The Garner Files: A Memoir

by James Garner

  We entered long-distance endurance events—LeMans, Daytona, Sebring. We raced two cars and kept a third as a backup. At our first Daytona, our Lolas finished second and seventh.

  In those days auto racing was friendly competition. You thought nothing of helping a competitor fix his car during a race. I remember doing that for Roger Penske at Sebring. To me that’s what racing is all about.

  It was fun and exciting owning AIR while it lasted, but I disbanded the team at the end of 1969 after discovering that racing is a big commitment of time and money. I didn’t have enough of either to continue.

  We chronicled AIR’s 1969 season in The Racing Scene, a ninety-minute documentary directed by former ABC Sports director Andy Sidaris and written by William Edgar. The film follows us as we race at Daytona, Sebring, and on the Formula A circuit at Lime Rock and St. Jovite. The title sequence shows Scooter Patrick and me driving in the Baja 1000.

  I couldn’t drive in Formula A because I was busy working. Even if I’d had the time, the insurance companies wouldn’t have covered me. But for some reason they did allow me to drive in the Baja 1000. I’m not sure why they made that exception. Maybe they thought it was a rally because there were checkpoints. Whatever the reason, I’m glad I fell through that crack.

  First run in 1967, the Baja 1000 is the granddaddy of off-road races and the longest nonstop, point-to-point race in the world, running over a thousand kilometers through the beautiful desolation of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula from Ensenada, 100 miles south of San Diego, to La Paz, near the peninsula’s southern tip.

  The Baja had already been a popular playground for dune buggy and dirt bike enthusiasts, so it was a natural for a big off-road race. The course starts on the Pacific Ocean side of Baja California in Ensenada and zigzags from east to west.

  It’s an eerie, majestic, untamed landscape where the terrain changes suddenly and drastically, going from seaside to desert, mountains to cactus forest, salt marsh to lava field. There’s every road hazard you can imagine: auto parts, fenders, and tires litter the course; there are steep grades, sharp switchbacks, rocks, washouts, sand pits, sagebrush, scorpions, poisonous snakes, and blinding, smothering silt beds. The most feared hazard of all, silt is like talcum powder. It can be several feet deep with sharp ruts at the bottom. The silt cloud gets so thick, you just point the car, put your foot down, and hope.

  If all that weren’t enough, the course is open to local traffic during the race! Livestock wanders onto the course. Spectators build hidden ramps to send vehicles airborne to enhance their viewing pleasure. Nobody sells tickets; people just walk onto the course and stand there, a few feet from the action. There can be tree trunks across the road and other fun-loving sabotage, like when spectators switch course markers to lead drivers astray. One year there was even a speed trap: a pair of enterprising local cops pulled competitors over during the race to sell them tickets to the policeman’s ball.

  Baja 1000 drivers are celebrities in Mexico, where they’re admired for their proficiency and daring. The greats from all forms of auto racing have driven there: Indy Car racers Johnny Unser, Jimmy Vasser, Roberto Guerrero, Danny Sullivan, and Mario Andretti (“You don’t fall asleep at the Baja,” Mario said); desert racers Rod Hall, Larry Roeseler, and Ron Bishop; and NASCAR champions Jimmie Johnson and Robby Gordon. Robby was one of the best I ever saw down there. He was so good, I swear he hardly ever touched the ground. And there were sports car drivers like Paul Newman who, in 2004 at the age of seventy-nine, was the oldest person ever to compete in the Baja 1000. Paul was good. Very precise. In the 1970s and ’80s, “P. J. Newman” won a bunch of SCCA (Sports Car Club of America) national titles. In ’78, he won his class at LeMans and finished second overall.

  The first official Baja 1000, in 1967, had sixty-five entries. Now the vehicles are all high-tech, with factory support teams and corporate sponsors. But back in the old days, it was friendly and relaxed. There were hardly any rules and very little prize money. Everyone was there for the fun of taking part in a crazy carnival.

  I drove the Baja five or six times, beginning in 1968. That year there were 250 entries, half of which didn’t finish. (In 2010, there were more than 1,200 entries.) I finished the race every year, whether in a truck or car, which is a testament to the people who built the vehicles, not the driver.

