The Garner Files: A Memoir

by James Garner

  Jim is one of the most intuitive people I know, but he’s complicated. I think he always seemed happiest when working. I’m not sure why, but I suspect it’s something deep. Although he’s very private, we have had, I guess you could say, an intimate relationship over the years, sharing very confidential and personal things. But I’m not so sure that’s his usual way.

  I know Jim was thrilled with his success in television (I always thought he could have become a serious movie star, too), but he never gave himself enough credit as an actor and an artist, and he is both of those things for sure. There’s an enigmatic aspect to him that most people never see. They accept the image he wants to portray. But I think he has his secrets. Maybe something like the cat who ate the canary? . . . but always with a big smile to go with it.

  —JOEL GREY

  When Jim and Steve worked together on The Great Escape, it was a tenuous relationship. They liked each other—at least Steve liked Jim—but Steve was wary of him, I think because Jim was so incredibly good looking. Of course, so was Steve in his own way, but he just felt that Jim was tall, dark, and handsome, while Steve was more of the rough-and-tumble kind of guy.

  In 1963, just before Steve and I went to Taiwan to film The Sand Pebbles, Paul Newman, James Garner, Steve, and I went to the car races at Riverside. On our way home, the men got annoyed because I insisted on stopping at the next service station restroom. When they did stop, I discovered to my dismay that there was a long line of women ahead of me. I couldn’t stand the delay any longer, and I knew the men were probably getting angrier by the minute, so I came up with a brilliant idea. I said to the girls standing there, “Hey, do you know there’s a car full of movie stars around the bend?”

  “Who?” they cried in unison.

  “Why, there’s Steve McQueen, there’s Paul Newman, and there’s James Garner!”

  The girls looked at each other and ran like crazy, leaving me in sole possession of the facilities. I never did tell the fellas how a swarm of females suddenly discovered them!

  —NEILE McQUEEN TOFFEL

  August 28, 1963, was an exhilarating day. Those of us from the West Coast who came to the March on Washington were grateful to be there and thrilled to be united in such an important common cause. We understood there was possible danger but we put our fears aside.

  I was the only woman in the group, and that day I received brotherly attention from some of the most beautiful men in the world. Especially James, who was always chivalrous and caring about women.

  Later, when I came to town to do my own television series, he was the first to welcome me to the community. I have a vivid memory of a car pulling into the driveway and Jim getting out and saying, “Welcome. This is a crazy town, there’s lots of good and lots of bad.” It was just the advice one needed coming to a strange land. “I’m a big brother,” he said, “if you need anything, call me, I’m not far away.”

  Soon after that, I was on a tennis court with Jim, Sidney Poitier, and Dennis Weaver. Naturally, I was wearing my most provocative little white shorts. A bee flew into the shorts and I panicked. I was screaming and yelling, all the while thinking, on the one hand, I should take the shorts off to allow the bee to escape, but on the other hand wanting to preserve my modesty. The men were trying to distract me from being terrified by this little bee, especially Jim, who was so sweet and so funny. He said things like, “I don’t know, that bee might never come out of there” and “I think that’s the happiest bee in town.” When the bee suddenly fell onto the ground of its own accord and sort of hopped around in circles, Jim flashed that famous grin and said, “Look, he’s drunk!”

  —DIAHANN CARROLL

  Jim and I worked together only twice, in Move Over, Darling and The Thrill of It All. He’s so good at what he does . . . I felt married. We didn’t see each other much over the following years, but we’ve stayed friends because we talk on the phone regularly. I don’t know how, because Jim hates the telephone. I usually have to call him. “Can’t you pick up a phone?” I say, but he just grumbles.

  We had fun. He’s a marvelous actor. He’s very real when he talks to you. He’s so funny and so nice, I just love him. Even though he broke two of my ribs. Jim, if we don’t speak for a while, I forgive you for breaking my ribs. Both of them. Don’t give it another thought.

