The Garner Files: A Memoir (9 page)

M
averick
’s competition on Sunday night—Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, and Jack Benny—were each making $25,000 a week, and we were burying them in the ratings. Sullivan had been on top for years and nobody had ever beaten him before, yet I was making $500 a week for doing not only
Maverick
but also appearing in feature films (
Up Periscope
and
Cash McCall
in addition to
Darby’s Rangers
). I was also required to do publicity, including at least one interview a day at lunch, plus personal appearances on weekends. They also wanted me to go out at night and be seen around town, but I didn’t have the money. I couldn’t afford the clothes, and I couldn’t afford the car. I had to borrow Natalie Wood’s Cadillac to take Lois to the premiere of
West Side Story
because my car was an old clunker.

I figured that since
Maverick
was a hit, the studio would do the right thing and tear up the old contract. I figured wrong.

When
Maverick
was on hiatus, I hit the road at the rate of three cities a day. One weekend they sent me to Texas, and when we landed in San Antonio, there were five thousand people at the airport. They
overran the gates and came right up to the plane. I did local TV, rode in a float with Miss San Diego, and was Grand Marshal at the Illinois State Fair, for which I received $100 pocket money while the studio got $25,000.

One time they put a bunch of VIPs on a Mississippi steamboat and pre-positioned me, costumed as Bret Maverick, on a small island in the middle of the river. When the boat came by the captain announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to pick up an extra passenger.” They took me aboard and I mingled with the customers until we docked.

When I was asked to do
The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom
on ABC, I knew the usual fee was $7,500, but a Warner Bros. executive informed me I was expected to do it for nothing and I’d already been “committed” to appear.

“Then uncommit me,” I said.

When they threatened to fire me, I said, “Up to you.”

When they threatened to sue me, I said, “Go ahead.”

We finally compromised: I got $2,500 for the Boone show, plus a new (1959) Corvette, tax-free, with a full tank of gas and the key in the ignition. (Wish I had that car today!) Plus, no more bookings without my permission, and I’d get half of all future appearance fees.

I
f you bring your personality to roles, people get to know you. When you play someone you don’t understand, it doesn’t work. I understood Maverick right away because a maverick is a rebel and I’ve always been a rebel. Maverick doesn’t like to fight, but he’ll use his fists if pushed to the wall. Me, too. (There’s a line in
Murphy’s Romance
that I think fits us both: “When I’m pushed, I shove.”) Maverick is a drifter, and I was a drifter. He isn’t anti-Indian, and neither am I, being one quarter Cherokee.

Maverick is quick-witted and quick on the draw, though he tries
to avoid gunplay. But he’s not a coward . . . exactly. He just believes in self-preservation. His attitude is, why risk your life over something trivial, like money? Or “honor”? But Maverick has his own moral code, and he does have a conscience. Yes, he cheats at cards, but he only cheats cheaters. He doesn’t have to cheat anybody else because he’s a great poker player. (That’s one trait we
don’t
share.) Maverick is often described as an antihero, but I don’t think that’s true. I’d call him a
reluctant
hero. He’ll come to your aid if there’s an injustice involved, and he’ll always stand up to bullies. (Have I mentioned that I hate bullies?)

Mind you, I wasn’t thinking about all this stuff when I was making
Maverick
. I just wanted that check at the end of the week.

I
t took us eight calendar days to make a
Maverick
episode: We’d start on Tuesday, shoot through Friday afternoon, break for the weekend, then come back and finish late Monday or early Tuesday. But since the episodes were being aired every seven days, we were losing a day a week, and it was only a matter of time before we would run out of shows. So after about the eighth week they got the idea of adding a brother who could alternate with Bret. They auditioned a bunch of actors, including Stuart Whitman, Rod Taylor, Richard Jaeckel, and Jack Kelly, the brother of the movie actress Nancy Kelly. One day they brought Jack over to the Warners back lot. We hit it off right away. They hired him to play Bart Maverick for $650 a week, $150 more than my salary . . . and he was
still
getting screwed. (My $500 a week increased to $600 the second year and to $1,250 the third, which, in those days, was . . . not a lot of money.)

