by James Garner
People have no idea how physically punishing it is to do an action series. You’re producing twenty-two one-hour movies every year. You’re on the set fifteen hours a day with no time to do anything else but get a few hours sleep before you have to start all over again. Wore me down to a nub!
You show me a leading man who’s done a drama series for more than two or three years and I’ll show you somebody who’s beat to a pulp. Our legs are gone, our backs are gone, and generally our brains are gone, too. (I just barely managed to hang on to mine.)
David Janssen and I grew up in the business together. I saw what the demands of doing a television series did to him. He had three or four knee operations, and while he was making The Fugitive, he’d call and say, “I don’t know if I’m going to make it.” David drank too much—not because he was an alcoholic, but because of the pressures of being on the screen for an hour every week. He died in 1980 at the age of forty-eight. The work killed him.
For the last ten years of Gunsmoke, Jim Arness just phoned it in. Everyone else carried the show. He’d come in one day a week and they’d give him his script and tell him what to do. He had terrible arthritis and couldn’t work any more than that. If he had a normal job, he’d have been on disability. David Soul had to go into the hospital after two years on Starsky & Hutch. It’s just pure overwork. Nobody talked about it, because they didn’t want to tarnish their tough-guy image.
I limped through every episode of The Rockford Files. I had a double, but only for long shots. The stunt guys used knee pads but I couldn’t—they’d show. I needed muscle relaxants and painkillers to get me through a day’s filming. I took Robaxin, Percodan, and codeine on a regular basis.
I got beat up a minimum of twice per show. I don’t know why, but viewers loved to see me get whipped. Maybe they knew I’d get even later on. In staged fights, the big danger is slipping and hitting something. I hit a dolly once and broke a piece off my spine. Otherwise, I’ve been lucky doing fight scenes: I’ve never been accidentally hit with a punch.
But I have been hit on purpose: there was an actor in Maverick, a burly guy named Leo Gordon, who played Big Mike McComb. Leo was a genuine tough guy who had served time in San Quentin for armed robbery. Everybody in the crew was afraid of Leo because he was a scary guy. In one fight scene, he nailed me right in the gut. I looked at him like, “Huh? What was that?” He just grinned and kept doing it. Well, the fight turned around and I got to beat on him a little, and I buried my fist right down to the spine. He looked at me like, “HUH, what was THAT?” We got along fine from then on. We understood each other. (Hey, if you give it, you’ve gotta be able to take it, right?) Leo did three or four Rockford s, and he was also in the Maverick movie, and we never had a problem.
In the six years I did Rockford, I had seven knee operations. Every hiatus, I had one or both of them operated on, but I didn’t have enough time to recover, so I’d be back working on them and they’d give out again. When I was in the hospital for one of the operations, Burt Lancaster was in the next room having a prosthetic knee put in. He raved about it. Said it worked fine and there was no pain. That’s what it was like in those days; we were constantly comparing notes on doctors and procedures. I remember Joe Namath calling to tell me he’d found a great new orthopedic guy.
I finally had both knees replaced. They didn’t give me any trouble after that, but they were stiff. If only I could’ve had my feet and my back replaced.
In the first year, after I’d done five or six Rockford s, I asked Steve Cannell, “Could you please write for somebody else? I’m in every shot!”
Steve said, “Jim, just give us eight shows where you’re prominent and then we’ll back off.”
Every year after that I said the same thing: “Guys, can you please write something for somebody else?”
Never happened.
My contract with Universal was for six years, but Universal had only a five-year contract with NBC. After the fifth year I was in such bad shape I asked Fred Silverman, NBC’s head of programming, not to pick up Rockford for a sixth season. But he didn’t want to let Rockford go. I didn’t blame him; he had a winner and they needed to fill the hour. I’d have done the same thing in his shoes.
