Freewheeling Slick

Not long ago, NBC's Steve Allen scribbled a note to ABC's top Cowpoke James (Maverick) Garner, 29. "Somebody told me you carry a .45. and I got pretty scared. I thought it was your rating." It darn near was. Maverick Garner was giving Allen and his fellow TV Titan Ed Sullivan plenty to worry about on the Sunday-at-8 spot. Last week, for the fifth time. Maverick (7:30 to 8:30) outrode both of them in the Trendex derby--for what that is worth (and to TV and ad moguls it still seems to be worth millions). Also, Maverick for the first time kicked dust into the face of the almost peerless Jack Benny.

A Kind of Bum. Quick success, like his ready smile, seems to cling naturally to husky (200 Ibs., 6 ft. 3 in.), lackadaisical Jim Garner, who, unlike Competitor Sullivan, has a hard time keeping a straight face during his five-days-a-week shooting schedule on the busy back lot of Warner Bros. Confesses Jim: "I can do it better clowning." Any way he does it, Garner gets the support of brisk direction, handsome settings, some elemental but red-blooded lines from writers like Marion Hargrove and Phi Beta Kappa (U.C.L.A., '39) Writer-Producer Roy Huggins, who describes Hero Bret Maverick* as "an antihero, a disorganization man, a kind of bum. He doesn't like to be employed. He's a drifter."

Huggins might also have been describing his leading man. Born James Baumgarner in Norman, Okla., Garner grew up on a farm he "hated," rode two miles to school, on horseback, and took pot shots at odd jobs (traveling salesman, oilfield worker, the Merchant Marine), which he always quit "when I got bored." He drifted to Hollywood, where he helped his father lay carpets, modeled bathing suits for Jantzen, and returned to his home state to become the first Oklahoma draftee called into the Korean war. Four years later an old soda-jerk friend, Producer Paul Gregory, gave Garner a job cueing Lloyd Nolan in the touring company of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, and he eventually replaced the late John Hodiak in the show. "I didn't register beyond the sixth row," he admits. But later, Garner landed a small part in TV's Cheyenne, and on the strength of it, Warner Bros, signed him to play Marlon Brando's Marine buddy in Sayonara.

Kicked-Up Rating. Garner has happily forsaken his nomadic life for San Fernando Valley, where he lives with his wife Lois and her nine-year-old daughter by a previous marriage, Kimberly. In his three months on Maverick, to which ABC, Warner Bros, and the sponsor, Kaiser Industries, have committed $6,000,000 for 52 shows (13 of them repeats), he has earned a trifling $500 a week; but he insists that "salary doesn't mean a cotton-picking thing to me." Cowpoke Garner and his colleagues get the pleasure of playing from scripts in which a stage direction may read: "Maverick walks up to the camera and turns on that winning smile that has kicked his ratings up to the stratosphere."

* According to Webster's: "After S. A. Maverick (1803-70), a Texas cattle owner who did not brand his calves, 1) An unbranded animal, esp. a motherless calf; 2) a refractory individual who bolts his group and initiates an independent course." Garner's own definition: "A sort of freewheeling slick."

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