Home of the Range Revisited : Balboa Actor-Turned-Salesman Returns to Lone Pine, Backdrop for B Movies

Most folks who know Richard Martin know him as an insurance salesman. That’s what he’s been since the ‘50s, and that’s what it says on his business card: Richard Martin Associates, estate planning and business insurance.

But every so often, Martin gets the chance to step back into a previous life where he fought injustice across the frontier, where he had a reputation for being equally handy with his fists and with the ladies, and where his name was Chito Jose Gonzales Bustamonte Rafferty--Chito to his friends.

That was Martin’s persona in more than 30 Western serials made between 1944 and 1952, most of them with Tim Holt. Half-Irish, half-Mexican, Martin’s Chito (given to malapropisms and an overactive libido) was the comic counterpoint to Holt’s serious and steadfast cowboy hero in a series of one-hour films for RKO.

Martin, who lives on Balboa Island, left the movie business in 1952 after Howard Hughes decided to end all B pictures at RKO. But Chito is still remembered--to Martin’s never-ending surprise. He was one of the featured guests last weekend for the Sierra Film Festival, which draws thousands of B-movie buffs to the town of Lone Pine, under the shadow of the Eastern Sierra.

For most people, Lone Pine is little more than a refueling stop on the way to Mammoth or, for backpackers, the turnoff to Mt. Whitney. Some travelers may pull in to Bobo’s Bonanza for what must be the world’s biggest chicken-fried steak (about a foot across) or stop at the handful of souvenir shops that line the town’s main drag.

Beginning in the ‘20s, however, the rocky hills behind town were among the most popular outdoor locations for Hollywood Westerns, a landscape indelibly stamped into the memories of youngsters who filled movie theaters each week for the latest adventures of their cowboy heroes. (Not to mention their younger siblings who saw them the second time around on TV.) These are the hills where Hopalong Cassidy rode, where the Lone Ranger fought outlaws, where singing cowboys Roy Rogers and Gene Autry plied their trade.

Another singing cowboy who filmed here was dubbed Singin’ Sandy, but that character never caught on so the actor was relegated to non-singing roles (his name? John Wayne). The Alabama Hills, as they are called, also served for some non-Western locales: The 1939 adventure classic “Gunga Din,” set in India, was filmed here during a monumental two-month shoot.

Although they are still used for an occasional shoot, the hills are now mostly an object of nostalgic fascination for film buffs. One of the organizers of the three-year-old Sierra Film Festival, Dave Holland, has for years wandered the hills with film stills, trying to find the exact spots where the scenes were filmed (Holland’s research now forms the basis of three different tours of the hills, offered during the festival).

The festival is a funky, home-grown get-together that unashamedly extols the virtues of the B movie, and Lone Pine’s small-town charms provide a ideal setting. Movies run all day in the local high-school auditorium--movies with such titles as “King of the Pecos,” “Frontier Marshal” and “Dynamite Pass.”

Many of the special guests probably go unrecognized any other place in the country, but here they are treated like stars, hounded for autographs and asked for tales of their movie-making days. Among the guests this year, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (one of the stars of “Gunga Din”) was the biggest name, and in a panel session he shared some stories from the movie’s making, including the tidbit that he and Cary Grant tossed a coin to decide who would play which role.

Among the other guests were Clayton Moore, the Lone Ranger; Rand Brooks, a regular in the Hoppy series; John Agar, who filmed “Along the Great Divide” with Kirk Douglas in Lone Pine; William Witney, who directed the first Lone Ranger serial; movie badman Pierce Lyden (now an Orange resident); stuntman Loren Janes and Ann Rutherford, who was in dozens of Westerns but is best remembered as Scarlett O’Hara’s youngest sister in “Gone With the Wind.”

The festival draws fans from all over the country and beyond: Returning visitors included a man from Brazil who was the talk of the festival last year because he and his companions took a taxi from LAX all the way to Lone Pine (the fare for the 250-mile ride was $300).

All the fan attention, Martin admitted, is part of the appeal of festivals like this one (there are several annual B-movie festivals in the South). “It’s nice to get the recognition for what you did, whether people admit it or not,” he said. But one of the biggest draws is getting to see some of the people he worked with back in his movie days.

Martin spent a lot of time with longtime pal Walter Reed, who appeared in several of the Tim Holt Westerns and other serials, including one called “Flying Disc Men From Mars.” The two walked along the town’s main street, remembering all-night poker games in the basement of the Dow Hotel, recalling pranks pulled on the sets and exchanging anecdotes (not all of them flattering) about other actors.