One day on the set in October 1979, I suddenly doubled over with stomach pains and I was bleeding rectally. The studio doctor diagnosed ulcers. I went down to the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla and they told me I had to stop working. I took their advice, because I was literally sick and tired. I was a plow horse who’d pulled the plow too long.
By the time I was anywhere near able to go back to work, we’d missed our air dates and NBC had canceled The Rockford Files with ten episodes of the sixth season still unfinished. They claimed I was malingering.
On January 16, 1980, at about six p.m., I was driving my 1979 TransAm north on Coldwater Canyon Drive, a steep, winding road that connects Beverly Hills with the San Fernando Valley. The rush-hour traffic was down to a crawl when I noticed an El Camino in my rearview mirror passing cars on the right shoulder. I sped up a little and moved over to let the guy back into line behind me, but instead he tried to pass me on the right and he hit my right rear fender. I put my turn signal on and began to pull over to check the damage, but the El Camino tried to pass me on the left. I thought he was trying to get away without exchanging insurance information, so I swerved to the middle of the lane, stopped in front of him, and turned off the ignition. Just as I was about to open the door I heard, “YOU MOTHERFUCKER!”
That’s when I got clobbered. This character was punching me through the open window! I couldn’t get out from behind the wheel because he’d grabbed hold of the gold chain around my neck and kept flailing away, and I didn’t have room to throw a punch. All I could do was reach up and grab him by the throat. At that point a woman—his sister, it turned out—opened the passenger door, reached in, grabbed my keys, and said, “Let’s go, Aubrey, I’ve got his keys.” I guess she thought they’d throw my keys away and take off, leaving me bleeding at the wheel.
Didn’t happen, because I wouldn’t let go of that sucker. While he was still hitting me, I pulled him so close to the car that his chin was pinned against the roof. But he kept punching! And he was doing some damage. At that point, I was holding him with both hands and he had me with his left and was punching with his right. I finally managed to lean back and kick him in the chest hard enough to push him away.
I opened the door and swung my feet onto the pavement. As soon as I stood up, I caught one flush in the mouth. I threw a punch and missed, and then I grabbed him. I held on, we stumbled clear across the highway, tripped over a curb, and I landed on top of him.
The next thing I know I’m lying facedown and he’s kicking me in the head. I couldn’t believe he got up so fast. He kicked me up one side of my body and down the other. It suddenly dawned on me that he was trying to kill me and that he might succeed, so I yelled, “Someone get this son of a bitch off me!”
There were lots of bystanders, but nobody wanted any part of this guy, and I don’t blame them because he was out of control. But I don’t think I would have stood by and watched someone take a beating like that.
When nobody came to my aid, I figured I’d better play dead, so the next time he kicked me in the head I sort of shuddered and went limp. That’s when he hauled off and kicked me like you never saw! He was wearing pointy Italian shoes and he nailed me right behind the ear. He tried to kick me in the cojones but got my tailbone instead and fractured it. Then he kicked me again, and I heard the sister yell, “C’mon, Aubrey, let’s get out of here.”
They started to leave, but I figured anybody who could hit and kick me so many times without killing me wasn’t that tough. If he’d had any punch at all, he’d have knocked me out halfway through the first round. So I got up and went after him.
I couldn’t see very well, but I made it to the passenger side of his car. I reached in to grab his sister’s hair, thinking I’d hold on to it even if he started to dr
ive away. But one of the bystanders—Lew Wasserman’s chauffeur, as it happened—grabbed me from behind and Aubrey and his sister took off.
I spent three days in the hospital. In addition to the cracked tailbone, I had a concussion and assorted abrasions, lacerations, and bruises. Considering the number of free shots that sucker had at me, I was in a lot better shape than I had any right to be.
They charged Aubrey Lee Williams Jr., a thirty-five-year-old ex– Green Beret, with assault with a deadly weapon, the weapon being his shoes. The prosecution called three or four witnesses who all told the same story. They could have called fifteen more. The jury convicted Williams of felonious assault, and the judge sentenced him to one hundred days in jail, a $500 fine, and three years’ probation.
