GARNER SHIFTS GEARS IN HALLMARK’S ‘PROMISE’

Jim Rockford’s alter ego won’t be screeching tires and getting thumped by thugs much anymore.

“Hey, at my age I can’t do it--and it’s not believable anymore,” James Garner was saying over a plate of bacon and eggs the other day.

At 58, the man who gave TV viewers two of their most reluctant heroes--gambler Bret Maverick and harried private eye Rockford in the long-running “The Rockford Files”--is trying to wear his age gracefully. “I’ve got to make that transition,” he said, “from the leading man to more character roles, and still stay in sort of a leading man capacity.

“The producers, the directors and everybody have to know I can do something besides drive a Pontiac and get beat up.”

“Murphy’s Romance,” in which he starred early this year as Sally Field’s much-senior suitor, filled that niche pretty nicely, the critics thought.

Television viewers can see Garner in a somewhat more jarring, more complex mid-life role Sunday, when the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presents “Promise,” airing at 9 p.m. on CBS (Channels 2 and 8). In it, Garner plays Bob, a small-town bachelor set in his ways, who, against his wishes, is given charge of his schizophrenic younger brother, played by James Woods.

It’s one of Garner’s more unsympathetic roles. He whines, he cries, he shrinks from responsibility. This is not the public image the actor cultivated by frolicking with Doris Day in “The Thrill of It All” or taking on pro bono investigations as Rockford.

“Yeah, the public image. People will hate me. That doesn’t bother me. I don’t even think about it,” he said. “Look at the stuff that (Jack) Nicholson has done. He’s done stuff that . . . he’s not really likable.”

(Garner actually came close to treading on Nicholson’s turf; he was “interviewed” by director James Brooks for the aging astronaut role in “Terms of Endearment.” “Jack was a much better choice than I would have been,” he said. “I talked to Brooks, and I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. He didn’t make sense to me.”)

If more roles came his way like this year’s “Murphy’s Romance,” Garner might not have had to become a TV-movie producer. But they didn’t, and he is. “Promise” is based on a script Garner bought four years ago and went on to executive produce along with his partner, former agent Peter Duchow.

“I love to make movies,” Garner said. “You’ve got more time, they’re easier, there’s more money involved. But the really good things are coming to television. Movies, they’re doing take-over-the-world, blow up something, go into space. Or it’s a teen-age thing.

“I saw a title, ‘Solarbabies.’ So-lar-babies ? I can’t imagine what that would be . . . .”

It would be a futuristic teen fantasy epic from Mel Brooks’ company; it wouldn’t be a movie with any place for Jim Garner.

Even the strength of his name--or the critical success of “Murphy’s” or last year’s “Heartsounds” drama doesn’t seem to help much. Columbia Pictures, he notes, had to have its arm twisted to make “Murphy’s” at all.

Garner also had shown the script upon which “Promise” is based, titled “Watercolors,” to “Murphy’s” director Martin Ritt and asked if it could fly as a movie. Ritt’s answer came without hesitation, as Garner recalls: “No. No one will do it.”

That’s why he concludes, after 40-plus films and a 30-year screen career that “the best writing is in television.”

That certainly seems to be the case with “Promise,” which eschews the expected bright ending and instead goes for powerful realism, backed up by compelling performances by Garner, Woods and Piper Laurie.

For Garner, right now, television also provides the steadiest income, but not from the sources one would expect.

He’s still awaiting a court date for his lawsuit against Universal Television, which he contends failed to pay him the 38% of the profits due him from “The Rockford Files.”

So he’ll soon be adding commercials for the Beef Council to those for Mazda and Polaroid. “It’s a quick way and it’s a good way” to make money, he said. He insists that he’s sincere about those products’ merits.

“Like my Mazda commercial. I’ve been associated with cars for 20 years, so it’s legitimate. I’ve eaten beef all my life. The people in Oklahoma where I came from, those people are starving because beef (consumption) is down.”

No light-eater, he. Breakfast at a little-known Hollywood eatery that shuns the glamour crowd consists of two or three eggs with cream cheese folded in, six strips of bacon and a couple slabs of homemade white toast slathered with butter.

“But you’ll note I didn’t eat all the bacon,” Garner said.

“Promise” fulfills Garner’s production deal with Warner Bros. Television. Garner/Duchow’s next TV project will likely be “The Alcoholics Anonymous Story.” But executive producer Garner will not likely have his eye on that guy from the Polaroid commercials as the star. “I think there are other actors better for it,” he said.

Easing into what he acknowledges are his “older years,” Garner said, he’d be happy “if I did one good movie and one good television show a year.” That’s why being a producer, a role he’s had before in film and TV--including “Rockford”--is one that Garner thinks suits him just fine.

“I’d rather produce than work. It’s just sitting there making decisions. It kind of keeps me in television so I know what’s going on pretty much.”