The Garner Files: A Memoir

by James Garner

  I was always nervous at the start of a picture, and often before shooting a Maverick or a Rockford episode. I’d get flustered doing TV interviews: I have a bad memory for names and it embarrasses me when I’ve just worked with a great director and I can’t think of his name. I’d go on talk shows to plug something, but I didn’t like it.

  I never enjoyed working on the stage the way some actors do. There were never any plays I wanted to do. Some actors want to do Shakespeare. I don’t give a damn about Shakespeare. (He never calls.) The same thing night after night gets old, and applause doesn’t turn me on. Never had that particular addiction. Some actors are devoted to The Theatah, but I couldn’t care less. Maybe that’s why I don’t bother with acting superstitions. Stage actors say, “Break a leg” and all that stuff. They call Macbeth “the Scottish Play” because they’re afraid to say the name. Doesn’t concern me. I say, “Good luck” to fellow actors all the time.

  I promised myself in Paul Gregory’s office in 1953 that I’d give acting five years to see if I liked it and could make a living at it. My goal was to keep working. After five years I was starring in Maverick, so I thought Okay, I’ll go for another five. After that, I went for another five, then another. It wasn’t until my fiftieth birthday that I believed I could last in the business.

  Throughout my career, I’ve gone back and forth between television and movies. I started in TV in the 1950s, did movies in the ’60s, went back to television in the ’70s, and did both from then on. Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, and I were the first to make the leap from TV to movies, but it was unusual. Television was a second-class medium for a long time. When we started, being on television carried a stigma. There was a pecking order: stage actors were next to God, film actors were right up there with the angels, TV actors were beneath them, and commercial acting was the dregs. If you were a television actor, you weren’t allowed to do movies; if you were a movie actor, you didn’t dare do television, and if you were a stage actor and you did a movie, they said you had “sold out.” In the old days, a movie actor got more respect in the industry than a television actor. Today if you have a hit on TV, you get just as much respect, maybe because there’s so much competition on television. The biggest stars can do an HBO movie or even a TV series and not lose their clout. Theater, movies, television, even commercials—it’s all the same. We’re actors.

  Well, not completely. There are some differences. I always felt movies were easier. The pace was slower and the pay was better. Television was more demanding, both mentally and physically. The budgets for movies were bigger and you had more time to shoot them. That’s why the product was usually better. That’s changed. Now the big movies are all action and special effects. The better stories are on television. In movies, the director has final cut; in television, it’s the producer. It’s hard to be a television director. You never have the time or the money to do what you want.

  Acting for television, you don’t have to project yourself like you do in a movie because the TV camera is looking right down your throat. It does your projecting for you. There’s a difference in the way the public treats you because TV is a personal medium. When I was doing Maverick, I was part of the family. I’d been in their living room like an old piece of furniture. If I ate in a restaurant, people would invite me to sit at their table: “Hey, Jimbo, come meet the wife and kids!” Would they say that to Cary Grant? (After I’d been doing Maverick for a couple of years, I was at the Beverly Hilton for some big function. Cary Grant came over, introduced himself, and told me how much he liked my work. I was so flabbergasted, all I could manage was something dumb like, “I like your work, too.”)

  When I was on television, our mailman would want to bring his kids over to meet me. He felt he knew me because I was on a small screen in his living room every week for free. As soon as I started doing movies, fewer people came up to me in public. You were up there on the big screen and they were in awe of you, so they kept their distance.

  In 1963, I was in four hit pictures: Move Over, Darling; The Thrill of It All; The Wheeler Dealers; and The Great Escape. I was advised that an all-out publicity campaign could make me number one at the box office. I said, “Why would I want to do that? Once you’re number one, there’s nowhere to go but down.” I wanted to avoid the highs and lows and have longevity. I thought I’d be better off hanging in there at a solid number five or six and let the other guys fight it out for the top spot.

  In Hollywood, you have to “defend your quote”—keep your fee as high as possible and never accept less. Lee Marvin raised his quote to a million dollars a picture after he won an Oscar for Cat Ballou and had trouble getting parts.

