Judy Garland: A Biography

by Anne Edwards

  She was doing radio and camp shows in every spare minute and was preparing For Me and My Gal—once again to be filmed with “the Freed Unit.” It was to be her first big starring musical apart from Rooney. There were endless meetings and conferences as to the casting of her male partner in the film. Casting was not easy. The role was extremely avant-garde. Harry Palmer, the ambitious, extortionist antihero, the vaudevillian who would sacrifice his partner (Judy) for his career and maim his hand rather than face military service was not the sort of role any of the MGM male contract players thought would carry them on to stardom. Also, Harry Palmer had to sing and dance well enough to believably end up playing the Palace.

  A young man named Gene Kelly had been brought out to the Coast from Broadway, where he had made unmemorable supporting appearances, and had been signed by David O. Selznick. He made an extremely bad test and Selznick dropped him, deciding he had no film potential. Judy had met him previously in New York on one of her personal-appearance tours. He was, at the time, appearing in a supporting role in a Broadway show, and she had spent an evening with the cast. Judy was pleased to see him again.

  She was still married to David, but they were quickly becoming strangers—the hostilities growing between them. Kelly was sympathetic. He was married to Betsy Blair, and the union appeared sound. He gave Judy no real indication that he would ever offer her more than friendship, but she did continue to fantasize that he might. Instinctively, and apart from all personal considerations, she felt Kelly was the right person to play Harry Palmer.

  She went to Freed and to Buzz Berkeley, who was to be the film’s director, and insisted they cast Kelly. The test was rerun. It did not improve upon a reshowing; but personal interview and further tests, and the well-being of the film’s star, Judy, convinced them they should gamble. Kelly was signed to a Metro contract, his first film bringing him star status in a major musical. In a forerunner of his Pal Joey role, he portrayed the heel with more naiveté than villainy. Set in the First World War, it represented MGM’s early bid for a patriotic war-film ending: Kelly proves himself to really be a hero and by the final fadeout is reunited with Judy while the Armistice is signed; peace once more reigns in Leadville, and they appear as head-liners at the Palace Theatre.

  Seeing the film today is a moving experience. Never did Judy look so vulnerable. There are several moments in close-ups when there is a striking likeness to Monroe. The eyes widen in unguarded pain; the mouth trembles, quivers; the skin has that luminous, third-dimension, touch-or-feel quality to it; and the voice is a quiet sigh of anguish.

  The combination was a good one, though at the premiere Kelly got laughs in all the wrong places. But Judy proved she no longer needed Rooney. Her dancing with Kelly was the best she had done, and in the blending of their voices a special tone was created, the flatness of Kelly’s voice somehow causing Judy’s voice to sound fuller-bodied. But the rendition of one song—“After You’ve Gone”—should make the film now a classic. It was one of the first times an “up,” fast song had been slowed and sung torchily. Edens’ arrangement is brilliant and contemporary even today, and Judy, her face in a close-up that filled the screen, her voice clear—never missing or failing—rose to her greatest film presence.

  The reviews made note of her growth and her frailty (she was thin and pale in this one—her own frailness aiding and abetting the role). Kate Cameron in the New York Daily News said, “Jurdy looks thin and frail throughout the picture, but she seems to have developed enormously as an actress and entertainer since her last screen assignment (Babes on Broadway)” And Time observed, “Boney-faced Judy Garland is already well graduated from a sort of female Mickey Rooney into one of the more reliable song pluggers in the business.”

  Judy was now one of the top ten box-office stars in America. She was earning a tremendous salary. She had made it. But pressure and exhaustion plagued her. There was no rest at home—only a growing hostility; and Ethel and Bill Gilmore, now taking over as Judy’s managers, were constantly at her about the property and mining investments they were making with her money to enable her to someday be very rich as well as famous. All these investments unfortunately turned out to be poor risks and cost Judy eventually more than she had originally invested. In fact, since Ethel and her husband received a fee for their services, they ended up the only beneficiaries.

  She was ill and she knew it and was aware that it was not just a physical thing, nor was it caused by her pill addiction. She felt her whole world was falling apart. She went to Joe Mankiewicz, who had recently become her friend and for whom she had great admiration. Mankiewicz was an excellent writer, a witty raconteur, and in Judy’s eyes, at least, the first true intellectual she had ever known who would talk with her on an equal level. Somehow she was afraid of Edens’ disapproval, but that was not the case with Mankiewicz.

  Mankiewicz was a sensitive and perceptive man. He recognized the depth of her mental anguish and the extent of her confusion. He contacted the eminent psychiatrist Karl Menninger for her, and Menninger, in turn, recommended an early associate of his, Dr. Ernst Simmel, who practiced in Los Angeles. He was an elderly man, a distinguished German refugee, and a psychoanalyst.

  Mayer was more outraged at Mankiewicz for usurping his authority and giving a Metro star advice than he was concerned about Judy. He called Mankiewicz into his office and proceeded to viciously berate him. The younger man grew not only indignant but also deeply angry that Mayer would value his own ego above the possible help that could be given a deeply disturbed and unhappy young woman. He handed in his resignation, but Mayer refused to accept it. Finally, though, after keeping him inactive for a very long time, Mayer released him, and Mankiewicz went to Twentieth Century–Fox.

  Secretly Judy began forty-five-minute sessions with Dr. Simmel prior to her reporting before the cameras. The doctor spoke with a heavy accent that was difficult for Judy to understand, and he was also slightly hard of hearing. The sessions were strained, but the important factor was that she recognized her need for outside professional help and at great physical expense sought it out and kept after it. Analysis was a painful experience for her. It brought things to the surface that she had consciously forgotten years before; and having chosen an older man as an analyst, she found “confession” impossible. Now she had these rumblings in her head, these lurching anxieties in her chest, the twisting in her stomach to contend with, added to all the other problems. And there were many.

  There was no way Mayer could understand that Judy was suffering severe psychological disorders. He regarded his stars as children, and his brand of discipline was to arrange for Judy’s film schedule to be toughened—reasoning that if she worked harder, she wouldn’t think so much.

  In February, 1943, she divorced David. A step toward her own independence, it still was like a woman who had walked on crutches all her life throwing them away when she was not yet sufficiently rehabilitated to walk alone. Having sought psychiatric aid in secrecy and feeling the need to discuss her frustrating sessions with someone, she turned to her mother. Ethel was alarmed and went immediately to Mayer to discuss this turn of events. The psychiatric sessions were thus ended for the time being.

  It had been eight years since Joe Pasternak had tried to get Judy over to Universal and had hired Deanna Durbin in her place. Now he was on the Metro lot, preparing to shoot Presenting Lily Mars, the Booth Tarkington novel bought originally as a straight dramatic vehicle for Lana Turner. Pasternak preferred the concept of doing it as a musical to star Judy, whom he had never been able to forget. Mayer agreed, and the film was set into motion. Pasternak and his wife, Dorothy, warmed immediately to the film’s star. “She had,” according to Pasternak, “a small-child quality, pathetic, making you want to hug and cuddle her. She admired Lana and no convincing could make her believe she was anything but second choice—a replacement. It took her a long time to appear from makeup. She thought she was ugly. Mario Lanza had some of the same problems.”

  Pasternak
again comments: “Musicians are the biggest critics in the world. If they don’t think a singer is doing justice to an orchestration, they feel sad. But not with her. When she did a song for me, she would go over it once or twice with Roger Edens at the piano and then Take One—finished. Perfect. She was the same way with her lines in action—very quick.”

  Unfortunately, his effusive Hungarian enthusiasm and peppery personality was not a combination Judy could relate to. She was fond of him—enough to spend a few spare hours she might have at his house or playing tennis with him and Dorothy—but she was unable to take them into her confidence. The rumblings were growing louder.

  “I prayed for her,” Pasternak confesses. “I saw what might happen and prayed. You know? Such a great talent. She deserved God’s personal attention.”

  And then about her film appearances: “She was not too glamorous for the girls to dislike her or be jealous of her, and she was beautiful enough for the men to fall in love with her. Those eyes—when she looked at you! She sold herself to everybody individually and collectively. You believed everything she did.”

