When I was a kid, it wasn’t uncommon for me to come home after school, plop down in front of the TV, and watch cartoons. I favored the Loony Toons stable of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and their wild-eyed cohorts.
By 1980, I was in the 8th grade. And while my love of Bugs Bunny has never diminished, during junior high school, my after school TV habits shifted to reflect my uneven, lurching path towards manhood.
There was the 4:30 movie, which often featured Japanese monsters or Elizabeth Taylor. There were repeats of various sitcoms from the 1960s, sporadically in black and white or color on our 19″ Zenith, which seemed really quite large at the time.
And then came Jim Rockford.
Once I discovered The Rockford Files, I was hooked.
I was already a little familiar with the show, as it was a big hit during my mid-late 1970s childhood. The kick-ass theme song had even ridden the Billboard chart for four months, peaking at #10 and winning a grammy for Best Instrumental in 1975.
The 70s were like that. Sometimes shit came out of no where to kick some ass, and everyone just went along with it. Kick ass TV theme song? Cool, man, let’s get the 45.
I’d seen bits of The Rockford Files here and there during its initial run from 1974 through 1979. However, I didn’t have any real sense of the show other than knowing it was one of the many private eye programs that were popular at the time.
But during many weekday afternoons of my teenage years, I’d settle into the family love seat with the copper colored corduroy cushions that almost matched Jim Rockford’s iconic Pontiac Firebird. And as I set there, a young teen wondering what it meant to be a man, I saw something that made sense in ways I’d never anticipated.
Jim Rockford wasn’t your typical hero. But he wasn’t one some nihilistic anti-hero either. Jim Rockford was . . . well, he was just this guy. And he was trying his best to get by, but it wasn’t easy. He was frequently put upon. Things often didn’t go well, and when they did go well, that usually didn’t last long.
The character of Jim Rockford had a working class background. His father was a retired truck driver. He had served in Korea. He’d also served 5 years in prison after being framed for armed robbery. He carried the stigma of being an “ex-con” even though he’d received a full pardon.
A grown adult, he was definitely not an overly formal “James.” He was just “Jim,” sometimes “Jimmy,” or even “Jimbo” to those who were close to him.
He lived in a parking lot by the beach, by himself, in a modest trailer. He had a cool car, but not much else in the way of luxuries. He always seemed to be short of money.
He often wore a sports coat, particularly when on the job. He was professional, but the opposite of pretentious. He was down to earth.
He had friends, but m
ore often than not they were more trouble than they were worth.
His love life was sporadic. There were no ex-wife or kids, no real prospect of landing any, and that seemed to be just fine.
He never wanted to fight, preferring to rely on his quick wits and fast talking, but he could trade blows when he had to (it was a 1970s P.I. show after all). Sometimes he held his own, but got his ass kicked seemingly just as often.
He was braver than most, but never foolhardy. He was quick to turn tail and flee if the odds were bad. Discretion was the better part of his valor.
He was proud and ethical, yet more than willing and quite adept at bending the rules when he needed to.
He was a grizzled pessimist, but also a softie who could usually be talked into helping someone who needed it, even when he knew it was a bad idea.
He could complain bitterly while still being gracious.
He could be grumpy when things went wrong, which they usually did, and deeply cynical about a world that had so often given him and many another decent sort a bum turn.
But the character of Jim Rockford was also smart, wry, flashed a disarming smile, and had charm to spare.
And he could only have been played by James Garner.
He was born James Baumgartner in Norman, Oklahoma in 1928. His paternal grandfather, who came to Oklahoma Territory for the land rush, was shot to death by the son of a woman he’d been having an affair with. His maternal grandfather was Cherokee.
Baumgartner’s mother died early on in his his Great Depression childhood. His father drank too much and beat the kids.
“My dad worked hard as an upholsterer and carpet layer, but he was a rake and he drank a lot,” Garner later recalled. “He’d come home bombed and make us sing to him or get a whipping.”
The family scattered and reassembled more than once. His father eventually remarried an abusive woman who also took shots at the kids. By age 14, Baumgartner was in and out of school, working jobs in Oklahoma, Texas, and Los Angeles, where his father eventually resettled.
