The Garner Files: A Memoir (11 page)

I’ve been told my lawsuit set a precedent that liberated actors from the kind of one-sided contract I’d been under, and that the court decision against Warner Bros. was one of the final blows against the studio system. The truth is, I wasn’t thinking about anybody but myself. All I knew was I couldn’t continue working
under those conditions. That’s why I was willing to risk my career to get out.

But that wasn’t quite the end of the story. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure Jack Warner tried to kill my movie career. On the same day in December 1960 that the judgment came down in my favor, I got a script from 20th Century-Fox called
The Comancheros
. Though I was anxious to work, I didn’t much care for the movie and I turned it down. A few days later, when I heard that Gary Cooper had signed to do the other part, I said, “Whoa, send me that script back!” I looked at it again and decided to do it, just for the chance of working with a great star and a man I admired. As it turned out, Coop dropped out and Duke Wayne played the lead, but that would have been fine with me: I felt the same way about Wayne as I did about Cooper. The director and head of production both wanted me, and we thought it was all set. But I never heard from them again, and they wouldn’t talk to my agent. Stu Whitman wound up with the part.

I’m convinced that Jack Warner called Spyros Skouras, the head of 20th, and told him not to use me.

Luckily, there were enough independent producers around that I didn’t have to rely on a studio to get a job. It wasn’t long before a big director cast me in an important film, and from then on, I could work anywhere.

A
fter I’d won my lawsuit against Warners, offers weren’t exactly rolling in. Producers were understandably cautious. But my agent arranged a meeting with William Wyler and he hired me for
The Children’s Hour
on the spot. I didn’t even have to read for it.

Two schoolteachers, played by Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, are accused of being lesbians by one of the students, a vicious little girl played by Karen Balkin. In those days, it was a touchy subject. We couldn’t use the word “lesbian.” Imagine. But the script wasn’t about homosexuality anyway; it was about the harm rumors can cause.

William Wyler (
Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, Ben-Hur
) was one of our great directors. He had the reputation of being a perfectionist and a bit of a taskmaster, but I found him to be a pussycat. He didn’t use force of any kind. He’d talk to you about the situation calmly and quietly.

But he didn’t actually tell you anything. He had his own way of communicating, and it wasn’t verbal. I don’t think he knew how to express himself to actors. You’d do a take and all he’d say was, “Okay, let’s do it again.” He’d do five or six takes for every scene. In one scene,
he did take after take to get Karen to cry. He finally got her so upset that the dam burst and she didn’t stop crying for two days.

Shirley, Audrey, and I never knew what he was looking for so we kept searching, trying everything we could think of. We’d have these desperate little conversations: “What does he
want
?”

“I don’t know, but let’s keep going.”

Looking back, I guess
he
didn’t know what he wanted, either . . . until he saw it. Or, rather, heard it: Wyler didn’t watch what we were doing; he turned his back and listened. He was hard of hearing, so he’d hook up his hearing aid to the sound system and keep shooting until he
heard
what he wanted.

And he’d keep changing things. He was actually working from three scripts: In addition to ours, he had the original Lillian Hellman play, which is based on a true story and was done on Broadway in 1934. He also had the first movie version,
These Three,
with Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins, and Joel McCrea, which he’d also directed. It left out the lesbian stuff because of the Hays Code. He’d take a line from here and a line from there and keep moving them around. Then he’d change a line and have you do it again.

Wyler was a brilliant, talented man, and I considered it a privilege to work with him. I simply put myself in his hands. It made me proud whenever I did something that pleased him. He was a great director, and I think it was his judgment and dedication to what he felt was right that made him great.

It was wonderful working with Audrey and Shirley. They were very different, of course. Audrey was quiet and demure, a very proper lady, though she had a great sense of humor. I fell in love with her. (I could never figure out how she could have married that guy Mel Ferrer. She was way too good for him.)

I love Shirley, too. Terrific actress, wicked sense of humor, like one of the guys. One day Shirley and I were kidding around just before a take and Willy Wyler came over and told me, “Don’t do that! Think about the scene.” Shirley could laugh and tell jokes one
minute and flip a switch and be in character the next, but Wyler didn’t think I had that ability, and at the time he was right.

The Children’s Hour
is a poignant film. In one scene, I cry in front of a mirror. Coming right after years of doing light humor on
Maverick,
it was a departure. The first time I had to cry on camera was hard, and I didn’t like it. I’ve never gone back and looked at it because I know it would make me wince. But the role propelled me from TV Westerns into major motion pictures.

T
he Great Escape
is based on a true story, the mass breakout of Allied fliers from a German prison camp, Stalag Luft III, during World War II. Almost everything in the movie is accurate, though some incidents are condensed and a few characters are composites. It was such a good story that director John Sturges didn’t have to take liberties. Well, not many. Two of its most exciting sequences never happened.

The screenplay is credited to W. R. Burnett (
Little Caesar, The Asphalt Jungle
) and James Clavell (
Shogun
), who had himself been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. There was trouble with the script, so by the time we were done shooting, there’d been four more writers and about a dozen drafts, and we still wound up improvising scenes.

The film is based on a nonfiction book of the same name by Paul Brickhill, who’d been a POW in the real Stalag Luft III after his Spitfire was shot down over Tunisia. As a prisoner, Brickhill had been involved in the tunneling but ultimately couldn’t join the escape because he was claustrophobic.

Sturges bought the rights to Brickhill’s book in 1951, but it took ten years to get the picture made. The studios were afraid of it because there were no female characters, and because they thought it would be too expensive to shoot. Then there’s the unhappy ending, which prompted Sam Goldwyn to complain, “What the hell kind of
escape is this? Nobody gets away!” But in 1962, after the success of
The Magnificent Seven,
Sturges was suddenly bankable, and the Mirisch brothers and United Artists put up $4 million to make the picture.

