She danced so much on the way up.
Teri Garr, who died October 29 at 79, suffering from complications from multiple sclerosis, wrote in her autobiography “Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood” that as a teenager, when her tired mother was fighting again with Garr’s alcoholic gambler father, she retired to the garage and prepared a song and dance show. The redirection worked. The performance, she learned, could have “a real effect on the people around me.”
At 16, she joined a “West Side Story” touring company; soon after, she danced, sometimes uncredited, sometimes credited, in nine Elvis Presley films and many others. If you noticed her in these fleeting appearances, surrounded by young women doing the same, slightly less interesting dance steps, the funny side of her was almost invisible.
And then he came out, with the astute and touching dramatic actress she had rarely had the chance to meet.
Tributes to Garr and his film work, including “Young Frankenstein” and his Oscar-nominated performance in “Tootsie,” have flooded social media this week. “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig put it simply and spoke on behalf of Garr fans everywhere: “Truly one of my comedy heroes. I couldn’t have loved him more.
In the little-known 1964 short film “Where’s the Bus?” », directed by John Harris, here it is: dancing to Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass’ “Mexican Drummer Man” in the third minute. Garr was 20 years old at the time, with a few Elvis films already behind her. Filmed in downtown Los Angeles, the film is a doodle, a suggestion at best of Garr’s potential. But in a few of his double takes, you can get a sense of his future.
Ten years later, “Young Frankenstein” arrived. She played Inga, the lab assistant with the vaguely Teutonic Transylvanian accent that Garr borrowed from his friend Cher’s German wigmaker.
This is my favorite Mel Brooks movie, and watching excerpts on YouTube scenes, it’s astonishing to realize the cosmic accuracy of the casting. As written, Inga didn’t require much more than a blonde bombshell, funny as an option. Any good burlesque sketch nurse could have pulled it off. Brooks took this route when he cast Lee Meredith, a future slapstick sketch nurse in the film version of “The Sunshine Boys,” as sex toy secretary Ulla in “The Producers.”
Garr offered Inga a better deal. She’s honed a clever, witty take on a tiresome stereotype, playing it both straight and crooked. "I’m sending you, doctor," » she coos to Gene Wilder as she is hoisted from the hay where Inga has arrived. It’s after the famous knock on the door; Marty Feldman, seeking to enter Frankenstein’s old castle, is on his third strike. The setup couldn’t be cheaper or two-way. Just shameless. But Wilder plays fair (he’s truly inspired throughout) and Garr decorates his throwaway three word reply with a camera-directed toss of her braids and a hint of slow burn in her delivery.
In other words, she was funny.
His father was a half-successful, half-failed vaudevillian; her mother was a former Rockette and stockings model, nicknamed “Legs”. Garr, who finally got to star in a musical (“One From the Heart”) only to discover that Francis Ford Coppola didn’t really know how to direct the musical he envisioned, had, with “Young Frankenstein,” mastered the art of delivering the familiar in a sneakily unknown way.
Brooks’ film launched Garr to stardom, even if it came with a bittersweet asterisk. She was typecast, early and often. Usually, she played restless, frustrated wives of men at the center of a fantasy: like Ronnie, wondering if her husband and his marriage had become incredibly weird, in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”; as Bobbie, John Denver’s disbelieving wife in “Oh, God!” » ; and so on.
She’s terrific in “Close Encounters,” especially, even though the entire apparatus of Steve Spielberg’s masterpiece exists to sideline her character so that Richard Dreyfuss can escape. In the breakdown scene at the table, Garr does three or more things at once, almost imperceptibly. She always was. Even when she was perfectly still, Garr had so much going on, the zigzags in her character’s emotions and feelings doing all the dancing and keeping the scene lively and spontaneous.
With “Tootsie,” Garr excelled in his second major comedy ensemble, following the murderer’s argument in “Young Frankenstein.” Here, too, the plot sends her character, the struggling actress and sometime lover of Dustin Hoffman’s cross-dressing soap opera star, up the river as needed. But I like what the actor James Urbaniak posted on Tuesday X, highlighting a 26-second clip of “Tootsie.” These 26 seconds, he writes, “are a master class in comedic acting, its beats are all distinct and hilarious and there is an emotional truth behind each of them.” She could do anything.
Millions of people later came to know Garr, mainly through his frequent appearances on “Late Show with David Letterman.” Their comedic synchronicity, like that of Mariette Hartley and James Garner in all those Polaroid commercials, has many people wondering: Are these two married, or what? Garr continued to work hard, but by then his MS symptoms had become more intense, more unpredictable and more painful. When she made it public, she became a great and valiant spokesperson for MS awareness and research.
There was a lot of sadness running through Garr’s sunny public image. Long after casting directors, producers and directors began looking for “a Teri Garr type” instead of Teri Garr, she reflected: “They only write roles for women where they let themselves go all out.” crush, where they let people wipe their feet everywhere. them. Those are the kind of roles I play, and the kind of roles there are for me in this world. In this life.
It’s difficult to read that. This may be less true now. But not much. Garr told the Boston Globe that her big scene in “Tootsie,” confronting Hoffman’s character after one too many deceptions, was largely improvised, including the part where she says, listen, “I read ‘The Second Sex.” I read “The Cinderella Complex”. I’m responsible for my own orgasm!’ This “exasperation speech,” as Garr called it, was “really about a girl angry at the way the world is changing.”
In her time, the world had not changed enough to offer her the range of roles she deserved. The ones she obtained and raised will have to do. There really is no Teri Garr type. There was, and is, only Teri Garr.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.