by Anne Edwards
Priceless paintings were borrowed from the extensive collection of E. F. Albee and exhibited in the lobby; flashing crystal chandeliers replaced the outdated lighting; walls were painted a creamy ivory and trimmed in glistening gold; and a red velvet carpet was spread from the curb in front of the theater right up to the stage.
Opening night, a solid police cordon was called out to keep in check the mass of fans that teemed Duffy Square. Tickets were a $6 top, and the house was sold out, with signs reading NO STANDING ROOM. Backstage, Judy, pacing nervously amid the huge bouquets in her dressing room and flanked by Luft and accompanist Hugh Martin, was filled with the same last-minute opening-night terror she had experienced at the Palladium.
She was dressed in stylish black; but she was aware that while slimmer than she had been in England, she was still grossly overweight, and that an audience blazing with jewels worn by society figures and film stars—an audience of famous people like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, Durante (who had once played the Palace himself), and Jack Benny—now being shown to their seats, had never seen her fat.
She was scheduled to appear in the second half of the program, directly following the intermission—the usual spot for the top act in a vaudeville revue. After an overture led by orchestra conductor Don Albert, which included a medley of Garland hits, a teeterboard group opened the show. They were followed by the youthful Doodles and Spider, who were making their first Broadway appearance—though they had previously scored heavily at The Blue Angel. Then came Smith and Dale, the grand old vaudeville team who had, in 1909, headlined the first Ail-American vaudeville bill in Europe. Continental dancing stars Giselle and Francois Szony, a brother-and-sister act, appeared next. Comedian Max Bygraves, who had appeared with Judy at the Palladium, closed the first half.
As the plush and elegant red velvet curtains opened after the intermission, Don Albert raised his baton, and a group of eight young men billed as Judy’s Eight Boy Friends danced out onstage and introduced her. Judy stood, keyed up in the wings, snapping her fingers, tapping her foot to the beat of the music. Stepping from the wings on cue, she remained initially concealed by her chorus line of youthful male hoofers. There was a flash of her black velvet gown as they parted to let her through. On her appearance the audience stood and shouted, applauding wildly. Judy stepped to the footlights. The applause grew. She cupped her hands and yelled, “Hello!” at the top of her voice. The audience laughed, and Judy with them. Judy was more at ease and in command than she had been at the Palladium. She felt a rapport with the audience; and as Don Albert led the orchestra into her opening number—“Until You Play the Palace”—they quieted and sat down while Judy remained at the footlights for the opening bars. It was a warm and welcoming gesture.
The “Palace” number was reminiscent of the Palladium opener—“It’s a Long Way to Piccadilly”—in that Judy was having a musical dialogue with her audience. She related a few facts about her career, kidded the newspapermen about probably reporting that she needed to lose another ninety pounds, and then paid homage to the Palace and the great stars who had preceded her, singing their greatest hits—Fanny Brice’s “My Man,” Sophie Tucker’s “Some of These Days,” and Eva Tanguay’s “I Don’t Care.”
By now the audience was cheering her on to do her own songs. She was beginning to feel the power, the chemistry, the connection between the audience and herself. Tossing the microphone wire over her shoulder in a gesture that was pure camp (she had used a similar gesture at the Palladium but with not so much bravado), she set the mood for the performance to follow. Striding back and forth across the stage, she welcomed Hugh Martin and then launched into “You Made Me Love You,” after which she belted out “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby,” “The Trolley Song,” “For Me and My Gal,” and “Come Rain or Come Shine.” She picked up her skirt to reveal an orange crinoline petticoat and wiped her brow with a matching orange handkerchief. “Gotta have some water,” she exclaimed. “You don’t know how hot it is up here.” Then, taking a pitcher and a glass off the top of Hugh Martin’s piano, she walked to the footlights with it. “Anybody want a glass of water?” she asked in a clear, ringing voice. She used a lot of the same dialogue she had introduced into her English performances, but made it sound completely spontaneous. Returning to the piano, she did some dance steps, this time without falling, and on an almost blacked-out stage managed a few smooth and humorous pratfalls with Charles Walters.
