The Garner Files: A Memoir

by James Garner

  I hate everything about show business but acting. Publicity doesn’t interest me. I don’t read anything they write about me— articles, reviews, whatever. (Well, I do read reviews, but only the good ones.) I never liked making personal appearances or having my picture taken. That goes back to my days as a model.

  I’d rather dig a ditch than do an interview, let alone a press junket where you sit in a hotel room all day while a hundred reporters work you over one by one. I’ve never liked premieres or entourages or anything associated with celebrity. I’m not too crazy about limousines, either. I can’t stand Hollywood parties; when Lois and I went out, it was usually for dinner with close friends.

  And I don’t give a damn about awards. When TV Guide named me the best dramatic actor in television history, I didn’t even get a free copy of the magazine. That’s okay: I didn’t like TV Guide anyway because the owner, Walter Annenberg, used it as a platform for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.

  There was an English actress who said, “The Americans are famous for giving presents for acting.” Exactly. I don’t like trophies, especially for acting. I have no interest in Oscars. Though I’m a member of the Motion Picture Academy, I rarely see the nominated movies, so Lois does the voting.

  I didn’t get into the business to be better than anyone else. They give too much credit to actors, and I don’t think they should be singled out. It’s the writing. When it’s done right, acting isn’t a competition, it’s a collaboration. The better my fellow actors are, the better I am. If I get an acting award, I think I’m stealing it from somebody who deserves it more than I do. They should just nominate five people, give them all a trophy, and go home.

  I couldn’t stand fan magazines. Even as a teenager, I knew they were bullshit. I’d look at Photoplay and think, What a bunch of phonies! All those supposedly candid shots of the stars in “real life.” You could see them posing. I never understood the whole fan thing, because I’ve never been a fan of anybody. How can you care so much about someone you never met? I didn’t want to be part of that. But when Maverick became a hit, I did those same stories, to my shame. The fan magazines were so sleazy, they weren’t saved in libraries like old issues of Life or The Saturday Evening Post. I’m glad.

  I hate Hollywood. You say “Good morning” in this town and they say, “What did he mean by that?” Maybe that’s why they never understood me; I always said exactly what was on my mind. The industry is like it’s always been, a bunch of greedy people. You have to watch ’em every minute. I once got into a movie deal with a producer who said he had all the elements lined up, but when it got down to the wire it turned out he never had them. When I asked what happened he said, “I lied. It was the only way I could get you into the deal.” He thought that made it okay.

  I never got along with studio executives. Most of them have been to business school or law school, sometimes both, but as far as film goes, they have no creative talent at all. Their opinions aren’t worth a damn, so they go with the numbers. They’re in constant fear of losing their jobs, which makes them indecisive. In negotiations, their goal is to get the best of you, not to make a good deal for everybody involved. I’ve never understood that.

  I was careful not to get friendly with studio executives, because then I’d have to be nice to them. I wanted to be able to say whatever I wanted without worrying about harming a relationship.

  Hollywood is dishonest, it’s petty, and it’s ageist. Late in his life, Fred Zinnemann, the Oscar-winning director who gave us From Here to Eternity, High Noon, and A Man for All Seasons, had a meeting with a young producer who didn’t know who Zinnemann was.

  “Well, Mr. Zinnemann,” said the young man, “What have you done?”

  “You first,” said Zinnemann.

  It’s worse for actresses. Women come into their own in middle age—they’re smarter and more attractive. I thought Lana Turner was much more interesting at forty than she was at twenty. Producers don’t seem to realize that you still have the drive and most of the energy. You don’t look young, but you’ve lived, and that makes you a better actor. William Goldman was right: in Hollywood, nobody knows anything.

  Nope, there’s nothing I like about fame. Except for the ten-foot-tall, bronze statue of me as Bret Maverick that was unveiled in Norman on April 21, 2006. It’s near the train station, on a corner where I used to hang out when I was a kid. The town also changed the name of a street to James Garner Avenue.

  Norman was a great place to grow up, and I’m proud and happy to be from Oklahoma. I’ve always stayed loyal to my home state. People in the rest of the country don’t know what a wonderful place it is. The Rodgers and Hammerstein version of Oklahoma has nothing to do with reality. When I saw the movie, I thought to myself, Well, they’re having fun.

  Though I haven’t lived in Norman for a long time, my friends and relatives there have been very supportive. A group of them— committee members Roy Hamilton, Bill Cobb, and Bob Goins—along with Bill Saxon and Lee Allan Smith, were responsible for putting up the statue. They raised the money and hired the sculptor, Shan Gray. I went to the unveiling ceremony. We had a family reunion and there was a reception at the old train depot. Old friends and perfect strangers came to wish me well. It was an unforgettable day.

  Funny how it worked out: the statue is right across the street from the Sooner Theatre, where I’d watched movies as a boy, never dreaming anything like this could ever happen to me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Producing

  This is immodest, but I think Support Your Local Sheriff is one of the better Western spoofs ever made. It’s comedy, not humor. It’s very broad, with puns, slapstick, finger-in-a-gun-barrel kind of stuff. It’s the old story about a gunslinger who drifts into town—in this case, “on his way to Australia”—becomes sheriff, and takes on the powerful family that runs the town. When they hand him the badge, there’s a dent in it from a bullet. “This must have saved his life,” I say.

  “It would’ve . . . if it weren’t for all those other bullets.”

  Bill Bowers wrote the script and wanted a producer credit, so I gave it to him. The first day on the set, he wanted to know what to do, and I said, “See that chair over there with your name on it? Sit there and be quiet. We’ll holler if we need you.” (Never hollered.)

  Burt Kennedy had wonderful actors to work with: Joan Hackett, Jack Elam, Walter Brennan, Bruce Dern. Burt had directed some real Westerns, including The War Wagon with Duke Wayne. He was a good director, but for some reason he didn’t want Joan Hackett. I think he may have promised the role to Stella Stevens. Stella would’ve been fine, but I loved Joan. She was in the Jean Arthur league of comedic actresses. Just a funny woman. Burt kept complaining about her until I finally said, “You can reshoot anything you like, but we’re not getting rid of her.” I think Joan did a wonderful job in the picture and audiences and critics alike applauded her performance.

  Jack Elam was one of the nicest guys in the world and a lot of fun. Loved to gamble. He’d bet you the sun wouldn’t come up if you gave him the right odds. He’d been an accountant in charge of disbursements at one of the studios, but he really wanted to act. Some producer came in with a script he wanted to do and Jack said, “Look, I’ll see that you get the money if you give me this little part here.” That’s how he became a movie actor. Though it was his first comedy, Jack was easy to work with and he did a great job as my drunken sidekick.

  Walter Brennan was a marvelous old poop. He was well up in his seventies—I think it was the last picture he made. He’d won three Oscars. Walter was the first actor I’d ever seen use cards. He knew the dialogue cold and never flubbed a line, but I guess he just needed to know that his words were there as backup. He put a card up here and another down there and just kind of glanced at them to make sure. You couldn’t tell, though.

  Bruce Dern was a fine young actor and I think this was his first comedy. He went on to do great work in a long series of movies.

  Support Your Local Sher
iff was my first producing job. I’d noticed that, though actors make a lot of money, somebody has the money to pay them. Producers. I’d also noticed that producers weren’t smarter than me, they just made more money. I wanted to make more money. And have more control. So I formed Cherokee Productions.

  That’s when I learned there’s a reason why producers make the big bucks.

  Most people don’t know what a producer does. It’s not an easy job. They have to secure financing, commission a script, and hire everybody else to make the picture. They even have to come up with a title.

  It was originally called The Sheriff. I was with Burt Kennedy and Bill Bowers in an office on the second floor at MGM. I told them I thought The Sheriff was too dull. But we couldn’t think of anything better. I left the meeting early because I had to go home, and as I walked downstairs, there was a time clock with a sign over it: “Support Your Local Police.” I turned around, walked back up the stairs, poked my head in the office and said, “I’ve got it: Support Your Local Sheriff.” Didn’t even wait for a reaction. When I got home, there was a message from Burt: “Great title!”

