The Garner Files: A Memoir (19 page)

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, Emmy, 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.

P
eople 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.

I
n 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.

O
n 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 drive 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.