Warning: Do not ask Teri Garr about David Letterman.
At least, do not be the sixth or seventh person to ask the actress about the talk-show host during a 24-hour period.
“I’ve been doing interviews all day, and everybody wants to ask about David Letterman and me,” a clearly exasperated Garr complained during a recent chat. “I have no idea why, of all the things I’ve done in my life, this is what people most want to talk about — me sitting with a person I don’t know, plugging a movie.”
Garr’s frustration is understandable; she’d rather be known for her acting (she appears in the new film Waiting for the Light) than for her acumen in exchanging barbs on late-night television. But her appearances on the show have proven so popular that Letterman once scheduled an entire week of repeats featuring Teri Garr interviews.
“He’s a very interesting person,” she said of Letterman. “He’s very funny, very bright, very into life. I like that about him. I like to think of myself (in a similar) way: I notice things and observe life.
“Maybe with the two of us together, people listen twice as much. But why it makes people think I’m ditzy, I have no idea. I want to scream every time somebody asks me about it!”
Once you get beyond that sensitive topic, Garr is actually a very pleasant person to talk to: She’s bright, articulate and emotionally quite open. She is much happier talking about her childhood, which was largely spent in the San Fernando Valley.
“It was a great place to grow up,” she said. “It was very much like suburbia. It had tract homes and sidewalks and trees and roller skating and bikes. The bonus was that somebody on your block might have worked at the studio. And they knew Hopalong Cassidy!”
In fact, both of Garr’s parents were in show business; her father was an actor, and her mother a dancer and costumer.
“I would go down to NBC (where her mother was working) and watch them do The Dinah Shore Show,” she recalled. “I was just blown away. That was when I really went, ‘This is for me.”‘
Her interest in acting, however, had deeper psychological roots. Garr’s parents divorced when she was young, and, as a result, “I had no home life,” she said.
“Going to dancing school, or being in a play, is a very familial feeling,” she noted. “You’re around friends. That kind of becomes a replacement (for a family). But it’s a positive thing, as opposed to a street gang.
“I liked having a place to go, a place where I could fit, a place where I could do something. It was a microcosm of the world; you could be competitive but you could have friends. By the time I was 15 or 16, I had a skill and felt very confident. I thought: If I can’t be prom queen, I can dance Les Sylphide.”
Somehow, she segued from classical ballet to Elvis movies, where she made her screen debut.
“I danced in a company of West Side Story when I was very young,” she explained. “It was most of the original cast — Larry Kert, Chita Rivera — and Jerry Robbins directed. It was tough, a wonderful initiation for me.
“One of the guys who worked in the show started choreographing movies. So we all went and auditioned for the movie, and I got in. Elvis was making about six bad movies a year then, so I just started working on them.
“It was great, but it kept dawning on me that I wanted to be in front (rather than in the chorus line). I couldn’t understand why Ann-Margret was in the front. So I decided if I’m going to be the star, I’d better study acting.”
With that goal in mind, Garr moved to New York, where she studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio.
“Jack Nicholson was in one of my very first acting classes,” she said. “Eric Morris, who taught the class, had a sign up that said ‘No acting, please.’ That was a very important class, because you learned not to do the cliches. That was a great place for me to start. I got the concept to just behave naturally.”
It took a full decade of struggle before Garr found success as an actor. “I had acting jobs, dancing jobs, acting jobs, dancing jobs,” she recalled. “I’d keep saying, ‘One more dancing job and then I’m out.’ I was driven. Totally driven.
“I was very blind to anything negative. If I got 2 percent of the jobs I went out for, (I’d think of) the 98 percent of the people who didn’t hire me: ‘They were wrong. They made a BIG mistake. I could have played this part.’ I never once said, ‘Maybe I wasn’t any good’ or ‘Maybe I wasn’t right for the part.’ I COULD play the Jewish old woman!
“That (attitude) is considered one of ole in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein.
“That was the first film where I got my name on the poster,” she said. “I auditioned with 500 other girls and beat them out.”
Many other notable movies have followed, including The Black Stallion and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (two of her favorites). Asked to choose her best work, however, she points to a recent appearance in a Samuel Beckett play at the Mark Taper Forum.
“I’d like to play something classical,” she said. “I’m in the Strindberg society, and we do readings of Strindberg plays. I’d love to do Nora in A Doll’s House. And Chekhov. I have been working back to back on what I call ‘regular jobs,’ so it’s hard to do plays.
“I was offered to take over for Kathleen Turner in CatMom and Dad Save the World, it’s a comedy about an encounter between Jon Lovitz, the ruler of the Planet of the Idiots, and Garr, a Valley housewife.
“We added this scene yesterday,” she reported with a mischievous smile. “He has me tied up and gagged. He says, ‘Say goodbye to your planet, Marge Nelson. Say goodbye to Encino, Marge Nelson.’ I pull down the thing and say, ‘It’s Woodland Hills, you (expletive).’ “
Garr laughed. “I love it when people say, ‘You’re from the Valley? Where, Encino?’ ‘No, Tarzana!’ As if (the distinction) means anything!”
Sounds like a good topic of conversation for the Letterman show.
