Judy Garland on Judy Garland (30 page)

We went home to see Dad and then got a call for a season's work from a man we knew, named Bones Remer. He ran the Cal Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe. That's the place where the state line runs right through the middle of the dance floor. At that time, if you sat on one side of the dining room, you paid a sales tax; on the other side, you didn't. During our act, Jimmie and I would wave to each other from different states. We got a big bang out of it.

We had been lukewarm about going. I was glad to be with Dad, and Susie and Jimmie had discovered the opposite sex. But Bones always paid us, so we took the job.

It wasn't very eventful, and when fall came, we left, with Mom driving the old car, which was packed to the eaves. We had got about two miles down the mountain when Jimmie let out a yelp—she'd forgotten a big hatbox with all our headgear in it. We had to go back.

I ran into the dining room to get the box. Bones and some other men were in there, sitting around a table. Bones asked me to sing for his
friends. I told him my mother was waiting with the motor running, and anyhow, there weren't any musicians. One of the men stood up and said he could play a little piano. What would I like?

In my earnest way of trying to do what was requested of me, I said, “Well, I guess it's okay. Can you play ‘Dinah'?”

He grinned. “I can manage. I wrote it.” He was Harry Akst. I was flabbergasted, but I sang, and when I got back to the car, I caught a scolding for taking so long to get the hatbox.

I've heard about twenty versions of what happened next, some of them pretty wild. One story has it that M-G-M signed me without making a screen or sound test. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We went home to a house we'd taken in Los Angeles, and a few days later Lew Brown, the songwriter, who was also an executive at Columbia Pictures, called up and asked my mother to bring me to the studio. He'd been at Bones's table with Harry Akst. Of course we went, and I sang for some people there, but nobody was impressed. Lew Brown told an agent named Al Rosen about me, and Al towed me all over Southern California. I think I had an audition at every major studio, but everyone kept saying, “She isn't any age. She isn't a child wonder, and she isn't grown up.” Nobody had ever heard of
Junior Miss
or
[Meet] Corliss Archer
then. A teenager was regarded as a menace to the industry and fit only to be stuffed in a barrel until she could be made into a glamour job.

By a process of elimination we arrived at Metro where Jack Robbins agreed to hear me and got Louis B. Mayer to come in, too. When they told me, I asked, “Who's Mr. Mayer?” I guess they nearly dropped their teeth. Nobody said a word, but he couldn't have been mad because three days later my mother phoned me at school and said Metro wanted to put me on the payroll.

In the beginning, nothing changed. We kept living in the same house, and I didn't buy a lot of clothes or anything. I didn't expect much because I had certainly never planned on being a movie actress. I went to school in M-G-M's little red schoolhouse, which happens to be white. There were a half dozen other children there, all much younger than I, and there was also Mickey Rooney, bless him.

Several years before, I had met Mickey at Lawlor's School for Professional Children. Now Mickey took me in hand and showed me the ropes. He was tough, generous, gifted, and loyal. He told me not to be afraid of anybody on the lot, great or small, and never to do anything I didn't want to simply because other people said I must. It was good advice, and I wish I'd taken it; he'd had a heartbreaking time of it himself. Mickey and I have had a good, solid relationship over the years, not like a brother and sister because it was never that intimate, and not—to the disappointment of moviegoers, I guess—in any way romantic. Professionally and as a person, he respected me, and I him.

Hollywood is a place where it's easy to think the world revolves around Hollywood. You love it and live it, your friends are mixed up in it, your leisure time is dogged by it, everything you do is measured against it—will this be good or bad for your career?—you never get wholly away from it, no matter where you go or what you do. Don't misunderstand me; I love acting and if I couldn't do it anyplace else, I'd act on a street corner and collect pennies in a hat.

