The Garner Files: A Memoir by James Garner Page B

street, his big butt filling the frame, and Bret Maverick stands at the other end. Ben draws and fires, but his first shot misses. So do five more. Bret shouts, “Shall we stand a little closer, Marshal?”
    A wonderful character actor named Walker Edmiston played the Dennis Weaver part. In
Gunsmoke,
Dennis played Jim Arness’s sidekick, Chester Goode, with a famous, stiff-legged limp. After the first day of shooting, I noticed that Walker wasn’t limping. When I asked why not the director said, “That would be a little too much, Jim.” I said, “No, if you’re going to do it,
do
it!” So we added a little scene in which he comes into the marshal’s office and he’s limping all of a sudden. I say, “What’s the matter, did you get hurt?” and he says, “A gol-durned horse stepped on my foot and it hurts like thunder!” and I say, “You should keep it, it gives you character.” He limped for the rest of the show.
    A lmost from the beginning, there was an invisible character who was nearly as important as Bret or Bart: Pappy. His one-liners were a convenient way to end a scene on a humorous note, or to save face in a tough situation. They all began with, “As my old Pappy used to say . . . “ Here are my favorites: “Man’s the only animal you can skin more than once,” “Marriage is the only game of chance where both people can lose,” “If at first you don’t succeed, try something else,” “If you can’t fight ’em and they won’t let you join ’em, you best get out of the county,” “Any man who needs to make out a will just isn’t spending his money properly.”
    W arner Bros. made all the decisions for my career. The problem was, they didn’t
care
about my career.
I
cared, though. If I was going to succeed, I wanted it to be
my
success. If I was going to fail, I wanted it to be
my
failure, not because someone else made the wrong choices for me. As old Pappy used to say, “Make a lot of mistakes but always be sure they’re your own.”
    About a year and a half into
Maverick,
there was a Writers Guild strike, and Warner Bros. announced they were laying me off. They invoked the force majeure clause in my contract, which said if production was halted by circumstances beyond its control, like a strike, the studio wouldn’t have to pay my salary. They claimed they didn’t have scripts.
    My reaction was, “Hey, I’m ready to work. You’re paying me by the week and I’m here to do whatever you want.”
    “Nope, we’re not going to pay you.”
    Well, bull
shit
.
    I decided to sue them for breach of contract.
    Almost everyone I knew advised me against it. I was actually threatened more than once that if I didn’t drop the lawsuit, I’d “neverwork in this town again.” (Life imitating art . . . or something.) I was told, “You’ll be a dead man. You’re a nobody just starting out—even if you win in court, your career will be over.” I didn’t want to be blackballed by the studios, but I was tired of being pushed around. I kept saying I could always go back to laying carpets for a living. I didn’t really
want
to go back to laying carpets, but
they
didn’t know that.
    I was also a little concerned about being typecast as Bret Maverick. I didn’t want to get too identified with the character and worried I wouldn’t be able to make the transition from Bret to other roles.
    I hired Gang, Tyre, Rudin & Brown, a prominent Los Angeles law firm, and they assigned a young attorney and former Rhodes scholar named Frank Wells. Frank turned out to be an outstanding entertainment lawyer and later ran Disney with Michael Eisner.
    At first, I thought Jack Kelly was going to join me in the lawsuit, but then I heard the studio had upped his contract from forty to fifty-two weeks and promised him a feature film a year. To this day, I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, I don’t blame Jack. I just knew what I had to do for myself. After
Maverick,
Jack eventually left show business