Judy Garland on Judy Garland (31 page)

Paul Gallico had written a story especially for me, and Robert Nathan adapted it into a screenplay called
The Clock.
It was my first and only crack at a completely nonmusical movie, and I loved that story. It was a delicately balanced thing about a soldier and a girl who met in wartime under the clock in Pennsylvania Station. They got separated in a crowd and didn't even know each other's names so they went back to the clock and found each other again. They were married in an ugly civil ceremony, with an elevated train drowning out the words. But they went into
a church later and made their own service and their own beauty, and the next morning the soldier had to go away to war.

It had to be done just right. Robert Walker played opposite me, and he's wonderful, but somehow it didn't go together. After a while, the studio shelved it. I wasn't happy about that, and I kept going over it in my mind. One day I went to the studio officials and told them I knew what the picture needed—Vincente Minnelli.

“That man?” they exclaimed. “Are you crazy? He's the guy you were always getting so mad at.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, “but he got the best work out of me I've ever done, and I know he'll understand this story.”

I got him, and we did the picture. It just missed being great. The critics said it proved I could hold up my end without a forty-piece band, and that was gratifying. From my personal point of view, it was a triumph because it was during
The Clock
that I looked at Vincente one day and something hit me. I thought, here was a man I could know for years and still find fresh interest in. We started going out together, and about six months after my divorce was final, we were married in my mother's house.

We took three months off for a honeymoon in New York and then went to Boston for the opening of one of Vincente's pictures. It was the first time in more years than I could remember that I just relaxed and had fun and let somebody else take care of me. By the time we got back to Hollywood, I knew the baby was coming and I felt happy and loved.

We were wild over Liza from the first moment we laid eyes on her, but I fretted over not having the calm and serenity I thought I ought to have. I wanted deeply to be a good wife and mother, and I was a little scared. In an effort to learn why I had never been able to get closer to people, I took a series of psychoanalytical treatments, and I have never regretted anything more. I'm sure psychoanalysis has helped a great many people, but for me it was like taking strong medicine for a disease I didn't have. It just tore me apart.

I went back to work and lashed myself as I always had. The friction of personalities in the movie business is something fairly severe. I've never worked in an office, but I think it's like office politics, magnified a hundred times by money, by fame, by the lopsided idea that only movies matter.
I don't want to hurt anyone, and obviously I won't name names, but there have been people in Hollywood who sometimes made it extremely hard for me to do what I was so desperately trying to do—find myself. At least I felt that way.

Actors live in a queer sort of double world. Not many of us have the names or identities we were born with. I don't associate Frances Gumm with me —she's a girl I can read about the way other people do. I, Judy Garland, was born when I was twelve years old. When a studio puts you under contract, its publicity department starts turning out news copy about you that you read with astonishment. You think, can this be me they're talking about? They don't really manufacture untruths, but they play up whatever makes interesting reading, and then a columnist adds his own little embellishments and another adds to that until there's a whole body of so-called “facts” floating around—almost like another you—that simply isn't real. It isn't a lie, but it isn't real, either.

It's as if people were confusing you with some role you'd played on the screen. As a matter of fact, people did that with me and Dorothy of
The Wizard of Oz.
It took me six years to convince even movie people that I wasn't permanently twelve years old, wearing my hair in pigtails; I'm still trying to convince outsiders. You can't very well go around denying the stories your studio releases when it is doing everything it can to make you a star, and sometimes you get to doubting your actual personality.

When I was still a little girl, I found out people will believe anything about movie stars, often without any evidence at all. They will believe good things and bad things, often in equal measure, if it is just printed somewhere, or maybe merely rumored. You get used to it, of course, but it can still bother you a good deal. And it isn't just the bad things that can be bothersome—sometimes you read or hear something wonderful about yourself that has no basis in fact. Then you begin to wonder what kind of world it is that you live in, and you begin to wonder sometimes what kind of person you really are. Since childhood, I have always been on what I suppose would be called the “sensitive” side, and I can have more than the average share of “nerves” on occasion. And I certainly have been bothered
often with sleeplessness. Being unable to sleep is a pretty terrible situation, as anybody knows who suffers from this condition. At times I have been pretty much of a walking advertisement for sleeping pills. This is hardly something unknown to friends and acquaintances. But some people have exaggerated the habit, and twisted it around with words, and it is that sort of thing that can get a gal down, even if she has a lot more stability than I have. Taking sleeping pills is hardly a good habit. Nobody knows that better than I, but this inability to get a good night's rest has nagged me since childhood. And even though pills come on doctors' prescriptions, as mine did, they can be a tremendous strain on the nervous system. I was having my share of troubles with the studio and, there's no doubt about it, my physical condition didn't help.

And while I was in this condition, I became very concerned about Vincente. He is a calmer person than I have ever been, he's brilliant and temperamental, as he should be, and I got to thinking that a proper wife for him should be placid and always on an even keel. It was pretty plain that I was never going to be just that. In justice to him, I felt we ought to call things off, and he, trying hard as he always did to do whatever was best for me, finally agreed.

