by Anne Edwards
It seemed (and was) unlikely that Harper & Greenspan would proceed any further. Ridding herself of the Group V Ltd. contractual machinations was certainly one of Judy’s most triumphant legal encounters, but the unsavory aspect of the episode, the loathing she now felt for Luft, the bitter feelings she harbored of the past were a high price for her to pay.
Before even leaving the court, Judy reminded Deans of his promise to see what he could do about obtaining a license to wed. She wanted to be married immediately; certainly she did care for Deans, but at least in her eyes, a new marriage would be closing of a door to the past. However, according to California law, where her divorce decree against Mark Herron had been filed, no divorce was absolute until the final papers had been picked up. Herron had, so far, neglected to do this. Added to this complication was an English law requiring a two-week waiting period before a foreigner could be legally wed.
Judy and Deans returned to their suite, and Deans called Herron in California. Herron promised he would pick up the papers. Still, there was little chance of their marrying for several weeks. The joyousness of the morning’s victory was somehow dimmed, even though The Evening News came out with an early headline:
JUDGE TELLS JUDY:
CARRY ON SINGING!
adding the terse subheading:
AMERICANS’ BID TO STOP SHOW
IS THROWN OUT OF COURT
and with the very conservative Financial Times commenting: “For once the law has been anything but an ass.”
Judy and Deans ate a quiet dinner in their suite, and then Judy dressed for her opening night at The Talk of The Town.
The Talk of The Town might be called London’s Copaca-bana. It is an immense restaurant-nightclub, holding well over a thousand people, serviced by massive kitchens and bars. There is a vast balcony as well as the huge main floor with its wide stage, full orchestra, and commodious dance floor. Every six weeks there is a new “spectacular,” with beautiful showgirls and elaborate costumes and sets, but, as well, impresario Del-font always manages to lure the creme de la creme of the entertainment world. Judy was following such greats as Lena Home, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Tony Bennett, and her own daughter Liza Minnelli.
The lovers were met at the stage door by Glyn Jones, who was Delfont’s “ambassador”; his task was to assist Judy for the length of her run. They made their way past the mammoth backstage area, ascending the rear stairs to the first level, where the star’s dressing room was situated to their left. On the right was a small sitting room with a bar where people could wait to see her. The two rooms formed a “star suite.”
The club’s resident makeup artist, Vivian Martyne, was waiting for Judy in the flower-packed dressing room. She offered to remove some of the bouquets, but Judy insisted they all be left. As Ed Baily had known, she loved flowers, adored receiving them. They were notes of love to her. Kidding, she would say, “When I die I want my casket to look like it’s in a dressing room before an opening performance.”
With the exhaustion of the trip and the problems of the writ, Judy had only one rehearsal with Burt Rhodes, the musical director. Deans had met with him first, discussing with him the problem of the missing arrangements. Deans gave him the Carnegie Hall album, and from that, and in forty-eight hours, Rhodes had rescored eight numbers. What was never taken into consideration was that Judy’s physical condition had altered her stamina and her range since the Carnegie Hall concert. The numbers were arranged, therefore, in the keys she had sung in nearly a decade past. Some notes (especially the last in “Over the Rainbow”) were going to be almost impossible now for her to reach.
That evening (Saturday night) Rhodes went to the Ritz to meet Judy for the first time. He had seen her perform in ’54 when she had been in one of her heavy periods, and he was staggered when he was led into her sitting room, unable to believe this tiny, frail figure was Judy Garland. He had thought he had covered his surprise and that they had hit it off very well. Early Monday afternoon there was a rehearsal at the club, but Judy appeared unsteady on her feet and unable to sing at all, complaining she had a cold. Rhodes sat with her in the outer room of her suite and they talked about tempos as she watched workmen put up some red-flocked wallpaper. Judy was always putting personal touches into her dressing rooms. She loved the color red, even though she was not too fond of red roses, and often had red carpeting installed in her dressing rooms. In her Valley of the Dolls dressing room she had a pool table sent in, claiming pool was her current passion, but actually picking up a cue only once or twice.
