by Anne Edwards
They began to see each other in any free time she had, and on June 10, her eighteenth birthday, he presented her with a ring and they announced their engagement. Earlier that day she had posed with Ethel and Mayer in Mayer’s office for reporters to announce her birthday and had given no indication to Mayer or the studio of the news release she was to issue later on her own. As soon as the press was informed, Mayer was contacted. She was called back to Mayer’s office. He was beside himself. Rose had two strikes against him: one, he was not yet legally divorced; and two, he had once dated Jeanette MacDonald (whom Mayer had courted). This time Judy resisted, but she did agree that they would see each other on a more private basis until Rose was free and they would postpone marrying until a suitable new film image could be devised for her. In the meantime, she announced that she wanted to move out of her mother’s house and into an apartment of her own. Mayer said he would condone this only if she had a “chaperone.” There was a young woman employed on the lot with whom Judy had been friendly. Mayer suggested the girl, whom he thought to be of good character and fine reputation. Judy agreed.
Moving into an apartment of her own filled her with newfound self-assurance. She was overworked, overmedicated, and underfed; but she was eighteen, in love, and on her own. More happiness did not seem deserved, but it was to come. Barron Polan had left MGM and was now an agent with Leland Hayward. Convincing Ethel that Judy was being “had” in the Mayer-Orsatti arrangement, he persuaded her to sign with Hayward, thereby representing Judy himself. It was not as simple as that would seem. After long and angry negotiation with Orsatti, Hayward bought Judy’s contract from the Orsatti agency for $25,000. Judy, at that time, was still getting $500 a week and as a “bonus” being permitted to retain the money she would earn from guest radio appearances. By this time she had already made millions for Metro.
However, on September 26, Mayer presented her with a new contract that Hayward and Polan had fought for vociferously. It was for seven years, and she was to receive $2,000 a week for three years, $2,500 for the two years following, $3,000 for the last two years, with a guarantee of forty weeks’ work each year. A total of $680,000 over seven years.
Ethel went with her to get the contract approved in Los Angeles Superior Court (Ethel receiving a sizable percentage of Judy’s salary until Judy reached twenty-one). That evening the blond, deeply tanned Rose and Judy, celebrating in Judy’s apartment, planned an early and secret elopement.
The next day, Judy was commanded back to Mayer’s office with Rose. The girl with whom she had been sharing her apartment turned out to have been a studio spy and had betrayed the lovers’ plans.
Under threat of his being blacklisted from every radio station and film lot, Rose agreed that they would wait the year Mayer, as stern patriarch of the studio, had originally demanded.
Part Two
MAGGIE: You’d think someone would come to me and say: Look, Maggie, you made us all this money. Now we want you to develop yourself. What can we do for you?
QUENTIN: Darling, they’d be selling frankfurters if there were more money in it; how can you look to them for love?
—After the Fall,
by Arthur Miller
14“Love,” in the words of Victor Hugo, “is the greatest thing in the world because it makes an angel or a god out of a grocery clerk.” But as a film star already has godlike stature, what height remains for ascension? Judy, with blind faith in David and herself, wanted nothing more than to be eighteen and in love. But the studio would not permit that.
With Little Nellie Kelly, Life Begins for Andy Hardy, Ziegfeld Girl, and Babes on Broadway set for the year to follow, she was not being given much time for her private life. When the two lovers were together, Judy was exhausted. In his quiet way, David tried to exert what pressure he could to get Judy to fight the studio on the rigors of her schedule and on their demand that she remain on a regimen of pills and dieting.
David worked hard. He was musical director of the Tony Martin radio show, and also was in demand as a musical arranger. But watching Judy’s backbreaking daily routine shocked him. There were 6 A.M. makeup sessions, wardrobe fittings, exhausting work before the cameras, dance rehearsals, new songs to memorize, dialogue to learn, sittings for the still photographer, interviews, and a shooting schedule that had her putting in (with almost no rest) sixteen- to eighteen-hour days. It was logical he would believe she should have at least one square meal a day for her own survival. She began to gain a little weight. As soon as this happened, a dress form of a fat woman appeared beside the mirror where she stood to have her wardrobe fittings. “Do you want to look like this dummy or a star?” an attached note reminded her.