At the time, I was up to my elbows in
Annie Get Your Gun.
I'd made five pictures since Liza's birth, and started the ill-fated
[The] Barkleys [of Broadway].
My dearest desire—to know and love another person as I never had been able to do—was blowing up in my face, and one day I walked smack off the set and didn't go back. I wouldn't have cared if a truck had hit me. The studio promptly suspended me and then, anxious to help, financed an eight-month stay at a Boston hospital where I went for rest and recuperation. The best thing about that whole trip was patching it up with Vincente. I found out he wanted
me,
not a hypothetical creature I thought I ought to be. He and Liza came to Boston to see me, and we stayed, the three of us, in the same suite of rooms in which Vincente and I had spent part of our honeymoon. I returned to Hollywood, rested, full of hope and courage, and eager to work.

I made
Summer Stock
with Gene Kelly, who is a dear. You can work in pictures with some people and never really get to know them, but Gene
and I have been friends ever since our first film. I was partly responsible for getting him out there. I had seen him on Broadway in
Pal Joey
and had told Metro what a fine thing it would be if they put him into movies.

We got through
Summer Stock,
but not without a struggle. Gene encouraged me to forget what people might be saying, laughed with me, helped keep down the friction. I was late—I've been unpunctual all my life—and there were fights over that. I hate fights. I can't stand ill-feeling. I was wobbly and unsure, and desperately trying to prove, not to the world but to myself, that I was making good as a person.

My relationship with the studio for several years had been a little like that between a grown-up daughter and her parents. In some ways, they regarded me as their personal property, and they couldn't seem to realize I wasn't a child anymore. There was constant tension.

In such a mood, we went into rehearsals for
Royal Wedding.
At the end of two weeks, I was jumpy and irritable and sleeping very little. They were jumpy, too, and I couldn't blame them; they had put a million dollars into
Annie
before that day when I walked out blindly. On a Friday afternoon, I canceled a rehearsal, and in a matter of hours, I was out of the picture and indefinitely suspended.

It's hard for me to talk about what happened next. I felt humiliated and unwanted, and I was faced with the bitter knowledge that I'd come to that unhappy position by my own actions—it's true they were actions I couldn't seem to help, but they were my own. All my newfound hope evaporated, and all I could see ahead was more confusion. I wanted to black out the future as well as the past. I didn't want to live anymore. I wanted to hurt myself and others.

Yet even while I stood there in the bathroom with a shattered glass in my hand, and Vincente and my adored secretary, Tully, were pounding on the door, I knew I couldn't solve anything by running away—and that's what killing yourself is. I let them in and tried to make them understand how sorry I was.

It wasn't a good experience, but I think I'm better for it: You're always better for the tough things if you can get through them. The terrible tension broke, and I've had time for reflection. When
Summer Stock
came out, people liked it, and that made me happy because I've begun to see
that it isn't nice to hurt the people you love, and I still love audiences. Metro and I parted amicably, which was fine of them and good for me. I had been at the same place for sixteen years; it's healthy sometimes to make a change.

I'm going to try my fortune now in radio and on television, and I hope to appear soon on the Broadway musical stage. I find I'm acquiring a certain philosophy and that, I think, is the one thing I've needed above all others. I'm not religious in the ordinary sense, but I have a growing faith in God. I send Liza to Sunday School because I want her to get acquainted with Him early. I'm learning to let go and stop forcing things, stop trying to meet life in a head-on crash. Nobody can wipe out his mistakes; you can only learn from them and go on from there. And so, perhaps, I have at last grown up. I'm learning to take myself as show people know how to take others, the good with the bad. I'm people, too. If I can remember that, I'll be all right.

*
The enthusiastic reception at Grand Central Station actually took place on August 14, 1939. Judy and Mickey arrived in New York City to promote
The Wizard of Oz
and
Babes in Arms.

Judy's final reconciliation with Vincente Minnelli was brief. “I was just too lonely,” she told a superior court judge on March 22, 1951. “I couldn't go on…. When we were first married, we were very, very happy. We had many interests together, our work and our friends. We enjoyed living. Then suddenly, without warning, my husband became withdrawn. He secluded himself. He wouldn't explain why he went away so often. I had to appear alone at parties and many places and it was very embarrassing to try to explain why he wasn't along. I was nervous, very nervous and ill. I had to call the doctor many times.”

Recently released from the confines of M-G-M, and soon to be freed from her broken marriage to Vincente, Judy was essentially a free agent. Encouraged by Michael Sidney Luft, her new love interest, she took a daring step in the direction of independence in the spring of 1951. Judy set out on a professional journey that would establish and define the future of her career as an entertainer. With a monthlong gig beginning April 9 at the London Palladium, the city's preeminent variety house, she returned to her home on the stage and began concertizing. “I came full of fear; I left full of hope,” Judy told the British press at the time. “I have found where I belong—out there under the limelights singing for my supper…. Out there, under the lights, I suddenly knew that this was the beginning of a new life … no performer can experience the Palladium ‘roar'—that Niagara of noise rolling cross the footlights … without being shaken.”

Following a triumphant tour of the British Isles that took her to Liverpool, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Birmingham, Judy returned to the United States determined to bring her live variety show to Broadway. “Now I know I can do it,” she told Hedda Hopper. “I'm going to pick up where I left off. I've had enough trouble. Now I'm going to see to it that everything is right.” It was soon announced that Judy would headline a scheduled four-week engagement—an
all-star “two-a-day” bill—at the legendary Palace Theatre in New York City's Times Square.