Fatherhood is never easy, especially with the added pressure of finding a bed to sleep in each night. Chris Gardner’s yearlong struggle with homelessness and fatherhood was depicted in the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness. This is the real story behind the movie.

Chris Gardner’s pursuit of happiness was seen in theaters by millions of people. However, Gardner’s life did not entirely mirror Will Smith’s portrayal of him. Beyond the events of the film, Gardner lived a difficult life before he made his millions.

Gardner was born in Milwaukee on February 9, 1954. He never really had any male role models in his life and continually saw his sisters’ father (Freddie Triplett) physically abuse his mother and his sisters. Chris was placed in foster care twice – once after his mother was falsely imprisoned for welfare fraud (accused by Triplett), and another time after she tried to burn Triplett alive in his home. In addition, his uncle Henry, a huge influence on a young Chris, died when Chris was nine.

Pursuit Of Happiness Coin

One of the most traumatizing moments from Chris’s childhood involved his stepfather. One Christmas when Chris was a teenager, an intoxicated Triplett burst into the bathroom while Chris was taking a bath. With a shotgun in hand, he ordered Chris to leave the house. Promptly, Chris ran out of the house naked and soaking wet into the frigid Wisconsin winter. He had already kicked Chris’s mother out of the house. Gardner said that the event still stays on his mind.

After finishing secondary school, Gardner decided to follow in his Uncle Henry’s footsteps and enlist in the United States Navy. Chris was stationed in North Carolina at Camp Lejeune as a medical corpsman. In the film, Chris is depicted as selling medical equipment. While in the Navy, Chris befriended Dr. Robert Ellis, a cardiac surgeon that helped set him up with a clinical research position at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. He moved there after his discharge.

Although he was married to another woman, Chris began a relationship with a woman named Jackie Medina. He eventually moved in with Jackie after she became pregnant with their child. Christopher Jr. was born on January 28, 1981. Although he had hoped to become a physician, he had abandoned his dream when he fully realized the time and money it would take to get there. He was working as a lab assistant but did not make enough to support a girlfriend and child.

In the film, Will Smith’s Christopher approached a well-dressed man in a red Ferrari on the street and asked: “What do you do?” Gardner actually did this. However, it was a bit different than it was depicted in the film. Unlike the film, Chris approached this stockbroker in a parking garage while Christopher Jr. was still an infant. The man then followed up and met Chris for lunch to explain the basics of Wall Street, altering his life forever.

Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of “The Pursuit of Happyness” by Chris Gardner. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Distinguish between the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of pleasure. My brothers and sisters, the gospel is true. Not only that, it truly is “the great plan of happiness” (Alma 42:8). To act contrary to the principles and covenants of the gospel of Jesus Christ is to be “in a state contrary to the nature of happiness” (Alma 41:11).

By speaking with the stockbroker, Chris’s world opened up. The man, Bob Bridges, not only gave him the lowdown on the industry but helped him organize meetings with branch managers at big brokerage firms. Bridges was quite successful, earning over $80,000 a month, had great connections and was willing to help Chris get his foot in the door. Chris canceled all of his sales appointments so he could interview with these companies in hopes of placing into a training program.

One of the biggest pieces of misinformation from The Pursuit of Happyness involves Chris’s job before the training program. Although Chris did sell medical supplies, the film’s writers added the part in which Chris put his life savings into some portable bone density scanners. He did not go broke from purchasing the units himself before attempting to sell them. Also, he sold various medical products, not just the scanners depicted in the film. The products were generally of one brand.

One of the most intense scenes in the film involved Will Smith chasing after a man that had stolen one of his bone density scanners. While crossing the street, he is hit by a car and becomes quite emotional. This did not actually happen. Gardner never mentions it in his book nor has he mentioned this in any of the numerous interviews that he has given. It is just a piece of dramatic imagination drummed up by screenwriter Steve Conrad.