Leaving the Eight Boy Friends to do a number on their own, she startled the audience on her return to the footlights by having stripped down to black tights, a dashing tuxedo top, and a top hat to sing “Hallelujah, Come On, Get Happy!” from Summer Stock. It was perhaps the most theatrical moment in the show, for despite her weight the Garland legs were still exquisite and difficult to tear one’s eyes from. The house rose to a tumultuous ovation at the end of this number, and the continuing applause covered the opening bars of “This Is My Lucky Day.”
While Judy’s Eight Boy Friends once again held the stage, she changed costumes, reappearing this time in chalky tramp makeup and baggy hobo costume and assisted by an agile male partner, Jack McClendon, did the “We’re a Couple of Swells” number from Easter Parade. The true gamin in her shone forth. She grinned mischievously through blacked-out teeth, fluttered her battered hat, and batted her painted eyes. The audience screamed out their approval; and she stood there—the lonely tramp: the Chaplin pose Ethel had taught her so many years before—and waited. It was a long time before silence came. When it did, she went down to the footlights, battered hat in hand, sitting down in the footlight trough. Only one light on her face remained; the rest of the stage was in blackness. Cupping her chin in her hands and with tears in her eyes, she sang “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.”
The theater had never seemed more alive than it did with Judy poised on the edge of the stage in that cavernous darkness voicing a lost child’s pitiful lament; and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when she was done. She stood, and for a full three minutes the audience cheered and applauded her. “I’m not good at making speeches,” she finally faltered. “What can I say except bless you, good night, and I love you very much.”
At that point the usherettes came down the aisles and filled the stage with floral tributes, and it was many minutes more before the audience would let her leave.
Once again, as in London (though now polished and used to best advantage), her performance carried little admixtures of “salesmanship”—perhaps Walters and Lastfogel and Luft might have called it “showmanship.” In many ways this tainted the essential purity of her performance, but it did infuse her with a new image. There was a certain frenzy in her attitude— the quick staccato steps alternating with impatient striding across the stage, the whiplike tossing of the microphone cord over her shoulder, grabbing the instrument itself in an almost desperate manner, the impassioned energy in the delivery of her songs.
There was no question that in an effort to fit up-to-date American entertainment values she had permitted herself to be “presented”—that is, slightly industrialized. The act was flashy, and some thought it succeeded in spite of this, not because of it.
Quoting Harold Clurman:
[Judy] is at bottom a sort of early twentieth-century country kid, but the marks of the big city wounds of our day are upon her. Her poetry is not only in the things she has survived, but in a violent need to pour them forth in vivid popular form, which makes her the very epitome of the theatrical personality. The tension between the unctuously bright slickness which is expected of her medium and environment and the fierceness of what her being wants to cry out produces something positively orgastic in the final effect.
This was a historic night for her. She now knew that she had opened a new and exciting door in her career; there was the admiration of her peers, the adulation of her fans, a basket of roses sent by Minnelli in Liza’s name to make her feel her child was with her; and there was Sid Luft, glowing,
cheering, loving. There had been a call from Ethel, and its effect remained the only tinge of uneasiness she had. Instinctively she knew Sid and Ethel would someday cross swords, and she was honest enough with herself to know who must win and to feel the first pangs of a guilt toward Ethel that would never again desert her.
Backstage was pandemonium. Mobs of reporters, photographers, and well-wishers crowded around her, all telling her how wonderful she was. “Thank you, thank you,” she repeated again and again, grasping, holding on to each extended hand. “Are you coming to my party?” she would inquire. “You must come to my party. I’ll probably go straight home and collapse, but you must go to my party!” Everyone laughed.
Luft had planned a reception for her at the “21” Club. She changed into an ultrafeminine blue tulle off-the-shoulder. The confusion had already set in. She was the toast of Broadway, but she was dressed like a Hollywood starlet at a studio preview.
At least five thousand fans blocked her exit. “I’ve been on this beat twenty years,” a policeman said. “I’m telling you I’ve never seen anything like it.” Sid and four policemen guided her through the crowd. All around her rose shouts of “Judy! Bravo! Bravo!” To Judy they must have drowned out even the harsh sounds of nighttime Manhattan.
