"When I started working, I didn't have a clue what I was doing, in that I was just wandering around, hoping that I could succeed. Then after I got a little under my belt, it took me about 25 years to feel like I knew what I was doing"
- James Garner
James Garner died yesterday.
He was born James Scott Bumgarner on April 7, 1928.
Garner was one of the first Hollywood actors to excel in both film and
television. He starred in several television series spanning a career of more
than five decades. These included his popular roles as Bret Maverick in the 1950s western-comedy series, Maverick, and Jim Rockford in the
1970s detective drama, The Rockford Files. He starred in more than
fifty films, including The Great Escape (1963), Paddy
Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily (1964), Grand Prix (1966), Blake
Edwards' Victor Victoria(1982), Murphy's
Romance (1985), for which he received an Academy
Award nomination, and The Notebook (2004).
Garner, the youngest of three
children, was born in Norman,
Oklahoma, the son of Mildred Scott (née Meek) and Weldon Warren Bumgarner,
a carpet layer. His
two older brothers were actor Jack Garner (1926–2011) and Charles Bumgarner, a
school administrator who died in 1984. His
family was Methodist. His
mother, who was of part Cherokee descent, died when he was five years old. After
their mother's death, Garner and his brothers were sent to live with relatives.
Garner was reunited with his family in 1934, when Weldon remarried.
Garner grew to hate his
stepmother, Wilma, who beat all three boys, especially young James. When he was
fourteen, Garner finally had enough of his "wicked stepmother" and
after a particularly heated battle, she left for good. James' brother Jack
commented, "She was a damn no-good woman". Garner
stated that his stepmother punished him by forcing him to wear a dress in
public and that he finally engaged in a physical fight with her, knocking her
down and choking her to keep her from killing him in retaliation. This incident
ended the marriage.
Shortly after the breakup of the
marriage, Weldon Bumgarner moved to Los Angeles,
while Garner and his brothers remained in Norman. After working at several jobs
he disliked, at sixteen Garner joined the United States Merchant Marine near
the end of World War II. He fared well in the work and with
shipmates, but suffered from chronic seasickness.
At seventeen, he joined his father in Los Angeles and enrolled at Hollywood High School, where he was voted the
most popular student. A high school gym teacher recommended him for a job modeling Jantzen bathing
suits. It
paid well,$25 an hour, but in his first interview for
the Archives of American Television, he
said he hated modeling and soon quit and returned to Norman. There, he played
football and basketball, as well as competed on the track and golf teams,
for Norman High School. He
never graduated from high school, explaining in a 1976 Good
Housekeeping magazine interview: "I was a terrible student
and I never actually graduated from high school, but I got my diploma in the
Army."
Later, he joined the National Guard serving seven
months in the United States. He then went to Korea for 14 months in the Regular Army, serving in the 5th Regimental Combat Team in
the Korean
War. He was wounded twice, first in the face and hand from shrapnel fire from a mortar round,
and second on April 23, 1951 in the buttocks from friendly
fire from U.S. fighter jets as he dove headfirst into a foxhole.
Garner was awarded the purple heart in Korea for the first injury. For
the second wound, he received a second Purple Heart (eligibility requirement:
"As the result of friendly fire while actively engaging the enemy"),
although Garner received the medal in 1983, 32 years after his injury. Garner
was a self-described "scrounger" for his company in Korea, a role he
later played in The Great Escape and The
Americanization of Emily.
He changed his last name from
Bumgarner to Garner after the studio had credited him as "James
Garner" without permission. He then legally changed it upon the birth of
his first child, when he decided she had too many names. His
brother Jack also had an acting career and changed his surname to Garner, too.
His non-actor brother, Charlie, kept the Bumgarner surname.
Garner was closely advised by
financial adviser Irving Leonard, who also advised Clint
Eastwood in the late 1950s and 1960s. After
several feature film roles, including Sayonara with Marlon
Brando, Garner got his big break playing the role of professional
gambler Bret Maverick in the comedy Western
series Maverick from 1957 to 1960. Garner
was earlier considered for the lead role in another Warner Brothers Western
series, Cheyenne, but that role went to Clint
Walker because the casting director couldn't reach Garner in time
(according to Garner's autobiography), and Garner wound up playing an Army
officer in the pilot instead.
The show almost
immediately made Garner a household name. Various actors had recurring roles as
Maverick foils, including Efrem Zimbalist, Jr as "Dandy Jim
Buckley," Richard Long as "Gentleman Jack
Darby," Leo Gordon as "Big Mike McComb,"
and Diane Brewster as "Samantha Crawford"
(Huggins' mother's maiden name) while the series veered effortlessly from
comedy to adventure and back again. The relationship with Huggins, the creator
and original producer of Maverick, would later pay dividends for
Garner.
Garner was the lone star of Maverick for
the first seven episodes but production demands forced the studio, Warner
Brothers, to create a Maverick brother, Bart, played by Jack Kelly. This allowed two production units to
film different story lines and episodes simultaneously. The series also
featured popular cross-over episodes featuring both Maverick
brothers, including the famous "Shady Deal at Sunny Acres", upon
which the first half of the 1973 movie The Sting appears
to be based, according to Roy Huggins' Archive of American Television interview.