  In ’68, Larry Bergquist and Gary Preston finished first overall on a motorcycle. Larry Minor and Jack Bayer finished first in their class in the Number 3 Bronco, but not before hitting a cow on the way in. I drove the Number 59 Bronco with Scooter Patrick and we came in fourth in our class.

  Scooter and I split the driving, but you couldn’t get any rest while your partner was behind the wheel because it was such a rough ride. You had to vise-grip the handles on the side of the car just to stay in it.

  Another year I started from Ensenada while my codriver (and future Rockford assistant director) Cliff Coleman flew to El Larco, five hundred miles farther south. Cliff, a good night driver, took over there and finished the race.

  A word about Cliff: He’s crazy as hell, but he’s a good man to have around. In addition to his talents on a sound stage, Cliff is a terrific cook. Whenever we were stuck in a little Mexican village, he’d go to the local grocery and pick up canned meats and whip up a stew or some eggs and hash. He’s also a mechanic and a carpenter. I used to tell everybody, “Don’t go anywhere without Cliff.”

  Anybody can enter the Baja 1000 with almost any kind of vehicle, and there are now more than forty classes: small- or large-bore motorcycles, dune buggies, stock VW bugs, trucks, custom desert vehicles, ATVs. Each class goes off separately, the faster ones first. The heavyweights are the trophy trucks, the largest and fastest vehicles in the race, some with 800-horsepower, V-8 engines. These monsters can reach speeds of 140 miles per hour and cost $1 million to set up for the race.

  For a couple of years we ran Ford Broncos prepared by Bill Stroppe. They were good, rugged vehicles, but they weren’t pretty. People were always coming up and asking, “Are you really gonna race in that thing?”

  The 1963 Indy 500 winner Parnelli Jones was on the Bronco team. Parnelli, who won the Baja 1000 twice, said the race was “like being in a twenty-four-hour plane crash.” He’d go out in pre-runs and mark bad spots in the road with pink toilet paper and silver tape so we could see them at night.

  Parnelli and I became good friends. In 1970, his Bronco broke down, so we picked him up and gave him a ride hanging on our roll bar. After we got in, I thought I saw the imprint of his face on it. Another time he broke a steering rod, so I took two open-end wrenches, put one on this nut and one on the other, wired it together, secured it with 200-mph tape, and it held.

  I changed a tire during the race one year and forgot to strap down the tools when I put them back in the trunk. Every time I hit a bump, they rattled around, making a tremendous racket. After the race, I looked in. The tools had scoured all the paint off the inside of the trunk. It looked like someone had gone in and polished it.

  Vic Hickey, a senior engineer at General Motors, designed the Oldsmobile Banshee in 1972. I drove it in the Baja 1000 a couple of times and managed to come in second in my class one year. I was interested in the development of the car, so I would drop in on weekends while it was being built. I’d remembered that Formula One cars had the engine positioned toward the rear instead of in front, to prevent the weight from making the car nose down when it went airborne after hitting a bump. So we put the Banshee’s engine next to the driver. With all that weight in the right-center and my weight on the left-center to balance it out, the Banshee flew straight and landed flat, a big advantage in both handling and safety.

  The Banshee was unique for its time. It looked like an Olds Cutlass, but shorter and wider. It had a 500-horsepower aluminum block engine to give it a little more power. The Banshee placed high in a few races and won the Riverside Grand Prix, even though I hit the sand and had to jump the car into a mud pond near the start/finish. I was so disg
usted with myself, I jumped out of the car and smashed my helmet on the ground. (The crowd loved that.) I also rolled it a few times in a practice run, but it was strong enough to protect me.

  Steve McQueen and Bud Ekins, who’d done the motorcycle jump for Steve in The Great Escape, drove the Vic Hickey–designed Baja Boot, a four-wheel-drive vehicle custom-made by GM. Steve was a good driver, but nobody else was as good as he was, according to him. He was competitive with me, but it wasn’t mutual. I’d go through a checkpoint and they’d say, “McQueen just came through and wanted to know where you were.” I didn’t give a damn where he was.