The studio became more exacting. In its hands eighteen hours a day, she was forced to adhere to the soup diet Mayer had decreed. Chicken soup, black coffee and cigarettes (she was smoking four packs a day to fight her appetite), and pills every four hours became a way of life.
She later told Jinx Falkenburg and Tex McCrary in an interview, “I swear there must have been a vat full of chicken soup at the MGM commissary with my name engraved on it. If I sneaked in for a chocolate sundae with pecan nuts and bogs of whipped cream on top—I used to dream about those things—I would always get the same story: ‘Sorry, Mr. Mayer has left instructions about what you are to eat today—chicken soup.’”
The lovers’ favorite song was “Our Love,” which Rose had composed for her and which he interpolated into his radio program as often as possible; but as it stood, their love was not enough to sustain them. All Judy dreamed about was getting married. Marriage and love seemed interchangeable to her. Once she was married to David, her life would be totally different. She convinced herself of this. It got her through the majority of nightmare days. The rest of the time she relied on the pep-up pills the studio dispensed.
The rigid dieting kept her five-foot-two-inch frame down to ninety-eight pounds, but often, when she was near collapse, she would plead to Chuck Walters, the dance director, “I’m too hungry to continue.” Walters would reply, “Get on with it and you won’t be hungry.” Judy called him “the man with the bullwhip.”
The making of the films churned relentlessly like clouds in a hurricane sky. In Little Nellie Kelly (with George Murphy and Douglas MacPhail) she was allowed to grow up and have her first real screen kiss. Ziegfeld Girl found her with star billing—above that of Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner—and a role that gave her a more glamorous image. Judy Garland had matured before the public’s eyes.
Strike Up the Band was released to general acclaim and top grosses. It underscored Mayer’s philosophies and was overripe with such doggerel as momism, the kind banker, the reaping of fair reward, just deserts for good and evil; and once again an American flag proudly waved over a cast of thousands as they all marched in musical step to their happy endings.
Judy was to pay her last visit to Carvel in Life Begins for Andy Hardy. In this one Judy had also been allowed to grow up. Perhaps the most amusing fact about this film was that the Legion of Decency branded it “unobjectionable for adults”—which was another way of saying it was objectionable for children. This occurred because of a scene in the film in which a telephone operator separated from her husband invites Andy up to her apartment for an evening of unspecified “fun.” However, Andy’s father—Judge Hardy—prevails in the nick of time, giving his son a lecture on the importance of fidelity to the girl he will one day marry (Judy).
In her own life, marriage was constantly on Judy’s mind. It was not difficult to understand why. Driven by fantasies having their roots in frustration, rejection, and deprivation, she believed marriage would sweep away the past and purge the memory of those lonely hotel nights and of dismal one-night stands, as well as the patina of despair caused by her father’s death, and remedy her ravaged ego. But most of all, it seemed logical to her that the circle of David’s arms would be an amulet against sleeplessness. Perhaps this last was the most powerful incentive, for her nights were harr
owing bouts with insomnia. Alone, she would fill each room with a blasting radio; take as many Nembutals as she dared; then, terrified she had taken too many, counteract their effect with enough “uppers” to keep her awake.
Not only the studio but also Leland Hayward was concerned about the advisability of her marrying David Rose. Hayward’s reasons, however, were not the same. He was to all intents and purposes worried about the true depth of Judy’s feelings toward David Rose and her motivations for wanting to marry him. At the same time, having now obtained a star client and knowing how unstable she was, he did not want to chance her ability to maintain stardom if the marriage failed. He tried to talk Judy into living with Rose but not marrying him. She was reduced to anguished tears and then anger at this suggestion. A violent argument with Hayward followed, and she never again felt the same toward him; and though he had more power and influence at the studio than his fledgling agent, Barron Polan, she demanded that Polan alone represent her.
