Judy Garland on Judy Garland (10 page)

Billie Burke is Glinda, the Good, so beautiful you'll gasp! She comes into all the scenes in a big, glittery pink bubble, and it's just breathless! Don't ask me how it's done. I still don't know. I really half believe in magic after Oz! All of the scenes in Oz are in Technicolor, you know—such colors as even rainbows never dreamed of! The only scenes in black and white are the scenes on the Kansas farm. I can only say that Dorothy herself never felt so amazed when she walked through the streets of the wonderful Emerald City as I did. Honestly, it is an Emerald City, all shining green, every inch of it—houses, streets, everything, all studded with emeralds as big as boulders. And all the people are dressed in shining green, too, with white, white faces and real patent leather for hair.

Then there is the deadly Poppy Field—the most beautiful thing I've ever imagined. It covers a whole acre and a half, and there are forty thousand pastel poppies in it. Twenty men worked for a week, night and day, sticking the stems of the flowers into the ground.

When I met the Winged Monkeys—well, there was nothing make-believe about that, believe me! There I was in the Enchanted Forest with smoke that looked like real fog clinging to the ground and big black rocks, and the Winged Monkeys, eight of them, swooped down and carried me off. Of course, they were really midgets with condor wings, and we were really on wires, but it seemed very real. And just wait until you see the Talking, or Fighting, Trees, and then tell me how
you'd
like to take an apple off one of them, or try to, only to have the thing slap you! And then there are
the Winkies—all men six feet high in their stocking feet and built up two inches more—and the China people, and the Horse of Another Color. He was really funny—I mean,
they
were really funny, because we used several horses, and each one was vegetable-dyed a different color, one purple, one orange, one blue, and so on. And they used to shy at each other as if to say, “Even a horse knows there is no such thing as a purple horse!” And oh, there are all kinds of strange birds and things, several hundred birds of different species. One of them was the only trained raven in existence, Jim the Crow, who would get temperamental and go off on a “flight.” The only way we could get him back was to turn off all the lights on the sound stage and just sit quietly, waiting.

I finally find the Wizard, of course. And who is the Wizard but Mr. Frank Morgan! There has never been anyone like him. He has such a huge voice, and at first we're all so frightened of him and then we discover that
he
is a hoax and that he is frightened of
us!

I think this is about all I have room to tell you. It's really all I should tell you because, as I said, I want you all to come to Oz with me, and you'll see such sights as you never saw before!

*
Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz
, published in 1939, was actually the thirty-third Oz book. Baum completed fourteen titles before his death in 1919, and the series continued under the pen of Ruth Plumly Thompson, who published a new Oz book each year between 1921 and 1939.

She had the top-selling hit song of 1939 with “Over the Rainbow,” was invited to place her hand and footprints in the cement at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and was presented with a special Oscar for Outstanding Performance by a Juvenile Actress in
The Wizard of Oz.
She called it her “Munchkin Award,” but Judy entered the 1940s a mammoth star. In fact, she was a top-ten box office name in 1940, and would maintain such status for most of the decade.

Demand for all things Judy made her a favorite of the “fannies.” The movie fan magazines couldn't get enough of her, and hardly a month went by without Judy being featured, interviewed, or appearing in a gossip column. Up until this point, her supposed teen crushes (most were mere publicity dates) had included Freddie Bartholomew, Jackie Cooper, and, of course, Mickey Rooney. But with this new decade came Judy's inevitable evolution from girlhood to young womanhood. She became interested in older, more sophisticated men, and the teenage puppy loves detailed in this piece for
Modern Screen
gave way to more serious romances.

Interviewed around the time of her romance with 29-year-old bandleader Artie Shaw, Judy details her perfect mate and dreams of marriage. Their love affair was short-lived, though, and turned out to be terribly one-sided. Judy was dazed and devastated to read in the newspapers of Shaw's elopement with Lana Turner in February 1940.

Judy Garland plucked the knife from its place beside her salad and waved it dangerously. Her pert nose quivered. Her dark eyes sparked.

“Honestly, I don't know why, but all the gossip writers keep painting me as if I'm boy crazy! Maybe it's because of the songs I sing. Yes, it must be. Those songs give the wrong impression. But gee, I'm not that way at all!”

“Take the stories about Mickey Rooney and myself. I'll give it to you straight. The columnists keep saying I'm in love with Mickey. It upsets me so; really it does. Because I'm not at all in love with him. Not a single bit. Oh sure, we're swell friends, very good friends. Mickey is so full of fun and I enjoy working with him. I'm looking forward to our next picture,
Strike Up the Band.
But outside of pictures, why, I rarely even see him! Neither one of us cares for the other—except as pals. And that's the truth!”

Judy Garland puts the knife down, and absently contemplated her salad. When she looked up, she gulped, glanced around to see if anyone at the crowded tables in the M-G-M commissary had overheard her outburst, and then looked at me with her shy smile.

“Gee, you understand, don't you? The papers have it wrong. I don't go mooning over some new fellow every other day. It's all so unfair. Why, right now I haven't got a special boyfriend. And I don't even go out much.

“Last night, for example, I was home reading that marvelous book, [A
Treasury of Art Masterpieces]
by [Thomas] Craven. Then, this morning—why—did you see this morning's paper? Someone reported that last night I was at Victor Hugo's holding hands under the table with some person I don't even know! It's very confusing, and I hope everyone doesn't believe all those things.

