The Garner Files: A Memoir

by James Garner

  Fonda played Tom Joad, a young ex-convict whose family loses their farm in the Dust Bowl. With simple eloquence, he voices people’s outrage at the greedy bastards who got the country into the Great Depression. I still remember his line, “I’m just tryin’ to get along without shovin’ anybody.”

  Spencer Tracy was my all-time favorite. Though I was only nine or ten years old, I remember him as Father Flanagan in Boys Town and as a Portuguese fisherman in Captains Courageous. I couldn’t believe that one man could play such completely different characters so convincingly.

  I loved Western stars such as Hopalong Cassidy, Buck Jones, and especially Bob Steele, because he was a little bitty guy. He had to reach up to punch someone. He was a terrific athlete. He could run up and jump on a horse from behind and land smack in the saddle. I got to know Bob and played golf with him years later in Los Angeles. He was a good player and a wonderful guy. Everyone called him “the Little Sheriff.”

  We attended the McFarlin Methodist Church on Sundays. It wasn’t anything we enjoyed. Sometimes we’d set out for church dressed in our little black suits but take a detour to Massey’s drugstore. My father wasn’t much of a churchgoer, and Uncle John and Aunt Leone weren’t exactly devout, either. They were fair-weather Methodists: if it was raining too hard, they didn’t go. I count myself lucky they didn’t jump all over me with Jesus, or with that hellfire and damnation crap. I had a lot of doubt. There were just too many miracles in the Bible for me. I still feel that way, and I haven’t attended church since I was a teenager. I don’t like people who try to ram their religious beliefs down my throat. Hey, if it works for you, fine, but it doesn’t work for me, okay?

  On the other hand, more than once I’ve tried to pray my way out of a tight spot, all the while thinking, I wonder if this works.

  The Depression hit Oklahoma hard. Crop prices plunged and foreclosures and unemployment soared. There were bread lines, soup kitchens, and “Hoovervilles,” temporary settlements where the homeless lived in crates and cardboard boxes. Drought turned the overworked soil to dust, and when the winds came, big hunks of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Texas just blew away. They called it the Dust Bowl.

  Small farmers got wiped out. The land was useless, and many saw their houses destroyed by storms. Most were sharecroppers who didn’t own their farms, so the “Okies” packed up and pulled out, flooding the highways in their broken-down trucks and jalopies, just like in The Grapes of Wrath. Most drove west on Route 66 all the way to California. I remember seeing my father donate a few gallons of gas to countless travelers to help them get down the road.

  Norman fared a little better than the rural areas. I guess because the University of Oklahoma and the state mental hospital employed a lot of people. And there were WPA projects in Norman as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that put men to work constructing public buildings, many of which still stand.

  We got by. We didn’t have much, but nobody we knew had much either. We ate, slept, and played. What more could a kid want? I didn’t have any great desire for things, and still don’t.

  My father eventually remarried. Her name was Wilma, but everyone called her “Red,” because of her red hair. The family was reunited: Dad, Red, and my brothers and I all moved into a rented house together. But it wasn’t a happy home.

  Dad had hooked up with a man in Norman who owned two men’s stores. “Shorty” was about six-foot-five. Like my dad, he was a widower with three boys. They had something else in common: they both liked to drink whiskey. They spent a lot of time together, and Shorty provided work for Dad building cabinets for the stores. Dad was also a part-time fireman. He did whatever he could to make a living. He worked hard whenever there was work to be had, but he drank too much.

  Dad would come home drunk as a goat and make us sing for him or get a whipping. I hated to perform like that. I developed a phobia about getting up and talking in front of people. I wouldn’t have passed speech class if my football coach hadn’t been the teacher. To this day, I’m scared of public speaking. That’s why acting was hard for me at first. I had to make a conscious effort to get over my fears, and I’ve had to work hard at that easygoing manner you see on the screen. I’m okay in front of a camera because I’m surrounded by familiar faces and I know I can do it again if I mess up. But I could never have been a stage actor.

