The Garner Files: A Memoir (28 page)

But we weren’t proselytizing, we were just trying to tell a story that hadn’t been widely known about how AA got started. Members of AA couldn’t break the tradition of anonymity, but
we
could. Nor could AA endorse the film; however, individual members let us know they were pleased that we told their story in a sensitive and effective way.

Lois Wilson gave her blessing to the project before she died in 1988 at the age of ninety-seven. Lois had been a loving and loyal wife, but she couldn’t save Bill. He had to save himself, with the help of another drunk. Confronted with a different husband when Bill got sober, Lois founded Al-Anon, a self-help organization for the families of alcoholics. In 2010, she was the subject of another Borchert/Hallmark movie,
When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story
.

J
immy and I were temperamentally suited for our respective roles. Like Bill Wilson, Jimmy is hyperactive, fast-talking, and driven, while I’m more of a plodder, like Dr. Bob. While Bill W. was the go-getter, the front man, Dr. Bob was the anchor, the one who insisted on keeping everything simple and anonymous. (Bob once persuaded Bill to turn down the cover of
Time
magazine.)

Jimmy carries the film on his shoulders. My part isn’t very meaty. It’s really just a cameo. It was the first part I’d done since heart surgery and I was still shaky. I told Jimmy, “I don’t think I can make it.” He assured me I could, and he was right, but I couldn’t have handled much more at the time.

Jimmy had researched the part of Bill W. by going to AA meetings and talking to recovering alcoholics. He’d never had a problem with alcohol, but I had. I started drinking as a teenager and I was a nasty drunk. Under the influence of alcohol, I couldn’t control my temper. Somebody would say something and I’d deck ’im. I drank beer, whiskey, vodka—anything they put in front of me. I drank to get plastered. Did I have a “drinking problem”? No, I didn’t have a problem at all. I just went right ahead and drank.

Oklahoma was a “dry” state in those days, but there were plenty of bootleggers around Norman. Mark Fisher was the king of them. He started in the 1930s, when the only legal drink in the state was 3.2 beer, and he stayed in business until liquor by the drink became legal in 1984.

The South Canadian River separates Cleveland County from McClain County to the west. The riverbed is probably a mile and a half across, but the stream of water is only fifty yards wide, so there are trees, bushes, and sand dunes in the flatland called the “river breaks.” That’s where Fisher had his shack, an area that everyone thought of as a no-man’s-land belonging to neither county. I guess that’s why the law left Fisher alone. Or maybe he was paying somebody off.

Mark sold to drinkers from both sides of the river, including college kids from OU and us high school kids, no driver’s license required. There was easy access down to the river, but you had to know how to find Mark’s shack. We were scared to go in. You never knew who might be sitting inside with a shotgun on his lap. It was always after dark, and we had to get up the nerve to walk up to the door and shout, “Whatcha got tonight?”

You could get “Green Label” bourbons like Jim Beam or Jack Daniel’s for about fifteen dollars a pint, but we bought “Red Label” blended whiskey like Four Roses or Three Feathers at ten bucks a pint, mixed it with Coca-Cola and poured it down till we threw up.

I was a binge drinker until sometime in my early thirties, when I realized that I didn’t like the way alcohol made me feel or behave. It also occurred to me that the liquor industry could produce more bottles of the stuff than I could down. I said to myself, “Something awful is gonna happen if you keep doing this. You’ll end up killing somebody.”

So I quit. Just like that. I’ve been a light drinker ever since—very little beer or liquor, but I did learn to enjoy a glass of wine with dinner and built up a pretty decent wine cellar. At one point, Lois and I even had a small vineyard that produced wines under the private labels White Rhino and Chateau Jimbeaux.

My father was a full-time drinker, and I think I really quit booze because I didn’t want to follow him. He’d go on epic binges. In the early 1920s, he was in a group of men in Norman who fancied
themselves cowboys. They rode horses and wore cowboy boots and hats. They had a “roping club” on the edge of town where they’d all get together and rope calves. The wives knew it was just an excuse to get together and drink moonshine. My dad was a different person when he was drinking. For most of his life, booze brought a lot of misery on him and on the people around him.

M
y real addiction was to nicotine. I smoked my first cigarette when I was eight. It was a Chesterfield, because that’s what my dad smoked. Later I switched brands: in my seventh-grade class picture, I’m standing behind a girl, holding a pack of Lucky Strikes next to her shoulder. (My first endorsement.) Though I was partial to Luckies, I’d smoke any brand I could bum. I loved to smoke. When I started we didn’t know what we do now about the medical effects, but we knew it wasn’t right.

I didn’t care.

When I started doing
The Rockford Files,
in 1974, I smoked on camera whenever I felt like it. After a while, I realized it was a bad example, so Jim Rockford quit. But I didn’t. I used the standard excuse, “I don’t want to gain weight,” plus an original one: “I’m not gonna let C. Everett Koop tell
me
what to do!” I was a hard case. I kept smoking even after heart surgery in 1988. I finally quit in 2005, with more than sixty “pack years” under my belt.

I started smoking marijuana in my late teens. I drank to get drunk but ultimately didn’t like the effect. Not so with grass. Grass is smooth. It had the opposite effect from alcohol: it made me more tolerant and forgiving.

I did a little bit of cocaine in the 1980s, courtesy of John Belushi (we’d met through a mutual friend and hit it off right away), but fortunately I didn’t like it. I discovered that it never got better after the first time you did it.

I smoked marijuana for fifty years. I don’t know where I’d be
without it. It opened my mind to a lot of things, and now its active ingredient, THC, relaxes me and eases my arthritis pain. After decades of personal research and observation, I’ve concluded that marijuana should be legal and alcohol should be illegal. But good luck with
that
.

