Judy Garland on Judy Garland (23 page)

This interview was conducted on the set of
The Clock,
Judy's first straight dramatic role. She and costar Robert Walker began work on production during the summer of 1944 and continued through the fall.

A delightful chat with your favorite—Miss Judy Garland …

It was time to interview that veteran of ten years in pictures and twenty years in show business. Here was a trouper who should definitely have a story to tell. And she did!

Twenty-two-year-old Judy Garland was sitting in her pretty portable dressing room on the set. The decor is aqua and rose. Choo-Choo, Judy's pet miniature poodle, was happily settled in her lap when we arrived. She was between scenes of
The Clock,
her new picture at Metro.

Judy was very much the picture of “all's right with the world.” And it very definitely is—with Judy's world. She is playing her first straight dramatic role. She's in love with the script written by the poet and novelist, Robert Nathan. She's going to move back home with her family and that's the best part of it all.

It started, Judy's return to the home hearth, when she had the flu. It was shortly before the start of
The Clock.
Judy's flu made her downright miserable. Mrs. Garland took her straight home. Sister Jimmie was home with an impacted wisdom tooth. Judy and Jimmie were tucked into twin
beds, and Mrs. Garland babied them and nursed them back to health, just as she used to do when all of her girls were at home. Judy loved it.

“I really haven't been happy living alone,” Judy confessed, her brown eyes wide, earnest, thoughtful. “The last few months I've felt restless—kind of lost. Then the flu came along and the answer to all my problems. I wanted to be home again. Mother recently found a house large enough for us all. You see, there's Mother, my grandmother, my sister Jimmie and my little niece, Judy. I guess I'm used to family life. It isn't much fun coming home after a long working day, to an empty house. Now it isn't going to be that way anymore. I'm going to be part of the family again.

“When I moved from my big home in Bel Air” (Judy's and Dave Rose's), Judy continued, “I took a tiny apartment. I didn't like to stay alone at night, and there was no room for a maid. Mother's place then was too small, so I was house hunting again. I moved into Mary Martin's house in Westwood. Mary was in New York for
One Touch of Venus
and she decided to sell her house. There was another moving day to experience.

“A doctor acquaintance went into the Navy, and I leased his house for six months. Then Mother found her perfectly wonderful house, and I have been wanting to move in with her—longer than I
^-
had realized. It was the most wonderful thing to go home—and be home again.”

That talk about Judy being ill and thin and unhappy seemed grossly exaggerated. True, Judy is slim, happily so!

“I feel wonderful. I never felt better. I just lost my baby fat,” she smiled. “Everyone began saying, ‘Judy, how are you?' with anxious voices. I'd say, ‘I am feeling wonderful.' Then aware of their concern, I found myself actually wondering, ‘How am I?' I would like everyone to know that I am healthy and happy.

“Happy and quite concerned,” Judy added. “This is my first straight dramatic role. No singing. And while I am terribly thrilled, I am also a little nervous about it. What if the audiences keep waiting for me to sing? I told Bob Walker perhaps the picture should be retitled “Without a Song.” Then people will know what they are getting.

“This isn't a stark dramatic role, but it is a wonderful story. The story of a boy and a girl who meet under ‘The Clock' at the Pennsylvania station in New York. He has a forty-eight-hour furlough, and they live a lifetime while the clock ticks off the forty-eight hours.

“It is a story of a twenty-year-old girl. I rather smile when I think of some of the parts I've wanted to play. I realize now that they wouldn't have been right for me. It was the same when I was fourteen and Roger Edens, my arranger, arranged a song ‘Drums in My Heart' for Ethel Merman. I was wild to sing it.

“‘You're too young, Judy,' he said. ‘That song is for a woman, not a girl.'

“I was so enthused about it. I wanted to sing it so much. Roger said, ‘Look, I'll write you a special song all of your own. If you don't like it better than the Merman number, you can sing “Drums in My Heart.”' I came back from lunch and Mr. Edens had ‘Dear Mr. Gable.' Of course, that song gave me my great opportunity on the screen. I have learned the advisability of waiting for the right thing to come along.”

Judy paused. The quietness of the huge soundstage permeated the chintz walls of the dressing room. “Isn't it quiet?” Judy remarked. “No yelling, no screaming. I have always made musicals. You could always hear the noise all over the lot from my sets. The stages would be jumping with a playback going, Mickey pounding a piano, people dancing—rehearsing numbers in corners, a big boom overhead picking up the sound. Now [it is] just Bob and I alone in so many scenes. I couldn't get used to it at first. It didn't seem like we were working without the buzz of activity. Now I rather like it. It gives me a chance to write and work on my poetry.”

Judy has already sold an article to a national magazine. And she has a book of poetry in print. No, she will not release it for publication. Judy is afraid it isn't good enough. Her theory being that it might be printed because Judy Garland wrote it, even if it was not good. If it was good no one would believe that she actually wrote it.

“I don't want to only play dramatic roles,” Judy remarked—giving Choo-Choo a playful roll over and an affectionate pat. “I love musicals and I am thrilled beyond words at the prospect of my next picture,
The Belle of New York
opposite Fred Astaire. Imagine dancing with Fred Astaire!” Judy's eyes reflected admiring anticipation.
*

“It will be good to get into costumes again.” Judy ruefully observed the trim little navy blue suit and the soft white blouse that she wore. “It is pretty, I admit,” she said, “and in the picture the girl wears it from the time she meets the boy—until dinnertime. That is perhaps six hours in her life—but in mine, two months. I've been wearing it for weeks!”

