By Harry Haun
Betty Garrett, a Broadway Baby Who Went "On the Town"
The closest that the big screen ever came to a song-and-dance Ruth Sherwood was comedienne Betty Garrett, who died Feb. 12 at the somehow-too-soon age of 91.
Even in her only starring role, in "My Sister Eileen," she was billed third — after her sister Eileen (Janet Leigh) and her own boyfriend (Jack Lemmon) — but such was the plight of a superb second-banana with impeccable timing and a sophisticated feel for throwaways.
21 Feb 2011
Betty Garrett
Yes, as it turned out — light years away: Despite a bountiful harvest of hits by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green ("It's Love," "Ohio," "One Hundred Easy Ways," "Christopher Street," "A Quiet Girl," "Wrong Note Rag," "Conga!"), the Tony-winning Best Musical of 1953 was incredibly not turned into a major motion picture.
The fly in the ointment who blocked that kick was a vindictive studio boss, Harry Cohn, the Columbia Pictures president who figured, since he had produced the 1942 flick which had inspired the Broadway edition, that he was entitled to a discount for Wonderful Town. When none was forthcoming, it was hell to pay, and hell had no fury like a scorned Cohn, who decreed he'd do his own film musical of "My Sister Eileen," forcing Wonderful Town into a one-day run on CBS in 1958.
The "Eileen" According to Cohn was to have starred Judy Holliday, but, having been part of a nightclub act with Comden and Green called "The Revuers," Holliday would not hear of it. The studio called it "a contract dispute" and started scouring the town for a suitable replacement, eventually turning up Garrett, who had been warming the bench herself for six years because of the blacklisting of her spouse, Larry Parks.
Only a Rube Goldberg could have charted the convoluted course of this comeback, but Garrett grabbed on with both hands and wrung out a wise, wisecracking Ruth Sherwood, formerly of Columbus and tentatively of Greenwich Village, writing a series of short stories about her mantrap blonde kid-sister making it in Manhattan.
Released in 1955, the musical "My Sister Eileen" was, of course, no Wonderful Town, but it did share a certain charming kinship to the Broadway show. Certainly, it was better than it has any right to be, with lively choreography by Bob Fosse (who played Eileen's chief beau, Frank Lippincott) and an above-and-beyond-the-call kind of melodic, delightful score by Jule Styne and Leo Robin (hardly slouches, these two). Garrett carried the seven-song score commendably and proved a perfect foil for Lemmon's fencing 'n' flirting, doing "It's Bigger Than You and Me."
Blake Edwards and director Richard Quine (who was Janet Blair's Lippincott in the 1942 movie) were credited with the script — a tricky proposition with lawyers in place on both sides making certain that there was no similarities between the show and the new film (even though Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, who wrote the original comedy and the Wonderful Town book, got acknowledged).
The way out for the scripters was to fall back on the original source — Ruth McKenney's series of autobiographical short stories for The New Yorker. (Fields and Chodorov had utilized only the last two installments for their shows.)
The real-life sister Eileen McKenney never knew what a siren for the ages she would become. On Dec. 22, 1940 — four days before My Sister Eileen bowed at the Biltmore — she and her husband of eight months, novelist Nathaniel West, were killed in a car crash.
Better film roles should have followed Garrett's conspicuous star-turn in "My Sister Eileen" but didn't. In fact, none did. The blacklist wouldn't be broken for another five years. It was if the House Un-American Activities Committee had granted her special dispensation to do the film. Happily, her talent was such that it couldn't be buried.
(Most people, in fact, remember her as Irene Lorenzo, the liberal thorn in Archie Bunker's side on "All in the Family," or as Laverne & Shirley's landlady, Edna Babish.)
Replacing Holliday again brought her back to Broadway. She and Parks took over for the vacationing Holliday and Sydney Chaplin during the run of Bells Are Ringing.
She started in theatre, albeit ever-so-briefly in 1942's Of V We Sing and Let Freedom Sing, but Mike Todd hired her to understudy Ethel Merman in Something for the Boys. She won a Donaldson Award the year (1946) before it turned into the Tony Award, for Call Me Mister. Her last Broadway credits included being among The Supporting Cast (Sandy Dennis, Joyce Van Patten, Hope Lange and Jack Gilford), playing the Marjorie Main maid role (Irish Katie) in Meet Me in St. Louis and signing off with a blistering "Broadway Baby" in the 2001 Broadway Follies, her comic skills thoroughly intact and going on all cylinders.
In interviews, a measure of pride would usually creep into her voice when she talked about the favorite portion of her career — her two years before the M-G-M mast when that studio was truly a constantly functioning dream factory. Five of her six films were done there, all musicals. In 1948 she debuted as a nightclub chanteuse named Shoo Shoo Grady in a Margaret O'Brien movie called "Big City," and, in the starry and fanciful "Words and Music," she provided love interest for Mickey Rooney's Lorenz Hart (an improbably heterosexual romance for the gay Hart).
Her other, and last, year at this fabulous work plant saw her amusingly manhandling a spindly Frank Sinatra in both "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and "On the Town."
In "Neptune's Daughter," she grabbed a couple of verses of Frank Loesser's Oscar-winning "Baby, It's Cold Outside," aggressively vamping Red Skelton while Ricardo Montalban is simultaneously doing the same thing to Esther Williams.
The year 1949 marked the silver anniversary of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and, as if to prove it had "more stars than there are in the heavens," Louis B. Mayer one day ordered all of his working actors to a designated soundstage for a Class of '49 group shot.
Counting Lassie, 58 showed up in full twinkle 'n' shine. That's Betty Garrett, ninth from the left on the fourth row, between Judy Garland and Edmund Gwenn. On the other side of Gwenn was the one rotten apple in the group — wearing a trenchcoat and a scowl because the shoot was eating into her afternoon-nap time — Kathryn Grayson.
Garrett and Red Skelton sing "Baby, It's Cold Outside":
