The Garner Files: A Memoir (32 page)

Roy was also unusual in his choice of working hours. He often arrived at the studio at five or six in the evening (when most shows wrapped up production for the day) and worked well into the early-morning hours. As a result, an actor working on a Huggins-produced show was not likely to see him on a daily basis. So as well as he knew Jim—and came to understand him throughout their long association together—if Roy were alive today, I believe he would cite his modus operandi as a producer as one factor that would’ve prevented him from becoming part of Jim’s extended family.

I respect and admire both men. Whatever personal differences kept them apart, their professional collaborations changed the face of television in two genres. Along the way, they each left their own distinctive mark, for which we should all be grateful.

—ED ROBERTSON, author of
Maverick: Legend of the West
and
Thirty Years of The Rockford Files

I
worked with Jim on
Rockford
for six years and he never changed a line. He did the lines exactly as written. And not only that, if we had a guest star on the set who was bending the dialogue or doing approximations of the lines, Jim would listen to it in the camera rehearsal and then he would go over to that actor and in the nicest way he’d say, “You know, I think we have the best writers in
Hollywood working on this show, and I never change a line, and it would certainly mean a lot to me if you didn’t either.” So he was down there protecting the words.

I remember once, in the fourth year, David Chase, who as you know is the creator of
The Sopranos
and is one of the best writers I know . . . David was one of the producers on
The
Rockford Files
for four of the five years, and in the fourth year, we got a call that Jim was having trouble with one of the lines in a script that David had written. Jim was always good with his dialogue and hated to be the guy holding up the company because he couldn’t remember a line. Occasionally he would have a line he couldn’t remember, and it would just drive him nuts, and apparently, this line was completely baffling him and he couldn’t get it out. And one of the things about David is that he writes soliloquy-type speeches—they’re this long on the page—and that was part of the problem. And so I get a call from an assistant director who says, “You’d better get down here, he’s throwing furniture, he’s so upset.” So I grab David and we’re walking down to Stage 12 or wherever it was and I’m saying, “Well, you know, this is the exception that proves the rule: here we are five and a half years into this show and never rewritten a line for this guy and here’s the one time that it’s going to happen.”

And David’s kind of upset because he liked the line. Well, we get down to the set and the red light’s turning on the door and we have to wait until it shuts off and we walk into the soundstage and you can hear Jim screaming. He’d blown the line again. David’s kind of standing in the background—he’s like a little miffed because we’d never changed any of our dialogue.

I walk over to Jim and I go, “Hey, I’m down here with David and we can break this line up and throw one of the lines to Pidge [Noah Beery Jr.] and it’ll take us five minutes.”

Jim looked at me and he said, “Change this line? Steve, this is a
great
line. I just can’t remember the goddam thing!”

So we never changed it. And we were perfect: never changed a line on the show.

—STEPHEN J. CANNELL

I
was thirty years old.
The Rockford Files
was looking for a new producer, and this was going to be my big chance. The show had been on the air for two years and I was not a watcher of it, so they sent me to a screening room to see a couple of episodes. I’d never produced— I was a story editor—and I think I watched three in a row and got the feeling that
Rockford
was the only show I’d ever seen that didn’t exist just in its own time slot. It was in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles is a real place and these are real people. I’d never felt that way about anything else I’d seen. I think that has changed since, but at the time, there was something generic about television. Place didn’t matter. But
The Rockford Files
was very much about the place where it was set. And the people.

Jim taught me that good acting involves listening. When you have to do fifteen takes of the same scene, by the second or third take, an actor has heard what the other person is saying so it no longer registers. He’s only thinking about getting his line out. Jim is really good at listening and making it fresh every time. He told me that was because his first job was as one of the jurors in
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial
on Broadway. He had no lines, so he had to sit there for three hours trying to stay awake. The only way to make it work for him was to listen like it was brand new. That’s easier said than done. It’s not real when you’ve already heard it a million times.

I also learned about camera. I began to understand how film translates words into images. There was something about the way Jim worked that made me see that very clearly, maybe because there was no nonsense on the set. It was all about the work, and the work stood there very clear for you to see, without the Sturm und Drang. On Jim’s set, everyone was treated with kindness and respect. There
was no bullshit, no Hollywood slithering going on. Compared to the experiences I’d had before, working on
Rockford
was an upgrade to first class.

Every Christmas Jim gave each of the writers their scripts bound in beautiful red leather with gold lettering on the cover. We’d have a party at a Mexican restaurant near the Burbank Studio. We’d be sitting there dipping chips in guacamole and drinking beer and I’d suddenly think:
What am I doing here? What am I doing here with
James Garner
? With
Maverick
! How did this
happen
?

—DAVID CHASE

W
hen
The Rockford Files
debuted back in 1974, we were living in Michigan. I was the series’s biggest fan. It became sort of a religious experience, and friends knew not to call me on Friday night between nine and ten because I wouldn’t pick up the phone.

When we moved to Southern California in ’78, one of the first things I did was try to find Jim Rockford’s trailer. I knew it was at a place called Paradise Cove in Malibu, so I jumped in the car and headed for the beach. I was cruising up the Pacific Coast Highway when I saw two semi trucks with “Rockford Files/NBC” on the side. I couldn’t believe it!

I parked near the trucks and got out of the car. The first person I ran into was Luis Delgado. I told him I was a huge fan of the show and asked if Mr. Garner was there and he said, “Yeah, he’s here, do you want to meet him?” Just like that! I could have been
anybody
! (I
was,
actually.) Luis took me over to a motor home, opened the door, and there was Jim, sitting in a chair. Luis said, “This young man would like to meet you,” and Jim said, “Come in, son.” Jim always makes everybody feel welcome.

