Born as James Scott Bumgarner in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1928, Garner’s early years were unsettled. His mother died when he was young, and he and his brothers were shuffled between relatives. As a teenager, he worked a series of practical jobs before joining the Merchant Marine and later the U.S. Army. During the Korean War, he was wounded twice and awarded the Purple Heart. After returning home, he drifted toward acting almost by accident, taking small roles and modeling work that eventually led to a contract with Warner Bros.
His breakthrough came in 1957 with the television series Maverick. As Bret Maverick, a professional gambler navigating the Old West with caution and humor, Garner helped reshape the television Western. The show’s lighter tone and self-aware scripts stood out in a field crowded with solemn frontier dramas. Garner’s delivery — dry, observant and never overstated — made him a star and introduced a style he would refine for decades.
A contract dispute with Warner Bros. temporarily slowed his momentum, but it also set a precedent. Garner successfully challenged the studio’s suspension of his pay during a hiatus, a move that signaled changing power dynamics between actors and television producers. Once free, he expanded into film, appearing in The Great Escape (1963), Grand Prix (1966), Sunset (1988)— among others — and eventually earned an Academy Award nomination for Murphy’s Romance (1985). Whether in action roles or romantic leads, he favored understatement over showmanship.
In 1974, Garner returned to weekly television with The Rockford Files. As private investigator Jim Rockford, he played another reluctant hero — smart, practical and often exasperated. The role earned him an Emmy Award and cemented his reputation as a dependable lead who could anchor a series without dominating it. Rockford felt like an older cousin to Maverick, shaped by experience but guided by the same common sense.
Offscreen, Garner’s life was notably stable by Hollywood standards. He married Lois Clarke in 1956 after a brief courtship, and the marriage lasted nearly 58 years until his death in 2014. He remained outspoken about actors’ rights and later wrote candidly about his career in his memoir, The Garner Files. Colleagues often described him as prepared, professional and generous with younger performers.
James Garner never leaned into theatrical flourishes. He listened well on screen, allowed scenes to breathe and trusted subtle reactions over big gestures. That restraint became his signature. Across Western towns, prison camps, racetracks and Southern beaches, he carried himself the same way — grounded, capable and quietly amused. Looking back, his body of work reflects not a string of flashy turns but a steady presence that shaped television and film from the 1950s forward.
- Winokur, Jon (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 304 Pages - 10/23/2012 (Publication Date) - Simon & Schuster (Publisher)
‘Maverick’ Garner has good ‘cents’ (1975)
Lawrence Laurent, Longview Daily News (Washington) March 29, 1975
When James Garner was a high school boy in Norman, Okla., he answered to roll call as James Bumgarner, and his classmates called him “Slick.” He recalls that period as the time when he worked as a janitor for four hours before coming to school, and at a time when the young women of the high school carefully avoided “Slick.”
At the age of 16, he enlisted in the Merchant Marine and thus didn’t receive a high school diploma until after he had been drafted into the Army for the Korean War. Yet, his luck held. He was wounded in combat in Korea — in the backside, by United States artillery shells that fell short.
He was Oklahoma’s first draftee for the Korean War, and despite being a big property owner in California, as he approaches the age of 47, he remains a legal resident of Oklahoma.
Nearly everyone says that James Garner is lucky. He’s now starring in “The Rockford Files” on Friday nights.
Friday happens to be the night when all four NBC programs — “Sanford and Son,” “Chico and the Man,” “Police Woman” and “The Rockford Files” — are rated among TV’s top 11 programs. “Rockford” is the lowest rated of the bunch, but not by much.
The suspicion is that Garner deserves all the luck he can get. His mother died when he was 5 years old, and he claims that he was doing odd jobs and earning money by the time he was 9. He worked at all kinds of jobs, none of them very highly skilled.
His Cherokee (and German) ancestry gave him a certain stoicism that was good for his first real acting role. A friend got him a job in a road production of Herman Wouk’s “Caine Mutiny Court Martial,” and it was ideally suited to Garner’s talent at the time. He was a member of the board that listened to the testimony of the crew of the U.S.S. Caine. He sat through 512 performances, and he never spoke one word.
But old Slick Garner was learning as he sat there, watching professional actors at work. After the road tour ended, he found a few TV roles and took himself off to New York to study acting at the Berghof School.
His rugged good looks landed him a contract with Warner Bros. and the first of 25 feature motion pictures, a thing called “Toward the Unknown.”
Warner Bros. in the mid-1950s was grinding out TV shows by the hour, and it had a large stock company of good-looking young actors and actresses. (Connie Stevens, who was at Warner Bros. making “Hawaiian Eye” in those days, has recalled: “We were called ‘The Cattle,’ because they herded us from one set to another and because, except for the brands on our hides, they couldn’t tell the names of any of us.”)
Garner got out of bit parts and into a series called “Maverick.” Warner Bros. executives soon learned that they had a real maverick on the payroll. The creator of “Maverick” was a tall intellectual named Roy Huggins, and he got the idea, Garner once told me, from the antihero of Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black.”
“Maverick” was set in the post-Civil War American West, and Bret Maverick shattered nearly every cliché that Hollywood movies had been able to manufacture. He wore a black hat. Instead of being a hard-working cowman or gunfighter, he was a professional gambler.
The tone for the whole series was set by writer Marion Hargrove in the first script, when he instructed the cast and crew of “Maverick” with these words: “The cliché exists because human beings find great comfort in the familiar. On this show we intend to live dangerously.”
Garner, it was quickly discovered, also liked to live dangerously. Instead of being grateful for TV stardom, he thought he should be paid what he was worth. According to Arnold Mano of TV Guide, Garner was paid $500 a week for the first season of “Maverick,” $600 a week for the second season, and $1,250 a week during the third season. And in 1960, he got out of the contract, proving that at least one maverick couldn’t be treated like cattle.
Garner moved on to playing romantic leading men and developed into the kind of actor who took the roles that Rock Hudson turned down. He was at his best in comedies, and even served time as the leading man for Doris Day.
A shortage of movie roles brought him back to TV for a series called “Nichols,” which won neither good reviews nor high ratings. “I still love it,” Garner says fiercely.
Garner’s second television success came from his second teaming with Roy Huggins. The man who had developed “Maverick” from a novel by Stendhal developed “The Rockford Files” from a Huggins-produced TV series that failed in one season. The failure had been called “The Outsider,” starring Darren McGavin, during the 1968–69 season.
With minor refurbishing, the former convict-turned-private-detective called David (the Outsider) Ross became Jim Rockford, the innocent man who served five years in the penitentiary before being pardoned and licensed as a private investigator.
But this time old Slick knows the rules of the game. Garner’s Cherokee Productions was part of the ownership, along with Huggins Public Arts Productions and Universal Television.
Classic Rockford Files TV series: Nobody pushes ‘Jim’ around (1977)
Colin Dangaard, Press of Atlantic City (New Jersey) May 22, 1977
The night James Garner met Lois Clarke, he was at a Hollywood party with a girl he had dated four years. During the evening, the girl tipped vodka on Garner’s head, when he declined to take her home drunk.
Two weeks later, he married Lois. Garner’s action remains starkly indicative of the man: ain’t nobody gonna push this dude around.
As owner of the company that produces the popular television show, ‘The Rockford Files,’ in which he also stars, people are always pouring threats on his head, and expecting him to take home their ideas.
First, there is the network, which applies “double and triple” standards to his show, making “Rockford” one of the least violent on television. Then there are the lobbyists for various groups, demanding he hire so many women, so many Blacks, so many Mexicans…
True to form, Garner usually shakes off their threats and takes home his own ideas. Routinely he tells committees at NBC to take a long walk on a short jetty.
As he says: “I will not be intimidated by anybody. I deal in human beings, not groups. I look at people, not numbers. I will hire who I want. when I want. There is no black, no brown, no yellow going to tell me who I will use and when I will use them.”
“The Rockford Files” is in its fourth season of production, and plays to more than 30 million people in the U.S. alone. It has been sold to 49 countries and currently runs in most of them.
Unlike other hot shows that come and go, “Rockford” remains up near the top as if it were nailed there. This pleases investment-minded Garner. Having a slice of the action through his very own corporation, Cherokee Productions, which he started back in 1963 after deciding ‘the heaviest producers were no smarter than I am.”