“The last time I went on a date was over a week ago. A concert violinist named Jimmy took me to see Katharine Cornell in
No Time for Comedy.
I won't be going out again until the Ballet Russe comes to town. I have a date for that. I'm dying to see the Ballet Russe. Have you seen it? I can't wait!”

Judy unclasped her light fur jacket and allowed it to fall back over her chair. She went at the cottage cheese in her salad. It was her favorite and it seemed to mellow her.

“I'm really not very enthused about going out places,” she exclaimed. “Why should I be, when I live in such a marvelous home? Sometimes I see
different boys, maybe twice a week, but they come over to the house. We sit in my music room and listen to symphony records. Now that's real fun!

“Most of my friends are nonprofessionals. That is, they're not movie people. After all, I spent nine years in vaudeville, and I met the finest people that ever lived. They're still my best friends.”

Judy's red hair crept out from under her turban. She violently put her hair in its place.

“Do you really want to know how silly those rumors about me are?” she inquired, dead earnest. “I'll tell you. First the rumors said I was in love with Leonard Seuss, a musician. Now feature that. I've known Leonard for ten years! He's a sort of brother to me, a friend of the family. He's only seventeen, and supports his mother. Sometimes he works in my pictures.

“Then the rumors said I was in love with Peter Hayes, whose mother manages the Grace Hayes Lodge. Well, he's really a nice person. But I only went out with him three times in my life, and we were only pals.

“That's the way it is with everyone. When I make a new acquaintance or send someone I admire a note or flowers, I am madly in love. Imagine what people, reading about those different men and myself, must think. Boy-crazy Judy, they must say. And I'm not at all like that!”

Judy's intensity left her breathless. She sat back against her fur jacket and took a deep breath. She was a young girl being very and delightfully sincere.

Suddenly Judy Garland's eyes widened, and she leaned forward with a secret. “But one day I
am
going to fall in love—and it won't be a rumor.”

Her voice quickened. “The man I'm going to marry is going to be honest. Yes he is. He's going to be a colorful and exciting man. I want him to have strong, sincere opinions, even if they're wrong. And as for looks, gosh, how a man looks doesn't matter at all with me!

“I've always vaguely dreamed of getting married at twenty-four. That age sounds just right, doesn't it? If I'm still good enough to be in the movies, I wouldn't want to retire when I'm married. But I wouldn't want a burdensome contract, either. My big dream is to have a husband, a big family, and do maybe one picture a year. That sounds ideal. Too ideal, I'm afraid. Maybe it's only a fairytale dream. I suppose things never happen like that, do they? But I pray this does.”

And this certainly will. For, while Judy is only [seventeen], and much will happen to her as it does in all young lives, she will always and eternally be the same Judy—quick of enthusiasm, but sound of judgment and desire. She possesses an amazing sense of true values for one so young, and her seriousness and honesty are tempered by the most precious gift of all—laughter.

But Judy, at no one's expense, will always have her way and her desires, because she will always be Judy.

She hasn't changed a bit since she was Frances Ethel Gumm of Grand Rapids. Not even when, some seven years ago, she played on a vaudeville bill with George Jessel, and he said, “You can't get any place with a name like that—Gumm. Why, it sounds too much like crumb, bum, or dumb. I'll christen you with a new name. I'll name you after my best friend, the drama critic, Robert Garland.” Even when she came to Hollywood five long years ago, her feet were on the ground. Even when she tried to sing, and they said she was too young, and she sang anyway—and so well that Mr. Louis B. Mayer himself was dragged in to hear her and to sign her.

Today, with applause loud in her ears after
Babes in Arms
and
The Wizard of Oz,
with critics and polls falling all over themselves to vote her among the best ten of the past year, Judy still manages to retain the old values. My contention is that, if the past five years haven't changed her, nothing ever will. She may be the great Judy Garland to the world but, in her heart, she's still plain Frances Gumm, who loves dill pickles, Debussy, Bette Davis, Italian operas and new, silly charms for her bracelets.

It is a sign of sophistication among the young to consider mother love naïve and blasé. Well, Judy Garland isn't sophisticated. There's only one way to put it—she's nuts about her mother.

“I just want everyone to know this,” she insisted. “I've the most marvelous mother that ever lived. She's got such a regular sense of humor. She's so different from other movie mothers. She's not at all bossy. She never comes on the sets and tells me what to do. When I ask her advice, she gladly gives it, though she prefers that I do things on my own. And do you know, on certain matters, she even asks my opinion. Isn't that swell?

“She never used to lug me around to casting offices, either, like some stage mothers did. The first casting office I ever saw was when I came to
Hollywood at the age of eleven. And she's considerate. I'll never forget my last birthday. I woke up early in the morning, and there was a string tied to the bed. Beneath it was a note from Mother reading, ‘Follow this string, Judy, to your present.' I followed it through all the rooms in the house, to all sorts of little gifts, then down through the living-room and through the door and into the street, where the string was tied to the bumper of a brand new wine-colored coupe. It was something I'd always wanted. I almost fainted!”

Next to mother, and waiving other members of her family like sister Suzanne “who I talk to for hours and hours,” Judy's favorite is chubby Oscar Levant, whom you all know as the music expert on the radio program
Information, Please!
He's always been a sort of long-distance godfather to Judy.

“Oscar Levant is one of my truly best friends,” Judy confided to me. “In fact, he's now married to another friend of mine, June Gale. Oscar's so intelligent. He's brilliant, absolutely. In the days when I was struggling, and when I was often blue, each week he would write me two and three letters, with good common sense in them. They would inspire me. I still have all his letters, tied with a ribbon.” To this day, they still correspond.