—ROB HOWE

G
arner says he’s easygoing, but he’s lying. He’s angry and desperate, just like I am. That’s why
Rockford
has always worked so well, because Jim is coming from a very passionate, driven place.

—JOE SANTOS

T
he relationship between Jim Rockford and Beth Davenport was never explicit, just implicit. On purpose.

The character was created by Juanita Bartlett in the first
Rockford
episode she wrote. Beth was the first intelligent and attractive female character on television. There had been smart women before, but they usually wore big glasses and were fat or old. To have a young woman who actually had a brain in her head was something quite extraordinary at that time.

Working with Jim was like getting a little acting class every day. I learned a lot about camera angles, lenses, lighting. One of the hardest things to do as an actor is to walk and talk at the same time, especially when you have a lot of dialogue and there are about fifty people moving along with you off-camera. I always had a lot of lawyer shit to say. Jim helped me get my bearings so I’d know where the camera was at all times. He knows all that stuff because he’s been doing it all his life. He looked after me.

In addition to the technical things I learned from Jim, I also learned a lot about being a leader. Everybody loved him—but he took care of not only the actors and me but the whole crew. He knew everybody’s name, he knew everybody’s kids’ names. He had an enormous generosity toward everyone on the crew. And so of course they were all completely devoted to him in return.

I think Jim is such a good actor because he actually leaves his actor at home and he brings himself to the screen. That kind of ease in front of a camera takes time. He’s also a very appealing human
being. Both men and women feel safe with him, they feel like they
get
him.

— GRETCHEN CORBETT

I
had a term contract at Universal, a serious development deal, and had done two pilots that hadn’t sold. Universal got a script for a new show called
Magnum
and assigned it to me.

Well, I didn’t like the script. It was very James Bond–like and the guy did everything right. He was a superhero with a woman on each arm, and he was too perfect. I told them, “I don’t think I should play guys like this. I really don’t like him.” I probably said, “I want to do a character like Rockford.” We got into a big thing. My whole future was on the line. Most people didn’t know who I was and the studio said, “Who the hell do you think you are? You’ve never even been on the air!” It was a big dilemma for me because I did not think I fit in that kind of show.

I didn’t know what to do. If I stood firm and refused to take the part, whether or not they could have legally won in a courtroom, two things would have happened: (1) they could have tied me up forever,
(2) I would have gotten the reputation of being difficult and may never have worked again anyway.

I talked to Jim about it and he said, simply: “Do you want to do the show?” I said no. He said, “Well, Tom, I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I’ll tell you this: if they want you, you’ll never have more power than you do right now. As soon as you sign on, you’re going to have no power and no position and no one’s going to have to listen to you. Maybe if the show’s a raging success you’ll get that power back in the second or third year, but if you’re going to make a stand, now’s the only time you can make it.”

It occurred to me that this is not a guy who’s just throwing
advice off the top of his head. This is a guy who’s taken those kinds of risks.

It was not a precious discussion, not “Jim, I have to talk to you . . .” We were sitting around waiting for the crew to come back from lunch and it came up. Then we went on to something else. In fact, if I had sat him down and said, “I have to talk to you, I need some advice,” I probably wouldn’t have gotten any. We were just talking.

I took Jim’s advice and it worked. “Okay,” Universal said, “how ’bout if we give you a choice of three pilots?
Magnum
would be one of the three and we’ll bring in somebody new who can rewrite the show more to your liking.”

And that’s what happened. And it changed my life. In the new script, Magnum was not a superhero. He’s a tough guy, as Rockford was, but he was reluctant. That’s all from Jim.

I’ve had a couple of mentors in the business. One was Ben Johnson, who gave me my introduction to Westerns. The other is Jim. I don’t think he’d be comfortable being called a mentor, nor do I think he considered himself one, but he
was,
whether he likes it or not.

—TOM SELLECK

W
hen I was working with James in
The Rockford Files,
he kept disappearing every day and I kept thinking,
I want to have lunch with my leading man—how often am I going to get to work with James Garner?
So one day I cornered him and asked if he wouldn’t mind telling me where he goes every day, and couldn’t we at least have one lunch at the commissary? He said, “I’m terribly sorry, I have to go for my acupuncture.” He said that the only way he could survive was to go to his acupuncturist and get rid of the pain. I thought,
Wow, that’s quite a testimonial.
So I went to his acupuncturist for years and the acupuncturist said to me, “You know, acting is very injurious to your health.”

—ERIN GRAY

J
ames Garner taught me how to cross my eyes, one at a time. It’s a skill I have employed often to no advantage whatsoever.

—LEE PURCELL

I
t was television, starting in 1974 with James Garner in
The Rockford Files,
that really brought the investigative profession into the limelight. The show also had a major influence on people using the private investigator title.

No one in the country knew what a private investigator really did, or even what a PI was, until
The
Rockford Files
. Jim Rockford accurately portrayed the gumshoe of the time: if you wanted to get information, you had to get out there and ruffle some feathers. Jim Rockford was real. He worked hard to make a decent buck, but he often got beat by clients, even though he was trying to do the right thing. Real PIs deal with that on a regular basis. Even the fact that Rockford didn’t like to carry a gun is accurate: PIs are more likely to be packing a smart phone and a laptop than a gun.

Jim Garner is such a nice, down-to-earth person; he was a role model for me when I was coming up in the industry. He was representative of what the field was at the time and he portrayed it beautifully. The show made such an impact on the profession that we wanted to recognize James Garner for it, so we named him Television’s Most Famous Private Investigator.

—JIMMIE MESIS, editor in chief,
PI
magazine

G
oing into a new
Rockford
season, say the director of photography wanted a raise. The studio said, “Get another DP.” Jim quietly said, “Take the difference out of my money.” He did that all the time with various crew members.