The sophisticated and crowded interior of the “21” Club looked a bit like a Metro spectacular. It seemed everyone was there and toasting Judy in the most expensive champagne. Luft was ostensibly the host, but in fact, Judy was picking up the tab. It did not diminish her excitement as she waited with all her supporters for the morning newspapers to carry the reviews.
But what a grand irony that Robert Garland, the man whose name she had borrowed and then kept as her own twenty years before, was the man chosen by the Journal-American to review the show! “There were shining show people in the good old days,” he wrote. “There can be shining show people now. Witness Miss Garland. It is as if vaudeville had been waiting somewhere for her to come along, and she, in turn, for vaudeville.”
But perhaps the most moving review was written by Clifton Fadiman and appeared in Holiday magazine several months later. “As with all true clowns,” wrote Mr. Fadiman,
. . . she seemed to be neither male nor female, young nor old, pretty nor plain. She had no “glamour,” only magic. She was gaiety itself, yearning itself, fun itself.
. . . She wasn’t being judged or enjoyed, not even watched or heard. She was only being felt, as one feels the quiet run of one’s own blood, the shiver of the spine, Housman’s prickle of the skin; and when looking about eighteen inches high sitting hunched over the stage with only a tiny spotlight pinpointing her elf face, she breathed the last phrases of “Over the Rainbow” and cried out its universal, unanswerable query, “Why can’t I?,” it was as though the bewildered hearts of all the people in the world had moved quietly together and become one, shaking in Judy’s throat, and there breaking.
For nineteen weeks she played to packed houses. The grind was brutal. On a Sunday less than four weeks after she had opened she collapsed and was rushed to the Le Roy Hospital on Sixty-first Street, and there treated by a Dr. Udall Salamon for nervous exhaustion. By midweek she was back onstage. It was a marathon engagement. Eight hundred thousand people came to see her—breaking every existing record at the Palace.
She closed on a Sunday, February 24, 1952. Jimmy Stewart and Lauritz Melchior, the Metropolitan Opera star, were in the audience. Both joined her onstage at the finale, and Mr. Melchior, who was to follow her into the Palace, led the audience in a music tribute, singing—as her last English audience had sung—"Auld Lang Syne.”
The past would appear over and done with—swept away, lost, forgotten in the vitality of her new self, her newfound life-style. Luft was by her side. They were living a brassy, late-night life, thriving on nightclub smoke, surrounded by new faces—Broadway folk, nightclub habitués, musicians, and gamblers. She had earned $20,000 a week at the Palace and had never seen a penny of it, trusting Luft and Lastfogel to handle the finances. The Garland bandwagon had greased its motor and refueled, and the world was once again climbing aboard. But Judy loved the feeling of being “surrounded.” She was, in fact, very happy. Liza was on her mind, but she dreamed of a new future for the child, and she was looking forward to their being reunited.
She was, in fact, heading toward California. For on April 26, she was to open at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles.
Hollywood columnists Sheilah Graham, Hedda Hopper, and Mayer’s old friend Louella Parsons all announced from their Hollywood perches that Judy was on “thecomeback road”
26In an interview before her Los Angeles opening Judy told the world, “Sid has done it for me; that’s my fella.” And Luft had added: “I love Judy. I want to protect her from the trauma she once knew. I don’t want her to be bewildered or hurt again. I want her to have happiness.”
Judy was desperately in love and experiencing new sensations. There was a certain abandon in her feelings toward Luft that she had never felt before. Sid was tough, strong, and opinionated. From the onset of their relationship he was Number One and Judy the follower. She loved the role. It made her feel extremely feminine. She told herself she would be protected now, cared for, understood. But at heart she remained dreadfully insecure. Accordingly, she found herself constantly testing him. Therefore, there was never truly a time when they didn’t have “spats.”
