Judy Garland on Judy Garland (39 page)

Even though Judy Garland had already signed a contract to write her autobiography long before this resurgent period, the publisher now had to resign himself to a long wait. As Judy said, “It's too soon. I have too many things I want to do. I have a feeling that I am just about to do the best things I've ever done. There are things I haven't really tried.”

Judy was simply recognizing the fact that she had already had two careers, each of them as sensational as any in her profession, and that she would like to pursue a third, without distractions. After the current phase, she would probably settle for something simple, like producing shows on Broadway, or dictating her life story. For the moment, the best technique for grabbing Garland and putting her on paper seemed to be to recapitulate the basic facts of her life as briefly as possible and zero in on the 1961-model Judy.

Furthermore, the conventional terms “biography” and “life” do not seem to apply to the astral history of Judy Garland. Some of us remember
20 or 30 events in our lives that have had great emotional impact or professional significance, and some of us have only been touched by three. Judy has had significant visits from fate hundreds of times.

Judy Garland was born, if not with a caul, with inexhaustible energy, superior intelligence, a talent for every form of entertainment, a strong body and, most important, an overwhelming compulsion to keep trying and keep going. This formidable combination has used up everybody and everything in her 39 years except Judy herself, and even that has been close.

With only three or four pauses while she pulled herself together, each “pause” being billed as utter tragedy or complete collapse by professional crepe-hangers and oversolicitous fans, Judy managed to marry three times, bear three children, and make and spend $6,000,000. Meanwhile, she appeared in 31 motion pictures (as the star in most), grossing $250 million for M-G-M, and entertaining audiences totaling upward of one billion persons. Besides movies and TV she made better than 750 personal appearances, including benefits, USO shows, nightclub dates, theater presentations, and concerts before audiences ranging from 1,000 to 15,000 persons.

Some of the historically great motion-picture stars made no more than nine or ten pictures; some popular entertainers are content to work three or four weeks a year in nightclubs, or to star in one or two television shows a season in order to maintain a career; and some singers have made a national reputation with one song. Judy Garland, in addition to her movie career, which is far from over, has averaged one personal appearance each week for the past 12 years, including a record-breaking (19 weeks) run at the Palace Theatre in New York City; thereby, she has stamped her own name on over 100 songs. Anyone else is free to sing them, but they do so at their own peril. The resulting comparisons are likely to be rather odious.

If the above record is not enough for any five human beings, consider a childhood on the stage, the early loss of a father, a six-day week at M-G-M for 14 years (from age 12 on) with frequent 18- and 24-hour shooting sessions, and a completely public life, without normal friendships, until the age of 19. Add to this the strain of working closely and
intensely with a large and shifting complement of other professionals over the years; not only the 200 persons involved in each of her 31 motion pictures, but also some 300 others—doctors, lawyers, agents, press agents, producers, entrepreneurs, secretaries, arrangers, composers, accompanists, conductors and dancers. You would have to be a very strong elf indeed to survive.

Judy was and is. Born Frances Ethel Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, on June 10, 1922, she worked first as a professional at 2½ years old, when she broke into two impromptu choruses of “Jingle Bells” during one of her sisters' acts on the Rialto Theater stage in Grand Rapids during Christmas week. The family moved to Lancaster, California, shortly thereafter, and her mother (who created the act, wrote the arrangements and played the piano) took Judy and her two older sisters to Los Angeles. There Judy, at five, became one of the Meglin Kiddies (an organization composed of a great quantity of flopping blonde curls, ruffles, bows, tiny tapping patent leather shoes and very little talent). Dressed as Cupid she appeared with them at a downtown Los Angeles theater, where she sang “I Can't Give You Anything But Love.” After Judy finished this inauspicious single, their mother revived the sister act and took the Gumm girls to Chicago, where they were erroneously billed as the Glum Sisters at the Oriental Theatre. To avoid such unfortunate mistakes in the future, George Jessel, also on the bill, suggested they change their name. He came up with “Garland.” A 1934 run at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles was their last appearance together (Judy's sisters are now housewives, one in Las Vegas, the other in Dallas). M-G-M spotted Judy at the Wilshire and the result was an audition before Roger Edens, a member of M-G-M's music staff.

