James And Jack Garner - Actors/Brothers

The Rockford Files: A very happy Rockford Files 2013 New Year to all my viewers! May it be blessed! PHOTO: James & Jack Garner ACTORS/BROTHERS

Monday, December 31, 2012

A very happy Rockford Files 2013 New Year to all my viewers! May it be blessed! PHOTO: James & Jack Garner ACTORS/BROTHERS

Brothers /Actors James Garner and Jack Garner - What a team they were!

God bless James Garner and are prayers are with the late Jack Garner.

What a way to bring in the new year!

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The Americanization of James Garner

The Americanization of James Garner | Pioneer Woman Entertainment | Ree Drummond

Dec 03 2012

The Americanization of James Garner

144 comments

By Mark Spearman.

Not long ago someone asked if I could recall a perfect moment. Not a universal, deep-in-your-bones, milestone moment, like cradling a newborn or falling in love. No, the question implied a moment that might, from the outside, seem ordinary, but to you is anything but. A moment in which you experience, for a fleeting particle of time, that oceanic feeling of bliss usually reserved for artists and poets.

Mine was on a late summer evening while traveling for work. Returning to my hotel exhausted, I grab any icy Heineken from the mini-bar and hold it to my forehead. I slip into an almost-too-hot bath and feel the warm breeze from an open window to the Pacific Ocean at dusk. Just within my reach, a TV remote control. The screen on the wall flickers to life with… An answering machine. It’s James Garner’s voice as we begin one of my favorite episodes of The Rockford Files.

“Hello, this is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message. I’ll get back to you.”

Indescribable. No words.

While beer and bath salts certainly contributed to my euphoria, it was also Garner’s unmistakably familiar and entertaining presence, one you’ll find in every performance. And a tone that says Nothing is As Big of a Deal as You Think; and Life is Short, Let’s Not Get Our Panties in a Bundle. It’s understated, humble, with gentle humor and an acute sense of irony. And somehow he makes it all look easy.

I’ve written previously on my affection for Garner’s films. Recently I happened across and rewatched one of his better ones, The Great Escape, as well as what is likely his very best movie, The Americanization of Emily. That drew me to his memoir – just released in paperback – where I learned the surprising and sometimes traumatic journey of the boy James Scott Bumgarner in becoming the Movie Star James Garner. In its own way, it’s a story, and a life, as admirable and heroic as any role he has played.

It’s also refreshing in that we’ve become accustomed to actors and other celebrities exaggerating the dark corners of their lives. With Garner, one has the sense that his childhood was even worse than the abuse and abandonment he shows us. And he shows us a lot. The favorite son of Norman, Oklahoma was four when his mother died. He and his brothers were shuffled among various relatives. For a time, they were reunited with their dad and one of his wives – “Red” she was called, an explosive woman who dealt severe and frequent beatings. Little James Bumgarner, the youngest and most vulnerable, became her preferred victim. By the age of 14, Garner was gone and on his own.

The whole account is served up as matter-of-fact reporting. He does not dwell on this period, nor does he ask your sympathy. Just as later in our story, when Garner’s infantry unit of 130 men dwindles to 30 under punishing enemy fire in Korea. The next morning, during an airstrike by U.S. Navy Panther jets, white phosphorous rockets rain down on Garner and few stragglers who are misidentified as the enemy.

Again showing his talent for understatement, he notes that being caught in such an incendiary blast “smarts,” because “that stuff really burns.”

Not surprisingly, the rest of the memoir, and his life, carry a thread of intolerance for bullies. No matter who is doing the bullying, up to and including powerful studio bosses who learn from Garner what a lowly actor can accomplish with righteous determination, nerve and a scrappy lawyer.

Read the book – there’s lots of cool stuff in there: He once broke Doris Day’s ribs – accidentally, of course. He detests turkey and Charles Bronson, loves Henry Fonda. He’s an Adlai Stevenson Democrat and was part of the March on Washington.

There is modesty, humility, and a sensibility of live and let live – up to a point. Garner is not to be pushed around. Just ask him. When pushed, he shoves.

Which all sounds remarkably like Jim Rockford, Bret Maverick, or any of a couple of dozen of Garner’s film or TV characters. It is a persona so firmly established that over a 50-plus-year career, he has never been cast as what he calls “an out-and-out villain.”

As a kid growing up in the 60s, I loved Garner’s TV western Maverick, then in broad syndication. No disrespect meant to the late Jack Kelly, who was Bart Maverick, but I watched only the episodes that featured Garner’s suave and witty Bret Maverick.

However, it is The Rockford Files that ranks top tier in my TV Hall of Fame. It turned the detective genre on its ear. Jim Rockford didn’t carry a gun; he kept one hidden in a cookie jar in his trailer. He was a wrongly accused ex-convict. He got punched out a lot. But for $200 a day, plus expenses, you got the best detective money could buy.

It was well written, the relationships and characters were realistic, and it successfully navigated the rocky shoal of subtle humor. Everything about it was different, even the theme song and opening credits. The show has aged beautifully, and thanks to our modern networking technology, every episode is streaming on Netflix.

Garner demanded consistently good writing and had strong feelings about story and tone. But I’ve never heard an actor so candidly and bluntly assess the grueling nature of a weekly action show for television. Years performing his own stunts very nearly killed him; in six seasons of Rockford, Garner had seven knee operations, finally needing both replaced.