Rhodes had been very concerned. He did not see how she could be expected to perform without benefit of rehearsal and under the conditions forced upon them (the lack of proper arrangements, etc.). But at eleven-fifteen Judy was dressed and walked onstage to an overwhelming ovation. At front tables sat Ginger Rogers (in London for Mame), Danny LaRue (England’s greatest female impersonator), David Frost, and Johnnie Ray. Greeting them happily, Judy launched into her opening number, “I Belong In London,” and proceeded to forget all the lyrics. Rhodes, believing he was helping, prompted her. As Judy preferred confessing her lack of memory to an audience rather than covering it up, it irritated her that Rhodes interfered. A difficult relationship was thereupon begun and, unfortunately, was to continue throughout the run of the show. From that opening moment Judy seemed set on creating havoc in the programming, switching her numbers around at random, and bringing LaRue onstage to sing an unrehearsed song. The audience, assuming it was all part of the show, loved it, and when at the end she sat down at the edge of the stage to sing “Over the Rainbow,” confessing to her audience, “We’ve been through a lot,” they gave her a tremendous ovation. The single spotlight was on her painfully thin and aging face. “I may croak a bit,” she told them and then with some amazement, added, “You know, they tell me this is the twelve thousand three hundred and eightieth time Fve sung this song!” Never had she sung it with more emotion, and never had it seemed to have more meaning. Derek Jewel in The Sunday Times had this to say about the performance:
Time has ravaged her singing voice. Within a certain range of scale, tone, and volume it survives—most beautifully in a downbeat arrangement of “Just In Time”; outside that range, the vibrato is wild and uncontrolled, the pitch uncertain. At times she needs to sing very artfully indeed to disguise the flaws.
But the singing is not so important as the tension and the compulsive gamble of the entertainment. For an hour she conducts a ritual whose contrasts would unhinge most performances. She moves around endlessly, with quick nervous gestures, darting uncertainly to her musical director or the glass on the piano. She bathes the ringside in schmaltz, kissing her admirers, dropping names, tempting applause to dry up. She mixes sharp cracks—“I’m going to do something extraordinary. Not only am I going to appear . . .” (uproar) “but I’m going to sing a new song”—with indistinct mumbling. Pert professionalism collides with urchin gaucherie.
That her first-night audience, even discounting its preponderantly showbiz nature, gave her so rapturous a reception is still not completely susceptible of explanation, but I will try.
She is a legend, and legends are revered. Yet her secret is partly that she makes fun of the legend, the songs, herself and her image, even the audience. Somehow, too, she has never grown up. Her body, slim and supple in a trouser suit of bronze, is frail and girlish. Yet when she sits in a spotlight to sing, “Over The Rainbow” she is not only Dorothy on the way to Oz but also a woman in her middle forties whom life has pummelled. The pathos is terrifying.
Above all, she stands for the immaculate nostalgia of a whole generation—Andy Hardy, Odeons on steamy afternoons, records of Glenn Miller and early Sinatra, girls next door. They don’t write life like that anymore, and Judy Garland evokes it for all those who wish that someone would.
How like a movie script of the Forties it is that half of her music was lost before the opening. But it was all right. Bandleader Burt Rhodes listened to her records and pro
duced sparkling orchestrations inside forty-eight hours. They don’t make many musicians like that any more either.
She proved that she still had the star quality, the magnetism—that she could control an audience to the extent of bending all the rules to indulge herself; but in her heart she was scared. She could not be alone and insisted Deans be by her side as much as possible, bringing him onstage to introduce him (she would end the lyric of “For Once in My Life” with “For once in my life I have Mickey, who needs me"); had him tape her performances, which ensured he would be backstage when she came off; and before she would step out on stage she would say to him, "Make me laugh.” To each interviewer she loudly proclaimed her love, her happiness. One interviewer indiscreetly asked her about her health. “Listen, if my number comes up, I’ll draw another” she retorted, as she clung to Deans.