The night shooting ended on the Hardy film, Judy and David had dinner with Ethel and Gilmore. There was to be only a few days’ hiatus before rehearsals for Babes on Broadway were to begin. Forgetting any dream of a big church wedding, Judy pressed for an immediate elopement. For the first time in their lives, Ethel conceded to a move that might be difficult in terms of her daughter’s career but seemed paramount for her happiness. Being content herself, Ethel was tasting a bitter dose of guilt for the past. And also, as we know the intensity of Ethel’s need and ability to dream, one can imagine how this dream of Judy’s would appeal to her and block out all else. It was first agreed that the elopement would be kept secret. Then Ethel and Bill Gilmore hopped on a plane headed for Las Vegas with the young lovers, and at 1 A.M. on July 26, 1941, in a simple ceremony, Judy became Mrs. David Rose. A wedding picture survives: a radiant, painfully young Judy smiles up at the golden-tanned older man who is now her husband; and they are flanked by a stern, riveted Bill Gilmore, a smiling Betty Asher, and an exceptionally nervous-looking mother-of-the-bride.
Twenty-four hours later the studio had found out about the marriage and angrily demanded Judy report immediately for work on Babes on Broadway.
Fantasy, that grand comforter, enabled Judy to return to the harsh demands of a musical-filming schedule. The newlyweds had found a house they had fallen in love with and were preparing to move in. They bought the house from Shirley and Archie Preissman, but it had once been the mansion of Jean Harlow. Redecorated for the Preissmans by Tom Douglas, the house was done in what might be called Marie Antoinette by Courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It abounded in superrealistic copies of French antiques, satins, and brocades, and the details were carried out in “true” eighteenth-century style to the quill pen on the baroque library desk. Judy was in ecstasy. The house represented the fruition of all her childhood fantasies. The years she had dreamed of her father’s sharing such a house with her! She was not yet worldly enough to recognize the pseudo antiquity of the decor; the house gave her a sense of history, of permanence, of roots. Years of ill-heated hotel rooms and small suburban stuccoed houses in ice cream pinks and vanillas that seemed too common, too small to be a real home made the new house a dream come true. That its real history had begun less than twenty years before, that it had been originally built and designed for another Metro star, that Harlow had lived nights of anguish within its walls—died there—had no reality for Judy. She loved the thick white, wall-to-wall carpeting, the gracefully curved legs of the furniture, the delicacy of the wallpapers and lush richness of the fabrics; and that quill pen actually thrilled her.
To add a touch of the whimsical, the preposterous, David was a devotee of miniature trains, early American variety. His collection was (and is) vast, and of museum quality. His bachelor house had been small and in the San Fernando Valley, but the grounds had been able to accommodate his “railroads” (the trains, though miniature replicas, were large enough to ride in). Through the elegant glass doors of her small “chateau” Judy glanced out at one thousand feet of track that circled the house and a splendid, new, perfect replica of a train depot of Western origin and nineteenth-century vintage.
She was nineteen and had never run a house in her life. Ethel hired a couple to care for it. They treated Judy like a child and took their instructions from Ethel. Searching for dignity and an area of capability was not easy. Then she discovered she was pregnant. She was right in the midst of shooting Babes on Broadway. She kept it to herself for several weeks, finally sharing the news with David. Not so young as Judy, he saw the problems a pregnancy and a child represented. His lack of all-out enthusiasm dismayed and shook her. She went to Ethel carrying the “good news.” Ethel was upset and tried to explain what a baby now would mean. Yes, of course, Judy could complete Babes on Broadway before any physical signs would be detected, but the studio had another film—For Me and My Gal—lined up directly to follow. More of a consideration was her film image in all the pictures in release, about to be released, and planned for in the future. Motherhood did not suit Mickey Rooney’s or Andy Hardy’s girlfriend. Judy was distraught, but Ethel told her to go home to her husband and not worry about the problem for the present.
A Machiavellian sequence of events followed. Ethel immediately went to see Arthur Freed, who was producing Babes on Broadway and would be producing For Me and My Gal. They met with studio executives. There is no way of knowing whose suggestion it was, but they all agreed that the best thing for Judy’s career and for the studio would be for Judy to have an abortion. Ethel seemed assured that though abortion was illegal in the State of California and Judy, therefore, would be forced to have the operation sub rosa, it would still be performed under the best of all circumstances. She went back to Judy, who was both shocked and shaken by the proposal.
David appeared to be non-supportive on her behalf, and so, unable to talk with her sisters, or to broach such a delicate subject to Roger Edens, embarrassed to do so with Rooney, and estranged from Leland Hayward, Judy consulted Barron Polan. Very young then himself (early twenties) and not knowledgeable in the ways of women, Polan did not recognize the full portent of the situation except in terms of his friend/client’s career and his own. He took a placatory, yet noncommittal stand.
She had the abortion at a Hollywood hospital. Ethel accompanied her; the studio doctor performed it. Press notices went out that she had had a small tonsil flare-up. In forty-eight hours she was home, and forty-eight hours after that she was back in the Metro recording studio, working on the synchronization of some of the big musical numbers in Babes on Broadway.
15Perhaps if she could have forgiven herself, she could also have forgiven David. If she had loved herself more and her need for approval had been less, she might have fought the studio and Ethel on the abortion. No one had drugged or kidnapped her. She had finally just weakened and agreed and, with Ethel leading the way, had followed obediently in step to the hospital room. She had signed fraudulent papers, betrayed her own needs and desires, and then, terrified of the ordeal before her, had not even taken a last, desperate stand. She could not forgive herself, so how was it possible for her to forgive the others?
Early training had not taught her how to fight on her own or for herself. Never allowed to court the idea that she owed any fidelity to her own needs, she considered herself a chattel to her “career”; and she never once came to understand that it was her career, her bandwagon, and all the others were on for a free ride. That explains a great deal in terms off the various repeats of her submission to power pressures during her lifetime. She fell back on what seemed her only recourse—her vulnerability, her terrifying need for compassion, time, and help. She had no experience at infighting and had no one really in her corner. And she was only nineteen years old.
For one year after the abortion she tried to keep the marriage together, but for all the wrong reasons. No longer trusting David, her own love shriveling and dying in her as though it were the fetus of their aborted child, nonetheless she feared div
orce and what it would mean in terms of Ethel and the studio. The dream house, dream husband, dream marriage had no substantive meaning. It was like living inside the boundaries of one of her own films. But she did at least have temporary asylum.
To add to the fears, the insecurities, the United States had entered the war. On a private level she was aware that their marriage afforded some protection against David’s being drafted. Divorcing him at such a time seemed disloyal. Then so many of her male friends faced induction or enlisted. Barron Polan was the first to go, and it was difficult for her to cope with the enormity of this “desertion”—for in a way, she thought about his leaving in that manner.
She tried very hard to take a patriotic, romantic, Mayer-oriented position in seeing friends and loved ones off to the wars, but it was pretty much a sham and very difficult for her to come to terms with.
So the work continued, and that was good. It was familiar, and though it was increasingly painful, the pain was her own and one of the very few things she could set such claims on. But suddenly her loss of weight had gone too far. The diet pills were stopped. She was stick-thin and pale-faced, and her nights were torturous, frightening bouts with insomnia. She would at last fall into an exhausted sleep at four in the morning—only to have to be awakened at five to go to the studio. As soon as the diet pills stopped, however, she had severe withdrawal symptoms. The pains were constant, and she suffered fits of nausea.