The Garner Files: A Memoir

by James Garner

  By the mid-1950s, there were a lot of “adult Westerns” on television, shows like Wyatt Earp, Gunsmoke, and Have Gun Will Travel. They had a more modern point of view than traditional TV shoot-’em-ups like The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid, which were so silly only a kid of ten could stand them. In adult Westerns, the hero didn’t wear a mask and the writers tried to tell stories without using stencils. (Somebody said an adult Western is where the hero still kisses his horse at the end, only now he worries about it.) Maverick was the most adult of them all, including the other Warner Bros. Westerns, Cheyenne with Clint Walker, Lawman (John Russell), and Sugarfoot(Will Hutchins).

  Maverick turned the genre upside down. It wasn’t comedy and it wasn’t satire, it was a Western with humor. Not slapstick, situation humor. Tongue-in-cheek. It let the air out of the stalwart TV Western hero. Maverick was the first hero to wear black. He wasn’t crazy about horses, so his mount was never a character in the show like Trigger and Silver were for Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger.

  Roy Huggins had his own ideas about the Maverick phenomenon. He distilled them into a list of instructions:

  The Ten-Point Guide to Happiness While

  Writing or Directing a Maverick

  1. Maverick is the original disorganization man.

  2. Maverick’s primary motivation is that ancient and most noble of motives: the profit motive.

  3. Heavies in Maverick are always absolutely right, and they are always beloved to someone.

  4. The cliché flourishes in the creative arts because the familiar gives a sense of comfort and security. Writers and directors of Maverick are requested to live dangerously.

  5. Maverick’s activities are seldom grandiose. To force him into magnificent speculations is to lose sight of his essential indolence.

  6. The Maverick series is a regeneration story in which the regeneration has been indefinitely postponed.

  7. Maverick’s travels are never aimless; he always has an object in view: his pocket and yours. However, there are times when he is merely fleeing from heroic enterprise.

  8. In the traditional Western story, the situation is always serious but never hopeless. In a Maverick story, the situation is always hopeless but never serious.

  9. “Cowardly” would be too strong a word to apply to Maverick. “Cautious” is possibly more accurate, and certainly more kind. When the two brothers went off to the Civil War, their old Pappy said to them: “If either of you comes back with a medal, I’ll beat you to death.” They never shamed him.

  10. The widely held belief that Maverick is a gambler is a fallacy. In his hands, poker is not a game of chance. He plays it earnestly, patiently, and with an abiding faith in the laws of probability.

  I’ve always enjoyed working. I feel at home on a set and I try to promote a relaxed atmosphere for everybody else. Jack felt the same, so we’d play little pranks to blow off steam. One day we rode our horses through all four sets shooting blanks and yelling and generally raising hell. Jack and I also played a game we called “BANG!” Whenever we saw each other, the first guy to draw his prop gun and yell “bang!” would get a point. One time he literally caught me with my pants down.

  But it wasn’t all fun and games. You were on stage shooting by 8:00 a.m. and you’d work until 7:00 or 8:00 in the evening. When you left the studio at night, they handed you the script for the next day. You went home and read it while you were having dinner . . . if you were lucky: Sometimes you wouldn’t get the script until you were in the makeup chair the next morning at 6:45. I remember a director named Walter Doniger coming in one morning and saying, “Good script, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll let you know when I read it.”

  “You haven’t read the script?”

  “No, I just got it, but don’t worry, I’ll read it before lunch.”

  We worked all morning without a problem—I could read eight or ten pages and pretty much know what it was about because the character was so strong. And I’ve always been a quick study when it comes to learning lines.

