Get Happy (47 page)

The truth, as far as the other actors were concerned, was the exact opposite. Far from pointing their fingers at her, Judy’s colleagues did their best to make her laugh. Phil Silvers came in on his days off to cheer her up, and young Carleton Carpenter wrote an encouraging song. “Don’t be afraid, baby, let go o’ your heart,” it began. Carpenter even attempted to rescue her in his dreams, trying, over and over, to pull her out of an imaginary drug den—her dressing room. “I had to get her out of there,” he said, “away from the narcotics—but I couldn’t.” Nor could anyone else.

If the cast of
Summer Stock
was on Judy’s side, many in the Thalberg Building were not, and the production notes were even more thorough than usual, obsessively documenting each second of delay that she caused. The mood of official displeasure was reflected in Louella Parsons’s column. Parsons said that although she had never before publicly spanked Judy—actually, she had whacked her hard on several occasions—she would do so now. “I can’t understand her attitude after all that has been done for her,” Parsons went on to complain. “Even the people who sympathize with her can’t understand her actions toward the studio.”

One who no longer sympathized was Joe Pasternak. The “laughing Hungarian,” as he was sometimes called, was now all frowns and gloomy sighs, her ardent supporter no longer. “That’s all, I can’t take it any longer,” Pasternak told Mayer at last, suggesting that Metro close down the picture. “I quit.” But Mayer refused to allow that or to give up on Judy. “Sit down,” he said. “This little girl has been so wonderful. She’s made us a lot of money, and she’s in trouble. We’ve got to help her.” To which he added, in grim conclusion: “If you stop production now, it’ll finish her.”

Mayer, who still retained vestiges of his former authority, had his way, and filming proceeded in starts and stops, like an unreliable car struggling toward its destination. Suffering all of a sudden from an ulcer, an ailment he blamed on Judy, Chuck Walters found it almost galling to watch the dailies: the film he saw emerging in the screening room was another of Joe Pasternak’s airy delights, with nary a hint of the torment on the set. Although Judy was indeed too heavy, she seemed fine otherwise, in good voice and good spirits. “How dare this look like a happy picture!” Walters would find himself saying, all but shaking his fist at the screen.

At least Walters knew that his misery would cease when the lights were doused and the sets were struck. Judy did not have that comfort. Drinking too much at the traditional end-of-the-picture party, she threw herself into the lap of Saul Chaplin, one of the movie’s two music directors. “I’m a fat slob!” she cried, digging her head into his shoulder. “I’m so ugly and untalented. They’re going to find me out!”

The cheers that had gone up when shooting ended in the spring of 1950, long past schedule, changed to groans a few weeks later, when Metro decided that the film demanded a dramatic concluding number. Judy, who had gone to the seaside resort of Carmel for a long rest, would have to be called back. It was left to Walters to break the bad news to the star herself, who surprised him with her cheerful, even enthusiastic agreement. She set only one condition: the number would have to be “Get Happy,” a song from a 1930 Broadway revue, music by Harold Arlen, words by Ted Koehler, that she had always wanted to
sing. This was a demand Metro could gladly accept, and Judy canceled her vacation to return to Culver City.

In a Hollywood musical, even a three-minute segment, which is all “Get Happy” was, could call for months of preparation. The Pasternak crew did not have that luxury. Saul Chaplin quickly wrote an arrangement, Walters himself did the staging—Nick Castle, who had choreographed all the other songs, had decamped for another project—and teams of set designers, electricians, costumers and cameramen hurried to make sure everything would be in order for the first day of shooting. As was so often the case, Judy, the quickest of quick studies, breezed through the prerecording, not even requiring a rehearsal. As was also so often the case, however, she fell apart at the climactic moment—the first time she was called before the cameras. She was, in fact, so drugged she could scarcely stand, let along nimbly dance her way through a circle of eight dinner-jacketed chorus boys.

“Put her up there!” a furious Pasternak ordered anyway. “Shoot the number. I want everybody to see what’s happened to her.”

“Joe, you can’t do that,” Jennings pleaded. “You just can’t do it. You’ll hate yourself if you do.” Pasternak reluctantly conceded, but Jennings then had to calm an equally furious Judy, who, unaware of her hapless state, also wanted to go ahead, retreating only when Jennings invoked technical problems that could not be corrected until morning. “I’ll be on the set and ready at nine o’clock in the morning,” she angrily declared, “and you’d better be ready to shoot!”

If she could get at least one great song across, Judy had told Vincente, she would be satisfied with
Summer Stock
, which she quite rightly considered an amiable trifle, beneath the abilities of everybody involved. “Get Happy,” she hoped, would be the number that made the whole effort worthwhile, and to everyone’s astonishment, she showed up early the following morning to start it, just as she had promised.

Unable to lose much weight during the many months Metro had been screaming at her, she had watched the pounds melt away in Carmel, where there was no one to harass her. The Judy who strode onstage that morning in late spring was therefore not the same Judy who had stood there a few weeks earlier. Slim and supple, she had been taken out of overalls and matronly dresses and put into a costume that
would have been previously impossible: a tight-fitting man’s dinner jacket over a still tighter leotard. She wanted to show off the legs that one besotted literary critic compared to a couplet by AAlexander Pope—“beautifully and smoothly turned.” Topping off her new wardrobe was a hat, a black fedora, which she tipped provocatively—insouciantly—over her right eye. She looked so strikingly different from the chubby Judy who was seen in the rest of the movie that many people later assumed that “Get Happy” was unused footage from a previous production.

When Judy, rakishly exuberant, concluded, “Get Happy” was everything that she had wished, or could have wished. The very definition of a showstopper, it was the perfect ending for
Summer Stock
, the best part of the picture by far. It was also the perfect ending for Judy’s career at M-G-M—the last number she was ever to do for the studio of the stars.

At the conclusion of
Summer Stock
, it was clear, both to Judy’s doctors in Boston and to her hard-nosed bosses in Culver City, that Peter Bent Brigham had not been able to correct what Dore Schary uncharitably
called her “catalogue of ills.” To effect a permanent cure, as well as to protect one of its most important assets, Metro now did what it probably should have done seven years earlier, when Karl Menninger had first made the recommendation: it volunteered to give her a year off at full salary, and to pay all of her medical bills too. There was only one catch to that generous proposal: she would have to undergo a strict regimen of treatment, presumably at Menninger’s or some similar clinic.

An offer that might have been accepted in 1943, however, when it came from a man she believed she could trust, was coldly rejected in 1950, when it came from Schary, a man she had reason to distrust. Indeed, Judy may well have suspected that, once inside a psychiatric clinic, she would not be let out—a justifiable fear given the fact that her own mother had looked into the possibility of having her forcibly committed, traveling all the way to Topeka to make inquiries of Menninger himself. Now, when Metro made the suggestion, Judy was indignant. “I’m not crazy,” she told Schary, who promptly washed his hands of her.

When a relationship is over, it is over, and it is futile to try to prolong it. Irritating habits that were ignored, or regarded as charming eccentricities, during the good days suddenly become incitements to scorn and fury, sparks for harsh words and angry actions. In such a charged atmosphere, even a minor infraction can become a casus belli. And that was where Judy and M-G-M stood with each other in the uneasy spring of 1950. Their romance had long since ended, and though neither was yet willing to acknowledge it, a breakup was inevitable. All that was lacking was an excuse, and that came soon enough.

After she finished “Get Happy,” Judy returned to Carmel, where she planned several weeks of rest and relaxation. Her doctor recommended a vacation of at least eight months, and Metro, which had no immediate plans for her, seemed in no hurry to put her back to work. Scarcely had she become comfortable in her picturesque retreat, however, than she received a phone call from the studio. Eight days into rehearsals for Arthur Freed’s
Royal Wedding
, June Allyson had announced that she was pregnant—she would have to drop out. Was Judy well enough to take her place? In what she was later to term “one of the really classic mistakes”
of her life, Judy said yes, and on May 23 she was back in Culver City, rushing to rehearsals and preparing to do another picture with her old friends Chuck Walters and Fred Astaire.

This time her arrival was not met with universal joy. Like a veteran still limping from his battle wounds, Walters begged to be relieved: his health, he said, could not stand the strain of directing another movie with Judy. “I’ve got an ulcer,” he cried to Freed. “I’m a wreck! Not two in a row with Judy—I can’t.” Freed reluctantly released him and assigned the director’s job to a promising novice, twenty-six-year-old Stanley Donen, who until then had been chiefly known as Gene Kelly’s collaborator and assistant. But it was Judy, not Donen, who was on trial.

For the first week she passed every test, punctual to the minute. She was half an hour late on June 1, however, and later still on June 2, when she was called for eleven, but failed to arrive until midafternoon—two-fifteen. By the third week of June, the last week of rehearsals, her energy was clearly flagging, and, over Donen’s objections, she gained Freed’s approval to work half-days, a reasonable request given her famous ability to learn routines after only one or two run-throughs. She had, in fact, already mastered the picture’s complicated score. “Oh,” exclaimed Saul Chaplin, “she sang the songs so brilliantly!”