The Garner Files: A Memoir Read Online Free

wife’s sister and her husband, Lorita and Bill Lewis. There by himself, he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of sixty.
    I still can’t believe he’s gone.
    W hen we were kids, Jack, two years older, would occasionally pull rank. Like the time I reached for the last piece of chicken-fried steak on the platter and he stabbed my hand with his fork. Then he lectured me: “Don’t ever take food out of my mouth.” It wasn’t toolong before I got to where I could whip his butt and there were no more lectures.
    Jack was a hell of an athlete, and I always took a backseat to him. At Norman High, he was a point guard on a championship basketball team and quarterbacked an all-state football team. But his best sport was baseball: Jack was a pitcher in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization for eleven years. He was a better athlete than I was and a lot more outgoing. I was always in his footsteps.
    When Jack came out to California in the early 1960s, he changed his name to Garner as I’d done a few years before. He was a singer with the house band at the Ambassador Hotel for a while, and then he asked me to get him in the movies. I said no.
    “Why not?” he said. “You’re a big-time star now.”
    “Well, you’re my brother, and if I get you a job in the movies and you don’t pan out worth a damn, it’s not only bad for you, it’s bad for me. If you want to get in the movies, you’re going to have to do it yourself.”
    Jack got busy and worked in the business doing different television parts here and there. It was a good ten years before he ever worked with me. That didn’t change how we felt about each other, because I think Jack understood what I was talking about.
    It finally got to where occasionally Jack did work on my shows. But every time he did a
Rockford
episode, he had to go in and read. Sometimes he didn’t get the part, sometimes he did. But Jack worked on many other shows, too. In fact, he worked so much that he finally got a Screen Actors Guild pension. Jack’s day job was as a golf professional. He was a popular teaching pro in Los Angeles for thirty years. He’s retired now and lives in Palm Springs.
    T he set-to with Red and my father’s departure for California when I was fourteen were my emancipation. The day my dad left Norman, he dropped me off at a dairy farm where he’d arranged for my roomand board in return for doing chores. I slept on a cot in the cellar next to the washtub. I can still smell the damp laundry. And the cow shit, which I had to sweep up every morning. I lasted about three weeks.
    That’s when I began supporting myself. I got up at 3:30 every morning to sweep out the administration building at OU before going to my junior high classes. I understood right off that nothing would be given to me; still I daydreamed a rich relative somewhere would die and leave me a fortune.
    Didn’t happen.
    My father wasn’t bad. He just wasn’t there. He couldn’t handle the responsibility of raising three young boys. And he had several wives after my mother died, three or four; we’re not sure to this day. Dad got married for the last time when he was in his mid-sixties, to a sweet woman named Grace. I called her “Mama Grace” and I loved her. She was the closest I ever came to having a real mother.
    On my eighteenth birthday, I was in Odessa, Texas, out of work. The only thing I’d eaten in three days was the crackers I could steal off tables in restaurants. I called my father in California and said, “Dad, for my birthday, could you lend me fifty dollars?” And he said, “I’m sorry, son. I don’t have it.” Grace came on the line and said, “It’ll be there in the morning.” She wired the money, and I got back on my feet. I stood by her for the rest of her life.
    Dad and I got closer after I became an actor, and toward the end of his and Grace’s lives, I got to spend time with both of them. I eventually forgave my dad everything. He may have had a drinking problem