Judy Garland on Judy Garland (53 page)

Of her $150,000, Judy pays her cast and crew approximately $100,000, sometimes more. This leaves the tiny singer (5 feet tall, 97 pounds) with $30,000 to $50,000 each week, making her, along with Danny Kaye, probably the most highly paid star in TV.

Judy's basic deal with CBS calls for her company, Kingsrow Productions, to turn over to the network 30 one-hour shows at $150,000 per show. In addition, the network guarantees to rerun eight of these shows at $75,000 each.

“The best part of Judy's deal, however,” explains agent Freddie Fields, who negotiated it, “is that Judy owns the tapes, and they're worth at least three to four million. She can release them over and over again. She can sell the syndication rights, the foreign rights, anything she wants. For once in her hectic life, this little dynamo is going to be financially secure. And it's about time.

“Judy,” he goes on feelingly, “is 41. She's done everything there is to do in show business, from vaudeville to one-night stands. She's earned fortunes for other people, but she's been victimized over and over again. Before we made this deal with CBS, she was practically broke. But television is going to give her what it's given others much less talented than she—security. These shows are going to bring in money so that she doesn't have to sing her guts out in concerts night after night to support her kids.”

Judy puts it more gently. “It's nice to think,” she says, “that these shows will make me rich.”

Even nicer to see is Judy Garland—after all the professional and domestic crises she's weathered—happy, healthy, relaxed and seemingly at peace with the world, especially while a storm brews 'round her lovely head.

This storm concerns
The Judy Garland Show.
Through no fault of her own, Judy's is not a commercially successful television program.

At this writing it has a Nielsen rating of 18, which means that of the 50,000,000 television families in America, approximately 18 percent,
or 9,000,000 families, watch
The Judy Garland Show
on Sunday nights. Admittedly that's a large number of families. But
Bonanza,
slotted by NBC against Judy at the same time, has a Nielsen rating of 35, which means that twice as many families prefer watching the Western to viewing Garland. Also opposite Judy on Sunday nights is a third program,
Arrest and Trial,
telecast by ABC.
Arrest and Trial
also has an 18 rating. In fact, its rating is a fraction higher than
The Judy Garland Show,
so as of this moment, Judy's show is running last in a race of three.

In a sentence, the
Judy Garland Show
is in trouble.

The fault is not Judy's, and she knows nothing about this rating abracadabra. The man who goofed in this particular case is Jim Aubrey, the CBS chief who placed the show into the Sunday night 9:00 to 10:00
PM
time slot opposite
Bonanza.

He made the judgment, and the audience figures have proved him wrong.

Judy Garland—and this is the opinion of the men who have produced her show (she has had three producers to date)—should be spotted on Monday nights from 10:00 to 11:00, or even on Sunday nights from 10:00 to 11:00.

“She is basically,” says Norman Jewison, who produced eight of her shows, “a sophisticated performer who appeals to sophisticated, intelligent, and literate people. She is definitely not the girl next door. She will never attract the mass meat-and-potatoes audience that
Bonanza
does, and it's foolish even to let her try.”

George Schlatter, a talented producer who was removed by CBS from Judy's program after he had done the first five shows, operated on the following concept: “Judy Garland is someone special, one of the great, electric, incomparable talents of our time. I can't tell you,” Schlatter says, “how cooperative Judy was when I worked with her. She did everything I asked, and more. She was prompt, tireless, painstaking. She worked like a Trojan. All this baloney about her being temperamental and high-strung—she showed none of that.

“In her first five shows—and these haven't been telecast in sequence—I framed her as someone very special with a background of elegance and incomparable talent. I framed her performance as an event, because I think it is.”

The CBS program chiefs—and let's not get into names here—feel that what Judy's show needs to gain a wider audience is a family of regulars such as Garry Moore offers. They feel strongly that the show should have two or three performers who appear every week.

Judy, who knows relatively little about television, is willing to listen to anyone. She went back to New York a few weeks ago and was advised by network executives that she must stop touching her guest stars, that people complained about such physical intimacy; so she has stopped. She was also told that she must talk to TV editors throughout the United States, so she has arranged an elaborate setup of long-distance conference calls whereby she talks simultaneously to 10 or12 reporters throughout the country.

I was at her house one recent afternoon—a one-story, modern, eight-room Brentwood job worth $250,000, pool included—when she was giving out with such an interview.

Here are some of the questions and answers:

Q. How do you like TV compared to other media you've worked in?

A. I like TV better than any of the other jobs I've had in the past. It's hard work, but we've got it down to a pretty good routine now. I work four days a week and have Saturday, Sunday and Monday off. It's inspiring and fun and not too much work.

Q. I thought your television show was supposed to originate in New York. That was the original announcement.

A. I know, but we decided it would be better to do it from out here. After all, it gets so hot in New York during the summer. I would have had to take an apartment in Manhattan and my children would have had to be out on Long Island. This way we are all together. And besides, I have such a pretty new house. Oh, yes, my children watch the show. They come to the studio on Fridays when I tape it, and I must tell you this. The other week they were sitting down front, and they fell asleep while I was doing the show. My daughter, Liza—yes, she's out here, in fact, she's so busy I have to make an appointment to see her—I've done one show with her, and I'm doing the Christmas show with my other children, too.

