by James Garner
That convinced me that Roy should not be involved in our day-to-day operations. When I put out the word that he’d have nothing to do with the scripts, he went ballistic. But I had a company to run. After that, I never had to send a script back. Just for conceiving the character, by the way, Roy made himself over a million bucks. I often thought that if we’d had that money, we could have put it to work on the screen where it belonged.
When my former agent, Meta Rosenberg, became our executive producer, her assistant, MaryAnn Rea, came to work for me, and we’ve had a close working relationship ever since. I tell people, “If you want to reach me, call MaryAnn, because she always knows where I am, what I’m doing, and what I’m thinking.” It’s a credit to her that we can work so well together while so far apart geographically: for the past ten years, she’s lived in Northern California, yet she runs everything like clockwork. MaryAnn is my right arm. Make that right and left. I’ve been lucky to have her in my professional life all these years.
Meta was a first-rate organizer who knew a good script when she saw one, and it all starts with the writing. Without good writing, you’re not going anywhere. Fortunately, we had the best writers in television. Steve Cannell oversaw the scripts and wrote about fifty episodes himself. Nobody could write as fast or as well as Steve. He could sit down and bang out a script a week for an hour show on that electric typewriter of his. I’ve never heard of anybody else who could do that.
Steve had a tremendous career after Rockford, with shows like Baretta, Wiseguy, The A-Team, The Greatest American Hero, and The Commish. He was responsible for something like forty TV series, and for three decades Steve always had at least one show on network television. He personally wrote hundreds of episodes of various series, primarily crime dramas, and in his spare time, he turned out a couple of dozen best-selling crime novels. All despite a severe disability: Steve was diagnosed with dyslexia as an adult. He became an advocate for people with learning disabilities. Steve was about the finest human being I’ve ever known. It was a devastating loss when he died in 2010 after battling melanoma.
We also had Juanita Bartlett, who’d been Meta’s secretary when we were doing Nichols. Juanita wrote some of the best Rockford s, including “The Great Blue Lake Land and Development Company,” inspired by a 60 Minutes story about land fraud, and “So Help Me God,” about the abuses of the grand jury system. I’m proud of that show, because it was instrumental in bringing about changes in the law. Juanita eventually became a successful writer-producer in her own right.
Meta hired David Chase for the third season as a writer-producer and he stayed on the show until the end. David, of course, went on to win a slew of Emmys for creating, writing, and producing The Sopranos, one of the great American drama series of all time . I’m proud of him.
Charles Floyd Johnson, our producer, was an attorney who’d worked at the US Copyright Office before going into television. He was also executive producer on the Rockford movies and has produced a bunch of other hit series including Magnum, P.I.; Quantum Leap; Simon and Simon; and JAG.
In addition to his other duties, Chas was the guy in charge of the notorious phone messages. Each episode began with Rockford’s answering machine: “Hi, this is Jim Rockford. At the tone, please leave your name and I’ll get back to you.” You’d hear the tone and then the message, which was usually bad news:
“Jim, this is Norma at the market. It bounced. Do you want us to tear it up, send it back, or put it with the others?”
“Gene’s 24-Hour Emergency Plumbing. Your water heater’s blown? We’ll have somebody out there Tuesday . . . Thursday at the latest. “
“Hi. Just wanted to put your mind at rest . . . found your address book in the theater last week. It’s in the mail. By the way, Carol’s okay—but Linda?”
“It’s Lori at the trailer park. A space opened up. Do you want me to save it, or are the cops gonna let you stay where you are?”
“This is the Message Phone company. I see you’re using our unit . . . now how ’bout paying for it?”
“Jim, it’s Shirley at the cleaners. You know that brown jacket—the one that looks so great on you—your favorite? We lost it.”
It got to the point in the third or fourth season where the writers were running out of messages. It was the biggest problem they had writing the show! They got desperate there toward the end and were asking secretaries, Teamsters, everyone.
