Philosophy
Lovers!
Click Here

[The following passage is from The Garner Files: A Memoir by James Garner and John Winokur, 2011.]

The only reason I’m an actor is that a lady pulled out of a parking space in front of a producer’s office. When I came home from Korea I visited my dad in California for a few months, but I still hoped to play football, so I went back to Norman and enrolled in the University of Oklahoma. Unfortunately, my knees were so messed up I couldn’t play. I dropped out after one semester, even though I had a B average. I just wasn’t interested in school.

I hung around the pool hall, racking balls and picking up a little change on the side hustling snooker and playing cards. Six months later, I was back in California, laying carpets for my father. I didn’t want to lay carpets, but I didn’t know what else to do. I’d never found a job I liked and didn’t have much of an education or any real skills.

One day I drove down to San Pedro to apply for an oil field job in Saudi Arabia, but it turned out they were hiring geologists, not roughnecks. On the way home, driving up La Cienega Boulevard feeling sorry for myself, I noticed a sign on a building: “Paul Gregory and Associates.” I’d met Paul in 1945, when I was seventeen and working at the Shell station on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea. A fellow Oklahoman, Paul was a soda jerk at the Gotham drugstore across the street, but he really wanted to be an agent. He kept telling me, “You oughta be in pictures,” and offered to “represent” me.

I laughed at him.

I ran into Paul a few years later, this time in Greenblatt’s Delicatessen, when I was about to leave for Korea. By then he had an office across from Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard and he was driving a great big Cadillac convertible.

“See, I told you you should have been in pictures!” he said.

On my way back from Korea two years later, I saw Paul’s name in Newsweek magazine. He was a big stage producer with three hits going, including Don Juan in Hell with Charles Laughton and Agnes Moorehead. So when I saw the “Paul Gregory and Associates” sign on La Cienega I thought, Gee, maybe the soda jerk knows what he’s talking about. At that instant, a woman pulled out of a parking space in front of the building, and I pulled in. It was fate. Or at least serendipity: if the parking space hadn’t suddenly been there, I would not have driven around the block looking for one. I’d have kept on going.

Paul saw me right away. He said he’d be willing to take me on as a client. (In those days, producers could be agents, too.) We talked for about an hour. Or rather, he talked. He told me I could have a “big career.” “Look at yourself, Jim,” he said. “You could definitely be a success if you’d learn how to act.” I decided to give it a try. Though I wasn’t much interested in acting, I was less interested in laying carpets. I wasn’t looking for stardom. I just wanted a clean job for decent money. I was twenty-five years old and told myself I’d give it until I was thirty to see if I could make a living at it. I also told myself I’d have to overcome my stage fright.

Click HERE to reach the associated topic for this webpage.
For more topics click HERE.