It's hard to keep your perspective in a world like that. When you grow up in it the way I did, it's hard to acquire a perspective in the first place. I wasn't a baby when I went there, but at fourteen was impressionable, excited, and eager to make good at any cost. I had missed the gentle maturing experiences most girls have, and I was supercharged with the kind of physical energy that spills out all over the place. People like me don't grow up easily; they bounce. One day they're adults with a head full of wisdom, and the next day they're stubborn children who have to be led by the hand.

Remember that girl in the book
Kitty Foyle
? She said her father was wonderfully wise—he knew when to treat a fourteen-year-old kid like a woman and when to treat her like a baby. I often thought of that because I needed my own father so much, but he died of pneumonia [
sic]
a few weeks after I went to work at Metro. I did a radio show with Al Jolson [sic] the night before my father died. Just before we went on the air, the doctor, who was Dad's best friend, telephoned and asked me to do a specially good job because Dad would be hearing me. I knew then that Dad was
dying; he was too sick to have been allowed a radio otherwise. I sang my heart out for him. By morning, he was gone.

About six months after Metro signed me—I had begun to think they put me under contract just to send me to school—another girl my age walked into the schoolroom. Her name was Deanna Durbin. Nobody had ever looked so good to me. We were the only adolescent girls on the lot, and we promptly formed a coalition and became fast friends. Eventually somebody discovered they'd hired us, and we made that awful two-reeler together called
Every Sunday Afternoon.
Then she went to Universal and became a really big star, long before I got anywhere at all. I was never jealous of her. I had no reason to be; we didn't do the same kind of work, and anyway, I liked her.

It was Mickey Rooney who gave me my first real insight into acting. I'd been in vaudeville ten years, and I'd never read a line; I only sang and danced. When at last I got some parts at Metro, in
Pigskin Parade
[on loan to 20th Century Fox],
Thoroughbreds Don't Cry,
and
Broadway Melody [of 1938],
I had to look at the results sideways to make them seem bearable. I thought that I was bad. I had tried too hard. I thought I overacted something awful.

Then came my first Andy Hardy picture, with Mickey clowning around, but doing a brilliant job. He was so easy, so natural. Just before our first scene together, he took my hands and said, “Honey, you gotta believe this, now. Make like you're singing it.” And all at once I knew what I had been doing wrong. Good singing is a form of good acting; at least it is if you want people to believe what you're singing. If you can make yourself
believe
what you're saying—and you have to say some pretty silly things in musicals—everything else falls into place. Your timing, your gestures, your coordination, all take care of themselves. I learned to relax, and I found I could do a lot better.

The next big thing I learned about acting came six years later when I beat my head against my first scene in
Meet Me in St. Louis.
Because of my photographic memory, I was known on the lot as a one-take girl—two at the most. Nobody directed me very much; I just went out there and did what came naturally. So I hadn't reckoned on Vincente Minnelli. We
had met before, but I had never seen him at work or worked under him. He made me do that first scene in
Meet Me
twenty-five times. I couldn't believe my ears. I was baffled and scared cross-eyed. When I went to my dressing room for lunch, I told my maid something dreadful had happened between my last picture and this one; I'd lost all my talent. I cried all over my makeup, and she almost had to push me back on that set. But then on the first try, it went off smooth as cream. Suddenly I knew what he had wanted all along; I saw that if I was ever going to be any good, I had to let go of myself and
be
whatever character I was portraying.

Vincente drove the whole cast, and in the end, I was more pleased with
Meet Me in St. Louis
than with anything else I had done up till that time.

I was to receive still another lesson in acting two or three years after that when I went to see
The Glass Menagerie
on Broadway. To be sure I'd have tickets, I wrote ahead for them before I left the [West] Coast. When I got to New York and picked up the tickets at the box office, a little note from Laurette Taylor, the play's star, was enclosed, asking me to visit backstage. I was touched and surprised, because we'd never met, and of course I went, my face still streaked with tears after her exquisite performance.

