An Update For All Who Have Had Jim In Their Thoughts And Prayers

Hello everyone who has been concerned about Jim Garner and his stroke. I have news - wonderful news.

Jim is still in rehab, but should be released soon - completely recovered. His speech is as it always was, his mind is totally intact. He did have some weakness on the left side, but even that is gone. His left side is now as strong as his right.

Jim's brother Jack always said that Jim was tougher than Dick Tracey. I guess Jim proved his point.

Congratulations, Jim. We love you.

Never believe what you read in The National Enquirer.

Get Well Wishes For A TRUE American Idol

As must be well known by now, Jim Garner is recovering in the hospital, having had surgery following a minor stroke. By all accounts he is expected to make a full recovery, but the details haven't yet been made public.

I'm sure this self-effacing, very private man would prefer that none of this had been made public, but he's long since realized that it's the price of fame. And, despite his shyness, he does deeply appreciate - and has always been puzzled by - the actual love and real concern of his millions of loyal admirers.

I have been among that group since I was 13 and watched the premier of a new western series called Maverick in the fall of 1957. James Garner was my very first celeb crush. Actually, he's also my only celeb crush, because in all these years I've never seen anyone who impressed me quite like he always has.

What started out as a teen crush became something more over the years, as I learned about James Garner the person. He became a father figure to this only child of a man who had never wanted children and never attempted to hide his resentment at my unwanted presence in his life. James Garner came to fill that void for me. He was my male role model as I grew up.

I'd never want to embarrass this wonderful man who can't even understand why people think he is special, but, Jim, you are special. I admire you for so many things - I could never list them all.

But most of all, I admire you for being a real hero - without feet of clay - to a young girl who was badly in need of a hero in her life. You've never let me down in all these many years, and for that I could never thank you enough.

God bless and get well soon.

A Post After My Own Heart!

Check this out, folks. WOW!

Vox Hunt: Mistletoe Kisses -

Vox Hunt: Mistletoe Kisses

• Dec 17, 2006 at 8:14 PM
• 2 comments

Show us who you'd like to kiss under the mistletoe.

Sally Field told Rita Braver on CBS News Sunday Morning that James Garner gave her "the best kiss I ever had in my life, which was on camera, believe it or not" (in a scene from "Murphy's Romance").

Presented with this information in a separate interview with Braver, Garner said, "She’s such a dear. Poor thing. She must not get out very much. But that's nice for her to say. I've had a couple of them say that. I might not be a bad kisser after all."

Another Birthday Tribute

The Rap Sheet: Happy Birthday, Jimbo

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Happy Birthday, Jimbo

I’ve been thinking a lot about James Garner lately, not just because he is among my favorite actors, but because one of the characters he’s best known for having portrayed--Jim Rockford of The Rockford Files--is contending in The Rap Sheet’s second online poll for the title of “best TV private eye in history.” It’s Garner’s 79th birthday today, and that got me to thinking about a short tribute to him I penned last year for my other blog, Limbo. I’ve used that post as the basis for this longer panegyric.



Born James Scott Bumgarner in Norman, Oklahoma, on this date in 1928, the man who would be Rockford was the son of a carpet layer. His mother (through whom Garner is one quarter Cherokee--a fact recalled in the name of his film and TV production company, Cherokee Productions) died when young James was just 4 years old, and he and his two older brothers, Jack and Charles, were sent to live with relatives. Only after their father remarried in 1934, was the family reunited--but by no means peacefully. According to Wikipedia, “Garner grew to hate his stepmother, Wilma, who beat all three boys, but especially young James. When he was 14, James finally had enough of his ‘wicked stepmother’ and after a particularly heated battle, she left for good. As James’ brother Jack commented, ‘She was a damn no-good woman.’”



At age 16, James Bumgarner joined the United States Merchant Marine, but he had to leave after a year, due to chronic seasickness. He moved west to Los Angeles, where his dad was living since the breakup of his second marriage. There he attended Hollywood High School and modeled for Portland, Oregon-based swimsuit manufacturer Jantzen (at $25 an hour), but he “hated” modeling and returned to Norman, where he played high school football and basketball (“If there was a ball, I played it”) before joining the U.S. Army as an infantryman during the Korean War. (He would receive two Purple Hearts for his military service.)