Unfortunately, Chris’s acceptance into the E.F.Hutton training program turned into nothing when the hiring manager was fired. He continued to apply to other programs, but his personal life was also in shambles. His relationship with Jackie reached a head when she tried to run off with Chris Jr. While trying to take Chris Jr. from her arms, he swung her into garden bushes. Police arrested Chris and additionally charged him with owing $1,200 in parking tickets.

Chris’s first break within the finance world was with brokerage Dean Witter Reynolds. Unlike in the movie, Chris did not befriend a Dean Witter employee by impressing him with completing a Rubik’s cube. That was added for dramatic effect. He did befriend a broker named Marty that helped him along the way. However, after his spat with Jackie, Chris arrived back at home from prison to find an empty apartment as Jackie had taken their son to the East Coast.

The movie got one thing about his Dean Witter interview correct – he did not come dressed appropriately. His spat with Jackie landed him in jail for ten days. When he got out, he stayed at his friend’s house. Chris had his interview the next day and only had a Members Only jacket and sneakers splattered with paint to wear. He might not have made the “pants joke” from the film, but he told Mr. Albanese the truth about his appearance sans the jail part.

The Pursuit of Happiness got another thing wrong about Chris’s acceptance into the Dean Witter Reynolds training program – he actually did get paid. It made for a nice story that he was working full days without a salary, but trainees received $1,000 a month. It was not the full salary that brokers make, but it was more than enough for a man selling medical equipment. Soon enough, Chris would understand what it meant to make the big bucks.

After four months, Jackie returned to San Francisco with two-year-old Christopher Jr. Chris’s training salary provided some living expenses but not nearly enough for Chris and his boy. Chris and Jackie decided that it was best for Junior to stay with his father. However, this caused another major issue. Even though he was employed, the building that Chris was living in did not allow children. They would have to find alternative living quarters.

Embarrassed by his situation, Christopher decided to keep both his son and his homelessness a secret from his co-workers. He was still diligently working through Dean Witter’s training program but had to provide for his son too. Many nights they had to choose between money for food or money for shelter, frequently choosing food. By prioritizing food over shelter, the dynamic duo had to constantly look for new and creative places to stay so Christopher could save up for permanent housing.

Fans of The Pursuit of Happyness might be surprised to learn the real age of Christopher Jr. during the events of the film. In reality, Christopher Jr. was two years old. The film producers and writers decided to make him five years old so he could have more meaningful interactions with Chris Sr. in the film. Gardner approved of the change because he realized they could tell his story better. Jaden Smith was seven at the time he played Chris Jr.

In a touching moment with his son (onscreen and real life), Will Smith’s Christopher shared a true moment with Jaden/Chris Jr. In the film, while they were still homeless, Chris Jr. told his father that he was “a good poppa.” When Chris and Chris Jr. were finally off the street, Chris Jr. shared his kind words. Gardner was giving Chris Jr. a bath when he stood up and said, “Poppa, you know what? You’re a good poppa.”

Christopher was willing to go to great lengths to find places to sleep. In the direst of circumstances, Christopher and his son slept on the bathroom floor of the MacArthur BART station in Oakland. This is accurately depicted in the The Pursuit of Happyness. They only slept on the floor for a couple of nights, but made the most of the BART for shelter. They would also sleep on the BART trains.

To prepare for the film, Chris took Will Smith to see the actual bathroom in which he slept with Chris Jr. Gardner told Smith that it made him uncomfortable to be in there for too long, but Smith decided to take in the scene after Chris left the restroom. Gardner said, “We left him in there for a good five minutes, and when he came out he was not Will Smith, he was Chris Gardner.”

Money was tight for Chris, so he had to get creative in how he earned a buck here and there. On several occasions, he gave blood for cash. It did not get him much, but it was better than nothing. Chris never felt good about giving blood for money because it allowed him to see desperation at a whole new level – not only from others that he considered below him but from himself as well.

As he was attempting to scrape together money, Christopher learned of a scam to earn some bills. One day, Gardner saw a man fighting with a vending machine for cigarettes in a hotel. When the man went to the front desk and asked for a refund, they obliged. Over the next two weeks, Chris adopted this into a ploy of his own. He would tell the desk that a vending machine ate his money and they would give him a “refund.”

