Lifestyles

Marilu Henner, the Former ‘Taxi’ Star, Doesn’t Need a Grocery List

NEW YORK — Marilu Henner had her last bite of cheese 39 years and one day ago.

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By
Joanne Kaufman
, New York Times

NEW YORK — Marilu Henner had her last bite of cheese 39 years and one day ago.

“I celebrated my health birthday yesterday,” said Henner on a recent Thursday, as — inevitably — the details began flooding back. “August 15, 1979, I gave up dairy products. It was a Wednesday. The weather that day was beautiful. And I went to see a doctor, who told me, ‘You have to give up dairy products. You’re not going to be healthy unless you give up dairy.'”

Henner, 66, who just opened in the Broadway musical “Gettin’ the Band Back Together,” was taking advantage of her first free afternoon in weeks by having a cashew chai at the Peacefood Café, a vegan bakery on the Upper West Side, followed by some grocery shopping.

“You want to know something else?” she said, pausing midsip and midsentence to hug her sister, Christal, who lives in the neighborhood and had dropped by to say hello. “After I saw the doctor, I went to Erewhon, this natural foods store which is so famous now in LA but at the time was this tiny place. And I ran into Jeff Goldblum, who I had done a movie with a few years before, and he walked me around showing me dairy substitutes.”

Henner is famous for playing cabby Elaine Nardo in the 1970s sitcom “Taxi.” She has also written 10 books (mostly about health and well-being); starred in another TV series, “Evening Shade”; and appeared in several movies and Broadway shows, including “Chicago” and “Grease.”

But thanks to a “60 Minutes” segment in 2010, Henner has become famous for what neuroscientists call highly superior autobiographical memory — the ability to recall life experiences, including day of the week and date, with remarkably vivid detail.

“You don’t know for how many years people have been talking about my memory,” Henner said. “And then they’ll ask me about something from two weeks ago, and I tell them, ‘You can go a little further back than that.'”

Back, say, to when she learned about being cast in “Taxi.” It was June 4, 1978, a Sunday. Henner was at the premiere of the movie “Grease” and ran into the casting director for the series, who gave her the thumbs up. Then there was the Hollywood party at which Gregory Peck and Sean Connery told her they were big “Taxi” fans: Tuesday, Nov. 13, 1984.

“I saw them, two of my idols, Atticus Finch and James Bond, and I thought, ‘They’re coming in this direction,” she said. “They’re walking, walking, walking, walking, and suddenly I realized they’re coming to me. I had, like, literally an out-of-body experience. That was like my biggest celebrity moment.”

Henner is the big celebrity in “Gettin’ the Band Back Together,” a musical about dashed hopes and second chances for a bunch of Jersey boys; she plays a foxy mother with a groupie past. (It received mixed reviews, though Jesse Green, a theater critic for The New York Times, wrote that Henner performs “winningly.”)

After sipping her tea for half an hour, she asked for a to-go cup and headed out into the scorching afternoon, popped on her Alice & Olivia sunglasses and stuck out her arm to hail a taxi.

“You know what everybody asks?” Henner said. “'Why don’t they revive ‘Taxi’ and call it ‘Uber’?”

Dropoff was in front of the Westerly Natural Market on West 54th Street and Eighth Avenue, and she went straight for an avocado. “This is the food everyone is doing now, but it was the first food I gave my kids,” she said, referring to her sons, Joey, 22, and Nicholas, 24. “It’s like brain food for babies.”

“This is the other trendy food,” she added, reaching for a cauliflower, then, navigating her cart through the crowded store, she grabbed a multipack of GoodBelly, a probiotic juice drink. “I take it at night, and it makes such a difference, especially if your stomach has been upset.”

There was brief consternation when Henner thought the kombucha bar was no longer making her preferred blend, Air, which includes peppermint, pineapple, lime and echinacea. Fortunately, she was mistaken; there was lots on tap.

“I am the queen of discontinued,” she said after apologizing to the clerk for forgetting her growler. “A wonderful eye pencil called black plum from Bobbi Brown? I got the last 12 in the country. This concealer pink pencil from Arbonne? Over. The black Puma sneakers? Over. I bought six pairs.”

Almost $91 of groceries later, Henner strolled toward the apartment that’s home for the duration of her time in the show.

At the corner of West 53rd Street, Henner bumped into Audra McDonald, whom she’d seen earlier in the summer (Monday, June 18, she’ll tell you) at a fundraiser for Covenant House, and then into her younger son, Joey.

“Oh, my gosh. This is what I love about New York,” she said, stopping to make introductions before heading into the lobby of her building. “I always say I want to try to make the day as great as possible because I’m going to remember it. This is a great day.”

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