Judy Garland on Judy Garland (40 page)

In England, a year ago, Judy had been anxious about showing her children and her home to the notoriously ruthless British press, but it seemed to be called for and a group of reporters were invited for tea. They came in to hear Lorna and Joe singing, innocently, the words from
West Side Story,
“Officer Krupke, you're really a square … my father is a bastard, my ma's an s.o.b…. goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess …”

Judy wanted to end the evening singing some quieter songs: “Joey,” which she described as a singer's song, and “Never Will I Marry,” which she was about to add to her rigid concert list.

It was obvious that the alchemy she practiced in the concerts was only a part of her own happiness. Singing was her life, never work nor an exercise,
and she sang, I discovered, with as much delight and meaning to her friends and children at home as she did at the concerts.

With several days free before her concert July 1 at Forest Hills, Judy wanted to see a new motion picture every night. After writhing through
The Guns of Navarone,
which she called
Navarone Sunday,
we attended
La Verite,
with Brigitte Bardot, whom she liked as an actress, and
Rocco and His Brothers.
Waiting in the lobby of the Paris theater on West 58th Street for the beginning of
La Verite,
she saw a copy of Bosley Crowther's book on L. B. Mayer in a small showcase. She wondered whether Crowther had understood Louis B. Mayer.

Despite Mayer's reputation as a despot, she said, “He had moments of kindness and he followed them. I had just been thrown out of Metro, after 16 years. I was ill and I didn't have any money to go into a hospital. I went to L. B. Mayer and asked him if the studio would lend me some money. Mayer hadn't wanted to throw me out and he called Nick Schenck (the chairman of the board) in New York while I was in the office and asked if they could loan me some money. Schenck told him that they were not running a charity institution. Mayer hung up and said something strange and kind of marvelous: ‘If they'll do this to you, they'll do this to me, too,' and they
did,
as you know. He lent me the money himself and I paid him back. Crowther doesn't say anything about his kindness or the marvelous movies he
did
make. It's stylish to knock L. B. Mayer.”

About her own frankness and honesty she said, “Maybe it's because I've reached a point in my life when I must be accepted for what I am, and not for some preconceived pattern. You want to please, but you want to please on your own terms. I think good manners and thoughtfulness are important, but, aside from that, that's the best I can do.”

I asked Judy whether she wanted to go back to Hollywood and she shuddered. “I hate the sun. For 36 years I looked out the window every morning and there it was, always the same. And I don't like swimming pools. But I stayed there and I don't know why … perhaps because I thought it was my home. Many times it's much better to cut loose. I'm getting practical. I'm just beginning to realize the value of money, for example. I was surrounded by people who said, ‘That's all right,' and I never looked into the finances. Now I see it all. If you have children who depend on you, you can't be facetious or romantic.”

Judy's children, she claims, are the most important part of her life: “There isn't anything else but that. Everything else comes and goes but your children are there. And if you're smart, and give them enough respect and love, they will be there. There's no better insurance against loneliness than that.”

The discussion was resumed over supper. I asked Judy how she kept going on tour; did she read? Bobby Kennedy (“He's the most disarmingly honest man I know”) had lent her his car in Washington, complete with air conditioning, radio-telephone, and a copy of Irving Stone's book on Michelangelo,
The Agony and the Ecstasy,
but she found it hard to concentrate: “The day after a concert I'm mentally weary from remembering all of the lyrics.

“This last tour, oh my God, it was fun. For one thing, it was successful, and
that
can make anything fun. And there were three of us, David and Freddie. They can make me laugh all day long. I would have been dead a long time ago if I hadn't been able to laugh. At every crisis in my life, some Mack Sennett situation has come up that saved the day. You suddenly start to giggle in the middle of a tragedy.

“I'm very lucky, because something very funny will come along, and thank God I can recognize it.

