In her million-plus best-selling novel, ”Beaches” (Bantam Books, $3.95), and the film starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey, author Iris Rainer Dart describes the mercurial yet lasting friendship of two childhood pals who support each other through tragedy and prosperity, a dichotomy based on her own inconstant life. A one-time actress turned TV comedy writer, Dart, now a three-time best-selling novelist, has endured the murder of her first husband, Steve Wolf, a rock concert promoter, in 1977 by juvenile burglars. Dart, 45, a Pittsburgh native, is married to Stephen Dart, who heads an international telecommunications company. Iris Dart spoke with freelance writer Marion Flanagan from her Los Angeles home about her life`s vicissitudes and their influence on her novels and work.
The thing that people say about my books is that they make you laugh and cry. And lots of times people ask me, ”Do you write comedy or do you write drama?” and I say that I write about the human condition, which is sometimes deeply tragic and sometimes hilarious-and sometimes both at the same time.
I was a child performer, a tap dancer. So I saw a lot of that kind of seamy backstage life at a very early age. My father was a social worker and we were very, very poor. We lived in a little tiny house in Pittsburgh and didn`t have anything in the way of material things. But what we had that brought us so close and that keeps us so close is an amazing sense of humor.
I`m still very close with my sisters and my brother and their children. My brother, who has a hardware store in Pittsburgh, is one of the funniest people I know. People will say, ”Elliot should have been the comedy writer,” and it`s true. I worked in the hardware store from the time I was 12 until I graduated and most of the time I was there, we were laughing.
I became an acting major in the drama department of Carnegie Tech
(Carnegie-Mellon Institute, Pittsburgh) and that was a really serious and important training ground for actors. I studied the classics. And I came out to Los Angeles (planning to stay) just for a brief time. I was going to go back to New York and try acting on stage. But I kind of liked it here. I met my first husband very shortly after I arrived and decided to stay.
I had a failed acting career in television. My description is parts so small even a mother could miss them. I had written in college-when I was at Carnegie Tech, I wrote the varsity show two years in a row. My partner was Stephen Schwartz, who wrote ”Godspell” after we parted. And so when my acting career was going so poorly I decided I would try my hand at writing. And knocking on wood as we speak, it was immediately successful. I haven`t stopped working since that day.
I was just going on 24 and while I was dating my first husband, he introduced me to a woman named Susan Silvers and the two of us started writing situation comedy together. We wrote a ”Love American Style.” We wrote a
”That Girl.” And I was a voice-over actress for a while, because it didn`t matter that I was short and ethnic-nobody could tell by hearing my voice. I started writing Saturday morning television.
Then I wrote a Mary Tyler Moore spec (on speculation) script to send around to get work as a writer and one of the people who saw that script was
(George Schlatter) the producer of ”Laugh-In.” He kept in touch with me and then one day he called and said, ”I`m doing three specials. There is one for Doris Day, one for Diana Ross and one for Cher.”
And I said, ”I think I`ll do the one for Cher.” So he signed me on and I worked on that show, which starred Cher, Elton John, Flip Wilson and Bette Midler. It was picked up by the network as a series and ran for four years. I stayed with that show for 63 episodes, and I was the only woman for two of the four years. It was me and all guys in a room pitching jokes and writing sketches and it was really fabulous. I couldn`t believe somebody was giving me money to do it.
But when you write for television, what finally gets on is frequently unrecognizable. You write it and then by the time it goes through all of the hands that it takes to get it on the air, it`s changed and pushed around and altered to a state that you may not recognize. I wanted to write something that would come out looking like my message. So I retired from television to get into the novel business.
I was married for seven years and I was single for six. And now Stephen
(Dart) and I have been married for seven years.
The death of my first husband was a horrible, sad thing and I became not just a single mother as in divorce but a single mother who was raising her child essentially alone. It was tough.
I was trying to stay afloat as a single parent. But I wanted to write about the friendship between women (”Beaches”). I have a cousin who is my best friend. She is older than I am and since the day I was born, she has always been my closest friend and protector.
We`re very different and yet we are the best friends for one another. And I think it`s because what one lacks the other makes up.
I wanted to speak to that kind of friendship that women have that transcends every other relationship. A person who`s there at four in the morning if you need them. If you call them in the middle of the night they don`t say, ”Do you have any idea what time it is?” They say, ”What do you need?” and there`s lots of stories about my cousin.
In fact, one that particularly strikes me about how well we know one another is that when I was pregnant-I have a four-year-old-and I was volunteering at the Motion Picture Hospital, I was about eight months into my pregnancy and my teen-age son developed the chicken pox. My husband called and said, ”You`d better not go home because Greg has chicken pox.” I said,
”Well, if he has them, I probably have them by now, too.” And he said,
”Well, it depends. Have you had them? ”
I had absolutely no idea how to find out if I had ever had the chicken pox and suddenly it occurred to me. My cousin lives in Sarasota, Fla. So I dialed the telephone and she picked up and without even saying who it was I just said, ”Have I ever had the chicken pox?” and she said, ”Of course, you have a pock mark on your left leg.”
I said, ”Even my husband doesn`t know that about me.” And she said,
”Honey, we`ve been married longer.” And it`s true.
I`m a storyteller and I guess probably unconsciously the stories that interest me the most are the ones that have positive messages because they feel good.
One of the most important things (in her life now) was my relationship with my second husband (Stephen) and how we had met and found one another under impossible situations. That we fell head-over-heels in love and married and had a child together is just ridiculous, but true and wonderful.
My father was a socialist and a social worker in a settlement house. And I was brought up in a household with the most left-wing beliefs possible. My father-in-law was Justin Dart, who was an industrialist, well-known for being a member of the (Reagan) ”kitchen cabinet,” and his beliefs were exactly the opposite of my father`s. And I`m a Jew and (Stephen`s) a Gentile. And when I met him, I was 37 and he was 29. Now he`s 38 and I`m 45. It`s so interesting to us because we`ll talk about our pasts the way the characters did in ”Til the Real Thing”-when I was dating he was still not able to tie his shoes. But it doesn`t seem to matter because we have so many other things in common.
I never want to stop working. I have too many ideas. And I think for me, there will always be a comedy aspect. That ability to laugh at the saddest things is what gets us through.
We can get through the worst things if we don`t take them too seriously-if we maintain a perspective even about the painful moments. And that`s the story I want to tell again and again.