“We’re not a big flashy hit,” says Garner, “but the show grows on you. It’s easy to watch. Nobody in the family need be embarrassed. I think this is good for longevity.”
![The Rockford Files [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Op6paomsL._SL160_.jpg "James Garner: From reluctant actor to treasured Hollywood mainstay (1950s-2014) 10")
- English (Publication Language)
The casual, laconic tones of “Rockford”? very much reflect the James Garner few people know. At 49 years of age, he is a lone mini-conglomerate, with holdings in everything from houses to oil wells. He’s not surprised to find he co-owns his show, with Universal Studios, since he became an actor “by accident” and a businessman “by design.”
He is famous and wealthy and a star, yet he works harder now than he did as a boy milking cows back in Oklahoma. His lifestyle is elegant, not loud; he is more comfortable in his truck than any Rolls Royce he could afford. On the party circuit, he mostly just fails to arrive.
Garner was born in Norman, Oklahoma, the youngest son of an upholsterer, carpet layer, country-store owner. There are two brothers: Jack, an actor and golf pro who lives in Los Angeles, and Charles, a schoolteacher who remains in Norman.
When he was 13, Garner’s family was in Los Angeles, where Jim’s father, Weldon Baumgarner (“It’s obvious why I changed my name!”) was once again laying carpets. Jim joined the merchant marine, returned to play football in Oklahoma, then went to Los Angeles.
Needing something better than laying carpets, he went to the Shell Oil Company. “As I was driving back,” he recalls, “there was an empty parking space in front of a building where a guy I used to know had an office. His name was Paul Gregory. I was a gas jockey when I knew him, and he was a soda jerk. But now he was a producer. I went in and he offered me a job in ‘The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.’ I took it and I’ve been an actor ever since.”
After 52 performances playing Lt. Steve Maryk, Warner Brothers signed him to a contract in 1955, to begin the “Cheyenne” television series opposite Clint Walker, and to debut in movies with “Toward The Unknown.”
He also met and married Lois, who was soon pregnant with the first of their two daughters, Garner was 28 years old and earning $175 a week. ‘We blew everything I had in the bank on our honeymoon,” he says, “all $77…”
Garner’s career boomed after playing Marlon Brando’s buddy in “Sayonara,” and he was signed to star in the new television series “Maverick,” destined to become the highest rated program on the air.
He pulled out of the series after three years, following a legal fight with Warner Brothers, which he won, and became active in the Screens Actors Guild «pushing legislation to Five actors TV residuals and established fees. In 1963, he formed Cherokee productions — so named because he is part Indian — and prospered with movies and, finally, “The Rockford Files,”
Besides working hard, Garner plays hard, golfing in the 70’s and driving in the 150’s. He starts regularly in the Las Vegas Mint 400-miler, the Riverside Grand Prix, the Mexican 500, the Mexican 1000, and the pro- celebrity prelude to the California 500. He was Grand Marshal and drove the pace car at the 1975 Indianapolis 500, doing the same this year.
Garner backs few causes, and keeps a slender political profile. “You don’t hear from me unless it’s something I really believe in,” he said. “Like, civil liberties and human rights. When I got on a plane to do the first march on Washington, in 1967, I remember Harry Belafonte spotting me and yelling, ‘Where the hell did YOU come from?’”
James Garner and his family (1959)
James Garner and wife, Lois (1970)
More James Garner movies
Move over, Darling
- Amazon Prime Video (Video on Demand)
- Doris Day, James Garner, Polly Bergen (Actors)
- Michael Gordon (Director) - Hal Kanter (Writer) - Aaron Rosenberg (Producer)
The Art of Love
![The Art of Love [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/512uO9sG7xL._SL160_.jpg "James Garner: From reluctant actor to treasured Hollywood mainstay (1950s-2014) 20")
- James Garner, Dick Van Dyke, Elke Sommer (Actors)
- Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Boys’ Night Out
![Boy's Night Out [Remaster]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51-XWNxdDeL._SL160_.jpg "James Garner: From reluctant actor to treasured Hollywood mainstay (1950s-2014) 22")
- Factory sealed DVD
- Kim Novak, James Garner, Tony Randall (Actors)
- Michael Gordon (Director)
