Teri Garr only has a handful of lines in The Conversation, and when she’s done with her scene she never appears again, but she breaks my heart as Harry Caul’s secret girlfriend who wants more than he’s willing to give and so chooses herself. “Harry, I was so happy when you came over tonight,” she says, “when I heard you open up the door, my toes were dancing under the covers. But I don’t think I’m going to wait for you anymore.”
I think this is very much who Teri Garr was — too smart, too pretty, the frankest and the brightest, and she valued herself, you know? She knew she had value and there was only so much time she would give to anyone who didn’t know it, too. This strength comes through in the string of legendary talk show appearances on David Letterman’s show where she spars with him as an equal, as more than an equal. She punches holes in his pumped up, fast-talking persona. She doesn’t laugh when he’s crass. And then when he’s disarmed entirely, she says “Dave, your hair looks good” and she laughs that full-throated laugh of hers: the one that’s delighted and embarrassed, too, because she’s uncomfortable but she’s having a good time. I could never tell if she was doing a bit, but if she is, it’s the high-wire, high-concept kind that you don’t try unless you have intimidating confidence in your tripwire timing. Letterman was never better than when Garr was his guest — and he knew that because she kept getting invited back, over and over and over again, for a total of 39 appearances. He was never better than he was when sparring with her because very few people demanded they bring the heat, their A-game, like Garr unfailingly did. If one wants to get better at chess, one plays against masters.
She was best when expressing incredulity, disdain, bemusement — every arch, superior emotion but in ways that expressed vulnerability, even pain. The magic of Garr is in how she navigates that tension that women must between smart and “likable” — I can’t tell you how hard it is for a woman to express amazement at a man’s shortcomings without immediately triggering masculine insecurities, but Garr’s mastered it. The first time I saw her she was in the last episode of the second season of Star Trek (“Assignment Earth”). She plays Roberta, the secretary of Gary 7 (Robert Lansing), an enigmatic figure who sticks out like a Tom Bombadil in the Star Trek universe. Really, she’s more like one of Dr. Who’s assistants than a secretary. When asked for a rundown of who Roberta is, an A.I. confides: “Although behavior appears erratic, possesses high I.Q.” and then there’s that laugh again, Teri Garr, called out in front of this stranger for being sharp and defusing it instantly. I remember this because my dad teased me — I couldn’t have been more than five — for watching her a little too intently. But of course I did. She was magnetic and whatever scene she was ever in, she was where every line on the horizon converged.
I think of her in that little red one-piece dress she wears on her first date in Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart with rakish dreamboat Ray (Raul Julia). I think of how she looks in it when her boyfriend Hank (Frederic Forrest) surprises her after she first puts it on: equal parts delighted and shy and then, as their conversation turns cold and accusatory, how her face freezes and she goes away in her eyes. And I think of her in it when Ray in his excitement knocks a crab leg off her plate and she makes a quick “eek” face at, simultaneously, his cheesiness and his gorgeousness. The film, a wild swing at expressionistic Golden Age musical (think the ballet sequence from Singin’ in the Rain as an entire film, with a book all of hard-bitten, neon-drenched Las Vegas), only works because of Garr. Garr who embodies its toughness and its lightness, its clumsiness and its grace, its sense of self-deprecating humor and go-for-broke courage.
Watch the dizzying range of emotions she goes through as Sandy, long-suffering girlfriend of failed actor Michael Dorsey in Sidney Pollack’s Tootsie, when she confronts him for his neglect of her and he gives her a box of chocolate-covered cherries as an apology. She’s furious, but in that moment, she can’t help but be charmed. She’s hurt and she still loves him; she’s too smart not to know something’s going on (Michael’s roommate confirms “I would never call you stupid to your face”), but she wants to believe she’s wrong. Watch her resignation when she asks Michael if he’s gay. Then her reaction when he tells her no, but that he is in love with another woman. How do you dance this line between bedroom farce and affecting interpersonal tragedy? How does their bad behavior only serve to make us like them more by humanizing them for us?
Most people will, and for every good reason, remember Teri Garr for her turn as Inga, the lusty lab assistant to reluctant mad scientist Froderik von Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Her ridiculous accent, her demure delight at the good doctor’s apparent appreciation of her “knockers” (“Oof, SANK you, doctor!”), and her admiration/horror when imagining the size of the monster’s schwanzstucker. My favorite bit in a film I’ve memorized is when she gets stuck, just off-screen, in a revolving bookcase and carefully instructs her boss to “put… the candle… back.” As a kid, I was used to seeing the guy get the punchline at the end of an elaborate gag – the beautiful girl?
I love her in her uncredited cameo in Ghost World as Enid’s dad’s girlfriend Maxine. How in one scene she portrays somehow an entire lifetime for her character full of chances lost, misplaced maternal desires, a certain defensiveness and insecurity masked by pretension and this last attempt at love and connection late in her life. I love her as Dabney Coleman’s ex-wife in the underestimated Short Time, her exasperation turning into sweet surprise when this man who has repeatedly let her down takes ownership of his failings and asks for another chance. It seems the plight of women like Teri Garr to be the bigger person with the men in their lives who don’t deserve them: better than the jobs they’d hire her characters for; better in some instances than the roles in which she was cast. She was her generation’s Jean Arthur, brilliant and indomitable, a pacesetter for screen partners who were always better with her in the ring with them. I wonder sometimes if she was born too late: imagine her in a screwball comedy or as the fatale in a noir opposite a Mitchum or a Bogart. Men in her proverbial weight class: who could take the punches she could dole out like the straight killer she was.
