The Gregarious, Gorgeous Teri Garr

I once had the good fortune of seeing Teri Garr up close and personal. It was decades ago, long before the brilliant comic actress was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the cruel disease that recently ended her life at age 79. The place: the tiny, cramped locker room at Jane Fonda’s then-famous West Hollywood exercise studio. Both of us were changing out of exercise gear. She was among friends, clearly—and I saw her as a true life force, lively and exuberant.

 She brought that same exuberance to her acting career, which included the wife role in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the adorable mädchen who loved a roll in the hay in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Her biggest screen success came in 1982, with the release of Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman stars as an out-of-work actor who disguises himself as a woman to win a soap opera role. The gender confusion that arises in this Sydney Pollack film is hilarious. But it also seems quite modern, given that there’s a move afoot to deny a newly-elected transgender U.S. congresswoman the right to use the women’s restroom in the Capitol. (So what, pray tell, is she supposed to do when the need arises?) 

 When Tootsie was being cast, Garr apparently hankered for the role of the female lead. Julie is depicted as a slightly damaged but sturdy soul who interacts with Hoffman’s Dorothy Michaels in a popular hospital-based soap opera. (She introduces herself to the new cast member as the “hospital slut.”) Julie treasures Dorothy’s friendship and is guided by her relationship wisdom, but has no inkling that this sassy older woman is actually a man—and that he’s in love with her. After losing the role of Julie to Jessica Lange, Garr was reluctant to take the smaller part of Sandy, the neurotic would-be actress who’s Michael’s protégée and at one point his accidental lover. (Don’t ask!) Luckily for us, Garr ultimately changed her mind about the role. Sandy’s uproarious neediness is a highlight of the film, and resulted in an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Ironically, Jessica Lange was also nominated in this category, and took home the gold statuette: it was the only win for Tootsie that evening despite a whooping nine nominations. (This was the year of Gandhi—and the gender-bending Victor/Victoria). But if Lange won the Oscar, Teri Garr completely won my heart.

 Like all the greatest comedies, Tootsie has something to say, about the human condition. Its particular focus is on how women are treated in what often continues to feel like a man’s world. What Dustin Hoffman’s character discovers—in this beautifully directed, beautifully written, beautifully edited film—is that women benefit from being able to stand up for themselves. And, as a man, he comes to acknowledge that women need, and deserve, basic respect. Two prominent characters who have not learned this lesson are Dabney Coleman as an outrageously sexist TV director and George Gaynes as a preening actor who makes it his business to tongue-kiss every actress on camera. (By contrast, Julie’s father, as played by Charles Durning, is a manly but gentle widower who is smitten by “Dorothy” and complicates things by proposing marriage.)  Big kudos to screenwriter Larry Gelbart for finding the funny in the battle of the sexes while acknowledging that his characters all have something to learn. One of those characters of course is Garr’s Sandy. But she fights to hold onto her sense of humor. That of course also describes Garr, who considered titling her memoir, Does This Wheelchair Make Me Look Fat?  

 

Raising Cain: 1981’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice”

Watching 1946’s The Postman Always Rings Twice set me off on a path you might call obsessive. First I checked out the 1981 remake starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, notorious in its day for its frank sexuality. Then, to better understand the source of it all, I read James M. Cain’s pulp novella from 1934. 

 To be honest, the 1981 remake didn’t do much for me. Yes, that initial sex scene is startling in its brutal power, but it gave me far more than I needed in setting the scene for what was to follow. There’s only so much of a sexually voracious Jack Nicholson that someone like me can take. His nearly devouring Jessica Lange in his brutal embrace just made me squirmy (and certainly made me wonder about her character’s basic intelligence, since she seems to welcome it).  Maybe, I figured, sado-masochism works better on the page than on the screen. The great Sven Nykvist’s cinematography was a marvel, though, in keeping the couple’s private parts completely hidden even while clothes were ripped away.

 Along with Nykvist, who was Ingmar Bergman’s longtime cinematographer, the remake attracted a host of top-grade professionals. The director was Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces), and none other than playwright David Mamet adapted Cain’s work for the screen. Part of the hype at the time of the film’s release was that it was far closer to Cain’s original work that the sanitized Production Code version of 1946.  That’s why I wanted to understand what Cain was up to.

 No question: Cain in this work closely aligns sex with death. The novella contains at least three major scenes of erotic connection between the narrator, Frank, and his boss’s wife, Cora. In the first, coming onto Cora in the kitchen of her husband’s roadside lunchroom, he says. “I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers.”  She’s the one who pleads for him to bite her . . .  and he does: “I sank my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down my neck when I carried her upstairs.” 

 The second big scene of passion occurs immediately after they manage to maneuver her soused immigrant husband (scornfully referred to as The Greek) over the side of a California cliff. To suggest that the car crash is pure accident, Frank roughs up Cora by punching her in the eye. Next thing you know, they are locked in each other’s arms. And Frank admits that “Hell could have opened for me then, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I had to have her, if I hung for it.” Then he adds, “I had her.”

 For all that the film remake tries to capture Cain’s tone, it just doesn’t pull us along in the way that Frank’s on-the-page narration does. Yes, there are the same plot twists and turns, including some sneaky legal wranglings that briefly have the lovers at each other’s throat. And the remake also includes the novella’s bizarre interlude in which Frank, separated from Cora, takes up with a dame who raises pumas and other exotic jungle cats. (The original film had him tempted by a much more commonplace lady.) On screen this cat-woman is played, apparently in the buff, by Anjelica Huston, Nicholson’s real-life main squeeze at the time.

 One more thing the remake doesn’t have is the novella’s powerful ending, in which we learn for the first time just where Frank is as he tells us his tale. It’s the capper we need to understand everything.