The Garner Files: A Memoir (2 page)

This glimpse into his early life, the cruelty and deprivation he suffered, his years in the service, his slow rise to fame, power, and fulfillment was a revelation for me. This memoir provides us all with a rare opportunity to get to know the captivating, enigmatic, complicated man that is the real Jim Garner.

Did I mention that he’s a sweetheart?

June 2011

Dear Reader,

I’ve avoided writing a book until now because I’m really pretty average and I didn’t think anyone would care about my life.

I’m still a little uncomfortable, but I finally agreed, because people I trust persuaded me you might be interested, and because I realized it would allow me to acknowledge those who’ve helped me along the way, from friends and family to the actors, directors, writers, and crew members I’ve worked with over the years.

I’ll also talk about my childhood, try to clear up some misconceptions, and maybe even settle a score or two.

I don’t like to brag on myself, and I won’t start now, but I will ask people who know me to weigh in, for better or worse.

Above all, I want you to know I have no regrets. Here’s this dumb kid from Oklahoma, raised during the Depression, comes to Hollywood, gets a career, becomes famous, makes some money, has a wonderful family . . . what would I change? Nothing. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Yours truly,

Jimmy is very close to his characters. That’s the face he wants the world to see—the man who doesn’t quite fit into any mold but is loved. The first thing I noticed about Jim was how funny he was. But Jim is a rather complicated man and is covering up lots of hurt. Growing up he was abused, lonely, and deprived.

—L
OIS
G
ARNER

N
orman, Oklahoma, is located near the center of the state, in the middle of “Tornado Alley” where, April through June, dry polar air from Canada mixes with warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico to produce hundreds of tornadoes. If the southern Plains are a giant target for twisters, Norman is close to the bull’s-eye, having taken as many hits, and even more near misses, than any other place on the continent. If that weren’t enough, Norman is hot as hell in summer, cold as hell in winter, and windy as hell all year round. The landscape is flat and featureless . . . you might even say
bleak
.

But Norman was a good place to grow up. Everybody knew each
other, and you could walk the streets at night. It was a college town of about ten thousand, with three thousand University of Oklahoma students. Now, with thirty thousand students, the population is over one hundred thousand, and it’s the third-largest city in the state, behind Oklahoma City and Tulsa. It’s often mentioned as one of the best small cities in the United States, with its performing arts center, museums, theaters, parks, and annual festivals. But Norman in the 1930s was a sleepy little town.

My grandparents on both sides were among the first settlers of Norman. My father’s father, Will Bumgarner, took part in the Oklahoma Land Rush and might have been one of the famous “Sooners.”

On April 22, 1889, fifty thousand would-be landowners who’d come by train, covered wagon, on horseback, and on foot, gathered on the Arkansas, Kansas, and Texas borders. At high noon, at the sound of a cannon shot, they tore out to claim their 160-acre homesteads. By the end of the day, thousands had staked claims in Guthrie, Kingfisher, Oklahoma City, and on the sandy banks of the shallow Canadian River, where my grandfather had waited for the signal along with a few hundred others who would settle Norman.

Or maybe not. Grandpa Will might have slipped in beforehand: There were two kinds of settlers, “Boomers” and “Sooners.” Boomers played by the rules and waited for the official signal to enter, but “Sooners” snuck in
sooner
than the law allowed to get the choice parcels. A few of them had to forfeit their land later on, but most got away with it.

Before statehood in 1907, Oklahoma was called Indian Territory, for good reason: the Indians were there first. Many tribes had roamed the Great Plains for thousands of years. It must have been beautiful country, with shoulder-high grass as far as the eye could see, pecan trees, and endless herds of buffalo.

The Creek, Choctaw (“Oklahoma” is Choctaw for “red people”), Blackfoot, Comanche, Arapaho, Kiowa, Cherokee, Cheyenne,
Pawnee, Shoshone, Crow, and Apache all depended on the buffalo for survival. They used every bit of the animal except the heart, which they buried ceremonially. When the settlers came, they slaughtered the buffalo, while the government put the tribes on reservations to “protect” them from homesteaders moving west. It shuffled them around for decades, uprooting them whenever the territory they occupied became desirable to whites, each time promising that the new land would be theirs forever. Norman is on ground that was “given” to the Creek Nation in 1832.

B
umgarner means “orchard tender,” leading me to think that the Bumgarners, who came to America from East Prussia in the mid-1700s, were farmers. I have to guess, because I don’t know much about them, and our German ancestry was never discussed. In my family, we never talked about feelings or about anything
personal,
like our roots. I learned only recently that my mother’s family goes back to the Virginia colony in the early 1600s. I think that’s remarkable, and I wish I knew more about her ancestors. All I know is that her parents, Charles Bailey Meek and Abbie Womack, were married in 1904 and that my mother, Mildred, was born a year later.

Charlie Meek, my mother’s father, was Native American. My maternal grandparents disowned Abbie when she married him. I once asked my dad, “What was Grandpa Charlie like?” I’d never even seen a picture of him. All he said was, “He was a black, full-blood Cherokee. He was the blackest man I’ve ever seen.” I don’t know anything else about Grandpa Charlie because everybody pretended he didn’t exist.