Deans liked to think of himself as a swinger, and he thought it would be distracting and good for Judy to change her image. He took her to Carnaby Street, selecting mod clothes for both of them, buying everything in sight, unable to carry all the packages back to the hotel. She listened hungrily to his plans, his promises, his quick enthusiasms. He never seemed to be intimidated by the future. She liked that. He bossed her around. She liked that, too.
But the anguish and guilt at not being able to have Lorna and Joey with her was growing, her bitterness toward Luft intensifying with the knowledge that though he was unstable, he was the more qualified of the two to be a parent at this time. And try as she might (and she did), she could not crush her dependence upon the pills. When she did cut her intake (she was then taking between twenty and thirty Ritalin a day and about eight Seconals to sleep), the withdrawal pains and the depression were unbearable.
Several nights after the Talk of The Town opening, Deans found her in a withdrawal stage, pills gone, the show only hours away. He contacted Glyn Jones, who in turn contacted a doctor who came up to the Ritz Suite believing it was Deans in need of medical attention. It took only moments for the doctor to zoom in on the true picture, though he did not see Judy at all. She was in the large bedroom, lying concealed in the dark, and Deans led him straight past the door and into the sitting room. He issued Deans a prescription for a small supply, not refillable without his knowledge, and left. Several hours later, he was called back. Deans asked him if he would accompany them to the club; the doctor this time met Judy, who had not yet overcome her unsteadiness from the withdrawal. He agreed to go with them.
This physician might be termed a specialist in show-business personalities, having treated many of them over the years. He is himself quite a theatrical personality, charming, witty, able to dispense a good joke along with his diagnosis. Having treated pill-addicted stars for years, he took the familiar course of making the pills available to Judy, but in measured amounts.
He was quite talkative as they drove in the limousine toward the club, telling her about Tony Hancock, the famous English comedian, who had also been a patient of his. “Tony was a great fan of yours,” he confided. “It seems rather ironic that less than a year ago we were riding in a car on the way to an engagement of his and he told me that of all the entertainers in the world, someday he hoped to do a show with Judy Garland. And here I am in a car with you and Tony is dead. He died in Australia, you know, only eight months ago. Suicide. Such a waste.”
“He’s not dead,” the physician says Judy replied. ”A great entertainer doesn’t really die.”
Then he reports that he stared at the figure seated in the semidark beside him, thinking “she looks like a wizened little old monkey.” She weighed under ninety pounds, her eyes were too big for her face, her bones protruded sharply wherever flesh was exposed, and though she was enveloped in perfume (she had recently switched from Joy to Ma Griff e)9 there was a strong underlying body odor. The doctor asserts that she was suffering from malnutrition and that she was having problems passing anything through her colon. He wondered about a colonic obstruction, but he didn’t press the matter. Though he did openly discuss her addiction.
“Do you understand anything about the pills you are taking, Judy?” he claims he asked, going on to explain: “Ritalin is an antidepressant, an ‘up’ as you say, but it not an amphetamine. There are many amphetamines with brand names like Dexe-drine, Benzedrine, etcetera. I will never, ever prescribe those for you and I warn you severely, never take them. They will kill you.”
“Don’t you know any good jokes?” she countered.
The doctor reached back in his repertory and found one.
It was a tragedy that Judy was always fearful that a doctor might report her to the authorities as an addict, and so did not discuss her physical problems. Still it remains a great enigma how all those close to her allowed her to ignore her appalling health problems. True, Judy was extremely strong-willed, but she could be influenced by each of the successive men she loved. Most of them encouraged her to perform, reminding her of her old nagging, childhood guilt that not to perform was the worst degree of misbehavior. There were many reasons why Judy felt she must perform: she needed her audience; she was fearful of not getting her pills if she did not perform; she felt she must be the one to pay the bills; and she desperately needed the approval and attention of those close to her, and only performing could bring her that. If it dawned on her that she had an equal right to expect a husband or lover to support her, she never gave it full consideration. That might have gone back to the relationship with her father; for Frank Gumm—though thoroughly capable of supporting his family—had not stopped Ethel from singling Judy out as the one child who was expected to work. In order to rationalize Frank Gumm’s behavior, it was not unlikely that Judy might feel she had to excuse all the other men in her life.
