Judy Garland: A Biography

by Anne Edwards

  The experience of being in Chicago without funds had sufficiently clipped Ethel’s wings so that she was willing to remain close to home. The family was back together again, and Judy could not have been happier. Bookings were made and kept in theaters around Los Angeles during the school year so that the girls could remain at Mrs. Lawlor’s. Two summers were spent at Lake Tahoe at the Cal-Neva Lodge, where the girls had four-week stands. The engagements appeared to be singularly uneventful, but during the second summer they met A1 Rosen, a Hollywood agent.

  Rosen had come to the Lodge with a friend who was obtaining an unpleasant divorce and needed someone to hold his hand. Rosen was not a big-time agent, but he was a man who knew how to turn a situation to his advantage. According to Rosen, he recognized Judy’s potential immediately, as had “Bones” Remer, who was one of the owners and operators of the Lodge. He also knew she didn’t stand a chance as long as Ethel and Jimmy and Sue came as part of the package.

  As Rosen tells it, the day the engagement ended, Harry Akst, the songwriter, and Lou Brown, at that time a casting director for Twentieth Century-Fox, arrived at the Lodge. Feeling this was the propitious moment, he maneuvered the cast of characters to Judy’s and his advantage.

  Rosen’s story has Ethel and the girls already in the old car ready to depart when he called Judy back to the Casino on a pretext, Ethel waiting unsuspectingly in the hot sun while inside the large, cool interior of the Casino, “Bones” Remer, Akst, and Brown played gin rummy. “Dinah” was Akst’s most famous song. Interrupting the game, Rosen insisted Akst play the song while Judy sang, promising Akst he would hear the song as it was meant to be performed.

  But another version appeared in McCalls magazine twenty years later. In this one, Judy, Ethel, and the girls were in the old flivver ready to return home when Jimmy remembered that they had left behind a box of hats in a closet, and Judy was sent back to retrieve it. On the way, Judy supposedly met “Bones” Remer, who asked her to accompany him to the Casino, whereupon she met Akst and Brown and Rosen for the first time and in pure innocence requested Akst to play “Dinah” for her, not knowing he had written the song.

  Rosen and the McCall's story do agree on what followed.

  Judy had never sung without Ethel or her own arrangement. And she was, in her own words, “. . . scared they’d [the girls and Ethel] all be mad at me—or leave.” Standing in the center of that large, otherwise empty casino, she was not at all sure she had made the right decision.

  Never having learned how to read music, Judy did not know what key she sang in. She was advised to begin and Akst would follow. The conditions were different and the youngster was nervous. It gave her voice a distinct tremolo. Her mind was on the anger with which Ethel would greet her when she finally returned to the car. She set a hurried and almost frantic pace. Years later, Bobby Cole, one of her musical directors, was to say: “We always set the key and pace so that it seemed that Judy would never be able to reach the last note. That way there was always cheering when she did.”

  The men were impressed, but Brown was certain, because of her physical awkwardness, that she had no place in films. Rosen had more faith. He gave her a slip of paper with his name and telephone number on it and told her to have her mother call him in Los Angeles in a few days.

  They were halfway home before Judy told Ethel about the “audition” and gave her mother A1 Rosen’s telephone number. To her wide-eyed and grateful surprise, Ethel was not angry.

  A1 Rosen became her first agent. This had many ramifications. To begin with, Rosen was interested only in Judy and refused to represent her except as a solo. That was the end of the Gumm/Garland Sister Act. Secondly, Rosen was essentially a film agent and insisted she remain in the Los Angeles area. And thirdly, having formed an immediate and distinct antipathy to Ethel and recognizing the inadequacy of her talent, he tried whenever possible to get Judy another accompanist.

  These two—Ethel and Rosen—had swords drawn against each other from the beginning. Both, however, desperately needed the same thing: a star in their stable. No other agent had taken the interest Rosen had. Though Ethel hated the man, she trusted his dedication to Judy’s success. She didn’t always go along with his decisions, but more often than not she was agreeable.

