Her Story Is One of Luck, Loss--and Abiding Love

Betty Garrett’s coffee table is stacked with photos: of her cuddling with Frank Sinatra in “On the Town,” singing and dancing beside Janet Leigh in “My Sister Eileen,” surrounded by everyone from Clark Gable to Lassie in a late-’40s group shot of MGM’s contract players.

These are just a few of the mementos the 78-year-old actress pulled from storage and scattered throughout her Studio City home as she worked on her autobiography. Expected in stores in early December, “Betty Garrett and Other Songs” (Madison Books) charts Garrett’s career through the glory days of the movie musical, the dark hours of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the glimmering nights of ‘70s television and the developmental years of Los Angeles’ small-theater scene.

During her 60 years--and counting--in show business, Garrett has worked with such legends as Ethel Merman, Gene Kelly, Red Skelton and Mickey Rooney. She never quite attained their all-out stardom, however. In Broadway programs and film credits, her name typically was listed after a few others, and in her later years on television, she just popped her head in the door every now and then as Irene Lorenzo on “All in the Family” or as Edna Babish, the chummy landlady on “Laverne & Shirley.”

Yet many of her roles are indelible: the cab driver who knows what she wants--namely, Sinatra’s fresh-faced sailor--in “On the Town”; the girl who rebuffs Rooney’s Lorenz Hart in the Rodgers and Hart film biography “Words and Music”; and the neighbor who speaks her mind to Carroll O’Connor’s bigoted Archie Bunker on CBS’ “All in the Family.”

“At the time,” Garrett recalls, “I used to say, ‘How come I never get to play the lead?’ But I look back now and I think, ‘Oh, I really had the most interesting part.’

“I feel that, along the line, I have been very, very lucky,” she adds. “I was at MGM, which was, I think, the best studio for making musicals at that time. Then, when it came to television, I was on ‘All in the Family’ when it was the top show on the top network. And the next show was ‘Laverne & Shirley,’ which was then the top show. That doesn’t hurt you at all. You can be brilliant in something, but if it’s not big box office, you can just get lost. If you’re in something the public has really taken to, it all rubs off on you.”

This is pure Betty Garrett, according to those who know her. She’s always looking for the silver lining, always walking on the sunny side of the street.

“She has been through a great deal,” says “My Sister Eileen” co-star Leigh, referring, in part, to the devastating impact that the 1951 House committee hearings had on Garrett’s husband, the late Larry Parks, star of “The Jolson Story.” Yet, Leigh says, “she just never lost her ability to smile.”

Jack Lemmon, who also starred in “My Sister Eileen,” says, “I regard Betty Garrett as one of the sweetest, brightest and most talented actresses I have been fortunate enough to work with.”

Lemmon and Garrett have just finished their scenes together for the CBS movie “The Long Way Home”--their first joint project since 1955’s “Eileen.” “Even though it has been decades since we worked together,” Lemmon relays by fax, “it was as if we had taken just one day off. . . . It was like silk.”

Garrett is a longtime night owl, and beyond her picture window, the sun is fading from the November sky as she sits down to talk. Looking trim and elegant, she sits primly--hands folded in lap--on a long couch.

She smiles as she thinks back to her days on the set of “Eileen,” in which she and Leigh played Ohio siblings who move to big-city New York.

“It took nine months to make that picture, and we were all exhausted by the time we got through,” Garrett recalls. “I remember we were all in the makeup room, and we turned to each other and said, ‘Let’s go home and get a good night’s sleep--and come back and start all over again.’ That’s really unusual; we really all liked each other so much.”

When she meets fans, though, they most often want to know about her movies with Sinatra.

Garrett, like thousands of screaming women in the ‘40s, thought the singer was just dreamy. So she couldn’t believe her luck when she found herself playing his love interest in two 1949 movies: the whimsical baseball-world musical “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and the sailors-on-leave musical “On the Town.”

On the first day of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” their first film together, she recalls: “The first shot was over my shoulder, a close-up of him. They finished and the director said, ‘OK, break it down. We’re gonna move over here.’ And Frank said, ‘Wait a minute. What about my girl here?’ And he made them reverse the camera and do a close-up of me over his shoulder--which, I always thought, was very kind and made me feel very good the first day of work.”

Garrett’s autobiography--written with former Los Angeles sports columnist Ron Rapoport--contains many such stories, interspersed with lyrics from songs the actress has performed through the years.

At its core, though, “Betty Garrett and Other Songs” is a love story. Linked by trust and admiration, Garrett and Parks shared the cheers of film stardom and the catcalls of Cold War hysteria. Through it all they raised two sons, Garrett, now a composer, and Andrew, an actor. The couple were married 30 years, until Parks’ death from a heart attack at age 60 in 1975.

“My life has been quite wonderful,” she says, distractedly playing with her wedding ring finger, “but his was a lot of disappointment. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about him.”

Called for questioning during the anti-Communist fervor, Parks became the reluctant star of one of the biggest dramas to play out during the HUAC hearings.

Nowadays, he is often referred to as the committee’s first “cooperative” witness. “Well,” Garrett says, “if you read his testimony, you know he was not very cooperative”--particularly when he told the committee: “I don’t think this is American justice.”

Parks’ film career evaporated in the ensuing media firestorm, and Garrett’s career faltered too, temporarily.

They discovered that the blacklist didn’t extend to Las Vegas, however, and so they performed a variety act there. One night, the maitre d’ came backstage to tell them that Sen. Joseph McCarthy was in the audience and wanted to buy them a drink.

They joined McCarthy (who was “drunk as a skunk,” Garrett recalls), and the senator--who had done so much to generate the anti-Communist feeling that engulfed Parks--put his arm around the actor. As flabbergasted now as she was then, Garrett remembers: “He said, ‘Are they giving you a hard time, kid?’ And Larry said, ‘You’re asking me that?’ And McCarthy said, ‘Let me give you a motto to live by: bastardae non carborundum--don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ ”

The next morning, Garrett happened upon McCarthy again at the hotel pool. He was teaching her two young sons to swim. “They never understood why they had to take a bath right after getting out of the swimming pool,” Garrett says with a chortle.

Back in Los Angeles, Garrett helped to found Theatre West, which made its biggest splash in the early ‘60s with its stage adaptation of Edgar Lee Masters’ poetic saga “Spoon River Anthology.”

The 35-year-old company--now based near Universal Studios in Hollywood--operates primarily as a workshop for actors, writers and others. Garrett remains closely involved, leading a weekly musical comedy workshop, serving as the board’s chairwoman emeritus and, occasionally, performing.

Garrett hates to hear put-downs of Los Angeles theater. Instead, she sings the praises of such small companies as Venice’s Pacific Resident Theatre (where her younger son, Andrew, has recently acted) and North Hollywood’s Interact Theatre Company. “The imagination that it takes to do something like that in such limited spaces,” she says with wonder in her voice. “I don’t think Los Angeles should take any second-hand, stepchild place to other places around the country.”

As she talks, she must pause occasionally to tend to a ticklish cough that has troubled her since a paramedic accidentally punctured her esophagus during a severe asthma attack three years ago. The injury has also limited her singing range.

It’s just one of many challenges she’s faced, but she’s a fighter, which is evident as she pooh-poohs the long-ago newspaper report that she had fainted when she heard what had happened at the HUAC hearing. “That’s not my nature,” she says.