Playboy Interview: James Garner

It has been almost a quarter of a century since James Garner first captured America's fancy as television's Bret Maverick, the most charming scamp and champion of justice (in his own way) ever to saddle a horse and ride out into the sunset. In the years since then, Garner, 6'3" tall and ruggedly handsome, has retained his franchise as the only American actor who looks and moves like a classic leading man but who invariably imbues his roles with a touch of classic schlemiel. "The Rockford Files," Garner's most recent TV series, showcased its Emmy award--winning star as a pusillanimous private eye who flouted every mystery cliché extant. TV detectives front Richard Diamond to Barnaby Jones employed dishy (or at least personable) secretaries; Rockford used an answering machine. Instead of a suitably shabby office à la Harry-O or the swank digs favored by a Peter Gunn, Rockford lived in a tacky trailer. And while hawk-shows like Banacek, Mannix and Cannon were well paid for their exploits, Rockford was usually stiffed by his clients. It was a bright, funny show that grew more popular each year as the rest of TV prime time grew more devoted to cheap sitcoms and network freak shows such as "Real People" and "That's Incredible."

A far more versatile performer than his fans sometimes realize, Garner has made it as big in films as he has on TV. In the course of taking part in 32 movies--his latest is "The Fan," with Lauren Bacall--the veteran actor has quietly rolled up an impressive list of characterizations. Garner has adroitly done romantic comedies ("The Thrill of It All" and "Move Over, Darling") cow-boy shoot-'em-ups ("Duel at Diablo" and "Hour of the Gun"), contemporary action adventures ("Grand Prix" and "They Only Kill Their Masters") and psychological dramas ("36 Hours" and "Mister Buddwing"). His favorite film genre, however, remains comedy laced with satire. "I suppose I've played a fairly decent range of characters," he recently noted, "but given three scripts that are about equal, I'll always go with the humor. It's what I like to do."

James Garner has always done what he likes to do. Born in Norman, Oklahoma, on April 7, 1928, he was the youngest of Mildred and Weldon Bumgarner's three sons. His eldest brother, Charles, was a fine student who became a schoolteacher, and Jack, two years James's senior, pitched in the Pittsburgh Pirates' farm system and later became a golf pro. Their baby brother, however, was always an ace goof-off. In high school, Garner excelled at football, basketball, track and truancy. While in high school (or at least in the vicinity thereof), he earned a reputation for picking up whatever dares his friends laid down. "My buddies used to bet me I couldn't steal something, and I'd do it just to show 'em I could," he recently recalled. "My best was taking one of those four-foot-high peanut machines front Woolworth's. I just picked it up and walked out with aplomb, as if I was supposed to. After that, my friend Betty Jane Smith gave me the nickname Slick."

Slick Bumgarner became James Garner in 1954, when he wound up in Hollywood. Three years later, he was the nation's biggest TV star, routing both Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen on Sunday nights in "Maverick." It was the start of an enduring career that has yet to show a sign of slowing up.

To interview the 52-year-old actor, Playboy sent free-lancer Lawrence Linderman to meet with Garner in Lethbridge, Alberta, where Garner was filming a new movie. Linderman reports:

"Lethbridge is a small, hospitable Western town set just inside Canada about 200 miles north of Great Falls, Montana. When I flew in from San Francisco via Calgary, the area was experiencing its first snowstorm of the season, and it was a beauty. Garner had been in town for a month, acting in 'Pure Escape,' a comedy written and directed by his friend Stuart Margolin (Angel in 'The Rockford Files'), and costarring Billy Dee Williams. The week I arrived, Garner and the rest of the cast were working from five P.M. to five A.M. each day, and my first evening there, I drove 40 miles to a location shoot in an unheated barn. It was not a glamorous setting. One side of the barn was open, and there was a lot of chatter on the set, mostly from my teeth. When we were introduced, Garner kidded me about showing up without winter clothing, but, as I told him, weather reports for the area had shown temperatures holding steady around 64 degrees, not six below freezing.

"Garner is as amiable offscreen as he is on, and between takes, he generously took the time to explain to a shivering journalist exactly what was going, on. Garner had grown a full beard for his role as a former rodeo rider who, with Williams, steals a prize bull to justifiably settle a personal score. I hung in for three hours, watching Garner do various scenes in a stall with a 2100-pound bull, and also checking out the terrific rapport among Garner, Margolin and the crew of about two dozen mostly young Canadians. Unfortunately, 'Pure Escape' fell apart--its financing evaporated--the day after Garner and I completed the interview.

"In any case, my first night in Canada ended with a mild, case of frostbite and two Japanese cassette recorders rendered hors de combat by the cold. The next afternoon, armed with a new Sony, I visited Garner in his room at the Lethbridge Lodge Hotel. Garner genuinely dislikes doing interviews--his quota is one a year--but in spite of that, I found him to be a remarkably candid and friendly cuss and we quickly got down to cases. A lot of people (including myself) didn't really know why Garner had quit 'The Rockford Files,' and that provided an opener for our conversation."

[Q] Playboy: Universal Studios is suing you for leaving The Rockford Files in the middle of its sixth season. Why did you quit?

[A] Garner: I just couldn't work anymore. I was a physical mess, mostly because of things that had built up over the years. I'm talking about injury on top of injury on top of injury, which was the result of working when I shouldn't have worked. I'd done 11 of the series' final 22 shows, but pain has a way of building up till it's unbearable, and I couldn't work with it anymore. And when the ulcers came along, well, I knew my mind was going, too.

[Q] Playboy: Is doing a TV series really that much of a grind?

[A] Garner: I don't think people have any idea how physically killing it is on a human being to be on the screen every week in a one-hour action series. You can start with a little thing like the knees. David Janssen was always in the hospital with bad knees, and the same was true of James Arness and even David Soul, and Starsky and Hutch was on the air for only two seasons. We all know what it's like. I know that more than once I talked to David Janssen along this line and he'd say, "I don't know if I'm going to make it." I think you could pretty well attribute David's death to overstrain and overwork. David wasn't doing a series when he died, but I'm talking about a cumulative effect. When you do it for too many years, it'll get you. We have doubles, but you can use them only on long shots. So you've got to flop yourself on the ground here, and guy punch you and you get a little beat up there, and eventually you wind up comparing broken bones and torn muscles.

[Q] Playboy: What injuries did you sustain in the course of making Maverick, Nichols and The Rockford Files?

[A] Garner: Well, gosh, I wouldn't know where to start. I've had three knee operations, broke a bone in my spine, and I also broke my right kneecap twice in the same place, but that didn't happen while I was working. I did that at home; I can't walk up and clown stairs very well because of the knees, so twice I slipped on the stairs. I've also broken ribs and knuckles, I have disintegrated disks in my back and my neck and I've had all kinds of dislocations, sprains and torn ligaments and tendons. The worst is the knees, though. I've had five incisions in my right knee--the left one's been operated on, too--and the last time, they went in with a hammer and chisel to see if they could get it to bend more than 100 degrees. I'm running a race with Dick Butkus to see who can have more knee operations. In a way, it's kind of funny, because we all get in touch with one another if we find out anything new. Joe Namath used to call and say, "Hey, Jim, I found a great doctor!" Janssen and other actors would call when one of them discovered a new orthopedic guy who could help out. The last time I was in the hospital, Burt Lancaster was in the next room. Burt couldn't run anymore, so he was having a prosthetic knee put in. He told me, "It works fine, and at least there's no pain." You know, you can fix sinuses and you can fix ulcers, but you can't fix legs when they're gone. And we're not talking about soreness or just being uncomfortable. It's pain!

In my last year on The Rockford Files, I'd get up to walk and I'd hobble for the first ten steps. Until I could get some circulation in my legs and feet, it was like walking on hot coals. In fact, I was in such bad shape at the end of the show's fifth year that I asked Freddy Silverman not to pick up Rockford for a sixth season. My contract with Universal was for six years, but NBC's contract with Universal was for five, and if the series wasn't picked up by NBC or another network, I could use the time to rest. But Silverman decided to go with Rockford for another year, so I had to do the best I could.

[Q] Playboy: Were you annoyed with Silverman for not letting you off the hook?

[A] Garner: No, I wasn't perturbed at all, because I knew the situation lie was in: He had to fill the hour. Hell, he had a winner in Rockford, so it was easy to understand. I thought that somehow I'd be able to struggle through another year; after all, I'd already gone through five of 'em as Jim Rockford. But I didn't make it.

[Q] Playboy: Did anyone at NBC or Universal accuse you of being a hypochondriac when you dropped out of The Rockford Files?