“Right now I think is possibly the best time of my life. I'm terribly healthy. I have three marvelous children, and I think I have a brand new career opening up. There's lots I have to do. I haven't ever really acted. I've done things I liked, though. It's very difficult for a woman alone in this particular business. You arrive at the conclusion that you must be what you are. If you're not too bad and don't need too many changes, you'll be all right. I don't feel like taking a swipe at anything. I feel terribly fortunate and very lucky.”

Judy then departed into one of her curiously charming nonsequential observations. She evidently felt that we had gotten too serious and wanted to bring me into her own world of candid humor: “Did you ever realize, as long as you're writing for this entertainment magazine, that all dancing teams beat each other up after every performance? They do the most beautiful things on stage, and as soon as they come off, the stagehands have to interfere to keep them from killing each other. I knew a man who danced with a midget girl. She couldn't have weighed more than
60 pounds but he beat her up if she had too much for lunch, complaining that she was too heavy to lift.”

The next evening we went to the opening of
Rocco and His Brothers
at an Upper East Side art house. Shortly after the beginning of the picture, the mother of Rocco and his brothers began yelling in Italian at her sons for a full and horrible 10 minutes to wake them up to shovel snow. She drove Judy out into the street along with the sons, and we missed what was supposed to be one of the best pictures of the year. Even though she obviously hated the mother (“What could she have done with a more important event, like a death in the family?”), Judy was too polite to tell the manager why we were leaving so soon.

Judy didn't know why she couldn't tell him: “I'm terribly conventional, I suppose, a bit of a square, but at the same time I don't live in a stuffy way. When we were leaving the theater, I couldn't say anything to that man. When a show is in the making, I may see reasons for change, but after it's open, when nothing can be changed, I see no reason for saying, ‘What the hell did you do that for?' You have to be pretty presumptuous to say something to Noël Coward about a show.”

We were eating dinner at Danny's Hideaway, a famous show business nest, and a long line of people came by the table to talk to Judy: Arthur P. Jacobs, who runs the publicity firm that handles Judy; songwriter Adolph Green; and a young lady who wanted to take Joe Luft to a children's party the next day. Judy was the focus of attention during dinner but took no notice of the stares. She held up an arm to show me a present from Sid Bernstein, who was producing the 1961 Music at Newport concerts. It was a gold bracelet, with a pendant in the form of a girl singing in a tent, all in diamonds and rubies.

“I look like
Tess of the Storm Country.
I have a theory that I cheapen furs and jewelry. Diamonds turn to rhinestones and mink turns to squirrel. Did I tell you I got a wig for the concerts? I discovered that my one great expense on tour was carrying the hairdresser around. They were
all
expensive. The only way out, I thought, is to invent a really good wig. I called Kenneth (the best hairdresser in the country), at Lilly Daché and I said, ‘Now, who can make the best wig?' He sent over a lady with head calipers to measure my skull, and also lots of little swatches of hair. The wig finally arrived in Detroit. You've never seen such a gray wig in all your
life, and it cost hundreds. A great clump of hair came loose in the back. I put it on for everybody and I thought I'd die. They finally got it to a fairly good color but it came so low on my forehead I looked simpleminded.”

As we left Danny's Hideaway, where the last thing you could do was hide, we turned in a half bottle of Blue Nun to Danny, who keeps a bank of half-finished bottles of wine for Judy. As we reached the door, a drunk selling balloons got into a fight with the doorman. When that was over, the driver of the rented limousine reported that the battery was dead. It was 12:30
AM
and Kay Thompson was rehearsing some songs in a CBS studio not far away. We got into a cab and found Kay in a deserted broadcasting booth running through “How Deep, Deep, Deep Is the Deep Sea?” with three male singers. Kay and Judy sang “Great Day” and the three boys looked as if they had just seen into the Great Beyond. They countered with another run-through of “Deep Sea,” which Judy had never heard in a complete arrangement. She was just as impressed with them as they had been with her and refused to sing again, saying, “I can't follow that.”

Judy and Kay went back to the apartment to play the Carnegie recordings, which had just come in that day.

Judy said that the sound of the band while she was performing was most important to her. “I happened to walk by the brass section that night, before the Carnegie concert, where this Capitol recording engineer was telling the trumpets to take it easy. I said, ‘Oh, no, this is my night' and the poor fellow went home with migraine.” Judy listened to “Just You, Just Me” and told Kay, “This was great in Buffalo. You should have heard the band.”

The Carnegie audience was the best of all, though. Judy quoted David Begelman: “The ins applaud the beginning notes and the squares wait until the opening words, ‘the night is bitter.'” Kay imitated Judy singing “The Man That Got Away,” with her arms flailing out in all directions, and said that the whole front row at Carnegie looked like a dentist's ad, except Roger Edens, who somehow had never seen a Garland concert, and was crying from happiness.
*
And Judy told Kay that Kay had behaved like Mrs. Meglin with her Kiddies, saying, “Smile, baby.”

Kay asked Judy if she was paid from the receipts after each performance. Judy said there was always a check before she went on. “In Texas it is different. They pay you in cash, and you don't know how big $20,000 can be until you hold it. It was like Charlie Chaplin in
Monsieur Verdoux.
What to do with the money? I had Gertrude Palmer, my secretary, with me with a bag. I said, ‘Just stand there in the wings where I can see you and don't put the bag down.'

“There are going to be 14,000 people at Forest Hills,” she added a little apprehensively.

“Not enough,” Kay returned jovially. But the hour was late and the Forest Hills concert was only two days away. It was time to go back to work.

In the next issue James Goode takes Judy Garland step by step through one of her big nights, describes in intimate detail what happens before the spotlight catches her and after it lets her go.

PART II: Garland performing is Garland at the moment of truth and triumph. Here is a play-by-play account of one of the Garland love-feasts that are becoming legendary in the annals of recent show business—the preparation, the delivery, the aftermath.

The Garland-Fields-Begelman corporation, inactive for the five weeks since their second Carnegie concert, went to work again on Friday, June 30. At 9:30 Friday evening, David Begelman and Freddie Fields arrived at the Garland apartment in a rented gray Rolls-Royce limousine and drove Judy to the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium on Long Island to check the lights and the special platform and “to get the feel of the place” for the next night's concert. Nothing was ready and the three-man amusement corporation turned around without a whimper and cheerfully returned to town. There Fields called Forest Hills again and three hours later they were on their way back to Long Island.

In the clear moonlight Judy stood in the deserted stadium, looked out at the rows of empty seats and commented, “It seems all right, but the stands look frightening and far away.” When I asked Judy why two
90-minute round trips were necessary for just a brief glimpse, she said, “In my business every night is opening night.”

David Begelman picked up Judy in the Rolls again the next day at 2:30. They drove through Central Park and, pretending not to see him, passed Freddie, who was waiting at the corner of 57th Street and Park Avenue. “He's running after us,” David said, looking through the rear window, “like an abandoned unwed mother.” After they circled round and picked him up, Judy found a small bottle of perfume left in the Rolls by a previous tenant. She read the label,
“Je Reviens,
I return. I got it for the comebacks. It's a perfume company, owned jointly by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Judy Garland. David, what are we going to do about the airplanes? [The Forest Hills stadium, open to the skies, was directly under the flight patterns of La Guardia and International airports.] I've been trying all night to think of airplane jokes…. God, that was marvelous in the stadium last night, the moon and the cool air. I'm wondering whether I should talk at all in that big place…. At seven, I woke up for the children, and at 10 I was hit by a sledgehammer and the next thing I knew it was 1:30 and Emmy was waking me up. I said, ‘I don't care, what day is it?'”

Freddie Fields told the most unrelaxing story he could think of, about a macabre restaurant in Hong Kong where the guests are invited to pick out live animals from a pit and watch them boiled alive for dinner. There was no response other than muffled horror and he adjusted his cuff links. Judy told him that they had gone out of style five years ago. David forced a boisterous “Ha … ha … ha.” Judy laughed at David and asked him to do it again. He refused, saying, “Judy, you know how nervous I get just before a concert.”