  —DORIS DAY

  Talk to anyone who has ever worked with Jim, and the word “family” will emerge almost immediately. In many cases, their association with Jim lasted several decades. No wonder they consider him, and he considers them, like family.

  Roy Huggins was never part of that extended family—which seems odd at first, considering how integral Roy was to Jim’s two greatest successes. Roy cast Jim as Bret Maverick, a character he created in 1956 when he was under contract as a producer at Warner Bros. Television. The success of Maverick made Jim a huge star, enabling him to make the leap to feature motion pictures in the 1960s.

  Jim and Roy shared many traits, but they were also wired differently. Roy was a writer first and foremost, so he was often reclusive by choice—a mentality that, in many ways, reflected his approach as a television producer, particularly during his eighteen years at Universal. Though he oversaw the entire production of Rockford during the show’s first season (as he did on every TV project for which he was “show runner”), Roy devoted most of his energy to two specific areas: the development of stories and scripts, and the editing of the film. All other aspects of day-to-day production, he entrusted to the likes of such capable lieutenants as Jo Swerling and Stephen J. Cannell. With regard to story and character development, Roy’s focus was so singular that he would often isolate himself for days at a time—usually in the form of one of his patented “story drives,” where he would embark on a long drive in his car, accompanied only by his tape recorder, and dictate several full-length stories for his shows. (On one such excursion, he dictated a sixteen-page single-spaced story that served as the basis for the Rockford Files pilot.)

  Roy was also unusual in his choice of working hours. He often arrived at the studio at five or six in the evening (when most shows wrapped up production for the day) and worked well into the early-morning hours. As a result, an actor working on a Huggins-produced show was not likely to see him on a daily basis. So as well as he knew Jim—and came to understand him throughout their long association together—if Roy were alive today, I believe he would cite his modus operandi as a producer as one factor that would’ve prevented him from becoming part of Jim’s extended family.

  I respect and admire both men. Whatever personal differences kept them apart, their professional collaborations changed the face of television in two genres. Along the way, they each left their own distinctive mark, for which we should all be grateful.

  —ED ROBERTSON, author of

  Maverick: Legend of the West and Thirty Years of The Rockford Files

  I worked with Jim on Rockford for six years and he never changed a line. He did the lines exactly as written. And not only that, if we had a guest star on the set who was bending the dialogue or doing approximations of the lines, Jim would listen to it in the camera rehearsal and then he would go over to that actor and in the nicest way he’d say, “You know, I think we have the best writers in Hollywood working on this show, and I never change a line, and it would certainly mean a lot to me if you didn’t either.” So he was down there protecting the words.

  I remember once, in the fourth year, David Chase, who as you know is the creator of The Sopranos and is one of the best writers I know . . . David was one of the producers on The Rockford Files for four of the five years, and in the fourth year, we got a call that Jim was having trouble with one of the lines in a script that David had written. Jim was always good with his dialogue and hated to be the guy holding up the company because he couldn’t remember a line. Occasionally he would have a line he couldn’t remember, and it would just drive him nuts, and apparently, this line was completely baffling him and he couldn’t get it out. And
one of the things about David is that he writes soliloquy-type speeches—they’re this long on the page—and that was part of the problem. And so I get a call from an assistant director who says, “You’d better get down here, he’s throwing furniture, he’s so upset.” So I grab David and we’re walking down to Stage 12 or wherever it was and I’m saying, “Well, you know, this is the exception that proves the rule: here we are five and a half years into this show and never rewritten a line for this guy and here’s the one time that it’s going to happen.”

  And David’s kind of upset because he liked the line. Well, we get down to the set and the red light’s turning on the door and we have to wait until it shuts off and we walk into the soundstage and you can hear Jim screaming. He’d blown the line again. David’s kind of standing in the background—he’s like a little miffed because we’d never changed any of our dialogue.

