IS TERI GARR SERIOUS WHEN (original) (raw)

”I have no idea what he`s really like,” Teri Garr is saying, evenly, in answer to the umpteenth question put to her this day about David Letterman, on whose show she frequently appears. ”I go in, do the show and leave.”

She wishes promotional tours were so simple. Chicago is her third of five cities in as many days, and her piquant face is pale with fatigue. Her mission is to hype interest in ”Full Moon in Blue Water,” a quasi-comedy set to open Nov. 23 in which she stars with Gene Hackman and Burgess Meredith. (”Out Cold,” a black comedy with Garr, Randy Quaid and John Lithgow, is due to open soon as well.)

As soon as this trip is over, she starts work on ”Let It Ride” with Richard Dreyfuss, her costar in Steven Spielberg`s ”Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” one of the movies that helped push Garr into the category of full-fledged movie star after years of secondary roles. She doesn`t like to say how many years.

”Once, I auditioned for Bob Fosse, and he asked me how old I was. And I told him and he said, `Honey, never ever tell anybody your age in this business.` And I think he was right. I really think numbers prejudice people. If I was up for a part and the people said, `Oh, she`s that number? Oh, we didn`t want anybody who`s that number. . . .` ”

It would be hard to begrudge Garr this deception. For one thing, she has earned it, having appeared in so many films that she has lost count.

”There was one point in my life when I did so many movies I was in a hotel room for one year. I was just nuts from it, and I said, `Okay, let`s stop and go spend some of this money.` But then I got nervous. . . .”

That kind of nervousness has brought her work with a galaxy of directors: Besides Spielberg, there`s Martin Scorsese (”After Hours”), Francis Ford Coppola (”One from the Heart” and ”The Conversation”), Mel Brooks (”Young Frankenstein”), John Schlesinger (”Honky Tonk Freeway”), Carroll Ballard

(”Black Stallion”) and, of course, Sidney Pollack (”Tootsie”).

”Somehow in the back of my mind I think I`ll get the parts I`m supposed to get, but meanwhile, every good part I hear about, I`m saying, `I want it, why are they giving it to Sigourney Weaver, why am I not getting it?` My agents say I can pick and choose, but I`m always trying to get into everything.”

It`s that combination of talent and sheer drive that has brought Garr plenty of name and face recognition.

In her soft white blouse, gray tweed slacks and simple black flats, she could be an executive. Part of her, the part that wants more creative control over the films she makes, would like to be.

”If you want to be taken seriously, you have to dress seriously and look like you have thought about it,” she says. ”I try, but I`m not serious.”

She starts to grin. ”People ask me, `What was your favorite role?` and I say, `Oh, ”Gone with the Wind.” ` You know. I`m just not serious!”

With that, she proceeds to be quite serious indeed.

On screen Garr is somehow accessible. She`s the character you`ve known all your life. Warm. Giving. Probably too giving for her own good. Often ditsy and not in control. Off screen she looks surprisingly small and delicate, but she radiates confidence, so much so that you wonder why she`s not doing a Sally Field or a Goldie Hawn, why she`s not producing her own properties.

”There`s a bunch of things I`ve decided to try to get the rights to remake-old movies in the public domain,” she says, ”but it`s so hard to get a movie off the ground.”

Her role model, in fact, is not the actress-producer at all but the actress-mother, Meryl Streep. ”I love the fact that Meryl has a great career and can be a mother and have a husband. I know her and I know she goes home and makes a salad and washes out the tub and bathes her kids, and I think it`s great. And I know it`s not easy.”

Was this why she never married?

She looks surprised. ”Well, I lived with two men, one for seven years, the other for five. I was with Birnbaum (Roger Birnbaum, an independent producer) for seven. That was like a marriage. In fact, it was worse than a marriage because when we split up, it was, `Who gets the house?` `Who gets this?` `Who gets that?` No, my not getting married has a lot more to do with my relationship with my parents than with anything more recent.”

Garr`s father was Eddie Garr, a vaudevillian, Broadway and Hollywood actor; her mother was a Radio City Rockette nicknamed ”Legs.” The family-she has two brothers-moved from Hollywood to Cleveland to New Jersey and back to Hollywood before her father died of a heart attack when Teri was 11. Her mother struggled to make ends meet, renting out rooms in her house to boarders and taking in sewing, before landing full-time work as a studio costumer. Garr, meanwhile, had started studying ballet with dreams of becoming a member of the American Ballet Theatre.

”I became obsessed with ballet dancing,” she told Ms. magazine in 1983. ”I`d go for three, four hours a day; my feet would be bleeding. I`d take buses all over the city just to go to the best dancing schools. You could just stand there and be quiet and beat yourself up, push the body. . . .”

Reading between the lines of Garr`s biography and of previous interviews suggests that not only was her childhood difficult but that her father was never very available to her, an observation that causes her obvious pain.