  Judy was maturing and reading, and she began a new campaign at the studio: would MGM consider giving her a leave of absence to try the stage? Mayer laughed at her and came back through Ethel with a “Don’t-put-your-daughter-on-the-stage, —Mrs. Worthington” philosophy. But it was all unnecessary. Judy could fantasize herself as Lynn Fontanne as much as she wished; it hardly mattered. The day after Lily Mars had stopped rolling, she was cast once again opposite Mickey—this time in Girl Crazy.

  But Judy no longer had faith in her film image. And she was now less amused or exhilarated by the kind of immature ribbing Rooney gave her on the set. It no longer seemed funny when Rooney would mug out of sight of the director—like a “tic-ravaged chimpanzee“—trying to make Judy ruin a take. Nor could she get into the spirit for practical jokes such as the one Rooney played, when she was taking a nap between takes, by planting a smoke pot at her door; screaming, “Fire!”; and dashing a glass of cold water in her face. These “gags” continued throughout Girl Crazy. When Judy appeared on the set in white calfskin boots, he quipped, “You look like a vanilla ice cream cone.” Judy, retaliating that once, replied, after measuring Rooney’s scarlet cowboy clothes, “You look like a rationed bottle of ketchup.”

  A fan magazine ran an article at that time. “Doesn’t Judy do anything but work?” it questioned. Indeed, she worried, fretted, fantasized, dramatized and traumatized; but she had very little personal life. There were men she saw on the lot and had crushes on—there was still Kelly; there were Oscar Levant and Johnny Mercer; but there was no time for any relationship to grow. Girl Crazy, the George and Ira Gershwin show which reunited her with Rooney, was a backbreaker filled with large production numbers. Busby Berkeley, who had directed the team three previous times and had also been at the helm in For Me and My Gal and Ziegfeld Girl, began the film. For the first time Judy had a personality clash with a director. (It was the beginning of a series of such clashes.) Berkeley was a taskmaster, and the precision he demanded for his grand-scale production numbers meant Judy had to reshoot scenes over and over. He did return to the film to handle the spectacular finale, which deployed one hundred dancing boys and girls and a complex of rodeo routines—but Norman Taurog replaced him otherwise.

  She sang fine songs like “Embraceable You,” “Bidin’ My Time,” “But Not for Me,” “Treat Me Rough,” and “I Got Rhythm.” Her presence was open and warming, while Rooney was beginning to acquire the detachment of a veteran vaudevillian, and her popularity was gradually overtaking Rooney’s; but her concern for her future was growing out of all perspective. Time said, “If she were not so profitably good at her own game, she could obviously be a dramatic cinema actress with profit to all.” She was becoming convinced that if she did not make the transition, her bubble would burst. But she had more fear that the strenuous work involved in a musical would destroy her physically than that her voice would leave her. She was suffering nightly bouts with what she called “the terrors.” Alone, in her “dream house,” the bills piling up (she was soon to lose it because of nonpayment of the mortgage) as Ethel and Bill invested more and more heavily in “sure things” for her; taking uppers now—not because she needed to lose weight but because she could not bear the withdrawal agony not taking them caused; able to sleep only with the aid of Nembutals; so terrified of silence that she was never anywhere without radios or music or live conversation or telephone calls—she was actually already experiencing a nervous breakdown.

  She begged Ethel to intercede with Mayer and to send her down to the Menninger Clinic for six months. Ethel went to Mayer, but the edict came back: she was to do a guest spot in a star-studded wartime musical, As Thousands Cheer. When she completed that assignment (perhaps her weakest film appearance, in which she sang the ill-suited “Things Are Really Jumping Down at Carnegie Hall” to José Iturbi’s pretentious piano), she expected time off. Instead, Mayer sent her on a personal-appearance tour to promote As Thousands Cheer.

