Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood by Teri Garr & Henriette Mantel

Author:Teri Garr & Henriette Mantel [Garr, Teri & Mantel, Henriette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B001NGN2F0
Publisher: Plume
Published: 2006-10-30T08:00:00+00:00

When I was doing my nighttime talk-show hopping, I was still living up on Lookout Mountain with Roger Birnbaum. Roger had been my boyfriend since 1979, a couple years before I did Tootsie. We met when I lived in an apartment on Sunset Plaza Drive in the Hollywood Hills. I was glad when my next-door neighbor moved out—his late-night sexual gymnastics kept waking me up. Then I met Roger at the mailboxes and found out that he’d moved in next door. He was cute, tall, and slender with dark, curly hair, and the only sounds that came from his apartment were the cheers of guys watching basketball. It was a real improvement. We became friends, and it was like living a sitcom. Day and night we’d knock on each other’s windows and doors. Then one weekend I had overnight guests, so I stayed in his apartment. He had worked for the music producer Clive Davis and had great taste in music. This was before I shot One from the Heart, and he introduced me to—or should I say seduced me with—Tom Waits. By the time my guests left my apartment, I wasn’t just sleeping at Roger’s for the convenience.

When we first started dating, we tried to break through the wall from his apartment to mine. Our bedrooms seemed to share a wall, so we took a hammer and tried to bang out a hole connecting the bedrooms, but when we broke through his wall it came through the back of my closet, which wasn’t quite as festive. At best, I could use the hole as a laundry chute. Finally, I literally moved next door, into his apartment. He was adorable, nice, funny, smart, and tenacious, and we were really tight. I loved that his approach to life was different from mine. He had strong tastes—in art, music, food, everything. When he saw a beautiful, simple landscape by Jim Ganzer (who collaborated with Ed Ruscha) he said, “This is good. Let’s buy it.” We’d drive down the coast and he’d say, “See that shack? A guy can sit down there and have a cold beer and a cracked crab.” I was always impressed that he knew what he liked and where to find it. Roger was sophisticated. He knew how to tap into what was already there (even though he was from New Jersey).

Roger also had a laid-back love of life that was refreshing. We were always throwing parties and barbecues. The first summer we dated, we had a party for my birthday I’ll never forget. Penny Marshall was there, as were producer Sean Daniel, who’d go on to produce many movies; Freddy Forrest, my costar in One from the Heart; Sean Daniel’s girlfriend Linda Marder; and Alfa-Betty and Marshall. I cooked hamburgers for hours as an endless stream of people poured in bearing six-packs. Except my dear friend Toni—she always came empty-handed, or with some feathers or something. Kevin Kline sat and played the piano for hours, and he was great.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.