The Garner Files: A Memoir (7 page)

After living off the Winston money for a year, I was about broke and wondering if I’d have to go back to carpet-laying when I was offered the part of Maryk in a touring company of
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.
A previous road company had been a disaster because Paul Douglas, who played Queeg, gave an interview in Alabama. Douglas told the reporter he hated the South because it was “full of sorghum, sow bellies, and segregation.” There were $30,000 worth of cancellations in about a week and they had to call off the tour.

They eventually put a new company together with Charles Laughton directing. Though I was still prone to stage fright, I jumped at the chance to work with the great English actor who’d created such unforgettable roles as Captain Bligh in
Mutiny on the Bounty
and Quasimodo in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

One morning when we were still in rehearsals, Laughton said, “James, I’d like you to come up to the house and lunch with me.”

I was
sure
he was going to can me, because I knew I wasn’t very good.

After lunch he said, “James, do you know what your problem is?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“You’re afraid to be bad, and therefore you don’t do anything.
You stay in the middle of the road. You’re not dull, but you aren’t interesting, either.”

It shook me to the core, but I knew he was right. I didn’t care if the audience
liked
me, I just didn’t want them to
dislike
me, and so I underplayed everything. I didn’t want to do anything that might alienate them. As a result, I was mediocre.

Laughton said, “Don’t worry about the audience. Just go out there and take the risk of being bad! I’ll rein you in when necessary.”

I suppose that applies to life, too: You have to take the risk. You may fail, but at least you’ve given it your best shot.

Laughton’s advice helped me relax. Ever since then I just stick my neck out and let the director chop it off if he wants to. It also made me realize that if I wanted to be more than just another big ox standing there going “Duh,” I’d have to distinguish myself somehow. I began to think I might be able to do it with humor.

I played Maryk in the road company for four months as we toured Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. But I knew I wasn’t cut out for the theater. It was great experience, but it finally dawned on me that if I were going to succeed as an actor, it would have to be on the screen. I recalled some advice I’d gotten from a friend in the
Caine Mutiny
cast, a fine actor named John Crawford.

John was staying at the stage manager’s apartment while he was out of town. I asked if I could stay there, too, because I wanted to cut off the rent at the Belvedere Hotel. Late one night we were talking about what we wanted to do. John had already worked in films, and he said, “Jim, when you start making movies, learn what the camera can and cannot do, because that’s your audience, that’s your proscenium stage, the one you’re playing to.”

Then he gave me some “exercises.”

“Jim, after lunch, don’t sit around and bullshit with the crew,” he said. “Go back to the set by yourself. They’ll have the camera set up for the next shot. Pull up a chair and face the monster. Get about a foot away. Take a deep breath and look at that thing. There’ll be a
screw on the left and a screw on the right. Those are the ‘eyes.’ Look from one eye to the other as you say, ‘I’m gonna kill you, you sonofabitch!’ Do it again. And again. And again.”

It made perfect sense. The camera isn’t an object—it’s a person. The most important person on the set.

“Now the camera is a woman,” he said, “and you’re trying to get her in bed. Look all over her face, but don’t say anything, just think. Film is in the eyes. On a movie screen, your head is twenty feet high. If there’s anything going on, the audience will see it.
Go make friends with the camera
.”

So I did.

I learned everything I could about what the camera does, including the technical stuff, and I got to the point where I
could
play love scenes to the monster.

I also lowered my voice and worked to get rid of my Oklahoma accent.

I was beginning to think of myself as an actor.

B
y the end of 1955, I was back in Los Angeles, looking for work. I’d make the rounds of the studios during the day and drink beer at night with another struggling actor, Clint Eastwood. We’d talk about our plans for the future and what we wanted to do in the business.

In the mid-1950s, television was eating into movie ticket sales and the movie studios were losing money. Warner Bros. in particular was strapped for cash, so Harry and Albert Warner sold their shares to a banker named Serge Semenenko, who, against Jack Warner’s wishes, steered the company into television production. Within a few years, Warner Bros. TV shows would be so profitable that Jack Warner bought back Semenenko’s shares and wound up owning the whole studio himself.

Jack Warner tapped William T. Orr to head the TV division, not because of any great talent, but because Bill Orr was his son-in-law. A former actor, Orr was married to Warner’s stepdaughter, Joy Page. (“The son-in-law also rises,” some wag said.) It was comic at times: Orr and his two assistants would ride their little bicycles around the lot. Bill would be in front, then the first assistant, then the second. Nobody was
allowed to pass anybody. It was like, “I’m the king!” If one of the assistants wanted to talk, he could pull up alongside Orr for a minute, but couldn’t pass him. It was that kind of childish stuff.

Orr didn’t want to pay for established talent for the new shows, so he had the producer-director Richard Bare scout around for unknowns who’d work cheap. One night I was in a bar with Robert Lowery, another out-of-work actor, when Dick Bare came in. Bob introduced me to Dick and we all had a drink. Dick mentioned he’d been looking for someone to star in
Cheyenne,
Warners’ first Western series, but hadn’t found the right guy. We talked a while longer and went our separate ways.

The next day it occurred to Dick Bare that the guy he’d met in the bar might be right for the
Cheyenne
lead, so he called Bob Lowery to track me down. Bob gave him my name but didn’t know how to reach me, so all Dick could do was leave a message for me at the bar. I didn’t go in there again until about a week later. I called Dick as soon as I got his message.

“If you can get to the studio right away, I may have a job for you.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes!”

Next thing I knew I was auditioning for Bare and Bill Orr. They’d already given the
Cheyenne
starring role to Clint Walker, but there was still one part left to cast. They were desperate because the company was going on location the next morning to begin filming the first episode. I’m sure that’s why I got the part. It couldn’t have been my acting.

