The Modern Mrs. Meers

A big-laughing Texan finds the kooky dragon lady within

By Blake Green
STAFF WRITER

June 23, 2002

Having won a Tony Award for her role in "Thoroughly Modern Millie," Harriet Harris is on to more important things - such as worrying about the people she failed to mention in the one minute allowed for her thank yous. "I dropped a whole section of my speech!" the actress wailed between bites of blackened tuna the other day at lunch. "And it was the people I work most closely with."

Then there was her dress: A lovely frock on loan from Lars Nilsson of Bill Blass that interviewers on the red carpet outside the awards ceremony failed to ask about. "I got sandwiched between Liam Neeson and Calista Flockhart, and who wanted to know anything about me?"

And the audacity of her brother and sister, who called afterward with congratulations and, by the by, they'd noticed she hadn't mentioned them. "Are you kidding?" Harris says she demanded to know. "What did you do?

"Oh, the regrets! Oh, the regrets!" Harris says, back of the hand dramatically positioned against forehead. But she's also laughing uproariously - as she often does, her narrow eyes becoming new moons when her face crinkles with delight.

For a second, you might think Harris was Chinese - which is what Mrs. Meers, her dragon lady character in "Millie," is pretending to be. This, while she's running a hotel for young women and trafficking in white slavery, her browbeaten cohorts being two real Chinese, Ching Ho and Bun Foo, played by Ken Leung and Francis Jue (two of the people Harris omitted mentioning when she accepted the Tony for best featured actress).

That the squirrely Mrs. Meers is such a preposterous character is certainly why Harris has so much fun playing her - as she did creating her. "They let me do pretty much what I wanted," she says. For example: "She wasn't supposed to have that accent which is just absurd." So absurd, in fact, that she says she first tried it on Leung and Jue to see if they took offense at such bodacious political incorrectness.

Their conclusion - once they'd stopped laughing - "'It's so wrong, it's OK.'"

Then there are kooky touches, such as that "neurotic moment of smoking" Mrs. Meers takes at one point in the show. And her costume: "I wanted to wear Chinese pajamas and an empress kind of black wig" - complete with chopsticks - "to look like I was in the Peking Opera," Harris says.

So enthusiastic is the actress about her character - "she's really a modern woman, an entrepreneur" - Harris is a little bit worried that after months of hearing people who've seen the show conclude, "'Oh, she's just evil,' I might be tempted to try to make them understand her torment, to understand who she really is." And that, Harris is well aware, could tilt the musical's comedic tone. She quotes the late Richard Morris, co-author of the musical's book, who warned her, "No one wants to understand Mrs. Meers' pain."

"It's just that she's so real," laments Harris, who's made something of a career of playing eccentric women. Fans of HBO's "Six Feet Under" saw her as an "erratic-behaving wife" shopping around for a funeral for her husband. In NBC's "Frasier," she makes periodic appearances as the over-the-top Bebe Glazer, Frasier Crane's agent. "That's only about once a year, because that character just eats up all the oxygen," Harris explains. "It's like certain spices just taking over a dish; you want them in there, but not too much."

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Harris, who says "being Texan has a lot to do with my viewpoint," comes from a family of, if not eccentrics, "people with very big personalities," some of them extraordinarily talented in the arts.

Her mother was an artist, but "one of those people who don't want to do something unless they can be the best at it." She encouraged her daughter to go to Juilliard - to study acting; "Millie" is her first musical theater. Harris' father was a lawyer who died when she was 7 - "when I still wanted to be governor of Texas."

For years, Harris, who's 47, lived in New York, but she's made her home in Southern California for seven years, returning occasionally to do a play. She played Girl Friday Maggie in the Roundabout's 2000 production of "The Man Who Came to Dinner" and points out, "She [Maggie] was the least eccentric person in that show.

"I've been very fortunate," Harris says. "Without ever being famous, I've been able to support myself doing this" - which may be behind some of her angst about her character. It's revealed in one of the plot twists that when Mrs. Meers was younger, she'd desperately wanted to be an actress.

Meers' failure had nothing to do with any absence of talent, Harris is convinced. "When people become successful," she says she's discovered in her own acting life, "they tend to forget that there are so many talented people out there that just haven't had the opportunity."

Or, sometimes been afraid to go for it. Harris, whose previous brush with singing was "voice lessons in the eighth grade," says she was "scared, scared, scared" about tackling a musical. "But I realized this was an opportunity that would not come again.

"Acting is very therapeutic, a great thing for introverted people like me to do," Harris says, in part because "you're around people. Anything else I might have done" - she names landscape gardening and interior design - "I'd be alone too much."

She does garden and rearrange the furnishings in the house she shares with actor Matt Bradford Sullivan and a trio of birds whose names can't be revealed "because they're the codes on credit cards.

"I have more friends here and more of an emotional center," she says, comparing the two coasts. "But California is more like Texas, a nondemanding, outdoor lifestyle. I like being out of work there more than I like being out of work here."

WHERE & WHEN "Thoroughly Modern Millie" is at the Marquis Theatre, 1535 Broadway. For ticket information and performance times, call 212-307-4100.

MOVIES TO MUSICALS

Opening this summer:

HAIRSPRAY. Begins previews July 18, opens Aug. 15, at the Neil Simon Theater, 250 W. 52nd St.; tickets, 212-757-8646.

Based on the 1988 film satire by John Waters about the integration of a teen dance program in 1962

Baltimore.

Currently on Broadway:

THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE. Opened April 18 (won 2002 Tony for best musical) at the Marriott Marquis Theater; 1535 Broadway; tickets, 212-307-4100.

Based on 1967 film starring Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore about a small-town girl who finds love - and intrigue - in New York City in the 1920s.

THE PRODUCERS. Opened April 19, 2001 (won 2001 Tony for best musical), at the St. James Theater, 246 W. 44th St.,

tickets, 212-239-6200.

Based on Mel Brooks' 1968 film starring Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel about two Broadway produ- cers who find themselves in terrible trouble when they raise money for a surefire flop that turns into a huge hit.

42ND STREET. Opened May 2, 2001 (won 2001 Tony for best musical revival), at the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, 213 W. 42nd St., tickets 212-307-4450.

Based on the 1933 movie about backstage shenanigans at a Broadway musical.

THE FULL MONTY. Opened Oct. 26, 2001, at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, 230 W. 49th St., tickets, 212-239-6200.

Based on 1997 British comedy about unemployed steelworkers who, out of desperation and the need for money, decide to become male strippers.

THE LION KING. Opened Nov. 13, 1997 (won the 1998 Tony for best musical), at the New Amsterdam Theater, 214 W. 42nd St., tickets, 212-282-2900.

Based on 1994 Disney animated movie about a lion cub that, sabotaged by his evil uncle, lives in exile until it is able to take its rightful place as king.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Opened April 19, 1994, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, 205 W. 46th St., tickets, 212-575-9200.

Based on the 1991 anima- ted Disney movie in which bookish Belle and the ferocious Beast, who's living under a curse, learn to love one another after he impri- sons her in his castle.

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws