Frank Gumm, was not in Hollywood. Judy’s mother telephoned Ida the
morning after Deanna’s big show: “I can’t do a thing with Judy. She’s
been crying all night. What shall I do?”
“Bring her right over,” said Ida. With no children of her own, she was
a mother hen to everyone who needed her. Judy was as close to her as a
daughter. She fell into Ida’s lap and buried her head on her shoulder,
sobbing: “I’ve been in show business ten years, and Deanna’s starred in
a picture and I’m nothing.”
Frustrated ambition has to be treated gently. “You’ll get your feet in
cement, too,” Ida soothed her. “You’ll be starred, you’ll see. Don’t
forget, I’ve told you so.”
Mayer schemed to turn the tables on Universal. Nobody was going to
laugh at him for keeping the wrong girl. “I’ll take this fat one,
Garland, and make her a bigger star than Durbin,” he boasted to his
associates. How to start was the puzzle. He began by insisting that
she be coached in acting and dancing, though she’s never had a formal
singing lesson in her life. She still doesn’t know what key she sings
in. She’ll say, “Play some chords and I’ll pick one.” He had orders
sent down to the commissary: “No matter what she orders, give her
nothing but chicken soup and cottage cheese.”
Her one dear friend in approximately her own age group was Mickey
Rooney. They were nuts about each other. They went to school together,
along with Metro’s Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew, and other child
stars whom Mickey rapidly eclipsed. Mickey, who remains today one of
the greatest underrated talents in entertainment, was brash, cocksure,
and growing up fast. He was doing calisthenics in the schoolyard
one day under an instructor’s eye when Frank Whitbeck, the studio
advertising director, passed by.
“Hi, Uncle Frank,” yelled Mickey. “Ain’t this the damndest thing for a
grown man to be doing?”
The crush Judy had on Mickey would have burned up a girl twice her age.
An explosive mixture of emotion and ambition churns inside her. “I have
to have a crush on somebody,” she once cried to Ida, “but they don’t
last.” Mickey had a shield of toughness, which she lacked, and a heart
as big as Ireland, but he mostly regarded her as a kid, too young for
him.
She’d played minor roles, two of them with Mickey as star, when _The
Wizard of Oz_ came along. Producer Mervyn LeRoy, typically, was all set
to have Shirley Temple as Dorothy, but Twentieth Century-Fox wouldn’t
release her. So he reluctantly settled for Judy--and she had it made.
The top executive offices at Culver City are located in the Thalberg
Building, otherwise known as the “Iron Lung” by reason of its
much-envied air-conditioning system. Before it was built, Metro
tried to buy a little piece of corner property, on which stands a
long-established undertaker’s parlor. He refused to sell, so today his
establishment stands like a sore thumb next to the handsome structure
named for Irving Thalberg. The undertaker occasionally peers into the
“Iron Lung” and says: “Well, I’ll get you all, sooner or later.” He’s
had most of the old-timers already.
From the executive offices you could look across the street at four
big twenty-four-sheet billboards standing side by side. On them were
displayed posters that shouted the claims of the studio’s newest hits,
listing names of the stars, featured players, producer, director and,
if they were lucky, the writers.
Since actors are vain, Mayer and his aides, like soft-spoken Benny Thau
and burly Eddie Mannix, could sweet-talk them into accepting bigger
billing in lieu of more money in many a contract. With _Oz_, Judy’s
billing grew like a mushroom. It jumped above the picture’s title,
making her technically a star. The size of the lettering that was used
to spell out her name expanded year by year. Now she’s reached the
peak, where one name, _Judy_--like _Garbo_ and _Gable_--does all the
selling needed to pull in an audience.
Then Metro smelled gold in billing Mickey and Judy together for _Babes
on Broadway_, and some of her cruelest years opened up for her.
Compared with Mickey’s greased-lightning ability to do everything and
anything and get it right instantly, Judy was a slow study. Dance
rehearsals were a torture. She was driven frantic, dancing, singing,
improvising, putting a picture together. The director, Busby Berkeley,
was a taskmaster who extracted the last ounce of her energy.
“I used to feel,” she told me later, “as if he had a big black bull
whip, and he was lashing me with it. Sometimes I used to think I
couldn’t live through the day. Other times I’d have my driver take me
round and round the block because I hated to go through the gates.”
