The Garner Files: A Memoir (15 page)

But I wish I had.

I’m tired of hearing that actors shouldn’t take positions on public issues. We’re citizens, and I think it’s our obligation to take a stand. But there’s a big difference between speaking out and holding office, which involves abilities actors don’t have. Unfortunately, a lot of people in office don’t have those abilities, either.

Too many actors have run for office. There’s one difference between me and them: I
know
I’m not qualified. In my opinion, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t qualified to be governor of California. Ronald Reagan wasn’t qualified to be governor, let alone president. I
was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president. My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That’s no way to run a union, let alone a state or a country.

My decision not to run for governor was also influenced by Lois’s reaction to the idea. Her exact words were: “I’d rather die.” But Lois is very passionate about issues. She writes letters. Sometimes, when she’s
really
passionate, she says, “Jimmy, I want you to sign this one, too.” I have a standard answer for that: “Yes, dear.”

The cause closest to my heart is the environment. Lois and I supported the efforts to prevent oil drilling along the Southern California coast, to stop logging in Northern California forests, and to create a nature conservancy in the Santa Monica Mountains. Is there anything more crucial or more urgent than saving the planet?

L
ate in 1965, I heard that John Frankenheimer was about to direct a big-budget, CinemaScope feature about Formula One racing. I’d done a series of small films and felt I needed an “epic,” so I had my agent get the script. I didn’t know that Steve McQueen had already been signed for the part.

As it happened, Steve couldn’t get along with the producer, Ed Lewis, so he backed out of the picture, flew to Taiwan to make
The Sand Pebbles
instead, and I got the part, even though Frankenheimer had wanted an unknown to play Pete Aron. I think he was looking for someone he could control. He had worked a lot with Burt Lancaster, and Burt always had an opinion, so Frankenheimer didn’t want anyone with an opinion. But both Ed Lewis and the studio wanted me, and they overruled Frankenheimer.

Just to be nice, I called Steve to tell him. When I said, “Steve, I’m gonna do
Grand Prix,
” there was about a twenty-five-dollar silence. He finally wished me luck, and I didn’t think any more about it. But Steve wouldn’t talk to me for a long time afterward. He eventually made his own racing picture, originally called
The Champions,
directed by John
Sturges. It came out in 1971, retitled
Le Mans
. Years later, Steve’s wife, Neile, said he resented me for taking the part, even though he’d already turned it down.

T
he movie follows four drivers through a season of racing for the world championship in the Grand Prix series. Antonio Sabato plays a promising rookie, Yves Montand a former champion at the end of his career, and Brian Bedford a Scotsman recovering from a crash. My character, Pete Aron, is an American trying to make a comeback after being thrown off his racing team for recklessly causing injury to a fellow driver. Eva Marie Saint, Jessica Walter, and Françoise Hardy play the love interests, but the story is pure soap opera.

Making
Grand Prix
was the most fun I’ve ever had on a movie. Hell, it was the most fun I’ve ever had, period! Six months with the best cars and the best drivers on the best circuits in the world . . . for a guy who’d always loved cars and racing, it was a fantasy come true.

We filmed at actual races at Monte Carlo, Clermont-Ferrand in France, Spa Francorchamps in Belgium, Brands Hatch in England, Zandvoort in the Netherlands, and Monza in Italy. The crowds in the movie are real. We shot before, during, and after the races and blended our footage with film of the real competition.

Formula One is the elite class of single-seater auto racing. Along with Indy Car racing, it’s at the pinnacle of motor sports. The “formula” is the set of rules prescribing weight, length, width, and engine capacity (three liters or 3,000 cc.). No two race circuits are the same; they have unique lengths, configurations, and local conditions.

The filming got off to a rocky start. The drivers were skeptical at first, and no wonder: we crowded into the pits with our cameras and lights, ate into their practice time, and were a hazard on the track. Most of all, I think they doubted whether we cared enough to get it right.