Like the film, Chris did frequent the Glide Memorial Church for shelter. One thing the movie did not detail is that the church only took in homeless mothers with kids. The church’s reverend, Cecil Williams, made a special exception for Chris and Chris Jr. Reverend Williams played himself in the film too. Chris felt indebted to Reverend Williams and vowed to pay him back for sheltering them. He eventually helped bankroll a $50 million project headed by Williams for low-income housing.

Chris truly cherished the help that Reverend Williams gave to him. Not only did he appreciate him offering shelter, but Chris was moved by his words too. Reverend Williams hammered into Chris’s head that “baby steps count too.” Those simple words were quite helpful in keeping Chris motivated and moving forward. By repeating “baby steps count too” to himself as he roamed the streets of San Francisco, Chris stayed positive and worked toward his goal.

Chris was a natural during his training program and was one of the best performers in the program. Early into the program, he passed his Series 7 Exam which allowed him to become a full employee at the company. Bear Stearns was impressed with his work and tried to recruit him. In the end, he was hired by Dean Witter thanks to his sensational work ethic. He made around 200 calls, coming in early and staying late each day.

Dean Witter’s training program was incorrectly portrayed in the film. The Pursuit of Happyness made it seem as if only one person from the training program could be hired by the company. In fact, Dean Witter welcomed any of their trainees to join the company so long as they passed the licensing exam. At the end of the program, Chris was hired because he scored an 88% on the test. It was a good start to his stockbroker life.

In 2006, Gardner published an autobiography detailing his struggle and rise titled The Pursuit of Happyness. Gardner chose to change the spelling from ‘happiness’ to ‘happyness’ to reflect a trying time in their past. When Chris and his son were taking up shelter in Oakland near MacArthur Park, they frequently passed by a daycare center which had purposefully misspelled ‘happyness.’ He was learning about the “food chain” of daycare in the country so he could send Chris somewhere.

Pursuit Of Happiness Kid Cudi

Due to the timeframe of the film, Chris’s life beyond the movie is rarely discussed. One part that is left out is that he has another child. After the events of the film, Christopher and Jackie began speaking again. She quickly became pregnant with their second child. Jacintha Gardner was born in 1985. Although she was born in Los Angeles, not far from Chris’s home in San Francisco, Jacintha did not spend much early life with Chris as he had moved to New York.

In 1985, Chris jumped across the country to New York. He had been working for brokerage firm Bear Stearns in San Francisco but had transferred to their Wall Street office. While he was in New York, Chris wanted Chris Jr. to grow up with his sister, so he sent him to Los Angeles to live with his mother. After two years in New York, Chris had had it and decided to move to Chicago.

The move to Chicago was not only great for Chris professionally, but also personally. For starters, he opened his own brokerage firm, Gardner Rich & Company. After struggling to make ends meet, he was now employing people of his own. In addition, the move to Chicago allowed Christopher to move Chris Jr. and Jacintha to Chicago to live with him. While he dealt with the pressures of managing a firm, he had many relatives in nearby Milwaukee to help out with the kids.

Gardner did such a great job of putting on a facade of normalcy for his son that Christopher Jr. did not even know that they were homeless. He did not know until he was grown. The now-36-year-old said in an interview, “I didn’t know we were homeless. I just remember that we were doing a whole lot of moving. I just know that when I looked up, he was there. I looked around, he was there.”

By 1988, Christopher had achieved an incredible feat – he earned over $1 million in a single year. He was 34 years old and ecstatic with his achievement. To reward himself, Gardner decided to buy himself a Ferrari. It was not red like the one that inspired him to become a stockbroker, but a Ferrari nonetheless. The car was not just any Ferrari either – it had belonged to basketball legend Michael Jordan. His customized license plate read, “NOT MJ.”