  In July, 1943, she walked out on the stage of Philadelphia’s Robin Hood Dell Theater to make her first concert appearance. She was backed by the ninety-piece Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of André Kostelanetz. Her hair was dyed a startling red-blond, and she opened with a quartet of Gershwin songs. She looked, was dressed, and acted like a girl at her first formal party who was scared stiff no one would dance with her. It was incongruous considering the 36,000 fans seated on benches, in aisles, on rooftops, in trees, on steps, and on the hillside of the outdoor arena.

  Afterward she said, “I thought to myself that they were probably thinking what was I doing there anyway, so I just sang louder.”

  By intermission she had loosened up and was singing songs from her own movies. The crowd roared, stamped, clapped, and whistled. Kostelanetz had imported six hot saxophonists, a jazz trumpet, and a boogie-woogie pianist for “The Joint is Really Jumping Down at Carnegie Hall” and the concert was a huge success. Talk was that Judy might do another concert the following winter; but shortly after her return to Hollywood, simply keeping in front of the cameras was more than she could cope with.

  The sleeplessness set in ruthlessly. She wandered the house at night, terrified at every sound. The long years of ringing people in the middle of the night began. There were late calls to Dr. Simmel, her analyst. She was desperate to level with him, to correct some of the lies that she had told him. One night she couldn’t reach anyone. Taking vodka along with her Nembutals to speed their action, she lost count of her intake. Near collapse, she finally reached Dr. Simmel. He came right away.

  Those “in the know” at the studio called it “her first phony suicide attempt.” It was, of course, more a scream—a desperate plea for help. For five years thereafter, she saw Dr. Simmel for fifty minutes morning and night, and yet all that time she found the elderly man difficult to talk with and actually walked the floors at night rehearsing what she would say to him.

  She needed a lot—but mostly a man who could love her unfailingly: a heroic man who at the same time could accept without question and with loving balm the tarnished days and nights of her youth; an alter ego who matched her sensitivity, who had fears of his own but had overcome them and would help her, who knew or feared no other allegiance or threats; but finally, a man with whom she could have a fulfilled sexual experience.

  Not unobservant, Mayer now considered the possibility of a “made marriage” for Judy—a marriage to a man of sensitivity and talent, certain strength, and above all, loyalty to Mayer and MGM. He cast a searing eye about the available men on the lot. No one was exempt; every man was vulnerable.

  But in the meantime, he was making plans for Judy’s next film.

  16He was born in Chicago, the son of Vincente and Nina Lebeau Minnelli, stars of Minnelli Brothers Dramatic and Tent Shows. At three he was pushed onto the stage to play Little Willie in East Lynne. Until he was eight, he had no real home. Life was a
temporary dwelling—a tent, a hotel room, a theater. Then his family moved to Delaware, Ohio. All his youth was spent in yearning. His own world seemed small and shabby to him. He knew not only that he must rise above it but that he would. Strong-willed, self-opinionated, he had two talents: an ability to fantasize a world of elegance and beauty, and the capability to sketch those images, pinning them like rare butterflies on his drawing pad. It was not enough to satisfy his compelling needs. The world he fantasized must become the real world, his own nonexistent.

  He envisioned drawing rooms Coward and Gertie Lawrence would feel at home in; ballrooms elegant enough for the suave Astaires. His walk, his voice, his dress became Upper Park Avenue or Lower Belgravia; but his eyes—those large, soulful, dark Italian eyes that one always felt looked into, not at, you—never fitted the role. With dizzying speed he went from designer of costumes and sets for Balaban and Katz Theatres to Broadway.

  The year was 1931, and he was still in his early twenties. He designed a three-hundred-foot curtain for Earl Carroll’s 1931 Vanities. It was spectacular, in a style one might call “sumptuous gorgeousness.” One degree more fabulous and it would have been either camp or kitsch, but young Vincente Minnelli had the good fortune to possess an instinct that knew exactly how far one could stretch extravagant taste to keep it within the bounds of acceptability.

  Grace Moore grabbed him to design costumes and sets for her operetta DuBarry. It was such a lavish cornucopia of luxury and richness that there seemed only one place the designer could have more room for growth. Happily, he was hired by the Radio City Music Hall, the world’s largest theater, as art director—a post he held for three and a half years. He was, therefore, rather handsomely paid to work out all his most opulent fantasies.