While still with Luft, she wrote an article for Coronet magazine titled “How Not to Love A Woman,” in which she stated, “We [women] must know, beyond doubt, that we’re safe with you [men]. That you can take it, that you are not bluffing about your strength and most of all, that you care enough to win.” And in another part of the article she writes, “We will seem to be fighting you to the last ditch for final authority . . . But in the obscure recesses of our hearts, we want you to win. You have to win. For we aren’t really made for leadership. It’s a pose.”
Luft was not about to yield his leadership or hand Judy the reins, as she might have feared. Yes, there were moments of confusion, twinges of alarm, an instinct that perhaps she should pull back. Always moved by the passage in the Bible in the Book of Ruth, “Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge,” she comments at the end of her Coronet article on this philosophy: “We weep because we think of it as a beautiful description of woman the follower. To many of us it means that you [men] alone must be the leader. If you are, nothing else really matters.”
There was, however, that key word “leader”—its interpretation and the confusion it brought to Judy. Luft had a strength that was born of toughness, not courage, and an ability not so much to lead as to drive others who could help him satisfy his own needs. In Judy’s case and at this point in her life, the latter worked as a positive force. Luft craved the limelight, a showy, ostentatious life—wanted to be “in the big time.” He had already come to terms with his own inability to gain these ends by himself. All of which gave his one true talent—the art of promoting—a thrust forward.
Luft was, however, no Mike Todd or P. T. Barnum. Lacking their genius, he had to first have a presold product. Where he could not succeed in making Lynn Bari a star of the first magnitude, he could take a star—Judy—and keep her in orbit. There were perhaps other agents, managers, promoters (who would have come into no more than 10 percent of the take) who could have done the same thing. But no one was willing to take the time, give the dedication, and risk the chance of personal jeopardy that working with Judy imposed. This was Luft’s additive—the extra ingredient that enabled him to get Judy on her feet, bigger, better, and more of a money-maker than ever before. In effect, he took over her life on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis. He bullied her, pushed her, praised her, beat her down, picked her up—at each turn carefully weighing which would in the end get her up on that stage playing to packed houses.
Until the very end of her affiliation with Luft, Judy claimed she never saw any of the money she made and in the early yea
rs never inquired about its disposition. Her feeling that Luft had to be Number One was a good assessment of his personality. By the time they were headed for California, he exerted full control over her. His ability to do this was one of his greatest attractions for Judy and certainly a complete reversal of the passivity of David Rose and the aestheticism of Vincente Minnelli. Only Mayer—and before him, Ethel—had ever made her sense that another power was greater than her own. Mayer was ostensibly out of her life, but Ethel was waiting for her in Los Angeles. Judy had not seen her in a year, and Luft and Ethel had not yet met. That meeting was scheduled shortly after their arrival in California. Depending on whose viewpoint one subscribed to, it was both fatal and highly successful. Each took an instant dislike to the other, and Ethel was made to understand that she was now the complete and total outsider.
Ethel was bereft. She was also aware that she stood no chance of cracking through the wall Luft placed between Judy and herself, because he would be on constant guard. She was extremely disturbed. She developed a painful ulcer, and her own resources were now shrunken so that her standard of living had to be altered. She had become fearful of her financial future—having always relied on Judy’s support, she feared Luft might influence Judy to withdraw it; but she was also concerned that he might exert other influences on Judy and that she might be losing her place in her daughter’s life.
Sought out by the press, Ethel made some unflattering remarks about Luft, ambiguously saying she thought he was bad for Judy but not specifying how or why. As soon as the newspaper report appeared, she had second thoughts on what she had done and tried to contact Judy, but to no avail—being told her daughter could not be reached. Asking the stranger to whom she was speaking (who was someone obviously in Judy’s employ) if Judy was disturbed by the newspaper report, Ethel received the reply that she was not. But, of course, this did not represent the truth. Judy was bitterly hurt and very protective of Luft. She refused to see Ethel while she was in Los Angeles. Fate stepped in and decreed that they were not to see each other again, though their tremendous mutual ability to create deep-rooted disturbances in the other’s life was far from over. Luft could pressure Judy not to see Ethel, but later it was beyond his capacity to exorcise Ethel’s ghost from her daughter’s psyche.