He was the rare actor who moved freely between television and films in an era when a strict hierarchy separated the two.

Among his many films, The Americanization of Emily stands apart, and may be his best. It was written by Paddy Chayefsky, who also penned Network, The Hospital, and Marty. Throughout the film, Garner delivers long paragraphs of intricate, thoughtful dialogue as if its coming into his head just a he speaks it, something most of his contemporaries could not have done half as well.

It has a controversial message, that war will no longer exist when we all stop thinking that fighting is noble. “So long as valor is a virtue, we will have soldiers,” Garner’s character Charlie says. Dead heroes, he argues, are merely dead men.

It’s a philosophy that’s rejected by Julie Andrews, the adorable and sweet young English war widow Emily. But eventually she comes around to seeing that Charlie’s view is perhaps the most American – that we’re meant to be free to pursue our dreams and desires and shouldn’t feel compelled to self-sacrifice.

Garner’s experiences early in life sparked a transformation of its own. It wouldn’t have been surprising if James Bumgarner had never become James Garner. But instead we see someone who channeled hurt and pain into values of compassion and fair play, with a bright line separating right from wrong.

Which brings to mind that Rockford episode I watched from the almost-too-hot bath while sipping the cold, cold Heineken. It’s called The Hammer of C Block. Isaac Hayes is a menacing ex-convict named Gandolph Fitch who enlists Rockford’s services in exchange for settling an old $1,500 gambling debt.

He demands that Rockford prove his innocence in a 20-year-old murder. We learn that the victim, Fitch’s estranged girlfriend, had committed suicide over their troubled relationship. She staged her death to be seen as murder, implicating Fitch.

In the final scene, Rockford tells Fitch he has a choice: stay bitter, angry and miserable. Or move on.

“The only thing I’ve learned in this rotten life is collecting what’s due,” says Fitch.

“So you went out and collected a rotten life,” says Rockford.

Walk away, Gandy. You’re free and clear… If you want to be.”

Tell it, Jimbo.

Over on the blog from which I re-blogged this, there are 144 comments! Including mine. You really should go and read them. SO much love!

James Garner, actor, The Garner Files

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Projections Movie Blog - James Garner: Hometown "Maverick" Still Embraces Humble Norman Beginnings

Projections Movie Blog » James Garner: Hometown ‘Maverick’ still embraces humble Norman beginnings

James Garner: Hometown ‘Maverick’ still embraces humble Norman beginnings
Posted on May 7th, 2012 at 7:19 pm | 2 Comments | Classic Movies, Movie books, Movie business

BY GENE TRIPLETT

He learned to drive on the bumpy back roads of Cleveland County when he was a high-spirited kid of 10, and by the time he was 50 he was doing “reverse 180s” on the streets of Hollywood in a Sierra Gold 1978 Pontiac Firebird.

James Garner as Bret Maverick

That’s a trick driving maneuver where “you’re going straight in reverse at about 35 miles an hour, you come off the gas pedal, go hard left, and pull on the emergency brake. That locks

the wheels and throws the front end around. Then you release everything, hit the gas, and off you go in the opposite direction,” James Garner explains in his memoir, “The Garner Files.”

The stunt — seen fairly regularly on the hit 1970s detective series “The Rockford Files” — was performed by Garner himself.

The Norman-born film star seldom used stuntmen, from his early, star-making stint as an itinerant frontier gambler on the ’50s TV sensation “Maverick,” through a successful acting career on both the small and big screens that’s spanned five decades.

But he’s never forgotten his Oklahoma roots, and in a recent email interview with The Oklahoman he said his fondest memories of his home state stem from “growing up in Norman, where you’d walk down the street and know half the people you saw.”

Born James Scott Bumgarner on April 7, 1928, in the hometown of Sooner football, he lived his earliest days in a tiny nearby burg that few people have ever heard of — Denver, OK. It’s underwater now, covered by Lake Thunderbird, but in the depths of the Depression it was a single building — a country store run by Garner’s dad.

“Population 5,” Garner writes in his memoir. “Dad, mom, my two brothers, and me. It was a combination hardware store-mail drop-service station on an old country road. Store in the

James Garner as Jim Rockford.

front and two bedrooms and a kitchen in the back, and that was it. We didn’t have indoor plumbing.”

His father, Weldon “Bill” Bumgarner, was of European ancestry, and his mother, Mildred Meek Bumgarner, was half Cherokee. She died when Garner was 4, and he and his brothers were split up and sent to live with relatives until his father eventually remarried.

A violently abusive stepmother nicknamed “Red” and being bounced from home to home didn’t make for easy life as a kid.

“I might have had some bad times when I was a kid but, you know, everybody does,” Garner said in a 2001 interview with The Oklahoman. “You just live with it … I think I had some fun times in Norman High. And I did a lot of working when I was a kid. I had to work a lot.”

In fact, when his father finally split with Red and took off for California, Garner was on his own and supporting himself at 14.

But he took his fun from high school sports, excelling in football, basketball, shot put, discus and track. When basketball season ended, Garner usually left or was expelled from the halls of education, which was all right with him because he didn’t care to play baseball.