We rotated directors so they could prepare during the week or ten days before the episode began filming. We had people like Lou Antonio, Jackie Cooper, William Wiard, Ivan Dixon—the best in the business.
In our second season, CBS scheduled the popular Hawaii Five-0 against us in the nine p.m. Friday night slot, and the studio got nervous. They decided Rockford should be a straight detective to compete with macho man Jack Lord, and they wanted us to take the humor out.
Take the humor out?
As soon as I heard that, I called Frank Price and asked him to come out to the location.
“When are you breaking for lunch?” he said.
“We’ve broken for lunch,” I said.
“Well, okay, I’ll be out in a couple of hours.”
“Fine, but we’re not going back to work until we talk.”
Frank was there in twenty minutes.
We were shooting at Riviera Country Club and we met in my motor home. I explained to Frank that I’d been in the business a long time and that humor is what I do best.
“That’s what people hire me for,” I said. “If they don’t want it, I’d just as soon do something else. I’m not going to change at the whim of somebody with no experience and no judgment, so either fire me or don’t mess with it. If you don’t like the series, cancel it.”
I don’t think Frank expected me to talk to him like that and it obviously shook him up. I might have raised my voice a little. I may have even broken one or two small pieces of furniture. Whatever I did or said, it got them off our backs once and for all. After that Frank and I got along just fine, though from then on he insisted on having at least one other person in the room whenever we met.
In the 1970s, Universal was a factory for prime-time television series: Columbo, Quincy, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman— all the shows had a similar style, or lack of it. Bland. Cookie-cutter. The studio cared more about getting them out than getting them good. I didn’t want Rockford to be tainted by that attitude, so I hired my own production crew and bought my own location equipment. I wanted to get off of Universal’s back lot. and I wanted the camera to follow Rockford wherever he went, so we shot more than half the scenes on location.
Universal’s trucks were always breaking down, so I bought two semis and outfitted each to carry three or four different departments, which eliminated eight drivers and trucks. All those drivers cost money! The union wasn’t happy about it, and when they complained, I said, “Well, gentlemen, why should I spend money on something I don’t need?” After further discussion, they ended up making me an honorary Teamster.
I did everything I could to minimize production costs because I thought it would increase my share of the profits. In fact, the crew had a running joke: “Let’s get to work—it’s Garner’s money we’re wasting.” They were a solid group who all knew their craft and worked well together. That’s what makes a successful series. One guy can’t do it alone. You’ve got to have all those people working together. If we ever had a bad apple, he was out like that. Otherwise, I let people do their jobs and I didn’t look over their shoulders. I always tried to promote a family atmosphere on the set. That’s what made me comfortable, and I think everybody else liked it, too.
Hour shows usually took seven or eight days to shoot; we shot an episode in six. In five and a half years, we were never over budget and only a handful of days over schedule. No other television show came close to that record. When Universal noticed it, they sent efficiency experts down to find out how we did it.
Even our theme music was a depa
rture from the standard TV fare of the time. Steve Cannell brought in Mike Post and Pete Carpenter to write it: bluesy harmonica and a bluegrass instrument called a Dobro guitar, backed by a big band. The Rockford theme made the Top Ten on the Billboard charts, and Post and Carpenter won a Grammy for it. They also wrote the score, deliberately avoiding what they called “Mickey-Mousing,” the common practice of punctuating action and telegraphing emotion with music.
If you look at Maverick and Rockford, they’re pretty much the same guy. One is a gambler and the other a detective, but their attitudes are identical.
Rockford isn’t your typical detective. He’s a quirky character who turns all the private eye clichés inside out: he works out of a broken-down trailer at the beach instead of in a seedy downtown office; he’s got a telephone answering machine rather than a leggy secretary; and while most private eyes are loners without families, Rockford has his dad, Rocky.
