Judy Garland on Judy Garland (29 page)

At a time when I've been gossip's victim and the target of a thousand lies, you people have stood by me. I won't ever forget that.

You've judged me not on the basis of headlines, rumor and innuendo but on my performances as an actress and entertainer.

Ever since the release of my last picture,
Summer Stock,
thousands of you have had the kindness to write me. You've congratulated me,
encouraged me, and pledged me your support. And for all this—let me repeat—I'm eternally grateful.

Inasmuch as it is impossible for me to reply individually to your more than 18,000 letters, I'm using this space in
Modern Screen
to answer those questions most frequently asked.

I have a responsibility to you friends. Rather than let you be misguided by the flood of nonsense printed about me by reporters and uninformed writers who know none of the facts, I intend to fulfill my responsibility by telling you moviegoers the truth.

I am not quitting motion pictures. Movies are my life's blood. I love making motion pictures and always have ever since I was a little girl.

I do not intend, however, to make any films for the next six months. I'm just going to relax, take things easy, and regain my peace of mind.

For a while I expected to go to Paris with my daughter, Liza, and my husband, Vincente Minnelli—but his studio has decided to film all of
An American in Paris
in Hollywood, and since he is directing that picture and plans shortly to direct the sequel to
Father of the Bride,
we all plan to remain in California.

I love to work, I love to sing, I love to act—I get restless when I don't—and it's entirely possible that I will do a few broadcasts with Bing Crosby or Bob Hope before six months are up.

My health is fine. As I write this, I've just returned from a vacation in Sun Valley and Lake Tahoe. I'm suntanned, I weigh 110 pounds, and my outlook on things is joyful and optimistic.

Many of you have written and asked what was wrong with me in the past.

The honest answer is that I suffered from a mild sort of inferiority complex. I used to work myself up into depressions, [and] thought no one really cared about me, no one outside my family, that is.

Why I should have ever gotten depressed, I certainly don't know. You people have proved to me that I've got thousands of friends the world over, that you care about my welfare and my career.

It's perfectly normal for people to have their ups and downs. I know that now, but a year or so ago, these depressions of mine used to worry me, and the more I worried about them, the lower I felt.

Anyway, all of that is gone and done with. The slate of the past is wiped clean. Insofar as I'm concerned, the world is good, golden and glorious. My best years and my best work lie ahead of me, and I'm going to give them everything I've got.

Many of you have asked if I realized how closely you followed my career and behavior. I certainly do, and that's why I want all of you to know, especially the youngsters, that I'm not in the slightest embittered about Hollywood and that I still think a motion picture career is one of the finest ambitions any girl can have.

It means hard work and it has its pitfalls but so has every other occupation.

If my daughter, Liza, wants to become an actress, I'll do everything to help her.

Of course, being a child actress and being raised on a studio lot is not the easiest adjustment a young girl can make. You don't go to baseball games or junior proms or sorority initiations, but every success has its sacrifices, and these are the ones a very young girl must make if she wants a career at a very early age.

The girl who finishes her schooling, however, and then wants to become an actress is facing a thrilling, rewarding career.

If I had to do it all over again, I would probably make the same choices and the same errors. These are part of living.

A lot of fanciful stories have depicted me as the victim of stark tragedy, high drama, and all sorts of mysterious Hollywood meanderings. All that is bunk.

Basically, I am still Judy Garland, a plain American girl from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, who's had a lot of good breaks, a few tough breaks, and who loves you with all her heart for your kindness in understanding that I am nothing more, nothing less.

Thank you again.

Judy Garland

Judy's first major print feature after the split with Metro came in the form of this “as told to” piece for
Cosmopolitan
in which she recapped her life story and, for the first time, made mention of a dependency on sleeping pills. She also addressed her highly publicized suicide attempt of the previous year, and announced career plans for the future.

“People will believe anything, good or bad, about movie stars. You get used to it, of course, but it can still shock you.”

All my life I have tried to do whatever was expected of me, and now sometimes I think that isn't very smart. Sooner or later something inside of you kicks. It has taken me a long time to find that out, because I am a born trouper. My father used to say, “It won't make any difference what Judy does for a living, she'll tear the house down getting there,” and he was right. I would have trouped in a shoe factory.

As it happened, I got into a business where trouping counts. One snowy Christmas Eve before I was three years old, I began singing and dancing on the stage in a little town in Minnesota. I poured my heart into five straight choruses of “Jingle Bells,” and I would have kept it up all night if Dad hadn't carried me off, kicking and yelling like an Indian. I don't know whether I actually remember that or whether I've heard people talk about it so much that it seems as if I remember, but I do know this: I took
one look at all those people, laughing and applauding, and I fell hopelessly in love with audiences. After twenty-five years, I still love them, and it has been a serious romance.

I wanted it that way. My mother is a strong-minded woman, but she was never a “stage mamma.” During those vaudeville years, my sisters and I, while standing in countless wings waiting for our cues, used to hear other mothers threatening their children, saying things like, “You go on out there or I'll break your head,” and it made us kind of sick. Nobody ever talked to me like that or forced me in any way. I drove myself—but it was my own doing.

Why I felt compelled to do it, I don't entirely know. It wasn't to forget my troubles—I've never been able to lose myself completely in my work the way some people can—but so much of the time acting was the only reliable thing I knew, the only place where I felt like a useful person, where people said, “Fine, you did a good job. Come again,” and everybody needs to hear those things.