Where he did love to play was behind the wheel of a hot automobile, a passion that hooked him early.

"The Great Escape"

“That was the big deal — everybody get a car and chase each other.”

Garner managed to steer clear of trouble with the law, but he indulged in his share of mischief, pulling one particular prank that earned him the nickname “Slick.”

“A bunch of us were hanging out in front of Woolworth’s in Norman,” Garner recalled in the recent email interview. “There was a row of vending machines and just to show off, I said, ‘I bet I could steal one of those.’

“The gang dared me, so I sidled over to a peanut machine, swept it up in one arm, and kept walking with it right down Main Street. Everyone was so impressed at how smooth it was, they nicknamed me ‘Slick.’ (I didn’t know what to do with the peanut machine, so I took it back to the store.)”

When he was 16, Garner dropped out of school and joined the Merchant Marine, but that only lasted a year because of a susceptibility to seasickness.

Garner followed his father’s example and headed for Los Angeles in 1945, where he stayed with his Aunt Grace Bumgarner and briefly attended Hollywood High, then trade school while working in a filling station.

The next five years were back and forth between California and Oklahoma, during which Garner worked in chick hatcheries and the oil fields, as a truck driver and grocery clerk, and

even as a swim trunks model for Jantzen, before the Army gave him the distinction of becoming the Sooner state’s first draftee in the Korean conflict.

Author Jon Winokur (“The Portable Curmudgeon”) has known Garner for more than 20 years, but knew little of the actor’s rugged childhood or his combat experiences until the two

"The Thrill of It All" with Doris Day.

men began collaborating on Garner’s memoir.

“I had no idea how extensive (Garner’s Korean service) was,” Winokur said in a recent phone interview. “He was in a unit that was thrown into the front lines when the Chinese Communists crossed the 38th Parallel in 1951, and his unit was the first thing they ran into, and they were decimated. They had something like 60 percent casualties in a very short time, and (Garner) was wounded a couple of times … and got a Purple Heart with an Oak Leaf Cluster, which he never talked about very much.”

Winokur said he also discovered the extent of Garner’s generosity and altruism. Early evidence of this can be seen in a 1951 snapshot from Korea of a fatigues-clad Garner and a small boy, provided to The Oklahoman by his daughter, Gigi Garner, who included this explanatory note:

“Here is a wonderful photo of my father and an orphaned boy he named ‘Jocko’ that my Dad looked after during the Korean War.”

Winokur said, “He puts himself in other people’s shoes. …I guess that’s really true empathy that he has.”

Another revelation for the author, from interviews with Garner’s friends and associates, was “the number of people whose lives he has enhanced through his generosity. … Something that came up again and again was how tremendously generous he is, both financially and in other ways.”

After Korea, Garner returned to L.A. and continued searching for a way to make a living that he could live with, while helping his father lay carpet.

He even went back to Norman long enough to attend a semester at the University of Oklahoma, having passed the high school equivalency test in the

"The Americanization of Emily"

service. But when bad knees prevented him from playing Sooner football, it was back to California.

He resisted suggestions from others that acting might be worth a try. After all, he had the tall, dark, handsome look down pat, but he was just too shy and introverted.

“I wouldn’t do it. I just wasn’t interested. And then, I don’t know, one day I got tired of laying carpets. And a guy offered me a job and I took it.”

The job was a nonspeaking role in the Broadway play “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial” in 1954. He decided he didn’t like the stage much, but the contacts he made led to a $150-a-week contract with Warner Bros., and his first on-camera dramatic role with Clint Walker in the TV series “Cheyenne” in 1955.

Garner, Paul Newman at the races.

Prominent big screen roles followed in “Toward the Unknown” (with William Holden) and “The Girl He Left Behind” (with Natalie Wood) before his breakthrough came in 1957, supporting Marlon Brando in Joshua Logan’s “Sayonara.”

It was during that filming in Japan that the studio tapped him to star in one of its new Western TV series — “Maverick.”

Many actors had tested for the role, but Garner says he was picked “because I was under contract to them. And I was cheap.”

Garner’s naturally easygoing affability and smooth, wry delivery of witty dialogue caught on with viewers, the show became Warner’s biggest TV hit, and Bret Maverick was the most famous card-playing cowpoke in America by the end of the ’57-’58 season.

But he wasn’t exactly in the chips. He was getting a paltry $500 a week.

“People said, ‘Well, what’re you going to do? They’re really rippin’ you off’ … I said, ‘They’re not going to make me unhappy. We’ve got the number one show on the air … These people aren’t stupid.’ I didn’t think they were, but they were.”

At great risk to his career, Garner sued Warner Bros. to get out of his contract, and won. He left the show and the studio after the third season, and the series lasted another two years without him.

But that didn’t matter to Garner, who was one of the first TV stars (then considered second-class citizens in the Hollywood community) to make a successful transition to feature films, along with people such as Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and his good friend, Clint Eastwood.

Garner would later work with all three, first with McQueen and Bronson in the 1963 war classic “The Great Escape” and much later with Eastwood in 2000′s “Space Cowboys.”

McQueen and Garner became neighbors in the ’60s and socialized a bit, both sharing a love for auto racing. What Garner didn’t know for many years was that McQueen harbored keen professional and personal jealousies toward him.

