Judy Garland on Judy Garland (21 page)

I think, summing it all up, that my worst mistake
_;
when young, was in being too tense about everything, too emotional, too “Oh-This-Is-The-End!”

I laugh, now
_;
when I remember how I went on about some of my adolescent romances: Each was the Great Love, of course, desperate and dark. One boy in particular. I'll call him James because that was not his name. Well, I just thought that James and I, oh, my! One evening we had a date. James did not appear. The next morning, at breakfast, I said to my mother, “Strange, James didn't show up last night. Guess he was busy.”
“I'll say he was,” said mother—and handed me the morning paper—James had eloped with another girl!
*

Well, of course I just dramatized myself all over the place about that. I had a broadcast to do that night and I drooped over the microphone like a wilting lily. Dave called for me after the show. We were Just Friends, Dave and I, or so I thought. I'd always tell him all my troubles and problems with my various crushes. I'd call him at any time of day or night to ask his advice about the most personal matters. He smiled when, on this occasion, he beheld my woebegone expression, took me out and bought me the most sensational piece of apple pie á la mode. Almost at once, I recuperated. I was rather disgusted with myself when I realized that nothing had ever happened to me that a good piece of apple pie couldn't cure!

And right then and there, I learned to correct another mistake, or mistaken idea of mine—that love, in order to be love; must be feverish and fatal and uncomfortable and wildly emotional. If I had not corrected that mistake—well, I might have mistaken the face of love, real love; when I saw it.

*
By this time, Judy was well established in several serious habits that would haunt her for the rest of her life. She was only four feet eleven inches inches tall, and M-G-M expected her to maintain a camera-slim ninety-five pounds. Studio doctors prescribed their “miracle drug” of choice, Benzedrine, to assist Judy in keeping her energy up and weight down. She was then given barbiturates to counteract the “pep” and induce sleep.

*
An early draft (dated 8/20/42) of this “as told to” Gladys Hall piece for
Silver Screen
confirms that James was, of course, none other than Artie Shaw.

On December 7, 1941, Judy Garland and husband, David Rose, were at Fort Ord, near Monterey, California, for a live broadcast of the
Chase and Sanborn Hour
when news arrived of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The broadcast went on as scheduled, but with frequent interruptions for special news bulletins.

Answering the War Department's call to help boost morale in army camps around the country, Judy took her place as one of the first entertainers to sing for troops during World War II. Just weeks after Pearl Harbor, she and Rose left on a USO tour of the Midwest. Rose served as her accompanist during the demanding month of singing a program of twelve songs for three or four shows a day. By the time the travelers reached Camp Wolters in Mineral Wells, Texas, their fifth and final stop, Judy collapsed with a severe case of strep throat.

Back home in Los Angeles, Judy remained patriotic and continued to assist in the war effort by entertaining on numerous radio shows and at the Hollywood Canteen. She went back out on her own army camp circuit during the summer of 1943 and was soon invited by the Hollywood Victory Committee to join its Hollywood Bond Cavalcade, a sixteen-city tour that left Washington, DC, on September 8. The all-star troupe included Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, James Cagney, Kathryn Grayson, Betty Hutton, Harpo Marx, and Mickey Rooney. In three weeks they traveled more than ten thousand miles, sang for more than seven million people, and raised $1,709,586,819 in war bonds as part of the Third War Loan drive.

It is likely that this hypothetical diary of sorts, published in
Photoplay,
dates to Judy's second USO camp tour in July and early August of 1943. Here she told the story of an all-too-familiar singer-actress she called “Joan.” The referenced “Earl” was composer/lyricist Earl Brent, her accompanist that summer.

You may very likely guess who the girl in this story is—and you may be right. But more important than her identity is the understanding that came to her heart.

This is a true story about a real girl, whom I choose not to identify. So I shall just put down her story for you. Perhaps, though, you will recognize her …

“Try it again, Joan,” Earl said, “and this time don't look gloomier than the song itself. Do you want the soldiers to commit mass suicide after hearing it?”

He played the introduction again to “Don't Get Around Much Anymore.” Joan, who'd been stalking the hotel room rug as if it were a jungle trail, stopped beside the piano and began singing again. It was the twelfth popular song she had memorized in two days, closeted here in this strange New York hotel room—because, as Earl had pointed out, maybe the soldiers would ask for songs that she hadn't sung in her pictures.

Across the room she could see her mother sitting, knitting busily, but with a worried expression on her face—as worried as that of her pianist as he bent frowning over the keyboard.

She knew it was ridiculous to them that she felt so hopelessly depressed—but she'd been in this mood for weeks now. It had continued all the way across the continent from Hollywood, and it had lasted right through these packed two days of song rehearsing.

While she sang, she argued with herself about it. Why should she feel lost and hopelessly sad? At twenty-one, she was a famous movie star who thoroughly enjoyed making musical pictures. She was young, successful, surrounded by friends … and yet she felt as if life had no aim for her, that there was no one person who needed her and whom she needed. She was deeply lonely … and, though she knew loneliness was a disease, striking millions of other women in America right now, company didn't ease her misery. She certainly had—what would you call it?—the wartime blues.

The worst of it was, she couldn't shake them. They were still with her the next morning at eleven, when she mounted the rough wooden steps to a
platform—in front of a murmuring, whistling, rustling mob of ten thousand uniformed men.

Earl sat at the piano, waiting for her. The heat was so oppressive that her powder had melted off her face on the way from her impromptu board dressing room, and now as she climbed the steps she shook out again the damp wrinkles of her gray jersey dress—a sixty-mile automobile ride in a temperature of 100 hadn't improved its lines.