Instead of being a tough guy who thrives on danger, Rockford is cautious. He believes bravery gets you nothing but hurt, and he’d rather quit than fight. (When he absolutely can’t avoid violence, he fights dirty.) Rockford doesn’t like to hit people because it hurts the hand. He owns a gun, but he keeps it in a cookie jar and rarely carries it because, he says, “If I carry a gun, I may have to shoot somebody.” (Though Rockford did fire his gun on a few occasions, he never killed anybody.)
Rockford softened the hard-boiled-detective image made popular by Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, and Robert Mitchum. Every real private detective I’ve ever talked to said Rockford was much closer to the truth than a lot of the tough ones on the screen.
Rockford has a bad back and worse luck. He has a problem with authority, so he tends to mouth off at the worst possible time, like when he’s being beaten up by a thug: “Does your mother know what you do for a living?”
Rockford’s tricky, but he isn’t bad. He’s an ordinary guy. He’s a bit thick around the waist because of a weakness for tacos and Oreo cookies. He helps people who’ve been wrongly accused, just as he’d been. He spent five years in San Quentin for something he didn’t do. He was convicted of armed robbery, but it was a bum rap and he got a full pardon.
“I have expenses,” he’s always saying. He runs credit checks on prospective clients, even if they’re beautiful women, but he isn’t greedy. “I won’t kill for money,” he says, “and I won’t marry for it. Other than that, I’m open to just about anything.” But Rockford only pretends to like money. In truth, he isn’t in it for the money because there isn’t much money in it, and deep down he knows that: two hundred bucks a day plus expenses wasn’t a lot, not even in the 1970s. Most of his clients stiffed him anyway. That’s okay, because Rockford has no ambition beyond being able to pay his bills, go fishing with his dad, and drink a few beers while watching football on TV.
Rockford is always suspicious of people’s motives, but he isn’t a cynic. When the chips are down, he’s up there on his white charger fighting like hell for what’s right. On the one hand, he’s seen it all, but on the other, he’s naive. He usually gets screwed in the end, but he’s never bitter. He’s a realist, but he has a good heart. In short, Jim Rockford is an honorable man.
Speaking of honor, or rather the lack of it, there was a producer at Universal named Glen Larson who stole a bunch of Rockford stories. He had the gall to lift the plots and just put different characters in them! When we caught him, we complained to the Writers Guild and they fined him. The fine obviously didn’t teach him, because he copied the Rockford theme music for one of his shows.
One day on the back lot he came up, put his arm around me, and said, “I hope there are no hard feelings, Jim.”
“Take your arm off me,” I said.
He didn’t listen. I told him again to take his arm off me, but he still didn’t listen. I was so goddamn mad at him for stealing our stuff, I hauled off and belted him. Knocked him clear across a curb and into a motor home and he came out the other side. It’s a good thing I only hit him with my left hand, because if I’d hit him with my right, I’d have killed him.
It was crazy: the studio had wanted us to change our show to look like Hawaii Five-0, but now they had this guy changing his show to look like ours. We weren’t dealing with creative geniuses up there in the Black Tower.
We had a wonderful cast. Noah Beery Jr., or “Pidge,” as everyone called him, played Jim Rockford’s father. Pidge was a fine actor and a gentle man. He was a complete professional who always showed up on time, knew his lines, and never complained. But then, he had acting in his blood: his father was a silent film star and his uncle, Wallace Beery, won an Oscar for The Champ in 1931.
Pidge’s character, Rocky, is a retired trucker who isn’t happy that his son is a private detective. He’s always saying things like, “Sonny, how can I tell my friends my son’s a private eye?” or “Sonny, you never gave trucking a chance.” Rocky loved to fish, and he passed that love on to his son. The moments when they’re fishing together are among my favorites, and I think Rockford’s relationship with his father is the emotional backbone of the show. Sometimes they get on each other’s nerves, but the affection is there through it all.
Stuart Margolin, as Angel Martin, is a perfect foil for Rockford. Though Rockford is smarter than just about everybody else, everybody takes advantage of him, even his friends. Especially Angel, who was Rockford’s cell mate at San Quentin.