Ferrari refused to allow its cars or even its name to be used in the movie at a time when Ferrari was synonymous with Grand Prix racing. There was no way to make the film without their cooperation, so Frankenheimer cut together an hour’s worth of footage, took it to the factory in Maranello, and screened it for Enzo Ferrari, the former racing driver who manufactured the fastest sports cars in the world and founded the Ferrari Grand Prix team. He immediately gave his blessing. After that, the drivers came around, too. I guess they needed to know we were on their side and wanted to give a true picture of their sport.

I
f I hadn’t been an actor, I’d like to have been a race driver. I’ve always admired them because what they do takes so much courage and skill. I was especially in awe of the Grand Prix drivers. It was an honor to be on the same track, and those guys went out of their way to help me. They pointed out the correct line through corners, briefed me on what to do in a spinout, and generally showed me the ropes. Between shots, we did some impromptu racing. We’d do a choreographed shot with five or six cars passing and jockeying, and when we cut we’d all turn around and race back. Fuuun!

Frankenheimer put as many Formula One drivers in the movie as possible. Phil Hill, then the only American to have won a world championship, and Graham Hill—I called him “Mr. Smooth”—both played drivers and had a few lines in the picture. Richie Ginther, Jochen Rindt, Jack Brabham, and Bruce McLaren had walk-ons. The legendary, five-time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio came out of retirement to do a cameo and almost caused a riot when he appeared at Monza.

I started driving when I was ten years old, as soon as I was big enough to reach the pedals. I began playing “Ditch ’Em” around Norman not long after my fourteenth birthday, when I got my driver’s license. We’d line up half a dozen cars, and the first guy
would take off and try to lose the rest. Or I’d be cruising around town in my dad’s Ford sedan or my Uncle John’s Chevy and I’d see Jim Paul Dickenson in his mother’s Ford V-8 or Pud Lindsay in the family Packard (with the gear shift
right on the steering column
) and off we’d go. No comments—you’d start driving on the other guy’s bumper and the race was on.

It was during the war and gas was rationed, so we had to steal it. We’d go up to somebody’s car at night with a siphon hose and a five-gallon can. Then we’d chase each other all over the county. It was great fun, with a lot of whoopin’ and hollerin’, but it wasn’t as dangerous as it sounds. Nobody ever got hurt—never even rolled a car, because we were all good drivers. Or so we thought.

Before I went to Europe, I worked for two months in Southern California with Bob Bondurant. Bob was a successful sports car and F1 driver who now has the largest driving school in the world, but I was his first student. I went at it like I’d never driven a car before in my life, because driving a race car is completely different from driving a passenger car on the highway.

Bondurant and I went up to the track at Willow Springs. At first, I sat in the passenger seat and watched him drive. Then we switched places and he coached me. We started slowly and gradually built up speed on each lap until I reached my limit. You have to know your limit, go to the edge of it, and stay there. But I was never afraid of it. We worked four or five days a week and every day I’d drive home on the freeway thinking it was more dangerous than the race track.

I went over to Europe early, and while the other actors attended Jim Russell’s racing school in England, I worked with some of the real F1 drivers who were in the movie. You’d be surprised how fast you can learn when you have teachers like Phil Hill and Richie Ginther. We worked in a two-seater at first, and then I’d drive a single-seater. I learned the tracks in sections, a few hundred yards at a time, and eventually memorized the whole circuit down to each bump and oil spot. I learned there’s a perfect way to drive a course,
and you strive to come as close to that ideal as possible. With
that car
. The car dictates what you can do. Taking an 80-mile-an-hour corner at 80 miles an hour is very satisfying. Not 79, which is too slow, or 81, which will spin you out.

You don’t so much sit in a Formula One car as wear it. The cockpit was so cramped I couldn’t fit, even though I’d lost twenty pounds for the part. They had to raise the roll bar and take the seat out. I sat smack on the frame, on a little piece of leather wrapped around a towel. I’d get quite a jolt when the car bottomed out at 130 mph.