I’d never taken a beating like that, and it was hard to swallow. But the worst part of the whole deal was when his attorney called me a liar on television. A reporter asked him if there were “discrepancies” in my story, and the lawyer said, “Garner isn’t telling the truth.” The best part was the outpouring of love and support. I got thousands of cards and letters from all over the world, and flowers from people in show business I’d never even met.
But the warm glow didn’t last long: while I was still in the hospital, MCA/Universal filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against me for failing to complete the Rockford season.
I became an actor by accident, but I’m a businessman by design. My company, Cherokee Productions, produced The Rockford Files. I took less money up front in return for a 37.5 percent share of the profits. I was personally paid about $30,000 per episode, which was and still is a lot of money, but it could have been several times that. But I figured once Rockford went into syndication, the profit sharing would be my real reward, an annuity for my old age.
Early in 1979, someone at Universal mistakenly sent me an accounting sheet showing that The Rockford Files had lost $9.5 million in its first five years on the air. It shocked me. I thought we were doing well.
It’s demoralizing to break your neck bringing a show in on budget and on schedule only to find you’ve been wasting your time and effort because they’ve been bookkeeping you to death.
Lew Wasserman was known as “the King of Hollywood” for good reason. As head of MCA/Universal, he was both feared and admired. As an agent with MCA, Wasserman had made groundbreaking deals for his clients. He incorporated Jack Benny and sold the entity to a radio network so Benny paid less than half the taxes he would have as a salaried employee. Wasserman somehow got Warner Bros. to pay a B actor named Ronald Reagan a million dollars a year in the 1940s. Reagan returned the favor when, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, he secured favorable treatment from the Guild for MCA. In the 1950s, Wasserman got Jimmy Stewart a percentage of the gross for Winchester ’73 and made him rich. Before that even the biggest stars got only a percentage of the elusive net, not “points” off the top.
Wasserman’s hard bargains for his clients had helped bring down the studio system. As head of Universal, he created the thing that replaced it, a diversified entertainment company with tentacles in all areas of the business.
Wasserman was smarter and tougher than the original Hollywood moguls and he had more power. Say what you want about Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and Harry Cohn, they were moviemakers first and businessmen second. Wasserman never much cared for movies and never pretended otherwise. He was fixated on the bottom line. He shunned publicity (other than for his art collection) and stayed in the background while cultivating connections with big labor unions, elected officials, and underworld bosses.
MCA bought the failing Universal Pictures and turned it into the industry’s biggest supplier of television programs. Universal independently produced television and radio series, pioneered made-for-TV movies, and bought the Paramount film library and rented the movies out to TV stations. In 1975, Universal invented the summer blockbuster by releasing Jaws in hundreds of theaters across the US while saturating the TV airwaves with commercials.
Wasserman sold Universal to Matsushita Electric in 1990 for $6.6 billion and walked away with $300 million for himself.
In the summer of ’79, Bill Saxon and I were in Thailand playing golf. When it came time to leave, we wanted to buy gifts for our girls—we both have two daughters—and we heard about a department store in downtown Bangkok where they sold a special pin made from an orchid dipped in gold, and we asked our driver to take us there. We’d no sooner entered the store when someone shouted, “Rockford! Rockford!” Before we knew it, we were swamped by people wanting autographs and trying to touch me or tear off a piece of my clothing. It took a police escort to get us out of there. When we were safely back in the car, I said to Billy Dee, “And Universal tells me that Rockford hasn’t paid out yet! If people in Thailand know me, how can the show be doing so poorly?”
Of course, Rockford wasn’t doing poorly; it was earning millions of dollars in syndication. It was playing all over the world, morning, noon, and night, dubbed or subtitled in dozens of languages. The Rockford Files was one of the most successful television series ever, yet I wasn’t getting a dime.