Clothes? Judy loves clothes and she wears smart clothes off the screen. “Now that I am so much thinner, I love clothes.” She smiled. Judy was referring back to her adolescence—when she first became a star. “Everyone was so certain that I would be pudgy and fat.” Judy laughed. “I have always loved chocolate and chocolate cake and peanut butter fudge. And I was always being warned that I must not eat the things I liked. I was the ugly duckling,” Judy laughed.

But today, the slender pretty Judy at twenty-two has no diet worries. The baby fat has disappeared. Judy eats as she pleases. Which means chocolate.

“For my birthday I had a chocolate roll birthday cake. It happens to be my favorite. Today I received an entire carton of chocolate bars. Some soldiers on the studio lot on a visit discovered how much I like chocolate. They took turns daily going to the camp P.X. and finally collected this entire carton. Wasn't that wonderful of them?” Judy's nose wrinkled the way it does when she smiles and she's so very, very pleased.

“Radio is for me,” Judy remarked. “I am given chances on the air—that I am never given on the screen. I played opposite Walter Pidgeon in
A Star is Born
and there was
Morning Glory
opposite Adolphe Menjou. People actually called up at home asking, ‘Is that really Judy?'”

Judy's hair is now its natural shade of dark brown. “I lightened it to red when I made
The Wizard of Oz
… It seems years back,” Judy remarked. “I hope to keep it its natural shade now. I like things natural, as they are, not merely what they seem to be. I admit I am a little on the old-fashioned side. The home type I suspect.”

That's what Judy is to the boys in the service. “You're just like the girl next door at home,” they write. “Thank God, you haven't gone glamorous.”

Judy is hoping that the boys will like her latest pinup picture. It is a snapshot taken with a tiny brownie camera on her vacation at Del Monte.
Judy in a pair of shorts is standing by some rocks. Typically a picture the girl next door would take on her summer vacation.

Betty Jane Graham snapped the picture. And therein lies a story. Betty Jane is one of Judy's closest friends. They met when they were both small children and were auditioning for a picture at Universal. Judy thought Betty Jane would get the coveted part. Betty Jane resented Judy's certain assurance in winning the role. Alas, neither won. It was given to Cora Sue Collins. Instead of remaining bitter rivals, Judy and Betty Jane consoled each other's disappointment and became the fastest of friends.

A year ago Betty Jane married, and for months she followed her young soldier-husband from camp to camp. Recently she received word that he was killed in action on his second mission over Burma. Judy took Betty Jane with her to Del Monte. Now she is sponsoring Betty Jane's career at Metro.

“Yes, it is wonderful to be home and with the whole family again,” Judy said. “Wonderful until the day when I can have a home and children of my own.”

Then—she went on the set for her next scene in
The Clock.

Thank you, Judy, for such a heart-to-heart chat. You've answered everything that all of your thousands of fans have wanted to hear for a very long time!

*
With a score by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II,
The Belle of New York
was first set for production in 1943. Script revisions and rewrites continued over the next four years, and composers Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer did their own take on the score, but the film never materialized during Judy's tenure at M-G-M.
Belle
was finally produced in 1951 with Astaire alongside Vera-Ellen.

Judy's budding love affair with Vincente Minnelli began when the two worked together on
Meet Me in St. Louis,
and blossomed once Minnelli replaced director Fred Zinnemann on
The Clock,
which wrapped on November 21, 1944. Three days later, the new couple boarded a train bound for the New York premiere of
St. Louis
and announced their engagement soon after.

This two-part feature for
Photoplay
comes from the pen of the publication's best-known female writer. In her time, Adela Rogers St. Johns was something of a Barbara Walters figure in the media because of her aggressive approach to journalism. Her own alleged intimate affairs with several in the industry led to her becoming known as the “Mother Confessor of Hollywood.”

The first time I ever saw Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli together was in the cold gray dawn on a station platform in Pasadena.

I had gone out to meet a dear friend who was coming three thousand miles, but even the glow of welcome couldn't warm the wind that blew down from California's snow-capped peaks. Since misery loves company, I was glad to find a lot of other people waiting for the train and to discover that they were all there because Judy Garland was coming back from a trip to New York, and that Vincente Minnelli was on the same train.

There had been vague rumors that a romance was brewing between Judy and the young director who had piloted her
Meet Me in St. Louis
to such a triumphant success. But nobody seemed to be very sure about it because Judy had taken her separation and divorce from David Rose pretty seriously.

Personally, I was hopeful about it. I had never met Mr. Minnelli, but I felt that I knew him very well. Last summer when my youngest son worked as a messenger boy at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, I learned Vincente was the idol of the messenger boys. If a messenger couldn't be found, he was out on the
[Ziegfeld
]
Follies
set watching Mr. Minnelli's picturesque methods of getting all the girls into their bubbles at the same time, or listening to his vivid and humorous vocabulary and admiring his directorial genius.

I am inclined to take the clear-eyed verdict of youth seriously myself, so I already felt a keen interest in and admiration for Mr. Minnelli.

Presently the Super Chief steamed proudly in and Judy and Vincente Minnelli got off the train and, all of a sudden, I was quite warm and happy. My friend touched me on the shoulder and I greeted her with the slightly inane remark, “But they're in love, I'm sure they are. Isn't that splendid?”

The reason I thought it was splendid was because, like everybody else, I adore Judy and to date her romances hadn't been lucky. So I decided, in spite of its being just before Christmas, to go and see Judy and ask her about it. Actually it was the day before Christmas when I waited for her in her dressing rooms, a suite with a charming little drawing room and a big room which, upon this occasion, was completely filled with packages and when Judy came in she was completely loaded with packages, too.