I fell in love with James Garner when he played Bret Maverick and have never seen any reason to change my mind. The 1950s world was awash with grim cowboys and marshals and sheriffs saying, “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” There were problems aplenty in the Old West, and they could only be resolved with gunplay. Then along came Bret Maverick, con man and gambler. He was handsome, witty, suave, well-dressed, and a first-rate lady’s man. He’d rather talk than fight, but, if it came to fighting, he could do that too. Oh what a relief he was! The country loved him, and so did I.

The Old West has never been portrayed realistically in either films or on TV, but accuracy is not what either medium had in mind. The Old West was heroes in action, entertainment, diversion, a different place to be for a while. In fact, real life in the Old West was thoroughly hard, with long days of grueling work and very little time for play. The towns where most of the films and TV programs are supposed to take place were villages really, just a store, possibly a church, maybe a school, maybe a doctor. Oh, and a saloon, maybe, if the town wasn’t prohibitionist. Maybe there was a sheriff whose office had a room that could be used as a jail. That depended on where the law in the county was. There were enough residents to man the services and a few more. Life outside town either in cattle country on farming country was hard work for little profit. It’s not a place where you would really want to live. The modern world, with all its frustrations, is a much better place to be. But if you had to live in the Old West, Bret Maverick’s West is preferable to Clint Eastwood’s. It’s more fun, for one thing.

By the 1970s the Old West was gone, a victim of the Vietnamese war, its kind of law and order out of date. We didn’t have the luxury of inhabiting the Old West anymore. We knew we lived in a dangerous world, and a different kind of fictional law and order was required for our comfort. Cops and private detectives inhabited television, all of them hard in that ‘man’s got to do what a man’s got to do’ sort of way. The problems were more complex, more recognizable as a kind of reality, but the solution was the same: gunplay.

Into this world came Jim Rockford, a sort of a private detective, a man who lived in a trailer, went his own way, and helped people in trouble, accompanied, and occasionally hampered, by a cast of family and friends and cops. Rockford’s world was recognizably now, but there was a lot of Bret Maverick in him. Hardly suave, but witty, wearing jeans instead of a well tailored suit, perhaps he fought more than Brett did, for if our Old West is largely imaginary we know the violence of the modern world is not. Jim Rockford solved his cases to little thanks and less reward. Maybe that is more recognizably modern too.

Cowboys and sheriffs and cops, and private detectives too, exist in our fantasies to set the world aright, for a little while, but not for long, for the world is too much with us soon and late, and nothing ever stays right for any length of time. Oh, how we need Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford!

So long, James Garner.

Thanks for the memories.