  I had the privilege of working with a lot of good actors on Maverick. In addition to the regulars, a succession of top-notch actors guested, including Mike Connors, Bing Russell (Kurt’s dad), Fay Spain, Ruta Lee, Werner Klemperer (before he played Colonel Klink on Hogan’s Heroes), Sig Ruman, Joanna Barnes, Hans Conreid, John Vivyan (before he starred on TV as Mr. Lucky), Jane Darwell, George O’Hanlon (the original Joe McDoakes in the movie shorts and later the voice of George Jetson), Claude Akins, Dan Blocker (Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza), Regis Toomey, Wayne Morris, Marcel Dalio (that wonderful French character actor), Edgar Buchanan, Abby Dalton, Robert Conrad ( The Wild, Wild West), Louise Fletcher, James Lydon (we became good friends), Diane McBain, Connie Stevens, Adam West ( Batman), William Schallert, Mona Freeman, Buddy Ebsen (Fess Parker’s sidekick in Davy Crockett and later Jed Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies), Richard Webb ( Captain Midnight), Martin Landau . . . the list goes on. In one show, Clint Eastwood plays a smartass heavy who keeps calling me “Maver-ack,” and a very young Robert Redford appears as a cowhand in another.

  Fifty years later, two guest stars stand out in my mind: Kathleen Crowley was one of those actresses who worked a lot in the ’50s. She did several Maverick s and always played charming grifters. Her character’s relationship with Maverick was unusual: We didn’t trust each other as far as we could throw a bull calf, but we liked each other. And Kathleen was gorgeous. She wasn’t very tall, but she had classic beauty. Nobody considered her much of an actress, but I did.

  Gerald Mohr was the one I had the most fun working with on Maverick. He appeared in several episodes, including one as Doc Holliday. Mohr was well educated. He was fluent in several languages, and he’d been a medical student when the radio bug bit him. He was good enough to be a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre ensemble, and he did hundreds of shows during the 1930s and ’40s, the golden age of radio. He made the transition to television and was one of the busiest actors in Hollywood for many years. He could tell a joke better than anybody, and he had a bunch of them. Never repeated himself. And he was a pro. I learned a few things about acting from him.

  A Shady Deal at Sunny Acres” is probably the definitive Maverick. It’s certainly my favorite episode, because it’s Bret at his coolest. One day Roy Huggins told me a script idea: One Maverick brother pulls off a complicated “sting” operation against a guy who had swindled the other brother out of some money while the brother who got swindled just sits on a porch all day and whittles. Every once in a while a citizen comes up to him and asks, “Why aren’t you out trying to get your money back?” All he says is, “I’m working on it” and just keeps whittling. Roy gave me the choice of roles, and I took the one sitting on the porch. He was surprised, because it was the smaller of the two parts. But I needed to get off my feet!

  Marion Hargrove wrote an episode that was a spoof of Gunsmoke called “Gun-Shy.” Ben Gage played Marshal Mort Dooley, a send-up of the James Arness character Marshal Matt Dillon. In the opening, Ben stands at one end of a deserted street, his big butt filling the frame, and Bret Maverick stands at the other end. Ben draws and fires, but his first shot misses. So do five more. Bret shouts, “Shall we stand a little closer, Marshal?”

  A wonderful character actor named Walker Edmiston played the Dennis Weaver part. In Gunsmoke, Dennis played Jim Arness’s sidekick, Chester Goode, with a famous, stiff-legged limp. After the first day of shooting, I noticed that Walker wasn’t limping. When I asked why not the director said, “That would be a little too much, Jim.” I said, “No, if you’re going to do it, do it!” So we added a little scene in which he comes into the marshal’s office and he’s limping all of a sudden. I say, “What’s the matter, did you get hurt?” and he says, “A gol-durned horse stepped on my foot and it hurts like thunder!” and I say, “You should keep it, it gives you character.” He limped for the rest of the show.

  Almost from the beginning, there was an invisible character who was near
ly as important as Bret or Bart: Pappy. His one-liners were a convenient way to end a scene on a humorous note, or to save face in a tough situation. They all began with, “As my old Pappy used to say . . . “ Here are my favorites: “Man’s the only animal you can skin more than once,” “Marriage is the only game of chance where both people can lose,” “If at first you don’t succeed, try something else,” “If you can’t fight ’em and they won’t let you join ’em, you best get out of the county,” “Any man who needs to make out a will just isn’t spending his money properly.”