Q. Is it true that CBS didn't like the first concept of your program and is now changing it?

A. Well, they're thinking along the family concept right now, that I should have a group of regulars, a Judy Garland family of performers, so that the program doesn't look like a spectacular each week.

Q. Judy, I've heard some people say that you look like a little old lady on television.

A. Well, I am a little old lady.

Q. Is it true that you won't allow people to watch you in your dress rehearsal?

A. I don't like a lot of people sitting in the audience during rehearsals because I'm too hammy and I wind up singing to them. I entertain the visitors, and then when it comes time for me to tape the show I'm dead.

Q. All the girls in my office want to know how you managed to diet so much—you must have lost 100 pounds.

A. That's my secret. Seriously, I just stay away from food. I drink tea.

Q. What do you do when you're not working?

A. I stay at home with my children. I play a little golf. I wait around for Tuesday and work to begin.

As all her fans know—and most of them are 30 or over—Judy Garland has not lived a particularly happy life to date. Child movie star, poor picker of husbands and lovers, bedeviled and bewildered by agents and advisers, wracked by illnesses physical and mental, this great talent, this living legend, has somehow managed to generate from her own essence enough fortitude, enough determination, to fight herself out of life's defeats.

It is ironic at this point, when she is healthier and happier than she's been for years, that Madison Avenue and the advertising fraternity should interpret Judy and her show in the light of disappointment.

Heretofore, Judy Garland has never failed in any avenue of show business. If her weekly TV series ends in statistical failure because it has been incorrectly targeted by network masterminds, at least Judy will have the satisfaction of winding up with three or four million dollars to balm her low Nielsen.

As predicted, CBS canceled
The Judy Garland Show.
The network allowing Judy to make the announcement herself meant she could exit from the ordeal somewhat gracefully, but more importantly for CBS, they wouldn't have to take the blame for the show's demise.

Judy's made-up resignation to James Aubrey was released to the press on January 22, 1964. “I am most grateful for the support that I've had from CBS these past months, both personally and professionally,” the letter read. “I have found my experience on weekly television a most gratifying one and a part of my career that I will always remember as exciting and fulfilling, as well as challenging. Now, however, in spite of all this, I have had to make the decision not to continue after the production of my twenty-sixth program. I have found the involvement that I must give to production and performing these programs to be incompatible with the time and attention that I must give to family matters.”

Aubrey made his own ingratiating public response. “Although I can appreciate the compelling reason for Miss Garland's action, I would like to say how genuinely sorry all of us at the network are that she has reached this decision,” he said, going on to praise her talent and even extending an invitation for future collaborations. “We look forward to her return to television—hopefully on the CBS Network.”

No one was fooled by the underhanded activities at CBS. Critics and astute viewers alike knew the network's disregard for the show was to blame for its demise. As Terry Turner observed in the
Chicago Sun-Times,
“They hired Judy because she was a star, and then they wouldn't let her be one.”

She tells of her triumphs, frustrations and mistakes, and vows, ‘Never again.'

“I don't blame people for watching
Bonanza
instead of
The Judy Garland Show.
It was a natural choice.”

The only thing remarkable about that statement is that Judy Garland made it. She was perched on a chair in the living room of her Brentwood, Cal., home, sipping a vodka and tonic and casually performing a postmortem on her series. It had been trampled every Sunday night in the ratings by the galloping Cartwright clan, and systematically dismembered by the critics.

Judy was neither distraught nor angry about her year on television. The show had failed, true, but she didn't believe she was a personal failure. Her mood was clinical.

“I wasn't disappointed that we didn't get higher ratings,” she said. “I don't think we deserved them. The time slot was impossible. After four or five years of loyalty to
Bonanza,
I can understand why viewers did not switch to my show.”

She added proudly, “But I did prove to everybody that I was reliable. They said I'd never answer the bell for the second round. But we turned out 26 shows. And some of them were damned good, too. Especially the last five we did.”

It wasn't until she'd completed the first 19 segments that Judy insisted on a concert format, a move she desperately wishes she had made earlier: “I wanted to do concerts from the beginning because of the success at Carnegie Hall. It's what I do best. And I wanted guest stars who also sang. There was a philosophy at CBS that I couldn't do a
special
every week. They said a concert was a special. But if I ever come back to television, it will be for a group of concerts.

“My year on television was very enlightening—and funny. It was instant disaster. Sometimes instant success. It was that way every week, one way or the other. By the time we discovered where we were going, it was too late.”

She sprang to her feet and pirouetted across the deep shag rug, holding her highball daintily aloft. She did it well. “The network wanted me to be sort of the girl next door,” she piped in a falsetto version of
all
the girls
next door. “But they couldn't find the right house, or the right door. I've never been the girl next door.”