By Wendy Wasserstein
New York Woman
March 1988

Teri Garr shows up for lunch wearing a plaid flannel shirt, a blue Benettonish sweater and a pair of slacks. It’s the very same ensemble I once saw on Mariel Hemingway in the Russian Tea Room. I remember thinking at that time that only an actress could get away with such a look. Any mother, psychiatrist or career counselor would tell you, Honey, this is not dressing for success. But on Mariel and Teri it is. They can wear flannel and look successful.

I’ve always felt a particular connection to Teri, and it’s not because of Tootsie or because I’ve followed her ever since Star Trek, and she obviously can whip David Letterman. It’s just that there’s always something so human and touching about her. She doesn’t have to save a farm from destruction or have the best baby and the best neurotic behavior to prove it. In other words, she doesn’t hit you over the head with her meaningfulness. She’s just funny.

Now, these are all very nice things to say about her, considering she shows up an hour late for lunch. Teri finally arrives at our designated Village restaurant hassled, angry, still swearing at her taxi driver and, like the good actress that she is, demonstrating how she pleaded with him to go through the light, and he just wouldn’t acknowledge her presence. I get at least five minutes on the impossibility of her relationship with this taxi driver, and soon, not only am I forgiving her for standing me with radicchio, Roquefort and avocado, but I am completely identifying with her. She is sort of all of us. I’ve been in her taxi.

Teri and I first met in 1978 when she was auditioning for my play Uncommon Women and Others, and she didn’t get the part. I had just graduated from the Yale School of Drama and had spent the summer at the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theater Center. The stresses we wound up casting were friends from school and the East Coast not-for-profit theater circuit—Meryl Streep, Swoosie Kurtz, Jill Eikenberry, Alma Cuervo, Glenn Close and Anna Levine. In other words, there was an old-girl network, and Teri, a dancer and a film actress from the West Coast, was a suspiciously new girl on the block. Why not be suspicious of this self-starter from Hollywood?

Since that rejection in 1978, Teri has made all the serious East Coast theater stops—summers at the Eugene O’Neill foundation and Williamstown and Off-Broadway productions at the Phoenix Theater and Playwrights Horizons. And that’s in addition to an Oscar nomination for Tootsie and creating characters ranging from Richrd Dreyfuss’s permanently-hair-clipped wife in Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the next-door neighbor spy in Pack of Lies. In other words, Teri had the last laugh on me and the old-girl network.

Winding up the taxi horror story, Teri finally takes off her trench coat, sighs with relief and sits down. “So dahling, forget the interview, what’s new?” It takes about two minutes with Teri to figure out that, unlike the characters she often plays, she’s no ditz. She’s a very successful professional woman who thinks about marriage, children, her career and how you do it all and whether you should. In other words, she’s like a nice girlfriend—complicated, thoughtful and with a certain amount of hindsight. “I mean,” she confides to me, one roughly-thirty-five-year-old to another, rougher thirty-five-year-old, “I guess it’s time for you and me to think about heirs. Not too hard, but to think about it.” For the moment, we decide to think about lunch instead.

We actually became friendly last year during the shooting of a film I wrote for PBS’s series Trying Times. Teri played a professor of Russian art history whose boyfriend leaves her for the girl in The Dukes of Hazzard because he likes the way she gets in and out of cars. We shot the pivotal abandonment scene in a well-heeled, suburban Vancouver home. Between takes, Teri and I wandered through the upstairs bedrooms. The wallpapered halls were replete with photos of the five blond children who lives there and their four blond grandparents.

“Do we envy this life?” Teri asked me.

“Maybe. But who cleans here? I don’t understand how one would begin,” I whispered back.

“I get kinda, I don’t know, upset with the image of women in Baby Boom and Fatal Attraction. I mean, what is that? It’s very regressive.”

We then walked into one of the kids’ bedrooms to make a domestic inquiry. Our nine-year-old host explained that she herself made her bed every day and just couldn’t tolerate a mess house. Teri and I exchanged looks: we felt like we had just landed on Saturn together.