  People had warned me that comedy Westerns weren’t commercial, but I went ahead and made it anyway, for $750,000, which was nothing even then. It opened for a week and didn’t do any business. The studio wanted to shelve it. I said, “Tell you what: You put up ten thousand dollars and I’ll put up ten thousand dollars, and we’ll run it in one theater.” We put it on Wilshire Boulevard for a month and they lined up. We rereleased it and it did great business everywhere. I’m still getting checks.

  Nichols was my first TV work since Maverick more than ten years earlier, and my first foray into television producing. My agent, Meta Rosenberg, was our executive producer. As far as I know, she was the first woman to hold such a high position in television. The writer-director Frank Pierson had created the character and served as our producer. Frank had already written successful movies, including Cat Ballou, Cool Hand Luke, and Dog Day Afternoon. We had directors like John Badham and Paul Bogart, and writers like Buck Houghton, Marion Hargrove, and Juanita Bartlett.

  Juanita had been hanging around town writing spec scripts without making a sale until she took a job as Meta’s secretary. One day Juanita asked Frank Pierson if he needed a script for “Bertha.” Frank said he wasn’t aware of a character named Bertha in the show. Juanita explained that the saloon on the Nichols set was named Bertha’s, and that she had a story idea for an episode featuring Bertha. Frank told Juanita to go ahead and write a script. She did, and we all liked it so much, we made Bertha an ongoing character, cast Alice Ghostley in the role, and hired Juanita as a staff writer.

  But Juanita was still very shy and unsure of herself. She cried for a week and didn’t want to leave her secretary’s desk. She thought the whole thing might be a fluke and kept on making coffee for Meta until we convinced her that the new secretary could do that. After doing a rewrite of another script, Juanita finally relaxed. She went on to a long career as a writer-producer. She isn’t shy anymore.

  Nichols is a turn-of-the-century Western set in a small town in Arizona. I love that era. Right after World War I, before industrialization and world leadership, the country was just waking up. New inventions like the telephone and the automobile were making life better and more exciting, but the old values still hadn’t given way.

  Nichols—we never gave him a first name—retires from the army and returns to his hometown of Nichols, Arizona, named for his grandfather, who’d founded it. He takes the job of sheriff but doesn’t carry a gun, not because he’s afraid of them, but because he’s sick of violence. In short, Nichols isn’t much of an authority figure. He’s more interested in making a quick buck than enforcing the law.

  Maverick and Rockford are basically the same character, but Nichols is different. He’s a free spirit and an independent thinker struggling to keep up with a fast-changing world. He has his own style, with jodhpurs, cavalry boots, and a goofy little cap. He drives a 1914 Chevrolet and a belt-drive Harley-Davidson.

  I’d run the Baja 1000 and driven fast cars in Grand Prix, but I was scared to death of that rickety old bike. It was uncomfortable and dangerous. Though the bike had been restored and strengthened, the handlebars were weird and it had no suspension, so it was hard to control. We built another one out of a modern motorcycle and fitted it with tanks and fenders to make it look like the original, but in some shots, I had to drive right into the camera, so they couldn’t double for me or the bike.

  To make Nichols work I needed a sidekick who was a shifty-eyed, back-stabbing rat, but also lovable. Tall order. We’d made screen tests but couldn’t find what we were looking for until one day I saw a clip from Love, American Style. It wasn’t a scene that should have gotten a laugh, but the actor was so good, he broke me up. I knew he was the one for the part.

  The actor was Stuart Margolin, and we cast him as my deputy sheriff, Mitch. Stuart and I were on the same wavelength from the start: in our first scene together, we met on a staircase and improvised a side-to-side bit that came off beautifully. It set the tone for our future work together. Mitch was the forerunner to Angel Martin, the character Stuart played in The Rockford Files, and later to his slippery Native American, Philo Sandeen, in Bret Maverick.