I played a smart aleck Union Army officer I thought of as “the irate lieutenant.” Just a couple of scenes. Over the next few months, I hung around Warners and did half a dozen small TV parts. One day somebody from the front office called and said they wanted to give me a screen test.

“What for? I’ve just done a bunch of jobs for you. If you can’t tell by now, what good is a screen test?”

“Well, we like to test.”

I didn’t want to do it, but I finally said, “Okay, but you only get two weeks to make up your mind.” They wanted a month, but I told them I might lose a job waiting, so they agreed to two weeks. I think they tested fourteen people in one day, including Dennis Hopper and Michael Landon. I told them, “Whatever you do about me, you ought to hire that Michael Landon. The kid’s good.”

Two weeks came and went and they asked for another week to make up their minds.

“Forget it,” I said. “I didn’t want to be under contract anyway.”

Well, they picked me up that day. I was the only one of the fourteen they tested who got a contract.

I
fell in love for the first and last time on August 1, 1956, at an Adlai Stevenson-for-President rally.

Stevenson lost.

I won.

That’s where I met Lois Clarke.

It was love at first sight. The “thunderbolt.” She was as beautiful as she was sweet. She reminded me of Audrey Hepburn, only full bodied, like Sophia Loren. And she was obviously a good Democrat. I was nuts about her from the moment we met.

Still am.

It was a barbecue and I ended up in the pool with the children. That’s how I got to talk to Lois. It wasn’t any strategy, it’s just what happened. She was very nice. Within the first few minutes she told me she had a daughter from her first marriage, Kimberly, who had polio.

Lois and I saw each other every day—sometimes twice a day— until August 17, when we were married in the Beverly Hills courthouse.

My family was against the marriage. They pointed out that Lois and I had little in common. I was six feet three inches tall and Lois
was petite; I was the outdoor, athletic type and she was the indoor type. I was practical and pragmatic, she was a dreamer. I was from a small town in Oklahoma, Lois had lived in LA all her life. The biggest objection was the difference in religion: I’m a Methodist, Lois is Jewish. But neither of us was ever what you’d call religious, so it wasn’t an issue, at least not for Lois and me.

None of the naysayers had stopped to consider that Lois and I complemented each other. What they saw as weaknesses, we saw as strengths. Lois had what I lacked and vice versa.

Our honeymoon consisted of two days and one night at the La Jollan, an old hotel (a “dump,” according to Lois) near San Diego. It was all we could afford on my contract player’s salary. We didn’t have the bridal suite, but a tiny room and bath overlooking the street. Lois now says she had to drag me to the beach during the day and to a play that night, and that I would have been happy just staying in the room, but that’s not how I remember it. As I recall, if she wanted to go, I went . . .
cheerfully
.

B
ack home, we rented a small apartment on Dickens Street in Sherman Oaks. Its only advantages were proximity to the studio and affordable rent. Money was tight: Kim’s condition had required expensive treatments, and the medical bills had piled up.

When I started acting, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I was just stumbling around, hoping to get lucky. Getting married made me serious about my career and about my life. Suddenly I was the breadwinner for a family of three, soon to be four—our daughter Gigi was born a little over a year later. I had to buckle down and support these people. I welcomed the responsibility, but I also felt the weight of it. I think it focused me as an actor and motivated me to try to build a career rather than just drift along as I’d done before.

It wasn’t easy. My signature on the Warner Bros. contract consigned me to the same studio system that Jimmy Cagney and Bette
Davis had rebelled against in the 1930s and ’40s. For openers, the studio changed my name without my permission. I was born James Scott Bumgarner; the studio knocked off the “Bum.” I accepted it because of Kim. Her name was Kimberly Clarke. She was known in school as “Kimberly Clarke,” and “Kimberly Bumgarner,” and “Kim Garner.” That’s confusing for a little girl, so I changed it legally—to make sure she knew who she was.

The contract was harsh. The studio owned you body and soul, and they had no qualms about putting you in a picture that was bad for your career. If you refused the part, they’d suspend you without pay and add the time to your contract. They could also make money “loaning” you out to other studios. Contract actors were indentured servants, like pro ballplayers before free agency.

I had a fifty-two-week deal, which meant they could use me for movies, television, public relations—they could make me sell pencils if they wanted to. They sent me all over the country for personal appearances and cast me in small character parts in several features, beginning with a William Holden vehicle,
Toward the Unknown,
directed by Mervyn LeRoy. When we started shooting, I was scared to death and had no idea what I was doing. I was so green I didn’t even know what a producer was.

LeRoy was known for singling out one actor and picking on him for the whole shoot, and sure enough, he tried to make
me
his whipping boy on the set. He was especially nasty if he hadn’t taken his pills that morning. Well, the first time he pushed me, I shoved right back, and he found somebody else to lord it over.

I got along fine with my fellow actors, including Lloyd Nolan, a pal since
Caine Mutiny Court Martial
. One day on the set, Bill Holden took me aside. “Jim,” he said, “I saw the dailies, and you’re gonna be a big star.” What a generous thing to do. It gave me confidence when I really needed it.

Still a novice, I did small parts in two more features,
The Girl He Left Behind
with Tab Hunter, Natalie Wood, and David Janssen, and
Shoot-out at Medicine Bend,
directed by Dick Bare. It was Randy Scott’s last contract picture for Warners after a long run. The movie couldn’t decide if it was a comedy or a drama, maybe because Bare had gotten his start directing the “Joe McDoakes” comedy shorts in the 1940s. Even the title is off; there’s gunplay, but not one decent shoot-out in the whole picture.