The Garner Files: A Memoir (8 page)

Though my acting still wasn’t very good, my next assignment was my first role of any consequence, and my first serious film.

S
ayonara
is the story of American servicemen in Japan who break the taboo against fraternizing with Japanese women. Based on James Michener’s novel, it’s a love story that also deals with racism.

Warner Bros. originally wanted Marlon Brando and Audrey Hepburn to play the leads, but they didn’t have the budget for two big stars, so it came down to a choice between Brando and an unknown Japanese girl, or Audrey Hepburn and a newcomer in the Brando role. I figured I had a chance at the lead if they went with Audrey, but they decided on Marlon and a beautiful young actress named Miiko Taka.

Still a lowly contract player at Warner Bros., I was assigned to do screen tests with all the actors they were considering for the part of Marlon’s buddy. The list included David Janssen, Robert Sterling, and Gary Merrill. When I heard they’d decided on a young actor named John Smith for the role, I asked to see the director, Joshua Logan, and the producer, Bill Goetz.

“Look,” I said, “you’ve already got me, I’m a lot cheaper, and I think I’m better for the part.”

And by golly, they hired me.

It’s the only part I’ve ever gone after. (Okay, maybe I stole it.)

We shot
Sayonara
in Japan, in beautiful locations like the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, with its magnificent rock gardens and cherry trees. The movie showed tea ceremonies and traditional dances, and I think
the portrayal of Japanese culture a decade after the end of World War II helped increase understanding between former enemies.

Marlon and I hit it off from the start. We gave each other the right of way, maybe because we had something in common: we were both rebels.

Marlon plays Major Lloyd Gruver, an Air Force ace and West Point graduate who risks a promising career when he takes up with a Japanese entertainer. I play Marlon’s sidekick, Captain Mike Bailey, a Marine pilot.

The first scene we shot was in the back of a taxicab, and I couldn’t help thinking about another taxi scene, Marlon’s famous one with Rod Steiger in
On the Waterfront
. I knew I was no Rod Steiger.

I was so tense my palms were dripping wet, and Marlon noticed it.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I’m so nervous I can’t see straight. I’ve never done a first-class picture before.”

Marlon immediately put me at ease. He took me aside and said, “If you have any problems, just let me know and we’ll work ’em out.”

That calmed me down. From then on, we worked well together.

Marlon had the reputation of being “difficult,” but it wasn’t with fellow actors, just producers and directors. For one thing, he liked to rewrite dialogue. For another, as Major Gruver he affected a Southern accent, which wasn’t in the script.

Marlon was unhappy because he didn’t feel Josh Logan was giving him any direction. He’d say to Josh, “Why don’t you direct me?” and Josh would say, “Marlon, if you do anything I don’t like I’ll tell you.” I think Marlon wanted a confrontation, but Josh was so agreeable, it was like pushing on a rope. That frustrated Marlon even more and he complained to me about it.

“Why are you doing this picture?” I asked.

“For the money.”

“Okay, then, do it for the money, but don’t give the director a heart attack!”

Josh didn’t give me a lot of direction either, probably because Marlon became my personal coach. We’d go out to a rice paddy and “improve” the scenes. Then the two of us would rehearse and rehearse. I thought,
Josh is gonna kill me for this,
but when we showed him our stuff he usually liked it and wound up using it. But not because Josh was a pushover. When he made
Sayonara
, he was already a veteran stage and screen director, with film credits that included
Bus Stop
and
Picnic,
and he’d won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama as coauthor of the Broadway musical
South Pacific
. Josh had been around the block, and he was smart enough to stay out of Marlon’s way.

Marlon Brando was the best movie actor we’ve ever had. I know that’s not exactly going out on a limb, but I just want to be on record with all the other actors who feel the same way. He could make you forget he was the great Brando and you’d just see the character. Not many actors can do that. For what it’s worth, I think he could have been even greater if he had chosen his material more carefully. But I never saw him do a bad job. Marlon was in a lot of bad movies, but he was always interesting.

Sayonara
earned a bunch of Oscar nominations and wound up with several statuettes, including one each for supporting actors Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki. Though my role as Marlon’s buddy wasn’t outstanding, it was a big learning experience and a definite career boost. You’re bound to get a little of it on you when you’re in a film like that.