  It was a small house. From the room where my brother Jack and I slept we could hear everything my dad and stepmother did. They fought like two men. They got into some real knockdown, drag-outs, and she actually could knock my father down.

  Red was a nasty bitch. She enjoyed beating the bejesus out of us. Sometimes she’d make us go out and cut willow switches so she could whip our butts with them. Other times she’d fly into a rage for no reason and hit us with whatever was handy, whether a stick or a board or a spatula. She loved to hit me with a spatula, and she had a favorite one for the purpose. I’ll never forget that spatula.

  I don’t know why, but she picked on me especially. She gave me all the dirty chores, and when something needed to be blamed on someone, it was always me.

  Red singled out Jack for a different kind of abuse. “I lost my virginity to her when I was just a little kid,” he told me when we were teenagers. “I must have been in the third or fourth grade. I didn’t really know what the hell was going on at the time. Later I realized what she’d done. I try not to think about it.”

  On top of the beatings, Red liked to put me in a dress and make everyone call me “Louise.” Whenever I did anything wrong, I’d have to go put that dress on. My brothers would tease me and call me Louise and a fight would break out. And then I’d go hide. Now they’d put that woman in jail for what she did to us. But in those days nobody cared.

  I’ll tell you, it got to me. I became introverted, and it took a long time before I came out of my shell. I hated being ridiculed and never wanted to feel that way again. I think the experience shaped my acting style: I’ve always kept my tongue in my cheek and a twinkle in my eye because I want people to laugh with me, not at me. I don’t want them to think I take this play-acting thing too seriously. I think it also gave me sympathy for the underdog. I can’t stand to see big people picking on little people. If a director starts abusing someone in the crew, I’ll butt in.

  I finally took care of the problem with Red when I was fourteen. One day in the kitchen she raised her hand to me with that spatula and a voice inside me said, “You’re too old to take this anymore.”

  I flattened her with one punch.

  The next thing I knew I had her down and was choking her. Luckily, Dad and Jack came in just as she was turning purple and pulled me off her. Otherwise, I don’t think I’d have let go until she quit breathing, because I thought she’d kill me if she got up.

  Dad automatically took Red’s side. He and Jack held me down while she took her revenge with the spatula. But a few hours later, Dad asked her what I’d done to deserve a whipping in the first place.

  “Well, he did something,” she said.

  Dad wanted to know what.

  “I don’t remember, but I know he did something.”

  “You mean you were going to beat the hell out of the kid, but you don’t know what he did to deserve it?”

  They had it out right then and there. Red moved out of the house within a week, and Dad lit out for California soon thereafter, leaving us on our own again.

  Years later, while I was doing Maverick, I was in a parade in Norman. Both my brothers were there. We’d heard that Red was in town and we were scared, because Jack and I had said things about her that were quoted in the local paper. I thought she might blast me with a shotgun or try to pick me off from a window. It sounds paranoid, but we knew she was capable of murder and we went to the police. They assigned plainclothes officers to Bum and Jack. As the parade came through town, Jack kept pace with me down one side of the street and Bum down the other to protect me. I was out there riding in a covered wagon, smiling and wavin
g, all the while fearing I’d be shot at any second. Thank goodness, she didn’t show up.

  In my life, I’ve been on the wrong end of violence, and I’ve done violence myself. I’m not temperamental, but I do have a temper. Most of the time I direct it at myself. I think I’m harder on myself than I am with anybody else. Though I have a high boiling point and it takes a long time to get my goat, it can be got. I’ll accept a lot before I snap, but when I do snap, I kind of go blind. I don’t care what I do or what I say; I don’t care about anything or anybody. Or the future. When I’m like that, it’s best to stay out of my way. I’ve punched movie-set trailers out of frustration. I slugged a producer once. And I decked a guy on a golf course. In my opinion, they all deserved it. Except the trailers.

  I refuse to glorify violence in my movie and television roles. The characters I’ve played, especially Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford, almost never use a gun, and they always try to use their wits instead of their fists. My favorite film character, Charlie Madison in The Americanization of Emily, is a downright coward and proud of it.