Henry Kaiser wasn’t just a sponsor; he was a 33 percent partner in
Maverick
’s profits, but as far as I know, he never interfered with the production. When the network accidentally forgot to tell Kaiser about the addition of another Maverick—he didn’t find out until the first episode aired—he was livid. “I paid for red apples and they gave
me green apples!” Kaiser said. ABC had to pay him $600,000 to smooth his feathers.

They created a second production company for Jack Kelly that worked simultaneously with ours. Jack and I did separate episodes, but all the scripts were written for
Maverick,
not for a specific brother, so they were interchangeable. Occasionally we’d cross over. He’d appear in my episode, I’d appear in his. Just a few scenes, though, usually to rescue each other from a tight spot.

Jack was a good guy and we got along fine. The only problem was, he drank too much. He wasn’t
bad,
but whenever we’d go on an airplane, he’d get snockered and become
difficult
. And sometimes he’d arrive on set with a hangover and an attitude. But within a couple of hours, we were having fun again.

Jack’s wife, the actress May Wynn, was another story. Born Donna Lee Hickey, she took her stage name from her character in the film version of
The Caine Mutiny
. She resented that Jack wasn’t a bigger star, and I think she blamed
me
for it. She’d nag him about my having funnier scripts and getting more recognition. After a few drinks, she would needle Jack mercilessly. Then
he’d
have another drink, and they’d get into a big argument.

The audience somehow got the idea I was the senior Maverick brother, even though Jack was seven months older, maybe because I was there first, or because I was an inch or so taller than Jack. That may explain why Bart Maverick’s episodes weren’t as popular as Bret’s. The audience was disappointed: All of a sudden, they weren’t getting what drew them to the show in the first place. We tried to remedy that by having Bret introduce Bart’s first few solo episodes.

These were the early days of television. We didn’t have the time or money to do anything extravagant. The whole series was shot at Warner Bros. Studios. I don’t think we went on location more than once or twice in three years. There were four units filming simultaneously on the lot in Burbank. We were literally back-to-back, one camera pointed at us, the other at
Sugarfoot
or
Cheyenne
or one of
the other Westerns. The dolly grips were butt-to-butt and we had to take turns shooting.

R
oy Huggins was the writer-producer and creator of
Maverick
. Roy was smart and he was successful, in a commercial sense. Look at the shows he created:
Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive, The Rockford Files, Baretta.
Roy was a nice enough guy, I suppose, but he had strong opinions and would never listen to anybody. He borrowed just about every story he ever did and just changed it from one form to another. Somehow, I don’t think he had the depth or the scope for the movies.

Roy did have a great line about me: “Jim Garner and I have a love/hate relationship: I love him and he hates me.”

It wasn’t true; Roy didn’t love me at all.

But I may not be an impartial witness. I knew more than I should about Roy because my friend Luis Delgado was his brother-in-law. (Luis’s sister, the actress Adele Mara, was Roy’s wife.) More than that, I can’t say.

Luis was Jack Kelly’s stand-in on
Maverick
when I asked him to work for me. “I will on one condition,” he said. “You take care of the acting and I’ll handle everything else.”

And did he ever. He looked after me like I was his baby. When we traveled, he made all the arrangements. He’d go to a city ahead of me and rent a car, check into the hotel, go to the production office and get our per diems, then pick me up at the airport. If I needed clothes, he got clothes. If I needed laundry or dry cleaning done, he saw to it. He’d drop me off and pick me up at the golf course (Luis didn’t play); he’d get the script changes and put them in for me. He handled all the cash and made sure I always had spending money.

In short, Luis made sure I didn’t have anything to worry about so I could focus all my energy on acting.

Luis (“LOO-ee”) was a dynamic guy with a commanding
presence. My driver, Chester Grimes, could be across the room, Luis could just look at him, and Chester would straighten right up. (Chester, aka “Cheddar Cheese,” has been with me for many years, and I can always depend on him to make me laugh. Sometimes so much I have to beg him to stop.)

