The Garner Files: A Memoir by James Garner

Author:James Garner [Garner, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781451642612
Amazon: 145164261X
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-10-23T07:00:00+00:00

The chemistry was so great, in fact, a lot of people thought we were married in real life. Probably the ones who thought I was really Maverick. (The same thing happened after the success of Mrs. Miniver in the 1940s. The studio got thousands of letters urging Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson to divorce their respective spouses and marry each other.) It got so bad that Mariette had a T-shirt made that said, “I am NOT Mrs. James Garner.” When Mariette’s daughter Justine was born, she got another T-shirt saying, “I Am NOT James Garner’s Baby.” Then I saw a woman on the street wearing one that said, “I Am NOT Mrs. James Garner, Either.” The whole thing didn’t make Lois too happy, so I got her one that said, “I’m the REAL Mrs. James Garner.”

After a year, they were still paying Mariette scale. I felt they needed to make a better deal with her, because it just wasn’t right for me to be making so much more than she was. So I did a naughty thing: I called her and told her all about it. Then she did a naughty thing and stuck it to them pretty good. But Polaroid sold a ton of cameras and everybody wound up happy.

Making those commercials with Mariette was a wonderful experience. I consider them a high point in my acting career. During that period, Mariette also did a Rockford episode. We were at Paradise Cove shooting a scene in which we kiss, and a photographer hiding in the bushes with a long lens snapped us and sold the photo to the tabloids, which passed it off as a real kiss. It caused a commotion at home for both of us, I can tell you.

I was never a photography bug, but when Polaroid introduced an instant movie camera, I brought a prototype with me on a golfing trip to Scotland. I took movies of everything I saw and did over there, thinking we might use them in future commercials. But none of the movies came out. The film speed was so low, everything turned out dark and blurry, so Polaroid never did well with the camera. And as digital photography made the instant camera obsolete, the company filed for a series of reorganizations and finally went out of business.

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