Longtime resident, producer and even actor, Arthur Gardner, will receive a special proclamation at the Beverly Hills City Council Tuesday in honor of his contributions to the entertainment industry, and his 100th birthday.
Gardner, who never wanting to do anything but be in show business, left Wisconsin at 18, the day after he graduated high school, to come to Hollywood—it took him a year.
An aggressive young man, he got a meeting with another “Wisconsinite” Carl Lammele and got his first job as an extra at Universal.
“I was always a ham, but not a particularly good actor,” says Gardner, who was known as a star of his high school’s drama society and a practical joker.
He is the last surviving cast member of 1930’s All Quiet On The Western Front starring Lew Ayres. He also appeared in Mystic Circle Murder and Assassin Of Youth, which came out the same year as Refer Madness with the same anti-marijuana theme, as the juvenile lead.
He is one of the few surviving members of WWII’s First Motion Picture Unit stationed at Fort (Hal) Roach studios, making training films under commanding officer Ronald Reagan.
Realizing that “anything is better than acting,” after the war, he worked as an assistant director and production manager, and later he and his two (now deceased) partners (Jules Levy and Arnold Laven) founded Levy-Gardner-Laven Prods. “We were inseparable, like brothers,” Gardner says.
They eventually produced four television series (including The Rifleman and The Big Valley, which his company still owns) and 22 feature films (among them: Sam Whiskey, Gator and White Lightning with Burt Reynolds, Kansas City Bomber with Raquel Welch and Scalphunters with Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis.
Also McQ and Brannigan with John Wayne whom Gardner later shared office space with. “We always got along very cordially,” Gardner says.
His autobiography, The Badger Kid, reveals he first cast Sammy Davis Jr. as a black gunfighter and Buddy Hackett in a dramatic role on The Rifleman. On the same show which starred ex-baseball player Chuck Conners, he cast Dodger hero Duke Snider. He gave Burt Reynolds his first directing job and would have given 24-year-old Steven Speilberg his directing debut in White Lighting, had the director not requested a release to direct Sugarland Express.
He still comes to the office he shares with his son Steven H. Gardner almost every day, has lunch with showbiz friends every Friday and just recently gave up golf and driving.
He threw out the first pitch at Dodger Stadium on his actual birthday, June 7. He’s been a season ticket holder since the team moved from Brooklyn.
At the time of a recent interview, he said he was confidently up to 30 feet from the mound, “but may need help with the rest.”
“What I feel is unique about him is he was able to maintain a stable environment for his family outside of the ‘business’ to which he chose to devote his life’s work,” said his son Steven, an El Rodeo and BHHS graduate. “Never ‘star-struck,’ not ostentatious, and always watching the budget (they never made a film overbudget), he was a real regular guy who did what he loved with no regrets and with a wealth of good will from everyone he worked with. His boyhood hero was Horatio Alger and he lived that legacy.”
Gardner, who moved to Beverly Hills in 1963, attributes his longevity to his Russian Jewish ancestry, eating slowly and swimming every morning. He swam at 6 a.m. every morning through his 90s.
His positive, glass-always-half-full attitude also helps. “I’ve got nothing to complain about,” Gardner says. “I thank God for everything.”
Gardner who never attended college, but always had a love for archeology, got his doctor’s okay to climb to the top of Manchu Pichu in Peru in his 90s. His son recalls him jumping over the last step proclaiming, “I feel like I’m 20.”
A former member of the Academy’s foreign film committee, Gardner professes a continuing love for film and TV. “I always said I have to be in this industry.”
—Steve Simmons
