Freaky Sneaks Around The Globe

Betty Garrett, who died on February 12 aged 91, was a vivacious Broadway star best known for playing Frank Sinatra’s sweetheart in On The Town (1949) before her career became mired in the Hollywood blacklist controversy of the early 1950s.

Her troubles began in 1951 when American congressmen forced her husband, the actor Larry Parks, to testify about his earlier membership of the Communist Party. Parks had earned stardom and an Academy Award nomination as best actor for his dynamic portrayal of the singer Al Jolson in the film The Jolson Story (1946). But in 1951, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and admitted that he had joined the Communist Party in 1941 and left in 1944 or 1945.

Betty Garrett, too, had also had a brief dalliance with the party but was not called to testify, perhaps, she said, because she was heavily pregnant with her second son. Nevertheless the couple were blacklisted and forced out of Hollywood.

“With all of it I tried to keep smiling,” Betty Garrett recalled in 2004. “I always say if one loses ones sense of humour it’s the end of everything and one might as well turn out the light.”

Betty Garrett was born on May 23 1919 in St Joseph, Missouri. Her father, a travelling salesman, moved his wife and daughter to Seattle, but he died of alcoholism when Betty was two. Her mother married an old flame and moved to Canada, only to discover that Betty’s stepfather was in love with a man he had met at a meat packing company. Betty Garrett recalled that all her woes at home meant she was craving an alternative life, “and that life was the make-believe of the movies and theatre”.

Although not Roman Catholic, she attended Catholic schools where she demonstrated a talent for dancing and acting. When Betty was 17, her ambitious mother took her to New York where she won a scholarship at the Neighbourhood Playhouse.

Betty Garrett’s stage debut came in Danton’s Death at Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre in 1938. Later shows included All in Fun, Something for the Boys, Laffin’ Room Only and Bells Are Ringing. She also danced with the Martha Graham troupe, worked summers in the Borscht Belt, and even wore a fake jewel in her navel as a $25-a-week chorus girl in the Latin Quarter in Boston. In 1941 she joined the Communist Party.

She was cast in Call Me Mister on Broadway opposite Harold Rome, Jules Munshin and Virginia Davis. Her performance in this role, her biggest break to date, did not go unnoticed in Hollywood. In January 1947 she signed a 12-month contract with MGM.

Betty Garrett made her film debut as Shoo Shoo O’Grady in Big City (1948) with the then child actress Margaret O’Brien, Robert Preston and Danny Thomas. She joined an all-star cast including Judy Garland and June Allyson for Words and Music (also 1948), the fictionalised story of the songwriting partnership of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. In 1949 she appeared with Esther Williams in Take Me Out to the Ball Game and later that year joined Williams again as her scatterbrain sister in Neptune’s Daughter.

But her most memorable film role was in On The Town as the amorous taxi driver Hilde Esterhazy who pursues Sinatra with the racy song Come Up to My Place. The film told the story of three sailors, Gabey, Chip and Ozzie (Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin) on a day of shore leave in New York City, looking for fun and romance before their 24 hours are up. Ann Miller and Vera-Ellen co-starred.

As a result of the Hollywood blacklist Betty Garrett’s career nosedived and she had to find jobs in summer repertory. With her husband Larry Parks she joined touring companies and starred at the London Palladium with The Al Jolson Story. The couple returned to London with the show on two further occasions.

To Betty Garrett’s surprise, Hollywood welcomed her back in 1955 to replace Judy Holliday as Janet Leigh’s sister alongside Jack Lemmon in the musical My Sister Eileen.

But the role, although a critical success, failed to revive her film career. Undaunted she went to New York and found work in the fledgling medium of television, and it was her role as the landlady Edna Babish DeFazio in the 1970s sitcom Laverne and Shirley that reignited her career.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s she appeared in television series such as All in the Family, Murder She Wrote and The Golden Girls. In 2006 she made a guest appearance in Grey’s Anatomy and in 2009 returned to the big screen in the horror film Dark and Stormy Night. As recently as last year she had starred in her one-woman show, Betty Garrett and Other Songs, the title of her 1998 autobiography.

In recent years Betty Garrett had been teaching, and only last week gave a class in musical comedy at Theatre West, the non-profit theatre she helped to found in North Hollywood in 1960.

When Betty Garrett married Larry Parks in 1944, the actor Lloyd Bridges was best man and she subsequently became godmother to his son, Jeff Bridges. Larry Parks died in 1975. Their two sons survive her.