I saw him work her over in one picture, where she stood on a truck and
sang. He watched from the floor, with a wild gleam in his eye, while
in take after take he drove her toward the perfection he demanded. She
was close to hysteria; I was ready to scream myself. But the order was
repeated time and time again: “Cut. Let’s try it again, Judy.”
“Come on, Judy! Move! Get the lead out.” By now, she was determined to
keep her name in the billing, but I doubt if she would have pretended
to anyone that she enjoyed being an actress. She was jealous of Mickey,
forever running to Ida to complain: “He got the break, I didn’t.” For
all the friendship of the two young people, she wanted to best him in
everything they did together.
The two of them sat together in the darkened theater. On one side of
them was Irene Dunne; on the other, Sonja Henie; behind them, Cary
Grant. When the house lights came on, Judy was crying through the
applause. “I know what you’re thinking,” Mickey said. “We’re two kids
from vaudeville, and we didn’t mean a damn thing for so long, and now
it’s happened to both of us.”
Years later, after Judy had fallen into a bottomless pit and climbed
out again, the Friars Club gave a banquet at the Biltmore Bowl and
proclaimed her “Miss Show Business.” She had just had the British
eating out of her hand at the London Palladium, played the Palace in
New York for nineteen sensational weeks; toured the United States and
finished her triumph at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles.
Mickey’s career was running downhill. Somebody remembered to send him
an invitation to the Biltmore Bowl, but it was to sit way over in a
corner.
“Everybody was slapping each other on the back,” he reported without
bitterness, “and I said to myself: ‘Poor Judy, how many of these people
really care about you?’”
I said: “You two were like ham and eggs. You helped her more than
anybody.”
“Yeah, but the people who gave the party forgot that. That was the
only thing that hurt. Because I felt so close. I haven’t seen her much
lately. It’s all a kind of whirl.”
Adolescence can give a rough ride to any girl--and her mother, if
she’s around to share her daughter’s fears and confidences and dry her
tears. Judy’s thinned-out body was not given time to readjust. The
public idolized her. The exhibitors couldn’t get enough Garland-Rooney
musicals. She had to go on churning them out one after another. They’d
been sent to New York for the Capitol Theatre opening of _Babes on
Broadway_. They went back again and broke every house record.
“We’d been doing six, seven shows a day and having about forty minutes
between shows,” Mickey recalled. “This one afternoon we’d just gone
off stage to come back and take a bow together, and she collapsed in
the wings. I didn’t know what to do. I filled up with tears. I felt as
though something serious had happened. I came out on stage and just
felt lost without her. She wasn’t dieting at this time. She was just
going too fast.” And with the wrong companions.
That was Louis B. Mayer’s doing. His suspicious brain came up with the
idea that Ida had too much influence over Judy. She might be tempted to
think of what was good for the girl before she thought of the studio,
so he flatly told Ida: “You’ve got too much work to do to look after
the Garland.” By order, the old intimacy was ended.
The studio brushed off somebody else in Judy’s life, too--her first
husband, David Rose, the serious-minded, preoccupied composer to whom
she was married at nineteen. She made two mistakes in that. She married
him without consulting Mr. Mayer beforehand, which was a fracture of
MGM protocol. Even worse was the fact that she married at all.
A star’s life was supposedly controlled twenty-four hours a day by the
studio. She was told what to do, both at work and after working hours;
where to go; what to say; whom to mix with. Mayer didn’t want any star
to marry because that introduced a foreign influence in the control
system. A husband could often influence a star against the studio for
her own good and sometimes for his own power.
They turned on Judy like rattlesnakes. On Academy Awards night, she had
sat for years at the number-one table along with the rest of the MGM
stars. As Mrs. David Rose she was deliberately humiliated and seated at
a much less desirable spot on the side and out of the spotlight. That
year she called to ask if I’d like to sit with her.
“Love to,” I said, then proceeded to give the tsar hell by telephone:
“Louis, you are treating her outrageously. Even if you personally don’t
like her, think of what she has done for your company. You should be
ashamed of yourself.” But he was immune to shame or compassion. I
wasted my breath.
