The Garner Files: A Memoir (24 page)

I
didn’t particularly want to be an actor, but by the time I reached my mid-twenties, I
really
didn’t want to be a roustabout. Watching movies in the Sooner Theatre in Norman as a boy, acting was the last thing I could imagine. But after a hundred odd jobs, I was looking for clean, well-paid work, and I’m glad I found acting, because it pays the best and it’s the most fun of all.

I was awful at first, stumbling around, hoping to get lucky. I didn’t care about acting, I just wanted to support my family. I’d gotten married to Lois and had an instant family. Our daughter Kim was just out of the hospital, weak with polio. I had to get serious. The responsibilities of life made me pay attention to what I was doing on the screen.

I’m a Methodist, but not as an actor. I’m from the Spencer Tracy school: be on time, know your words, hit your marks, and tell the truth. I don’t have any theories about acting and I don’t think about how to do it, except that an actor shouldn’t take himself too seriously, and shouldn’t try to make acting something it isn’t. Acting is just common sense. It isn’t hard if you put yourself aside and just do what the writer wrote.

I don’t have the background a lot of actors have. For one thing, I’ve
never taken acting lessons. That’s not true: in 1954, while playing a silent judge in
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial,
I briefly studied at the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York. When I say briefly, I mean one class. I couldn’t see the point. When Warner Bros. put me under contract, I took one or two classes with their drama coach, Blair Cutting. All I remember about the whole experience with Blair is if the wind was strong, his hair would blow off.

In those days people kept telling me I needed a “foundation” in the theory and technique of the great acting teachers. I wondered about it at first, but then realized that my foundation was the life experience I’d had by the time I was twenty-five. I’d been all over the world and seen a lot. I figured I knew at least as much as someone who’d been to acting school. Let’s face it: Anybody can be an actor. There are no qualifications. The only other profession like that is politics.

I learned my craft doing
Maverick
. Natalie Wood and I were both under contract to Warners at the time, and we worked together in
Cash McCall.
One day on the set, she said, “Jim, now that you’ve established yourself, you need to take some acting classes.”

“Why would I want to do that?” I said. “I’ve got the top show on television. If and when things start to go south, I’ll consider taking lessons, but until then I don’t want to mess with a good thing.”

I never thought acting was frivolous, though I thought some actors were. It’s a worthy vocation if practiced right. But I have to laugh when I hear actors talking about their
art
. Hey, it’s a
movie
. Just say the lines.

I could never teach anybody to act because I don’t have a clue myself. The class would last about thirty seconds, because I’d tell them to just be yourself. Put yourself in the situation the character is in. How would
you
react to it? That’s all I know.

I’m a very structured actor. I like to have the whole script in front of me before I shoot. I like it solid and I like to stick to it. (Some directors work without a script, but I don’t think they’re very good.) You can put the best actors and the best directors in the world out
there, but they’re nothing without the written word. The script is sacred. I don’t improvise, because the writers write better than I do. So my first instinct is to leave the script exactly like it is. Actors like to tinker because it’s easier that way. If they don’t understand it the way it’s written, they assume they know better than the writer. But the writer has a point of view that the actor does not. He’s looking at the whole picture, not just one character.

The late writer-producer Larry Gelbart once said it’s rare for a writer to find someone who wants to serve the material. “Not Gable,” he said, “who refused to go down with the submarine, because Gable doesn’t sink.” Well, I’ll sink. I’ll do whatever’s necessary to tell the story. That includes doing off-camera lines with fellow actors. It’s a courtesy to a colleague, but it’s also a service to the piece. You get better results from the actual person because it’s consistent: If I do a scene with
you
and then read lines in my close-ups to
him
off-camera, the audience is going to see a difference.

I don’t act—I
react
to what someone else does. Give me a “reactor” over an actor every time. A reactor is sensitive to what’s going on around him. If you don’t have something to react to, you’re just out there chewing the scenery.