[A] Garner: Not that I know of; but if someone had, I probably would have rapped him in the mouth. I really think they should have been more aware of what kind of shape I was in, because all they had to do was call up their first-aid de partment to find out how many pain pills and muscle relaxants they had to give me to keep me on my feet. I was taking Percodan, codeine, Soma, Robax in--anything that would keep me working. I really felt like a plow horse who'd pulled the goddamn plow too long; but I made up my mind to stick it out. And then one day I was on the stage and I had such pains in my stomach that I didn't really know what the trouble was. I just doubled up in pain and I was bleeding rectally; I couldn't breathe because of my sinuses--it was not a wonderful moment. I said, "Whoa, get me a doctor," so the studio doctor came out and discovered that my ulcers were hack with a vengeance. I think we finished filming that show and then I went down to the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, which is kind of like the West Coast's Mayo Clinic. I spent three days there, and they told me I was run-clown. I needed an immediate rest--and I took one.

[Q] Playboy: If what you say is true, why do Universal executives claim you left the series over a money dispute?

[A] Garner: Well, about four months before I got sick, somebody at Universal made a terrible mistake and sent me a cost-accounting sheet that showed that after five years on the air, The Rockford Files was $9,500,000 in debt.

[Q] Playboy: Exactly what did that mean?

[A] Garner: It meant that Universal's got the greatest accountant you've ever heard of. It also meant that, according to Universal, The Rockford Files was a terrible failure as far as any profits were concerned. After the first year, I'd never seen an accounting of the show, and I think the guy who sent it over after the fifth year is probably digging ditches somewhere in Peru, because I'm sure Universal fired him for sending it to me. It's pretty disheartening to know that you're doing everything you can to bring a show in on schedule, and then find out it's all been a waste of time. Anyway, I think Universal felt that after I saw the cost accounting, I said, "Fuck 'em, I quit." But that's their first reaction to everything: An actor's not sick, he's malingering 'cause he wants something. As I said, I saw that profit-and-loss sheet months before I got ill, and when I gave my deposition to their lawyers, I got the feeling they'd been trying to tell Universal that they ain't got much of a case. I think it's a corporate ego lawsuit.

[Q] Playboy: Why would you have been upset about Rockford's being $9,500,000 in debt? Were you in for a share of the profits?

[A] Garner: Sure, I was. Cherokee Productions, my company, produced The Rockford Files, and my share of the series' profits was 38 percent. You'd assume that a series that goes six years and earns $40,000,000 in rentals would be pretty profitable, wouldn't you? I did, especially since we were no more than a total of seven days over on our shooting schedule for all six years--and nobody had ever done that before. I also rented my company's semis and trucks and lights to the show for a lot less money than Universal would have charged in order to keep the show's costs down, to always keep it within our budget. I worked and scrimped and saved and pushed and cajoled and did everything I knew to make the show successful, because I figured, boy, if you can't make a bundle in six years in a series--especially at the rate I was deteriorating physically--then what was the point? I mean, I can go out and work and make an awful lot of money doing pictures or whatever, but I thought that Rockford would make me financially independent of the business. You can question anybody you want on this, and you'll hear the same thing: There never was a better TV crew or production company than we had on The Rockford Files. And then you find out it's all worthless, because they're going to bookkeep you to death. That'll punch a hole in your balloon, sport, I'll tell you that.

[Q] Playboy: It was recently alleged that Robert Wagner and his wife, Natalie Wood, who own half of Charlie's Angels, had been cheated out of their profits through unethical accounting maneuvers. Is that kind of thing widespread in television?

[A] Garner: It's been happening to an awful lot of people for an awful lot of years. In fact, up until just a couple of years ago--I haven't checked on this lately--Raymond Burr and Jack Webb were about the only two people who ever made a profit on a television series. I also made money on a series I produced. In 1971, we made Nichols, and even though the show ran for only 26 episodes and has never been rerun to speak of, it's in profits--and that had never been done before.

[Q] Playboy: Are you planning to contest Universal Studios on its Rockford figures?

[A] Garner: I certainly am. When I first saw that five-year report, I laughed and said, "Oh, well, my lawyers and accountants will take care of that." But the more I got into it, the more I found out just what kind of things Universal did on the show. Let me start with a small example: Let's say you're the set decorator, right? You buy something for our show that costs $100. Well, instead of the actual cost, the studio will multiply that by about 3.3, so that it now costs the show $330. Now, I can't be absolutely sure of that figure, but I'm not far off. The idea is for the set department to make a profit on what they buy. OK, we shoot the hour and now it's time to strike the set; the set department now adds another third of the stepped-up cost for tearing down the set, so the price is now up to about $450. On top of that, they have what they call their generic account. I don't know what it means and neither does anybody else, but they now add on another third of the inflated price, so from $450, it goes to $600, and to top it off, they add another 20 percent for overhead, so that $100 item has now cost the series about $725. They'll tell me I'm crazy when they read this, but let 'em. I'd like to see somebody take a look at that generic account of theirs.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think Universal may have done you out of a couple of million dollars in profits?

[Q] Garner: A couple of million? I think it's a lot more than a couple of million! There's no doubt in my mind whatsoever about that.

[Q] Playboy: What do you plan to do about it?

[A] Garner: Oh, we'll have to sue, because they're not going to make us an offer. We will try to go over their books and then we will sue them and they will say, "Well, let's not do it that way, let's see if we can settle it amicably." They'll offer to give me about ten cents on the dollar; I won't take it. It'll be like trying to open the books of any major company. I'll be ten years in the courts trying to get a good look at their books, but that's all right, too. I'm not going anywhere.

[Q] Playboy: Aside from the production hassles, did you enjoy playing Jim Rockford?

[A] Garner: Absolutely. Steve Cannell created the character and wrote the first script and Roy Huggins brought it to me. They'd been working on Toma, and Rockford was a character in an episode of that show. I don't think Steve wrote Rockford with me in mind, though he might have, because the first time I read it, the character was there. I mean, it was just obvious to me. The character developed as we went along, but it was all basically there in the first episode.

[Q] Playboy: As the series evolved, what kinds of things did you bring to the character?

[A] Garner: Me? I didn't bring anything to it. Really, I just showed up and said the words. I never changed dialog or did things like that. And I never had the writers screaming at me for doing something the wrong way, because I evidently understood what they were trying to do. It was the same thing I wanted to do.

[Q] Playboy: Which was?

[A] Garner: Create a humorous character. Cleveland Amory once reviewed Rockford and said, "Garner's funny, but he's slow funny." I think that's right. I don't come out there with a lollipop and I don't say "dem" and "dose" and "take dat to da bank," and I'm not flashy. I do humor; I don't do comedy. And humor is much more subtle than comedy, and it takes a longer time to understand the characters. I'm much more interested in characters than flash, because flash hits quick and leaves quick. But characters just go on and on, and build and build. Rockford, if you remember, wasn't that big a hit during its first or second year; but it got better the third and the fourth and fifth--and the series was stronger when I left it than at any other time.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think Rockford was so successful?

[A] Garner: I think the writing was terrific. Cannel' and Juanita Bartlett gave us brilliant scripts, and Meta Rosenberg may be the best producer in television. As far as my part in it, I just feel that if something works for me, it's gonna work for everyone, because I'm pretty average. I mean, I'm not any smarter than anybody else. I'm really the norm; I'm not looking to impress New York, I'm looking to impress Delight, Arkansas. I've gotten to the point where I can read a script and think, Yeah, that's good, or, No, I don't think it'll really sell. And I've really gotten very comfortable with humor. I felt that was what Rockford really had going for itself, and that was also the source of our biggest argument with Universal. After our first season, they wanted us to take the humor out of the series.

[Q] Playboy: Why did they want to do that?

[Q] Garner: Because they were going to put us up against Hawaii Five-O, so they wanted Jim Rockford to be a straight detective. I told 'em, "If you don't like the series, fine, cancel it, but don't come down here and tell us how to make it." Studio executives are usually worried about their jobs, which often leaves them in a situation of not really knowing what to do. But I wasn't worried about my job, and I knew what I was doing. I've been (taking pictures for 25 years, and if you don't want to buy what I do, that's OK. But I don't want people coming in and I trying to tell me what to do when they don't really know. I mean, studio executives have been to business school and law school, but as far as film goes, they have no creative talent whatsoever. And SD we stuck with the humor, and by the third season, they were after us to do more. A lot of that really had to do with Stuart Margolin. who played the part of Angel. We snuck him into the pilot of Rockford as a kind of snitch: Angel's brother-in-law owned a small newspaper, so any time Rockford needed information, he had a source to go to. Well, we started using Angel more often than the network anticipated and they told us not to bother with him. By the third year, they couldn't get enough of Angel. Stu's really a buddy, and he's not only a fine actor, he's also a talented director and singer.