There’s an infamous bit of bathroom graffiti in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) of a shark eating the penis of a rather calm man, all things considered, that I have always wondered if the waitress of the offended joint, Teri Garr’s Julie, were responsible for. It’s impish, bizarre, and appears right after she’s passed a surreptitious note to our hero Paul (Griffin Dunne) about needing help because she hates her job. Later on in his hellish, Odyssean night as Paul’s attempts to get home continue to be thwarted, he runs into Julie again, offering an umbrella, then a trip up to her apartment where she plays him The Monkees and then, sensing the mood, switches over to Joni Mitchell. She starts sketching him and I notice there’s another sketch hanging on her wall and a bed surrounded by a platoon of mousetraps. You can see how I made the connection to the shark guy, not that it’s a puzzle that needs solving, but if it were, Julie’s the kind of person who would do something weird like that, funny and castrating. She asks him to touch her hair and he gets his finger stuck in it. She tries to give him a present and a rat gets caught in a trap. Julie deserves a better job and a better man. It’s made her nuts, but because it’s Teri Garr, your heart aches a little bit for her all the same.
I’m sad for her as Ronnie in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, too, the long-suffering wife of bit-of-a-dolt head in his clouds Roy (Richard Dreyfuss), who goes chasing eternity in a flying saucer when there she is right at home. On a dark, stormy night, Roy takes her out to look at the sky and doesn’t see her behind him, fixing her hair just right, and pulling the schlub in for a kiss. Roy’s choice at the end is a lot harder because it’s Garr he’s leaving behind. By itself, it’s always made the ending of that film melancholy and ambiguous.
I love the smile her Bobbie gives her husband Jerry (John Denver) in Carl Reiner’s Oh, God!, too, when he tells her he loves watching her use a little exercise doodad; the look of incredulity and love she holds carefully in a courtroom when Jerry calls God (George Burns) to the stand. She loves him unconditionally, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t think he’s off his rocker. It’s no wonder she was the dream-partner for an entire generation of guys wondering if they would ever find someone who got them and still didn’t run away.
When I was a kid, I spent a summer watching the John Hughes-penned Mr. Mom in which Michael Keaton’s Jack is laid off from his factory job, forcing his wife Carolyn (Teri Garr) to get a job while he stays home with their three kids. Something about Hughes’ caveman social politics appealed to the ten-year-old me, this somehow less progressive version of the “Job Switching” episode of the I Love Lucy show dealing with a guy being emasculated by his unemployment and, worse, by his wife’s professional success. I felt like a threatened dalliance with an enthusiastic housewife played by Ann Jillian would have been fully justified. I was imprinted with all of the wrong messages and not for the last time with John Hughes.
Midway, during a fantasy sequence, Carolyn comes home early from work and catches Jack in a torrid clinch. She pulls out a gun, screws on a silencer, and looks every bit the part of avenging noir angel. Revisiting this film today as a man of 51, happily married for 26 years, it comes clear that for all of Keaton’s mad kinetic energy, it’s Garr who anchors the piece. She’s warm enough to make for a perfect mother; sharp enough to credibly climb the corporate ladder; decent enough to notice when her husband throws the company field day so as not to humiliate her boss; and for all of these elements, attractive enough to be the better choice by a mile over even Ann Jillian in her formidable prime. It’s not so obvious when you’re a kid, but when you’ve spent decades trying to deserve someone with the confidence and carriage, the sense of humor and the kindness of a Teri Garr, it’s clear as day.
Through it all, though, all the television appearances including regular roles in a couple of short-lived series Good & Evil (1991) and Good Advice (1993) and Women of the House (1995) – all the voice performances in personal favorites like Duckman, Dr. Katz and Batman Beyond — it’s that tiny role as Amy that I think of almost every day. Her scene starts with her boyfriend Harry, a surveillance expert, loner, maybe a weirdo, definitely traumatized by the things he’s done for money for the wrong people, coming to the apartment he rents for her for a little escape from the troubles of his day-to-day. We’re inclined to be on his side. We empathize with his worries and I think at this point in The Conversation, we still feel like he deserves a respite from his nightmare. But Amy wants to talk. She asks him questions about himself. What does he do for work? How come she doesn’t even know it was his birthday? “Does something special happen between us on your birthday?” she wonders, “something personal?” She wants to know something about him that’s a secret. She wants intimacy. She takes his hand and looks at hers against his. She says “I’m your secret.” She says it like she likes it, but something about her betrays that she doesn’t like that at all.
When she goes to the kitchen to get a snack, she rubs her head and pulls at the sides of her head: an expression of frustration usually, but when she does it it feels more like resignation. She knows she’s breaking up with him and that’s her secret she’s keeping from him, but not for much longer. Harry tries to lie to her, to kiss her quiet, and then Harry realizes he can’t lie to her because she’s too smart to fool. She delivers her line about her toes dancing as he leaves, standing in the shadow by the door. She puts her hands together and touches them to her chin like she’s praying. For what? Or for whom? I’ll think about that forever, I bet.
This perfect line delivered by the perfect actress in just the right way. Teri Garr died on October 29, 2024 and my heart is broken.
Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.