  Though my brothers and I were separated a lot when we were young, we eventually got to know each other. Charles—“Bum”—was a natural leader and the worker in the bunch. He was always focused and would take charge while Jack and I would be screwing around. He was a surrogate father. I think he was the best of us.

  Bum could do anything with his hands. When he was still a teenager he wanted an electric guitar, so he made one. He could build furniture, rebuild a car motor, do leatherwork, and make jewelry. He was also a crack shot: serving aboard a navy minesweeper during World War II, he exploded mines by shooting them with a rifle from the deck of the ship.

  After the war, Bum got an industrial arts education degree from OU and went to work for the Norman school system teaching shop and mechanical drawing. If anything needed repairing at school, they’d come to him, and more often than not he’d fix it. He finally told the school board, “Either I’m going to be a teacher or a glorified janitor.” They didn’t want to lose him, so they promoted him to Assistant Superintendent, Director of Buildings and Grounds, and he thrived. He invented a special heating system and did architectural work on new school buildings. He eventually took charge of all the construction for Norman’s public schools.

  When Bum retired from the school system in 1982, he was immediately rehired as a consultant to manage new construction projects. He was looking forward to the part-time work and fishing the rest of the time. One weekend he drove up to a cabin on Lake Eufaula that he’d help build with his wife’s sister and her husband, Lorita and Bill Lewis. There by himself, he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of sixty.

  I still can’t believe he’s gone.

  When we were kids, Jack, two years older, would occasionally pull rank. Like the time I reached for the last piece of chicken-fried steak on the platter and he stabbed my hand with his fork. Then he lectured me: “Don’t ever take food out of my mouth.” It wasn’t too long before I got to where I could whip his butt and there were no more lectures.

  Jack was a hell of an athlete, and I always took a backseat to him. At Norman High, he was a point guard on a championship basketball team and quarterbacked an all-state football team. But his best sport was baseball: Jack was a pitcher in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization for eleven years. He was a better athlete than I was and a lot more outgoing. I was always in his footsteps.

  When Jack came out to California in the early 1960s, he changed his name to Garner as I’d done a few years before. He was a singer with the house band at the Ambassador Hotel for a while, and then he asked me to get him in the movies. I said no.

  “Why not?” he said. “You’re a big-time star now.”

  “Well, you’re my brother, and if I get you a job in the movies and you don’t pan out worth a damn, it’s not only bad for you, it’s bad for me. If you want to get in the movies, you’re going to have to do it yourself.”

  Jack got busy and worked in the business doing different television parts here and there. It was a good ten years before he ever worked with me. That didn’t change how we felt about each other, because I think Jack understood what I was talking about.

  It finally got to where occasionally Jack did work on my shows. But every time he did a Rockford episode, he had to go in and read. Sometimes he didn’t get the part, sometimes he did. But Jack worked on many other shows, too. In fact, he worked so much that he finally got a Screen Actors Guild pension. Jack’s day job was as a golf professional. He was a popular teaching pro in Los Angeles for thirty years. He’s retired now and lives in Palm Springs.

  The set-to with Red and my father’s departure for California when I was fourteen were my emancipation. The day my dad left Norman, he dropped me off at a dairy farm where he’d arranged for my room and board in return for doing chores. I slept on a cot in the cellar next to the washtub. I can still smell the damp laundry. And the cow shit, which I had to sweep up every morning. I lasted about three weeks.

  That’s when I began supporting myself. I got up at 3:30 every morning to sweep out the administration building at OU before going to my junior high classes. I understood right off that nothing would be given to me; still I daydreamed a rich relative somewhere would die and leave me a fortune.

  Didn’t happen.

  My father wasn’t bad. He just wasn’t there. He couldn’t handle the responsibility of raising three young boys. And he had several wives after my mother died, three or four; we’re not sure to this day. Dad got married for the last time when he was in his mid-sixties, to a sweet woman named Grace. I called her “Mama Grace” and I loved her. She was the closest I ever came to having a real mother.