If you listen carefully, you remember your words. You hear what the other actor is saying and you get
involved
. I try to listen to every word—even if it isn’t directed at me—and see the reaction to it. I try to stay with the dialogue and not anticipate it, to be in the action and react to it rather than just observe it. When you approach acting that way, you don’t learn lines, you learn
thoughts
. When I can’t remember a line, it’s usually because it doesn’t flow with the rest of the script.

You put on a face for the public. The face isn’t false; it’s just another side of you. If it were false, you couldn’t last. People want something real and natural, and if they catch you acting, you’re dead. It has to look real. In order to look real, it has to
be
real, and I’ve always thought of the characters I played as real people.

People think it’s easy for me to make it look easy. “That’s just good ole, easygoing Jim,” they say. Well, Lois can tell you I ain’t no “easygoing Jim.” People think I’m “playing myself.” Well, I’m not myself on the screen. I’m playing a character, but I try to put myself in his position. I work hard at not seeming to work too hard. I try to make the audience think it’s the first time I’m saying it. That’s not always easy, especially after the twelfth take. I’m basically a three-take actor. After that, it’s all downhill. (I get bored when I have to do a lot of takes. And if I have to do a lot of takes, you can bet it isn’t my fault.)

G
ene Hackman is my favorite actor, though I’ve never worked with him. Never even met the man. (We were in the same movie,
Twilight,
but didn’t have any scenes together.) I’d watch Gene do anything on the screen. I love the way he delivers his lines, the choices he makes. I also love Robert Duvall. He immerses himself in research for a role and then makes it look effortless. I don’t know if he considers himself a Method actor, but if he is, it works for him.

I’m the opposite. I don’t do much preparation for a part. I purposely don’t read the books of movies I might make, because I don’t want to be disappointed by what they might change or leave out. I don’t do research, and I’m not interested in delving into the character’s hidden facets. I don’t care about his “backstory” or what kind of toothpaste he uses. For me, too much analysis takes the fun out of acting.

W
hen we were making
36 Hours,
George Seaton told me a story about his friend, the British character actor Edmund Gwenn. You may remember him as Kris Kringle in the original
Miracle on 34th Street
. Seaton and Gwenn had a running argument about which was harder to do, comedy or drama. Seaton said drama; Gwenn insisted it was comedy. Well, Gwenn got sick, and when Seaton heard he wasn’t
going to last long, he went to say good-bye. He found Gwenn in a hospital ward. After some small talk, Seaton said, “Dying must be hard.”

“Dying is easy,” Gwenn said. “
Comedy
is hard.”

That’s right. You can create drama with lighting, with scenery, with music. You can heighten it with editing. But you can ruin comedy with those things. You can’t fake humor. It had better be funny or you’re dead.

I draw a line between comedy and humor. Comedy is slapstick— slipping on a banana peel and all that stuff. Humor is more subtle. Humor is cerebral and pure. It lasts. Either the joke is there or it isn’t, and if something isn’t funny, you ain’t gonna make it so by falling down.

I do humor, not comedy. If I’m funny at all, I try to be
slow
funny. I tend to look at everything from the side, and I’m more interested in character than flash, because flash hits quick and leaves quick. It takes a little longer to know a character, but character builds and builds, and it’s funnier.

You can do comedy alone, but you can’t do humor without a good partner. You have to have somebody to bounce off of. To play humor you need a “sense of humor,” which means you have to know what’s funny and what isn’t. And you have to have comic timing. You can’t learn that; you have to be born with it.

Robert Montgomery was a wonderful comic actor, but he didn’t get much credit because he made it look easy. You never saw him acting. The actors who get the credit are the ones you do see acting.

I
like a happy set, and I think it shows in the finished product. I like to laugh. But I also like to work. I enjoy going to the set every day with my fellow actors and the crew and the director. But I don’t take it home with me. When they yell, “Wrap!” I don’t think any more about it. I don’t even worry whether it’ll be a success or a failure,
because I know I’ve done my best and have no control over how it’ll be received. But I can’t wait to get back to work the next day.

When young actors want advice, I ask them: “Do you really, truly,
have
to be an actor?”

