The Garner Files: A Memoir

by James Garner

  Paddy Chayefsky broke a lot of rules, including the old Hollywood taboo against trying to make “message” pictures. (Sam Goldwyn warned screenwriters: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”) Paddy’s movies and plays are full of messages. I think his message here is that sentimentality is as much a cause of war as greed or racism or religious hatred. A lot of antiwar movies are preachy, but not this one. As Charlie says, “I’m not sentimental about war. I see nothing noble in widows.” But the picture isn’t really antiwar. It allows that sometimes war is necessary, like when you have to defend yourself from an invader. But don’t make war seem so wonderful that kids want to make “the ultimate sacrifice” when they grow up. If we ever want to end war, we have to stop building shrines to dead soldiers—they just perpetuate the carnage. The most patriotic thing we can do is be yellow for our country. As Charlie Madison says:

  War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best; the highest morality he’s capable of. It’s not war that’s insane, you see. It’s the morality of it. It’s not greed or ambition that makes war: it’s goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons: for liberation or manifest destiny. Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity. So far this war, we’ve managed to butcher some ten million humans in the interest of humanity. Next war it seems we’ll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity. It’s not war that’s unnatural to us, it’s virtue. As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So, I preach cowardice. Through cowardice, we shall all be saved.

  In a long scene with Emily and her mother, played by Joyce Grenfell, Charlie gets up on a soapbox to make his point about cowards saving the world. We’re having tea in the backyard—sorry, the “garden”—and I just talk and talk. Joyce would ask me a question and I’d do two pages and then Julie would say, “Isn’t that wonderful,” and I’d do two or three more. I think the whole speech was eleven or twelve pages. It says, in part:

  I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades . . . we shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows’ weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices. My brother died at Anzio—an everyday soldier’s death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud.

  I worked on it a lot at home, and we rehearsed it so much it was probably the best speech I ever gave in terms of understanding what I was saying. But at the end of day, I wasn’t happy with my work in the scene. I asked Arthur if we could do it over. He reshot the close-ups, but I don’t think it helped much. I failed to do the job I wanted to do.

  I have to say that if I’m not a downright hypocrite, I am, at the very least, inconsistent. Though I’ve never thought war is noble, and though I always understood the absurdity and brutality of it, I still wanted the Purple Hearts I’d earned in Korea and went out of my way to get the medals. So I contributed to the problem by buying into the whole glorification of war thing. Maybe I’m splitting hairs, but in truth I don’t want Korean War vets glorified, I just want them recognized for their service along with vets of other wars. It’s a fine line.

  The Americanization of Emily got good notices from the “important” critics. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that it “says more for basic pacifism than a fistful of intellectual tracts” and he also found it “highly entertaining.” But the picture was a commercial failure. After Julie won her Oscar for Mary Poppins, the studio tried to capitalize by reissuing it with the shortened title Emily, but that didn’t make it a woman’s picture and didn’t help at the box office. Ted Turner colorized it, then saw the light and apologized. A legal dispute kept it unavailable until 2005, when a court decision rescued it from obscurity. You can see it now, uncut and uncolorized.

  The Americanization of Emily is my favorite of all the films I’ve done. Julie has said it’s one of her favorites—as did Jimmy Coburn and Marty Ransohoff. Paddy once said that it was one of his two favorites, along with The Hospital. I think it was ahead of its time. When it was released in 1964, the country was still in turmoil after the Kennedy assassination, and the public hadn’t yet turned against the Vietnam War. Most Americans who saw the picture were outraged by it. It was, after all, the first major Hollywood picture with a hero who was proud to be a coward. But its message dovetailed with the growing conviction that Vietnam wasn’t worth dying for. Audiences have come around to it, and it’s now a cult favorite and a minor classic.

  Unfortunately, it hasn’t put war out of style.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Politics

  I’m a “bleeding-heart liberal,” one of those card-carrying Democrats that Rush Limbaugh thinks is a communist. I’m proud of it. And proud to have been part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, when 250,000 Americans of every age, race, and religion came to the nation’s capital to support passage of a landmark civil rights bill.

  I was there for one reason: I didn’t think it was right that a hundred years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans still didn’t have basic rights of citizenship. In the South they couldn’t vote or sit together with whites on a bus, they couldn’t eat at the same restaurants or use the same water fountains or restrooms. Black children couldn’t go to school with white children or use public swimming pools or libraries. Things weren’t much better in the North, where blacks were relegated to inferior schools and low-paying jobs.

  President John F. Kennedy proposed a bill to remedy the situation, but there was strong opposition in Congress and the bill wasn’t given much chance. A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, came up with the idea of a mass demonstration, a “living petition” to pressure Congress to do the right thing. He enlisted master organizer Bayard Rustin, who’d been fighting racism since the 1930s. A coalition of unions, churches, and civil rights groups joined in support.