  This insecure youngster was now in the center of a hurricane of hostility, always being pushed, exploited, and disregarded in any human sense. First she had been Ethel’s dream; now she was an agent’s meal ticket, his chance for the big time. Because of this she suffered severe and irreparable damage as a human being and as a woman. But these same malevolent forces became the prime movers of her career.

  Rosen could not afford the time required for formal voice lessons, and yet he felt Judy needed a more intensified and identifiable style to set her apart. A big voice was not enough. He recognized that her delivery was directed to the heart as well as the ear. Employing the help of a cantor in Boyle Heights (the Jewish ghetto of Los Angeles), he had Judy work with him on the famous “Kol Nidre” and other emotional prayer songs. Then he took her to all the major studios. The answers were always the same. If she had been a toddler or a young woman, they might have signed her. They all thought her voice was sensational. But she was, at twelve, overweight and not very pretty, and no one knew what to do with her.

  Though Rosen could at times cut Ethel out of an audition, he could not control her handling of Judy at home. Ethel was still making those pink ruffled dresses, curling the reluctant thin hair, and painting the bitten nails. The youngster could not have been presented more unbecomingly.

  Again there is a conflict in stories of how Judy first came to the attention of MGM. In one, A1 Rosen secured an audition for Judy at the Feist Music Company, which was a subsidiary of Metro, hoping for a recording contract. Someone at Feist called Roger Edens, who was to become Judy’s future musical mentor. Edens, a top executive in the MGM music department, was asked to come down and hear this young girl sing. Edens obliged and even agreed to accompany her at the piano.

  One cannot help digressing for a moment to conjure up the picture of this youngster—her hair curled atrociously, her clothes ill fitting and in the worst possible taste—accompanied by this sophisticated, handsome young musician—his dress superb, his manners elegant, his speech impeccable. Not yet thirty at the time, Edens had already traveled extensively around the world and was a consummate musician.

  Judy asked him if he could play in her key. Years later, she recalled that moment with embarrassment. It was an incredible question to ask a fine musician.

  She sang “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.” Edens made her sing it again, this time switching the emphasis on notes, shading the phrasing. By the third time, he was confident his instincts were right. Returning to the studio, he went directly to Ida Koverman, Louis B. Mayer’s secretary, to arrange a studio audition. Rosen was contacted.

  That day Ethel had gone out on errands and Judy was home alone with Frank. Rosen called to say that he had just won an executive audition for Judy at MGM and for her to get over to the studio right away. Ethel had left instructions that Judy never leave the house for an audition without her knowledge. At the time Rosen called, Judy was playing in the backyard. She was wearing gray slacks and a white blouse, and her hair was brushed back from her face. It was the way Frank Gumm liked his daughter best. He decided he would not wait for Ethel and that he would take Judy to the studio exactly as she was.

  With Edens accompanying her, she once again sang “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”—this time for Frank Robbins, the Metro talent chief (later to become a well-known music publisher), and Ida Koverman. Rosen was nervous and excited. The presence of Mrs. Koverman meant Judy might audition for the great mogul, Mayer himself. Judy was told what was about to happen, but she was not in the least overwhelmed.

  After Judy sang, Ida Koverman called Mayer down to hear her. Neither Judy nor Frank knew Mayer’s power in the studio, and both were rather astounded at the electricity in the r
oom as everyone waited for Mayer to appear. He finally did, secretaries hovering close at his heels, furious at Ida Koverman for interrupting his work, glaring at Judy. She sang, her father close to her for support. The expression on Mayer’s face never changed while he listened, and when she was done, he got up without saying a word to her and left, his secretaries once more scurrying behind him.

  But though Mayer did not seem to react, he had studied the young girl performing for him: stocky, short, plain, freckled face, big eyes, and pug nose; she was no beauty, but she did look like everyone’s kid sister or the kid next door, and Mayer liked to make films with a true-blue-American-family feel to them. He also recognized the strength and talent of her voice and the electricity its emotional power generated.

  Never saying a word to Rosen or his client, he left them to speculate. Frank and Judy thought it had been, in her words, “a big nothing.” Rosen kept calling the studio for word.