T
he studio bosses were absolute monarchs. Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Harry “Genghis” Cohn, and Warner Bros. head of production Jack L. Warner—the Hollywood “moguls”—didn’t like back talk from mere actors.

J.L., or “the colonel,” as his subordinates called him—he’d wangled a commission in the Signal Corps during World War II— was the youngest of four brothers who’d immigrated to the United
States from Poland in around 1900. They were movie exhibitors, then distributors, and by World War I they’d opened a studio, Warner Bros., Inc., which introduced sound to the movies with
The Jazz Singer
in 1927 and made low-budget, socially conscious features in the 1930s and ’40s.

Jack Warner treated everybody the same: lousy. He didn’t spare his wife, his son, or his mistress. He hated writers ( “schmucks with Underwoods,” he called them), he hated actors, and he was cruel to his employees. According to Warner’s own son, if Jack’s brothers hadn’t hired him, he’d have been out of work.

Someone once said in Warner’s defense that he “bore no grudge against those he had wronged.” But that wasn’t true in my case, because Jack Warner hated me. Maybe it was because I said in a
Time
magazine interview that being under contract to Warner Bros. was like being a ham in a smokehouse: whenever they wanted some, they’d take it off the hook, slice off a few pieces, then hang it back on the hook. Word got back to me that the colonel didn’t like that.

Warner was rude and crude—the most vulgar man I’ve ever met. He had terrible taste in most things and a filthy mouth. The first time Lois and I went to the Oscars, we sat at his table and listened to him tell one dirty joke after another. He actually thought they were funny. We got up and moved to another table. I told Bill Orr: “Don’t you ever . . . don’t you
ever
get me invited anywhere where he’s going to be.” Well, you don’t say that about the boss.

Warner seemed to enjoy embarrassing himself and everybody in the room. When Madame Chiang Kai-Shek came to the United States on a fund-raising tour for China during World War II, she visited the Warner Bros. lot, where a dinner was given in her honor. After she delivered a gracious speech thanking her American allies for their continuing support and praising Warner Bros. for their contributions to the war effort, Jack Warner got up, waited for the applause to die down, looked at Madame Chiang, and said, “Holy cow, that reminds me, I forgot to pick up my laundry!”

I think Warner was scared of me. I mean
physically
. Whenever we were together, I’d catch him watching me out of the corner of his eye, as if he were afraid I’d pick him up and throw him out of a window, maybe because Errol Flynn had once threatened to do just that, and Warner thought I was the same kind of guy. I was careful not to dispel that notion, but I would never have laid a hand on him. A few years after I left Warner Bros., we were both at some premiere, and the minute he saw me he had his bodyguards circle around him as if he were in mortal danger.

Warner hated agents, especially Lew Wasserman and Jules Stein of MCA, who’d made a deal for client Charlton Heston to star in a Warner Bros. combat movie. While Heston was preparing for the role, Warner discovered that the contract gave the actor 10 percent of the movie’s gross. He went ballistic and tore up the contract. Meanwhile, the studio ordered Heston to report for the start of production. When he refused on the advice of his agents, Warner Bros. declared him in breach of contract and lawsuits were filed.

Questioned by MCA’s lawyer in a deposition, Warner ticked off his objections to the contract the agency had negotiated, and then blurted out: “Aw, those fucking actors deserve anything bad that happens to them anyway.” The MCA attorney smiled and said, “Thank you, Mr. Warner, that’s all we need from you.” Heston got a big settlement.

At 5:30 on the same afternoon that Chuck Heston failed to report for the start of
Darby’s Rangers,
I was called up to the Warner executive offices. They said they wanted to reward me for being such a great guy and offered to raise my salary to $350 a week and give me a two-year extension on my contract. I wasn’t sure what they were up to, but I knew it was something, so I said no. Then they upped the offer to $500 a week. With Kim recovering from polio and Lois pregnant with Gigi, I took it. I didn’t know that the $500 was really $285; the rest was withheld as an “advance against residuals” that I’d never see because actors didn’t get residuals in those days.

On the following Monday morning, I learned I was to replace Heston as the lead in
Darby’s Rangers.
It would be my first starring role in a feature, and they were getting me for $500 a week. They’d have had to pay anyone else many times that to star in the picture.