  I never worked with Lee, but I thought that as an actor he was very colorful. As a guy, he was a pain in the ass. He just didn’t care. He was a bad drinker. One night in a limousine on our way to some function, he made moves on my wife. That’s a little more than I can handle and I almost decked him.

  Anyway, Lee wanted to work but couldn’t take a salary cut. I didn’t want to fall into that trap, so I never let my quote get too high. Actors are paid more than they’re worth anyway. Producers are idiots for paying the ridiculous prices we ask. We make so much money, the majority of pictures never make a profit. I think movies would be a lot better if more actors waived their big salaries in order to do worthwhile pictures.

  I don’t think actors today are well served by their agents and managers, who aren’t as good as they used to be. They just want their 10 percent and let their clients do things they shouldn’t. They have one hit and three flops and their careers are over.

  By the late 1960s, I’d done one film after another and was burned out. I told my agent I was taking a year off and didn’t want to read any scripts. After a few months of golf every day I said, “If there’s a really good script out there, I’ll look at it.” Nothing came my way. A couple months later I said, “If there’s a script out there, I’ll look at it.” Nothing. A few months later I said, “Get me a script!” Producers forgot me. I wasn’t on their radar, so they didn’t think of me for a part. The lesson is, never be off the screen for long. The industry is fickle. They forget you quickly. You have to keep working.

  On the other hand, you can’t make film after film. There aren’t enough good scripts, and sooner or later, you’re going to do some stinkers, which will disappoint the audience, and they’ll stay away, and your value will drop. It’s better to do good work in fewer projects. I think you make more money in the long run that way. Most of the bad pictures I’ve made, I did for the money. The Pink Jungle, A Man Called Sledge, One Little Indian—any one of those could have ruined my career.

  The anxieties of this business are incredible. You can get away with a few bombs, but suddenly they catch up with you and you’re looking for work. You never feel secure. Henry Fonda was one of the great movie actors, but one day at the height of his career he told me, “I just finished a picture and it’ll probably be the last one I’ll ever do.” Henry Fonda was worried about whether he’d work again. I had those doubts all the time. The old Hollywood cliché is true: you’re only as good as your last picture.

  I never tried to analyze the secret of being popular. Ratings never meant a thing to me. Never even looked at them. Now and then, somebody would walk up and say, “Look at these demographics,” and I’d be polite and say, “Good, okay.” I was too busy doing what I do, which is making film. I do my best and I have no control over what happens after that, so I don’t worry about it. I never get too high after a success, or too low after a failure. I don’t worry if it’s going to succeed or fail, because I have no control over that. I do the work and forget about it. The only way I judge my work is by how much it embarrasses me when I see it. Not whether it embarrasses me, but how much. I’m never satisfied with a performance, because I know what I was trying to do and realize I fell short. I don’t like how I look or how I sound. I look at my performance and think, Why’d I do that ? That’s why I don’t watch myself.
I don’t look at my movies and I don’t watch old Maverick s or Rockford s. I’m not a fan of me.

  One of the keys to longevity as an actor is choosing roles carefully. I turned down so many scripts, my manager Bill Robinson always says he’d rather have 5 percent of what I turn down than 10 percent of what I do. When I get a script and I understand the character— which doesn’t happen that often—my next question is, How’s the movie as a whole? I look at the writer, director, producer, and other actors involved. Then I make up my mind. The industry wants blockbusters, but I like pictures about relationships between people. I don’t watch action-adventure or sci-fi movies, and I don’t want to do any. I don’t understand them. A reporter once asked if I would ever do a nude scene. I told him I don’t do horror films.

  I’ve never regretted losing or passing on a role, because I always figured something as good or better was right around the corner. The only two pictures I ever went after were Sayonara and Grand Prix. Otherwise, I just waited for the right part to come along and it usually did.

  I don’t like movies that glorify violence. That’s why I passed on Rambo. He had a bad attitude. He killed a bunch of Americans— National Guardsmen and police. I wanted nothing to do with him. I guess the violence in my early life made me partial to characters who try to avoid it.