She was leaning heavily upon religion, reading the Bible whenever she was in sound mind, and in the final analysis, looked to God as one would to a husband or father. “Hasn’t He always looked after me and the kids?” she would say, and quote passages at random. The fact that she had never been married in a church caused her great concern. There was a young clergyman in London whom she had known and consulted in the past. Prevailing upon Deans, she arranged for him to meet this young man, The Reverend Peter Delaney, to see if they could be married in his church.
The minister, whose church was the same one in which Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning had been wed, felt that if all the legal problems of the divorce from Herron could be settled, there would be no reason why the two could not be married at St. Marylebone Parish.
Taking the Reverend Delaney with him, Deans went down to file a marriage application at Caxton Hall and to establish residence for the two-week waiting period required. He had already called Judy’s attorney in California, Godfrey Isaac, and knew that Herron had not picked up the final papers. He now was told Herron would sign a letter stating that he (Herron) was not responsible for any taxes accrued during their marriage, as he had, at the time, signed a joint income-tax return.
This meant more delays. Judy was frantic, apparently frightened that something would inevitably keep them from marrying. Her apprehension grew more unreasonable when Deans received a letter from Arthur informing him that he was fired. Interpreting this news as a possible impetus that might return Deans to New York to settle his affairs, Judy pressed for a blessing of their union in Peter Delaney’s church, rationalizing that vows exchanged in a church would necessarily be binding even if they were not legal marital vows. Reverend Delaney agreed to bless them.
That night Judy appeared radiant onstage. The watchman at the club had a large brown-and-white Alsatian dog that Judy had mothered each night. He could see that Judy was in love with the animal and told Deans he would like Judy to have the dog. Deans accepted the offer that night. It seemed a very special omen to Judy. She named the dog (his name had been Rags) Brandy, and brought him into her dressing room. The dog was bigger than she was. She hugged him around the neck constantly as she dressed and left him backstage as she went on.
She was ecstatic, making it difficult for Rhodes, changing the program as she went along, inviting thirty to forty members of the audience to sit on the edge of the stage as she sang. She was wearing a glittering white pants suit with a red ruff about her neck and silver slippers on her feet, and shook hands with everyone near to her like a Presidential candidate. Borrowing drinks and handkerchiefs, she exchanged witticisms with Rhodes and members of the audience. At one point, as Rhodes valiantly struggled to follow a new music cue she had just given him, she said, “Now Fd like to do Aida.” It brought down the house.
After the show, like a sixteen-year-old going out on her first date, she took tremendous pains in dressing, deciding upon a long, soft blue-gray dress, demurely high at the neck and tight at the wrists, and wearing a string of pearls and pearl earrings that Tony Bennett had given her the Christmas before—keeping on the silver slippers, and using very little makeup.
They knelt before the altar that Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning had knelt before. Judy had wanted Deans to give her a ring, but he had not brought one. Reverend Delaney gave him one that had belonged to his grandmother. It was immense for Judy, but she put it on her middle finger and held her fingers tightly together so that it would not slip off. By three A.M. the blessing had been concluded and Judy and Deans had exchanged vows.
For the next ten days the show went quite well. Judy, overflowing with happiness and yet frustrated that she had promised to keep the blessing secret to avoid getting the Reverend Delaney in trouble, gave revealing interviews about her love for Deans, wanting the world to understand how sincere their feelings were. “I love him,” she told columnist Arthur Helliwell, “and loving him means I no longer have to love the lights and the applause.”