Angel is a weasel. He double-crosses Rockford again and again. He’s always getting in trouble, and Rockford always has to bail him out. (Few people know that Angel’s first name is Evelyn. No wonder he’s got issues.) I confess that I’ve never understood why Rockford likes Angel so much, because he’s rotten to the core. But there’s something lovable about him. I don’t know what it is, but it’s all Stuart’s doing.
NBC didn’t want Stuart in the show, but I was crazy about him and we cast him in the pilot as a snitch. NBC said they didn’t like his performance, but we put him in a second episode anyway, then a third. NBC still didn’t want him and they told us point-blank not to use him again. Then he got an Emmy nomination.
“Do you think we can get him for next year?” they said.
“I don’t know. He’s pretty busy. I’ll have to talk to him.”
Of course, I told Stuart all about it, and he was able to make a pretty good deal. He wound up with two Emmys for his work on Rockford. Stu is also a talented director, and a fine singer! We’ve remained great friends down the years.
Joe Santos played Detective Dennis Becker. He’s a good cop and they have a good relationship, even though they use each other. Rockford gives Dennis a tip here and there, and in return Dennis keeps his superiors from pulling Rockford’s PI license. The top brass can’t stand Rockford because he makes them look bad by solving cases.
I just love Joe. He’s the kind of guy who lights up a set just by showing up. He’s so good and so professional, and he’s got so damn much enthusiasm that it’s always fun working with him. He’s a hell of an actor and one tough little dude. But mostly, what Joe is, is a pussycat.
Gretchen Corbett played Rockford’s lawyer and sometime love interest Beth Davenport. She was as smart and tough as she was beautiful.
Tom Selleck appeared in two episodes as an intrepid detective named Lance White. Lance is rich, he has all the advantages, and all the luck: clues appear for him as if by magic. Tom was so funny and so good in the role, I was positive he’d be a big star and I told him so. “Tom,” I said, “you’re a good actor and, looking the way you do, just keep doing what you’re doing and it’ll come sooner or later.” Sure enough, the next thing I knew, he was starring in Magnum, P.I.
Rita Moreno appeared in three Rockford episodes as a needy ex-hooker called Rita Capkovic and won an Emmy for it. I’ve known Rita a long time: we worked together in Marlowe, and she’d made a screen test with me at 20th Century-Fox years before. Rita is incredibly talented, one of the few performers to have won all the major show business awards: Oscar, E
mmy, Grammy, Tony, and Golden Globe.
We were also fortunate to have had Dennis Dugan as Richie Brockelman and Isaac Hayes as Gandolph Fitch in the cast, and week after week we had terrific guest stars like James Woods, Lauren Bacall, Jill Clayburgh, Ned Beatty, Rob Reiner, and Mariette Hartley.
Rockford’s Firebird was also a character in the show. I’ve been asked why he didn’t have a TransAm instead. Well, he would’ve liked one—it’s much sexier—but I didn’t think he could afford it. The Firebird was more of a blue-collar car, a stripped-down version of the TransAm, with a sticker price of about $3,000 for the 1970 model. And I thought it handled better than the TransAm.
We got a new car every season, actually three—two backups in case of breakdowns or damage—until the last two seasons, when we stayed with the ’78 model. The official color was Sierra Gold and the interior was Camel Tan. Standard equipment on the Firebird Esprit was a 400-cubic-inch, 6.6 liter V-8 engine, with dual exhausts and an automatic transmission. Which was fine for our purposes. The only modification we made was to stouten up the suspension to handle all the stunts.
I’ve heard different stories about the significance of the license plate number, 853 OKG. I think the OKG stands for “Oklahoma Garner,” but I don’t know about the 853.
Car chases and car action were a big part of the series, and I did most of the driving myself. That was my fun. I’d driven race cars a little in Grand Prix and gotten the bug. One maneuver became a kind of signature of the show. People thought I invented it and began calling it a “Rockford,” but it was really just a reverse 180, also known as a “moonshiner’s turn” or “J-turn.” When 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.