James Garner' enjoyed an outstanding career in the movie industry for over seventy years appearing in more than 50 theatrical films.
His wife, Lois Clarke, was by his side throughout his time in Hollywood proving that love at first sight, is real. Together, the duo raised two beautiful children.
Garner, is best known for his portrayal of the gambler Bret Maverick in the ‘50s Western “Maverick,” as well as Jim Rockford in the ‘70s series “The Rockford Files.”
Before his Hollywood fame, Garner served in the Army during the Korean War. He was wounded in action twice, earning two Purple Hearts.
Early life[]
Garner was born James Scott Bumgarner in 1928 in Denver, Oklahoma (now under Lake Thunderbird near Norman). His parents were German Americans, Weldon Warren Bumgarner,[1] a widower, and Mildred Scott (Meek), who died five years after his birth. His mother was half Cherokee.[2]
His older brothers were Jack Garner, also an actor, and Charles Bumgarner, a school administrator.[3] His family was Methodist.[4] After their mother's death, Garner and his brothers were sent to live with relatives. Garner was reunited with his family in 1934, when Weldon remarried.[5]
Garner's father remarried several times.[6]
Image from the Children's Hour trailer
With Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine in The Children's Hour
Garner had a volatile relationship with one of his stepmothers, Wilma, nicknamed 'Red' who beat all three boys. He said that his stepmother also punished him by forcing him to wear a dress in public. When he was 14 years old, he fought with her, knocking her down and choking her to keep her from retaliating against him physically. She left the family and never returned.[7]
His brother Jack later commented, "She was a damn no-good woman".[8] Garner's last stepmother was Grace, whom he said he loved and called "Mama Grace", and he felt that she was more of a mother to him than anyone else had been.[9]
Shortly after Garner's father's marriage to Wilma broke up, his father moved to Los Angeles, leaving Garner and his brothers in Norman. After working at several jobs he disliked, Garner joined the United States Merchant Marine at age 16 near the end of World War II. He liked the work and his shipmates, but he had chronic seasickness.[10]
After World War II, Garner joined his father in Los Angeles and was enrolled at Hollywood High School, where he was voted the most popular student. A high school gym teacher recommended him for a job modeling Jantzen bathing suits.[11] It paid well ($25 an hour) but, in his first interview for the Archives of American Television,[12] he said he hated modeling. He soon quit and returned to Norman.
There he played football and basketball at Norman High School and competed on the track and golf teams.[13] However, he dropped out in his senior year. In a 1976 Good Housekeeping magazine interview, he admitted, "I was a terrible student and I never actually graduated from high school, but I got my diploma in the Army."[14]
Military service[]
Garner enlisted in the California Army National Guard, serving his first 7 months in California. Then, during the Korean War, he went to Korea for 14 months as a rifleman in the 5th Regimental Combat Team, then part of the 24th Infantry Division. He was wounded twice: first in the face and hand by shrapnel from a mortar round, and second in the buttocks from friendly fire from U.S. fighter jets as he dove into a foxhole.
Garner received the Purple Heart in Korea for the first wound. He qualified for a second Purple Heart (eligibility requirement: "As the result of friendly fire while actively engaging the enemy"), but he did not actually receive it until 1983, 32 years after the event.[15]
Maverick TV Show (1957–1960)[]
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Bret Maverick (James Garner)
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James Garner & Louise Fletcher (Maverick, 1959)
After several feature film roles, including Sayonara (1957) with Marlon Brando, Garner got his big break playing the role of professional gambler Bret Maverick in the Western series Maverick from 1957 to 1960. The series was created by Roy Huggins.
This series is of importance to our wiki because producers Roy Huggins and Stephen J. Cannell devised the Rockford character to be as engaging and charismatic as Maverick.
Bret Maverick is an adroitly articulate poker player plying his trade on riverboats and in saloons while traveling incessantly through the 19th-century American frontier.
Garner was the lone star of Maverick for the first seven episodes but production demands forced the studio, Warner Bros., to create a Maverick brother, Bart (played by Jack Kelly).
Garner eventually quit the series in its third season.[16] The studio attempted to replace Garner's character with a Maverick cousin who had lived in Britain long enough to gain an English accent, featuring Roger Moore as Beau Maverick, but Moore left the series after filming only 14 episodes.