When Chris was young, he dreamed of becoming a millionaire. He watched as ballplayers raked in huge contracts each year and he wanted to be a part of it. His mother continuously told him that he could be that successful too. Gardner said, “I just had to find the right venue. It took me 15 years, but the day I walked into a Wall Street trading room, I knew, this was the place my mama was telling me about.”

The Pursuit of Happyness was a huge hit as millions became captivated by Christopher’s story. Will Smith was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Chris. The next time you see the film, look closely, and you can find Chris. Just before the credits, Chris has a brief cameo. He is dressed in a suit as he walks past Will and Jaden Smith. It is that he could be a part of the project that introduced him to the public.

Following the release of the film and his autobiography, in addition to his financial successes, Chris is now worth around $60 million. He founded a new company called Gardner International Holdings in 2006 after selling his share in Gardner Rich. They have offices in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. He travels around the world as a motivational speaker and devotes much of his time to philanthropic causes. His story is an inspiration to many, and he continues to share how his struggle helped him become a success.

Chris is thankful for the help he received along the way. He decided to pay it forward to a woman named Niyokie when he became successful on his own. As a junior in high school, she earned an internship with Chris’s firm. She came from a community of substance abusers and teen pregnancies. After she completed the internship, Chris gave her a college scholarship. She became the first of her 12 siblings to graduate from a four-year university.

The right to “the pursuit of happiness” affirmed in the Declaration of Independence is taken these days to affirm a right to chase after whatever makes one subjectively happy. Further, the Declaration doesn’t guarantee the right to happiness, the thought usually goes, but only the right to pursue what makes you happy. But this reading of the Declaration’s “pursuit of happiness” is wrong on both scores.

“Happiness” in the public discourse of the time often did not simply refer to a subjective emotional state. It meant prosperity or, perhaps better, well-being in the broader sense. It included the right to meet physical needs, but it also included a significant moral and religious dimension. In correspondence between James Madison and James Monroe in 1786, Madison notes that “happiness” cannot simply be identified with meeting people’s interests, but includes a higher reference:

There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation, than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong. Taking the word “interest” as synonymous with “ultimate happiness,” in which sense it is qualified with every necessary moral ingredient, the proposition is no doubt true. But taking it in its popular sense, as referring to the immediate augmentation of property and wealth, nothing can be more false.

The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 affirms that “the happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality, and . . . these cannot be generally diffused through a community but by the institution of the public worship of God and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality.”

So, too, Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 affirms that “religion, morality, and knowledge” are “essential to the happiness of mankind.”

Affirmations of these kinds could be multiplied many times from documents and speeches of the time. The upshot is that “happiness” in the Declaration should be understood centrally as a sort of virtuous felicity, perhaps in the sense of Greek eudaimonia, although one refined by Christian sensibilities.

Arthur Schlesinger Sr. observed in an obscure book chapter that “pursuit” has a particular meaning at the time of the Declaration. While less employed today, this secondary meeting nonetheless remains in use when referring, for example, to the pursuit of medicine, or the pursuit of lawyering, etc. In this sense “pursuit” means occupation or practice. We might even think of it in the sense of vocation.

So “the pursuit of happiness” means something like occupying one’s life with the activities that provide for overall wellbeing. This certainly includes a right to material things, but it goes beyond that to include humanity’s spiritual and moral condition.

That the “pursuit of happiness” is an inalienable right—one that cannot be given away—and that governments have been tasked to protect it suggests a relationship between government and humanity’s moral ends in tension, if not in outright contradiction, with modern liberalism. It seems to assume an objective moral order from which a person may not alienate himself.

In the theory of the Declaration, liberty is not the entire universe of the American project. Liberty is encapsulated within equally significant commitments to life and to happiness. Life and happiness give form and shape to the liberty that the Declaration affirms.

All of this may seem like a quaint historical observation. And perhaps it is no more than that. Nonetheless, we Americans have a continuing habit of taking recourse to the Declaration to understand ourselves and our government.

