The Garner Files: A Memoir

by James Garner

  Jimmy researched the part of D.J. by spending time at a halfway house in Santa Monica called Step Up on Second. It was founded by Susan Dempsay, whose son, Mark Klemperer, was schizophrenic.

  People in their late teens or early twenties—usually men, but it happens to women, too—can suddenly develop schizophrenia. Their odd behavior is often misinterpreted and they go undiagnosed. They self-medicate with alcohol and illegal drugs, and many wind up homeless, strung out, muttering to themselves.

  Susan Dempsay envisioned a place where these kids could at least get off the streets. It’s not that she didn’t want to take care of Mark herself, but he’d do erratic things like suddenly jump out of a car and disappear for weeks. She’d find him eating out of a Dumpster. So she created a refuge where people like him could relax, maybe learn about government assistance programs, be reminded to take their meds, and connect with others like themselves.

  I had no idea what schizophrenics have to endure. I learned that they inhabit a terrifying world of hallucinations and inner voices that seem completely real. Even when they’re well, they have the burden of knowing they can lose control in an instant. I’ve never forgotten what one of them said: “When I was awake, I seemed alone, even when I was with people. My life was narrated by thoughts that weren’t mine.”

  Jimmy’s D.J. is very intelligent. But he’s crazy. In lucid moments, he knows he’s crazy and can talk eloquently about what it’s like to be schizophrenic. Those moments make his suffering even more heartbreaking. But most of the time, D.J.’s behavior is exasperating. He sits for hours in front of a television set, chain-smoking and watching commercials, obediently sending for useless products because he takes the words “order now” as a command from a higher authority. He digs up the backyard on a ridiculous whim, makes embarrassing scenes in public, washes his hands compulsively. He has violent mood swings from despondency to euphoria.

  One day at Step Up on Second, Jimmy Woods met “Sam,” who gave a beautiful, eloquent description of what it’s like to be schizophrenic. Richard Friedenberg put it in the script:

  D.J.: Do you want to know what it’s like, Bobby? It’s like, all the electric wires in the house are plugged into my brain. And every one has a different noise, so I can’t think. Some of the wires have voices in them and they tell me things like what to do and that people are watching me. I know there really aren’t any voices, but I feel that there are, and that I should listen to them or something will happen. That’s why I send for all those ads on the TV, because I feel the voice in the ad is talking to me. I hear him talking to me. He tells me to buy the things and that . . . well, I’m afraid if I don’t . . .

  I can remember what I was like before. I was a class officer, I had friends. I was going to be an aeronautical engineer. Do you remember, Bobby?

  BOB: Of course, I do.

  D.J.: I’ve never had a job. I’ve never owned a car. I’ve never lived alone. I’ve never made love to a woman. And I never will. That’s what it’s like.

  You should know. That’s why I’m a Hindu. Because maybe it’s true: Maybe people are born again. And if there is a God, maybe he’ll give me another chance. I believe that, because this can’t be all I get.

  Accepting the Emmy for Best Teleplay, Richard Friedenberg said he hoped the film would help schizophrenics by calling attention to their plight. I’m sorry to say that twenty-five years later, schizophrenia is the worst mental health problem facing the nation. Asylums have been closed, and government spending on mental health has been cut to the bone. There are new medications for schizophrenia, but though more expensive, they’re not much more effective than the old ones. And there is still no cure.

  After Promise had wrapped, Peter Duchow and I were sitting in a coffee shop in Salem, Oregon, talking about the Bill Wilson story. Jimmy Woods was eavesdropping (as usual) from a couple of booths away. I’m not going to say he lobbied for the part, but he ran over and announced, “I am Bill W.!”

  My Name Is Bill W. is the story of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Few American films had dealt with alcoholism seriously. Aside from Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend in 1945, Come Fill the Cup in 1951 with James Cagney as a recovering alcoholic newspaper editor, The Voice in the Mirror in 1958 with Richard Eagan and Julie London, and Days of Wine and Roses (1962, written by J. P. Miller and directed by Blake Edwards), drunks and drunkenness were played for laughs in films.