  Two weeks later it came. Judy Garland was now under contract to MGM.

  5Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the 167-acre movie domain, is not in Hollywood. It is five miles to the southwest in Culver City. In 1934, when Mayer hired Judy, the studio was the busiest; the main lot, with its park, artificial lake, private zoo, schoolhouse, restaurant, hospital, raffish collection of old sets and barnlike buildings, stood quietly in the sunlight like an abandoned city. Whatever was going on inside the big white buildings whose doors were guarded by red lights blinking on and off, warning intruders and interrupters away, was in the power of one man. Louis B. Mayer controlled the life of the studio and was responsible for those blinking red lights.

  Mayer was the wealthiest and most influential mogul—just as his company was the wealthiest and the most influential company for over three decades. Upon his decisions or instructions rested the fortune and fate of hundreds of persons. The competition for jobs was fierce and emotional involvement intense. Anyone who had the final word on hiring had in his hand the power of bestowing life or death. And no one in the industry wielded more power during those years in the growth of the American film than Louis B. Mayer.

  He was more than a man. He was a demigod to some, a monster to others. He was, according to David O. Selznick, “. . . the greatest single figure in the history of motion picture production.”

  Mayer insisted, “I want to rule by love, not by fear.” He did not recognize how totalitarian that concept—I want to rule— was. Hollywood was a jungle in those days, and the matter of survival often rested in Mayer’s not-too-lily-white hands, for he was quite capable of using any means to attain his goals. Early in the thirties he was indicted by a Los Angeles grand jury for conspiring to commit usury. He certainly thought very little of working his child performers twelve hours a day, or of starting them off on pep pills to keep them before the cameras.

  He had been born in Poland in 1885, son of a poor laborer and a mother of peasant stock. His mother swore he had been born on July 4—fitting for a future great American. His Polish years were marked by hunger and thirst and great privation. By some miracle, his entire immediate family—father, mother, two sisters and himself—was able to emigrate westward together when he was still a child.

  He was brought up in Saint John, a small city in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. His father was a ragpicker, and from the very earliest time the boy had been taught to scuttle along the sidewalks, back lanes and alleys searching the ground for discarded scraps of rusted iron, broken bits of anything, stuffing them in a pack he always wore strapped on his back.

  The family fortunes slowly improved. By the time Mayer was a young man, they were salvaging metals from wrecked ships along the coast and were respectable junk dealers. Brothers Ruby and Jake were needed to help their father in the main office, but Mayer was sent to Boston to arrange the sale of their salvage. Louis B. Mayer was on his way. But salvage was not to be his future.

  The year was 1907, and a new entertainment phenomenon, the nickelodeon, was sweeping the country. For a nickel, one could see a “moving picture.” The theaters were, more often than not, vacant stores equipped with folding chairs, and the film was projected on a cotton sheet. By 1907 there were between 2,500 and 3,000 of these “movie houses” in the United States. Mayer put up $50 on a three-day option for a theater in the neighboring town of Haverhill and struggled just under the deadline to raise the remaining cash. Haverhill was a shoe-manufacturing city with a population of 45,000, most of whom were factory workers. The movie house was an instant success.

  Keeping his eye to the ground as he had always been trained to do, Mayer swept across the country, adding new movie houses to the pack on his back. He was now a successful exhibitor in a class with William Fox, Marcus Loew, Carl Laemmle, and Adolph Zukor. He wanted more. He wanted to be a movie producer.

  Most films were being produced in New York. Mayer, feeling that more sunlight, allowing for longer hours of outdoor shooting, was essential, went to Los Angeles. It was late in 1918. The country had just emerged from a World War.

  By 1924, Mayer had managed a merger with Goldwyn on the Culver City site. The studio was to be called Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The roster of stars and directors was impressive: Erich von Stroheim, Frank Borzage, Rupert Hughes, Mae Murray, John Gilbert, Will Rogers, and Lon Chaney, to mention a few. Only a few years later, Goldwyn and Mayer parted company—the Goldwyn in the title now no more than a name. (Decades later, Samuel Goldwyn was to remark harshly at Mayer’s funeral, “The reason so many people showed up at his funeral was because they wanted to make sure the S.O.B. was dead.”)