[Q] Playboy: How did you happen to connect with him?

[A] Garner: Oh, I met Stu at the end of the Sixties, when I was getting ready to do Nichols. Right about then, I'd gotten really weary of doing movies. I'd been going back and forth to Europe and Mexico three or four times a year. and I was tired of traveling, and tired of seeing my family only in hotel rooms, so I decided not to work for a year. I lasted about three months, and then I started going buggy. I told my agent, "Let's take a look at a couple of scripts," and after nine months, I told him, "Just get me a goddamn script: I've got to go to work." It went on for over a year like that, and I ended up doing a terrible Italian picture titled A Man Called Sledge for Dino Di Laurentiis. I almost didn't care what it turned out like, because I'm not geared to not working. The problem was, I just didn't see any scripts I liked. In most of 'em, you had to cuss a lot or take off your clothes, and that's particularly bad for me, because if I take off my clothes, well, my body is so covered with scars--I'm a member of the 200-stitch club--that it would turn into a horror picture, and I don't do horror pictures.

Anyway, I felt worthless and guilty. and I wanted to go back to work, but I didn't want to work outside Los Angeles, so I decided to do another television series. That's when Nichols came along, and it was about a turn-of-the-century sheriff. Maverick and Rockford were pretty much alike as characters, but Nichols was a different kind of bird. The series drew a pretty fine line between making social comments and being entertaining. We'd make sly little predictions and comments about, oh, what might happen with the automobile, the changing of the old West or the treatment Indians received. But we made certain that Nichols was still funny. To make it work, the sheriff I played needed a deputy who was a kind of lovable, shifty-eyed, no-good rat. So we began doing screen tests. and one day Meta came to me and said she'd found someone I'd really like. Well, it was Stu Margolin, and I looked at some film of him on Love, American Style. St used to do all those little vignettes between the show's longer pieces. and I remember watching him in this quick take in a jail cell. Some guy slammed the cell door in Stn's face and he made me laugh. I thought the guy was great, because I know it's difficult to make me laugh by watching a guy's reaction to a door slammed in his face. I told Meta, "Let's get him," and after I started working with him, I found out how brilliant Margolin is. So we put him in Nichols and later on used him in the pilot of Rockford.

[Q] Playboy:Nichols ran for only one year. Why didn't it succeed?

[A] Garner: For one thing, I really think the show was five or ten years ahead of its time. For another, it received treatment from the sponsor and from the network that almost guaranteed its demise before it ever got on the air. Chevrolet sponsored the series, and I remember going to Detroit and showing it to them, and they were disappointed because it wasn't Maverick, and they thought they were going to get Maverick. Frankly, Nichols was above their heads and above their intelligence. They just didn't understand it, and so they walked away feeling, Oh, God, we've got a clunker. They didn't wait to see whether or not it would be a clunker on the air, which it was not. The show got good ratings. We were doing anywhere from 33 to 38 in the Nielsens, and there are a lot of shows with 29s and 30s that are still on TV. I think Nichols would have built up its audience and become stronger and stronger the same way Rockford did, if NBC had left it on for another year, but they really didn't give it a chance. Out of 26 shows, eight were pre-empted--mostly for political coverage--and then in midseason, they moved us opposite Marcus Welby, M.D., in hopes that we'd take enough audience away to knock old Marcus right out of the top ten. Well, any time one third of your shows are pre-empted and then the time slot is switched, people aren't gonna know when you're on. I was terribly disappointed, because I still think Nichols is the best of the three TV series I've done.

[Q] Playboy: You recently agreed to produce and star in a weekly remake of Maverick, beginning on NBC next fall. Having told us about the pitfalls of doing a TV series, why would you want to make another one?

[A] Garner: Well, I had a commitment with Warner Bros. and NBC for another series after Rockford, and I have a pretty good relationship with Warners. I made Nichols for them and I have some confidence in them. I really don't anticipate running into any of the same problems with Warner Bros. that I had with Universal.

[Q] Playboy: Why Maverick and not another character?

[A] Garner: I couldn't find anything else that interested me. I mean, I've done a detective--so has everybody else--and doctors are dead and lawyers have been run into the ground and, besides, neither of those two professions is too admirable at the moment. And I don't deal in futuristic things. Meanwhile, I'd thought about doing Maverick again ever since the TV film of it a couple of years ago with Charlie Frank. I started thinking what Bret Maverick would be like 20 years later and what the series would look like updated from the 1860s to the 1880s. If I couldn't find a new format, I said I'd like to try Maverick, and the minute I voiced that, everybody seemed to say hooray, wonderful, and we soon couldn't get our minds on anything but Maverick. So they liked the idea, and I'll go give it a shot.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't you worried that you won't be up to the physical demands of another weekly TV series?

[A] Garner: No, because I'm a lot healthier now than I was at the end of Rockford. I've rested since then, and I'm not planning to be on the screen every minute, the way I was in Rockford. We're going to have other characters in Maverick, because I'm just not physically able to be on the screen one hour every week. Rockford really fixed that for me. I can't remember ever being in such bad shape as when I left that series.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you've completely recuperated?

[A] Garner: Oh, I got better almost as soon as I stopped work. I left the series in December of '79, and a month later, I was feeling really fine. As a matter of fact, I remember going over to see Stu Margolin one afternoon and telling Pat O'Bannon, Stu's girlfriend, that the last couple of clays had been the first time I'd been relatively free of pain. On the drive back to my place, I was really looking forward to watching a Laker basketball game on TV--and then that son of a bitch jumped me in Coldwater Canyon.

[Q] Playboy: If you're referring to the incident in January 1980 in which you were severely beaten up, would you mind telling us what happened?

[A] Garner: Well, it was something I really didn't need. I was driving home at about six o'clock, in the heart of evening rush-hour traffic, and in my rearview mirror, I saw an El Camino passing cars on the right. Traffic was going six or eight miles an hour and just where Coldwater Canyon narrows, I saw this car come up slightly behind me on the right side, and I thought, What the hell is this? So I kind of pulled to the center and sped up a little bit to let the guy get in behind me, but instead of doing that, he tried to pass me and he hit my car, a Trans Am, on the right rear fender. It didn't feel like much of a collision, but I decided to stop and take a look. If there was any damage, I thought we'd exchange licenses and the names of our insurance companies. I put my right-turn signal on and started to drive off the road--and the El Camino tried to pass me on the left, so I pulled into the middle of the street and stopped. I turned off the ignition, put on the emergency brake and was about to open the door when I suddenly heard, "You motherfucker!" And then, wham!, I got belted. I wasn't exactly expecting that.

[Q] Playboy: Your window was open?

[A] Garner: Yeah. I had the window down, and by the third time this character hit me, I'd reached up and grabbed him by the throat. And while he's pumping away, this woman--who turns out to be his sister--opens the passenger door of my car and grabs my keys and says, "C'mon, Aubrey, I've got the keys, let's go." Evidently, Aubrey--his name is Aubrey Williams, Jr.--was going to pop me a couple of times, leave me bleeding at the wheel, throw away my keys and then take off. It didn't work out that way.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Garner: Because I didn't let go of that sucker. After he'd hit me about nine times, I had him pulled up so close to the car that his face was on top of the roof; but even though he couldn't see where he was punching, he was doing some damage. I was holding him with both hands and he had hold of me with his left and was punching with his right. Finally, his necklace broke and so did mine, and he pulled himself away. I was pretty busted up at that point, but I wanted some of his butt. I'd had about all I wanted in the face, so I leaned back and got my feet out the window and kicked him hard enough in the chest to push him back. I finally got out of the car and as I stood up and turned to look for him, boy, I caught one flush in the mouth. I threw a punch at him and missed, and then took him clear across the street and we tripped over a curb and I landed on top of him. Afterward, I couldn't remember how he'd been able to get up so quick, but at the trial, he said he grabbed me by the co-jones, and that's probably the only thing he didn't lie about in court. Anyway, he got up, and the next thing I know, I'm getting kicked in the head. I was lying face down and lie kicked me three or four times in the head, and then he kicked his way down the left side of my body. I figured I'd had enough, so I yelled, "Somebody get this son of a bitch off me!"

[Q] Playboy: Were there a lot of people around?