Then she was standing there looking down at the suddenly quiet sea of faces above the half-mile mass of khaki—and she pushed her depression away by sheer force. Smiling, she stepped up to the microphone.

“I didn't come here to tell you how to fight the war,” she said, and her light voice went out clearly into the great silence of the men. “All I know is that you
will
fight the war, and you will win it—and I and a hundred and thirty million other people will be forever indebted to you. So I came to give you a down payment on our indebtedness, with a piano and some songs. What would you like to hear?” A few hardy souls yelled song titles toward her, and then with a roar like the ocean surf, they were all shouting together.

Out of the turbulence she picked the five songs they called the most loudly for—and she was to sing those same five songs for thousands of other boys in a dozen other camps in the next crowded three weeks, for they were the favorite songs of Uncle Sam's Army. Three of them were from her pictures, and she sang them easily: “You Made Me Love You,” “For Me and My Gal” and “Over the Rainbow.” The other two she had learned only yesterday, in that hotel room—“Don't Get Around Much Anymore” and “Let's Get Lost.”

After she had sung those five, she sang seven more—twelve altogether. She'd borrowed Earl's handkerchief after the second song and frankly mopped off her face with it, and she continued to mop while she sang in the suffocating heat.

When she finally came down the stairs again, hundreds of soldiers surged around her, waving pencils and autograph books, grabbing at the pink bows in her hair—snatching them off, shredding them, clutching at the tiny pieces for souvenirs. She stood there, dripping perspiration,
signing and signing again for a good half hour … and then she was back in the car with Earl and her mother, driving miles across the enormous encampment to another platform, with another ten thousand soldiers already waiting to hear her songs.

She was to sing five times that day, to five gigantic, eager impatient audiences … singing good-bye to them, really, for this was an embarkation point, this camp, and so were all of the others scheduled for her tour.

But even though she shoved back that feeling of lost sadness while she sang—it was still there, waiting to take possession of her again the minute she was alone. The world seemed
so
overpoweringly sad—10,000 sadnesses after 10,000 sadnesses. And what could you do about it really. Don't kid yourself, Joan. You just aren't in this thing and you know it.

Technically for Joan, the tour went on. Five times a day she sang to enormous sprawling soldier audiences traveling in blisteringly hot trains from one camp to another. She learned that paratroopers always yell from emotional pressure as they leap from a plane—hoarse shouts of “Geronimo!” as they drop into space. She learned that soldiers always sing with unnatural loudness as they march down to their overseas boats—mainly the songs of the last war, like “Over There,” and “I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad),” and “K-K-K-Katy!”

And she kept traveling. Once she was in three different states in one day, singing. Sometimes she lived right on the embarkation post with the soldiers—in old-fashioned little board houses, with ancient wind-it-yourself phonographs stocked with aged records. Night and day sentries marched in circles around her twenty-four-hour home, gun on shoulder … “Protecting me from either the Jap soldiers—or the American soldiers!” Joan laughed to her mother. “I'm sure I don't know which!”

She was touched by some of the things that happened to her—like the special love song written to her by one soldier and sung to her on an officers' club balcony like a G. I. Romeo and Juliet scene. And the time she went into an enlisted men's club and found a sign saying, “Welcome, Joan!” written in delicate paper flowers that a tough battalion had spent two weeks making by hand. And the time she ran into Clarence Stroud, now an Army pilot—whom she'd last seen eight years before in vaudeville.

There was another part of her camp activities—a part which was soon to play a vital role in Joan's life. At every camp she sang to an audience of patients in the recreation hall of the hospital provided by the Red Cross and with gentle “Gray Ladies,” as the boys call the Red Cross nurses, visited six or seven wards, going to each bedside and talking to each man.

It was Joe who provided the vital link. Joe was just a sheeted bundle on the nineteenth bed from the door when she first saw him from the threshold of the ward. She worked her way down to him, going from bed to bed, holding each patient's hand, looking at each boy's ever-present snapshot of his sweetheart or his wife, speaking to each one of his hometown. And then she was holding Joe's hand—a calloused young hand with short, work-stained nails. Joe's young face went with that hand; and it was topped by a wide white bandage that matched the white wrapping around one leg hoisted in the air on a pulley.

It was Joe's simplicity that got her. Mostly the boys were too engrossed with the aura of being visited by a movie star to talk much about themselves in these short visits. But Joe was different.

Searching for a way of opening the conversation, Joan commented on the snapshot of a pretty, dark girl in a sweater and skirt on his bedstand. “Is that your girl, Joe? Does she know you're in the hospital?”

“Naw,” he said in his Brooklyn voice. “But she won't care when she does know, 'cause she'll know I'll be well again—and I'm on'y in this war for her.”

“For her?” said Joan, surprised.

“To protec' her,” Joe explained, equally surprised that she didn't know that. “And my mother, too. We guys gotta fight so our women can be safe—but, gosh, you know that without me tellin' you.”

“Oh,” said Joan, and she sat down. Soon Joe was telling her all his plans—how he'd saved two thousand dollars while he worked as a riveter in a factory before the war and he'd signed over all his savings jointly to his girl and his mother —in case anything happened to him. How he'd reluctantly sold his adored car—“A real zooty car, with three searchlights and white skirts on the back fenders—printed with Ella's name,” he finished, sighing. And how he was sending home everything he made except six dollars a month, which was for beers and occasional movies.