  In hindsight, the march was a turning point in the civil rights struggle. It was the largest demonstration for equality in American history, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his now legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. But in the weeks before the march, there were serious doubts.

  The summer of 1963 had been a violent one. African Americans who dared to protest in public had been jailed, beaten, and even killed. Alabama governor George Wallace declared: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” In Birmingham, Bull Connor turned fire hoses and attack dogs on peaceful demonstrators and put two thousand children in jail.

  In that atmosphere, we didn’t know if hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi Party would attack the marchers. A few black leaders, including Malcolm X, were advocating violent revolution, so no one could guarantee that the marchers themselves would be peaceable. And while organizers hoped for one hundred thousand marchers, there was no telling how many would show up.

  About a week before the march, with the press warning that a large mob would be uncontrollable and with critics claiming the march was a communist plot to overthrow the government, President Kennedy tried to stop it. He thought the sight of thousands of blacks parading in the streets of Washington would anger whites and hurt the civil rights bill rather than help it. But when the leaders refused to cancel the march, Kennedy endorsed it.

  March organizers insisted on a peaceful protest in line with the nonviolent picketing, sit-ins, and boycotts that had been going on in the South. Bayard Rustin tried to ensure an orderly crowd through careful planning: he secured plenty o
f pay phones, water fountains, and portable toilets along the route, had thousands of box lunches on hand, and somehow convinced local police to patrol the crowd in plainclothes so as not to intimidate marchers.

  On a warm, sunny Wednesday, hundreds of “freedom buses,” “freedom trains,” and chartered airline flights converged on the city carrying marchers from all over the country. I flew in the day before on the “celebrity plane” that Harry Belafonte had arranged. For security, we weren’t told when and where to board until the last minute. The night before the march, FBI agents called the “celebrities” one by one and warned us to stay away, saying they couldn’t guarantee our safety.

  The Hollywood contingent included Charlton Heston, Sidney Poitier, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Blake Edwards, Rita Moreno, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll, Sam Peckinpah, Sammy Davis Jr., Anthony Franciosa, Tony Curtis, and Marlon Brando.

  Before we left Los Angeles, Chuck Heston, the Screen Actors Guild president and self-appointed leader of our group, presided over a planning meeting where Marlon held up a cattle prod that had been used against demonstrators in Gadsden, Alabama. Marlon wanted us all to chain ourselves to the Lincoln Memorial. Chuck didn’t like that. He said we should play by the rules and threatened to bail out of the march if we did any “militant” stuff. Marlon shut up and we did it Chuck’s way.

  I was not a fan of Heston’s, either as an actor—he was stiff as a board—or as a defender of civil rights. It turned out my instincts were right. About a year after the March on Washington, during the 1964 presidential race between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, Heston had an epiphany. Stuck in traffic in his limousine on the way to the studio one morning, he looked up at a campaign billboard with a photograph of Barry Goldwater and the slogan, “In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right.” Chuck stared at that billboard and said to himself, “Sonofabitch—in my heart, I do know he’s right!” That was it. That was how Chuck Heston went from liberal to conservative, from the SAG president who marched for civil rights to the NRA president who said they’d have to pry his gun from his “cold, dead hands.”

  We got a lot of flak for joining the march, and there was pressure from the Hollywood establishment. When a studio head told Paul Newman that our presence would alienate Southern theater and TV station owners, Paul said, “I’m not going to ignore a great injustice merely because it might be bad for business.”

  That about says it all. Civil rights is a matter of conscience. I had to express myself on the issue because I’m a citizen as well as an actor. It’s not only my right to speak out—it’s my responsibility. If my celebrity draws extra attention to my cause, all the better.

  Marchers assembled at the Washington Monument and walked the mile or so up the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial, where entertainers performed and leaders gave speeches from a temporary podium in front of Lincoln’s statue.

  The great Jackie Robinson, the first black baseball player in the major leagues, was there with his young son. The writer James Baldwin and the entertainer Josephine Baker flew in from Paris. The comedian Dick Gregory was there. Marian Anderson sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Bobby Darin, Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Odetta, and Mahalia Jackson all sang.

  Roy Wilkins announced the death of NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois in Ghana the day before. Walter Reuther of the AFL-CIO, John Lewis of SNCC, and Whitney Young of the National Urban League all gave short speeches. James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality sent a letter from his jail cell in Louisiana, where he’d been arrested during a demonstration.

  Dr. King was the last speaker. I was seated in the third row when, standing before the columns of the Lincoln Memorial, he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. I’ve never experienced such powerful oratory before or since, and I knew I was witnessing history.

  We heard later that the “I Have a Dream” section was not part of Dr. King’s prepared text. He had improvised it, inspired by the occasion and by Mahalia Jackson, who, seated behind him, leaned down and whispered, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” She’d heard him talk about “the dream” in an earlier speech.