They actually believed that she belonged to them, body and soul. They’d
created her; why couldn’t she show more gratitude? The marriage hadn’t
a chance. The studio told her so. David Rose was the wrong man for her,
said the sycophants who clung to her like leeches. “He’s trading on
your popularity. You’re a star; he’s a struggling composer.” If they
passed the two of them in the Culver City streets, they’d greet her but
ignore him.
After Judy left him, as she inevitably did, her private life changed
in many ways. Her father had died and her mother remarried to become
Ethel Gilmore. Both sisters were married, too. Metro assigned a
publicity writer, Betty Asher, to stay with Judy, and they lived high,
wide, and not particularly handsome.
She turned from her mother and her old friends. When they warned her
about the new set she was going with, the rainbow girl screamed: “I’m
old enough to know what I want. When I want your advice I’ll ask for
it.”
The dismal cycle of benzedrine and sleeping pills began again. The
studio kept up the illusion of Judy’s perfect health. She plunged on,
beating her thin chest and saying: “I feel fine.” Of course, she knew
she wasn’t, but she was too riddled with ambition to let someone else
take over a picture scheduled for her.
She listened to anybody who flattered her ego. Joe Mankiewicz, the
director who suffered the tortures of the damned on _Cleopatra_, was
a great ego booster. “You could be the greatest dramatic star in the
world,” he told her. “Anything Bernhardt did, you can do better. I’ll
write material for you, make you another Bernhardt.” That was something
he never did.
Metro smiled on marriage number two--to Vincent Minnelli, who had
directed her in _Meet Me in St. Louis_ and _The Clock_. They felt this
gentle man would bring her under control. Judy was married in her
mother’s home. Louis Mayer gave the bride away; Betty Asher was matron
of honor; Ira Gershwin the best man. Ida Koverman was not invited, nor
was I. Judy was then twenty-three.
Minnelli, ten years her senior, had never married before. Though he
controlled hundreds on a sound stage, he wasn’t successful in seizing
the reins as husband. He was too gentle. She continued to mingle with
her old crowd; sought and found her sensations; quarreled with her
mother.
By this time, we knew many of Judy’s problems and were delighted to
hear that she was pregnant. Maybe motherhood would bring her back to
her senses. Before Liza was born, I wanted to give her a different
kind of baby shower, with only men invited. Judy was in a depressed
mood. She bowed out with a note: “I’d have been a dull guest of honor,
but it was a wonderful idea. Thanks for thinking of me. Forgive me, and
after March I’ll be rarin’ to go. I’ll be my old self again.”
Unfortunately motherhood rarely produces miracles. Though the birth
left Judy weakened, she scurried back to work again. Metro issued
glowing reports about her health, but her previously ravenous appetite
had strangely deserted her, and she stayed pathetically thin. She got
through her pictures only on nervous energy and doctors’ help. She was
so near the borderline that when I visited her in her dressing room on
the set of _The Pirate_, in which she was co-starring with Gene Kelly,
she was shaking like an aspen leaf. She went into a frenzy of hysteria.
Everybody who had once loved her had turned against her, she said. She
had no friends.
Even her mother, Judy said, tapped her telephone calls. “She is doing
everything in her power to destroy me.”
I said: “You know that isn’t true. Nobody in the world loves you as
your mother does--and has all your life through all your troubles.”
But she cried out against her mother; against Ida Koverman; against
all those who had helped her out of so much potential trouble. She was
carried out of the dressing room, put in a limousine, still wearing
make-up and costume, and put to bed. But she rallied and finished the
picture.
The gulf between her and Minnelli widened. He tried to force her to
eat, but she couldn’t. In fits of temperament, the couple parted many
times. But he was always on hand to help.
The road got rougher. Something desperate was happening to her. The
sad chronicle of studio suspensions began. Then Metro bought _Annie
Get Your Gun_ for her and assigned as director the “man with the bull
whip,” Buzz Berkeley. She went into a weeping rage when she was told
she’d have to work for him again and refused point-blank to do it. So
the studio gave her Charles Walters in his place. But then nothing
could have improved the situation for her.
She recorded the songs which are collectors’ items--I often sit and
play them in my den at night. Then day after day, with a million
dollars of Metro’s money already invested, she didn’t show up for work.
Her bosses took her off the picture. Betty Hutton was brought in to
replace her, which was one of their biggest mistakes. They should have
waited until Judy got well.