“I was never aware of it until we were racing in Baja, and he was in a different category than I was, so we weren’t really competitors,” Garner recalled in the 2001 interview. “And yet, every place he got to he said, ‘Where’s Garner? Where’s Garner? How far ahead is he?’ You know, he tore up a race car trying to catch me.

“Then Neile, his wife at the time, said, ‘He’s always been jealous of tall, dark men.’”

James Garmer, Sally Field in "Murphy's Romance."

Garner’s many other big-screen successes include “The Children’s Hour” (with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine), “The Thrill of it All,” “Move Over Darling” (both with Doris Day), “The Americanization of Emily” (with Julie Andrews), “Grand Prix” (with Eva Marie Saint), “Support Your Local Sheriff” (with Joan Hackett), “Skin Game” (with Louis Gossett Jr.), “Victor Victoria” (with Julie Andrews) and “Murphy’s Romance” (with Sally Field), for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

At the same time, Garner continued to ply his trade on television with TV movies and series, most notably as the amiable, tongue-in-cheek, ex-con detective of “The Rockford Files” (1974-1980) which led to yet another lawsuit over money. Universal ended up settling out of court, paying Garner an undisclosed amount in withheld profits and punitive damages.

Legally, Garner can’t reveal the size of the settlement, but for weeks afterward his wife Lois “had to keep telling me to wipe the grin off my face,” he writes in his memoir.

“One of the things that’s really remarkable about my dad is that there are very few actors in Hollywood or anywhere that have been able to go from film to TV, back to film, back to TV” without diminishing his A-list stature, daughter Gigi Garner said in another recent phone interview.

“He’s a very rare bird in that area,” she said, adding that she and her father are planning to produce a couple of film projects together through their Cherokee Productions company.

James and Lois Garner, married 55 years, also raised another daughter, Kimberly, from Lois’ first marriage.

Garner said in an email that “The Notebook” (2004) is one of his three favorites of his own films “because it was about everlasting love. I believe in everlasting love.”

His other favorites: “‘My Name is Bill W.’ (1989) because over the years people have told me that seeing the story of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous had helped them. ‘The Americanization of Emily’ (1964), because it was written by the great Paddy Chayefsky and because it was about the futility of war.”

His least favorites: “‘Mister Buddwing’ (1966), the worst picture that I ever made, and ‘A Man Called Sledge.’ Sludge.”

Not many blemishes on his own assessment of his lengthy and remarkable career.

These days, arthritis prevents him from indulging in two of his greatest passions, driving and golf, and he hasn’t appeared in a film since 2007.

At 84, Garner’s health history has included chronic knee problems that required numerous operations, quintuple bypass surgery in 1988 and a stroke in 2008. And all of those stunts were bound to have left some damage as well, not to mention sore knuckles from decking the occasional jerk, such as the producer who was stealing story ideas from “The Rockford Files,” and “A Man Could Get Killed” costar Anthony Franciosa for bullying the stunt crew.

But Winokur said don’t write Garner off just yet.

“He’s hangin’ in there,” the author said. “He’s had some issues from which he’s recovered and he’s in good spirits. The problem is his mobility. As you can imagine, he’s got arthritis in about every place you can have it, and that puts a hitch in his get-along. He’s had one stroke, four years ago in May which really didn’t leave him with any permanent damage … No plans at the moment, but I would not count him out. I mean he loves to work and he’s so great. I wouldn’t want to bet against him.”

The work ethic dates back to that rough and tumble Oklahoma boyhood, when Garner had to fend for himself. It’s served him well, and he’s paid his home state back by returning for numerous personal appearances and benefits over the years.

In 2003, he donated $500,000 to endow the James Garner Chair in the School of Drama at the University of Oklahoma. It was the first endowed chair in the drama school’s history.

And he’s gotten love in return.

In 1990, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

In 1995, Garner received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Oklahoma.

In 2006, the City of Norman erected a 10-foot, bronze statue of Garner as Bret Maverick, which stands across from the old Sooner Theatre, where Garner used to sit through Saturday matinees idolizing his heroes, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, James Cagney, and Henry Fonda, whom Garner saw in “The Grapes of Wrath” when he was 12 or 13.

In his memoir, he says he was amazed at the time that they had actually made a movie about people like him, but he didn’t like the term “Okie.” He still doesn’t. Thinks it’s derogatory.

What has being from Oklahoma meant to him?

“Everything!” he said in his email. “I’m so proud of it, I almost start conversations, ‘Hi, I’m Jim from Oklahoma.’ … Oklahoma is friendly and full of nice people.”