  On the way to the Baja one year, McQueen, Cliff Coleman, and I flew from LA to Nogales, Mexico. As soon as we got off the plane, the local police arrested us, herded us into a room, and made us take off all our clothes. That’s right: strip-searched in a Mexican jail! There we were, lined up with our backs against the wall, side-by-side, buck naked. It was a humbling experience in more ways than one: not only was it demeaning to stand there bare-ass next to your peers (more or less), it was also deflating that the policemen, most of whom were snickering at us, didn’t seem to know or care that Steve and I were movie stars. They kept us locked up for a few hours and then let us go without explanation or apology.

  Driving the Baja 1000 is a world apart from Formula One, where finesse, precision, and, above all, speed are essential. I didn’t have a clue about off-road racing at first, but I learned the desert’s secrets pretty fast. I was born in the country and drove on country roads where if you hit one bump, you remember it. That background came in handy.

  Running the Baja is mentally exhausting. You’re paranoid. You’re never sure what’s over the next rise. You look at every tree, bush, and shadow in the road that can tell you, “There’s a hole here.” And it’s hard on the body, especially the back. Even though we’d worked on the suspensions to soften the bumps, at the end of a run I could barely stand up. Felt like I’d been gone over with a rubber hose.

  But the fun outweighed the pain.

  In the Baja, you drive just as fast as you can and hope your car doesn’t break. We’d get up to 90 miles an hour in the Bronco on those desert trails. If you got stuck behind a slower car, you ran up, gave him a little bump in the back, and kept bumping him until he moved over. At night, you flashed your lights to signal a slower car in front of you to get out of the way. If you drove the Baja alone, you were in the car fifteen to twenty hours in 100-degree heat during the day and subfreezing temperatures at night. Darkness complicated everything, of course.

  The vehicles need a lot of logistical support, so there are dozens of mechanics, welders, fabricators, and fuelers on hand with stockpiles of food, gasoline, and spare parts. In the old days, you had to stop at eight different checkpoints along the way and actually have a paper ticket punched at each one. You’d stop, get gas and oil, take a drink, grab a hot dog, and off you went again. The crews would leapfrog ahead and wait for the racers at the checkpoints, which were spaced at about every hundred miles, usually in a little town. After the driver went through, the support people would pack up and jump to the next checkpoint. A few drivers took shortcuts between checkpoints. Now they track all the vehicles with GPS and the course changes from year to year, with secret checkpoints to discourage cheating.

  The Baja 1000 is generally recognized as the most grueling off-road race in the world, and I’m told it’s become a test bed for passenger cars and off-road vehicles. Lessons learned in the Baja help manufacturers improve drivetrains and suspensions.

  Once ABC’s Wide World of Sports began covering it, the Baja 1000 was on the way to becoming the major international event it is today. Winning it is right up there with the great accomplishments in motor sports, and there’s a lot of money and glory on the line. But all I know, it was a lot of fun.

  Speaking of fun, I drove the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 three times, in 1975, 1977, and 1985. It’s a great honor: Some of the others who’ve done it are Eddie Rickenbacker, Carroll Shelby, Chuck Yeager, and General Colin Powell. Driving the pace car puts you on the same track with three dozen of the most advanced race cars in the world.

  Formula One and Indy are the two fastest forms of motor racing. The cars are similar, but because Indy cars run on oval circuits, they’re built heavier, to hug the tracks, while Formula One cars are quicker and more agile in the turns.

  Unlike F1, the Indianapolis 500 uses a rolling start. The pace car ensures that nobody gets an advantage. On the three pace laps, the cars form into eleven rows of three. They gradually build speed while warming up their engines and tires until they get the green flag signaling a clean start, and the pace car leaves the track.

  During the race, whenever there’s a yellow caution light, the pace car comes out and the race cars have to bunch up behind it without changing position. The pace car leads the field at a safe speed—100 mph or so, until the green light comes back on. Casual viewers may not know that it’s a different pace car driver, a professional who does it every year rather than the driver who does only the first three laps.

  Some people get bent out of shape when they drive the ceremonial pace car, so race organizers want somebody who’s used to being in crowds and knows something about driving. Officials got even more nervous in 1971, when an auto dealer from Indianapolis lost control of the pace car and wiped out a photographers’ stand in the pits, injuring twenty people.

