The Garner Files: A Memoir (12 page)

That’s when I lost my temper. A reporter had witnessed the whole thing, and I gave him a spontaneous interview that I would later regret. I told him that the Munich police were out of control, that the situation was worse than what I’d seen in Tokyo while we were shooting
Sayonara
. I said the Japanese police were tough on student demonstrators, but the Munich cops were much worse. And then I added, “What I’ve witnessed here reminds me what it must have been like under the Nazis in the thirties.”

That
little nugget touched a nerve.

The Germans were still sensitive in 1962. They didn’t want to be reminded of the Third Reich, so when I compared the Munich police
to Nazis, all hell broke loose. The German public was up in arms and the government demanded an apology.

Despite pressure from the studio, I refused to apologize. I’d hated seeing the kids bullied by the police and I meant what I said. But a few days later, after they’d threatened to deport me, which would have prevented us from finishing the picture, I caved in. I realized it would hurt too many other people. So I issued an apology. But I didn’t mean it.

M
y character, an American in the RAF named Bob Hendley, was a composite. His part in the actual escape was done by several individuals. It wasn’t a stretch to play Hendley the Scrounger; that’s what I’d done in Korea. Hendley was a hustler who could bribe, barter, or con his way around anything. He’d do whatever necessary to get what he needed, whether an identity card or an expensive camera, and he wasn’t afraid to take a risk when he had to.

Sturges had German actors playing all the Germans, which was unusual for a Hollywood film. It worked: Hannes Messemer was convincing as Kommandant von Luger, as was Robert Graf as Werner the Ferret.

The prisoners were well supplied with cigarettes, coffee, chocolate, and canned goods from Red Cross packages. The Germans didn’t have such luxuries, so it was easy to bribe the ferrets, and Hendley plays Werner like a violin. I think some of the scenes between them were among the best in the film, and Graf was a delight to work with, as were all the German actors. I didn’t feel any animosity from them, even though they were making a film about their side losing the war.

For the most part, it was a happy set and everyone in the diverse cast got along. Donald Pleasence and I became good friends, just like our characters in the film. He plays Flight Lieutenant Colin Blythe, the camp forger who goes blind from working by candlelight. Big X
tells him he can’t join the escape, but I promise to take care of him: “Colin’s not a blind man as long as he’s with me, and he’s
going
with me!”

By the time he made
Great Escape,
Donald was an accomplished stage and film actor. An officer in the RAF during the war but too old to fly, he was a “boffin”—a desk jockey. One day in 1944, he went on a mission in a Lancaster bomber just to see what it was like. The Lancaster was shot down over France and Donald spent the rest of the war in a fliers’ camp like the one in the picture.

In a sequence that didn’t happen in real life, Donald and I steal a German two-seat trainer with an old-fashioned crank starter to make our escape. In the script, I sit at the controls while Donald cranks the engine, then I have to get out and help him into the plane because he can’t see. The crew could never get the engine to turn over in rehearsals, so Sturges told Donald to go through the motions of cranking it and then he’d do the rest of the scene in cuts. I said, “What if it starts?”

“Don’t worry, it won’t.”

“Okay,” I said, “but if it does we’re in trouble, because I’m not a pilot.”

Just to humor me, Bob Relyea, our production manager and a weekend pilot, gave me a quick lesson on how to use the brakes and throttle. The cameras rolled, Donald turned the crank, and sure enough, the damn thing kicked over on the first try. With the cameras still rolling, I throttled back and tested the brakes. When I realized the plane wasn’t moving, I got out and helped Donald into the cockpit, then got back in myself. I revved the throttle, eased off the brake . . . and the damn thing began to taxi! You should have seen the look on the faces of the crew. But they kept rolling and got the scene. Nobody was more surprised than I was.

In the script, Donald and I run out of gas and crash before we can make it to Switzerland. They couldn’t get a stunt pilot to crash it, so it fell to Relyea. Bob took most of the fuel out of the plane, flew it across
a field, and pancaked it, tearing both wings off in the process. Sturges wound up with some great footage and Bob wound up in a back brace.