  The March on Washington was, as Dr. King called it, “the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation,” and a resounding victory for the cause of civil rights in America, leading to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it wasn’t the end of the struggle: Two weeks later a bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan members exploded in the basement of a black church in Birmingham, killing four young girls. Three months later, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Five years later, on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was struck down in Memphis.

  Everybody I knew in Oklahoma was a Democrat, but the first time I voted, in 1952, it was for Eisenhower. I felt we needed a strong military man in there because the world was in turmoil. I learned my lesson. Never voted Republican again. I don’t understand the conservative way of thinking. The next time I voted, it was for Stevenson. I think he’s still the most intelligent presidential candidate we’ve ever had. I think Obama runs a close second.

  In 1962, they asked me to run for Congress on the Republican ticket. It didn’t stop them when I told them I was a Democrat. They didn’t know anything about me, and they didn’t care about my politics. They just thought I could win.

  The Democrats wanted me to run for governor of California in 1990. A group from the party came over to the house. The discussion soon got around to the issue of abortion and they asked my opinion.

  “I don’t have an opinion,” I said, “because that’s up to the woman. It has nothing to do with me.”

  “Well, you can’t say that. They’ll kill you.”

  “What do you mean, I can’t say that? It’s how I feel, and I’m not going to say anything else.”

  They sat there for a few more minutes trying to get me to change my mind, then they got up and left.

  It was reported during the 2008 presidential campaign that I took out an injunction against John McCain to stop him from calling himself a maverick. I was quoted as saying:

  “Maverick, my chapped old-man ass! Ask anyone and they’ll tell you, I was the original Maverick! I was a maverick back when you were just another asshole in danger of failing out of Annapolis! I played the title role of Maverick on ABC between 1957 and 1960. That means I’ve been Maverick to two hundred million Americans for fifty-one years! Take it from me, young man, the camera may love you, but you sure as shit ain’t no maverick.”

  I want to squash this rumor once and for all: It was a hoax. I never said it. Let me make it crystal clear: I never said any of those things.

  But I wish I had.

  I’m tired of hearing that actors shouldn’t take positions on public issues. We’re citizens, and I think it’s our obligation to take a stand. But there’s a big difference between speaking out and holding office, which involves abilities actors don’t have. Unfortunately, a lot of people in office don’t have those abilities, either.

  Too many actors have run for office. There’s one difference between me and them: I know I’m not qualified. In my opinion, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t qualified to be governor of California. Ronald Reagan wasn’t qualified to be governor, let alone president. I was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president. My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That’s no way to run a union, let alone a state or a country.

  My decision not to run for governor was also influenced by Lois’s reaction to the idea. Her exact words were: “I’d rather die.” But Lois is very passionate about issues. She writes letters. Sometimes, when she’s really passionate, she says, “Jimmy, I want you to sign this one, too.” I have a standard answer for that: “Yes, dear.”

  The cause closest to my heart is the environment. Lois and I supported the efforts to prevent oil drilling al
ong the Southern California coast, to stop logging in Northern California forests, and to create a nature conservancy in the Santa Monica Mountains. Is there anything more crucial or more urgent than saving the planet?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Racing

  Late in 1965, I heard that John Frankenheimer was about to direct a big-budget, CinemaScope feature about Formula One racing. I’d done a series of small films and felt I needed an “epic,” so I had my agent get the script. I didn’t know that Steve McQueen had already been signed for the part.

  As it happened, Steve couldn’t get along with the producer, Ed Lewis, so he backed out of the picture, flew to Taiwan to make The Sand Pebbles instead, and I got the part, even though Frankenheimer had wanted an unknown to play Pete Aron. I think he was looking for someone he could control. He had worked a lot with Burt Lancaster, and Burt always had an opinion, so Frankenheimer didn’t want anyone with an opinion. But both Ed Lewis and the studio wanted me, and they overruled Frankenheimer.

  Just to be nice, I called Steve to tell him. When I said, “Steve, I’m gonna do Grand Prix,” there was about a twenty-five-dollar silence. He finally wished me luck, and I didn’t think any more about it. But Steve wouldn’t talk to me for a long time afterward. He eventually made his own racing picture, originally called The Champions, directed by John Sturges. It came out in 1971, retitled Le Mans. Years later, Steve’s wife, Neile, said he resented me for taking the part, even though he’d already turned it down.

  The movie follows four drivers through a season of racing for the world championship in the Grand Prix series. Antonio Sabato plays a promising rookie, Yves Montand a former champion at the end of his career, and Brian Bedford a Scotsman recovering from a crash. My character, Pete Aron, is an American trying to make a comeback after being thrown off his racing team for recklessly causing injury to a fellow driver. Eva Marie Saint, Jessica Walter, and Françoise Hardy play the love interests, but the story is pure soap opera.