The Garner Files

I saw a reference to James Garner's autobiography when reading about They Only Kill Their Masters. He ranked his films and gave it two stars. He didn't want to talk about the film otherwise. So mysterious!

The book is overall pretty good. He wrote it with someone a few years before his death.

I can do without chapters on golf and racing, but they are two of his passions. An "outtakes" section provides various stories from family, friends, and others. He talks about his childhood without talking much about his wife and daughters (very little, though they pop up in the outtakes section).  

Garner (originally Bumgarner) references that his cousin once told him that his mother died from complications of an abortion. She was twenty-six and had three young boys in Depression Era Oklahoma. 

(It was just referenced in a discussion about his childhood. He later says he supports abortion rights and is a strong Democrat.) 

Julia Sweeney, in an otherwise light-hearted book on parenthood, talked about how her mother-in-law got an illegal abortion in the 1960s. Sweeney did some good long-form monologues, including her first, "God Said, Ha!" A later one was basically "God? Ha!"

You can hear Garner's telltale voice while reading the book. His characters often had much of him in them. He did not train to be an actor. He got work early on because he had a movie star look. Garner got married in around two weeks. It worked for him -- they stayed together for nearly sixty years.  

I was not a big fan of his private eye television show, though I know people who liked it. I wanted to check out Maverick, his 1950s show, and saw it was on. It turns out to have been a late episode with Roger Moore, who replaced him! 

I like James Garner overall as an actor, including in Murphy's Romance. I did not see that many of his movies. I checked out the first of his Western spoofs. Didn't much care for it. His one-season television show, Nichols, was playing on one of the retro stations. Think he would appreciate that. 

(I agree with him that The Notebook is very good.) 

I had difficulty finding a good book lately. The latest by Erik Loomis (Organizing America) with twenty thumbnail biographies was pretty interesting. 

This one was a good, easy read, though again was not really interested in forty pages about golf and racing. And would have liked to read a bit more about his daughters. Overall, he had a good no-nonsense philosophy mixed with empathy. Good values. 

He gives some opinions, good and bad, about some actors and other people he knew. Nothing too terrible, but he does criticize a few celebrities. 

Garner also said that he was a long-term user of marijuana, finding it helpful for medicinal purposes. If anything, alcohol was more dangerous in his experience.  He tried cocaine via Jim Belushi but didn't care for it.  Not too many big reveals overall.