  I walk over to Jim and I go, “Hey, I’m down here with David and we can break this line up and throw one of the lines to Pidge [Noah Beery Jr.] and it’ll take us five minutes.”

  Jim looked at me and he said, “Change this line? Steve, this is a great line. I just can’t remember the goddam thing!”

  So we never changed it. And we were perfect: never changed a line on the show.

  —STEPHEN J. CANNELL

  I was thirty years old. The Rockford Files was looking for a new producer, and this was going to be my big chance. The show had been on the air for two years and I was not a watcher of it, so they sent me to a screening room to see a couple of episodes. I’d never produced— I was a story editor—and I think I watched three in a row and got the feeling that Rockford was the only show I’d ever seen that didn’t exist just in its own time slot. It was in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles is a real place and these are real people. I’d never felt that way about anything else I’d seen. I think that has changed since, but at the time, there was something generic about television. Place didn’t matter. But The Rockford Files was very much about the place where it was set. And the people.

  Jim taught me that good acting involves listening. When you have to do fifteen takes of the same scene, by the second or third take, an actor has heard what the other person is saying so it no longer registers. He’s only thinking about getting his line out. Jim is really good at listening and making it fresh every time. He told me that was because his first job was as one of the jurors in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial on Broadway. He had no lines, so he had to sit there for three hours trying to stay awake. The only way to make it work for him was to listen like it was brand new. That’s easier said than done. It’s not real when you’ve already heard it a million times.

  I also learned about camera. I began to understand how film translates words into images. There was something about the way Jim worked that made me see that very clearly, maybe because there was no nonsense on the set. It was all about the work, and the work stood there very clear for you to see, without the Sturm und Drang. On Jim’s set, everyone was treated with kindness and respect. There was no bullshit, no Hollywood slithering going on. Compared to the experiences I’d had before, working on Rockford was an upgrade to first class.

  Every Christmas Jim gave each of the writers their scripts bound in beautiful red leather with gold lettering on the cover. We’d have a party at a Mexican restaurant near the Burbank Studio. We’d be sitting there dipping chips in guacamole and drinking beer and I’d suddenly think: What am I doing here? What am I doing here with James Garner ? With Maverick ! How did this happen ?

  —DAVID CHASE

  When The Rockford Files debuted back in 1974, we were living in Michigan. I was the series’s biggest fan. It became sort of a religious experience, and friends knew not to call me on Friday night between nine and ten because I wouldn’t pick up the phone.

  When we moved to Southern California in ’78, one of the first things I did was try to find Jim Rockford’s trailer. I knew it was at a place called Paradise Cove in Malibu, so I jumped in the car and headed for the beach. I was cruising up the Pacific Coast Highway when I saw two semi trucks with “Rockford Files/NBC” on the side. I couldn’t believe it!

  I parked near the trucks and got out of the car. The first person I ran into was Luis Delgado. I told him I was a huge fan of the show and asked if Mr. Garner was there and he said, “Yeah, he’s here, do you want to meet him?” Just like that! I could have been anybody! (I was, actually.) Luis took me over to a motor home, opened the door, and there was Jim, sitting in a chair. Luis said, “This young man would like to meet you,” and Jim said, “Come in, son.” Jim always makes everybody feel welcome.

  —ROB HOWE

  Garner says he’s easygoing, but he’s lying. He’s angry and desperate, just like I am. That’s why Rockford has always worked so well, because Jim is coming from a very passionate, driven place.

  —JOE SANTOS

  The relationship between Jim Rockford and Beth Davenport was never explicit, just implicit. On purpose.

  The character was created by Juanita Bartlett in the first Rockford episode she wrote. Beth was the first intelligent and attractive female character on television. There had been smart women before, but they usually wore big glasses and were fat or old. To have a young woman who actually had a brain in her head was something quite extraordinary at that time.