Beyond that, there may be a more practical constitutional import in the not-too-distant future. To understand what this may be requires a bit of background. Throughout the 20th Century, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution increasingly became a central channel through which national constitutional principles were applied to the U.S. states. After defining citizenship (and so effectively overturning the Dred Scott decision), the first section of the Amendment then guarantees that no state shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, requires that no state deprive persons of life, liberty or property without due process of law, and prohibits states from denying to any person the equal protection of the laws.

The 14th Amendment’s language of “privileges or immunities” is borrowed from Section 4 of the Constitution which states that “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” While the meaning of the Section 4 privileges and immunities clause is not transparent, that the constitutional framers lifted the language form Article 4 of the Articles of Confederation seems to illuminates its meaning: to prohibits states from discriminating in favor of their own citizens and against citizens of other states in regards to certain basic or fundamental rights.

When the 14th Amendment was proposed and ratified after the Civil War, the purpose of the Privileges or Immunities clause in that Amendment seemed clear to many observers: it sought to apply the set of basic or fundamental rights protected by the Article IV Privileges and Immunities clause internally to the states. It would authorize the organs of the national government to protect citizens of a state from deprivations of fundamental rights by their own state government.

This “obvious” purpose of the 14th Amendment Privileges or Immunities Clause, however, was effectively killed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Slaughterhouse Cases in 1872. In declining to apply the clause to a group of Louisiana butchers, the Court limited the reach of the clause to a modest set of rights. This decision arguably distorted the development of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence up through today. In particular, the decision seemed to have forced the Court to draw on the Amendment’s “due process” clause to protect rights more naturally protected as “privileges or immunities.”

All this may be interesting enough, but what does it have to do with “happiness” in the Declaration?

The increased popularity and respectability of textualist approaches to interpreting the Constitution has prompted growing interest in revivifying the privileges or immunities clause of the 14th Amendment. There is more at stake in this than an honest of reading the Amendment. The long tradition construing the privileges and immunities clause in Article IV of the Constitution would inform how we understand the 14th Amendment’s privileges and immunities clause. It is this tradition that draws on the Declaration’s verbiage to understand Article IV privileges and immunities guarantees and, hence, could be expected to inform how judges understand the 14th Amendment’s privileges or immunities clause.

In a pivotal 1823 case construing the Section 4 privileges and immunities clause, Justice Bushrod Washington (nephew to George Washington) wrote:

The inquiry is what are the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several States? We feel no hesitation in confining these expressions to those privileges and immunities which are fundamental; which belong of right to the citizens of all free governments, and which have at all times been enjoyed by citizens of the several States which compose this Union, from the time of their becoming free, independent, and sovereign. What these fundamental principles are it would be more tedious than difficult to enumerate. They may all, however, be comprehended under the following general heads: protection by the government, with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind and to pursue and obtain happiness and safety, subject, nevertheless, to such restraints as the government may prescribe for the general good of the whole.

The phrase, “happiness and safety,” derives from the Declaration. It affirms that whenever a government becomes destructive of inalienable rights, it is the people’s right to create a new government with principles and power formed “as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” So the type of happiness that governments are formed “to effect” at this point in the text is the same “pursuit of happiness” that governments are instituted to secure two sentences earlier in the Declaration.

If “happiness” in the Declaration necessarily assumes the existence of an objective moral order, then its co-equal relationship to “liberty” is central to understanding liberty, and one little explored in modern jurisprudence. The understanding that life and happiness encapsulate liberty stands in obvious tension with the modern itch to universalize liberty as the sole dimension of the American constitutional project. Even given the ambiguity of the text, a privileges or immunities clause that draws on the Declaration’s theory of happiness would make it problematic for judges to affirm blandly, as the plurality did in the 1991 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that “the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Understanding the moral and religious overtones of the Declaration’s “pursuit of happiness,” as well as its application to physical sustenance, has potentially significant implications for understanding constitutional guarantees, as well as for understanding the nature of the American project more generally.

James R. Rogers is department head and associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University. He leads the “New Man” prison ministry at the Hamilton Unit in Bryan, Texas, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Texas District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

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