According to the New York Times, young Jim Baumgartner held a string of jobs, including: telephone installer, oilfield roughneck, chauffeur, dishwasher, janitor, lifeguard, grocery clerk, salesman, and gas station attendant.
He eventually returned to Norman to finish high school, where he was a star athlete. Afterwards, like the Rockford character he later played, he was drafted into the army and served in Korea. He was twice injured in action and received two purple hearts.
Baumgartner didn’t have much in the way of formal training when he finally began acting at the age of 25, almost by accident. He was forever nervous in front of the camera during his long career. The lack of training, compared to many of his peers, “keeps me on my toes,” he told Charlie Rose in 2002. “I’ve never been that confident, I don’t have the background in acting.”
He made up for it by relying on his real life experiences.
“When I was 25 when I first started acting, I’d been around the world a little bit. I’d traveled in a lot of different societies. I felt I knew as much as any of these actors who’d been to acting school.”
That commitment to life was evident in the way Garner performed most of his own stunts in the many fight scenes and car chases of The Rockford Files, though he was by then was in his late 40s and early 50
s. And he certainly knew his way around a car. Several times Garner drove in the Baja 1000, the thousand mile of-road race down Meixco’s Baja peninsula. He also drove the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 three times (1975, 1978, and 1985).
James Baumgartner’s first professional acting role was a non-speaking part as a juror in the stage production of The Caine Mutiny, which starred Henry Fonda. It toured the country and ended up on Broadway, but Baumgartner had stage fright and never again worked in theater.
During the late 1950s he launched his career in front of the camera. He dropped the first half of his surname and worked small parts for Warner Brothers.
James Garner’s star turn came in 1957 when he won the leading role in the TV program Maverick. The show gently mocked the Western, which at that time was firmly entrenched as the dominant genre of both television and film.
Instead of wearing the white hat and using righteous violence to tame the frontier, Bret Maverick was a shady hero with a sly grin, and he literally wore a black hat. He didn’t like guns or horses. He was more interested in money and good times than solemnly meting out justice. But despite all his anti-hero stances, Garner’s Bret Maverick was the guy you rooted for because he was smart and funny, his foibles and flaws were human, and his heart was in the right place.
Bret Maverick was the prototype for Jim Rockford.
Maverick ran for three seasons. Concerned that the show was slipping by the end, Garner successfully sued Warner Brothers to get out of his contract. He spent the next decade building a film career.
Garner’s first leading role on the big screen had come in 1958’s Darby’s Rangers, a part he landed after Charlton Heston abandoned the picture in a dispute over money. During the 1960s he emerged as one of Hollywood’s top leading men.
Garner didn’t have conventional range that allowed him to play all sorts of different roles. He wasn’t Albert Finney or Marlon Brando. He didn’t change accents, reconfigure his looks, use The Method, or employ other stagecraft to remake himself for a role. The minute he popped up on the screen, you always knew it was him: the square jawed American with the sparkling eyes, impish smile, and rich baritone.
But Garner had range in the sense that he could he could be serious or lighthearted. He could do comedy or straight drama, perhaps because he blended the two so seamlessly.
Garner took the lead in action films like Grand Prix, Duel at Diablo, or the epic 1963 war film The Great Escape. He also co-starred in a string of successful romantic comedies with the likes of Doris Day and Lee Remick. And he continued to make cheeky satires like Support Your Local Sheriff and Support Your Local Gunfighter.
Garner was often quoted as saying his favorite movie from among the dozens he made was 1964’s The Americanization of Emily. Co-starring Julie Andrews and James Coburn, and featuring a script by Paddy Chayefsky, it’s easy to understand why.
When I stumbled across the The Americanization of Emily back in 2000, I was floored. Challenging conventional notions of the Hollywood hero, Garner pulled off what was almost unthinkable in the midd
le of the Cold War. He starred in a World War II movie as a U.S. Army officer who was an avowed coward and pacifist, and who, instead of coming home to an American sweetheart, ends up taking a British war bride.