  Working with Jim was like getting a little acting class every day. I learned a lot about camera angles, lenses, lighting. One of the hardest things to do as an actor is to walk and talk at the same time, especially when you have a lot of dialogue and there are about fifty people moving along with you off-camera. I always had a lot of lawyer shit to say. Jim helped me get my bearings so I’d know where the camera was at all times. He knows all that stuff because he’s been doing it all his life. He looked after me.

  In addition to the technical things I learned from Jim, I also learned a lot about being a leader. Everybody loved him—but he took care of not only the actors and me but the whole crew. He knew everybody’s name, he knew everybody’s kids’ names. He had an enormous generosity toward everyone on the crew. And so of course they were all completely devoted to him in return.

  I think Jim is such a good actor because he actually leaves his actor at home and he brings himself to the screen. That kind of ease in front of a camera takes time. He’s also a very appealing human being. Both men and women feel safe with him, they feel like they get him.

  — GRETCHEN CORBETT

  I had a term contract at Universal, a serious development deal, and had done two pilots that hadn’t sold. Universal got a script for a new show called Magnum and assigned it to me.

  Well, I didn’t like the script. It was very James Bond–like and the guy did everything right. He was a superhero with a woman on each arm, and he was too perfect. I told them, “I don’t think I should play guys like this. I really don’t like him.” I probably said, “I want to do a character like Rockford.” We got into a big thing. My whole future was on the line. Most people didn’t know who I was and the studio said, “Who the hell do you think you are? You’ve never even been on the air!” It was a big dilemma for me because I did not think I fit in that kind of show.

  I didn’t know what to do. If I stood firm and refused to take the part, whether or not they could have legally won in a courtroom, two things would have happened: (1) they could have tied me up forever, (2) I would have gotten the reputation of being difficult and may never have worked again anyway.

  I talked to Jim about it and he said, simply: “Do you want to do the show?” I said no. He said, “Well, Tom, I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I’ll tell you this: if they want you, you’ll never have more power than you do right now. As soon as you sign on, you’re going to have no power and no position and no one’s going to have to listen to you. Maybe if the show’s a raging success you’ll get that power back in the second or third year, but if you’re going to make a stand, now’s the only time you can make it.”

  It occurred to me th
at this is not a guy who’s just throwing advice off the top of his head. This is a guy who’s taken those kinds of risks.

  It was not a precious discussion, not “Jim, I have to talk to you . . .” We were sitting around waiting for the crew to come back from lunch and it came up. Then we went on to something else. In fact, if I had sat him down and said, “I have to talk to you, I need some advice,” I probably wouldn’t have gotten any. We were just talking.

  I took Jim’s advice and it worked. “Okay,” Universal said, “how ’bout if we give you a choice of three pilots? Magnum would be one of the three and we’ll bring in somebody new who can rewrite the show more to your liking.”

  And that’s what happened. And it changed my life. In the new script, Magnum was not a superhero. He’s a tough guy, as Rockford was, but he was reluctant. That’s all from Jim.

  I’ve had a couple of mentors in the business. One was Ben Johnson, who gave me my introduction to Westerns. The other is Jim. I don’t think he’d be comfortable being called a mentor, nor do I think he considered himself one, but he was, whether he likes it or not.

  —TOM SELLECK

  When I was working with James in The Rockford Files, he kept disappearing every day and I kept thinking, I want to have lunch with my leading man—how often am I going to get to work with James Garner? So one day I cornered him and asked if he wouldn’t mind telling me where he goes every day, and couldn’t we at least have one lunch at the commissary? He said, “I’m terribly sorry, I have to go for my acupuncture.” He said that the only way he could survive was to go to his acupuncturist and get rid of the pain. I thought, Wow, that’s quite a testimonial. So I went to his acupuncturist for years and the acupuncturist said to me, “You know, acting is very injurious to your health.”

  —ERIN GRAY

  James Garner taught me how to cross my eyes, one at a time. It’s a skill I have employed often to no advantage whatsoever.

  —LEE PURCELL