  If alcoholism was treated seriously at all, it was portrayed as a character flaw rather than a disease. Which mirrored the general attitude. People thought that if you were a drunk, it was because you lacked willpower. The only help for alcoholics was in the form of a hot meal and a sermon, or a trip to the drunk tank, sanitarium, or psycho ward. If you were a drunk, you stayed a drunk until you died.

  My family history had sensitized me to the problem, so when my producing partner, Peter, suggested doing a serious film about Alcoholics Anonymous, I welcomed the idea. I wanted to tell the story of how two men came up with a simple way to deal with alcoholism and help millions of people lead decent lives.

  William Griffith Wilson was a World War I hero and a hotshot securities analyst through the 1920s. When the stock market crashed in 1929, his already excessive drinking spun out of control. After several alcohol-related trips to the hospital, Bill had an epiphany and swore off booze. But sobriety didn’t bring him the peace he’d hoped for, and his battle to stay sober put a strain on his marriage.

  On a business trip to Akron, Ohio, craving a drink and terrified of falling off the wagon, Bill asked a local minister to put him in touch with another alcoholic, just to talk. That’s how he met Robert Holbrook Smith, MD, a barely functioning alcoholic surgeon.

  At first, “Dr. Bob” was reluctant to talk with Bill and planned to spend only a few minutes with him. But after Bill told him, “I’m not here to help you, I’m here to help me,” Bob got interested. The conversation kept going until they both realized that if they could talk it out, they could make it, one day at a time.

  The two men gave each other a safe harbor from “the stormy sea of booze,” as Dr. Bob put it. Their decision to share their “shaky little fellowship” with other drunks resulted in Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the most successful self-help movements in history.

  We struggled for five years to bring the story to the screen, going through four or five scripts. We didn’t hit on the right approach until MaryAnn Rea in my office plucked an unsolicited script out of the slush pile from an unknown writer named William Borchert and suggested that Peter and I read it. As usual, MaryAnn was right.

  We’d been focusing on AA the organization, and it didn’t click until we read Bill Borchert’s script, which centered on the love story between Bill Wilson and his wife, Lois. It was the first script Bill had ever written, though he’d been a successful producer. Once we decided just to tell a great story, everything fell into place. Daniel Petrie directed with great skill and insight, and we got fine performances from JoBeth Williams as Lois and from Gary Sinise as Bill’s friend and drinking buddy, Ebby.

  I think Bob Smith and Bill Wilson are among the great men of the last century. They got together to help each other, but the organization they founded in 1935 has helped millions of people around the world by giving them a way to share their experiences without being judged or preached at or psychoanalyzed. AA’s twelve-step program really works. It provides an option for dealing with alcoholism besides death, insanity, or incarceration.

  But we weren’t proselytizing, we were just trying to tell a story that hadn’t been widely known about how AA got started. Members of AA couldn’t break the tradition of anonymity, but we could. Nor could AA endorse the film; however, individual members let us know they were pleased that we told their story in a sensitive and effective way.

  Lois Wilson gave her blessing to the project before she died in 1988 at the age of ninety-seven. Lois had been a loving and loyal wife, but she couldn’t save Bill. He had to save himself, with the help of
another drunk. Confronted with a different husband when Bill got sober, Lois founded Al-Anon, a self-help organization for the families of alcoholics. In 2010, she was the subject of another Borchert/Hallmark movie, When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story.

  Jimmy and I were temperamentally suited for our respective roles. Like Bill Wilson, Jimmy is hyperactive, fast-talking, and driven, while I’m more of a plodder, like Dr. Bob. While Bill W. was the go-getter, the front man, Dr. Bob was the anchor, the one who insisted on keeping everything simple and anonymous. (Bob once persuaded Bill to turn down the cover of Time magazine.)

  Jimmy carries the film on his shoulders. My part isn’t very meaty. It’s really just a cameo. It was the first part I’d done since heart surgery and I was still shaky. I told Jimmy, “I don’t think I can make it.” He assured me I could, and he was right, but I couldn’t have handled much more at the time.