Warner Bros. had also hired Robert Colbert, a Garner look-alike, to play a third Maverick brother named Brent Maverick. Colbert only appeared in two episodes toward the end of the season. That left the rest of the series' run to Kelly, alternating with reruns of episodes with Garner during the fifth season. Garner still received billing during the opening series credits for these newly produced Kelly episodes, aired in the 1961–1962 season, although he did not appear in them and had left the series two years previously. The studio did, however, reverse the billing, at the beginning of each show and in advertisements during the fifth season, billing Kelly above Garner.
Garner did make one fourth-season Maverick appearance, in an episode titled "The Maverick Line" starring both Garner and Jack Kelly that had been filmed in the third season but held back to run as the season's first episode if Garner lost his lawsuit against Warner Bros. Garner won in court, left the series, and the episode was run in the middle of the season instead.
The show ran for five seasons from September 22, 1957, to July 8, 1962, on ABC.
After his departure, Garner played the lead role in Darby's Rangers a 1958 film. Following Garner's success in Maverick and Darby's Rangers, Warner Bros. gave Garner two more major theatrical films to be filmed during breaks in his "Maverick" shooting schedule. These were Up Periscope (1959) with Edmond O'Brien and the romantic drama Cash McCall (1960) with Natalie Wood.[17]
Spin-offs and crossovers[]
In the decades following the cancellation of Maverick, the characters and situations have been revived several times.
The New Maverick (1978)
The New Maverick is a 1978 TV movie with James Garner and Jack Kelly reprising their roles, and Charles Frank playing young Ben Maverick, the son of their cousin Beau (Roger Moore, although Moore did not appear in The New Maverick). Garner shot the film while on hiatus from The Rockford Files.
Young Maverick (1979)
The New Maverick was the pilot for a new series, Young Maverick, which ran for a short time in 1979. Charles Frank's character, Ben Maverick, was the focal point of the show, while Garner only appeared as Bret for a few moments at the beginning of the first episode. The series ended so quickly that some episodes that had already been filmed were never broadcast in the United States.
Bret Maverick (1981)
Two years later, Garner left The Rockford Files and began looking at possibilities for another series. Bret Maverick (1981–82) stars the 53-year-old as an older-but-no-wiser Bret, originally seen in the earlier series at age 29. The new series involves Bret Maverick settling down in a small town in Arizona after winning a saloon in a poker game; a large new supporting cast was introduced to take some of the burden off Garner, who had been in almost every scene of most of his original Maverick episodes as well as The Rockford Files. The two-hour pilot episode was reedited as the TV movie Bret Maverick: The Lazy Ace and the series' only two-part episode was later marketed as a TV movie titled Bret Maverick: Faith, Hope and Clarity. Bret Maverick ends on a sentimental note, with Bret and Bart embracing during an unexpected encounter, with the theme from the original series playing in the background.
In February 2005, he received the Screen Actors Guild's Lifetime Achievement Award and also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In his hometown of Norman, Oklahoma, stands a 10-foot bronze statue of Garner as Bret Maverick.
Personal life[]
Marriage and family[]
Lois, Kim, Garner and Gigi (clockwise), 1959
Garner, Gigi, Kim and Lois (l.to r.), 1961
In 1956,a few days after first crossing paths at a mutual friend's barbecue Garner formerly met his future wife Lois Josephine Fleischman Clarke.[18]
In his biography,[19] Garner says that he was at the poolside when he noticed a young and beautiful Clarke sitting by the pool and watching him. Garner confessed that it was love at first sight. They married 14 days later on August 17, 1956. "We went to dinner every night for 14 nights. I was just absolutely nuts about her. I spent $77 on our honeymoon, and it about broke me."[20] According to Garner, "Marriage is like the Army; everyone complains, but you'd be surprised at the large number of people who re-enlist."[21] His wife practiced Judaism.[22] For this reason, Garner's family disliked the couple's relationship.[23]
When Garner and Clarke married, her daughter Kim from a previous marriage was seven years old and recovering from polio.[24] Garner had one daughter with Lois, Greta "Gigi" Garner, who was born on January 4, 1958. Gigi became a published author, songwriter, philanthropist and artist.[25]
They had two separations, the first for three months in 1970. This was the result of a decade-long struggle resulting from Garner's quick rise to fame, his family's refusal to accept their union, and Clarke's ailing daughter. The second was nine years later. Garner stated that during this second period apart, he split his time between Canada and "a rented house in the Valley." In each case, Garner said the separations were caused by the stress of his acting career, and were not due to marital problems. In the case of The Rockford Files, he was in almost every scene, in constant pain due to his arthritic knees, and was under tremendous stress from the studio.[26] He stated when he quit the series in 1979 he simply needed to spend time alone in order to recover from the stress.[27] In 1981, after 18 months of being away from each other, Garner and Clarke sorted out their differences and reconciled. Afterward, the couple made efforts toward making their marriage and family work.[28]
Garner's death in 2014 was less than a month before their 58th wedding anniversary. He was 86. His wife died seven years later, on October 30, 2021.