[A] Garner: Sure there were, but nobody wanted any part of him. The guy had gone completely berserk; he had a man down who hadn't hit him and he was trying to kill him, so, in a way, I don't blame anybody for not jumping in, but I don't think I'd ever just stand by and watch. Anyway, the guy tried to kick me in the balls, but he got my tailbone instead, and fractured it. After that, he kicked his way up the right side of my body, and as I could feel him getting near my head again, I thought, If he kicks me one more time, I'm going to play like I'm out and dead. Well, he kicked me in the head, and I shuddered and made a noise and just went limp. And then I got kicked like you never saw! He kicked me just behind my right ear and I thought he'd about tore my head off. And then he kicked me once more in the head and I heard his sister yell, "Come on, Aubrey, let's go." And so they started to take off. He didn't know it yet, but he hadn't finished with me.

[Q] Playboy: You got up and went after him?

[A] Garner: Damn right I did. I figured that any son of a bitch who can kick me and hit me that many times and who can't put me out ain't that tough. I couldn't see too well, but I did spot his car, so I started going for it. I was on the passenger side of his car then, and I thought maybe I could grab his sister by the hair, and if he wanted to drive off, he could, but he'd be dragging me, and I wasn't about to let go of his sister's head. But as I started after him, two guys I know--one of 'em was Lew Wasserman's chauffeur--came up and held me. Aubrey and his sister took off, and I went to the hospital for three days.

[Q] Playboy: How extensive were your injuries?

[A] Garner: Oh, I had a pretty bad concussion, a cracked tailbone, a lot of aches and bruises and a few stitches in the head. But they were just small wounds, because Williams had been wearing kind of flashy Italian shoes. They got Williams only on assault with a deadly weapon, his shoes. Anyway, I ain't near as mad at Aubrey as I am at his lawyer, who called me a liar on television. A reporter asked, "Do you think there are some discrepancies in Mr. Garner's story?" and Williams' lawyer said, "Garner's a liar. "The next day, his man was totally convicted. The prosecution could have called 15 witnesses and they all would have told the same story, but only three or four were needed.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever find out what provoked the attack?

[A] Garner: The guy just blew his stack. Williams is an ex--Green Beret who's belligerent and hot-tempered, and nothing makes you madder than to be doing something wrong and really fuck up at it. And that's what happened. He was hurrying and passing people on the right, and then he ran into me and got mad at me for getting in his way. But he knew how to take care of it: He'd just jump out and pop me a couple of times and then drive on. It backfired on him.

[Q] Playboy: Between your physical bout with Rockford Files and your separation from your wife, this couldn't have been one of the better periods in your life.

[A] Garner: The past couple of years really have been bad, and I don't know when I'm going to see the end of it; but, hey, you have your ups and you have your downs. At that point, it felt like it was just one damned thing tacked onto another; but by the time I got out of the hospital, I felt a little better. I think it was because of the public reaction to what happened to me: I received thousands of letters, and a lot of people in show business whom I don't know very well sent flowers. The warmth I felt from all those people made me feel pretty good; and when I got home, I was still cut and bruised, but I also thought that maybe I'd gone as far down as I could go. I felt, well, the business was shitty, the family was in an uproar, and physically I'd taken another real good beating; but, hey, maybe this was the end of it. And then I found the sweetest little dog you ever saw, a Samoyed, and he was a great companion. Called him Rocky after you-know-who.

[Q] Playboy: Have things lightened up for you since then?

[A] Garner: No, not really, because so many things are still up in the air. I'm not quite sure what I want to do careerwise, and my marriage is still not together. I didn't want to talk about this in an interview, but the reason my wife and I are separated is that I was so physically and mentally exhausted from work that I said I had to take a sabbatical; I needed a hiatus. I had to get away and take some of the pressure off me, because there was tremendous pressure on me from many, many areas. And my wife understood that. Lois and I haven't had any arguments and we haven't had any fights. My wife and I go to dinner once a week and we talk on the phone just about every day. There never was gonna be a divorce.

[Q] Playboy: In terms of what you want to do with your career, does any of the conflict have to do with making movies versus working on TV?

[A] Garner: No, 'cause I think it's all kind of like formula-car racing, if you know what that's about. In formula racing, you run a car on a set of tires that can be only so wide, with an engine that can be only so big and can create only so much horsepower, and every formula is different. The idea is to see who can drive more-or-less equal cars fast enough and smart enough to win. TV and movies are like that, too. You have certain restrictions in television that you don't have in films, and it gets down to who works best in which formula. Right now, I don't think movies are my forte. I really haven't read a script lately that hasn't contained sex and/or violence that I want to be a part of, and I also haven't read a script where I wouldn't have to tell a director that I'm not gonna say this or do that. Now, I don't like to tell writers what they can and cannot do; when I get a script, I'll tell them either yes, I like it, or no, I don't. But I hate to go in and tell them how to do their picture. Anyway, I don't distinguish between TV and films careerwise. Which is why I said, OK, we'll do the TV series and we'll work within that framework.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel the same way about doing commercials?

[A] Garner: Yeah, I do. The first thing I ever did on film was a Winston commercial. I'm the guy who made that grammatical error, read it, actually, that "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should," instead of as a cigarette should. I didn't know anything about acting when I did it, so it had no value, but I've learned a bit since then. As far as TV commercials are concerned, I'm very selective about the ones I do. I'm not going to sell ant killer or deodorant and I don't do toothpaste commercials, and you show me a commercial for Excedrin and I guarantee that watching it will give you a headache. I've been real fortunate with the Polaroid people, and it's been good for them, too.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you decide on Polaroid? Did they make you an offer you couldn't refuse?

[A] Garner: No, because a lot of other things were being offered to me, and for more money. But Polaroid always had a certain amount of class and they never did anything cheap. Their first salesman to speak of was Perry Como, and then they had Laurence Olivier and Candy Bergen. I had some meetings with their ad people and I was straight with them. I told 'em I don't believe in hard sell and I don't care about f-stops, light, convenience or color. What I'd do would be to put the camera in front of people and tell a little joke and let the audience walk away with a smile. And if people really wanted to find out about the camera, they could go ask a salesman, but I wasn't gonna get up on television and say, "This is the best camera I've ever seen," and all that bullshit. I just wanted to leave them with a good feeling about the product. By now, I've probably done about 70 commercials for Polaroid, and not all of them work, but some of them do.

[Q] Playboy: Why so many?

[A] Garner: That was my choice. I didn't want people to see and hear one joke 58 times a week, because by the second or third time around, they'd get sick of it--and they'd also get sick of the product. So I asked to make more commercials, but not to have any of 'em run too many times in any area. That's because commercials usually turn me off, so when I do one, I want people to like it and I want a little humor in it.

[Q] Playboy: And Polaroid saw eye to eye with you on that?

[A] Garner: Oh, I've bridled at certain things Polaroid has wanted me to do.

[Q] Playboy: Such as?

[Q] Garner: Everybody's going to hate me for this, but I don't like to work with kids and animals. Usually, you wind up bustin' your neck, trying to get a dog, say, to sit in one spot or trying to keep the kid happy. I deal in thoughts and humor, not in how cute a kid is. And it's so tedious trying to get timing in those situations. Have you ever heard the story about the comedian who asked the interviewer what the most important ingredient of comedy is? You be the interviewer and ask me the question.

[Q] Playboy: All right, Garner, what's the most--

[A] Garner: Timing. That's what comedy is all about, and when you have to worry about a dog or a kid who's not looking up to catch the light, timing goes out the window. And you can't have humor without timing, which is why I told the ad people, "If you really want me to leave in a hurry, just keep bringing those kids and animals on. That's why Henry Fonda left GAF, fellas. He couldn't take working with the kids and the animals." That's the truth. Fonda is one of our great actors, and all that other stuff was taking away from what he was trying to do. You see, acting is a business, it's my business, and as far as I'm concerned, I don't care what the medium is. And it really burns my ass when a Broadway actor goes to make a film in Hollywood and is called a sellout by his fellow actors, and the same thing happens when a movie actor does television or a commercial. We're actors. That's what we do, that's what we sell and that's how we make our livings. If you use good taste and judgment, there is nothing at all degrading about doing a commercial and there's nothing to be ashamed of--and I set out to prove that with the Polaroid stuff. Jane Fonda said she was embarrassed about Henry's doing commercials. Screw her! I mean, I love Jane and I've known her since she was a baby, but what a snobby attitude. God forbid if her career should go on its ass and she needed money to send her kids to school--if she was offered a commercial to do at that point, you think she'd do it? Damn right she would. And she'd probably also come out wit a statement about how there's an acceptable way to do commercials.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about another actress, Mariette Hartley. Were you surprised by the enormous response to the commercials you made with her?