  Jimmy had researched the part of Bill W. by going to AA meetings and talking to recovering alcoholics. He’d never had a problem with alcohol, but I had. I started drinking as a teenager and I was a nasty drunk. Under the influence of alcohol, I couldn’t control my temper. Somebody would say something and I’d deck ’im. I drank beer, whiskey, vodka—anything they put in front of me. I drank to get plastered. Did I have a “drinking problem”? No, I didn’t have a problem at all. I just went right ahead and drank.

  Oklahoma was a “dry” state in those days, but there were plenty of bootleggers around Norman. Mark Fisher was the king of them. He started in the 1930s, when the only legal drink in the state was 3.2 beer, and he stayed in business until liquor by the drink became legal in 1984.

  The South Canadian River separates Cleveland County from McClain County to the west. The riverbed is probably a mile and a half across, but the stream of water is only fifty yards wide, so there are trees, bushes, and sand dunes in the flatland called the “river breaks.” That’s where Fisher had his shack, an area that everyone thought of as a no-man’s-land belonging to neither county. I guess that’s why the law left Fisher alone. Or maybe he was paying somebody off.

  Mark sold to drinkers from both sides of the river, including college kids from OU and us high school kids, no driver’s license required. There was easy access down to the river, but you had to know how to find Mark’s shack. We were scared to go in. You never knew who might be sitting inside with a shotgun on his lap. It was always after dark, and we had to get up the nerve to walk up to the door and shout, “Whatcha got tonight?”

  You could get “Green Label” bourbons like Jim Beam or Jack Daniel’s for about fifteen dollars a pint, but we bought “Red Label” blended whiskey like Four Roses or Three Feathers at ten bucks a pint, mixed it with Coca-Cola and poured it down till we threw up.

  I was a binge drinker until sometime in my early thirties, when I realized that I didn’t like the way alcohol made me feel or behave. It also occurred to me that the liquor industry could produce more bottles of the stuff than I could down. I said to myself, “Something awful is gonna happen if you keep doing this. You’ll end up killing somebody.”

  So I quit. Just like that. I’ve been a light drinker ever since—very little beer or liquor, but I did learn to enjoy a glass of wine with dinner and built up a pretty decent wine cellar. At one point, Lois and I even had a small vineyard that produced wines under the private labels White Rhino and Chateau Jimbeaux.

  My father was a full-time drinker, and I think I really quit booze because I didn’t want to follow him. He’d go on epic binges. In the early 1920s, he was in a group of men in Norman who fancied themselves cowboys. They rode horses and wore cowboy boots and hats. They had a “roping club” on the edge of town where they’d all get together and rope calves. The wives knew it was just an excuse to get together and drink moonshine. My dad was a different person when he was drinking. For most of his life, booze brought a lot of misery on him and on the people around him.

  My real addiction was to nicotine. I smoked my first cigarette when I was eight. It was a Chesterfield, because that’s what my dad smoked. Later I switched brands: in my seventh-grade class picture, I’m standing behind a girl, holding a pack of Lucky Strikes next to her shoulder. (My first endorsement.) Though I was partial to Luckies, I’d smoke any brand I could bum. I loved to smoke. When I started we didn’t know what we do now about the medical effects, but we knew it wasn’t right.

  I didn’t care.

  When I started doing The Rockford Files, in 1974, I smoked on camera whenever I felt like it. After a while, I realized it was a bad example, so Jim Rockford quit. But I didn’t. I used the standard excuse, “I don’t want to gain weight,” plus an original one: “I’m not gonna let C. Everett Koop tell me what to do!” I was a hard case. I kept smoking even after heart surgery in 1988. I finally quit in 2005, with more than sixty “pack years” under my belt.

  I started smoking marijuana in my late teens. I drank to get drunk but ultimately didn’t like the effect. Not so with grass. Grass is smooth. It had the opposite effect from alcohol: it made me more tolerant and forgiving.

  I did a little bit of cocaine in the 1980s, courtesy of John Belushi (we’d met through a mutual friend and hit it off right away), but fortunately I didn’t like it. I discovered that it never got better after the first time you did it.

