“They Married After Just 16 Days… The Beautiful True Story of James Garner and Lois Clarke”

On August 1, 1956, an Oklahoma-born actor named James Scott Bumgarner — who had recently started appearing in a Warner Bros. television Western called Maverick under the stage name James Garner — attended an Adlai Stevenson-for-President campaign rally in Los Angeles.At the rally, Garner met Lois Josephine Fleischman Clarke, a thirty-two-year-old single mother. She had recently been fired from her job for missing too much work while staying at the hospital with her seven-year-old daughter Kim, who was recovering from polio.Sixteen days later, on August 17, 1956, they were married at the Beverly Hills courthouse.

James formally adopted Kim the same day.The popular version of the story is simple: fourteen days of dinners, a quick courthouse wedding, and a fifty-eight-year marriage. But beneath that romantic surface was something far more substantial from the very first day.Lois Clarke had been born in Los Angeles in 1923. By the summer of 1956, she was raising her daughter alone after a previous marriage. Kim’s polio had created a serious financial crisis. Lois had lost her job because of the long hospital stays, had no savings, and was struggling to cover the ongoing medical care her daughter needed.James

Garner was born James Scott Bumgarner on April 7, 1928, in Norman, Oklahoma. He lost his mother at age four, endured an abusive stepmother, and spent much of his childhood doing odd jobs — gas station attendant, oilfield worker, dishwasher. He was the first Oklahoman drafted for the Korean War in 1950, served with the 5th Regimental Combat Team, and was wounded twice, earning two Purple Hearts (the second awarded decades later in 1983).In 1955, at age twenty-seven, he signed a contract with Warner Bros. When he met Lois in 1956, he was a working actor who had not yet become a star.

That would change a year later with the premiere of Maverick.During those fourteen dinners, Lois was open with him about her reality: raising a daughter recovering from polio, the mountain of medical bills, and the difficult position she was in as a single mother in 1956. Garner later wrote in his 2011 memoir The Garner Files that he had fallen completely in love. He also asked seven-year-old Kim what she thought before proposing. Kim gave her approval.They married on August 17, 1956. James adopted Kim immediately, and her medical care continued under his name and financial support. Two years later, in 1958, James and Lois welcomed their biological daughter, Greta “Gigi” Garner.What looked like a Hollywood whirlwind romance was, for Lois, the resolution of a genuine crisis. For Garner, it meant becoming a father overnight at age twenty-eight — not gradually, but instantly, to a seven-year-old polio survivor.

The couple faced two separations — one in 1970 and another in 1979 amid the intense physical and emotional toll of filming The Rockford Files. Garner always attributed the second separation to the pressure of the show, not to problems with Lois. He returned to the marriage both times.James Garner died of cardiac arrest on July 19, 2014, at his home in Brentwood. He was eighty-six. Their marriage had lasted one month short of fifty-eight years.Lois Clarke Garner passed away in 2021 at the age of ninety-eight. She had outlived him by seven years and remained the steady foundation of the family until the very end.He needed her from the beginning. She became the structural heart of their family — raising two daughters with him, sustaining the household, and standing beside him through every