WING MAN

"RESPECT FOR NATURE, RESPECT FOR ALL RELIGIONS, AND RESPECT FOR THE CREATOR, WHATEVER HE OR SHE MAY BE CALLED."

off-reservation. First among these is the Religious Freedom Restora-tion Act of 1993, which says that governments may not “substantially burden religious exercise without compelling justification.” Thanks to casino and resort income, many tribes now have the resources to hire lawyers and pursue expensive legal action. And Williams has noted an interesting phenomenon: “The tribes that have been most successful at gaming operations are the same ones that have been most committed to culture and language preservation. It's no different from the non-Indian world: Culture and religion always require subsidies.” But a positive benefit for non-Indian cultures might be a reappraisal of the way we relate to nature. Leopold has pointed the direction: Let us quit thinking about land and the biotic community in terms of economic value, he wrote. Assume that everything has value and a right to exist. Only then can humans avoid destroying some vital link in the web that we don't yet understand.

Essayist Scott Russell Sanders, another white man who might be accused of thinking like an Indian, has written that sacred stories in all cultures “arise from our intuition that beneath the flow of Creation there is order.” After my conversation with Villareal and Allison-Ray at the Sher-aton, I drive a few miles to the South Mountain foothills and park, where I walk for a mile or two along an arroyo bed. A bit of the arroyo has been professionally landscaped for the benefit of the nearby sub-urban development. The banks are lined with staked mesquite and paloverde trees; the riverbed has been raked clean and dotted with strategic boulders to discourage off-roaders.

After a few hundred feet, the landscaping yields to the scruffy chaos of nature. As a creature of civilization, I instinctively feel more com-fortable in the tended landscape. But it's the other one - the scruffy, unkempt wrinkle in the desert - where the true underlying order resides, because it will maintain itself without intervention. That is the truly sacred, the place where we go to try to understand Creation.

WING MAN Bill Brooks' instructions were cryptic: “Fly to Orange County, California, pick up J.W’ and fly him to ‘Pop’s ranch.” But since the instructions came from William Randolph Hearst Jr., son of the billionaire publishing mogul, and “Pop’s ranch” was Hearst Castle, Brooks didn’t ask any questions.

He arrived at the airport announcing, “I’m here to pick up J.W.” A 6-foot-4-inch man in a floppy hat turned around. It was John Wayne. When Brooks respectfully addressed him as “Mr. Wayne,” the actor set him straight. “The name’s Duke,” he said, removing his hat to reveal a toupee-less bald patch. And that, as they say in Hollywood, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Just how Bill Brooks, a Phoenix native with ranch roots, became not only the personal pilot for John Wayne and a coterie of celebrities, but also hosted his own cooking show, became a judo master and even trained as an astronaut is a story more improbable than any movie plot.

Born in 1931, Brooks was raised by his maternal grandparents in Phoenix but spent much of his time at his paternal grandparents' ranch near Sulphur Springs. There, his grandmother, a Comanche Indian, taught young Brooks how to cook Mexican food for the ranch hands, who were all Mexican cowboys. His prowess with picante sauce would change his life. So would Barry Goldwater.

One day, the future U.S. senator who happened to be Brooks' scoutmaster in the Boy Scouts invited Brooks to help him deliver watermelons in his private plane to Prescott. After they gained altitude, Goldwater turned the controls over to the 14-year-old, who flew the plane for a half-hour. Brooks was bitten by the aviation bug. On his 16th birthday, he earned two licenses: a driver's and a pilot's, the latter funded by his somewhat skeptical stepfather. No one but his grandmother had the chutzpah to fly with the teenaged aviation sensation. So, he fitted her with a leather helmet, put her in the backseat of an old biplane, and they took off from Phoenix's Air Haven Airport to soar over the vast patchwork of farmland and citrus groves. “After that,” Brooks boasts, “I was mighty popular with the girls.” As a teenager, the ranch-bred boy also embraced the role of wrangler. With his skill on horseback and his uniform of Levi's, boots and a Stetson, he applied and was quickly hired as an extra in “a whole bunch of those cheap B-Westerns filmed in Sedona and the Granite Dells near Prescott,” he says.

Brooks' cinematic résumé reads like the marquee at a John Wayne movie marathon: Angel and the Bad Man, filmed in Sedona; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, set in Monument Valley; Rio Grande, shot in Moab, Utah; and several more. It was during these summers that Brooks first met the Duke, who wasn't above partying with the entire crew, including wide-eyed young extras.

As the boy became a man, he traded biplanes for B-29 bombers in the Air Force during the Korean War. “Young boys in those days wanted to be soldiers or pilots,” Brooks reminisces. Because his general believed all crewmembers should be able to defend themselves, Brooks learned judo at the Kodo-kan School in Tokyo, earning his black belt.

But he got “mighty lonesome” overseas, so while on leave he asked his sweetheart, Martha, to marry him. He finished his duty at home with the Phoenix Air Guard.

The 1950s and '60s were busy decades for Bill and Martha Brooks. Bill held a steady job as an engineer for the Mountain States Telephone Co. He became chief judo instructor at the Phoenix YMCA, coaching Martha to black-belt status and a national women's judo championship title. The couple had two daughters, Paige and Gail, and a son, William T. Brooks IV. “Every time we stopped at an air base, we had another kid,” Bill jokes. “Nobody ever told us what was making it happen.” Brooks also published a cookbook, If You Like It Hot, featuring the Mexican-food recipes his grandmother taught him. He competed on the chili-cooking circuit, which earned him the nickname "Chili Bill" and took him to such far-flung, non-chili-eating locales as Hawaii, Cancun and Tokyo. "It's like playing professional golf, only you're cooking chili," explains Brooks, who eventually became a chili champion. His secret? "Only meat, no beans." Plus, he cooked a Southwestern chili like his grandmother taught him, which means spicy. "A lot of Eastern people... their chili was more like a spaghetti sauce," he scoffs.

After 15 years, Brooks felt that his engineer career was stagnating. Then, in 1966 an opportunity arose in the form of pancakes. Brooks' father and a business partner had bought the Golden Carriage Pancake House in San Simeon, California, but spent more time bickering than baking. The father wanted out and offered to sell the business to Bill for $10,000.

"I was never the kind who could settle down to one thing," Brooks says. So he and Martha sold their house in Chandler and moved to San Simeon, at the foot of Hearst Castle.

Despite all the pancakes, two very lean years followed, as the castle had not caught on yet as a tourist destination. When it did become a tourist site, "We got so many customers we didn't know what to do," Brooks recalls. "We hired every kid in high school." The tourism boom brought the Brookses enough cash to build an adjacent 50-unit motel - the Golden Carriage Inn - and eventually buy the Paso Robles Flying Service at nearby Paso Robles Municipal Airport. Through the flying service, he signed a gem of a contract: to fly the Hearst family, which he would do for nearly 10 years. "We became pretty good friends," says Brooks of William Randolph Hearst Jr., who invited the Brookses to weekends at his mansions. The couple hobnobbed with international tycoons, marveled at the goldplated bathroom fixtures and slept in a bed once graced by John F. Kennedy. Though Martha was concerned that she and Bill were out of their league, the two became an instant hit with the crowds of celebrities, none of whom were airplane-flying, chili-cooking judo masters.

Brooks soon launched a small commuter airline, Golden Carriage Air, and two judo schools, recruiting instructors from his former school in Japan. He and Martha also sponsored a stock car dubbed "Golden Carriage," which led Brooks to a first-place win in an owners' and mechanics' race.

The Golden Carriage businesses became a family affair: Martha worked the cash register, Bill Jr. washed dishes, Paige and Gail served pancakes, and Bill flew the planes. Through his connection with the Hearsts, Bill piloted celebs Loretta Young, Jane Russell, Irene Dunn and, of course, John Wayne.

John Wayne didn't remember Bill Brooks as a B-Western actor, but their friendship grew at 6,000 feet as they flew between California and Wayne's Arizona ranches - Red River Ranch near Casa Grande and 26 Bar Ranch near Eagar. Brooks' chili recipe, which he dubbed "Duke's Chili," became Wayne's favorite (though Wayne liked to spike it with three shots of tequila). When Wayne was filming Brannigan in London, he phoned Brooks and asked him to send 5 gallons of his chili