[A] Garner: Oh, I knew they'd work out well before they were shown. Mariette started working about the fifth or sixth commercial I made, and at that point, I wasn't too happy with the whole thing. I'd just finished one with dogs and kids jumping all over me, and I thought it was bullshit, and said so. But then they needed an actress, and Mariette was hired and we did the one where she says, "Why do you say one-step? It's two." And I say, "No, there's only one," and we start playing with it. I knew it was good, and the ad guys immediately began writing those types of commercials, and it was fun to see the thing develop. Mariette is really a marvelous actress. She can do comedy and can cry at the drop of a hat. On top of that, she photographs beautifully. Here's a girl who worked for nearly 20 years to make it as a dramatic actress and she made it with a commercial that got people to sit up and notice that, hell, she's not only a dramatic actress, she's also got charm and humor.

I don't know if you'd say that's odd, but we all do it in our different ways. If you go back to Maverick and the time when Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan were on TV every Sunday night, Warner Bros. took this real-life dumb cowboy and put him in a cowboy suit and threw him out there on TV and told him to sink or swim against the giants. Well, he swam, but you wouldn't expect it to happen. I didn't.

[Q] Playboy: Were you really a cowboy?

[A] Garner: I wasn't a city slicker, that's for sure. I grew up around Norman, Oklahoma, and I was a poor kid; but I always had a lot o sympathy, because my mother died when I was four years old and my dad remarried a woman named Wilma, who was an absolute bitch. My aunts and uncles would always take me around and say, "Poor Jimmy." That woman was really responsible for the way I developed as an actor. I always try to keep my tongue in my cheek, because I don't want to be laughed at.

[Q] Playboy: Did your stepmother laugh at you?

[A] Garner: Well, yeah, she said some terrible things about me.

[Q] Playboy: Can you recall any?

[A] Garner: Oh, God, now you're getting into psychiatry. When I did something wrong, one of her great things was to put me in a dress and have everybody call me Louise. I mean, that was embarrassing, and I became quite introverted from the time I was about seven, when my dad remarried, to the time I was about 14, when they busted up. As you can see, I'm not all that introverted now, but it took me a long time to get over that. In fact, deciding to become an actor was tremendously hard for me, because I never wanted to perform. I used to have to sing with my cousins and my two brothers, Charlie and Jack, at family get-togethers. Or my dad would be drinking with his buddies and he'd say, "OK, boys, come here, I want you to sing. Charlie, you take bass; Jim, you take melody; and Jack, do the tenor part." And I hated those things, I just hated performing. Damn it, I'm gonna sneeze.

[Q] Playboy: You won't, Jim; it's all psychosomatic.

[A] Garner: Is it? Oh, well, forget it, then, I'm not going to sneeze. Anyway, I hated to do those things, and therefore I got to the point where I was really a rebel about it. By the time I was 14, I'd become an independent little bastard, which is what I was. Nobody was going to tell me what to do or when to do it. I think I developed that attitude after my last set-to with my stepmother.

[Q] Playboy: What happened?

[Q] Garner: Well, Wilma was going to whip me, and I didn't let her. She had this great thing about whipping. My dad then owned a country store and we lived aboutnine and a half miles outside Norman. My stepmother used to make us go out and cut willow switches and then she'd beat us on the butt with them, but she also loved to hit me with whatever she had in her hand, whether it was a stick, a board or a spatula--she really loved spatulas. Well, this one time she was gonna whip me, I didn't let her, and it was an open rebellion. She came at me with a spatula and I hit her. I don't remember how I hit (continued on page 158)James Garner (continued from page 96) her, but she banged her head on a kitchen shelf and that stunned her for a second, and when my old man came in, I was trying to choke her. He said, "What the hell's going on here?" He naturally took his wife's side, so my dad and my brother Jack had to hold me while Wilma busted my butt with a spatula. Later in the day, though, he asked my stepmother what I'd done to deserve a whipping and she said, "Well, he did something." My dad wanted to know what and she said, "I don't know, but I know he did something." Dad said, "You mean you beat the hell out of the kid and you don't even know what he did?" And she said, "Well, I know he did something." Beating me used to be a favorite pastime of hers, I think. My dad and her got into it right then and there. Wilma left the house a couple of weeks later, and then Dad left to work in California a couple of months after that. He put me on a farm in Hobart, Oklahoma, and I stayed there for a couple of months, and then I went back to Norman and lived with my aunt for a few months, and after that, I was on my own.

[Q] Playboy: How did you support yourself?

[A] Garner: I got a driver's license and a chauffeur's license when I was 14, and I drove a salesman for Curlee Clothes all over the state of Texas. We'd be out for a couple of months at a time, and I'd take care of the samples, keep his books and really kind of look after the salesman. He was an old guy who had an ulcer and he wasn't supposed to drink, but he really liked his Scotch and milk. He wasn't supposed to smoke cigars, either, and I was in charge of his cigars and every once in a while I allowed him to have one. We'd take a room at the Baker Hotel in Dallas or the Rice Hotel in Houston and the buyers would come in and they'd all sit around, drinking Scotch, and I'd end up doing the selling. The guy was vice-president of the company and wanted to adopt me, but I was happy to be on my own. The following year, I drove for the company's salesman in Oklahoma, and we must've gone through 100 towns in the state. Those jobs took only a few months each, so I had to do other things to pay my way. I worked at grocery stores, I cut trees for the telephone company so their lines could go through, I was a hod carrier, I hauled Sheetrock and bricks, I worked at a chicken hatchery--I really had a lot of jobs. I used to get up at 3:30 in the morning and go sweep out the administration building at Oklahoma University, and then I'd go to school, play football and then work at night. I learned real early how to be self-sufficient, but a lot of people helped me out, including my grandmother, my uncle and my buddy Jim Paul Dickenson's mother, who ran a rooming house in Norman. The Oklahoma University basketball team stayed there, and she let me live there rent-free. Mostly, though, I wanted to be like everybody else and go to school.

[Q] Playboy: Were you able to do that?

[A] Garner: Only to a certain extent. I finished my freshman year, played varsity football for the high school and really had a terrific time with my friends. My relatives were worried about me running around loose, but I didn't think I needed any supervision. I probably did, but I was a smart-aleck kid. I was still an introvert, but not among my friends.

[Q] Playboy: Did you get into any trouble with the law?

[A] Garner: Oh, occasionally, but I just did the mischievous kinds of things all the kids did. On Halloween, we'd throw rocks at streetlights and knock them out, and one of the best games we played was Ditch 'em: Six or seven of us would line up in cars and the first guy would take off and everybody would try to stay with him. The idea was to lose everybody else, and you'd drive all over town and all over the country to get away from the others. We raised a lot of hell with that game, but we never hurt anybody and never even rolled a car, because we had some pretty good drivers. It sounds dangerous, but it wasn't when we played it in 1944. Anyway, after my freshman year, I quit high school and Jim Paul and I joined the merchant marines. My dad signed permission for me to join, because I wanted to get in there and help win World War Two. The minute we enlisted, the Germans surrendered. I think they heard we were coming.

[Q] Playboy: How long did you stay in the Service?

[A] Garner: Only for about a year. Jim Paul and I wound up going to San Pedro, California, and he shipped out, but I saw these good-looking girls who went to Hollywood High School and I told him, "That's for me." So I went back to high school. My dad was living in Los Angeles and I stayed with him. Not too long after I got to Hollywood High, the Jantzen people came to school, looking for guys to model their bathing suits, and the physical-education teacher gave them the names of ten guys to talk to. I was on the list, and I wasn't interested until they told me they were paying 15 bucks an hour. They took me out to Palm Springs for three days and I made some real good money off them.

[Q] Playboy: Did that get you interested in show business?

[A] Garner: Hell, no. I wanted to play football for Hollywood High, but since I didn't show up for too many classes, I got kicked out. I was still under 18, so I had to go to school, and I ended up attending the Frank Williams Trade School. I think I majored in first aid there, and that's no joke. I started playing football for the Hollywood Boys' Club and right away, Doc Lefevre, the coach at Norman High School, called me and said he needed some football players very badly and if he didn't get them, he was gonna lose his job. Harley Doc Lefevre. I went back to Norman and played football for him. I won't say I got paid, but I did have a credit card at a clothing store and I didn't have to work a lot.