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Showbiz maverick - Los Angeles Times

Showbiz maverick
BRIEF ENCOUNTER
James Garner's life isn't in reruns. He still jumps casually from TV to film.
June 27, 2004|Mark Olsen

Quite genuinely, they don't make Hollywood actors like James Garner anymore. In a career that now spans some 50 years, he has slipped easily between television and film, appearing in such productions as "Murphy's Romance," "Sayonara," "The Great Escape," "Move Over, Darling," "Grand Prix," "Marlowe," "Victor/Victoria," "Maverick," "Barbarians at the Gate" and "The Rockford Files."
Recently, the 76-year-old Garner took on his first sitcom role in "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter" following the untimely passing of that show's star, John Ritter. Though it may feel a little odd to mention the gruff-but-lovable actor in the same sentence with "two-hankie tear-jerker," in "The Notebook," with Gena Rowlands, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, Garner has turned in one of the most heartfelt performances of his career.
People are taking notice of your performance in "The Notebook." Do you think because your screen persona is often that of an affable curmudgeon it's perhaps a surprise that such a tender and powerful performance comes from you? You always make acting look so easy.
The hardest thing to do is to go up there and "be yourself." I'm not myself on the screen, because I try to put myself in the position of whatever the writer wanted to portray. It's not easy to make it look like you've never done it before. Especially after you've just done 12 takes and you have to do it once more like it's the very first time. That's always my goal, that it looks like it's the first time it ever happened. It's hard work, and then everybody thinks, "Oh, that's just old Jim."
This isn't exactly the kind of thing you're associated with, though.
I never really care. If the film is good -- if it's a western or a comedy or a drama -- then that's what I want to do. I've never had any preferences one way or another. I suppose I haven't done a lot of love stories in my career. I get to do them later in life. "Murphy's Romance" was a love story, and "Victor/Victoria" was a love story, but funny too. I tried to do more serious films after about 1980. I didn't want to do a lot of action stuff, so I started to lean more to dramatic stuff.
Do you ever catch any of your older work on television? "The Rockford Files" is still on practically every day.
Just the night before last I watched a little of "The Great Escape." Now that was a great film and it holds up very well. I don't watch "Rockford." I didn't watch them originally, I don't watch them now. I've seen a few of them, yes, but I don't like my work very much. I don't know why, but I'm just not a fan of me.
Well somebody must be, as you're certainly quite busy these days.
At 65 I decided I was going to move out of here, and bought a beautiful piece of property up in Santa Ynez -- 400 acres, just gorgeous. We built the house on it, and I said by the time I'm 70 we can move here and just be peaceful or whatever. Then at 70 I was working as much as I ever worked, and I said we're not going just yet. Finally I had to sell the place; it was a big money drain. And here I am at 76 and I'm still doing it. And I can see another couple three years in the future. I think. I hope. Who knows, I might still be doing it at 80.

Do you ever think of just stopping?
When Henry Fonda made "On Golden Pond" he said, "I don't think I'm going to be working anymore." I remember saying, "Oh, come on Henry," but he was right. I haven't had any of those premonitions, that it's going to be the last one. I want to end on the set, doing what I love to do. Let them drag me off feet first.
-- Mark Olsen

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Life On The Set of Classic TV Westerns - James Garner in Maverick

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John Wayne On James Garner

Of course I couldn't agree more and this picture is a perfect demonstration of what John Wayne is talking about. 

1. You re-blogged bankston:

1. 

   bankston:
   

   “That Redford fellow is good. Brando. ‘Patton’ - George C. Scott. But the best of the bunch is Garner - James Garner. He can play anything. Comedy, westerns, drama - you name it. Yeah, I have to say Garner is the best around today. He doesn’t have to say anything - just make a face and you crack up.”—John Wayne  

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The Last Real Man - People Magazine, April 22, 1985

Reblogged bankston:


bankston:


• April 22, 1985
• Vol. 23
• No. 16

The Man Is Back

By Jane Hall

Depression Gone, Hollywood’s Last Real Man, James Garner, Returns to Rugged Form in Space

Look at him. Don’t worry. It’s okay to stare. James Garner is too concentrated on a putt to notice. Dressed in a beige V-neck sweater and slacks, Garner is enjoying his movie star privileges at the Bel Air Country Club. He stands there, without benefit of a filter lens, against a melting sun that would turn even a teen idol like Matt Dillon into a squinting gargoyle, and he looks terrific. Lines, creases and a thickening middle have sculpted character into this open-faced Hollywood hero of the 1960s. At 57, James Garner is wearing exceptionally well. Don’t ask him how he does it. “Looking good doesn’t enter my mind,” he says, grinning that smashing Garner grin.

The modesty, of course, only enhances his appeal. These days Garner is working with a vigor he hasn’t displayed since his time as TV’s Western gambler Bret Maverick and detective Jim Rockford (two dying archetypes he revitalized with humor). In three decades Garner has made nearly 40 films and countless TV shows, but he claims he hasn’t seen more than a third of them. In that, others may wisely follow his lead. Every goody (Victor/Victoria) comes with two clunkers (Mister Buddwing, Tank). Now he’s on a roll—a light-comic actor the experts are starting to take seriously.

This season, with Mary Tyler Moore in Heartsounds, he wowed critics (they’re already talking Emmy) as a doctor struggling with heart disease. “Jim makes it look so easy,” raves Mary. New Oscar winner Sally Field just snagged Garner to play her lover in Murphy’s Romance; she’s smitten. “If men only knew,” sighs Field. “What’s appealing to a woman is how a man makes her feel about herself. Jim is funny and dear, and he laughs at my jokes. That’s what makes Jim sexy; it doesn’t change with years.”