As the story goes, his first acting experience came while he was still attending Hollywood High. A friend persuaded him to take a non-speaking role in the Broadway production of Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. After that he starred in TV commercials and eventually captured roles on such series as Zane Grey Theater, Conflict, and Cheyenne. His earliest movie appearances were in 1956, when he could be seen in both Toward the Unknown (with William Holden) and The Girl He Left Behind (with Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood). As to why he changed his surname ... the explanation is that one of the film studios he worked for abbreviated “Baumgarner” to “Garner” (without permission), and he eventually went along with it. (He changed his name legally in the late 1950s.)



I was first introduced to Garner’s work during weekend reruns of the renowned Roy Huggins-created TV western, Maverick, one of my father’s favorite programs and also among the inspirations for my continuing interest in the history of the American West. Garner of course played Bret Maverick (1957-1960), a not too rough-and-tumble riverboat gambler who roamed the dusty, sometimes lusty U.S. frontier as much for fast bucks as adventure, becoming--as the theme song goes--“a legend of the west.” After that, I followed his career through a tumbling succession of memorable films--from The Great Escape (1963), The Wheeler Dealers (1963) and The Americanization of Emily (1964), to the better-remembered Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), Marlowe (an underappreciated 1969 film based on one of Raymond Chandler’s private eye novels, The Little Sister), Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971) and Skin Game (1971). Along the way, Garner starred in an unfortunately short-lived NBC-TV series called Nichols, which found him in the comfortable role of a cowardly, apathetic drifter (not so very different from the parts he’d played in Gunfighter and Skin Game) who, in 1914, leaves the army and returns to his small Arizona hometown ... only to be promptly blackmailed into taking the job of sheriff. Garner, who was extremely fond of Nichols, took its cancellation hard; the only good thing about it was that it left him free to take the lead three years later in The Rockford Files, another Huggins-created series.



Rockford cast Garner as a resourceful, smooth-talking, but distinctly unheroic Los Angeles private eye who never seemed to find an easy-paying client, a regular girlfriend, or a decent place to hang his hat (he lived in a dilapidated Nashua trailer in a Malibu parking lot). James Scott Rockford was effectively Bret Maverick for the 1970s, but with all of his horses under a Pontiac Firebird hood and a father who (unlike the philosophizing “Pappy” in Maverick) showed up more often than not, in the kindly person of Noah Beery Jr., the nephew of film legend Wallace Beery. During its six-year run (1974-1980)--which would have been longer, had Garner not been forced to pull out after injuring himself in the course of doing too many of his own stunts--Rockford picked up an impressive five Emmy Awards (including a Best Actor commendation for Garner) and was ranked by TV Guide as one the 50 finest American television shows ever. “When it came to private eyes--at least, the ones on movies and TV--Jim Rockford ... stood out like a slow curve in a world of fast balls,” opines Ed Robertson, who literally wrote the book on Garner’s gumshoe drama (Thirty Years of The Rockford Files, 2005).



After Rockford signed off as a series for the last time (only to spawn a sequence of popular TV movies during the Clinton era), the then 53-year-old Garner sought to return to his other most familiar small-screen role in NBC’s Bret Maverick (1981), which reimagined the former card sharp and con man semi-retiring to a backwater Arizona town. Sadly, that series--which I thought went a long way toward recapturing the vitality and humor of the original--lasted only a year, after which Garner returned to the silver screen, appearing in Victor/Victoria (1982, along with Julie Andrews), Murphy’s Romance (1985, with Sally Field), Sunset (1988, which had him portraying a crusty-but-romantic Wyatt Earp to Bruce Willis’ cowboy actor Tom Mix), Maverick (1994, in which he played the role of an impatient marshal, while Mel Gibson--in his pre-zealot days--assumed the part of brother Bret), Twilight (1998, with Paul Newman), and Space Cowboys (2000, with Clint Eastwood and Tommy Lee Jones). He also signed on for a few TV movies, including Barbarians at the Gate (1993), Breathing Lessons (1994), and Legalese (1998, which included the casually stunning Mary-Louise Parker as Garner’s sexy, thoroughly ambitious junior law partner).