E
arly in 1957, as soon as I’d finished my work on
Sayonara
in Japan, Warner Bros. called me back to Hollywood to test for a new Western series. They’d looked at just about every actor in Hollywood to play a gambler wandering the frontier in the 1870s, but they picked me, probably because they saw the
Sayonara
dailies and figured, Hey— we’ve already got this guy under contract, we might as well save money. That’s how they “discovered” me to play Bret Maverick. I wasn’t happy about it. I wanted to make movies, not a TV Western. But I didn’t have a choice.

Jack Warner had a firm policy against using original stories because he didn’t want to pay a $500-per-episode “created by” royalty to a writer. He decreed that, whenever possible, scripts should be adapted from properties already owned by the studio. If the odd pilot was based on an original script, Warner would screen it once or twice in a movie theater in Bermuda or somewhere to establish technically that the series came from a Warner Bros. “film.”

Maverick
’s pilot, “The War of the Silver Kings,” was adapted from the book
The War of the Copper Kings,
which the studio had previously purchased. For another episode, they recycled an old Warner Bros. feature called
Rocky Mountain
starring Errol Flynn. They used stock footage from the movie, and our clothes had to match, so I wore Flynn’s actual hat and vest. The rest of Maverick’s costume was a conglomeration of stuff they had lying around in the wardrobe department: Monty Woolley’s shirt from
The Man Who Came to Dinner,
Gary Cooper’s coat from
Saratoga Trunk
. I even had to ride a certain horse. This was standard operating procedure at Warners in those days. People used to say that if there were ever
more than two characters in a Warner Bros. TV show, it was stock footage.

In August 1957, on the strength of the pilot, ABC sold
Maverick
to the Kaiser Steel Company—in those days there was one sponsor for a whole show—for $6 million for fifty-two episodes, thirteen of them reruns. We had to deliver thirty-nine episodes the first season, giving us only a month to build up a backlog of shows before the series went on the air.

Henry J. Kaiser was an American industrialist who’d made his name and fortune building “Liberty” ships during World War II. He was a tough executive who figured out how to turn out a prefab cargo vessel in six days, which was a big boost to the Allied war effort. By the mid-1950s, his empire also included a steel and aluminum company based in Oakland, California. He wanted to go national, so he asked ABC for a suitable television show. ABC pitched
Maverick.

Kaiser’s friend, the TV host Art Linkletter, advised him not to buy it because, Linkletter said, there were already too many Westerns on the air. He predicted
Maverick
would “die like a dog” in the first season. Kaiser went ahead anyway, maybe because he saw a bit of himself in Bret Maverick. And I was told he liked the way I handled the character.

The
Maverick
pilot aired on September 22, 1957. After a few more episodes, the director Budd Boetticher and I started to play around with the scripts, injecting a little humor here and there. Soon Roy Huggins caught on. By the fourth episode, Roy was writing for it, and things got a lot more amusing.

One of the other
Maverick
writers, Marion Hargrove, liked to put little digs in the stage directions like, “Maverick looks as if he has lost his place in the script,” or “Maverick looks at him with his beady little eyes.” When someone told him you can’t refer to the star as “beady-eyed,” Marion said, “Leave it in. I know Garner, and believe me, he’s beady-eyed.”

By the tenth week, we were the top-rated show on television and were changing America’s viewing habits. Before
Maverick,
when
people went out to dinner on Sunday night, they made sure they were home by eight o’clock to watch Ed Sullivan or Steve Allen.
Maverick
came on at 7:30, so everybody had to get home a half hour earlier.

The show put the word “maverick” into the language. A “maverick” is “a refractory or recalcitrant individual who bolts from his party and initiates an independent course,” according to
The Western Dictionary.
The word goes back to a Texas cattleman who didn’t brand his calves. When they’d wander onto someone else’s ranch, people started calling them “mavericks.” In one of the shows, we defined a maverick as “a calf who’s lost his mother, and his father has run off with another cow.” I’ve always thought of it as a sort of freewheeling slick. In 1980, the name was used for a new NBA franchise—the Dallas Mavericks—and it’s the name of a chain of convenience stores in the Southwest, though they spell it “Maverik.”