The Garner Files: A Memoir by James Garner

rides into town, gets off his horse, and goes into a saloon. The barkeep pours him a shot and the cowboy sits down. He doesn’t have to worry about anything. Nobody wants to know where he came from or what he does. When he ties up his horse, there’s no parking meter on the hitching post. In
Maverick,
there’s always good weather, and you know neither Bret nor Bart will have to worry about where their next meal is coming from. Or where they’re going to sleep. They just get off their horses and lie down.
    By the mid-1950s, there were a lot of “adult Westerns” on television, shows like
Wyatt Earp,
Gunsmoke,
and
Have Gun Will Travel
. They had a more modern point of view than traditional TV shoot-’em-ups like
The Lone Ranger
and
The Cisco Kid,
which were so silly only a kid of ten could stand them. In adult Westerns, the hero didn’t wear a mask and the writers tried to tell stories without using stencils. (Somebody said an adult Western is where the hero still kisses his horse at the end, only now he worries about it.)
Maverick
was the most adult of them all, including the other Warner Bros. Westerns,
Cheyenne
with Clint Walker,
Lawman
(John Russell), and
Sugarfoot
(Will Hutchins).
    Maverick
turned the genre upside down. It wasn’t comedy and it wasn’t satire, it was a Western with humor. Not slapstick,
situation
humor. Tongue-in-cheek. It let the air out of the stalwart TVWestern hero. Maverick was the first hero to wear black. He wasn’t crazy about horses, so his mount was never a character in the show like Trigger and Silver were for Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger.
    Roy Huggins had his own ideas about the
Maverick
phenomenon. He distilled them into a list of instructions:
    The Ten-Point Guide to Happiness While
Writing or Directing a Maverick
    1. Maverick is the original disorganization man.
    2. Maverick’s primary motivation is that ancient and most noble of motives: the profit motive.
    3. Heavies in
Maverick
are always absolutely right, and they are always beloved to someone.
    4. The cliché flourishes in the creative arts because the familiar gives a sense of comfort and security. Writers and directors of
Maverick
are requested to
live dangerously
.
    5. Maverick’s activities are seldom grandiose. To force him into magnificent speculations is to lose sight of his essential indolence.
    6. The
Maverick
series is a regeneration story in which the regeneration has been indefinitely postponed.
    7. Maverick’s travels are never aimless; he always has an object in view: his pocket and yours. However, there are times when he is merely fleeing from heroic enterprise.
    8. In the traditional Western story, the situation is always serious but never hopeless. In a
Maverick
story, the situation is always hopeless but never serious.
    9. “Cowardly” would be too strong a word to apply to Maverick. “Cautious” is possibly more accurate, and certainly more kind. When the two brothers went off to the Civil War, their old Pappy said to them: “If either ofyou comes back with a medal, I’ll beat you to death.” They never shamed him.
    10. The widely held belief that Maverick is a gambler is a fallacy. In his hands, poker is not a game of chance. He plays it earnestly, patiently, and with an abiding faith in the laws of probability.
    I ’ve always enjoyed working. I feel at home on a set and I try to promote a relaxed atmosphere for everybody else. Jack felt the same, so we’d play little pranks to blow off steam. One day we rode our horses through all four sets shooting blanks and yelling and generally raising hell. Jack and I also played a game we called “BANG!” Whenever we saw each other, the first guy to draw his prop gun and yell “bang!” would get a point. One time he literally caught me with my pants down.
    But it wasn’t all fun and games. You were on stage shooting by 8:00 a.m. and you’d work until 7:00 or 8:00 in the evening. When you left the studio at night, they handed you the script for the