I was a punter and a linebacker on the football team, and even before I left California, a coach at Southern Cal told me that when I got out of high school, he wanted me to play for SC. As it turned out, I continued my outstanding academic career at Norman High: I dropped out of school when I was 18. I had no ambition and I didn't really want to do anything. If somebody would say, "Let's go to Oklahoma City," I'd pick up a job and work till I had enough money to go, and then I'd come back and think, OK, what am I gonna do now? If I'd get it in my head to go to California, I'd go. My dad had gotten into the carpet business, and when I came to Los Angeles, I'd work for him a little, and then I'd go back to Oklahoma. I swamped trucks in Odessa, Texas, for a while--loading and unloading them--and I also worked as a roughneck in oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma. I never stayed anywhere more than three or four months at a time. I just went whichever way the wind blowed.

[Q] Playboy: At what point did that start to get a little stale for you?

[A] Garner: If you really want the truth, not until I was 26 and about to get married. That's when I started to get ambition and accept responsibility. Until then, what did I care? I could eat, sleep, and I didn't want anything. I'd never had any great desire for things, you know. Anyway, in 1950, I was visiting my dad in California when got a notice from my draft board in Norman saying I could take my choice and report to the Army in Oklahoma or California. I was in the first bunch of guys drafted for the Korean War.

[Q] Playboy: We understand you won two (continued on page 184)James Garner (continued from page 158) Purple Hearts in Korea, so you must have seen a good deal of combat.

[A] Garner: Damn, how do you know all that? Did you do a little homework or something? Actually, I didn't trade fire with the enemy more than six or seven days, but they were really long, bad days. I got wounded the second day I was in Korea. I was bringing up the rear of a patrol and I got hit with shrapnel in my hand and the edge of my eye, so I went back to an aid station and I started picking out these little bits of metal while looking in the mirror of a jeep. Some captain ran up to me and said, "Don't do that! Go inside the aid station and we'll get you a Purple Heart." So I went inside and I was awarded one on my record. The second time was a lot more serious. I was part of the Fifth Regimental Combat Team and we were overrun on a ridge line one night by waves of Chinese. Out of 130 guys, I think we had no more than 40 people left the next morning. We retreated all night long, and about 6:30 the next morning, we connected with another unit, just in time to watch our Navy fighters blowing the shit out of the Chinese positions. We were all shouting things like, "All right, go get 'em, gang!" and right about then, an AT-6 spotter plane flew over us and because we didn't have our orange air panels, the observation plane told the fighters about this troop concentration he'd just seen. Next thing we knew, Navy Panther jets were firing 20-millimeter rockets at us. I immediately got hit in the butt and my rifle was blown up. When a rocket hits, it sprays white phosphorus in all directions, and rather than stick around, I jumped out of my foxhole and ran off the side of a cliff. God, I must have rolled 100 yards down, end over end. I dislocated my shoulder and tore up both my knees. Meanwhile, the jets were still firing away and their rockets were hitting rocks and bouncing around the side of the hill, which made me remember the line "It ain't the one with your name on it, it's the one to whom it may concern that you have to worry about." A Rok soldier had also rolled down there, and he was hit a little worse than I'd been; he had white phosphorus down his neck and back and you could tell it was smarting a little, 'cause that stuff burns. Because of my knees, I could hardly move, but we finally dragged ourselves back up the side of this steep hill--and no one was there!

[Q] Playboy: Where had everybody gone?

[A] Garner: That's what I wanted to know! I mean, I'd have gone with them. Me and this South Korean were now alone on top of the hill, and he didn't speak any English and I didn't speak any Korean. It didn't seem like a smart thing to stick around, so we began following the mountain ridge line south, hoping we could catch up to our retreating column. I finally recognized the valley we'd come up the day before and I looked at the Rok and said, "South, that's where we're going." He still had his rifle and I was wearing my helmet, and as we walked down the hill into the valley, I looked over to my right and maybe 150 yards away, we spotted a big group of soldiers--and they weren't ours. We saw them and they saw us, and this South Korean and I walked right by all these North Korean troops. The only thing I could ever figure out was that, since the Rok soldier was carrying a rifle, they thought he was one of them and that I was his prisoner. It took us six hours before we heard what we both knew were American tanks, and at that moment, the Rok soldier gave me the rifle and gestured for me to give him my helmet. He was obviously afraid our guys might think he was a North Korean who had the drop on me. That guy really picked up on all of it better than I did.

[Q] Playboy: How badly were you hurt?

[A] Garner: Oh, I had phosphorus burns on my backside, but they weren't too serious. I was more worried about my knees: When I got to the hospital, they'd swollen up like balloons. After I got out, I did nine months in Japan with a base postal office. That part of the war was fun for me, because I became a dog robber, which is what I played in The Americanization of Emily. Guys in the Army like their mail and they become very unhappy if they don't get it. Well, I decided to spruce up our unit, and if they didn't give me what we needed, they didn't get their mail. The base post office was stationed in a bombed-out shoe factory, and I turned it into a showplace. In exchange for their mail, other units got us the materials to build a bar and then kept it stocked with whiskey. Nobody over there had ice except us, courtesy of the Graves Registration Unit. I built us a theater in the biggest room in the shoe factory, got a baseball diamond laid out, got us hot water and showers, and my crowning achievement was a swimming pool. Now, that took genius. The smallest room in the shoe factory was the basement, so we cleaned it all out, whitewashed it, cemented the floor, put a ladder up the side and filled that sucker up with water. I went back to the States a reasonably happy man.

Before I got out of the Army, I took a high school equivalency test and I got my diploma, plus credit for two years of college. After visiting my dad in California for a few months, I went back to Norman and enrolled in the University of Oklahoma. I thought I could play college football, but my knees were too messed up. Instead, I hung around the pool hall after classes, racking balls, stealing what I could from the register, collecting my S20 a week in veteran's benefits and picking up a little change on the side by playing hearts. bridge and snooker.

[Q] Playboy: Were you a hustler?

[A] Garner: Let's just say I wasn't bad. Several years ago, I beat Minnesota Fats two out of three games of eight ball. Anyway, I dropped out of college after one semester, but at least I finished it with a B average. About six months later, I went back to California, and for a year or so, I worked for my dad, banging down carpets. And then fate really stepped in and I became an actor.

[Q] Playboy: Did you come down with an overnight case of stage fever?

[A] Garner: Oh, no, nothing like that. It really was fate, or at least coincidence. Remember I told you I went to Hollywood High for a while? Well, after school, I'd worked in a Shell service station on Hollywood Boulevard, just down the block from the Gotham Drug Store. A soda jerk in the drugstore named Paul Gregory used to buy his gas from me, and every time he'd drive in, he'd tell me how he was going to be a producer. He once came in and said that I was a natural for the part of Li'l Abner and that he wanted to be my agent. So now we fade out and I'm coming back from Korea and I pick up a Time and I see where a play called Don Juan in Hell, starring Agnes Moore-head and Charles Laughton, has been produced by Paul Gregory. I thought, Well, good for him, and then I didn't think any more about it.

Paul had always said, "You really ought to be an actor, Jim," but I'd never paid any attention to it. Well, one day, I was driving up La Brea and I noticed a building that said, Paul Gregory and Associates. I'd seen it before, but it had never really hit me.

Since I was thinking about getting into a career, I thought about going in to see him. Here's the part where fate steps in: If I get an urge to do something but it's not convenient to do it, I won't. Well, there was a parking space in front of Paul's building--and if that space hadn't been there, I would never (continued on page 192) James Garner (continued from page 184) have driven around the block to look for one.

[Q] Playboy: You really don't think so?

[A] Garner: I know damn well I wouldn't have. As it was, I went in and we talked for close to an hour. I told him I didn't know if I'd like to be an actor, but I was almost 25 years old and I had to do something, sometime. I made up my mind right then that I'd give myself five years to try it as an actor, and Paul agreed to become my agent. He thought I was finally using some common sense. Gregory said, "Look at yourself, Jim, and hear what you sound like. There's definitely a chance that something could happen if you learned how to act." That made sense to me, because nothing I'd done ever held out the opportunity to make the money an actor has a shot at. Basically, I'd be using what God had given me--my looks. Now, I knew that there were hundreds of guys who looked like me and most of 'em could get in the door, but could they close it behind them? Maybe I could. And I wasn't looking for stardom; I was looking for a job, something I could make a living at. But if I wanted it, I knew I was going to have to change my attitude about a lot of things.

[Q] Playboy: Such as?

[A] Garner: I was still scared to death to perform in front of anybody. Gregory quickly got me a reading at Columbia Studios with a talent coach named Benno Schneider, and afterward, Schneider told me, "I don't know what you've been doing, young man, but you really should go back to it. Just because you're young doesn't mean you can be an actor." Well, that about halfway pissed me off, telling me there was something I couldn't do. And it really helped me, because I had to get over that. It took me a long time to do it, but I did. I spent most of my first five years as an actor trying to get over my fear of performing. After that reading, Paul hired me to tour in the national company of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which he produced. I was one of six silent judges and I did it for a year and never had one word of dialog, but I got a lot of experience and learned a great deal from the show's stars.