Unlike many actors, Garner is remembered fondly by his daughters.
Garner adopted Clarke’s daughter, Kimberly. Garner did his best to show love to Kimberly because of his troubled childhood. Sadly, his efforts to connect with the little girl were slow going.
Gigi, who was Garner’s biological daughter with Clarke, talks about her dad fondly: "People that had abusive childhoods like my dad often continue the cycle. My dad stopped the cycle and tried to give us everything he never had."
Gigi also added that her actor dad was different than most of those in Hollywood in that, "he was happy being home with us, watching sports, and hanging with the dogs."[29] She also added that her dad was nothing like the characters he portrayed on his hit television shows. “The truth about my dad is that people think he’s like he was on TV, but there were many sides to his personality,” she explained. “He was funny and jovial; in fact, the funniest person I ever knew, so witty and so quick. At the same time, he was shy and introverted in some respects.”
Concerning acting and Hollywood, she said that “he had a very different mindset and went about things, even in the industry, much differently than other people did.” “He had a core sense of moral values ... He was truly an exemplary human being. He marched on Washington with Martin Luther King ... He sued a major studio while being threatened, ‘You’ll never work in this town again.’ Over ‘Maverick,’ of course. He won that lawsuit. He also sued over ‘Rockford.’ My dad was very convinced in his beliefs and if he believed he was in the right, he was going to stand up for that.”[30]
Gigi also shared that her dad never took his success in Hollywood for granted.
According to the New York Times, Garner detailed the importance of putting aside one’s ego in his memoir “The Garner Files.”
“I’m from the Spencer Tracy school: Be on time, know your words, hit your marks and tell the truth,” he wrote. “I don’t have any theories about acting, and I don’t think about how to do it, except that an actor shouldn’t take himself too seriously, and shouldn’t try to make acting something it isn’t. Acting is just common sense. It isn’t hard if you put yourself aside and just do what the writer wrote.” Garner even told the New York Times in 1984 that acting is like any other job.
“I was never really enamored of the business, never even wanted to be an actor, really,” he admitted.
“It’s always been a means to an end, which is to make a living.”
Looking back on her dad, she said that “I don’t look at my dad as some TV star or movie star,” she said. “I look at him as, ‘Oh, it’s my dad.’ Just like you would look at your dad. But I do realize that I’m very lucky that I do get to see him any time I want to because he’s immortalized on film and TV. A lot of people don’t have the privilege.”
Health problems[]
Garner's knees became a chronic problem during the filming of The Rockford Files in the 1970s, with "six or seven knee operations during that time." In 2000, he underwent knee replacement surgery for both knees.[31]
On April 22, 1988, Garner had quintuple bypass heart surgery.[32] Though he recovered rapidly, he was advised to stop smoking. Garner quit smoking 17 years later.[33]
Garner underwent surgery on May 11, 2008, following a severe stroke he had suffered two days earlier.[34] His prognosis was reported to be "very positive".[35]
Garner was a private and introverted man, according to family and friends.[36]
Death[]
On July 19, 2014, police and rescue personnel were summoned to Garner's Brentwood, Los Angeles home, where they found the actor dead at the age of 86.[37] He had been in poor health since his stroke in 2008.[38]
Longtime friends Tom Selleck (who worked with Garner on The Rockford Files), Sally Field (who starred with Garner in Murphy's Romance) and Clint Eastwood (who guest-starred with Garner on Maverick and starred in Space Cowboys) reflected on his death. Selleck said, "Jim was a mentor to me and a friend, and I will miss him."[39] Field said, "My heart just broke. There are few people on this planet I have adored as much as Jimmy Garner. I cherish every moment I spent with him and relive them over and over in my head. He was a diamond."[40] Eastwood said, "Garner opened the door for people like Steve McQueen and myself."[41]
References[]
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