  Warner Bros. made all the decisions for my career. The problem was, they didn’t care about my career. I cared, though. If I was going to succeed, I wanted it to be my success. If I was going to fail, I wanted it to be my failure, not because someone else made the wrong choices for me. As old Pappy used to say, “Make a lot of mistakes but always be sure they’re your own.”

  About a year and a half into Maverick, there was a Writers Guild strike, and Warner Bros. announced they were laying me off. They invoked the force majeure clause in my contract, which said if production was halted by circumstances beyond its control, like a strike, the studio wouldn’t have to pay my salary. They claimed they didn’t have scripts.

  My reaction was, “Hey, I’m ready to work. You’re paying me by the week and I’m here to do whatever you want.”

  “Nope, we’re not going to pay you.”

  Well, bull shit.

  I decided to sue them for breach of contract.

  Almost everyone I knew advised me against it. I was actually threatened more than once that if I didn’t drop the lawsuit, I’d “never work in this town again.” (Life imitating art . . . or something.) I was told, “You’ll be a dead man. You’re a nobody just starting out—even if you win in court, your career will be over.” I didn’t want to be blackballed by the studios, but I was tired of being pushed around. I kept saying I could always go back to laying carpets for a living. I didn’t really want to go back to laying carpets, but they didn’t know that.

  I was also a little concerned about being typecast as Bret Maverick. I didn’t want to get too identified with the character and worried I wouldn’t be able to make the transition from Bret to other roles.

  I hired Gang, Tyre, Rudin & Brown, a prominent Los Angeles law firm, and they assigned a young attorney and former Rhodes scholar named Frank Wells. Frank turned out to be an outstanding entertainment lawyer and later ran Disney with Michael Eisner.

  At first, I thought Jack Kelly was going to join me in the lawsuit, but then I heard the studio had upped his contract from forty to fifty-two weeks and promised him a feature film a year. To this day, I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, I don’t blame Jack. I just knew what I had to do for myself. After Maverick, Jack eventually left show business and got into real estate in Huntington Beach, California. He also served on the city council and was elected mayor, running on the slogan “Let Maverick Solve Your Problems.” Jack died of a stroke in 1992 at the age of sixty-five.

  Even though Maverick had ceased production because of the strike, there were still lots of requests for personal appearances, and I could have done movies while the writers were out. But the studio used the strike to teach me a lesson. So I went out and did eight weeks of John Loves Mary in summer stock and earned more than I had in a year at Warners. (For that matter, one year Luis Delgado made more money on Maverick as a stand-in than I did.)

  By the time my case went to trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, Frank Wells had discovered that contrary to the studio’s claim that it couldn’t get scripts during the strike, it actually had fifteen writers working under the table churning out dozens of scripts as “W. Hermanos.” Talk about prolific, that W. Hermanos really got around! “Hermanos,” of course, is Spanish for “brothers.”

  When Frank cross-examined Jack Warner on the witness stand, it was a thing of beauty. Not flashy like in a courtroom drama, but cold and methodical. And devastating.

  Warner claimed he didn’t know about the “Hermanos brothers” scripts, but Frank used Warner’s own testimony to prove otherwise. The Hollywood mogul seemed to get smaller and smaller as Frank caught him in one lie after another. By the time Frank was finished with him, Warner was a beaten man. He reminded me of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, except that Queeg was worthy of sympathy.

  The judge ruled in my favor, and after Warner Bros. lost its appeal, I was a free agent. As it turned out, I lost money on the original Maverick: I was paid $90,000 while I was under contract to Warners and it cost $100,000 in legal fees to escape. It was worth it.

  Warner Bros. made 124 Maverick episodes, and I was in 52 of them. When I left, after the third season, they tried to get Sean Connery to replace me and they even flew him over from England, but he ultimately passed. Then they decided to bring in Roger Moore as Beau Maverick, Bret’s English cousin. Roger had played a different character in a previous Maverick episode, “The Rivals,” and he did a good job.

  Roger was already under contract to Warners, and he insisted he’d do Maverick only if they’d release him at the end of the year. They balked at first, but he stood his ground and they finally agreed. After Roger worked the season, they did let him go, right into The Saint, which was a big hit for him. Good on ya, Roger!