[Q] Playboy: Who were they?

[A] Garner: Henry Fonda, Lloyd Nolan and the late John Hodiak. I used to watch Fonda just to study the way he moved, his posture and the way he sat, which I later copied, incidentally, in Support Your Local Gunfighter. I've used his attitude, stance and the mental images I have of him quite a few times in my films, but those were mostly physical things. What I really learned from him was a professional attitude and concentration. Johnny Hodiak became a good friend, and I was his understudy and he helped me out quite a lot. Nolan also taught me about concentration, which is the reason certain actors can walk out onstage and suddenly everyone's eyes are riveted on them. Anyway, we toured for three months or so, and then the play opened on Broadway. My first night in New York, the three of them got me a date with an absolutely beautiful redhead named Barbara Walters--not the TV interviewer--and they took us to the Trocadero and to "21" afterward, and I'll never forget their kindness. Here I was, a prop in this play, and my good buddies were the stars.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have any aspirations to become a Broadway star?

[A] Garner: None whatsoever. First of all, New York is not my town. I'm a small-town boy, and if you walk down the street in New York and say hi, somebody will hit you in the mouth. I mean, in New York, if you smile, they'll steal your teeth; and if you shake hands, you'll come back without an arm. It's just not my town. Also, after a year in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, I came to the conclusion that you have to be broader onstage than in film, and still being in the grip of introversion, I didn't have the guts to play that broadly. Before the show left Broadway, 20th Century-Fox offered me a screen test in New York; but there was a strong rivalry between New York and Hollywood offices of every film company, so I turned 'em down and said if I did a test, it would be in Hollywood, not New York. They thought I was crazy. Well, I went back to the Coast after The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial finished in New York. A couple of months later, Gergory called and asked if I wanted to play the role of Lieutenant Maryk in a new national tour to be directed by Laughton. I obviously wasn't going to turn that down, so we began rehearsing for it and one afternoon, Laughton said to me [imitating Laughton and doing it well], "James, I want you to come up to the house today and lunch with me." I was sure he was about to can me, because, although I knew my lines, I wasn't very good. That afternoon, he told me, "Jim, your problem is that you're afraid to be bad. Therefore, you do nothing. You go down the middle of the road and you have no highs and you have no lows." And he was right. I was still afraid of being laughed at, of being disliked, of trying not to be bad instead of focusing on being good.

[Q] Playboy: You were feeling defensive, in other words.

[A] Garner: Yeah, which is what the underplaying I did for a long time was all about. Oh, I got braver as I got along, but he was absolutely right: I was afraid to be bad. Laughton told me that if I wasn't any good, he'd let me know and to leave it to him. And since then, I'll stick my neck out and leave it to a director to chop it off if he has to. I did Maryk for four months in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas, and then I went back to Hollywood, made my Winston commercial and lived off that for eight months. After that, I got the part of an irate lieutenant in the first episode of Cheyenne. God, I was a good irate lieutenant. Warner Bros. then signed me to a contract for $200 a week, and then a lot of things happened very quickly. I got a small part in a William Holden movie, Toward the Unknown, and then I tested for Sayonara. Originally, the idea was to go with either Marlon Brando and an unknown Japanese girl or Audrey Hepburn and an unknown in the Brando role. They couldn't afford both Brando and Hepburn, so if they went with her, I had a shot at the lead. Well, they went with Brando and a Japanese girl, but I wasn't really disappointed, because I figured everything always works out for the best. They were going to cast John Smith as an Air Force major who is Brando's antagonist in the film, and one day I talked to the producer and the director of Sayonara, Bill Goetz and Josh Logan, and I said, "Fellas, you've seen my test and you know I can do the part. If you sign Smith, you're gonna have to pay him at least $1200 a week; but, hell, the studio's got me for $225, so I'm going to be a lot cheaper." By God, they hired me.

[Q] Garner: I think you could say that. The first scene I did with him was in the back of a taxi, and I didn't exactly feel like Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront. Marlon noticed that my hands were soaking wet and that I was wringing, and he said, "What's the matter?" I told (continued on page 197) James Garner (continued from page 192) him I was a little nervous because this was my first good picture. He told me not to worry and maybe he could help me out. He did, too. He was the friendliest of people, and from then on, I was his slave. He did make me feel comfortable and he wound up almost coaching me and being my personal director. I figured if what I was doing was good enough for Brando, it was good enough for me. And it also seemed good enough for Logan, who didn't give me a lot of direction, mainly because Marlon and I rehearsed and rehearsed. I'll tell you this: I think Brando is the best actor we've ever had. I always felt that because he couldn't trust anybody but Kazan, he needed someone to pick material for him. If he'd ever found someone like that, he could have done so much more. We haven't been that close over the years, but I still have a great affection for him because of what he did for me on Sayonara. Working with him was just a joy. I then went back and did the pilot for Maverick, because after looking at dailies of Sayonara, I don't think it was any stroke of genius on anybody's part to say, "I-Tell, let's use Garner--we've got him and he's cheap."

[Q] Playboy: Does it seem to you that you owe a lot of the initial interest in your career to the fact that you were underpaid?

[A] Garner: That's true. And clown through the years, I've always kept my salary below a lot of people's, for the simple reason that I think actors cut themselves out of too many pictures because of their prices. For instance, when Lee Marvin went to $1,000,000 a picture, he cut his chances of working by more that half. But it's one thing to be reasonable about your price and it was quite another what Warner Bros. at that time did to me on money. After I finished Sayonara and the Maverick pilot, Warners had a contract dispute with Charlton Heston and he walked out of Darby's Rangers. It turned out kind a funny. Jack Warner told Heston to have his Darby's Rangers contract signed by a Friday afternoon at five o'clock, but Heston didn't do it. Well, at 5:30, they called me over to the television department--not the movie department--and told me I was such a good guy that they wanted to give me a raise. I was making $250 a week and in another five months or so, my contract called for a raise to $350 a week. They said they wanted to raise me to $350 a week right then and there--but they also wanted another year and a half on the end of a seven-year contract. Well, I was smart enough to turn that down. They finally got around to offering me $500 a week, and I needed the money, because my wife was pregnant, we had an eight-year-old daughter who'd just come out of the hospital with polio. Well, on Monday morning, I found out I'd been given Heston's starring role in Darby's Rangers and I thought, OK, the sons of bitches got to me. I didn't find out until a couple of weeks later that they'd also sold the Maverick pilot. I told myself, you made the deal, but they're not crazy. If Maverick works and the movie goes, they'll rewrite the contract, because they know how inequitable it is. So I did Darby's Rangers, a World War Two movie that ends with Colonel Darby's becoming a general, and it was a little difficult for me to look all that mature when I had just turned 29. And then Maverick took off. Ed Sullivan was the Sunday-night competition and he was making $25,000 a week. I was making $500 a week and Maverick was swamping his show. But doing the show itself was a great, great experience.

[Q] Playboy: Do you remember the first Maverick ever filmed?

[A] Garner: I really do, yes. It was a remake of Rocky Mountain, an Errol Flynn movie--practically all the first Maverick scripts were rewrites of old Warner Bros. pictures. I even wore the coat and vest Flynn wore in Rocky Mountain, because they used stock footage from the movie for long shots, so I had to match my clothes to his. The first three episodes were directed by Budd Boetticher, a very fine director who's made cult pictures like Blood and Sand. He started injecting little bitty pieces of humor into the series almost immediately. I remember that in the second or third episode, we had an hour to film a very long fight scene, one in which both guys fight until they get so tired they can't throw any more punches. I told Budd, "Jesus, why don't we have this guy just knock me into some tall weeds and then come after me, and every once in a while I'll knock him out of the weeds, and then he can knock me out of 'em." We did it and you saw a lot of weeds and feet, and after that, we tended to use a lot of humor whenever we were pressed for time. After three shows, the writers started putting the humor on paper and, well, the show just took off.

[Q] Playboy: Did you feel as if you were doing a satire on Westerns?