When Judy walked into my den after hearing the news from Mayer himself,
she looked middle-aged. She stared into space, blamed herself for her
troubles. “I understand the studio’s problems at last. I’d been there
so long I’d forgotten you have to conform to their plans. Mr. Mayer
promised to take care of me. He said he’d give me so much to live on
while I’m out of work.”
She was in the throes of another separation from Minnelli. “I’m broke.
How can anyone save money in this business? When Vincent and I were
together, I spent $70,000 decorating our house. Since our separation
I’m paying $1000 a month rent on another. It’s tiny; no nursery for my
baby. But I have to keep working.”
I begged her to go to the Menninger Clinic. Treatments there had done
much good for Robert Walker, her co-star in _The Clock_. “There’s
nothing the matter with my head,” she replied. “It’s my body that’s
tired.”
A few days later she entered the Peter Brigham Hospital in Boston, with
Louis Mayer personally paying the bills, and stayed there for several
months. Back in Hollywood, fighting to lose weight again, she finished
_Summer Stock_ with Gene Kelly. Then, during rehearsals for _Royal
Wedding_ with Fred Astaire, the headlines screamed that Judy Garland,
suspended for refusing to work, had cut her throat in the house she’d
spent $70,000 decorating. Stories told of her racing into the bathroom,
breaking a glass, slashing her throat. In fact, the scratch could have
been as easily made with a pin. The cut wasn’t serious. It was more a
case of nerves than anything else.
Her mother had long since given up the hopeless task of staying close.
She was working as a theater manager in Dallas. When she heard the
news, she got in her little jalopy and drove thirty-six hours nonstop
to go to her daughter. “Judy,” she said enigmatically, “will never kill
herself.” She stayed on in California, working in a job in an aircraft
plant that Ida Koverman helped obtain for her. She died of a heart
attack in the parking lot there. Previously, she used to plead with her
friends: “Please don’t introduce me as Judy’s mother.”
Judy has walked the rocky road back to the top of the mountain with
Sid Luft by her side for most of the miles. Sid is her husband,
“manager,” and a gambling man who can kill $10,000 in an afternoon. He
loves horses and fast motor cars. It was Sid, with whom she has led an
on-again off-again life as Mrs. Luft, who arranged her first tour that
opened at the London Palladium, where she was an absolute sensation.
She has two more children by him: Lorna and Joe.
“I don’t think there’s any actress in the world that can produce
like she can when she’s going,” said one member of the group that
accompanied her to London. “When she’s going, she’s the greatest thing
on wheels. When you’re with a dame that’s fantastic like that, and you
don’t know if she’s going to get on or off or anything, you’re bound to
crack under the strain.”
Many people wondered how Judy Garland got her amazing contract from
Jack Warner to make the musical version of _A Star Is Born_. There was
a clause in it she didn’t have to work before 11 A.M. If she was ill
they wouldn’t expect her to work. It was a fantastic deal. Here’s the
story.
When it came time for Jack’s beautiful daughter Barbara to have her
coming-out party, he promised to get her anything she wanted. What she
wanted was to have Judy Garland sing at the party. Her father told her
that was impossible. “But, Daddy, you promised to give me anything I
wanted, and I thought you could do anything.” Then she burst into tears
and hung up the telephone.
Father went to work. He called Judy. Her answer was: “Why would I
do that? No.” He called her again: “What would I have to give you to
change your mind?”
Then it was that Sid Luft came on the phone and said: “We want _A Star
Is Born_,” naming an astronomical price for Judy and special clauses in
the contract. Warner had to buy the story from David O. Selznick at a
cost, I believe, of a quarter of a million.
But Judy survived the flop that _A Star Is Born_ proved to be, as
she has survived all the incredible excesses of her life. In every
performance--at concerts, on television, in her new pictures--she has
the power to stir an audience to the depths of their hearts, like an
old-fashioned revival meeting. “We have all come through the fire
together,” she seems to say, “and none of us is getting any younger,
but we’re here together, and I’ll love you if you love me.”
This feeling she gives out to and gets back from an audience may be
the one crush of her life that will last. She used to be her own worst
critic. Before she went into a number for the screen, her co-workers
had to keep telling her: “You’re wonderful, wonderful!” But she never
thought she was good. “I was awful” was her own self-judgment whenever
she’d finished. But now, as she literally tears her way through her
songs, her audiences go crazy listening to her. They crowd around to
touch her, and she believes in what she can achieve.