Reed looked the part of old Western star in his white cowboy hat and denim shirt and jeans, but Martin--well, he dressed more like an insurance salesman than a cowboy.

But back in Lone Pine for the first real visit since his days with Holt, Martin was clearly having a good time. Holt, who died of cancer in 1973, had a street named after him during the festival, and Martin was on hand with some fond memories of his co-star.

Holt “was always afraid if the studios found out what a great time we were having, they would cut our salaries,” he recalled during the panel session. Of course, the salaries were not too high to begin with, compared to today’s star paychecks--Martin sold swimming pools in his down time between shoots.

Martin started his show-business career as a receptionist with MGM, making $17.76 a week, he recalled in an interview in his Balboa Island home. His ambition was to be a makeup man, but, on a lark, one of his actor friends bet an agent that he couldn’t get Martin an acting contract.

A screen test with Fox didn’t go anywhere, but it led indirectly to a contract with RKO at $50 a week. That led to a string of bit parts in various A and B pictures. He met his wife, actress Elaine Riley, on the set of one film shot in Carmel, where a scheduled four-day shoot stretched to three weeks because of fog.

“It was a hell of a place to romance a gal, especially on the studio’s money,” Martin recalled. “Every morning we’d go out and sit around and wait for the fog to lift.”

It was in the 1943 war film “Bombardier,” with Pat O’Brien and Randolph Scott, in which Martin first developed the Chito character. Martin had grown up with some Latino children in his West Hollywood neighborhood during the Depression, and (in the days before ethnic authenticity was a consideration) affected an accent for the role.

The Chito character was enough of a hit to be carried over to a Zane Grey series. Martin shot two episodes starring Robert Mitchum before the latter got his career-making role in “G.I. Joe.” Martin was teamed up with James Warren in one episode before doing the last three films in the series with Tim Holt.

Martin’s partnership with Holt continued in 26 films with such titles as “Guns of Hate,” “Brothers in the Saddle” and “Dynamite Pass.” Typically, the movie interiors were shot in Hollywood before moving on to two weeks of location shooting, often in Lone Pine but also in other locations.

A bit of dialogue from 1948’s “The Arizona Ranger” tells the story of Martin’s character:

Cowhand: Say, Chito, you were pretty good with your dukes in that fight today.

Chito: Oh, that was easy. That’s the Irish in me.

Holt: Don’t let him fool you. He’s pretty good with the girls too.

Chito: Oh, that’s easy too. That’s the Spanish in me.

Cowhand: Hey, now, wait a minute. Are you an Irishman or a Mexican?

Chito: I’m both--Chito Jose Gonzales Bustamonte Rafferty. When Hughes pulled the plug on the series, Martin was too closely associated with the Chito role to get much work--which may be Hollywood’s only case of an Anglo being typecast as a Latino. It was about 10 years ago that he started getting fan mail again, along with videotaped copies of some of his old serials, some of which he never saw in their original run.

“I’m really impressed, and I’m also flattered that there’s that many people who are still fans of these movies,” Martin said. As for why they are still popular, Martin admitted, “I don’t know. I really don’t know. I wish I did. . . .

“It was a fun business. I love to ride horses. Tim Holt was such a neat guy,” Martin continued. “Picture people are a group all their own. I really enjoyed them. It was something different every day.”

A Black and White ‘Dreamscape’

LONE PINE

Among those attending this year’s Sierra Film Festival were a couple of video crews, one from the American Movie Classics cable network and one from BBC-TV.

The BBC crew was in town to tape a segment of a series called “Moving Pictures.” Producer Ian Whitcomb, a British expatriate living in Los Angeles, used to watch Westerns on the BBC in the early ‘50s, when he was a boy living outside London.

“I grew up on Hopalong Cassidy,” said Whitcomb, who is best known as a musician and music historian (he hosts a radio show on KPCC-FM). “This dreamscape--I just saw it in film after film and wondered, ‘Where the hell is that?’ ”

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago, when he was driving to Mammoth, that he found out it was Lone Pine. “I saw this place and it was like stepping into a dream,” Whitcomb said. “It looks better in black and white,” Whitcomb said, saying that black and white serves to underscore the unambiguous themes of good and evil that ran through the serials.

The film festival, with its home-grown feel, makes for just the sort of Americana that appeals to Whitcomb’s sensibilities. “It’s a very unusual festival. It’s not like Cannes,” he said, with British understatement. “I love this place, and I love Westerns.”