The Garner Files
A Memoir
By James Garner and Jon Winokur
Simon & Schuster 273 pp. $25.99
Reviewed by Jonathan Storm
Tall and handsome, one-quarter Cherokee, with an aw-shucks demeanor that he carried from Oklahoma to Hollywood with little else, James Garner has battled his way through 50 years of movies and two of the all-time great TV shows.
"I just wanted a clean job for decent money," he says in The Garner Files, a memoir written with Jon Winokur, a graduate of Temple University, that harps constantly on his dislike for pretentiousness and, particularly, pretentious actors.
"I don't give a damn about Shakespeare," he writes. "Acting is just common sense." In his epic career, he says, he took a total of two acting lessons - with Warner Bros. acting coach Blair Cutting when he was under contract to the studio.
"All I remember about the whole experience with Blair is if the wind was strong, his hair would blow off."
Though he's mostly a pussycat, Garner's not afraid to say mean things about some of his peers, in show business and in the other two main pursuits he outlines in the book, golf and auto racing.
Bill Murray "is a disgrace." Sam Snead "was a curmudgeon and full of himself," and a cheapskate, to boot. Director John Frankenheimer was a bully. Ronald Reagan, who "never had an original thought," wasn't qualified to be president or even governor of California. Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't qualified to be governor, either. Steve McQueen was "a poser who cultivated the image of a macho man," and Charles Bronson "was a pain in the ass, too."
McQueen and Bronson were costars with Garner in The Great Escape (1963). One of the biggest of Garner's 46 movies, it gets eight pages in the book, two less than Grand Prix (1966), which the race-car enthusiast describes as "the most fun I've ever had, period!" The Americanization of Emily (1964) is his favorite film, in part, he says, because it reflects his antiwar views.
He comes by them through experience. Garner writes that he was the first Oklahoman to be drafted, in 1950, into the Korean War, where he earned a Purple Heart with an oak-leaf cluster fighting with the 5th Regimental Combat Team of the 24th Division. Of the 3,200 RCT troops deployed with him, more than a third were killed, injured, or missing within six weeks.