  I smoked marijuana for fifty years. I don’t know where I’d be without it. It opened my mind to a lot of things, and now its active ingredient, THC, relaxes me and eases my arthritis pain. After decades of personal research and observation, I’ve concluded that marijuana should be legal and alcohol should be illegal. But good luck with that.

  The reaction to My Name Is Bill W. was almost all positive. People in AA were happy with it. As far as I recall, we got nothing but praise from that community, including the people on the set who were in the program. Of all the things I’ve ever done as an actor or producer, I think My Name Is Bill W. has had the greatest impact. It was certainly one of the most gratifying experiences I’ve ever had as a professional. People came up to me and said, “I got sober because of your movie” or, “My husband joined AA because of your movie.” You need only one of those to make it all worthwhile.

  When Jimmy Woods and I were on the Donahue show promoting My Name Is Bill W., a guy called and said, “I’m a drunk. I’m drinking right now and I’m alone. I have a gun and I’m going to use it on myself.” Jimmy twelve-stepped him right on the air: “You know, you really want to think about what you’re going to do,” Jimmy said. “If you could push a button and make it okay, would you do it?” The man said yes. “Well,” Jimmy said, “AA is the button. Just give it a try, then do whatever you want.” The man hung up. We were told that a few months later he called Donahue back and said he was in recovery.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Love Stories

  Murphy’s Romance is one of my favorites, as much for the people I worked with as the film itself. It was easy to do. Everything went smoothly on the set and everybody liked each other. It was a pleasure to go to work every day.

  Martin Ritt was a wonderful man and a fine director. He made movies that said something. I’d known Marty for a long time—we played softball in the park together, and my daughter Gigi and his daughter Tina were school friends. I’d always admired his films but hadn’t worked with him, so when Murphy’s Romance came along, I jumped at it.

  Like me, Marty had grown up during the Depression. He came out of the WPA and the Group Theater in New York to become a successful television director, and he went on to direct such movies as Hud, The Great White Hope, Sounder, Conrack, and Norma Rae, to name a few of his two dozen features.

  The studio wanted Marlon Brando for the part of Murphy Jones. Marty and Sally Field loved Marlon, but they thought he just wasn’t right for it. The studio was adamant, but Sally and Marty went to bat for me.

  Sally told them, “If Garner doesn’t do the picture, I don’t do the picture.”

  Sally is a wonderful girl and we got along great
. It’s a cliché, but we had great chemistry on the screen.

  I could certainly identify with my character, Murphy Jones, a kindly but slightly eccentric small-town druggist who befriends Sally’s character, Emma Moriarty, a confused divorcée come to town with her young son to start a horse ranch. Murphy is the kind of liberal who puts a “No Nukes” sticker on his antique Studebaker and battles city hall to replace the parking meter in front of his store with a tree.

  We shot the picture in and around Mesa, Arizona. I have fond memories of that area: for one thing, best tamales I’ve ever eaten. The mother of the assistant pro at the local golf course made them. God, they were good. When I left town she made two dozen and we put them in the freezer. Plus I shot my all-time best round there, a 65.

  Murphy’s drugstore was actually in nearby Florence, Arizona, and all we needed to do was dress it up a little. But we had to build Sally’s ranch from the ground up. It was on land next to a state prison and we’d see chain gangs on our way to and from the set.

  Marty Ritt is all about substance over flash. His films reflect his strong social conscience. He was one of Hollywood’s most prolific and successful directors, despite having been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. He was easygoing and supportive of everyone on the set and was especially encouraging to writers and actors. I considered him a dear friend and colleague. (A few years after Murphy’s Romance, when it was announced that Marty would be doing Nuts with Barbra Streisand, I knew his heart wasn’t good, so I called him and said, “Don’t do it Marty. She’ll fucking kill you.” Afterward, Marty told me she damn near did.)

  Murphy’s Romance is honest and low-key, with straightforward cinematography and a quietly brilliant script by the husband-wife team of Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch, who’d worked with Marty on Hud and Norma Rae. There’s a scene in the picture that exemplifies their talent, “the hat bit,” in which Murphy explains the significance of the different ways of wearing a cowboy hat: