Judy Garland: A Biography

by Anne Edwards

  Having foisted Judy as an eleven-year-old Dorothy on the public and won it over, Freed now had to help Judy successfully make the transition to portray a girl her own age (seventeen) in Babes in Arms and yet not lose the large audience she had won in Oz. This he achieved by establishing Judy’s character in the film as a humble Plain Jane (Mary, in this case) who stood back while Rooney took the lead—hoping, praying (always in song) that he would just look at her once as though she were a girl (which he did at the end of the last reel). Ray June, the cameraman, following Joe Ruttenberg’s lead, zoomed in—to the desperate need to be accepted in those wide velvet brown eyes, to the fear of always being the loser that caused that lip to tremble; and in the end—though the film was Rooney’s, and Judy’s role a supporting one despite star billing—it was the quality of pathos conveyed by Judy that kept the audience enthralled, and that same searching soulfulness that shot the bright moments so sky-high.

  The grind on the film was relentless; the pressures overwhelming. Judy had first suffered the exhausting filming of Oz; had been sent on the five-shows-a-day tour; had been cast immediately upon her return in Babes in Arms; and then—twelve hours after shooting had ended on that film—stepped into Andy Hardy Meets a Debutante (the debutante of the title being played by Diana Lewis). Again with no time between films, she was rushed into the strenuous schedule of the Freed Unit’s follow-up to Babes in Arms—Strike Up the Band.

  “. . . they had us working days and nights on end,” Judy complained in McCall’s. “They’d give us pep-up pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they’d take us to the studio hospital and knock us cold with sleeping pills—Mickey sprawled out on one bed and me on another. Then after four hours they’d wake us up and give us the pep-up pills again so we could work another seventy-two hours in a row. Half of the time we were hanging from the ceiling, but it became a way of life for us.”

  This appalling situation caused Edens to go to Freed, who claimed he had his hands tied. Edens did not think Freed was responsible and, in fact, always defended him, but he recognized that neither of them was a match for the man who ran the studio and was their boss. Babes in Arms and Strike Up the Band had huge budgets for their day (over $600,000). Longer shooting schedules could not be afforded if each film was to have a cast of hundreds; and as Mayer felt not one extra should be cut, the shooting schedule was adhered to, the budget left intact, and Judy and Rooney expected to continue as the studio demanded.

  The people in the front office were still concerned about Judy’s weight and kept reminding her that without their vigilance she would be a fat, awkward, unattractive teen-ager. Judy suffered the indignities of being told she wasn’t really a good performer, that they were making her look good, and again and again that there was always someone to step into her shoes.

  The premiere of Babes in Arms at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on October 10, 1939, was the culmination of Ethel’s dream. To all but Ethel the dream might have seemed unreachable. But Baby Frances was a bona fide star—her footsteps in the cement of the forecourt of Grauman’s along with threescore of filmdom’s greatest, triumphant in The Wizard of Oz and acclaimed for her co-starring role with Rooney. Ethel held her hand as Judy stepped onto the wet cement and assisted her as she stepped out again. Then she did a very curious thing.

  Judy knelt beside the block of wet cement and with her finger inscribed her name, then planted her hands in the cement for a handprint. As Judy did the last, Ethel leaned over her daughter and with her own finger straightened a letter in Judy’s signature.

  Stardom changed very little in Judy’s life. Ida Koverman had interceded to convince Mayer that Judy’s public would accept her in a sophisticated dress, and he had permitted a gown to be designed for her for the premiere. But as she looked around her at the sexy dress Lana wore, her own lost its glamour. It seemed to Judy that Lana was everything she wanted to be. She was not exactly envious of Lana, but she did admire her and constantly put herself down in comparison.

  Her inferiority complex was at its apex. Seventeen and a star, she was earning only $500 weekly—$200 of it payable to Ethel. She did not have a bevy of admirers. Her dates—like the ones she had with a young contract player, Robert Stack—were arranged by the studio, not for her benefit, but to place the man’s name before the public.

  She went to parties given by the young Hollywood set—Rooney, Rutherford, Jackie Cooper, Richard Quine, Sidney Miller, O’Connor, Leonard Sues. She always joined in and performed. On the outside she gave the appearance of a spirited, talented, fun-loving girl. Her sisters were now out of the house. Privately, she was a loner. She had two large German shepherd dogs on which she lavished affection; read a lot—romantic poetry, mostly; drew dress designs—always glamorous in execution; but deep doubts plagued her, sending her into spells of abysmal depression. Much of this could be attributed to the effect the pills were having on her. But other forces were at work. Having now completed her high school studies, she was on her own—her grades not warranting college acceptance; those around her unable to contribute to her intellectual growth. Roger Edens would discuss music and musicians and books and authors with her, but she was too embarrassed to tell him she had never heard the names before; and her schedule was such that there was never any time to go to libraries to find out for herself. She was beginning to look for the meaning of things, but it was a lot like stumbling about in a heavy fog.

  Waking dreams haunted her—thoughts that would not remain buried. There were men in closets peering lasciviously through solid wood doors. She dressed in the bathroom, locking herself in. She insisted on wearing a slip under everything, even if Wardrobe felt it was unnecessary. From the very beginning her studio biography revealed the truth about her background, while other players were given glamorous pasts. She hated interviews. “There’s nothing to say about me,” she would confess. The story she would repeat was about her father’s death. “He was a gay, handsome Irishman and we loved each other madly,” she confided to one and all.

  As Christmas, 1939, approached, she decided (though she did not tell Ethel) that when her contract was over, she would become a writer. She spoke to her close friend Barron Polan about this, telling him, “There are just so many things locked up in my head. I feel that if there was a can opener that could open my brain, all these thinkings and feelings would gush out like some unstoppable water tap.” She was encouraged to write some of them down.

  In whatever few moments came to her, she composed fragments of verse. Soon she had enough to fill a small book. In perhaps one of her first totally private acts, she hand-copied the poetry, giving the copy to a printer to bind in tan leather. Polan had many of the same qualities as Edens—the polish, the charm, the intelligence, the gentle understanding. They had become good friends during The Wizard of Oz, and when his birthday came around she presented him with her book of poems which Polan has held on to throughout the years.*

  The poems do not unveil Judy as another Emily Dickinson. However, they do indeed reveal a great deal about Judy. They reflect all the Rupert Brooke, Shelley, Keats, and Browning she had been reading (later she was to admire Edna St. Vincent Millay), and a deeply sensitive romantic nature is exposed.

  Whatever the critical assessment, the need to compose and publish the poetry screamed out for attention to be paid to that need. But there seemed no one close enough to hear her.

  Footnote

  * See Appendix for poems.

  12As 1940 rolled into high gear, Judy and Mickey were propelled from Andy Hardy Meets a Debutante directly into Strike Up the Band. Neither had very much free time, but what there was seemed provident to spend together. “Somehow,” as Mickey declares about that period, “it was easier to withstand public pressure when we were together. Wherever either of us went we were recognized.”

  They would frequent the nearby amusement piers—Venice, Ocean Park, Santa Monica—riding the roller coasters, wandering through the fun house. Rooney threw big parti
es at his new, fairly palatial house on Densmore Drive, playing the drums and doing impersonations; or the two of them would sing duets like “Manhattan” or “How About You?” As Rooney says, “Work and fun were inextricably interwoven. It was impossible to tell just where one ended and the other began. Our work was our fun, and our fun was our work.”

  On Sunday mornings he would drive to Judy’s house in Hollywood and they would have breakfast together, followed by long talks. “I was going to write a musical comedy for her,” Rooney recalls in his autobiography. “She was going to sing the songs I wrote. We’d do our own play. We’d capture Broadway. We’d be the most successful team in history.”

  It was, ironically, as their scriptwriters had divined. They would dream together, and in a crowd Judy would encourage him to go on, standing back, performing with him, but seldom alone. But that was where it ended. His dates were tall, gorgeous, and always by his side when Judy stepped away from the piano.