  On my eighteenth birthday, I was in Odessa, Texas, out of work. The only thing I’d eaten in three days was the crackers I could steal off tables in restaurants. I called my father in California and said, “Dad, for my birthday, could you lend me fifty dollars?” And he said, “I’m sorry, son. I don’t have it.” Grace came on the line and said, “It’ll be there in the morning.” She wired the money, and I got back on my feet. I stood by her for the rest of her life.

  Dad and I got closer after I became an actor, and toward the end of his and Grace’s lives, I got to spend time with both of them. I eventually forgave my dad everything. He may have had a drinking problem and married the wrong women, but he wasn’t evil. He died in 1996 at the age of eighty-five. We lost Mama Grace in 2002.

  I’d started driving on country roads when I was ten and got my license the summer after I turned fourteen, when I was hired by a salesman for Curlee Clothes to drive him around the state of Texas. I was a combination chauffeur/traveling secretary/babysitter. I took care of the samples, kept the books, and tried to keep my boss away from whiskey. He had an ulcer and mixed his Scotch with milk. He wasn’t supposed to smoke, either, so I doled out his cigars. He’d take a suite at the Baker in Dallas or the Rice in Houston where he’d sit around all day drinking with the buyers. I’d end up doing the selling. The guy offered to adopt me, but I wanted to be on my own.

  I worked in food markets and clothing stores. I cut trees for the telephone company. I hauled Sheetrock. I was a dishwasher, a janitor, a dockworker, an oil field roughneck, and a carpet layer. I worked on a line cleaning chickens. (God help you if you accidentally nicked a gizzard.) I was a hod carrier on a construction site—that’s the guy who brings bricks to the bricklayer in a box at the end of a pole.

  I was also an insurance salesman, but not a very good one. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Here’s some widowed mother of three who can’t afford to put food on the table . . . I’d take one look at her and say, “No, ma’am, you don’t really need insurance.” Otherwise, I tried to give my all. I was usually the best worker they had, though I never really liked to work and never stayed on a job more than a few months. I don’t think I was ever fired, but I’d quit as soon as I’d saved enough money to coast for a while.

  In those days, I went w
hichever way the wind blew. I had no ambition and wasn’t interested in getting an education. I just drifted here and there. I never had a job I liked enough to stick with until I took up acting, though it would be two or three years before I began to enjoy it.

  When people ask me if I had a “bad” childhood, I’m never sure how to answer. I just did what was necessary. I had to make a living, because nobody was supporting me. While other kids my age had chores and allowances and curfews, I was holding down grown-up jobs because I had to feed myself and put clothes on my back and a roof over my head. It was simply a matter of survival. People have said it’s right out of Dickens, but I didn’t think I had it tough, because it was all I knew.

  Looking back, I think I was better off having to do it earlier than later. Tell you what: You want to put pressure on somebody, live through the Depression. In Oklahoma. In the dust. After that, studio executives don’t bother you at all.

  Growing up in Norman I was lucky to have two great friends, Bill D. Saxon and Jim Paul Dickenson.

  I’ve known “Billy Dee” almost my whole life. We’re the same age. We went through grade school and junior high together, and we’ve stayed best friends these many years. Bill’s late wife, Wylodean, was also a dear lifelong friend. She was in my class all through school. Over the years, she always welcomed me to the Saxon home, where I spent a lot of time. Most important, Wylodean made chicken-fried steak just the way I like it.

  When I was growing up, Bill’s family lived on the street behind us, and our back porches faced each other. I remember playing with him along a little creek that ran between the houses. When we were in our early teens, Bill and I worked together at a combination feed store and hatchery. We’d drive the truck to take feed and seed out to people, and we’d bring back chickens.

  Bill’s dad and another man owned a bank south of Norman in a little town called Paoli, Oklahoma. They had all their money loaned out on broomcorn and cotton. When the Depression hit, the bottom dropped out of the market for both crops. The bank went belly-up and Mr. Saxon came back to Norman, where relatives took him in and helped him get back on his feet.