In general, visiting actors backstage is unsatisfactory. They're tired and hungry, or there's a brawl, with too many people. But Miss Taylor welcomed me as if into a drawing room. She washed her face and put on an old cotton robe, and then talked to me for two hours. I sat with her, drinking in her words, learning more about my own profession from her, perhaps, than from all the rest of my experiences, put together. I can't put into words what she conveyed, but I came away feeling as if my head were full of stars and I could do anything. Some months later I heard with shock that she was dead.

One day, years before
Meet Me in St. Louis
and my visit with Laurette Taylor, Mr. Mayer called me into his office and told me Mervyn LeRoy was going to produce
The Wizard of Oz
and wanted me to play Dorothy. It was my first big break. I got a special Academy Award for that film, and I wheedled my mother into letting me wear long white gloves to the reception, and a little white ermine cape I still have and still wear. Later, when
Mickey and I made
Babes in Arms,
I got my first long dress, white and
bouffant.
Other girls get their first evening dress for proms; I got mine so I'd look right when I put my feet in the wet cement at Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

Then everything did change, and very fast. I had obtained permission to go back to public school, and I attended Bancroft Junior High my whole last year, and graduated. It took me a while to convince the other kids I really wanted to be one of them, but when they decided I meant it, they took me right in and I lived as they did, with football games and gym lockers and all the rest of it. Then I tried to go to Hollywood High, but I lasted only six weeks.

People more astute than I have tried to understand the relationship between movie stars and fans. An actress not only holds a certain job, but in a sense she
is
that job; the fans like her and resent her job, if that makes sense. I'll never forget the first time I found myself in a mob of any size. Mickey and I went to New York for the opening of an Andy Hardy film, and there were about five thousand people in Grand Central Station to meet us.
*
I was terrified. It's one thing to be part of a happy mob like that, but it's something else to be its focal point. With the best intentions in the world, such a mob could kill you.

One of the most amazing things about all the trouble I've had lately is that people no longer want to paw me. People I see on the street, total strangers, look at me differently—as though they realize almost with amazement that I, too, have feelings.

I have lived hard and worked hard. I have never stopped to ask myself where I was going. There wasn't time, and the present was too exciting for me to worry about the future. Ordinarily it takes an actor two or three months to do his part in making a picture, but because of all the music and dances and rehearsals, a musical requires nearly six. I've worked in thirty-five pictures in sixteen years, only one of which was entirely without music—more than two a year. It was possible only because I am blessed, and cursed, with a photographic memory. I look at anything once—phone numbers or lyrics or music—and it sticks in my mind. I
have never studied a line of dialogue in my life. If I'd had to, I probably wouldn't have been an actress, because I don't like studying. While I'm getting my makeup on, I read a scene over—and that's it. I can remember as much as nine pages that way, sometimes for years.

When I was nineteen, Dave Rose and I eloped to Las Vegas, if you call it eloping when your mother goes along. I don't know how to explain that marriage; there wasn't any real reason for it. I was much too young. Probably nobody should be married at nineteen, but you couldn't have made me believe it then. Mom tried to tell me; so did several other people. I thought my superficial knowledge of the world was all there was to know.

I was in a cocoon emotionally, and Dave needed a certain kind of a girl that I wasn't. He's a talented man with an inner strength that makes him live a little apart. He enlisted in the Army without telling me till afterward. He didn't do it to be mean; he was just accustomed to fighting his own battles and making his own decisions. He and I were among the first entertainers to go into Army camps and put on shows. We worked hard at it, and we made records together, but music wasn't enough. And I was awfully young. It was something only time could do anything about.

I ran into Dave on the street not long ago. He's married to a lovely girl, and they have a baby daughter. I'm glad for him. We're each kind of content about the other. To feel no ill will toward a person you once were married to is a special kind of blessedness, and I'm grateful for it. During the time our marriage was running out, though, I was despondent. I didn't want to make a botch of my relationships with people. Nobody wants that, really, not I nor anybody else. The only thing I did well, it seemed, was work. That is not always a blessing.