  Neva Patterson plays Ma Ketchum, whose crooked family has taken over the town. Nichols’s only friend (and love interest) is Ruth, a barmaid played by a very young Margot Kidder. We also had John Beck and M. Emmet Walsh as recurring characters.

  There was great social and political turmoil in the country at the time. The civil rights and women’s movements were in full swing and the Vietnam War was still sending Americans home in body bags. We slipped in a little commentary here and there—Nichols was antiviolence, pro–civil rights, and pro–women’s rights—but we kept it gentle and never got preachy. And always tried to keep it funny.

  Chevrolet was our sponsor. When we screened the pilot for them in Detroit, the wife of one of the executives said, “It’s not Maverick!”

  I knew we were dead then and there. The folks at Chevrolet thought they were getting Maverick and, by golly, they wanted Maverick. They picked up half the show and sold off the other half.

  Nichols never got the chance to find its audience. We were preempted eight out of twenty-four shows by the presidential election campaign, and NBC switched us from one night to another in midseason without telling us, so it was pretty clear they had given up on the show. They renamed it James Garner as Nichols but it didn’t help

  NBC put us up against Marcus Welby, M.D., the top-rated show on television at the time, and we ran even. The critics liked us, and our ratings were better than a lot of shows that got picked up by the networks in those days. But the network canceled us anyway.

  I was so angry and disappointed, I decided to kill Nichols off in the last episode. In the opening sequence, Anthony Zerbe pulls a gun and blows me away. There’s a funeral and they bury me. But I come back as my twin brother, Jim Nichols, to avenge the killing. In the last shot, as I ride out of town on the Harley, the camera pans up to a sign: “You Are Now Leaving Nichols.”

  In my mind, Nichols is right up there with Maverick and Rockford. It lasted less than a year, from September 16, 1971, to March 14, 1972. I made a profit on it, though it ran for only twenty-four episodes and was never rerun. I think Nichols was ahead of its time. It was different and creative, and we had such wonderful people working on both sides of the camera. The cancellation about broke my heart.

  The Hallmark Hall of Fame, a television anthology series that began in 1951 with Amahl and the Night Visitors, has become an American entertainment institution. Hallmark has high standards and they stick to them. Over the decades they’ve done programs with strong performances and excellent production values—Shakespeare, the classics, biographies—plus original material with top-notch writing, directing, and acting. It was an easy decision for me and my producing partner, Peter Duchow, to join forces with Hallmark.


  The Hallmark Hall of Fame production of Promise originally aired on December 14, 1986. With wise, sensitive direction by Glenn Jordan, a magnificent script by Richard Friedenberg, and inspired performances by Piper Laurie and James Woods, Promise won five Emmys (Best Actor, Best Special, Best Direction, Best Teleplay, Best Writing), two Golden Globes, a Peabody Award, a Christopher Award, and the Humanitas Prize, given to the writers of television programs that “probe the meaning of human life” or supply “enriching human values.”

  I play Bob Beuhler, who’d promised his mother when he was twenty-one that he’d look after his emotionally disturbed younger brother D.J. When the old woman dies thirty years later, Bob is faced with the prospect of caring for a “crazy man” for the rest of his life.

  I couldn’t have played the character five years earlier. I’d have thought he was too unsympathetic. I was always reluctant to play heavies. People have told me that this was a mistake, that I should take on a wider variety of roles. But I never wanted to be a bad guy on the screen. I didn’t want to be a superhero either—didn’t want to go to either extreme. That’s why I hesitated. Not that Bob is a villain, he just never grew up.

  James Woods had been in the first episode of The Rockford Files. When we hired him for Promise, I called to say how happy I was to have him. He said, “I bet you don’t remember me,” and I said, “You bet I do. I’m not gonna forget you.” In case you haven’t noticed, Jimmy is very bright, extremely articulate, and a brilliant actor.