  Audiences are influenced by what they see on the screen, and I think it’s wrong to bombard them with violent images. Why does the hero have to kill thirty people in the first reel? I don’t think it’s exciting or entertaining.

  I’m no do-gooder; I just like to do good movies. I consider myself an average American, and I think I have a duty to other average Americans. As an actor and a producer, I try to exercise a certain amount of restraint. I feel I have a moral responsibility to the audience, particularly a television audience. After we did a Rockford episode showing how to get a phony driver’s license, we learned that the boys who hijacked the Chowchilla school bus in 1976 and kidnapped those children had watched our show and used the information to get licenses to help them commit the crime. I felt awful about that.

  I prefer clean over dirty. I saw an episode of Deadwood on HBO and was embarrassed by the foul language. They didn’t talk like that in the Old West! I like the old-fashioned way, where the language is clean and sex scenes are done tastefully, not graphically. And I don’t like to glorify gangsters. I think it influences people to imitate them. I thought Bonnie and Clyde was beautifully done, and I know that the real Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were folk heroes, but in fact they were cold-blooded killers, not a couple of lost little lambs.

  It’s gotten much worse. Now we have formula pictures that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Everybody’s wrong and nobody cares enough to point out what’s right. These movies are all about special effects without much story content. They don’t deal with people and their problems. The characters have no redeeming qualities. It’s violence for its own sake.

  I turned down the Richard Burton part in The Night of the Iguana. It was way too Tennessee Williams for me, and I didn’t care for the film they made. I was offered the role Jack Nicholson played in Terms of Endearment. I met with the writer-director, James L. Brooks, but had no idea what he was talking about. I couldn’t communicate with him and didn’t understand what he was trying to do with the movie. When I asked point-blank how he was going to end it, he couldn’t tell me. I guess I just couldn’t get on his level. So I walked out of his office and told my agent the part wasn’t for me. (I found out later that Burt Reynolds and Harrison Ford turned it down, too.) Jack Nicholson did a much better job than I’d have done, and it turned out to be a great film.

  There was a Brian Forbes movie at Columbia from a James Clavell novel that I wanted to do called King Rat. I loved the script. But George Segal got the part, I think because he was under contract to the studio and was a lot cheaper than I’d have been. In other words, George did to me on King Rat what I’d done to Roger Smith on Sayonara. Fair enough. I assumed it wasn’t meant to be and never looked back. I was signed to play Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove miniseries but had to drop out because I had surgery for an aortic aneurysm and couldn’t ride a horse. Robert Duvall took it and did such a fantastic job, I can’t imagine anyone else in the role, including me. Ten years later, I played Captain Woodrow Call in the sequel, Streets of Laredo. It all evens out over time . . . if you hang around long enough.

  As far as I can tell, the secret to having a long career is, above all else, you’ve got to be lucky. No substitute for that. Call it timing if you like. You have to have the right thing for the public at the right time. A little talent helps. You have to pick and choose scripts according to what you do best. And always try to maintain your dignity.

  If I didn’t want to be an actor, I certainly didn’t want to be a star. Fame is a trap. It comes and goes in a flash. Ever heard of the four stages in an actor’s career?

  1. Who is James Garner?

  2. Get me James Garner.

  3. Get me a James Garner type.

  4. Who is James Garner?

  I wanted fortune, but never fame. Not only is fame fleeting, it’s also deceiving. People are constantly telling you how wonderful you are. Your ego blows up like a balloon. You get sucked in by your own publicity and lose your grip on reality. It’s a drug; you need more and more of it. It’s also a bargain with the devil: you win fame and lose anonymity. It sounds like a fair trade. It isn’t.