Growing up I knew I was one-quarter Cherokee, but I have to admit I was a little afraid of Indians. For one thing, I didn’t
know
any. They were out of sight on reservations somewhere, or in the Little Axe community east of town. The schoolbooks didn’t help. They gave the impression that Indians were “savages” who attacked without
provocation. And our teachers didn’t tell us that when Europeans came to North America, it was a disaster for the previous tenants.

I never knew my paternal grandfather, either. It wasn’t until about twenty years ago that I learned anything about him. I’d flown from Dallas to Norman for a fund-raiser one rainy night with my friend Bill Saxon. After dinner, we went back to the airport to return to Dallas. My nephew Scott Bumgarner, our unofficial family historian, had dug up a newspaper article and left it for me with Bill’s pilot. It was a report in the
Norman Transcript
from 1914. I picked it up while we were taxiing for takeoff and couldn’t believe what I was reading.

It seems Grandpa Will Bumgarner was a bit of a rake. He and Grandma Lula (aka “Granny Bum”) lived in Norman, but thirty-five miles to the north, in Yukon, Oklahoma, there was a widow woman he’d taken a liking to. Every so often, he’d go on a “whiz”: he’d saddle up and ride for two days to see her. She must have been
some
woman.

The widow had a son who warned Grandpa to stay away from his mother. Grandpa didn’t listen. One summer day he was sitting under a shade tree at a farm sale when the son approached and said, “I told you to leave my mama alone.” He pulled out a nine-round repeating pistol and shot Grandpa five times. According to the newspaper account, Grandpa said, “Don’t shoot me again, you’ve already killed me.” But the kid put the other four bullets in him anyway.

Apparently, Will Bumgarner lived as violently as he died. Scott recently found some letters indicating that as a young man Will had a fight in a back alley and the other guy died, but Will was never convicted of a crime.

On the other hand, Scott points out that despite the fact that Will drank and fought and may have had affairs, Granny Bum apparently forgave his transgressions and in good moments even called him
“sweet William.” They had ten children, after all (three of whom died in infancy and another who died of burns at the age of six).

My mother, Mildred Scott Meek, and my father, Weldon Warren “Bill” Bumgarner, were married in 1921 and had three sons. Charles was born in 1924, Jack in ’26, and I was born James Scott Bumgarner on April 7, 1928. “James” was for Jimmy Johnson, the owner of the local tobacco shop and a drinking buddy of my father’s. Scott was my mother’s middle name—after the doctor who had delivered her, and me. (It’s also my daughter Gigi’s, whose full name is Greta Scott Garner.)

In the depths of the Great Depression, my father ran a country store nine miles east of Norman in a speck on the map called Denver, population 5: Dad, Mom, my two brothers, and me. It was a combination hardware store/mail drop/service station on an old country road. Store in the front and two bedrooms and a kitchen in the back, and that was it. We didn’t have indoor plumbing.

My mother died when I was four. I don’t remember her, but I do recall riding in her funeral procession and passing by the country store. I couldn’t understand why we didn’t stop, because that’s where we lived. It wasn’t until I was fifteen that my cousin Betty told me my mother died of uremic poisoning after a botched abortion. She was twenty-six. To this day, I don’t know the details, except that Grandma Meek and my mother were Christian Scientists. They never used a doctor, just prayer. I have no idea whether my father was involved in the decision to have the abortion or whether he blamed himself for her death. We never talked about it in the family.

Until I was five, I played every day by myself while my older brothers were at school. Well, I wasn’t
all
by myself: I had “George,” my imaginary friend. I was the sheriff of Denver, and he was my deputy. George was somebody to talk to. And I used him to get an extra piece of bread and peanut butter.

By the time I was six, I was working in the store selling peanut
butter out of a five-gallon can. I’d scoop it, put it in a bucket, and smooth it out. I also pumped gas, and in those days, we pumped it by hand.

Everyone called my brother Charles “Bum.” Jack was “Middle Bum,” and I was “Little Bum,” though I eventually grew to be physically bigger than both of them. They also called me “Babe” because I was the baby. One of my earliest memories is of the three of us riding bareback on an old horse with Bum in front, Jack in the middle, and me in the rear. Every once in a while they’d get mad and scoot me off the back. We rode that horse to a one-room schoolhouse. When we didn’t have the horse, we had to walk. And, I swear, we often went barefoot. But not in the snow.

W
hen I was seven, the store burned down and we moved to Norman. There were rumors my father set the fire. I don’t know if he did, but it wouldn’t shock me. In those days, people did all kinds of things to survive. It wasn’t something we ever talked about in the family.

After the store burned down, my father basically left us to fend for ourselves. We were shuffled back and forth among relatives. I stayed with Grandma Louella Bumgarner at first, and then with “Grandma Meek,” Abbie Womack Meek. We called her Maw. She was a feisty little ninety-pounder. Scotch-Irish. Brilliant. And so sweet. I could ask her for anything, and she’d give it to me, and if she didn’t have it, she’d get it. I can still hear her calling me for supper: “Jimmy James Scott Bumgarner, get in here this very minute!” Without my own mother there to take care of me, I grew to love Maw very much.