Following The West Wing’s award-winning early success, Garner made another stab at series television, working opposite Joe Mantegna on First Monday (2002), about the U.S. Supreme Court. Garner portrayed a football-loving conservative Chief Justice of the United States (a funny role for Garner, who’s a staunch Democrat, and was briefly courted to run for the 1990 Democratic nomination for governor of California). Unfortunately, audiences didn’t seem to care about earnest debate in the High Court the way they did about political strategizing and character assassination in the White House. First Monday didn’t make it into a second year. Garner went on to play a classically crusty grandfather on 8 Simple Rules ... for Dating My Teenage Daughter, an unremarkable part he took on after the untimely, 2003 death of lead John Ritter. The Internet Movie Database says he’ll be starring in a 2008 film called The Magic Shoe and doing voice work for an animated flick, Terra.



I’ve never met James Garner, and I am sure that he isn’t to be confused with the easygoing, lovable characters he has so often portrayed. But he’s given me four decades of enjoyment on screens large and small, and for that, he earns my best wishes on 79 years down, and many more to come.



SEE IT NOW: In March 1999, Garner was interviewed on-camera for the Archive of American Television. That candid and informative, six-part appearance is currently available on Google Video. Part one can be found here, together with links to the other five installments. It’s not to be missed by Garner fans.

posted by J. Kingston Pierce at 4:58 PM  

The American's American

Throughout his storied career – which now spans and astonishing 50 years – James Garner has been called an American prototype. In the 60’s it was the “all American sex symbol,” much to his chagrin, to Charlie Rose calling him the “Quintessential American” in a 2002 interview.

And so he is.

He was born in the Heartland – Norman, Oklahoma – in 1928, a child of the Great Depression. Jim was only four years old when his mother – who was one half Cherokee – died, and he’s been on his own since the was thirteen when his father moved to California to try and start over.

To this day, he remains devoted to his home state and his hometown, describing Norman as “a wonderful place to grow up.” However, many of his childhood memories were not wonderful.

When he was about six, his father married a woman who turned out to be a stepmother worthy of Hansel and Gretel. She beat all three boys, but especially young James. Not only did Jim come in for more of his share of beatings, the woman also punished him by making him wear dresses in public and referring to him as “Louise.” She did this many times over the course of the years. The abuse didn’t stop until Jim was thirteen. One evening, defending himself from another beating, “something snapped,” he says. He hauled off and decked his stepmother, knowing he would be in “big trouble.” Indeed he was. However, this night did mark the end of the marriage, and Jim and his brothers were finally free of their tormentor.

In the Korean War “I served my country to the best of my ability,” spending fourteen of his twenty-one month army hitch actually in Korea. He saw a lot of tough combat, earning two Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in the line of duty. Jim’s comment on the war? “It was cold and hard and I was one of the lucky ones.”

Jim never even considered being an actor, even though his looks had prompted almost everyone to push the idea at him all his life. He was a shy person and has said he would never have passed speech in high school if his coach had not been the teacher. His powerful fear of public speaking remains with him to this day.

In 1956 he married - for the first and only time - to Lois Clarke, whom Jim describes as "the great love of my life." They have two daughters, Kim, Lois' child from a former marriage, born in 1948, and Greta Scott (Gigi), born in 1958. Jim and Lois celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on August 17, 2006.

I became a Garner fan when I saw the first episode of the original Maverick series in September of 1957. I was thirteen and had never been particularly interested in movie/TV stars. Nevertheless, there was something about this guy…

Of course, I had a teenybopper crush on this handsome and talented actor, but, as I learned more about Garner the man, I became an even bigger fan of James Garner the person than James Garner the actor. In fact, – since my own father was hardly suitable for the job – Jim Garner became my male role model. Thank you, Jim. It’s now been 50 years, and you never let me down.

Now, on to some interesting tidbits about this Very American Idol.