Teri’s salad arrives, and she says she’s been working steadily since Vancouver. And that she feels exhilarated and exhausted. The exhausted part worries her because she fears losing herself to work, but then again, the work’s been good. She’s just completed a film, Full Moon in Bluewater, with Gene Hackman, in which she plays a waitress in a roadside diner, and made one before that with John Lithgow, Out Cold, in which she plays a calculating murderess. She’s pleased because they’re serious roles. Teri, like all talented comediennes, has a nagging desire to be taken seriously.

“I turned down a major ad for more-than-good salary. I mean, my pictures would have been in every airport. ‘Hi. Can I help you?’ ” She giggles at the thought that turning down the money makes her nervous. Frankly, it makes me nervous too.

“I come from a Dickensian family,” she expounds, “so money’s appealing. And I’m always afraid about money. But I figure the actors I really admire wouldn’t have done the ad. So I shouldn’t have done it.”

Facts about her Dickensian childhood: Teri was born in Hollywood. Her father, an actor, died when she was eleven; her mother was a dancer—a Rockette. The family lived a Spartan existence—often in one room, with Teri looking after the household (which included two older brothers) while her mother worked. Following in her parents’ footsteps, Teri was trained as a performer and danced in nine Elvis Presley movies before her first speaking role in 1968 in a movie written by a member of her acting class, Jack Nicholson. Her first major role came six years later, in Franci Coppola’s film The Conversation.

The talk veers back to our personal lives. We match each other for fear of intimacy, desire for intimacy, fear of commitment, desire for commitment. “I’m working on not being angry with men,” she says. “I’ve been involved with some real doozies.” She’s been seeing a nice internist. I hear the word doctor and immediately mutate into my mother. I want to make everything right for this nice girl. May it will work out with the doctor, but it’s not simple.

As we continue to chat I keep watching her face. The comedy and the truth of Teri Garr is in her eyes. She’ll raise an eyebrow to connote gentle sarcasm, and she’ll squint to show displeasure or lack of trust. She confides that tonight she has a dinner date with a friend who doesn’t have a bathroom in his apartment. “What do you think of that?” she says, rolling her eyes around the room. “Well, our shrinks say we should be out there, right?” She flutters a familiar flutter. One we’ve all seen on-screen before.

“I’m auditioning for this Circle in the Square production of Streetcar, and I’m dying to play Stella,” she tells me when I ask her what’s next. This is a transitional time for Teri. She’s letting go of an old apartment, she’s working all the time, and moving beyond a previous image, and, like all actresses of a certain generation, she’s coping with the ever-looming image of Meryl: Mery’s marriage, Meryl’s children, Meryl’s Oscars, Meryl on the cover of Life. “You’ve heard of Meryl, haven’t you?” she says with a giggle. It’s enough to make a girl an hour late.

But the time our coffee arrives, she seems almost calm. Finally over the trauma of the taxi, New York traffic and this town versus L.A., she relaxes and asks if I know anything about the play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair De Lune by Terrence McNally and how she can buy the rights to it. She loves the character of the short-order waitress: “I mean, that woman was real, warm, defensive and hopeful. Very human.”

I tell her that I know the playwright and that I think those rights have been bought. Now there’s a real frustration in her eyes. It’s very difficult being an actress and trying to mold a career. You can only take so many things into your own hands. “You know,” she tells me, “I get kinda, I don’t know, upset with the image of women in Baby Boom and Fatal Attraction. I mean, what is that? It’s very regressive.”

I smile. “How much worse would that be than your appearing in some Three Girls in a Loft sitcom and my having to write the script?”

“Right. Three Girls in a Loft. I’m always being offered that.”

We walk to her old apartment. We promise to call each other, to really try to be friends. But my instinct is that we are professional colleagues in the best possible way.

While typing up this interview, I get a call that Teri’s pictures for this magazine are fabulous and that I should mention whether she’s as adorable as she looks. Well, all I can think of is Teri telling me she’s got a member of the Strindberg Society—a group of actors in L.A. who get together once a week to read Strindberg. “Our motto is, The truth is audacious.” She openly giggles while she tells me this, and raises an eyebrow. Let’s face it, a girl who shows up for Strindberg once a week and can laugh about it is beyond adorable.

One From the Heart