”That`s . . . confusing . . . the father thing,” she says in a small, quiet voice. ”His death left us bereft, without any kind of income. And I saw my mother be this incredibly strong, creative woman who put three kids through college-one of my brothers is a surgeon. Any kind of lessons we wanted, we had to have scholarships or sweep the floors. It had to be free. And so we always had to try harder. That was instilled in me very early.”

Garr learned other lessons as well.

”My mother used to schlep these big, heavy racks of clothes around the studios. And one day when I was a kid she told me that her friend, Wes, who also worked in wardrobe, was getting a raise. And I asked, `Are you getting one, too?` And she said, `Why, no. Wes has a wife and child to support.` And I said, `But you have three children and no husband!` This was a turning point for me.”

The day after she graduated from North Hollywood High, Garr started her first professional job, in the chorus of the road company of ”West Side Story.”

”A girlfriend and I had seen the notice for auditions in the trades, and so we went and I was eliminated, but she was called back. I told her, `I`m going with you,` and she said, `But you were eliminated,` and I said, `But now I know what they want.` So I went back and did this other sort of acting, you know, and I got it, . . . so right out of the gate I was going for it.”

Her mother insisted on college, but after two years at California State University at Northridge, Garr headed to New York, where she entered a period of dancing in Broadway chorus lines by night and studying at the Actors Studio by day, interrupted by occasional commutes to Hollywood for dancing parts in beach party and Elvis Presley movies. (In Elvis` ”The Swinger” (1966)she was the dance double in some sequences for Ann-Margret.) Finally, in 1969, she landed a tiny speaking part in Bob Rafelson film, ”Head,” written by another alum of the Actors Studio, Jack Nicholson.

Garr does not consider herself a fist-waving feminist, though she appeared on the cover of ”Ms.” after ”Tootsie,” in which she had ad-libbed the famous line: ”Who said anything about love?! I read `The Second Sex!` I read `The Cinderella Complex!` I`m responsible for my own orgasm!”

”Researching my part for `Tootsie` was the only time I read any of that stuff,” she says now. ”And when I read that line about orgasm, I thought it was sad. And funny. Always when I hear about feminists trying to get men to stop seeing women as sex objects and putting them in Playboy and all that, I think, that`s a losing battle. But the other thing, with work and pay, this we can make progress on. And I really think we have.”

Such progress is not without irony, Garr finds. ”Financial independence has been a big thing with me. But now I go out with guys who don`t make as much money as I do and at some fundamental level I resent it. I think: `You`ve got to make more money-you`re a man!` ” She smiles at the ridiculousness of it all.

”It`s funny how the pendulum swings. I really think that movies reflect the climate of the society. When I did `Tootsie` and `Mr. Mom,` there was a lot of interest in role reversal. Now look at `Fatal Attraction.` ” Garr sits up straight suddenly. This is obviously a sore point, and she is energized.

”Okay, this woman has a career, so she can`t have a relationship with a man without being driven to murder and craziness. `Now, girls` ”-she is acting now, the scolding superior shaking her finger-” `see what happens when you go to work?`

”Then there`s `Baby Boom:` suddenly the competent career woman is hit with-a baby!” (Mock astonishment.) ”And she doesn`t know what to do! Until, of course, she quits her job. . . .”

End of schtick. She`s made her point. With that, she gets up to grab a third of a chocolate chip cookie from a tin someone has thoughtlessly supplied to her room.

”I can`t believe I`ve eaten all these,” she wails. She has just come off a severe regimen to lose weight and get in shape-riding an exercise bicycle 40 minutes a day, lifting weights-after seeing herself in ”Full Moon in Blue Water.”

”Wasn`t I fat in that movie?” she grimaces. She is animated now. The actress. The personality who appears on the hottest talk shows. The funny-face who, when asked if she has a mentor, can`t resist a little vamp: ”You mean, am I somebody`s protege?” She gives the last two syllables a little extra inflection and peeks out coquettishly from behind her long, blond hair.

”Well, Darryl Zanuck is dead, you know. He and I . . .” She lets the sentence dangle with a meaningful flutter of eyelashes.

The diet and the weight-lifting notwithstanding, Garr doesn`t consider herself vain, at least not by actress standards. ”These boyfriends I have who say, `Oh, you actresses!` I tell `em: `Look at Cher.` ”

”She sits in her bathroom with mirrors on every side and says, `Let`s see . . . a little more plastic surgery here. . . .` ” (Garr pinches one side of her chin) ” `. . . and here . . . and-something isn`t quite right here. . . .` ” (Garr inspects a cheekbone) ” `. . . a little more plastic surgery. . . .”

The question is there for the asking: Has Garr had plastic surgery?

”No,” she scoffs, with a look that says she thinks her face will back her up. Then, with a twinkle, she adds: ”Do you think I`d tell you if I had?” Right now the only image surgery she`ll confess to is on her wardrobe. Despite the short visit and full schedule, she manages to get in two bouts of shopping. ”I just had to throw away 85 percent of the clothes in my closet and go out and buy everything new. You know-find out who I am and all that?” We know. Didn`t she tell us herself? ”I`m just not serious.”

Originally Published: October 30, 1988 at 1:00 AM CDT