“Yes, I
have
to!”

“Okay, tell you what you do: Get a decent job. Make sure you have as much financial security as you can. Then go to your little theater and act your heart out. Forget about trying to make a living as an actor, because the odds are way against you.”

It’s a tough business. There’s no security. Last I heard there were twenty thousand members in the Screen Actors Guild in Los Angeles. Of those, only about a thousand make a living. That means, year after year, nineteen actors out of twenty have to work a day job to survive. If you want to be an actor, don’t do it for the money.

A lot of film actors go back to the theater periodically to “sharpen the saw.” They say they miss it. I don’t, because I’ve always been frightened of live audiences. When I was in
Caine Mutiny Court Martial
and
John Loves Mary,
the only two stage plays I’ve ever done, I had to pretend there was no back door in the theater or I would have used it. To this day, I’d be a wreck if I had to work in front of a crowd.

I was always nervous at the start of a picture, and often before shooting a
Maverick
or a
Rockford
episode. I’d get flustered doing TV interviews: I have a bad memory for names and it embarrasses me when I’ve just worked with a great director and I can’t think of his name. I’d go on talk shows to plug something, but I didn’t like it.

I never enjoyed working on the stage the way some actors do. There were never any plays I wanted to do. Some actors want to do Shakespeare. I don’t give a damn about Shakespeare. (He never calls.) The same thing night after night gets old, and applause doesn’t turn me on. Never had that particular addiction. Some actors are devoted to The Theatah, but I couldn’t care less. Maybe that’s why I don’t bother with acting superstitions. Stage actors say, “Break a leg” and all that stuff. They call
Macbeth
“the Scottish Play” because they’re
afraid to say the name. Doesn’t concern me. I say, “Good luck” to fellow actors all the time.

I
promised myself in Paul Gregory’s office in 1953 that I’d give acting five years to see if I liked it and could make a living at it. My goal was to keep working. After five years I was starring in
Maverick,
so I thought
Okay, I’ll go for another five.
After that, I went for another five, then another. It wasn’t until my fiftieth birthday that I believed I could last in the business.

Throughout my career, I’ve gone back and forth between television and movies. I started in TV in the 1950s, did movies in the ’60s, went back to television in the ’70s, and did both from then on. Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, and I were the first to make the leap from TV to movies, but it was unusual. Television was a second-class medium for a long time. When we started, being on television carried a stigma. There was a pecking order: stage actors were next to God, film actors were right up there with the angels, TV actors were beneath them, and commercial acting was the dregs. If you were a television actor, you weren’t allowed to do movies; if you were a movie actor, you didn’t dare do television, and if you were a stage actor and you did a movie, they said you had “sold out.” In the old days, a movie actor got more respect in the industry than a television actor. Today if you have a hit on TV, you get just as much respect, maybe because there’s so much competition on television. The biggest stars can do an HBO movie or even a TV series and not lose their clout. Theater, movies, television, even commercials—it’s all the same. We’re actors.

Well, not completely. There are some differences. I always felt movies were easier. The pace was slower and the pay was better. Television was more demanding, both mentally and physically. The budgets for movies were bigger and you had more time to shoot them. That’s why the product was usually better. That’s changed.
Now the big movies are all action and special effects. The better stories are on television. In movies, the director has final cut; in television, it’s the producer. It’s hard to be a television director. You never have the time or the money to do what you want.

Acting for television, you don’t have to project yourself like you do in a movie because the TV camera is looking right down your throat. It does your projecting for you. There’s a difference in the way the public treats you because TV is a personal medium. When I was doing
Maverick,
I was part of the family. I’d been in their living room like an old piece of furniture. If I ate in a restaurant, people would invite me to sit at their table: “Hey, Jimbo, come meet the wife and kids!” Would they say that to Cary Grant? (After I’d been doing
Maverick
for a couple of years, I was at the Beverly Hilton for some big function. Cary Grant came over, introduced himself, and told me how much he liked my work. I was so flabbergasted, all I could manage was something dumb like, “I like
your
work, too.”)