A
llied airmen captured during World War II were sent to prison camps run by the Luftwaffe, the elite flying corps and the least Nazified branch of the German military. For the most part, these camps honored the Geneva Convention and treated prisoners decently. In 1943, the Luftwaffe built Stalag Luft III in Sagan, about one hundred miles south of Berlin, to house prisoners who’d already made escape attempts. In putting the hard cases in one maximum-security camp, the Germans unwittingly created a cadre of super escape artists, men who refused to sit out the rest of the war as POWs. They were determined to create a diversion that would draw German troops away from combat against the Allies, and they knew it would be a propaganda coup if they could break out of what the Luftwaffe boasted was an “escape-proof” camp.

Roger Bartlett, Big X, played by Richard Attenborough, is based on Roger Bushell, a South African pilot who led the actual escape attempt. He wasn’t the ranking officer in the camp, but he was a clever and resourceful leader who knew how to harness the diverse skills of his fellow prisoners. Bushell considered it his duty to “harass, confound, and confuse the enemy.” He’d already tried several escapes when he devised a daring plan to break out 250 prisoners, the greatest escape ever attempted.

As shown in the film, the POWs simultaneously dug three tunnels, code-named “Tom,” “Dick,” and “Harry.” Each tunnel began with a thirty-foot, vertical shaft to make it deep enough so the Germans couldn’t hear the digging with underground microphones. The prisoners built a ventilation system and a trolley to move the dirt out of the tunnel. The soil was sandy and the tunnels were prone to
cave-ins, so wooden slats from prisoners’ bunks were used to shore up the walls. There were in fact escape attempts by hiding in a truck loaded with tree cuttings, and by trying to blend in with a detail of Russian prisoners. The inmates actually did sing Christmas carols to drown out the sounds of tunneling, and there really was a Fourth of July celebration with moonshine. (None of us could play fife and drums, so we faked it.)

A Canadian mining engineer named Wally Floody, the real “Tunnel King,” was a technical adviser on the film. A downed Spitfire pilot, he was captured by the Germans and sent to Stalag Luft III, where he was in charge of tunnel construction. Wally made sure the details of the tunnels in the film were accurate down to the color of the dirt.

Even the prison slang in the movie is correct:
Goons
were the Germans; when interrogated, the POWs told their captors “goon” stood for “German officer or noncom.” The sentry platforms were
goon boxes,
harassing the guards was
goon baiting,
the lookouts were
stooges,
and the guards assigned to escape-detection were
ferrets
. The prisoners who carried dirt in bags inside their trousers and released it in the yard, right under the
goons’
noses, were
penguins
.

S
turges had wanted to shoot the picture at Idyllwild, in the mountains near Los Angeles. It would have been too expensive to bring hundreds of extras in from Los Angeles every day, so he planned to hire college students from nearby Palm Springs. But the Screen Extras Guild wouldn’t give him a waiver. In need of a new location fast, assistant director Bob Relyea went to Germany and reported back to Sturges that, lo and behold, it looked just like Germany. Even better, the German government was offering all kinds of incentives, so Sturges bit the bullet and flew the whole company across the Atlantic.

We shot the interiors at Bavaria Studios in Geiselgasteig, just
outside Munich, and on location in an exact replica of Stalag Luft III built for us on the edge of a pine forest. Because it was an ensemble cast, there were stretches where an actor wouldn’t have a call for days on end, and the cast used the downtime to travel all over Europe. That was fine with Sturges, who liked to issue tourist information to the cast and crew on his movies. He asked only that they check in by phone every night. I decided to stay close and explore Munich, except when Lois flew over toward the middle of it and we spent a few days together in Paris.

F
or the most part the German people were friendly and hospitable, though there was one columnist who didn’t want us there reminding everybody we’d won the war. He ripped the studio for bringing in a bunch of “television actors.” I guess he meant me and Steve McQueen.

Though I felt comfortable in Munich and tried to behave myself, I still managed to get in trouble. Believe me, I never intended to take part in the Munich riots. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In that summer of 1962, the student quarter along Leopoldstrasse was a vibrant section of Munich and a top tourist attraction, with sidewalk cafés, restaurants, clubs, and a large public park. The endless stream of people of all shapes and sizes strolling up and down the boulevard reminded me of the Via Veneto in Rome.

One evening a student with a guitar plopped down in the middle of the sidewalk and began playing. Pedestrians had to thread their way around him, and somebody complained. Loudly. The argument attracted other pedestrians, and there was pushing and shoving. Pretty soon, hundreds of people had gathered around, most of them students. The police waded in to break it up, swinging their nightsticks, and that’s when it got out of hand.

More students showed up, outnumbering the police, who in turn
called for reinforcements. A line of mounted police advanced. As their riders swung rubber truncheons, the horses stepped on and kicked the students, who fled in all directions, many of them bloodied. It was a police riot, with cops beating and arresting defenseless kids.

The next night was worse. Police arrived in even greater force and there were ambulances standing by. The students were now armed with rocks, and there were more casualties. By the third or fourth night, the story was international news. Spectators came to watch the battle from the sidelines, and tourists got caught in the crossfire, including me.

It was a Friday night. I had just parked my car on a side street when two policemen approached. I thought they’d recognized me and were going to ask for an autograph. Instead, they demanded my passport. It was in the breast pocket of my jacket, along with my wallet, and when I pulled it out, one of the cops snatched the passport and the wallet, which he promptly emptied of its contents, about a thousand bucks’ worth of German marks, and threw the wallet on the ground. When I protested, he laughed in my face. When I asked for my passport back, he told me I could pick it up at police headquarters after they investigated my “case.” I asked him for his badge number, but he just laughed again.