Archive for November, 2011
This is not your typical memoir. Actor James Garner—famous for starring in Maverick, The Rockford Files, and myriad films—didn’t pen it all by himself in some Sunset Boulevard garret. Instead, this book is the product of extensive interviewing. Co-author Winokur sat down with Garner twice a week over a period of about 18 months, asked him about the ups and downs of his life, and recorded everything.
As a result, Garner’s voice—wry, witty, warm, and self-deprecating—comes through clearly in these pages. The Garner Files is generally chronological, beginning with the now 83-year-old actor’s difficult childhood in Oklahoma. He was the youngest of three boys, his mother died from a “botched abortion” when Garner was only 4, and his father parceled his sons out to relatives of uneven merits. From there, Garner remembers being “the first Oklahoman drafted for the Korean War.” He remembers the serendipity behind his becoming a Hollywood performer (“The only reason I’m an actor is that a lady pulled out of a parking space in front of a producer’s office”). He remembers meeting and falling in love with his wife-to-be during an Adlai Stevenson for President rally in 1956. He talks here about other film stars he’s admired (especially Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman), his occasional battles to win fair deals from entertainment studios, the health problems he’s endured as a result of on-screen stunts and years of racing cars, his love/hate relationship with golf, the constant pain from arthritis he’s endured since the 1960s, his attendance at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (Garner was seated in the third row at the Lincoln Memorial, when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech), and—last but certainly not least—his careful choice of screen roles over the decades (“A reporter asked once if I would ever do a nude scene. I told him I don’t do horror films”).
Garner also admits to being unlike the easygoing, lighthearted, self-confident, and sometimes self-interested characters he’s played on screens large and small. He says he has a bad temper and a tendency toward pessimism, and insists that he’s “really an old curmudgeon.” But then, some of his characters have been that way too, and viewers have delighted in their company all the same. ~ Jeff Pierce