J
ohn Sturges was a man’s man and a good director. He’d started as an editor for David O. Selznick and worked his way up to directing. He really knew how to cut a picture together. His specialty was action-adventure and he had a good track record—he’d done
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,
Bad Day at Black Rock,
and
The Magnificent Seven
before
The Great Escape
. He knew how to take a bunch of characters coming from different directions and draw them together in one purpose. In
Magnificent Seven,
it was protecting a village from bandits. In
Great Escape,
it was busting out of a German prison camp.

John would assemble a great cast and let them do their thing. He got the most out of actors by bolstering their confidence with a pat on the back at the right time. He was easygoing but could be tough when he needed to be. He was always fair.

I
n the middle of the shoot, McQueen walked out of the picture. He’d seen about an hour’s worth of dailies and didn’t like how he looked. Wanted to reshoot the whole thing. Of course, they couldn’t reshoot that much footage—it would have taken too long and cost too much money. Steve’s agents flew in from the States and had a showdown with Sturges.

The next day Sturges called me in and said, “Jim, McQueen’s out and you’re the star of the picture. We’ll change a few things here and there. It’ll work.”

I didn’t see how it could possibly work, and neither did Jimmy Coburn, so the two of us sat down with Steve at my rented house in Munich and asked him what the problem was.

“I don’t like the part. I’m not the hero. And the stuff they have me doing is corny.”

“Well, Steve, the reason you’re not
the
hero is because it’s an ensemble cast. There are a lot of heroes.”

Steve could be a stubborn little cuss, but Jimmy and I finally convinced him to stay on the picture. To pacify him, Sturges added some motorcycle stunts and changed his character, Hilts, the Cooler King, to a guy who goes out to reconnoiter the surrounding countryside, then unselfishly allows himself to be recaptured so he can share the information with the others.

T
here were no Americans in the actual escape; they’d all been transferred to other camps before the tunnel was finished. And there never was a motorcycle chase, but I think it’s the most exciting and memorable part of the movie. When people think of
The Great Escape,
they think of Steve on that motorcycle.

The bike was actually a 1961 Triumph 650 painted green and dressed with Nazi insignia, including swastikas. Steve did most of the driving, including the part of a German soldier chasing him, but not the now famous leap over the barbed wire barricade at the Swiss border. The insurance company wouldn’t allow it, and Sturges didn’t want to risk injury to Steve, so the racer and stunt driver Bud Ekins made the jump—off a wooden ramp just out of frame. Bud estimated that he flew sixty-five feet at a good twelve feet off the ground.

S
teve went nuts over there. He was always getting into scrapes. When he wasn’t working, he’d race that motorcycle with the swastikas on it all over Munich just to annoy the Germans. And people would yell. He also totaled a Mercedes Gullwing. Stuck it right into the pine trees. The police finally set up a roadblock and nailed him. They put him in jail for a few hours and took his driver’s license away.

Hilts was a great character and Steve did a good job. He had a
persona he brought to every role, and people loved it, which is fine, but you could always see him acting. That’s the kiss of death as far as I’m concerned.

Someone once asked me if Steve was “trouble.” Steve was trouble if you invited him for breakfast. He didn’t like
anything
. Like Brando, he could be a pain in the ass on the set. Unlike Brando, he wasn’t an actor. He was a movie star, a poser who cultivated the image of a macho man. Steve wasn’t a
bad
guy; I think he was just insecure. His wife Neile told me that he’d coveted the turtleneck sweater I wore in the picture. If I’d known that, I’d have given him the damn thing. Neile said that Steve had always been envious of tall, dark men, and that he was jealous because she and I had known each other during the Broadway years, when she was in
Kismet
and I was in
Caine Mutiny.
Though Neile and I were only casual acquaintances, Steve was convinced, she said, that we’d had an affair.

Yet Steve and I were good friends for a long time, probably because we had a couple of things in common besides acting. We both liked cars, and we raced together in the Baja 1000. We were also next-door neighbors.

Steve and Neile had a unique house in the hills above Los Angeles. It was built like a castle, out of stone, with turrets and secret passageways. Lois and I were there one day and noticed the property next door. It was a good-size piece of ground and we could see the potential. I told Steve, “I think I’ll try to buy that,” and he was all for it. We wound up building our dream house there.