  By the time Judy was signed to an MGM contract, Louis B. was forty-nine years old, and success and power had overtaken his girth, strengthened his haunches, and settled on his face with terrifying implacability. He was no one to oppose.

  In a very candid television interview on the David Frost show, Elizabeth Taylor (who, at the time of the following incident, was approximately the same age Judy was at her first meeting with Mayer) revealed what coming face to face with Mayer could be like for a thirteen- to fourteen-year-old girl. Frost asked her her impression of Mayer when she was a child star at MGM.

  “I thought he was a beast,” she replied. “He was inhuman. He used his power over people to such a degree that he was no longer a man. He become an instrument of power and he had no scruples and he didn’t care whom he cut down or whom he hurt.”

  Miss Taylor had been announced for a film, Sally in Our Alley, a musical; and as she was not a singer or a dancer, that meant a lot of work. Her mother was concerned and made an appointment for them to see Mayer.

  Relating what occurred next, Miss Taylor explained: "I am not a singer and dancer, so Mom and I went up to see L.B. because we had been given this big long lecture about ’I am your father and whenever you have trouble and whenever you need anything, come to me and I will help you. You are all my children and I am your father and all you have to do is come to me.’ So I went to his office, which was like Mussolini’s . . . you had to walk—well, it seemed a mile. And you walked on this white carpet to this white oak desk and all this white kind of carving of leather and the white chair in which this dwarf with a rather large nose peeking over the desk sat and peered at you. It was kind of terrifying because until you sat he’d do—[a kingly gesture: eyes upon work, hand waving to subject]—and then he’d say, ’Yes, what is it?’

  “We said we had read that I was going to do a film called Sally in Our Alley and if it were true, then we thought I should start work on it—like dancing lessons and singing lessons. Silence. Dead face. And then he looked at my mother and asked, ’What do you have to say?’ She said, ’We wondered if Elizabeth was going to do the film or not and whether we should start any kind of preparations.’ And he started like foaming at the mouth and said, ’How dare you come into my office and tell me how to run my business? I took you and pulled you out of the gutter and you’d be nowhere if it hadn’t been for me.’

  “Now, I promise you, David, I would have been quite happ
y in my ’gutter’—whatever he thought that was—without him. We said we didn’t come up here to ask for anything. We just wanted to know if we were to do anything, and started to walk out. He said, ’Get out. Get out of here,’ and started to foam—literally foam—at the mouth. ’Don’t you tell me how to run my business! You and your daughter are nothing but guttersnipes. Get out of here.’

  “And I said (it was the first swear word I had used), ’Mr. Mayer, you and your studio can go to hell!’ And I ran out of the room in tears.

  “I was called about an hour later by the Vice President and the Second Vice President to go in and apologize to L. B. Mayer for telling him and the studio to go to hell. And I said I didn’t see why I had to because I thought the way he had treated my mother and me was wrong and not that what we had done was wrong. Anyway, I couldn’t because I was so offended by the way he spoke to my mother.”

  Frost then asked her if she went back and apologized, and Miss Taylor replied that she never saw or spoke to him again.

  At the time of this incident, Elizabeth Taylor had already made National Velvet and was a child star. She had had a stable childhood, one much different from Judy’s. Born and brought up in her earlier years in England, she had not become a performer until she was ten. Mrs. Taylor had been an actress; Mr. Taylor, a successful antique dealer. Though Elizabeth’s mother was ambitious for her, there was never the intense need, the desperate drive for her daughter to be a star. Elizabeth never experienced the same pressures as Judy. Mayer could terrify her all he wished and not destroy her by taking away her stardom. She had family to return to where she was loved and accepted just as she was: Elizabeth—daughter and sister.

  From the very beginning, Judy was made to realize how important Mayer’s approval of her was and how destructive his disapproval would be. She thought of him at that time, she was later to say, as “the real grand Wizard of Oz”—and she walked the studio streets with the same mixed emotions of hope and fear that possessed Dorothy on the yellow brick road.