I can’t stand big people hurting little people. Especially me. So I sued Universal for breach of contract and fraud for withholding my rightful share of the profits. I’d decided I wasn’t going to put any more paintings on Lew Wasserman’s wall.
As soon as the legal papers were filed, I began hearing the same things I’d heard when I sued Warner Bros. twenty years before: “You’ll never beat them,” “They’ll draw out the litigation until you’re bankrupt,” and, of course, “You’ll never work in this town again.”
Lew Wasserman and Universal didn’t invent “creative accounting,” they just made it a science. Creative accounting is too polite a term for what Universal was doing, it was flat-out larceny. They systematically inflated the expenses to reduce—to wipe out—the net profit. They had all kinds of tricks. They double-dipped and triple-charged, they tacked on expenses unrelated to the actual production. It was a shell game with the net as the shell, a clever, intricate way of stealing money.
In one Rockford episode, we drove a car into a lake. Universal charged us full price for the car, and we had to repair it before we returned it to them. In another episode, there was a crash, and we had to buy the same damn car from them . . . and repair it again.
If the Universal set department bought something for us for $100, the studio arbitrarily multiplied it by 3.3, so it cost $330. After we used the item, they charged us another third of the stepped-up cost to take it away. Now we were at about $450. The studio added another third for its “generic account.” To this day, I don’t know what that means, but now we’re up to $600. Then they tacked on another 20 percent for “overhead.” In the end, a $100 item was charged to the series at over $700.
Universal also charged us a $50,000 “distribution fee” for each Rockford episode. We discovered that “distribution” consisted of having two Teamsters drive the film from Universal in North Hollywood to NBC in Burbank, a distance of five miles. Fifty thousand dollars per episode amounted to more than $6 million over the life of the series. Universal also charged us interest on the pretext that they could have taken the money spent on production and invested it in certificates of deposit.
Universal tried to tell us that despite taking in $120 million in revenues from syndication and foreign sales, the show had earned less than $1 million in profits. And it wasn’t an isolated case. I didn’t know it then, but that was standard operating procedure for Universal. It had been happening to an awful lot of actors, writers, and producers for a long time, prompting Steve Cannell to joke that Universal’s definition of “net profit” was that “everyone in the universe gets something before you do.” In those days, the studios would rather steal than do it right. They might have made even more money if they’d played it straight, but it wasn’t in their nature.
If you had the nerve to complain, they pretended not to know what you were talking
about. If you persisted, they shrugged their shoulders and told you to sue them. Few people did—it was too expensive. And if anybody had the money to hire a battery of lawyers and the guts to risk his career, Universal would drag out the litigation for years. It was like being in business with the Mafia, only Universal didn’t need a gun, just a pencil.
Well, I had the money in the bank—over $5 million. I’d put it there just in case, and I didn’t care about hurting my career. I was in it for the duration.
In December 1988, after seven years of filings and depositions, Universal sent me a check for $607,000. It was an insult. A few months later, they offered $6 million. I declined. We’d found out something Universal didn’t want us to know.
Universal’s salesmen went to TV stations and pitched reruns of popular series, those that had attained the magic number of one hundred episodes. My lawyers discovered that Universal was syndicating The Rockford Files as part of a package. Station managers were told they could have Rockford cheap, but only if they’d also take the less popular Quincy. Universal would bill Quincy at twice the rate of Rockford. In other words, on paper, Rockford earned only a fraction of the income it should have commanded, cheating me out of millions of dollars in profits.
When we confronted Universal with this knowledge, they immediately offered to settle out of court if we would seal the record. They didn’t want this practice revealed, and they certainly didn’t want to open their books.
On the day we were scheduled for trial, Universal offered me a huge settlement. I didn’t want to take it. I wanted to tell my side of the story to a jury. And I wanted to expose Universal’s bookkeeping tricks.
My lawyer warned me that we’d be rolling the dice. “Anything can happen in a trial,” he said. “You could wind up with nothing, and you’ll be out millions in legal fees.”