  The pace car is always a street-legal American car. In ’75 it was a Buick Century, in ’77 an Oldsmobile Delta 88, and in ’85 an Olds Cutlass Calais. Car companies jockey for the privilege of having one of their models selected as the year’s pace car for the prestige, and for the revenue from sales of pace car replicas with special performance packages and “Indy 500” decals.

  I love the traditions and camaraderie of “the Brickyard.” With 400,000 people cheering and singing “Back Home in Indiana,” it’s a unique experience. Even when I wasn’t driving the pace car, I tried to go back every year to renew acquaintances and soak up the atmosphere. And whenever I was in Indianapolis, I made the pilgrimage to the Iron Skillet for fried chicken and to the Kountry Kitchen for the best chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, and gravy in the world.

  I’ve made some great friends at the Indianapolis 500: Lloyd Ruby, Roger Ward, Mario Andretti. I first met Jim Murray at Indy. We’d sit up under the tree at the first turn. We played a lot of golf together at Riviera over the following years. I met Jim Cook and his son John there when he was a boy. John and I would later partner up at the Crosby Pro-Am. One year Bill Saxon joined me at the 500 and brought his friend Tom Davis. I wasn’t driving the pace car that year, but Saxon and Davis got in a convertible with me and we did a lap. I wanted them to feel the warmth and energy from the stands washing over them as I had. Every time I raised my hand to wave, the crowd roared. Billy Dee said he felt like a Roman gladiator.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Rockford Files

  Rock ford began as a character in Toma, a series that Roy Huggins and Stephen J. Cannell were doing at Universal. When Steve turned in the script, they realized they had something bigger, so they pitched it as a Movie of the Week with an eye toward making it into a series.

  Frank Price, the head of television at Universal and, by the way, Roy Huggins’s son-in-law, liked the concept and practically guaranteed the show would get on the air if they’d make one little change: turn Rockford into a short private detective. Evidently, the executives at Universal had seen Robert Blake in Electra Glide in Blue and were hot to do something with him. Price said, “Make the PI five-foot-six and you’ve got a hit.” Well, Roy Huggins didn’t like that idea, and he sent me the Rockford script instead.

  At that moment, I was negotiating with MGM to do a television series based on my character in Support Your Local Sheriff. When I got the Rockford script, I read it, loved it, and agreed to do it the same day, and Universal dropped the short detective idea. I asked for one change of my own: the character was ori
ginally named “Tom” Rockford. I said, “I’m not a Tom.” They changed it to Jim.

  Frank Price pitched the show to NBC, and they wanted to change the character, but in a different way: they didn’t want Rockford to be a “coward.” I told them, “Look, I said I’d do the show based on the script, and if you change a single word, I’ll walk.”

  The pilot was a ninety-minute Movie of the Week with a very young Lindsay Wagner, who hires Rockford to find her father’s killer. When it aired on March 27, 1974, it got good ratings and NBC picked it up for the fall.

  The series debuted on September 13, 1974, on NBC at nine p.m. on Friday night. Rockford ran for six seasons—a total of 122 episodes—until July 25, 1980. It went straight into syndication and hasn’t been off the air since.

  My company, Cherokee Productions, produced The Rockford Files. I wanted Steve Cannell to be our supervising producer. Besides being a talented and prolific writer, Steve understood the character because he had created it.

  The first time I met Steve, he said, “When I was a kid, my father let me stay up to watch Maverick if I was a good boy.”

  “There are a lot of things you could have said to me that would have been better than that,” I said.

  At that point, Steve had no interest in producing—he just wanted to write. But I insisted, and the studio finally talked him into doing it for one year. That first year went so well that Steve said he’d continue for as long as I wanted him, and we lasted for almost six years, the entire run of the series, and never had a single disagreement.

  Early in the first season, there was a script that just wasn’t working. I called Steve to tell him, but he didn’t know what I was talking about. He came down to the lot and found that we had pages that Roy Huggins had sent through without consulting Steve or anybody else, and they just didn’t fit in the script. Steve told us to go back to the original and it worked like a charm.