  Playing opposite Judy, though, he stood in constant admiration. “Her timing was like that of a chronometer,” he continues in his autobiography. “She could deliver a comic line with just the right comic touch or say a poignant line slowly enough for the poignancy to hit hard but still stay short of schmaltz. She could turn on intensity, as I could turn on intensity, memorize great chunks of script, as I could, ad-lib, as I. Alone, she could take an ordinary scene and by sheer strength of talent make it a scene that people everywhere remembered.”

  And later he says, “We were a couple of teen-age kids, proud of our talent and our poise ... I couldn’t rattle Judy and she couldn’t rattle me. God, we had fun.”

  Actually, those early months of 1940 were halcyon ones for Judy. The work was as grinding, but she had Rooney and Barron Polan and Roger Edens to talk to; and her home situation was the happiest it had been since her father’s death. Ethel had met a man named Bill Gilmore and had fallen in love.

  William Gilmore was no replacement for Frank Gumm. He lacked the warmth, charm, and communication that came from mutual talents and interests. Broad, weathered, and masculine, he looked as if he might have wandered off a Western set. A “dress” extra, perhaps—because he was not of the stuff of real cowboys. For that matter, his background was unclear, and so was his occupation. He possessed very little knowledge of films and the industry; stocks, mines, and investments punctuated his conversation. It was obvious he had bummed around the country, had held a variety of different jobs, and had come to California in search of a golden dream.

  Judy did not take to him, but so relieved was she that Ethel’s attention was diverted that she welcomed him into the family. Yet from the day Bill Gilmore married Ethel and moved into the house, Judy planned her own departure. Being only seventeen made that difficult. It was a waiting game—but a short one. In six months she would be eighteen, an age when it seemed plausible for her to have an apartment of her own.

  And a place of her own had become imperative—for those early months of Ethel’s marriage to Gilmore reopened doors that had been sealed shut for a long time. For a number of years the pressures of Judy’s career had been so intense and Ethel’s vigilance so consuming that sex had played only a small part in either of their lives. At the same time that she wanted to appear glamorous, to attract the young men she fancied, and to be thought of as the belle of the ball, Judy had desperately tried to bury all thoughts of sex, choosing a more romantic attitude. Ethel’s seducing, touching Gilmore was difficult for a young daughter to observe—and, as Ethel had not been as affectionate with her own father, impossible for Judy to accept.

  On the screen Judy was being confronted with an image of herself as America’s sweetheart—Andy Hardy’s next-door neighbor, the girl one eventually marries but with whom one never has premarital sex. Rooney ran off with all those sex bombshells, but Judy and the audience were convinced—because Judy represented what she did—that he would eventually come home to her.

  But offscreen there was Ethel being unfaithful to her father’s memory; and there was Mayer, who, with his wife ill, with his power and money at its zenith, and with the encroachment of middle age, had—after a number of years spent in the pursuit of his ideal of the American woman (Jeanette MacDonald and Myrna Loy falling into this category)—let loose the satyr in him. His old pal Frank Orsatti took a house in Santa Monica. There was a great deal of lecherous humor about the libidinous forays conducted at the beach house and much talk referring to the place as Metro’s Casting Couch.

  Judy was, therefore, affronted and confronted daily by a man who had set himself up as a father image and who was, at the same time, an outspoken moralist and a dirty old man.

  Mayer was famed for saying, “A son can hate his father but he must respect him.” In view of Mayor’s behavior, this was damned near impossible for the “children” on his payroll.

  13Nineteen hundred and forty was a leap year; and on February 29, both Judy and Rooney were in the audience of the ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel as nominees for an Academy Award. Bob Hope emceed the second half of the program, which was broadcast live on radio. The Awards to be given were for films released in 1939. It is the height of incongruity that Rooney had been nominated for his performance in Babes in Arms as Best Actor of the Year, whereas Judy’s nomination for the same film was as Best Juvenile Performer of the year (totally sexless, therefore).

  Nineteen hundred and thirty-nine was the year Gone with the Wind had been released. (Judy had attended the premiere at the Cathay Circle Theatre with Barron Polan.) The majority of awards—Best Film Director, Script, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, etc.—went to that film. However, Rooney lost out not to Gable, but to Robert Donat for Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

  The award for Best Juvenile Performer was won by Judy, who had also sung the winning song, “Over the Rainbow.” Publicity pictures of Judy standing with winners David O. Selznick, Vivien Leigh, Robert Donat, Leslie Howard, and Hattie McDaniel reveal a piquant young lady, badly dressed and poorly coiffed, looking like a youngster dressed in her mother’s clothes.

  Although Judy was escorted by Rooney to the Awards, another girl stood by as his date for the party immediately following. It was fate, because at that party Judy met the man who was to be her first grown-up romance—Tyrone Power. Not only was Power young and beautiful, he was the most popular rising star in Hollywood, having made In Old Chicago and Alexander’s Ragtime Band the previous year. Power told her she had a woman’s body and had to dress accordingly. He recognized that rather than a child in adult clothing, Judy was a restless, searching young woman. He found that “nervousness” exciting, her need for masculine attention compelling.

  There were stars in Judy’s eyes, and Mayer saw them immediately. Word went out to Louella Parsons that no mention of Power and Garland must be made in her column. Louella, who was answerable to only one god—Mayer’s friend Hearst—obeyed. Judy was called into Mayer’s office. She was never to see Power again. Mayer’s main reason was the sophistication factor. Films portraying Judy in the same All-American Girl role were being prepared. Babes in Arms was doing extremely well, and Strike Up the Band would soon be released. Judy was under eighteen; Power had dated all the worldly young starlets in Hollywood. There were accepted codes, laws to be respected. This was a period when girls under eighteen were called “San Quentin Quail,” implying that a man could be sent to prison if the girl claimed he had molested her. It was a time in which Errol Flynn and Charlie Chaplin had been loudly and openly condemned for relationships with young women. It was the height of hypocrisy for Mayer to cast the first stone, and it was incredibly insensitive of him not to realize how important this first affair was to Judy—making her for the first, and perhaps the only time in her life feel beautiful and loved. Mayer, in pursuit of winning his case through Ethel, now began to talk about her great future and a new contract making her a very rich young lady.

  Only a few days had passed when on March 9 an anonymous telephone call was made to the West Los Angeles police a
bout a plot to kidnap Judy. A nineteen-year-old youth was taken into custody, and he confessed that he and an older man had planned to kidnap Judy, take her into the mountains, and hold her for $50,000 ransom. The older man, identified as a “Frank Foster,” was at large, and the police had organized a search for him and placed a guard around Judy’s house.

  Terrified, Judy called on Power, who immediately took things into his own hands. Believing Judy should be away from the area of danger, he drove her down to Tijuana, leaving himself open to the scandal of a possible arrest on charges of the Mann Act (transporting a minor across a state line for immoral purposes). Ethel was told. Within hours, Judy and Power were forced to return to Hollywood. It was the last time they were to see each other as young lovers. Upon his return, Power began to date Lana Turner. It was the ultimate blow to Judy’s ego. Power offered no explanation; but of course, studio pressure could very well have been responsible for his breaking off the affair so coldly and so sharply.

  The kidnap scare faded into the past and Frank Foster was never found, but the episode and the disappointment in Power had unsettled Judy. The pressures and work schedule at the studio had increased to an even more frenetic pace. She was suffering extreme insomnia, and no quantity of pills seemed to help her sleep. No longer was she able to be “knocked out” for an hour or two between scenes. Nights were intolerable, sleepless; and the presence of Ethel and her stepfather troublesome. The house was too small and privacy impossible. She was a harassed, desperate young woman who did not know where to turn to find her own happiness and maturity.

  On Tuesday night following the Power fiasco, she appeared with Bob Hope on his radio show (she was making weekly appearances at the time). There she met David Rose, who conducted the orchestra. He was thirty years old, married to but separated from comedienne Martha Raye, and he had a quiet, intelligent, and mature manner. Born in London and educated at the Chicago College of Music, he also was a fine musician and a cultured, knowledgeable man. He was an established orchestra leader who specialized in symphonic arrangements of popular songs. He spoke to Judy about her musical phrasing, her cadence, her vibrato. She was certain she had fallen in love.