Corroboration of Sally’s statement is available this week as CBS airs Space, a 13-hour, five-night miniseries based on James Michener’s novel. The astronautical epic from Paramount TV cost $35 million, took five months to shoot and boasts 10 big-name stars. Still, the dazzling hardware pales next to Garner, who plays Norman Grant, a World War II naval hero turned senator on a space committee. Playing the hero is nothing new to the stalwart 6’3” actor, but catch his action (he’s hotter than ever) in those love scenes with Blair Brown, playing an astronaut’s wife the married senator takes to bed. “I didn’t want this to happen,” says Brown. “I did,” drawls Garner just before the clinch. That’s it: Just a few words and she’s a goner. Garner’s always been too cool or too shy (deciding which only adds to the fascination) to make the first move. “Every woman wants to be the one who reaches him,” says Brown.

Space is likely to alert audiences to what fans of The Rockford Files have long suspected: James Garner, whose wisecracks can’t hide integrity at the core, may be Hollywood’s last real man. John Wayne is dead. So are Gable, Cooper and Bogart. Who’ve we got now? Eastwood’s tough, but Dirty Harry is rarely good for a laugh. Redford, Newman, Reynolds and Selleck are too wrapped up in movie star vanity to qualify. De Niro, Pacino and Hoffman are chameleons, playing everything from psychos to women. With Garner you know where you stand. The new generation (Penn, Hutton and Cruise) has no history. Garner embodies what critic Tom Shales calls “the crusty, sardonic and self-effacing strain of American masculinity.”

Those qualities are apparent when Garner greets his woman visitor on the golf course. Interviews pain him and he does them rarely. “I hire a PR man just to keep people away from me,” he says. Especially women: “I was a real wallflower as a kid, and women still scare me.” Today he’s brought protection. An avid golfer (he plays the game four times a week when he’s not working), Garner’s lined up two friends and his brother Jack, 59. “That’s what I love about golf,” he says, laying down the challenge. “Nobody can get to you.”

As he settles into the golf cart, his brown eyes flash impishly. “I forgot to tell you, darling,” he says, “I love to race these carts.” It’s mock macho. Throughout the morning he is attentive and chivalrous, offering a gentle hand to my back as we climb a hill and swallowing his profanity when his drive misses the green. Big Jim, who has a six-handicap, is way off his game. “My bad back’[from all those movie stunts] is acting up,” he says. Brother Jack, a golf pro at a nearby club, proves an expert needier. “Now Jim,” he teases, “don’t get that pretty sweater of yours caught in the trees.” Garner grumbles good-naturedly, “It’s a good thing I like to putt.” Does he ever get mad? “Oh, you bet,” says Garner. “It’s a slow process. But when I blow, I don’t care what happens. I once decked a producer at Universal for stealing music and scripts from Rockford. Where I come from [Norman, Okla.], your word is your bond, but I’m in a business where they don’t understand that.” After playing out of a sand trap, he misses an easy putt. Red-faced, he tosses his putter into the air and stands a moment, roiling like an Oklahoma storm cloud. This time the storm passes. “Aw, hell,” he says. “It’s only a game and money.”

At the clubhouse Garner is talking out frustrations, not just his game but his career. “I’m getting too old to play the macho hero,” he says. “I want to play my age.” He’s increasingly terrified of love scenes: “They might laugh at me, and my creed is don’t laugh at me, laugh with me.” Garner liked putting on 15 pounds for Space: “I wanted to be paunchy, a little seedy, that’s what the character calls for.” But don’t think there’s a new De Niro in the making. “I’m a Methodist, but not in acting,” he says, cocking his left eyebrow, the one he uses to show seasoned exasperation. “Little Mariel Hemingway in Star 80,” he says, aghast. “Do you know she had breast implants for the picture?”

Garner will not play a character who strays too far from his personal beliefs. On Space, his first miniseries (at an estimated fee of $1 million), he was a ramrod. “I tried to make the guy less of a wimp than he was in the book,” he says. “I said I didn’t understand how a guy could be a big war hero and then come to the Senate and be pushed around.” Garner also changed the senator from a Republican to a Democrat. “I’m one of those bleeding heart liberals Reagan would like to put behind bars,” he says. “Besides, my wife wouldn’t let me play a Republican.”

Jim is mute about what Lois, his wife of 28 years, thought about his love scenes with Blair Brown, 36. He finds all the sex-symbol talk faintly ridiculous. Brother Jack doesn’t. “It’s not easy being married to Jim,” says Jack, “because of the way fans fall all over him.” Garner laughs it off. Despite an impressive list of screen lovers—including Audrey Hepburn, Natalie Wood and Kim Novak—Garner insists he’s never succumbed to temptation. “Honey,” he says, “I’ve worked with a lot of great-looking actresses, and I make it my business not to dislike any of them. I also make it my business not to fall in love with them either.”

There’s been talk, of course. The Garner marriage has endured two separations, one 15 years ago for three months, another in 1979 that lasted 18 months. During that time he was linked with Lauren Bacall, who had co-starred on Rockford and two films (Health and The Fan). Garner has denied the rumors. “Lois and I were never in serious trouble,” he says, “and everything is fine with us now—99 percent of the problem was the pressures of Rockford. It wasn’t us, it was me needing to get away to get my head together.”

