Producer Suggests Garner, Hartley Get Back in the Picture

Might there be a rematch for one of America’s favorite dueling screen couples?

When James Garner and Mariette Hartley made 250 Polaroid commercials as a snapping couple back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, their faux marital jousting was so convincing that Hartley wore a T-shirt declaring that she wasn’t Garner’s wife.

Well, she wasn’t. Garner’s lifelong honey Lois is. And when the ad campaign ended, so did Jim and Mariette’s reason to see each other--until last week, when the Museum of Television & Radio lured the reclusive Garner to its palace of broadcasting in Beverly Hills for a gala dinner in his honor.

“Everybody has a favorite Jim Garner moment,” said former “Laugh-In” producer George Schlatter, who had nudged the shy “Rockford Files” star into participating. “He was a rascal in ‘Maverick.’ He’s got that naughty adult child in everything he does. Men say, ‘I wish I had the guts to do that.’ And women say, ‘I wish you had the guts to do that.’ ”

Hartley’s favorite Jim Garner moment was their Polaroid moment, and she took the podium during dinner to let him know.

“It was the greatest time of my life,” she said. “I was taught my form of comedy, and I’ve never been able to publicly thank you for that. It was the beginning of my career.”

And if the impish Schlatter has any say in the matter, it might also be her next step. At the end of the evening, he suggested that the pair consider a rematch on the small screen.

“Everything about television now is about wanting to [have sex], [having sex], or what you’re going to do until you [have sex] again,” he told Hartley. “There’s got to be more about relationships and humanity and the way people really are. It would be wonderful. We’ll talk.”

*

Relax, everybody. Calm down. The tragedy in Littleton, Colo., does not mean that kids around the country are getting trigger-happy.

Oh, yes. And that SWAT team President Clinton dispatched to investigate the impact of Hollywood violence on youth? Piffle.

We have this from an expert, USC sociology professor Barry Glassner, who celebrated the publication of his new book at a party in Silver Lake on Saturday. The title gets its own sentence: “The Culture of Fear--Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage, & So Much More” (Basic Books).

Since Glassner seems to be surfing the zeitgeist, we asked him about the headline-making kids and the country’s testy reaction to them. He told us about a school safety expert he met in his recent travels.

“She said very seriously that she’s been doing research, and it seems that people with the last name of Harris commit murder more often, and one of the [Littleton] kids has that name. You get these absurd escalating numbers of things to be afraid of based on that one incident. What that does is to lose focus on the clear, proximate cause of these deaths, which is guns.

“That’s very convenient for politicians--but specifically those who are indebted to the gun lobby--so that now they can shift focus from the actual shootings. So now you’re hearing all this talk about Hollywood and video games and the Internet. It’s a great distraction. There’s no kid who is otherwise stable who’s going to commit mass murder because they’ve watched it on the screen. They have to be disturbed and have access to firepower.”

The reality is that fewer than 1% of schools has experienced a violent death on campus in the last seven years, Glassner says.

“The bottom line is, aside from airplanes, schools are the safest place kids can be. If you want kids to be safe, keep them flying. Close behind would be keeping them in school.”

Irene Lacher’s Out & About column runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Page 2. She can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.