  Maverick lasted one more year with Jack Kelly and a kid named Robert Colbert as Brent. They tried to sell him as a James Garner look-alike. They put him in my suit and underlit him, but as soon as he opened his mouth, you knew it wasn’t me. Young Colbert wasn’t happy. He complained about bad scripts and about having to wear my clothes. He pleaded with them not to make him a Bret Maverick clone. “Put me in a dress and call me Brenda, but please don’t do this to me!” he said.

  Over the succeeding years, we made several attempts to recapture the magic, but instead of reviving Maverick, we beat it to death.

  I think the original Maverick series, which ran on ABC from September 1957 to April 1962, was a milestone. It was a fresh approach to episodic television, with an irreverence that anticipated a lot of what was to come in the ’60s. In its own way, Maverick was “antiestablishment.” It gave voice to viewers’ dissatisfaction with the predictable, buttoned-down TV of the ’50s, with its black-and-white morality. Maverick explored gray areas by questioning the authority of the conventional Western hero. After Maverick, it was hard to watch those steely-eyed cowboys without laughing.

  If Warners had paid me a decent wage in the first place, I’d never have sued, and they’d have had me for life. I just needed to know I was appreciated. After we broke the contract, they offered me $5,000 a week to stay another year, and in those days, that was a lot of money. On top of that, Henry Kaiser offered me his one-third share of Maverick’s profits. Old Henry J. had been good to me and I liked him, but at that point I just wanted out.

  I’ll never know how different my life would have been if I’d stayed in Maverick, but I probably wouldn’t have had much of a movie career.

  I’ve been told my lawsuit set a precedent that liberated actors from the kind of one-sided contract I’d been under, and that the court decision against Warner Bros. was one of the final blows against the studio system. The truth is, I wasn’t thinking about anybody but myself. All I knew was I couldn’t continue working under those conditions. That’s why I was willing to risk my career to get out.

  But that wasn’t quite the end of the story. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure Jack Warner tried to kill my movie career. On the same day in December 1960 that the judgment came down in my favor, I got a script from 20th Century-Fox called The Comancheros. Though I was anxious to work, I didn’t much care for the movie and I turned it down. A few days later, when I heard that Gary Cooper had signed to do the other part, I said, “Whoa, send me that script back!” I looked at it again and decided to do it, just for the chance of working with a great star and a man I admired. As it turned out, Coop dropped out and Duke Wayne played the lead, but that would have been fine wi
th me: I felt the same way about Wayne as I did about Cooper. The director and head of production both wanted me, and we thought it was all set. But I never heard from them again, and they wouldn’t talk to my agent. Stu Whitman wound up with the part.

  I’m convinced that Jack Warner called Spyros Skouras, the head of 20th, and told him not to use me.

  Luckily, there were enough independent producers around that I didn’t have to rely on a studio to get a job. It wasn’t long before a big director cast me in an important film, and from then on, I could work anywhere.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Big Screen

  After I’d won my lawsuit against Warners, offers weren’t exactly rolling in. Producers were understandably cautious. But my agent arranged a meeting with William Wyler and he hired me for The Children’s Hour on the spot. I didn’t even have to read for it.

  Two schoolteachers, played by Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, are accused of being lesbians by one of the students, a vicious little girl played by Karen Balkin. In those days, it was a touchy subject. We couldn’t use the word “lesbian.” Imagine. But the script wasn’t about homosexuality anyway; it was about the harm rumors can cause.

  William Wyler ( Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, Ben-Hur) was one of our great directors. He had the reputation of being a perfectionist and a bit of a taskmaster, but I found him to be a pussycat. He didn’t use force of any kind. He’d talk to you about the situation calmly and quietly.

  But he didn’t actually tell you anything. He had his own way of communicating, and it wasn’t verbal. I don’t think he knew how to express himself to actors. You’d do a take and all he’d say was, “Okay, let’s do it again.” He’d do five or six takes for every scene. In one scene, he did take after take to get Karen to cry. He finally got her so upset that the dam burst and she didn’t stop crying for two days.