Free The Garner Files: A Memoir by James Garner Page A

always stand up to bullies. (Have I mentioned that I hate bullies?)
    Mind you, I wasn’t thinking about all this stuff when I was making
Maverick
. I just wanted that check at the end of the week.
    I t took us eight calendar days to make a
Maverick
episode: We’d start on Tuesday, shoot through Friday afternoon, break for the weekend, then come back and finish late Monday or early Tuesday. But since the episodes were being aired every seven days, we were losing a day a week, and it was only a matter of time before we would run out of shows. So after about the eighth week they got the idea of adding a brother who could alternate with Bret. They auditioned a bunch of actors, including Stuart Whitman, Rod Taylor, Richard Jaeckel, and Jack Kelly, the brother of the movie actress Nancy Kelly. One day they brought Jack over to the Warners back lot. We hit it off right away. They hired him to play Bart Maverick for $650 a week, $150 more than my salary . . . and he was
still
getting screwed. (My $500 a week increased to $600 the second year and to $1,250 the third, which, in those days, was . . . not a lot of money.)
    Henry Kaiser wasn’t just a sponsor; he was a 33 percent partner in
Maverick
’s profits, but as far as I know, he never interfered with the production. When the network accidentally forgot to tell Kaiser about the addition of another Maverick—he didn’t find out until the first episode aired—he was livid. “I paid for red apples and they gaveme green apples!” Kaiser said. ABC had to pay him $600,000 to smooth his feathers.
    They created a second production company for Jack Kelly that worked simultaneously with ours. Jack and I did separate episodes, but all the scripts were written for
Maverick,
not for a specific brother, so they were interchangeable. Occasionally we’d cross over. He’d appear in my episode, I’d appear in his. Just a few scenes, though, usually to rescue each other from a tight spot.
    Jack was a good guy and we got along fine. The only problem was, he drank too much. He wasn’t
bad,
but whenever we’d go on an airplane, he’d get snockered and become
difficult
. And sometimes he’d arrive on set with a hangover and an attitude. But within a couple of hours, we were having fun again.
    Jack’s wife, the actress May Wynn, was another story. Born Donna Lee Hickey, she took her stage name from her character in the film version of
The Caine Mutiny
. She resented that Jack wasn’t a bigger star, and I think she blamed
me
for it. She’d nag him about my having funnier scripts and getting more recognition. After a few drinks, she would needle Jack mercilessly. Then
he’d
have another drink, and they’d get into a big argument.
    The audience somehow got the idea I was the senior Maverick brother, even though Jack was seven months older, maybe because I was there first, or because I was an inch or so taller than Jack. That may explain why Bart Maverick’s episodes weren’t as popular as Bret’s. The audience was disappointed: All of a sudden, they weren’t getting what drew them to the show in the first place. We tried to remedy that by having Bret introduce Bart’s first few solo episodes.
    These were the early days of television. We didn’t have the time or money to do anything extravagant. The whole series was shot at Warner Bros. Studios. I don’t think we went on location more than once or twice in three years. There were four units filming simultaneously on the lot in Burbank. We were literally back-to-back, one camera pointed at us, the other at
Sugarfoot
or
Cheyenne
or one ofthe other Westerns. The dolly grips were butt-to-butt and we had to take turns shooting.
    R oy Huggins was the writer-producer and creator of
Maverick
. Roy was smart and he was successful, in a commercial sense. Look at the shows he created:
Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive, The Rockford Files, Baretta.
Roy was a nice enough guy, I suppose, but he had strong opinions and would never listen to