As neighbors, Steve and I hung out a lot. We’d tinker in the garage and ride our motorcycles on a nearby fire trail. After
The
Great Escape,
we both brought Mini Coopers back from Europe and we’d race them up and down our street. There were big speed bumps, so we’d shoot down either side, just a few inches from parked cars.

One thing Steve and I didn’t have in common was our politics, because Steve was a Republican. The only saving grace was that he
somehow made Nixon’s enemies list, an honor I would have given anything to have achieved.

Steve liked to lob his empty beer cans into my backyard. Claimed he couldn’t resist because it was always so neat, with the flowers trimmed and no newspapers lying around. He thought I didn’t know it was him. That was Steve. Deep down, he was just a wild kid. I think he thought of me as an older brother, and I guess I thought of him as a younger brother. A delinquent younger brother.

C
harlie Bronson was a pain in the ass, too. He used and abused people, and I didn’t like it. Charlie Buchinsky. He’d been a coal miner in Pennsylvania and a B-29 tail gunner in the Pacific. He was a bitter, belligerent SOB. I don’t know why he had a chip on his shoulder. He wasn’t a barrel of laughs on the set, I can tell you. His character, a claustrophobic Polish prisoner nicknamed Danny the Tunnel King, is loosely based on Wally Floody.

About a year after we made
Great Escape,
I had a little set-to with Charlie during a poker game at my house. He made a bet and then withdrew it after it was too late. I said, “Sorry, you can’t do that.” I wasn’t even in the hand; Charlie was against a street kid who was working extra in Hollywood. I made Charlie pay him, probably no more than fifty bucks, because that money meant a lot to the kid. Charlie got upset and we got head-to-head, but it didn’t come to blows.

After that, Charlie went around swearing he’d never work with me again. Throughout my life, there have been a few guys who didn’t like me because I was outspoken. Hell, I never thought I was outspoken, I just told the truth.

A few years later, I was in an Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills waiting for Lois. I’m back in a booth having a beer and I look up and there’s Charlie and he says, “How
are
ya, Jim?” and I say, “I’m fine, Charlie, how are you?” Next thing I know the four of us are having dinner together—Lois and me and Charlie and his wife, Jill Ireland.
It was all so very pleasant. But I think Charlie held a grudge. I know
I
did.

S
turges called one day while he was editing the film and invited me to lunch. “Jim,” he said, “the two best scenes in the picture are with you and Donald, but they’re on the cutting room floor. I had to stay with the goddamn motorcycle.”

They
were
touching scenes. In one of them, Donald and I are looking out the window in a blackout. All you could see was explosions, with us silhouetted in the distance light. I thanked Sturges for being considerate enough to break the news to me in person, before I saw the movie and got upset. I told him that I understood, and I did. The motorcycle action is exciting and gives the film a more upbeat ending.

T
he actual great escape took place in March 1944. Seventy-six prisoners got out before the tunnel was discovered. Only three made it to freedom. Yet the escape accomplished its goal: the Germans had to divert thousands of troops to round up the escapees. Hitler was so enraged he ordered fifty of the recaptured prisoners shot. The film’s dedication, “For the fifty,” refers to those men. In one of the closing scenes, Kommandant von Luger informs Group Captain Ramsey, played by James Donald, that the men were “shot while trying to escape.”

“How many were wounded?” Ramsey asks.

“None,” von Luger replies.

After the war, British Intelligence tracked down the murderers and brought them to justice. Most were convicted and either imprisoned or hanged.

T
hough the German government had been cooperative, the picture went over budget. Sturges cut scenes and used crew members in bit parts to economize, but the studio still wanted to pull us back and finish the picture at Arrowhead. To avoid that, a few of us deferred salary for the overage. We never expected to see any money—you rarely do in that situation. But the movie turned out to be a summer blockbuster, and we all got paid.

I knew
Great Escape
was going to be good, I just didn’t know how good. It had a little bit of everything: humor, pathos, and a wonderful sense of camaraderie among the fliers. Its pacing and suspense are a tribute to Sturges and to film editor Ferris Webster, who was nominated for an Oscar. The movie was both entertaining and educational: it introduced the younger generation to World War II and got people to look up the real story. It’s one of the few pictures I’m in that I’ll watch when it’s on television, even though it’s almost three hours long.