by Anne Edwards
Life with Minnelli, however, reached an impasse only short weeks after the completion of In the Good Old Summertime; and on March 31, 1949, Judy and Vincente made their announcements to the press. “It’s true—we’re happier apart,” Judy admitted. “Yes, we have separated” was all Minnelli would say.
Within the next few weeks, the small amount of emotional security Judy had been able to muster through the making of the Pasternak film went to pieces. She was back on the treadmill—pills, sleeplessness, and suicidal tendencies. For the first time, she accepted the truth: that without professional help she was not going to survive. She felt she had to get far, far away from Hollywood. This time Dr. Kupper recommended Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston.
On May 28, 1949, accompanied by her new manager, Pasadena socialite Carlton Alsop (married then to Sylvia Sidney), Judy arrived in Boston. (Pictures survive of Judy on the steps of the hospital with a nurse by her side. She bears the look of a woman who is recuperating from a severe and debilitating illness—one who has been in the hospital for a long time). “She feels better already,” Alsop confided to the press. “Maybe all she needed was to get away from Hollywood for a while. After all, she has spent almost her entire life on a movie lot. She has made twenty-seven pictures in thirteen years. She’s a little tired and she’s under suspension.” He did not add that after all that productivity, and in spite of the fact that she had been one of the top ten box-office attractions for 1940, 1941, and 1945, Judy Garland was broke. There was not, for that matter, money to finance the Boston trip and the hospitalization. Alsop appealed to Mayer; and Mayer, playing the “indulgent father,” agreed to pay her bill.
Judy was at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital for thirteen weeks (Alsop remaining close by with his wife to make sure “all remained well”). She was placed on a rigid schedule. Pills and liquor were withdrawn, and lights went out in her room at 9 P.M.> and remained off whether she slept or not. She was fed three generous meals a day. After four weeks, the first agony of withdrawal ended. Since Judy was weak and despondent and yearning for Liza, the doctors at the hospital decided she was ready for some kind of “active therapy.”
Peter Bent Brigham has an annex for retarded children. It was suggested to Judy that she “give” an hour or two a day to the entertainment (storytelling, singing simple songs, etc.) of these children, many of whom had been there for twelve or thirteen years. The experience was a traumatic one for Judy, remaining with her for years after and influencing her decision thirteen years later to star in A Child Is Waiting—a nonsinging role in which she portrayed the music teacher in a school for the retarded.
“All I can remember is their eyes,” Judy recalled later.
In her childhood she had imagined men staring at her through closed doors. Before live audiences she was aware of “all those eyes upon you.” She was drawn to men with soulful eyes, liked to play sad-eyed clowns, and was haunted in her lonely hours by the memory of Liza’s wide brown eyes. These retarded children—some in their late teens and early twenties but still mentally no more than seven or eight—were unguarded in the desperate need to be loved that their eyes revealed. Most retarded “children” live out their lives in institutions, and after the first year parents’ visits become farther and farther apart. Other family members seldom visit—so that when a parent dies or leaves the area, the “child” is always “waiting” for that representative of outside love.
The “children” at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital responded immediately to Judy. They had seen The Wizard of Oz. Her voice was familiar to them. From the very first moment she entered the ward they waved and called “Hi” to her, thinking she was someone they knew well; for unable to retain the memory of a book or story or film for more than a few hours, they did store familiarity. That inimitable Garland voice could not be misplaced, and its warmth assured them they had not been mistaken. Judy was someone they knew. Judy represented outside love.
One child—a small, dark-haired little girl not much older than Liza and with those same wide brown eyes—resisted. Her gaze fixed and followed Judy over the entire ward; but she remained huddled, totally withdrawn, her body wrapped about itself in a fetal position. She had not spoken a word in the two years she had been on the ward, communicating with neither the other children or the staff. Rejected completely by her family, she had no visitors.
It became the major point of each day for Judy to spend time with this little girl. She talked to her conversationally, expecting no reply and moving on to another story or confidence without stopping. She told her all about herself and Liza and about California. She sang nursery songs to her. Braver after a time, she reached out and touched the child. The little girl listened to her but never returned an emotion, a word, or a touch. The staff was hopeful, and Judy continued. Being needed in this direct situation took Judy away from her former destructive self-concentration. She improved slowly but steadily. The migraines lessened; the depression lifted greatly; and she was able to sleep. After three months Mayer, who was still paying the astronomical bills at the hospital, insisted that she should be able to return to work or be released from her contract, thereby acquitting Metro of any financial obligation to her.
Once more Joe Pasternak appeared as her savior. He was set to produce a film entitled Summer Stock. Hearing about Mayer’s ultimatum, he went to Mayer and requested Judy for the lead. Mayer agreed. Pasternak rang Judy personally at the hospital.
This time, returning to work was to be a big mistake. The hospital felt Judy needed another three months to fully recuperate; but feeling more alive than she had in years, Judy disagreed. She accepted Pasternak’s offer and prepared to leave Peter Bent Brigham. The last thing she did was go to the ward to say goodbye to the retarded children.
The staff had prepared them for Judy’s departure. The older ones were dressed for the occasion, and each one presented her with some flowers from the hospital garden. But the little girl was not present. Judy went in search of her and found her on the last bed of the last ward. Judy walked over to the child and sat down on the edge of the bed. The child huddled there, staring at her with wide, sad, dark eyes.
It was a moment that obviously held great meaning for Judy. The child might well have been retarded, but she was sensitive enough to realize she had been rejected and deserted. Her muteness was a defense, a wall against further rejection. The staff had fully briefed Judy on this problem. They had felt Judy could break through to the child. Now Judy was in terror that if she did—and leave—the little girl would retreat even deeper into her own solitary confinement. Still, she could not do anything but reach out to the child and try to draw her into an embrace, for Judy was by instinct a maternal woman.
The child broke out of the embrace, screaming and shouting Judy’s name at the top of her lungs. The sound was bloodcurdling, and all the other children and the staff came running. Then throwing herself prostrate into Judy’s arms, she clung to her fiercely and words, mostly unintelligible, poured from her between sobs. But Judy understood that the child did not want her to leave; and though she missed the train, she remained with the child for several hours until the storm had spent itself. She sat there by her side until she had fallen asleep. “I love you, I love you,” the exhausted child said before she closed her eyes. “If you love me, you must promise me you’ll talk to the nurses, because they love you very much too,” Judy replied. The child nodded her head.
There is no question of the impact this episode had on Judy’s life. It harked back to those terrible hours she had spent in strange hotel rooms when she had been no bigger than this little girl; the fear that she would be deserted by Ethel and everyone she knew. It brought to the surface her own guilt at leaving Liza in California, guilt that was reaffirmed by her holding and loving this strange child when Liza needed her love and might be feeling frightened and rejected. So, though the children had helped her get well and she was on her way to physical rehabilitation if she could sustain it, her state of mind was still not
stable; and at Peter Bent Brigham no psychoanalytic help had been initiated to enable her to understand any of her emotional reactions.
Returning to California fifteen pounds heavier than when she had left, she existed without pills and for limited hours slept without them; but she was in many ways even more insecure, even more confused at the role she wanted to play in her own life, than she had been before going to the hospital.
Upon reporting to the studio an ultimatum was issued: lose fifteen pounds before cameras roll. Judy began the diet-and-pill regimen, but was able to shed only seven pounds in eleven days. The studio was upset. Louella Parsons came out with an article chastising Judy: “I could spank Judy,” Louella said, “for not doing as the studio asks.”
The ball went back to Pasternak. Judy was still overweight. What was to be done? Pasternak’s decision was to let her play her film role (a New England farm owner who allows a summer stock company to use her barn for the summer and ends up as star of the show) at the weight she was. It gave her a truer farm-girl look, and Pasternak hoped that by Judy’s not having to concern herself with diet, her health would be assured. Such was not to be the case.
With Judy once again having to face many of the same problems she had before Peter Bent Brigham, often alone—Minnelli having moved out, and Liza being shifted back and forth; her friends occupied elsewhere—the sleeplessness set in again; and the pill pattern was set into motion and with it the alternating fits of highs and lows. Cut off from supply at the hospital, in the studio she could obtain through her masseur any amount that she needed. Pasternak was helpless to save her now. She was riding roughshod for destruction. Her performance was just as good as ever, but her working habits were impossible. She was constantly late, not appearing for retakes, refusing to come to rehearsals, and being short-tempered with everyone. Charles Walters was the director; Gene Kelly, her co-star. Neither ever worked with her again.
Two weeks after shooting ended, it was found that an additional song-and-dance sequence was needed. The “Get Happy” number was developed and Judy called back to the studio. Everyone was shocked to see her. She had lost over twenty pounds in two weeks and looked frail and quite ill. No one knew how she would get through the strenuous added takes, nor how they would ever match the plump Judy in the rest of the footage. The decision was to proceed anyway.
The “Get Happy” finale was without question the best footage in the film. Judy’s weight loss was glaring. Every reviewer was to pick it up, but her performance in the sequence was so exciting that no one truly seemed to care.
Judy went home; she was the weakest she had been in years, and those closest to her (at that time Kay Thompson, the doctor, the Pasternaks, Roger Edens, and her agent and manager) feared she would break completely. She was sent to the seaside resort of. Carmel for a rest.
22“It was a childhood,” Liza says, “to be reckoned with.” At three to four years of age it meant moving back and forth from her father to her mother; being exposed to Judy’s fits of depression, her suicide attempts, a hushed house one day, a madhouse the next. There were visits to the sets to watch her mother tensely perform. Hours spent waiting in silence on huge sound stages for her father to take her to lunch. There were enormous birthday parties, all with the same hired clown. And often there was her mother performing for her alone at home. She was a shy child. She liked to play games and pretend she was someone else, and even at three her eyes were wide and inquiring, dark and sad, and wise beyond their years.
She went to Carmel with her mother. Judy might not have been able to make it without her. The two of them played together in the strange, rented house, filling it with familiar games and stories and scents and sounds. It might have been difficult to discern who was playing mother, who was the child. The roles were to be confused throughout their lives. Judy was bruised and hurting badly, and Liza was helping her soothe her wounds.
This strange idyll lasted less than three weeks of the proposed six months. A call came from the studio. June Allyson was pregnant again and had to be replaced in the film she was preparing to do with Fred Astaire—Royal Wedding.
It was incredible that Mayer should even consider recalling Judy so soon after Summer Stock and all the production problems of that film. More so since Royal Wedding was to be a splashy musical with no fewer than seven lavish dance numbers in which the female star would have to participate. He had had an expensive lesson with Judy in Annie Get Your Gun and had been responsible for most of Judy’s bad press. It was possible that the move was made because he assumed she would refuse to return so soon, thereby “forcing” the studio to place her on suspension and saving it a large sum of money. (Her contract then had one more year to run at a salary double the salary of the President of the United States.) Actually, if one wanted to examine more closely Mayer’s “generosity” in picking up Judy’s bills at Peter Bent Brigham, one would have to place it in its proper perspective. He had been the one to place her on suspension. That meant that though the studio paid her hospital bills for three months, it did not pay her salary.
There was, of course, the possibility that Mayer still did not take her illnesses seriously, that he considered her—as he was quoted by the press—“a spoiled, bad girl having a temper tantrum.” In that case, work could seem a logical curative or punitive measure; and two and a half weeks might appear a sufficient duration of time for her to be self-indulgent. Another factor was the success of the Garland-Astaire pairing in Easter Parade. Mayer was convinced that a successful team more than doubled the gross of a film, and very little meant more to the man than the figures he had to present to his stockholders. With Mayer still the highest-salaried man in America, Metro profits had to be substantial to ensure such a large salary.
As in the past with Thalberg, LeRoy, and Minnelli, Mayer had once more found a personable and talented young man, Stanley Donen, who with Gene Kelly had just directed his first film—On the Town. Thinking Donen might be capable of the same stylistic flourishes as Minnelli, it was natural that Mayer would believe that working together, Donen and Garland could create an exciting film chemistry. And he must have convinced Judy of this, for she—to everyone’s amazement and her doctor’s horror—accepted, returning with Liza immediately to Hollywood.
Her reasoning had been that the press, seeing the studio’s faith in her so reinstated, would have a change of heart and that the past might be forgotten if the present included a successful film. Rehearsals began immediately upon her return. There were those seven dance routines to learn, as many songs, costumes to be fitted, weight to be maintained. The masseur started on her “fitness treatments,” and pills were again easily accessible. The migraines returned. Sleeplessness plagued her; she was nervous, tense, ill. One morning she thought she might have had a stroke. She was unable to get out of bed.
For the second time she was fired through Western Union. The telegram was delivered to her house. She was not only off the film, but “refusing” to work on a film in progress was a breach of contract. She was fired from the lot.
Minnelli and Carlton Alsop were at the house moments later. Judy was in a hysterical state. Minnelli was trying to do what he could to protect Liza from seeing her mother so distraught. It was only a short time before the press was at the door and on the telephone. Insinuating headlines came before the day was ended. There were strong hints that Judy was both a drug addict and an alcoholic.
No one kept the papers from her. She read them alone in her bedroom. She could hear the men’s voices downstairs, but Liza was apparently asleep. Dragging herself off the bed, she went into her bathroom, locking the door after herself. She was very conscious of what she planned to do and very frightened. It seemed to her that the humiliation was just too much. She thought she wanted to die. But it is obvious that if this had been the case, she would simply have emptied the bottle of Nembutals that was on her bedside. Instead, she broke a drinking glass and cut her throat—“lightly” (her own word), “so that it wouldn’t hurt t
oo much.” As soon as she saw the blood spurt, panicking with the sudden realization of what she had done, she unlocked the door of the bathroom and stumbled back to her bed screaming and crying hysterically. Minnelli and Alsop were at her side in a matter of seconds.
On June 21, 1950—eleven days after her twenty-eighth birthday—United Press issued this release:
Judy Garland may not make any more pictures for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a studio spokesman said today.
Miss Garland rested at home with a bandage on her neck while Jane Powell tried out for the part in Royal Wedding over which Miss Garland cut her throat slightly with the edge of a drinking glass Monday night. The action took place after she found out she had been taken off the picture.
“Jane Powell is the number one candidate to replace Judy,” said Arthur Freed, producer of the movie. “Jane is trying out the songs right now on a rehearsal stage. We hope Judy does come back to make movies, but we can’t say positively.”
An MGM spokesman added that whether “the now nervous singer will ever face a camera again remains to be seen.”
After sixteen years, it was “all over” between Judy and Metro. Mayer did not even send condolences. There was no severance pay, no retirement, no residuals for the twenty-eight films she had appeared in which had made about $80 million for the studio and would make that again in replay and in television sales.
Mayer issued this statement to the press: “I couldn’t have done more for her if she had been my own daughter.” Judy had been released from her contract “in her own best interest.”
In desperate financial straits until she could figure out what to do with the huge house and with her future, Judy asked Mayer for a loan. Mayer called Nicholas Schenck, Chairman of Loew’s, Incorporated. Schenck refused. As he replaced the receiver, Mayer’s words to Judy were “If they’d do this to you, they’ll do this to me too.” (It was a prophecy that was to come true a few years later.)