Chayefsky’s script was smart, crisp, and challenging. Andrews’ and Garners’ chemistry sizzled. Their delivery of the rat-a-tat-tat dialog was a master’s course on timing. It’s one of the great underrated movies of its era.
Garner and Andrews would reunite 20 years later for another film that also challenged conventional definitions of American manhood. Amid 1980s conservativism and homophobia, they co-starred in Victor/Victoria, a gender-bending, period piece comedy in which Garner’s character falls in love with Andrews’, a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. It was a huge success.
Garner’s ability to develop onscreen chemistry with his leading ladies was uncanny.
In 1985, he co-starred with Sally Field in Murphy’s Romance. Unlike so many aging Hollywood actors, who’d embarrassed themselves at the end of their careers by playing romantic leads with women young enough to be their daughters, Garner managed to deliver a convincing performance at the age of 60. He played Field’s love interest, 20 years her senior. But instead of trying to play young, Garner played the role honestly. It was the story of an older man and a younger woman, a May-December romance between a widower and a divorced, single mother.
The role earned Garner his only Academy Award nomination.
Perhaps the greatest testament to Garner’s chemistry with his leading ladies came in, of all things, a series of television commercials. During the 1970s and 1980s, he worked with actress Mariette Hartley in a series of ads for Polaroid cameras. In the 30 and 60 second spots, they played a charismatic lock horn couple who traded the upper hand as they ribbed each other with good natured teasing. The ads were so convincing that many Americans came to assume the two were actually married. At one point, Hartley started publicly wearing a t-shirt that read I am NOT Mrs. James Garner.
Garner met his actual wife in 1956, and they remained married until his death yesterday at the age of 86.
James Garner’s career was full by any measure. But more importantly, he left a positive mark on American culture. Many of his roles helped redefine American manhood for the better. And this was perhaps best exemplified by The Rockford Files.
Rockford and other Garner characters were manly by a number of mid-century American conventions, to be sure. They were tall, strapping, handsome, and capable of using their fists. But they weren’t thoughtless, violent lunk heads or chest-thumping soldiers. They weren’t silent tough guys who were violent as a matter of course, or moralists who used violence to further a righteous cause.
Jim Rockford, like so many Garner characters, was smart and worldly, and he had the physical and emotional scars to prove it. He avoided starry eyed patriotism. He scoffed at self-importance and righteousness. He was impatient with naiveté. He resisted crusades. He had a healthy dose of healthy skepticism. He made the case that “the greater good” should be closely examined before it was allowed to trump self-preservation. He was a good guy who made no excuse for his foibles. And he showed that being an American man meant you could avoid violence instead of pursuing it. That you could live and let live instead of being moralistic and judgmental. And that listening was more important than giving a speech.
Each episode of The Rockford Files opened with Jim listening. Someone else was always talking, leaving a message on his new-fangled answering machine.
This is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message. I’ll get back to you.
*Beep*
And then came something he probably didn’t want to hear. It was the bad or odd news of the day, or maybe just a symptom of his existential angst.
“Jimmy, it’s Angel. Don’t pay no attention to my other message. You’re out of it. You’re clean, no trouble at all. Just ignore the first message.”
“It’s Laurie at the trailer park. A space opened up. Do you want me to save it or are the cops going to let you stay where you are?”
“Really want Shim in the seventh? C’mon, that nag couldn’t go a mile in the back of a pickup truck. Call me.”
“This is the blood bank. If you don’t have malaria, hepatitis, or TB, we’d like to have a pint of your blood.”
“Jim, it’s Jack. I’m at the airport. I’m going to Tokyo and I want to pay you the $500 I owe you. Catch you next year when I get back.”
“Mr. Rockford? You don’t know me, but I’d like to hire you. Could you call me at . . . my name is, uh, never mind. Forget it.”
James Garner didn’t play Hollywood super heroes. He played regular guys like Jim Rockford, who heroically faced up to everyday life with their eyes wide open, and who lost at least as much as they won.
And for a skinny, pimply 14 year old sitting on a corduroy love seat after school, that was a helluva thing to idolize.