Everything looks serene as we drive up to the iron-gated Garner mansion in Brentwood. The house affords a view from every room, but the world is locked outside. Lois wants none of her husband’s public life. Garner met aspiring actress Lois Clarke at an Adlai Stevenson rally in 1956 (“She just knocked me out”). They were married two weeks later. Lois had a daughter, Kim, by a former marriage. Kim, now a teacher in L.A., came to live with them. Two years later daughter Gigi was born. A country singer, Gigi has settled in Nashville. “I think she sings pretty good,” Garner deadpans. He is never more exasperatingly laconic than when speaking of his family. Lois has helped fill in some of the blanks: “Jim is a rather complicated man and is covering up lots of hurt. Growing up he was abused, lonely and deprived.”

The youngest of Mildred and Weldon Bumgarner’s three sons, he had a childhood that played like a modern day Oliver Twist. He was only 5 when his mother died. The boys—Jim, Jack and Charles (a former high school shop teacher who died last year)—were farmed out to various relatives. Three years later the family was reunited when Weldon (who subsequently married four times) introduced them to their first stepmother, a mean-spirited woman who regularly beat them. “Mostly me,” says Jim. Weldon was no comfort. “My dad worked hard as an upholsterer and carpet layer,” says Jim, “but he was a rake and he drank a lot. He’d come home bombed and make us sing to him or get a whipping.” Garner’s sympathy for the underdog comes from this. “I cannot stand to see little people picked on by big people,” he says. “If a director starts abusing people, I’ll just jump in.”

At 14, he left home and did odd jobs. Two years later he lied about his age and joined the merchant marine, but left in less than a year. He drifted to L.A., where his father then lived with his third wife, and attended Hollywood High. Jim was a football hero, but shy off the field. “All the girls liked him,” says a childhood friend, Bill Saxon, “but Jim hardly dated.” Still his hunky teen torso won him his first on-camera job: a Jantzen swimsuit ad. He grimaces: “Ever since I did that darn ad, I’ve hated having my picture taken.”

The Korean War interrupted his modeling career. He was wounded twice and won two Purple Hearts. On his second day in Korea, he was hit by a shard of shrapnel. Later, he says, “our own jets strafed us. I went for a foxhole, and a South Korean soldier dived on top of me.” Garner spent three months recuperating from a dislocated shoulder and knee injuries. Typically he pooh-poohs accusations of bravery. “I wasn’t a hero,” he says. “I just got in the way a lot.”

It was also luck, he claims, that got him into acting. Paul Gregory, a soda-jerk pal from back home who had become a producer, gave him the small role of a judge in Broadway’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. The star of the show, Henry Fonda, became his mode! and mentor: “I learned just watching him act.” Warner Bros, made Garner a $500-a-week contract player in such unremarkable flicks as Toward the Unknown and Darby’s Rangers. Then, in 1957, they gave him Maverick at the same low price. The series made him a star, but not rich. After four years he had to sue his way out of the series.

Money matters had improved dramatically (an estimated $50,000 per episode) at the time Garner signed up for The Rockford Files in 1974. Still, at the end of 1979, Garner quit the series (perhaps the best ever in the detective genre), again in bitterness. He has filed a $22.5 million suit against MCA/Universal, the owners of Rockford, charging that the studio had cheated him out of his share of the profits. “They made $150 million on Rockford and, even though I owned 37.5 percent of it, I’ve yet to see the money.” Many similar cases are settled out of court. Garner, ever the man of principle, intends to go all the way, no matter how long it takes. “I ruined my health with all those stunts and long hours,” he says. “But I figured I was creating an annuity. The crew used to joke, ‘Come on, it’s Garner’s money we’re wasting.’ When I found out there were no profits, it turned me off this business.” He slid into despair. “I was going to chuck everything,” he has said. “The business. The family. Everybody can go to hell.” His poor health didn’t help. In 1980 he announced, “I’m constantly in pain. I have arthritis in my back and my knees and my hands. I had ulcers this year—and once an ulcer patient, always an ulcer patient. I get depressed. Very.” He saw a psychiatrist, split from his family and tried to work it out “before everything was ruined.” That he did work it out is a tribute to Garner. And Lois. “She’s just stuck with me all these years,” he says. “I guess she’s stubborn too.”

Gazing out on his garden, Garner smiles. “I love to sit under the trees and read.” Don’t bet on early retirement. In Heartsounds (“the one I did for love”) Garner played a man facing his own mortality. To act it with dignity, he drew on an inspiration: Henry Fonda. “I knew Henry very well,” he says softly. “I used a lot of his attitudes—his crotchetiness, his wit, his fight against something he couldn’t control.” Garner is unembarrassed by the emotion in his face. The rest he can’t put into words. He doesn’t have to. Fonda was the kind of man who lived by a code of honor. So is James Garner.






