Betty Garrett (1919 - 2011)

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Betty Garrett, Antsy Cabby in ‘On the Town,’ Is Dead at 91
By JOSEPH BERGER FEB. 13, 2011
Betty Garrett, the brassy comic actress who played Frank Sinatra’s ardent, taxi-driving pursuer in the movie “On the Town,” Archie Bunker’s liberal foil of a neighbor in “All in the Family” and a sardonic landlady in “Laverne & Shirley,” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 91.
The cause was an aortic aneurysm, her son Andrew Parks said.
In a career covering more than six decades, Ms. Garrett was seen in everything from theatrical revues to nightclubs to television sitcoms, but she most beguiled film audiences in a number of standout supporting roles in the popular MGM musicals of the late 1940s.
In “On the Town” (1949), she played a love-struck cabby, Brunhilde Esterhazy, who chases after an overwhelmed sailor (Sinatra), one of three sailors on a wartime leave in New York. (Gene Kelly and Jules Munshin were the other two.) While Sinatra is trapped in her cab hoping to see sights like Luchow’s restaurant and Radio City Music Hall, she pesters him in song to “Come Up to My Place.” Earlier that year she played a lovestruck fan who swoons for Sinatra — wearing a baseball uniform instead of Navy whites — in “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” the story of a team in the sport’s younger days that is surprised when its new owner is a woman (Esther Williams). While one of the movie’s most memorable songs was “O’Brien to Ryan to Goldberg,” again with Kelly and Munshin joining Sinatra, Ms. Garrett had a lively turn in “It’s Fate, Baby, It’s Fate.”
Just one year before, in 1948, Ms. Garrett had made a strong impression in a small role in “Words and Music,” a biographical film about Rodgers and Hart that highlighted the charm of their music. She played the girl who rejects Hart (Mickey Rooney) partly because he was short, but she gets to sing the classic “There’s a Small Hotel.”
Her career stalled soon after these milestones because in 1951 her husband, Larry Parks, an actor who had played Al Jolson in the movie “The Jolson Story,” was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and admitted he had been a member of the Communist Party between 1941 and 1945. He also identified other Hollywood professionals who had belonged. Choice roles dried up for both of them in the climate of the McCarthy-era America.
Ms. Garrett with Phil Foster in “Laverne & Shirley.” Credit ABC Photo Archives, via Getty Images
“She was tarred with the same brush,” Andrew Parks said in a telephone interview.
Her husband’s film career never quite recovered, but the couple began a two-decade circuit of summer stock and other theaters where they could perform together. Both also substituted in Broadway’s “Bells are Ringing,” with Ms. Garrett taking over from the show’s star, Judy Holliday, and Mr. Parks assuming the Sydney Chaplin role.
According to Andrew Parks, Ms. Garrett often said, “If it hadn’t been for the blacklist , we probably would not have worked together as much.” Mr. Parks died in 1975. Besides her son Andrew, Ms. Garrett, who never remarried, is survived by another son, Garrett, and one grandchild.
Ms. Garrett was able to resume work in the film industry by 1955, when Columbia Pictures had her star as Janet Leigh’s sister, Ruth, in a musical version of “My Sister Eileen,” the story of two starry-eyed newcomers from Ohio who tackle the hurly-burly of New York out of a Greenwich Village basement apartment.
“Miss Garrett has the proper skepticism and the right desperation for the role,” wrote Bosley Crowther in The New York Times. “Her way with a line is homicidal. What’s more she can dance and sing.”
In the early 1970s, the television producer Norman Lear gave her perhaps her biggest break since her MGM days with a role in “All in the Family.” Ms. Garrett and Vincent Gardenia played a couple who move next door to Archie and Edith Bunker. Her character, Irene Lorenzo, argued politics and social issues with the bigoted Archie, played by Carroll O’Connor.
After two years on that series, Ms. Garrett moved to “Laverne & Shirley,” where she portrayed the oft-married landlord, Edna Babish, who lands Laverne’s father.
Born on May 23, 1919, in St. Joseph, Mo., Ms. Garrett was 3 when her parents moved to Seattle. After her parents divorced, she and her mother moved to New York. After winning a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse, she played some roles at a 1939 World’s Fair production and joined some acts at the Catskills stages, then received her first Broadway role as an understudy in Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater production of “Danton’s Death.”
She was signed by the producer Michael Todd as Ethel Merman’s understudy in the 1943 Cole Porter musical “Something for the Boys” and then appeared in several other Broadway shows, including “Jackpot” and “Laffing Room Only.”
Her big breakthrough came in 1946 with “Call Me Mister.” In that Broadway revue, she stopped the show with “South America, Take It Away,” playing a U.S.O. hostess tired of America’s infatuation with Latin American dances like the rumba and samba.
She continued working well into her 80s, appearing in the musical “Meet Me in St. Louis” on Broadway in 1989 and in Noël Coward’s “Waiting in the Wings” in 2007 in Los Angeles.
Her final Broadway appearance came in 2001 in a revival of “Follies,” the Stephen Sondheim-James Goldman musical. She sang, appropriately, the much-loved anthem “Broadway Baby” — “I don’t need a lot,/Only what I got,/Plus a tube of greasepaint and a follow spot” — nearly 60 years after landing her first Broadway role.

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