Edens today recalls: “Her mother brought Judy to me to audition. Her mother played the piano and she sang ‘Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.' I knew instantly, in eight bars of music. The talent was that inbred. She sang it exactly as she sings it today, her mother's arrangement. I fell flat on my face. She was just so high and chubby, wearing a navy-blue middy blouse and baby-doll sandals, with lots of hair and no lipstick. I really flipped. I called Ida Koverman, L. B. Mayer's secretary, and she called Mr. Mayer, and he called the lawyers and she was signed
to a contract that day. It was like discovering gold at Sutter Creek. Mayer took her all over the lot that day and made her sing for everyone.
*

“She started the next day to school on the lot and also worked two hours a day with me, never on scales, just singing and working on the arrangements that I wrote for her. Out of these sessions, Mrs. Koverman chose her to sing for Clark Gable at a birthday party for him in the commissary. During lunch, I wrote the verse ‘Dear Mr. Gable' to the song, ‘You Made Me Love You'; and Judy got her first important chance, singing the same song in
Broadway Melody of 1938.
She was a hit.

“For the first two years at Metro, she worked with me two hours a day, six days a week. Then Metro sent her to New York to appear at Loew's State. I went with her and took her to the top of the RCA Building before the opening and told her, ‘This is all going to be yours someday.' Metro had told me to buy her a dress for the opening and we went to Best's and picked out an organdy one. The opening was at noon. There was this unknown 15-year-old girl alone for the first time on an enormous stage, nervous and singing much too loudly. The audience was coughing and a baby started crying. People laughed at the baby and Judy stopped her song, laughed and started again. That one thing steadied her and she wrapped that audience up from then on. She has been able to handle an audience ever since.”

The next 13 years of Garland is very familiar contemporary history, and an argument for stricter child labor laws in California. Besides the required three hours a day of school on the M-G-M lot, Judy spent two hours a day working with Edens, and only then began the exhausting work before the cameras, often finishing at four or five
AM.
Judy appeared first in a two-reeler,
Every Sunday,
with Deanna Durbin, was loaned out for
Pigskin Parade
with Stuart Erwin, established herself with “Dear Mr. Gable” in
Broadway Melody of 1938
and then starred in a succession of box-office smashes, ranking as one of the 10 best money-making stars in the Motion Picture Herald-Fame Poll in 1940, 1941 and 1945.

Her pictures, which are as much a history of M-G-M or life in the United States as they are of Judy Garland's career, were:
Thoroughbreds
Don't Cry; Everybody Sing; Love Finds Andy Hardy; Listen, Darling; The Wizard of Oz
(for which Judy was given a special, not a regular, Academy Award);
Babes in Arms; Andy Hardy Meets Debutante; Strike Up the Band; Little Nellie Kelly; Ziegfeld Girl; Life Begins for Andy Hardy; Babes on Broadway; For Me and My Gal; Presenting Lily Mars; Girl Crazy; Thousands Cheer
(in 1943, Judy's first grown-up role);
Meet Me in St. Louis; The Clock
(Judy's first straight dramatic role);
Ziegfeld Follies of 1946; The Harvey Girls; Till the Clouds Roll By; The Pirate; Easter Parade; Words and Music; In the Good Old Summertime;
and
Summer Stock.
She ended her association with M-G-M in 1950. Since then, she has starred in
A Star Is Born,
for Warner Brothers, and most recently played the role of a German Hausfrau in
Judgment at Nuremberg
for Stanley Kramer.

Judy married musician David Rose when she was 19, divorced him four years later, and immediately married director Vincente Minnelli. A daughter, Liza May, was born the first year and Judy was divorced again, after six years of marriage, in 1951. She married Sid Luft, who also became her manager, in 1952, and began the series of concerts and appearances that are still going on. A second daughter, Lorna, was born that year, and a son, Joseph, in 1955. Last summer in the midst of her concert appearances Judy announced, for the second time, that she was separated from Sid Luft.

So much for the Judy of history. Now for the 1961 model, who protests “I paid thousands and thousands of dollars to psychoanalysts and I couldn't tell them a thing. Why should I talk to you?” And suddenly she gives in. “What the hell, why fight it any longer. I'll tell everything and hope that it comes out all right.”