[A] Garner: Oh, yeah, and we really did do satire. We did a take-off on Gunsmoke that we called Gunshy, and we started it off with that shooting scene taken through Marshall Dillon's legs, except we called our sheriff Marshall Dooley. And we had a Doc, and instead of Chester, we called our guy Fester, who told me his limp was caused by a dad-blamed horse that had stepped on his toe. When it got better, I told Fester to keep the limp, because it gave him character, and he said, "I believe you're right," and so he limped for the rest of the show. Or we'd do things for New York like having me say, "Let's drop it into the swamp and see if it sinks." When I started it, there were about 17 Western series on TV, and I couldn't see playing another steely-eyed hero, because TV had plenty of those. I think Maverick was really the first pinprick in the balloon of TV Westerns, and when the series was finished, so were TV Westerns. The same thing was true of Rockford: There were umpteen detective series when The Rockford Files first went on the air, and I wasn't a steely-eyed private eye and I wasn't brave. How many detectives are left on TV six years later? I come in and scrape 'em up. I'm a killer of genres, I think, and there must be something to that, but. I don't quite know what it is.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever settle on a new contract with Warner Bros.?

[A] Garner: You must be kidding. No, of course not, they wouldn't have wanted to do that. You know, we started shooting Maverick on August 20, 1957, and when it went on the air on that September 22, we had one episode in the can--the pilot. They needed one a week and it took us six working days to shoot a show, meaning Maverick was losing a day a week. So Warners immediately started looking for a side-kick, and then they changed it to a brother and got Jack Kelly, and they signed him for more money than I was making--$650 to my $500--and they were still screwing him. Not only that but I didn't find out until months later that out of my $500 a week, $285 was straight salary and $215 was an advance against residuals. At Warner Bros., nobody got residuals. I'll never be able to remember all the tricks they pulled. Another instance: Contract players at Warners didn't receive per. sonal-appearance money--it was paid to the studio. I once got offered $7500 to appear on the Pat Boone show, and the studio wanted me on it, but they also wanted to keep the $7500, and that represented a lot of money to me. All the rest of ABC's cowboys were also going to be on--Jack Kelly, Clint Walker, Ty Hardin, Peter Brown and some others. Well, I refused to go on if I wasn't paid. I settled for $2500 cash and a Corvette with everything on it. The other guys wound up getting $500 each and Warners tried to teach me a lesson a little later on.

[Q] Playboy: What did they do?

[A] Garner: There was a writers' strike during the third year of Maverick and they suspended me for eight weeks without pay, just to show me a little something. They thought they had a contract clause allowing them to do that if the series had to shut clown. Well, I sued them for breach of contract and I won, but for several months after that, actors, directors and producers were waiting to see if I could get away with it. My lawyers were frankly worried, because the major studios had a lot of power at the time and they were worried that I might not get another job. I didn't make a film for more than a year, but in eight weeks of summer stock, I made more money doing John Loves Mary than I would've working a whole year on Maverick for $1250 a week. And at the end of the year, William Wyler hired me to do The Children's Hour with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. He broke the mold and there weren't any problems after that.

[Q] Playboy: You've made 24 movies since then. Which ones do you consider your best?

[A] Garner: The best, I think, was The Americanization of Emily. Unfortunately, critics were just scared to death of it. It was the first antiwar film, it was the first film of any content that had nudity in it and a lot of people in the industry were afraid of it. The script really was brilliant, but selling it to the public wasn't easy, because a lot of people thought it was a Julie Andrews--nanny movie. But, in the long run, it's shown itself to be the great film it is. I've had four or five films like that, movies people realized were better after they'd gone around. Support Your Local Gunfighter, which I like almost as much as The Americanization of Emily, though for different reasons, originally wasn't thought of as anything much. But it was a very good comedy. And Skin Game, also a very fine film, was practically thrown down the tubes. It came out the same year as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Warner Bros. put their advertising money on that one instead of Skin Game. That's because McCabe & Mrs. Miller cost a lot more to produce than Skin Game and they were trying to get an Academy Award nomination for it. To me, it was like the time the Pittsburgh Pirates signed my brother Jack as a pitcher and also signed a $100,000 bonus baby named Paul Pettit. They tried everything in the world to make Pettit a major leaguer, because they had big money invested in him. They tried him as a pitcher, an outfielder, a first baseman, everything. Meanwhile, my brother was doing nothing but winning ball games for their farm teams, and he was making $175 a month. Anyway, one other film I really liked was Grand Prix, especially the making of it, because I drove a race car for eight months. I also kind of like it because it's probably the only picture I ever went after as a career move.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you go after it?

[A] Garner: By 1966, I'd done a lot of nice little pictures and one day I thought, Boy, what I need is an epic, a real Charlton Heston type of epic. And then I read that John Frankenheimer was going to do Grand Prix in Cinerama, and I knew that if the picture was shot right, it had to be a big movie. I called Meta Rosenberg and she went over to MGM and got a script, and they liked the idea of my doing it, and it worked.

[Q] Playboy: You've been very upbeat during this interview, but we've been told there's a dark side to James Garner that manifests itself in two ways: Either you get terribly down on yourself or you get combative. You once mentioned that you're part Cherokee and that when you drink, you sometimes want to take back the land. Does that still hold true?

[A] Garner: Well, I don't do much drinking anymore, because of the ulcer; and, besides, I don't really want the land back--it has too many taxes on it. And what they've given to the Indians ain't worth having, anyway. But, yeah, there's a darker and worse side to me than what you've seen, and I'm not all those happy things the press has conjured up about me. I get into terrible depressions and I have my self-doubts and periods of gloom and doom. I'm getting to the point where I can recognize them and pull out of them, but they still happen.

[Q] Playboy: What are your depressions like?

[A] Garner: Oh, I've had times when I couldn't make a decision whether to take a shower or a bath, so I didn't do either and just sat there. Or I couldn't make a decision to watch a particular TV show or not, and just sat there.

[Q] Playboy: How long would you sit around like that?

[A] Garner: For days. I've had some pretty good downers, believe me, and when they happen, I don't want to see or talk to people. I just brood and stew, but it finally comes to me that, Jim, this is not very progressive, you're not accomplishing anything. To come out of it, I'll do something like go to a doctor or force myself to play golf, which used to be a great release for me. I've been a scratch golfer for most of my life, but I've had moments when I couldn't even get up the energy to go knock that dumb little ball around.

[Q] Playboy: What are your releases now?

[A] Garner: About the same. I always find I'm much better when I'm working, and I usually have fun making movies, because motion-picture people are the best people in the world. This is the only business I've ever seen where people are lined up a half hour early, ready to go to work. Nobody ever wants to be late, because it's really a fascinating life. I usually find that people have drifted into it because, for some reason, they couldn't work nine-to-five jobs. They just couldn't hack that, and if they get a taste for the movie business, they eventually wind up specializing in something. I mean, guys don't wake up one day when they're eight years old and say, "I want to be a prop man!"

[Q] Playboy: Does the same hold true for actors?

[A] Garner: It holds true for me, I know that. It's an interesting way to live and it takes you everywhere. My God, do you think I could have found another way to go first-class around the world and to meet kings and queens and Presidents and princesses?

[Q] Playboy: Probably not, but don't you think there's a fairly stiff price you've had to pay for that?

[A] Garner: No one ever said you get to win completely, because what goes around comes around. If you get something, you pay for it in one way or another. Everyone says, how could anybody be unhappy making the kind of money actors earn and being famous and all that? And yet you can be unhappy if that's not what you're looking for. I know that I miss my anonymity--and I miss it a lot. The thing that helped me as an actor for years and years was the fact that I could observe people and mimic them; and now I don't observe, I'm the one being observed. I think it diminishes my capacity to understand people, but that's part of the game, part of the business and part of the career. It happened and there it is, I have to learn to cope with it, and I have coped with it fairly well. But that's one of the things I miss a lot. It never occurred to me when I started out as an actor that I'd lose that. I never thought of being famous or even successful; I didn't have those fantasies.

[Q] Playboy: What were your fantasies?

[A] Garner: All I wanted was a job that I could make a living at, enough to comfortably support my wife and daughters. And, you know, I never thought all these other things would come along with it. I wasn't looking for it, I didn't want it. I think my big problem is that I've been so busy doing what. I'm doing, I don't know what I wanted. But I'm tired of talking about me. Why don't we talk about what you think about me?

"I've had three knee operations; broke a bone in my spine, broke my right kneecap twice. I've also broken ribs and knuckles."

"Somebody at the studio made a terrible mistake and sent me a cost-accounting sheet that showed Rockford' was $9,500,000 in debt."

"Mariette is really a marvelous actress. She can do comedy and can cry at the drop of a hat. On top of that, she photographs beautifully."

"My stepmother used to make us go out and cut willow switches and then she'd beat us on the butt with them. She loved to hit me."

"I also worked as a roughneck in oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma. I never stayed anywhere more than three or four months at a time."

"I used to watch Fonda just to study the way he moved, his posture and the way he sat, which I later copied in 'Support Your Local Gunfighter.' "