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What they saw was a very lightly managed natural wonderland, both on land and beneath the sea—Wrigley also kept afleet of glass-bottom boats so that people could safely admire the marine life.
    Most of the tourists were day-trippers, but they left a lot of money behind. I’ve been told that George S. Patton met his wife Beatrice on Catalina when they were children, but I’m not old enough to know if that’s true.
    The movies came to Catalina gradually. In 1920 Harry Houdini did some filming there for Terror Island . Buster Keaton’s The Navigator was filmed off Avalon Bay. And whenever the studios needed a place to stand in for the South Pacific, they usually went to Catalina, as MGM did for the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty .
    By then Wrigley had built a splendid Art Deco dance hall called the Catalina Casino, which opened in 1929; the lower level houses a theater, the upper level the world’s largest circular ballroom. The influx of population made the island a kind of artist’s colony. Not only that, but the Chicago Cubs, which just happened to be owned by Wrigley, trained on the island from 1921 to 1951, with time out for World War II, when the island was used as a military training facility. From Wrigley’s study, he could watch the Cubs work out their winter kinks during spring training.
    In the days before and after the war, Catalina was all about yachting, although there was also a smattering of aviators. The boaters clustered at either the Hotel St. Catherine or the La Conga Club, which had a private dock reserved for members’ boats. There were two yacht clubs: the Catalina Island Yacht Club in Avalon Bay, and the Isthmus Yacht Club in Two Harbors, whose building was built in 1864 as barracks for the Union Army. Then there was Moonstone Cove, a private cove operated by the Newport Harbor Yacht Club, and White’s Landing, just west of Moonstone, with two yacht club camps. I had a mooring at Emerald Bay for years.
    Catalina offered superb fishing; the waters were roiling with garibaldi, yellowtail, kelp, white sea bass, giant sea bass, and bonito. And there were great numbers of abalone, although now they’ve been fished out.
    Beyond fish that made for great eating, there were also barracuda, bat rays, horn sharks, and the occasional great white shark, the latter of which usually appeared on the west—or ocean—side of the island. I also remember the awe-inspiring sight of large schools of flying fish sailing out of the water.
    It was in the 1930s that Catalina became a getaway for Hollywood folks. It now seems that I must have spent half my adolescence and young manhood on Catalina, and the other half at the Bel Air Country Club. How lucky can you get? I began spending a great deal of time at Catalina right after the war. John Ford and his crew of reprobates all docked their yachts at Avalon. Ward Bond was always there, as was Ford’s daughter Barbara and, for a time, her fiancé Robert Walker, who was unsuccessfully trying to get over his broken marriage to Jennifer Jones. Wherever you found John Ford and Ward Bond, you also found John Wayne, not to mention character actors like Paul Fix.
    Ford’s group began organizing a series of softball games, and I was an occasional participant. I was Mr. Eager, happy to play anywhere, just to play. Mainly, I was at first base. Duke Wayne and Ward Bond had been football players at USC, and they were both natural athletes who also knew how to play baseball. The surprising thing was how competitive the games were. It was only a pickup game of softball, but as far as Wayne and Bond were concerned, it could have been the World Series—they both played to win. Ford was always there, but he didn’t actually take part much, which was odd, because he had been a champion athlete in high school.
    Catalina also played a big part in my becoming an actor. It was while spending time on the island that I met Stanley Anderson. His stepdaughter had been hurt in an