  I didn’t appreciate my anonymity until it was gone. You can’t do simple things like shop in a department store, take in a ball game, or stroll in the park. When you lose your anonymity, you also lose your privacy. It’s important for an actor to observe behavior, and I was always a people watcher. But once you’re famous, you can’t be inconspicuous. After Maverick, people were observing me. I remember standing in the vestibule of a New York hotel waiting for a car to pick me up. I stood there for half an hour watching people. Nobody bothered me because I could see out but they couldn’t see in. That was in 1960, and it was the last time I could do that in public.

  While we were making The Glitter Dome in Annapolis, Maryland, the secretaries in the building across from my hotel would watch me with binoculars. They said I smoked too much. (Didn’t say anything else.) While I was staying at a hotel in Madrid, a female “fan” broke into my room and stole a sports jacket as a souvenir. Once, as I walked through a hotel lobby in Las Vegas, two women approached and one put her hand up to my face like she wanted to stroke it or kiss me. Instead, she felt behind my ear and said to her companion, “See Mary, I told you he never had a face-lift!” Then there are the folks who confuse you with the character. They actually think you’re Bret Maverick or Jim Rockford in real life. These people need to get a life.

  During one dinner in a Palm Springs restaurant, I brought the fork to my mouth three times but never got a bite. My daughter Gigi says she can’t remember a meal in a restaurant that wasn’t interrupted. She says, “It goes with the territory,” but I know she didn’t like it. Neither did Kim or Lois. It ruined our time together as a family whenever we were in public.

  I couldn’t go anywhere without someone around me. Guys would follow me into men’s rooms for autographs. Paul Newman told me he stopped signing them forever the night he was standing at a urinal in Sardi’s and a guy shoved a pen and paper at him. Paul didn’t know whether to wash first before shaking hands. Clint Eastwood said that when the Dirty Harry pictures were in release, people would ask him to autograph their guns. Gary Cooper wrote checks for everything— gasoline, cigarettes, groceries, meals in restaurants—because he knew most of them wouldn’t be cashed. Coop figured he might as well get paid for signing his name.

  In the early 1980s, Bill Saxon and I flew to Southeast Asia to play golf. When we landed in Sri Lanka, the customs people rushed out to our plane as soon we touched down. They didn’t suspect us of smuggling, they just wanted my autograph.

  I hate giving autographs but do it anyway. In fifty years, I’ve
probably signed a hundred thousand. I try to be cheerful about it because it takes only a few seconds and it’s easier than turning somebody down and hurting their feelings (or, worse, having them get nasty). So I smile and write my name on little scraps of paper.

  While we were doing Rockford on the beach at Paradise Cove, I had a leather director’s chair with saddlebags that I’d sit in for hours with a little pad that said, “From the Desk of Jim Rockford” and sign autographs all day. I’m sure 95 percent of them got thrown out or wound up forgotten in a drawer.

  I wasn’t always polite to autograph seekers. One year after a round at the Greater Greensboro Open, Billy Dee and I were being taken back to our hotel in a courtesy car driven by a female volunteer. The car was parked next to the putting green where a bunch of pros were practicing. It was a tight parking spot and the lady was having a hard time maneuvering it out. She was going back and forth in small increments and I had my head out the window directing her. At that moment, a woman approached, stuck a paper and pen in my face, and asked for an autograph.

  “Lady, could you just wait a minute? We’re trying to get this car out of this space,” I said.

  “Well excuse me, Mister Movie Star!”

  I did a slow burn and said, “Lady, how would you like to kiss a fat man’s ass?”

  The pros on the putting green, who had stopped to watch, all applauded.

  There are a few perks. You get special treatment here and there, but it isn’t worth it. If America suddenly got amnesia and forgot who I was, that would be fine with me. I just don’t get it. On one hand, I know that some people like my work, but somehow that doesn’t get through. I’ve never thought of myself as anything special, and I don’t like to be the center of attention, but there wasn’t much I could do to prevent it. I’d have worn a disguise in public if I thought it would have done any good, but I figured they’d know who I was the minute I opened my mouth. It was once reported that I paid the seller of a map to the stars’ homes to take me off the list, but that’s not true. I may have threatened to give the guy a shot in the mouth, but I didn’t bribe him.