The Last Real Man - People Magazine

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Reblogged mavrock1

Jami Floyd's Review of "The Garner Files" »

mavrock1:

JAMI FLOYD’S REVIEW got picked up on “THIRD AGE”

I know exactly how Jami Floyd felt when she admitted to some trepidation reading the memoirs of a man she had idolized most of her life. I have idolized James Garner for most of my life too, only I’m a lot older than Jami. I was a kid when Maverick hit the air in 1957, and that’s when I developed my very first crush - on James Garner.
Like Jami, as I matured my crush matured into great admiration for Jim Garner as a person and an incredibly gifted actor. Sure, he’s handsome, but there’s a lot more to it than that. There are lots of handsome men in Hollywood - maybe not as handsome as Garner, but attractive nonetheless. Still, they never moved me. I’m not a Star Chaser either, and actually there has never been another star that I would walk across the street to see - seriously. Only James Garner.
I wasn’t really worried when I started reading The Garner Files, because, while I would have been as devastated as Jami if Garner had turned out to be a self-absorbed jerk, I didn’t expect that to happen. From the first time I ever saw him in Maverick, I was absolutely sure Jim Garner was a good man. I just knew. And I was right.
The book is wonderful although it held few real surprises for an old fan like me, there were details I didn’t know of course, and I found it all interesting. There were funny parts, sad parts, and everything in between.
Through it all, though, I found that Jim Garner was exactly who I had believed him to be for all these years, only - to quote Jon Winokur - “better.”

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A Thank You To James Garner

Maverick's Daughter

mavrock1:

I just found this lovely article online and I thought I would share it  ;)

Please Thank Them Before They Go: James Garner

We need to thank the people who provide good things for us to enjoy or benefit from before they go. People on this earth do wonderful things and then they fade into obscurity or pass away without anyone getting a chance to say ‘thanks’ until after it is too late for them to hear about it. It’s now time to change all that.
Today, we are giving thanks to legendary American actor, James Garner.

• A Korean War veteran, Garner earned two Purple Hearts while serving in the U.S. Army.

• The Oklahoma native was first known for his role as Bret in the 1957-1960 comedy Western series Maverick.

• His 1970s series, The Rockford Files, earned him a new generation of fans and an Emmy Award for Best Actor.

• His film roles over the years have included Grand Prix, The Americanization of Emily, The Great Escape, Support Your Local Sheriff, Murphy’s Romance, Victor, Victoria, Maverick, and Barbarians at the Gate.

• After his role in Grand Prix, he owned a share of the car racing team, the American International Racers, racing at LeMans, Sebring, Baja, and Daytona.

• He drove the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 in 1975, 1977, and 1985.

• He appeared in a memorable campaign for Polaroid with former Rockford Files co-star, Mariette Hartley.

• He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

• He was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the 1985 movie, Murphy’s Romance.

• In 1990, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

• He won the Most Valuable Amateur Player at the 1990 AT&T Golf Tournament.

• He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 1995 from the University of Oklahoma, a school he has supported for a number of years.

• In 2003, the James Garner Chair in the School of Drama at the University of Oklahoma was established.

• He joined the cast of 8 Simple Rules after the untimely death of John Ritter.

• In February 2005 he received the Screen Actors Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award

• A statue of the actor was unveiled in 2006 in his hometown of Norman, Oklahoma.

  
Thanks, Mr. G

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Dear James Garner Fans by Gigi Garner

Dear James Garner fans,

I would like to briefly address a recent attack upon my Father by the tabloids and clear up any misconceptions regarding his “drug” use as revealed in his new memoir, “The Garner Files”

I would like you to know that my dear Father has dealt with a lifetime of chronic pain, stemming from early football injuries, to stunts gone bad, to serious life threatening injuries and illnesses.

Considering that marijuana is now a legal medication here in California, with a prescription from a doctor, it obviously does help patients suffering with serious health problems, fatal illnesses and severe and chronic pain, the same way that many other natural and synthetic medications do.

Although he is no longer using it, I admire the courage it took to admit that he did use it and that it did help him with his chronic pain. I asked him about exposing this particular issue before the book came out and he said he wanted to talk about it because  “It might help someone”. At the risk of being attacked by the tabloids, that was his sole motivating factor. 

Thank you for your support and understanding ;)
 
I've been saying this myself ever since Jim's book, The Garner Files - in which Jim reveals that he had used marijuana to help with chronic pain and depression. Here is a book with 300 pages filled with Jim's view of his life, some funny, some poignant, many inspiring but all coming together to show us that James Garner is indeed the man we all thought him to be. He's is one of the very few who actually is a role model, one of a kind and yes, a hero.

But, with all that to choose from a few "reviewers" who obviously didn't even read the book, and of course, the tabloids, took a laser like focus on one tiny detail - he used pot! I don't think they would have been half as worked up if Jim had revealed himself as being a serial killer. What utter crap! What unbelievable hypocrisy. The tabloids I can understand because this is what they do after all - take a minor detail and make a major story out of it. Or flat make it up, as in the last few times they mentioned Jim and they had him at death's door. I guess smoking pot is better than being dead.

My major problem however is with the "reviewers" who had not read the book and took blurbs from others who had and hung an entire point of view on that one thing. One even called the book "drug filled." Come again? I believe the entire "drug" discussion took less than one page. These so-called "critics" revealed far more about themselves than about their target, who stands head and shoulders above them. But again, they know that, which undoubtedly is the true reason for their ridiculous rantings. Small people endlessly trying to drag a big person down to their level. Never happen, you phoney-balonies, so just get over it.

Don't give it another thought, Gigi. As someone who has endured chronic pain and depression for most of my own life, I understand perfectly. I'd use it too if it helped. For those who have been fortunate to have escaped this curse, I say, "Walk a mile in our shoes." If you can make it for a mile that is.

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