Ethel Barrymore, one of her greatest boosters, told me: “I think she
has a tremendous frustration. She’s always felt she wasn’t wanted. She
has a complex common among women--she wants to be beautiful. I told
her: ‘God is funny that way. He divides these things. When you open
your mouth to sing, you can be as beautiful as anyone I’ve ever known.’
But you’ve got to keep telling her.”
Judy suffers from nightmares concerning her mother. She has lost
something of herself somewhere along the road. But so long as she has
millions of people loving her and fighting for her, she’ll keep the
ghosts in the background.
Her performance in Carnegie Hall was one of the most amazing things I
ever witnessed. Her fans screamed and applauded after every number.
She gave encore after encore, promised: “I’ll stay all night if you
want me.” She threw her head back and used the mike like a trumpet.
She repeated the same frenzied performance in the Hollywood Bowl, this
time in the rain, and nobody moved. You sat enthralled because she’d
cast her magic spell as she did first when she sang “Over the Rainbow.”
This was our little Judy, who came home and persuaded the natives that
skies really were blue and that dreams really do come true.
_Eight_
One bright morning last spring, a fat young woman with a baby carriage
ambled along Hollywood Boulevard. First to catch my eye were the pink
Capri pants and her wabbling _derrière_ that was threatening to burst
right out of them. Next item I spotted was the cigarette dangling out
of her mouth, sprinkling ashes on the baby. I put on speed to catch up
with her, though I didn’t know her from Little Orphan Annie.
“I wonder if you know how you look from the rear. You should be ashamed
of yourself, and you a mother, too.”
That stopped her dead in her tracks. “And who might you be?”
“Doesn’t matter, but you’re disgusting.” With that, I walked on,
feeling I’d done my bit for the cause. I wasn’t exactly running any
risk. Though she outweighed me by thirty pounds, I knew she couldn’t
leave the baby to come after me.
The cause is glamour, for which I’ve been fighting a losing battle for
years. Our town was built on it, but there’s scarcely a trace left now.
Morning, noon, and night the girls parade in babushkas; dirty, sloppy
sweaters; and skin-tight pants. They may be an incitement to rape, but
certainly not to marriage. Unless the era of the tough tomboy ends
soon, the institution of matrimony is doomed to disappear forever.
The geniuses who conduct the motion-picture business killed glamour
when they decided that what the public wanted was not dream stuff, from
which movies used to be made, but realism. They took the girls out of
satin, chiffon, velvet, and mink, put them first into gingham and then
blue jeans. So what happened? They converted the heroine into the girl
next door, and I’ve always advocated that if they want to see the girl
next door, go next door. Now they’ve thrown the poor kid out to earn
her living on the streets.
The milliners, especially the males, have helped stitch glamour’s
shroud. Deep inside whatever they call their souls, they hate women.
They made the most ridiculous concoctions for women to wear on their
heads. Hats like table doilies, little pot holders, coal scuttles,
dishpans, crash helmets, bedpans. Husbands were ignored when they
complained: “Where in God’s name did you get that thing? Whoever made
it must hate your sex.”
Not until other women laughed at them did the glamour pusses discard
their psychotic chapeaux and go bareheaded. By then the designers had
ruined their own racket; they’d killed the sale of hats. I can walk
six blocks today in any city and see nothing more than hair or a scarf
covering anybody else’s hair but mine.
Studio wardrobe departments that employed cutters, seamstresses, and
embroidery hands by the dozens are empty, staffed by skeleton crews.
The stock rooms were crammed with bolts of magnificent brocades,
satins, laces; now most of the shelves are bare. One odd sight you’ll
see, though--rows and rows of realistic breasts cunningly contoured
from flesh-colored plastic, complete with pink nipples, hanging in
pairs, labeled with the name of the underprivileged star they were
created for. Some deceivers are made of rubber and inflate to size.
Everything else in Wardrobe was real--furs, fabrics, and feathers.
The cost of sheer labor that went into making the clothes drove the
accountants cross-eyed. One costume Garbo wore in _Mata Hari_ took
eight Guadalajaran needlewomen nine weeks to complete. In my wardrobe I
have the most beautiful coat I have seen anywhere, which Travis Banton
of Paramount designed. The embroidery alone cost $4000.