VMS Help FORTRAN, Data, Types, Character  *Conan The Librarian (sorry for the slow response - running on an old VAX)

  A character string is a contiguous sequence of bytes in memory.  A
  character string is specified by two attributes:  the address of
  the first byte of the string and the length of the string in bytes.
  The length of the string must be in the range 1 through 65535.

  Hollerith constants are stored internally, one character per byte.