When I was about fifteen, I went back to see Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where I was born. I found a gracious little town, full of trees and porches and people who know how to live in simple goodness. I think I would have liked to grow up there, carrying my schoolbooks in a strap and having a crush on the milkman's son. At least it made me feel good and somehow comforted to know that that was where I had my roots. That's the kind of roots I'm trying to provide for Liza, my little girl. While we were in New York last October, Liza wanted very much to go home for Halloween. She had her costume planned, and she'd been invited to a party where there would be popcorn and apples on a string. I let her go. Not just because we could afford it, not to spoil her, but because I felt it was important for her to have that memory to cling to.

My father, Frank Gumm, was a wonderful man with a fiery temper, a great sense of humor, and an untrained but beautiful voice. He met my mother, Ethel Milne, when he was singing in a Wisconsin theater where she was the pianist. They toured vaudeville together as “Jack and Virginia Lee, Sweet Southern Singers,” until their first baby was coming, and then Dad bought the movie theater in Grand Rapids, and they settled down in a two-story white frame house with a garden behind it.

By the time I came along, Susie was seven and Jimmie was five. My parents were hoping for a boy, and I understand they tried to wield a little prenatal influence by referring to me as Frank, but I don't think they were deeply disappointed when they had to revise it slightly to Frances. Contrary to what some people seem to think, I wasn't a tomboy. I had great vitality, but I never took it out in athletics, and to this day I hate exercise of that kind. I play tennis a little, but that's all, and we don't own a swimming pool.

I adored my father and he had a special kind of love for me. In the evening before he went to the theater, while I sat on his lap in a white flannelette nightgown, he used to sing “Danny Boy” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen.” He lived to know that I had signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but not long enough to see any of my pictures.

Being the daughters of show people, Sue and Jimmie were already a song-and-dance team for all community affairs, and I was full of infant fury at being left out. At Christmas, Mother and Dad did some of their old numbers, so the whole family went to the theater. The first two Christmases, I slept in a dressing room, but when the third one came, I was all eyes and ears. They told me to sit quietly on a box—they should have known better. I marched out in the middle of my sister's performance and launched into “Jingle Bells” at the top of my voice. After that, there were three Gumm Sisters in the act instead of two.

Nobody ever taught me what to do on a stage. I have never had a dancing lesson or a singing lesson in my life, and I still can't read music. In those days, that wasn't so unusual; vaudeville was full of people who taught themselves to dance and sing, made up their own routines, and even sewed their own costumes. You could either do it or you couldn't. It was as simple as that. But today it sometimes gives me the rocky feeling that I don't know what I'm doing. I'm never sure how I've done till I see the final pictures—and I do see them. Seeing your own movies along with an audience is the only satisfaction you get; it's the only way to tell whether you've “sent” just yourself or whether you've let the audience in on it.

In 1927, Dad sold the theater and bought another in Lancaster, a little town in California, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. We lived there for nine years, and I wasn't happy any of that time. It wasn't anybody's fault.
Life in those desert towns can be rough; the land is barren, red-brown and harsh, and the people come to be a lot like it. I started school there, and I should have made friends outside my family, but other children found me difficult, I imagine, though I didn't intend to be.

I was never fond of school, really. The only teacher I felt attracted to was Miss DuVal—I never knew her first name; I don't suppose I even thought she had one. She taught the kindergarten and she also managed all the school plays. She liked me, and thought I was talented. When she put on
Goldilocks and the Three Bears,
she gave me the lead, which impressed me because my hair was neither golden nor curly. Shortly thereafter the school board dismissed Miss DuVal—I still think it was because she had too much imagination!—and after that the leads in plays were handed out according to grades. You can imagine where that left me: in the third line of the chorus. Alas, people with high grades don't always make the best actresses.

At Halloween, our house was a brief center of attraction because we had an attic full of old stage costumes. Kids came around and let Mother sew them into some of our most cherished outfits, but they rarely gave me much of a chance to make friends. I wasn't very happy.

But we were away a lot, because by that time we had started to tour, and the work, as always, had meaning for me. Mother played the piano and chaperoned, while Dad stayed home and ran the theater. I think he and Mom were as happy as most couples, but she was part of an era that was hard on women. She wanted so desperately to be a person in her own right, and I can understand that. If I weren't in a business that has always accepted women as people, that would have been one of my battles, too. Mother
had
to succeed in whatever she undertook, and I don't think there's any denying that part of success is money. Once when we were engaged to play at a civic banquet in Los Angeles, it looked like our big chance. Mom dyed materials in the bathtub and stayed up nights making costumes on an old treadle sewing machine. We knocked ourselves out, and we knew they liked us, but the man paid us a total of a dollar and a half. Mom put her curly gray head down on her arms and wept.

As a family we were never poor, but as a vaudeville act we were frequently broke. There was always a manager who couldn't pay us, or a
downright cheat who wouldn't, but Mother never wrote home to Dad for money. Once, in Chicago, we found ourselves working for a mob of real gangsters, and when, after six weeks, Mother tried to collect what was owed us, they told her to shut up and stay healthy.

It was in Chicago, too, at the Oriental Theatre, that we were billed on the marquee as “The Glum Sisters.” We protested to the master of ceremonies, whose name was George Jessel, and he said bluntly that Gumm wasn't much better. “It rhymes with crumb and bum,” he said, “and in this business that isn't good. Why don't you change it?” He suggested we call ourselves Garland after a friend of his, Robert Garland, then the drama critic of the New York
World-Telegram
and now with the
Journal-American.
I doubt if we knew what the
World-Telegram
was, but drama critics were all right when they were on your side, and we adopted the name.

About the same time, I acquired “Judy” from a Hoagy Carmichael song. At first my family continued to call me Baby, my name since infancy, but I wouldn't answer until they said Judy, and in about three weeks they gave up. Inside of a year, people in Hollywood were even addressing my mother as Mrs. Garland.