to-earth people you could meet. And he surfed.
I would go as far as to say that Jim didn’t just surf, he was a full-on “surfer.” He loved it and it was huge part of his life and his “lifestyle.” He kept a house out by Makaha on Oahu and was a regular in the lineup there.
He was also a member of the San Onofre Surf Club and had property at the Hollister Ranch north of Santa Barbara. On top of that, he had a small plane and liked to make surf trips to hard-to-get-to spots in Baja that had dirt runways, but little, to no, actual roads.
I first met Jim at San Onofre back in the mid-1960s. At first, I was amazed at how big the guy was. He was a full 6-foot-7 and seemed taller than that. Plus, he must have weighed in at about 375. The dude was a “whopper.”
His son, Rolf, was an excellent surfer who would later go on to be a world champion, and we became very close pals. We surfed and made many trips together all through the late 1960s and very early 1970s. Rolf also liked to ski and we used to go to Mammoth together a lot during the winter.
One of the things that most people didn’t know about Jim was that he was extremely funny. He could easily have been a comedian. He loved to tell stories. He was so big and when he got into one of his tales, his eyes would get huge, and with his big body and face, it was quite amazing. His public persona was of a quiet, reserved man. But in real life, he was a crack-up.
Jim was big, and he liked stuff big. We used to spend a lot of time out at his place by Makaha. He was friends with Richard “Buffalo” Keaulana, the main man and lifeguard out there. Jim would grill up these zillion-pound steaks and make a barrel of what he called “Long John Silvers.” It was some sort of rum drink that was very potent. He served them in half-gallon glasses. He and Buffalo would stay up all night eating steaks and drinking, Rolf and I would split a steak and a Long John Silver and pass out.
One of my favorite memories of hanging out with Jim and Rolf was one day when Jim got us tickets to go see the play “Hair.” From their home in Pacific Palisades, it was a drive straight up Sunset Boulevard to the Aquarius Theater, where it was being performed.
It had been raining, and the streets were pretty wet. We came to an intersection where the light had just turned green and Jim, who was driving, cruised right through.
He was in the fast lane and there was a car in the slow lane that had been stopped and was just starting to go. The guy had his window down and when Jim went by, a ton of water got splashed into the guy’s window and all over him. It was not intentional.
But the guy was outraged and chased us down for a few blocks, trying to get Jim to pull over. Finally, we stopped and the guy jumped out of his car and ran up to Jim’s window and started yelling and telling him to get out of the car. He did not recognize Jim, who was trying to be nice and say he was sorry and all that. But the guy was not backing down, until Jim got out of the car.
Did I mention that one of Jim’s first roles was playing the part of “The Thing” in the movie “The Thing From Another World?” The angry dude was standing there looking up at this enormous “thing,” and he got very unmad very fast. I think I heard a tiny “oops” leak out of his mouth. It was classic. I think Jim gave him a hundred bucks to get his clothes cleaned, he was a really good guy.
That was just one of a bunch of fun stories of hangin’ with The Marshal.