Garner and Clint Eastwood staged an epic fistfight in an
episode entitled "Duel at Sundown", in which Eastwood
plays a vicious gunslinger. Critics were positive about Garner and Jack Kelly's
chemistry, but Garner quit the series in the third season because of a dispute
with Warner Brothers.Only Garner and series creator Roy Huggins thought Maverick could
compete with The Ed Sullivan Show and The Steve Allen Show. The show almost
immediately made Garner a household name. Various actors had recurring roles as
Maverick foils, including Efrem Zimbalist, Jr as "Dandy Jim
Buckley," Richard Long as "Gentleman Jack
Darby," Leo Gordon as "Big Mike McComb,"
and Diane Brewster as "Samantha Crawford"
(Huggins' mother's maiden name) while the series veered effortlessly from
comedy to adventure and back again. The relationship with Huggins, the creator
and original producer of Maverick, would later pay dividends for
Garner.
The studio attempted to replace
Garner's character with a Maverick cousin who had lived in Britain long enough
to pick up an English accent, played by Roger Moore,
but Moore quit the series after filming only 14 episodes as Beau Maverick. Warner Brothers also
dressed Robert Colbert, a Garner look-alike, in Bret
Maverick's outfit and called the character Brent, but Brent Maverick did not have a chance to
catch on with viewers since Colbert made only two episodes toward the end of
the season, leaving the rest of the series run to Kelly (alternating with
reruns of episodes with Garner).
When
Charlton
Heston turned down the lead role in
Darby's Rangers before
Garner's departure from
Maverick, Garner was selected and performed
well in the role. As a result of Garner's performance in
Darby's
Rangers, coupled with his
Maverick popularity,
Warner
Brothers subsequently gave him lead roles in other films, such
as
Up Periscope and
Cash McCall.
Jr. as his father, a retired truck driver.
The show was created by
Roy Huggins and
Stephen J.
Cannell. Huggins had created the television show
Maverick (1957–1962), which had
also starred Garner, and he wanted to try to recapture that magic in a
"modern day" detective
setting. He teamed with Cannell, who had written for
Jack Webb productions
such as
Adam-12 and
Chase (1973–1974, NBC), to
create
Rockford.
The show was credited as "A Public Arts/Roy Huggins Production" along
with
Universal Studios and in association with
Cherokee Productions. Cherokee was the name of Garner's company, which he ran
with partners
Meta Rosenberg and
Juanita
Bartlett, who doubled as story editor during most of
Rockford's
run.
 |
| Jim Rockford's Yellow Pages ad at the Universal Studios Property Warehouse |
The series theme by
composers
Mike Post and
Pete
Carpenter was released as a single and went to #10 on the
Billboard
Hot 100, remaining on the chart for 16 weeks. and won a
Grammy
Award for
Best Instrumental
Arrangement for 1975.
In 2002,
The Rockford Files was ranked #39 on
TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV
Shows of All Time.
Producers Roy Huggins and Stephen J. Cannell devised
the main
character to be a rather significant departure from typical television
detectives
of the time, essentially
Maverick as a modern detective. Rockford
had served time in California's
San Quentin Prison in the 1960s due to a
wrongful conviction. After five years, he received a pardon. His infrequent
jobs
as a private investigator barely allow him to maintain his dilapidated
mobile home (which
doubles as his office) in a parking lot on the beaches of
Malibu, California.
The show's title sequence began with someone leaving a
message on
Rockford's answering machine, which were still novel in 1974. A
different
message was heard in each episode. These frequently had to do with
creditors
to whom Rockford owed money, or deadbeat clients who owed money to
him.
They were usually unrelated to the rest of the plot. As the series went
on,
this gimmick became a burden for the show's writers, who had to come up
with
a different joke every week. Rockford wears low-budget "off the rack"
clothing and does his
best to avoid fights. He rarely carries
his
Colt Detective Special revolver,
for which
he does not have a permit, preferring to talk his way out
of trouble. He works
on
cold cases, missing persons
investigations,
and low-budget insurance scams, and he repeatedly states in the
series
that he does not handle "open cases" to avoid trouble with the
police.
In early episodes of the show's
first season, Rockford's trailer is located in a parking lot
alongside the highway (address 2354 Pacific Coast Highway) and near
the ocean; for the rest of the series, the trailer is at Paradise Cove (address 29 Cove Road), adjacent to a pier and a restaurant
("The Sand Castle", now known as the "Paradise Cove Beach
Cafe").
In the series of television
movies from 1994 to 1999, Rockford is still living in a trailer,
but it has been extensively enlarged.
On April 21, 2006, a 10-foot-tall
(3.0 m) bronze statue of Garner as
Bret Maverick was unveiled in Garner's
hometown of
Norman, Oklahoma, with Garner present at the
ceremony.
Good Night Mr. Garner
Stay Tuned
Tony Figueroa
Show No. 239 with guests Barry Livingston and Dwayne Epstein