F
rankenheimer was a good director. He’d begun in live television in the 1950s directing episodes of
Playhouse 90
and
Climax!
and went on to direct feature films including
The Manchurian Candidate,
The Birdman of Alcatraz,
and
Seven Days in May
. But he was a bully. If he wanted something, he
made
you do it. No arguments, no compromises, no suggestions, just do it! We got along okay, except for one little set-to when he was picking on somebody in the crew and I had to speak up. After that, everything was fine between us.

I don’t think Frankenheimer knew how to smile, but at least you knew what he wanted. He was trying to make a big movie under tough conditions, and I still don’t know how he managed the logistics of moving two hundred people, thirty race cars, and tons of equipment all over Europe for six months. At every stop, he had to shoot on the fly, regardless of weather or available light, with little or no chance to stage anything or shoot a scene more than once. As a result, it was an expensive movie to shoot: early in the production, we were already over budget and there were rumors the studio was about to pull the plug. On our first day in Monte Carlo I was in the hotel elevator with Frankenheimer and he said, “Well, we’ve got ’em now!”

“Got who?” I said.

“The studio. I have a five-million-dollar budget and I can’t bring in the picture for less than eight million dollars, but MGM is
committed,
so they’ve
got
to let us finish it.”

F
rankenheimer wanted to put viewers in the car and give them a sensation of speed. But he didn’t cheat anything: no rear projection, no process shots, no speeded-up footage. The technology he needed to get the realism had to be invented. Special effects man Milt Rice rigged a motorized, swiveling cockpit for close-ups of spinouts, and devised a tubular catapult charged with compressed nitrogen that was in effect a cannon for Formula One cars. In a split second, it could launch a mock-up car—with or without a dummy in it—from a standstill to 120 mph.

Because Frankenheimer was obsessed with details, the movie is almost a documentary in terms of the racing. Someone called it a “porno film for gearheads,” with tight close-ups of instrument needles, spinning wheels, drive shafts, suspensions, gear changes, heel-toe pedal work. The sound is deafening, with the thundering roar of engines and cars surging off the line. Sound effects editor Gordon Daniel prerecorded a whole library of motor sounds with Phil Hill driving on a straightaway in California. Phil simulated hundreds of gear changes specific to the corners on all the circuits. Gordon then matched them in postproduction to what the drivers were doing on the screen, so aficionados heard the exact sounds they expected at every corner of every track.

Former World Champion Phil Hill drove the camera car, a Ford GT-40, a Le Mans–type racer capable of hitting 200 mph. Some of the camera techniques invented for
Grand Prix
are still in use today, including helicopter shots, some of which were taken from only ten feet above the action. There were complaints about it flying too low, so they backed off for a while . . . then went back to flying low again. How low? The cameraman, John Stephens, would hang out of that
chopper with his feet dangling, and at the end of the day, his pant legs would be green from brushing the trees.

Lionel Lindon was the cinematographer, but Saul Bass directed the second unit and designed the multiscreen montages. The technique first appeared in the 1960s and soon became a cliché, but at the time, it was revolutionary, and all the more striking in Cinerama, a process that doubled or tripled the size of the screen and curved it around the audience. With a high-quality sound system and the advanced cinematography, some viewers actually got motion sickness.

NASA developed special microwave cameras to be mounted on the cars. Johnny Stephens put cameras over wheels, on hoods, in drivers’ laps. Those big, heavy, 70mm cameras—housed in special glass shields to protect the lenses from kicked-up pebbles and rain— were difficult to work with. Mounted on the chassis, they upset the aerodynamics so much that the cars had to be counterweighted. Stevens rigged special remote controls for them and experimented with antivibration mounts. He finally decided to let the camera shake because it looked sexier. Today’s cameras are so tiny they can fit several in the cockpit without bothering the driver, and television viewers are used to seeing what the driver sees from the cockpit. But in those days, Frankenheimer struggled for months trying to shoot from the driver’s point of view until Bell Labs created a camera that could be strapped to a driver’s helmet.