A few months before…

 
Joanna and Lisa asked me if I was willing to try my hand at asking stupid daily questions at GMP, I pitched a series of article to J about the five male actors who had the greatest impact on the person I am today. Out of that five, only two were still alive. Vincent Price had died on my 18th birthday and James Coburn and Anthony Perkins were gone as well.

For various reasons I never got around to writing those posts, but I carried on knowing that James Garner and Sidney Poitier were still a part of this world.

Except that isn’t true anymore. As you already know, Mr. Garner passed away at the age of 86 this weekend. And the loss of someone who I never met and who I will never meet is only just coming over me as I type these words and tears begin welling up in my eyes for the first time since I heard the news.

(And it’s only going to get worse if I allow myself to think how I will react when Mr. Poitier passes.)

This past Saturday night—before the news of Mr. Garner’s death hit the Internet—I found myself watching Jean Renoir’s 1939 masterpiece, La règle du jeu and marveling at the idea that everyone I was watching on screen was no longer with us. Paulette Dubost, who played the flirtatious maid Lisette, died three years ago at the age of 101.

The further you go back, the more cinema becomes the literal study of ghosts. And this would seem spooky, were it not for how much these flickering images feel less like something paranormal than they do like dreams we have managed to pluck out of the sky and preserve forever in black and white and Technicolor.

Now I will get this same sensation when I watch The Americanization of Emily, The Great Escape and TVs The Rockford Files. I will watch the star of these great works, knowing he is gone, but still able to reach out to him as though he were still here and tangible—a special memory I can return to whenever I need him.

But why Garner? What made him so special to make it into my personal pantheon?

That’s easy.

I loved James Garner because he was a movie star who had the presence, weight and features of an archetypal Hollywood “leading man”, but who chose instead to use those gifts to subvert the notion of what a hero could be.

I’ve seen the word “anti-hero” thrown about in the obituaries I’ve come across and that misses the mark of what he did. There was nothing “anti” about the heroes he played. Inevitably they did the right thing and they often did it for the right reasons. The difference was that the world around his characters never recognized their heroism. In virtually every episode, Jim Rockford went above and beyond his day rate to solve a case brought to him by a person unlikely to ever be able to pay him back, and for this everyone he knew thought he was a deadbeat and a bum. Rockford was an everyday hero, just looking to pay the rent (and who often failed to even do that).

In real life, Garner was a “man’s man” of his time and place who wasn’t above attempting to resolve a public dispute with his fists, but onscreen he gravitated to characters who abhorred physical violence. He acknowledged that his preference for playing “cowards” came from his own wartime experiences, where he received a Purple Heart in the Korean War. Having lived through that himself, he had little interest in being the next John Wayne (who famously avoided being drafted in WWII).

And that wasn’t the only way in which he differed from the other actors of his type. Politically, Garner was a liberal. “The bleeding heart kind,” he wrote unapologetically in his autobiography. In that same book, he describes how much he hated Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan—who weren’t mere names and symbols to him, but men who he actually knew and talked with. He thought Reagan was an idiot and wasn’t afraid to say so even after the late president’s unfathomable (at least to this Canadian) public deification.

He was an actor built for action and drama who preferred comedies where he was often the butt of the joke. This was actually best shown not in any of his movies or TV shows, but instead the extremely popular series of commercials he did for Polaroid in the 70s and 80s.

When the company approached him about doing the ads, Garner had one major demand. He was worried that if they filmed one or two commercials, people would inevitably get sick of seeing them (and him) over and over again, so he insisted that none of the commercials would air for longer than a few weeks at a time.

To accommodate this, they often shot more than 50 commercials a year and to give him someone to work with, he was paired with Mariette Hartley. The chemistry between them was so immediate and palpable that most people assumed they were actually married (to the point that Lois, his actual wife, got T-shirts made to wear at events that told everyone she was the “real” Mrs. Garner).
 

 
Speaking as someone who works in advertising, I love the purity of these commercials, which often have to do some heavy lifting, but manage to feel light as air thanks to the interplay between the two leads. (And it says something about Garner’s character that he actually went out of his way in his book to identify and credit the copywriter who wrote the ads—an act one suspects is beyond the grasp of even the most generous of today’s celebrities.)

Not every movie Garner made was a winner. In fact, in his book he makes it clear he didn’t like most of the films he starred in and actively loathed a few of them. Television was his true medium—the place where he really shined. I think this is because he had that unmistakeable bearing of a Screen Idol, but inside he was so utterly and inescapably human that there was nothing anyone could do to hide it.

He was never the kind of actor they give Oscars to. He wasn’t interested in those kinds of roles. In fact, most of the time it hardly ever seemed like he was acting at all. James Garner became an icon because he was incredibly gifted at being the most entertaining version of himself onscreen, which is a skill surprisingly few of us will ever possess.

So, to answer the question posed in the title of this post, the answer—I think—is no. There will never be another James Garner, which is okay, because whenever we want we can pluck out a dream from the sky and remember him just the way he was.