Drive-By Dreams : To Actress Teri Garr, <i> All</i> the Houses in the Hollywood Hills Feel Like Home

Teri Garr knows the houses in the Hollywood Hills the way a small-town busybody knows generations of gossip. She’s nosed around unusual architecture since she was a teen-ager in North Hollywood, and she’s lived in the canyons above Sunset Boulevard since 1967. Today, she divides her time between a New York apartment and a sunny pastel house off Sunset Plaza Drive that she bought about a year ago. “I’ve named it Happy House,” she says, “because it’s so much brighter than other places I’ve lived in. It’s fast becoming Milk Carton House, though. As I collect more stuff, it seems to get smaller and smaller.”

On weekends in town, Garr cruises the neighborhood hills, alone or with friends, on a route she’s labeled “T. Garr’s L.A.” As she drives past her favorite spots, she keeps an eye out for realtors’ open houses. “I feel ashamed of how many houses I’ve actually crept inside of when they were up for sale,” she says. “I’m not a snoop, but I love looking and imagining.”

She pauses and frowns a little behind black-framed sunglasses. “What I do is go around soul-searching houses. It straightens my head out.”

In the driver’s seat of her silver Mercedes convertible, she cocks her head--topped by a white painter’s cap with a picture of a ’57 Chevy above the bill--toward a Craftsman-style bungalow just off Hollywood Boulevard. “Now, if I lived there ,” she says, “I’d set out some cactus plants and put up a porch swing, and I’d be happy. I don’t know why those people don’t have a swing.” She shakes her head and slowly pulls away. At a sand-colored villa up the street, she says, her voice deep and her chin up, “Here, I’d wear pink nightgowns and have a staff of seven.”

Looking at houses motivates Garr to work. “I see places I like,” she says, “and I think, ‘I can’t afford that.’ Then I think, ‘I could if I did this and that and this and that.’ I looked at the house I now own for several years before I bought it. It’s not my dream house, but it’s the best of the worst, and I had to settle someplace. Someday, I’ll make the right connection with the house I’m meant to be in. It could be one of these.”

The can of Diet Coke anchored between her legs sloshes onto her skirt as she makes a sharp turn. On a winding road shored up on one side by a rock wall, she takes the curves with the confidence of someone who knows exactly where she’s going. “I hate the main streets,” she says. “I drive this route whenever I can.”

Around a bend, the road narrows unexpectedly, and Garr barely misses colliding head-on with a blue BMW. She swerves and slows down only slightly. “Whew, death came suddenly,” she laughs.

On an incline bordered by banks of bougainvillea, she brakes, takes a swig from her drink and uses the can to point to a brown cottage with a lamppost by the entrance and bird roosts near the point of the roof, said to be the signature of someone named Bird. “Isn’t this sweet?” she asks. “See the Dutch door and all the cutesy little places? He (Bird) did about five around here, all like big playhouses with shutters and shake roofs. And to think, they’re just inches away from the slime of Hollywood Boulevard.”

“Bird did that one, too,” she says, nodding toward a gray shingle-and-stone chalet. “I walked through it when it was for sale.”

Up the hill, a low-slung structure lies around a curve, following the contour of the road. Its several multilevel roofs jut out like oversize books in a stack. “That’s ‘50s, very Schindler-looking, with those things sticking out,” Garr says, referring to Rudolph Schindler, the Vienna-born architect and artist who lived in Los Angeles from 1920 to 1953. “Schindler built modernistic places that were strangely beautiful.” Garr throws out names like an authority but insists that she’s never formally studied architecture.

Back at Laurel Canyon and Hollywood boulevards, Garr wheels into a steep concrete driveway beside a towering mausoleum-type structure, a Frank Lloyd Wright house owned by a friend. “I talked once with Harrison Ford about Wright’s houses and how impressive they are,” she says, stepping out of the car. “He said, ‘Yeah, but did you ever try to live in one? They’re so hard and cold. Bunker-like.’ I think they’re like great music, though. So much thought went into just where the light would come in and where people would sit.”

Inside her friend’s house, she runs her fingers along the raised designs in the blocks between the tall windows. “I get so absorbed in these places,” she says slowly, “that even if Burt Reynolds walked in, I don’t think I’d notice. I’d just say, ‘ Look at this.’ ”

In the car again, she starts up a one-way street, in the wrong direction. “Uh-oh, this is not good,” she admits, “but I’m going to do it anyway. Look, here’s a place for sale.” She seems to forget she’s driving against traffic. “But no pool,” she says, dismissing it. A right-hand turn, and a bright blue cottage appears around a bend. “Whoa, have some blue!” she yells.

Then, suddenly, after a two-hour drive through a maze that on the map looks like a spider web, she’s back where she started. “Here’s Hollywood Boulevard again. Ringo Starr used to have a house up there, a Bird house,” she says, nodding to her right. “I looked at it when it was for sale. Naturally.”