I met Luis when I was eighteen and he was twenty, at the Dolores Drive-in at Wilshire and La Cienega where we both went to chase girls. The only difference was that Luis had a car.

Years later Luis owned a bar, the Laurelite, on Sunset Boulevard, next door to Greenblatt’s Delicatessen and across the street from Schwab’s drugstore. People in the movie business loved the place because he’d put them on the cuff. Luis never got wealthy, because he was too good-hearted.

Luis’s nickname was “the Thin Man,” and it fit:
delgado
means “thin” in Spanish, and Luis
was
skinny at six foot three, 185 pounds. He was too thin for the Army!

Luis always had good-looking cars—I remember a beautiful green Buick convertible he drove in the ’50s. We both loved cars and at one time both had Mini Coopers. You’d see us going home from the studio, Luis in his purple one and me in my blue one. In 1972, Luis’s wife bought him a custom van for his birthday. Luis was working as Steve McQueen’s stand-in on
The Getaway,
directed by Sam Peckinpah. They were shooting in San Antonio, Texas, and I volunteered to drive the van there from Los Angeles to surprise Luis. He
was
surprised, and he loved the van, which had a lot of custom work by Tony Nancy.

While on the set of
The Getaway
I did a car stunt for Peckinpah. Drove an orange VW Beetle in a robbery scene. When I asked Sam to pay me, he said, “How much do you want?”

“Just give me what you think it’s worth.”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a dollar.

I didn’t tell him that I had so much fun, I’d have paid
him
.

Luis was excellent company and we had great times. Between
shots on the set, we played backgammon. On weekends, we’d go to auto races all over Southern California. When we weren’t shooting, I’d go to his house in Sherman Oaks to play backgammon. Never played for money, and it’s a good thing, because Luis was the luckiest damn roller you ever saw!

Luis and I understood and trusted each other. We never had a cross word between us in fifty years. I lost him to cancer in 1997.

I
think Westerns are popular because they’re pure escapism. They don’t bother with the problem of how the hero earns his living. A cowboy rides into town, gets off his horse, and goes into a saloon. The barkeep pours him a shot and the cowboy sits down. He doesn’t have to worry about anything. Nobody wants to know where he came from or what he does. When he ties up his horse, there’s no parking meter on the hitching post. In
Maverick,
there’s always good weather, and you know neither Bret nor Bart will have to worry about where their next meal is coming from. Or where they’re going to sleep. They just get off their horses and lie down.

By the mid-1950s, there were a lot of “adult Westerns” on television, shows like
Wyatt Earp,
Gunsmoke,
and
Have Gun Will Travel
. They had a more modern point of view than traditional TV shoot-’em-ups like
The Lone Ranger
and
The Cisco Kid,
which were so silly only a kid of ten could stand them. In adult Westerns, the hero didn’t wear a mask and the writers tried to tell stories without using stencils. (Somebody said an adult Western is where the hero still kisses his horse at the end, only now he worries about it.)
Maverick
was the most adult of them all, including the other Warner Bros. Westerns,
Cheyenne
with Clint Walker,
Lawman
(John Russell), and
Sugarfoot
(Will Hutchins).

Maverick
turned the genre upside down. It wasn’t comedy and it wasn’t satire, it was a Western with humor. Not slapstick,
situation
humor. Tongue-in-cheek. It let the air out of the stalwart TV
Western hero. Maverick was the first hero to wear black. He wasn’t crazy about horses, so his mount was never a character in the show like Trigger and Silver were for Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger.

Roy Huggins had his own ideas about the
Maverick
phenomenon. He distilled them into a list of instructions:

The Ten-Point Guide to Happiness While
Writing or Directing a
Maverick

1. Maverick is the original disorganization man.

2. Maverick’s primary motivation is that ancient and most noble of motives: the profit motive.

3. Heavies in
Maverick
are always absolutely right, and they are always beloved to someone.

4. The cliché flourishes in the creative arts because the familiar gives a sense of comfort and security. Writers and directors of
Maverick
are requested to
live dangerously
.

5. Maverick’s activities are seldom grandiose. To force him into magnificent speculations is to lose sight of his essential indolence.