T
he reaction to
My Name Is Bill W.
was almost all positive. People in AA were happy with it. As far as I recall, we got nothing but praise from that community, including the people on the set who were in the program. Of all the things I’ve ever done as an actor or producer, I think
My Name Is Bill W.
has had the greatest impact. It was certainly one of the most gratifying experiences I’ve ever had as a professional. People came up to me and said, “I got sober because of your movie” or, “My husband joined AA because of your movie.” You need only one of those to make it all worthwhile.

When Jimmy Woods and I were on the
Donahue
show promoting
My Name Is Bill W.,
a guy called and said, “I’m a drunk. I’m drinking right now and I’m alone. I have a gun and I’m going to use it on myself.” Jimmy twelve-stepped him right on the air: “You know, you really want to think about what you’re going to do,” Jimmy said. “If you could push a button and make it okay, would you do it?” The man said yes. “Well,” Jimmy said, “AA is the button. Just give it a try, then do whatever you want.” The man hung up. We were told that a few months later he called
Donahue
back and said he was in recovery.

M
urphy’s Romance
is one of my favorites, as much for the people I worked with as the film itself. It was easy to do. Everything went smoothly on the set and everybody liked each other. It was a pleasure to go to work every day.

Martin Ritt was a wonderful man and a fine director. He made movies that said something. I’d known Marty for a long time—we played softball in the park together, and my daughter Gigi and his daughter Tina were school friends. I’d always admired his films but hadn’t worked with him, so when
Murphy’s Romance
came along, I jumped at it.

Like me, Marty had grown up during the Depression. He came out of the WPA and the Group Theater in New York to become a successful television director, and he went on to direct such movies as
Hud, The Great White Hope, Sounder, Conrack,
and
Norma Rae,
to name a few of his two dozen features.

The studio wanted Marlon Brando for the part of Murphy Jones. Marty and Sally Field loved Marlon, but they thought he just wasn’t right for it. The studio was adamant, but Sally and Marty went to bat for me.

Sally told them, “If
Garner
doesn’t do the picture,
I
don’t do the picture.”

Sally is a wonderful girl and we got along great. It’s a cliché, but we had great chemistry on the screen.

I
could certainly identify with my character, Murphy Jones, a kindly but slightly eccentric small-town druggist who befriends Sally’s character, Emma Moriarty, a confused divorcée come to town with her young son to start a horse ranch. Murphy is the kind of liberal who puts a “No Nukes” sticker on his antique Studebaker and battles city hall to replace the parking meter in front of his store with a tree.

We shot the picture in and around Mesa, Arizona. I have fond memories of that area: for one thing,
best tamales I’ve ever eaten
. The mother of the assistant pro at the local golf course made them.
God,
they were good. When I left town she made two dozen and we put them in the freezer. Plus I shot my all-time best round there, a 65.

Murphy’s drugstore was actually in nearby Florence, Arizona, and all we needed to do was dress it up a little. But we had to build Sally’s ranch from the ground up. It was on land next to a state prison and we’d see chain gangs on our way to and from the set.

M
arty Ritt is all about substance over flash. His films reflect his strong social conscience. He was one of Hollywood’s most prolific and successful directors, despite having been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. He was easygoing and supportive of everyone on the set and was especially encouraging to writers and actors. I considered him a dear friend and colleague. (A few years after
Murphy’s Romance,
when it was announced that Marty would be doing
Nuts
with Barbra Streisand, I knew his heart wasn’t good, so I called him and said, “Don’t do it Marty. She’ll fucking kill you.” Afterward, Marty told me she damn near did.)

M
urphy’s Romance
is honest and low-key, with straightforward cinematography and a quietly brilliant script by the husband-wife team of Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch, who’d worked with Marty on
Hud
and
Norma Rae.
There’s a scene in the picture that exemplifies their talent, “the hat bit,” in which Murphy explains the significance of the different ways of wearing a cowboy hat:

MURPHY:
It doesn’t matter how you bend it, it’s how you wear it. You wear it back on your head like that, well, that means you like people, your digestion works, and you’ve got all day. If you wear it tipped over on the side, like that, it means you’re a rooster and you’re looking for a young lady or a fight, whichever comes first. But if you wear it square on your head and low down on your forehead, well, that means get off the sidewalk and clear a path because you’re cocked and ready to fire!

I asked the Ravetches, “How’d you guys
know
that?” They said, “We just did, that’s all.”

And I think the last scene in the picture is one of the great love scenes ever:

EMMA:
Good evening, Murphy.

MURPHY:
Good evening.

EMMA:
It’s gonna be a lovely night, isn’t it?

MURPHY:
Yes it is.

EMMA:
Did you have a nice ride?

MURPHY:
Yes I did. It’s gonna be a handsome moon tonight.

EMMA:
Think it’s gonna rain?

MURPHY:
Nah, it’s dry this time of year.

EMMA:
Are we talking about the weather?

MURPHY:
You are.

EMMA:
That’s not what I want to talk about.

MURPHY:
Take a different tack, Emma.

EMMA:
I don’t know what tack to take.

MURPHY:
I’ll help you. Separate the men from the boys, Emma. I show some wear, I don’t deny it. But fruit hangs on a tree long enough, it gets ripe. I’m durable. I’m steady. I’m faithful. And I’m in love, for the last time in my life.

EMMA:
I’m in love for the first time in my life.

MURPHY:
So?

EMMA:
So! Stay to supper, Murphy?

MURPHY:
I won’t do that unless I’m still here at breakfast.

EMMA:
How do you like your eggs?