The performance began with a drink at The Carlyle on New York's Upper East Side. For those interested in fashion, Judy was wearing a green silk coat over a green silk dress and she looked very well indeed.

She entered with David Begelman, one of her two managers. The other, Freddie Fields, was in California. There was a little trouble. David was carrying a bottle of Blue Nun Liebfraumilch for Judy and an officious bar manager would not allow her to drink it. He didn't have any wine like it but he didn't want her to drink her own. The problem is that Judy's doctors only allow her to drink Blue Nun and one other label of Liebfraumilch, since a recent hepatitis attack.

Finally the manager of the hotel was called and gave her dispensation to drink. Judy began to talk about life in show business. “It's when you believe the romantic thing that you get in trouble. I know some people who have lost their way. You can wind up a triple schizophrenic.” We left the Carlyle and hailed a cab for the West Side. Familiar with New York cab drivers, Judy asked David when we got into the cab to ask the driver to go slow. The driver immediately put the cab in gear and roared toward the entrance to Central Park. Judy asked David to tell the driver to let us out.

We hailed another cab. David asked the driver to go slow. The driver took off like the outside chariot in
Ben-Hur.
Judy huddled back against the seat, not terrified, just realistically frightened. Life was precious to her, the mark of a happy person.

Back at her apartment, David Begelman left us and Judy talked about
Broken Blossoms,
a 1919 D. W. Griffith masterpiece starring Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess, which she had seen on television the night before. Judy said that Barthelmess had been so beautiful, made up as a Chinese, but that the subtitles had been ridiculous. Lillian Gish at one point had said to Barthelmess, “Why are you so good to me, Chinky?” Judy laughed as she repeated the line and then described a scene in which Barthelmess tried to stop a fight among three sailors. They had stopped fighting each other long enough to beat up Barthelmess, the Chinese peacemaker, and Judy thought that was
very
funny.

Judy asked me if I liked David Begelman. She said that she calls Freddie Fields and David “Loeb and Leopold” because they are so bright. “It's not like the usual artist-manager contract. We're partners; they see that the lights work and the curtain goes up. They found schools in New York for the children and they found this apartment.”

We arranged to meet again that night to see a motion picture,
The Guns of Navarone,
that had just opened on Broadway. Halfway through, Judy turned and asked if I wanted to see the rest of it. I replied that we had invested so much time in it already that we should stay to see the guns blown up. She agreed, somewhat reluctantly, but couldn't help turning sideways, averting her eyes and muttering at the screen as the story slowly unreeled, “The nerve of that director to come back and show those German soldiers in their underwear!” Judy said that she had been hoping all along the Germans would win.

The next evening, after dinner, Kay Thompson, the author of
Eloise
and one of Judy's oldest friends, brought a new song “How Deep, Deep, Deep Is the Deep Sea?,” loosely based on “How Deep is the Ocean?,” to play for Judy. Liza Minnelli, 15, Judy's oldest and Kay's godchild, sang with Kay, who played one of two grand pianos ferociously. Then we all tried it, from the top. I couldn't keep up and listened with Liza while Judy and Kay sang an incredible Thompson arrangement of “The Thrill Is Gone.” The fast, loud, intricate delivery went on through “Great Day” and Liza squealed with delight on “Lift up your head and shout” and “It's so far away.”

Kay sang “Some, somebody must love me, I wish I knew who it was …” and then “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” from
The Harvey Girls,
and that set off a chain of stories about M-G-M, where they had first met, Judy as a child star, and Kay as an arranger and coach. Liza sang, on request, “Jamboree Jones” with a great deal of her mother's talent, and then the three sang “Bob White.”

Liza imitated the singing of Lorna and Joe, the two younger children, who were asleep at the other end of the apartment. “Everyone in the family is musical,” said Judy. Lorna and Joe had learned the scores of
Bye Bye Birdie, Gypsy
and
West Side Story,
and sang them unerringly and relentlessly. Judy had taken Joe, then only four, to see
Gypsy
and had held him on her lap in a front-row seat. Joe had been quiet until Ethel Merman began to sing “Some People.” In his baby way Joe began to sing along with her: “He was saying to me, Wose,” and by the climax, Joe's “but not Wose” could be heard right along with the powerful Merman voice.