by Anne Edwards
During the next five years, he was able to hone his talent to a finer edge. In speedy procession he marched as art director from such splashy musical productions as Ziegfeld Follies to At Home Abroad, Cabin in the Sky, Hooray for What?, Very Warm for May, and The Show Is On. But the world of theater was now also beginning to feel small and shabby to him. He rightly believed his was a pictorial imagination; and when the chance came for him to go to Hollywood, he grabbed it.
He arrived in 1940 and became a new member of “the Freed Unit” on the Metro lot. He was forced to “apprentice,” and that nettled him; but as his aspirations were directorial and his ambition an educated though calculated thing, he reined in his leaning toward arrogance and managed to check his vanity. Freed and Mayer both recognized his uniqueness; and Freed, who so desperately felt his own artlessness, turned almost immediately to Minnelli for confirmation and inspiration.
By 1942 he had graduated from his apprenticeship and been given his first film directorial assignment—Cabin in the Sky. He had set the mood in the original stage version; he did so again in the film. Minnelli’s art was not personal but visual, not meaningful but decorative. The cinéastes, however, were wooed by his stylistic flourishes. He had already entered his name in the history of the film musical.
His acquaintanceship with Judy had been minimal. They had met on the lot, but he had not been involved in the making of any of her Freed films. Now it was suggested that they work together on Meet Me in St. Louis, a screenplay based on a series of New Yorker articles by Sally Benson, which Mayer had scheduled as her next film; but for openers, Judy did not want to make the picture, feeling it would be impossible for her at this time to appear in another musical with a lot of production, costuming, and rehearsal. Also, she was not drawn to Minnelli. He made her feel uneasy, unsure of herself. She was also not that convinced that he was the great director Freed said he was. Cabin in the Sky was skillful and pictorial, but only Ethel Waters’ singing had moved her. After that he had done a stylistic but less-than-great musical, I Dood It, with Red Skelton.
Mayer threatened suspensions if she did not agree to the film. It seemed incredible to her, but she was broke. The Gilmores had not put aside any of her money for taxes; they had tied up what she did have in poor investments with no current resale value; and her dream house was being repossessed for default on the mortgage payments. It hardly mattered that she weighed only ninety-two pounds (the studio liked her to maintain a weight of ninety-eight pounds) and that each morning when she entered the East Gate of the studio, she would get so violently ill that she would have to go immediately to her dressing room to rid herself of her breakfast.
She reported for work on Meet Me in St. Louis.
17It was the highest-budget film Judy had starred in, i and she was carrying the weight of the film squarely on her own frail shoulders. She was surrounded by supporting players such as Tom Drake, Mary Astor, Lucille Bremer, and Leon Ames; but only little Margaret O’Brien had any meaning at all at the box office. Having failed with I Dood It, Minnelli was out to prove himself on this one. Always a perfectionist, he was, with each day of shooting, more difficult and demanding, sometimes making Judy go through a scene twenty-five times. This did not increase the rapport between star and director at the beginning of the picture.
But the more Judy saw of herself on film, the less hostile she became toward Minnelli. She was not just good: she was the best she had ever been as an adult performer. There were no Garland mannerisms; even the tremor in the voice was controlled. Esther Smith was a real, a sensitive, an interesting young woman. She lived on film and apart from Judy.
Perhaps the most moving and beautiful moments in the film occur when Judy is onscreen with little five-year-old Margaret O’Brien, who portrays her baby sister—a tenderness, a communion of spirit transfers itself so completely from one to the other. There is one especially poignant scene in which the child has had a fit of hysteria and runs out into the snow. Esther (Judy) follows. She is the older sister who, in the absence of her mother, at that moment becomes maternal. The father is home and, crossing the hallway to his study to bring himself to a momentous family decision, does not see the two girls entering the hallway after him—Esther protecting the child with her coat, gently leading her upstairs, soothing her.
For a musical, the film had a distinctive and very special style. It was apparent Minnelli, much in the fashion of Cukor and Wyler, had a phenomenal ability in presenting women onscreen. Halfway through the picture, Judy decided she could trust him. As always happened with her, this meant she turned to him for advice and for support. He helped her with the selection of her personal wardrobe, her makeup, her hairstyles. He agreed with her that she should be given the chance to prove herself in a straight dramatic role. He even had in mind a Paul and Pauline Gallico story—The Clock—that Robert Nathan, the same fine writer who had authored A Portrait of Jenny, had scripted. Before she had finished shooting Meet Me in St. Louis, she had gone to Arthur Freed and asked him to schedule The Clock as her next film. Freed was very negative toward this suggestion. He believed that the public wanted to hear her sing. Judy did not let it go at that.
Meet Me in St. Louis, a sentimental film that was carried along on a wisp of a story about the trials and tribulations of a family in St. Louis at the turn of the century, was declared by Time to be “a musical even the deaf should enjoy. They will miss some attractive tunes . . . but they can watch one of the year’s prettiest pictures.” The review went on to call it “very near first-rate.” The picture was to become one of MGM’s all-time grossers, second only to Gone with the Wind; but when shooting ended, it was nearly Christmas, 1944, and the only thing Judy was sure of was that she could not possibly go on much longer alone—nor could she cope with another musical.
The studio, with the additional success of the film’s score (“The Trolley Song,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and “The Boy Next Door”), did not immediately agree to Judy’s appearing in The Clock. Freed, recognizing her fast-failing stamina, convinced Mayer, Thau, and Mannix that Judy should be allowed to do a straight dramatic role. They vetoed Minnelli’s directing the film, however, as they did not think it was a vehicle that would be right for him. This was a poignant, narrow-canvased love story; there was no opportunity—except in the use of Grand Central Station and other Manhattan locales—for Minnelli’s broad-stroked genius. They assigned Fred Zinnemann to the film, and the film did indeed get under way with him as director.
Zinnemann was a gentle man and easy with Judy, but she had a native instinct that they were wrong together, that as star and director they struck no sparks that would help her ignite the screen. She also had her mind set on Minnelli’s directing her in her first straight dramatic role. She went to Freed. Early rushes proved that she was right—that Zinnemann did not have the feel for her personality. He was fired and Minnelli brought in to direct.
The Clock was a love story about two young people meeting, falling in love, and marrying during a two-day period in World War II. For the first time Judy truly liked her image on the screen. It is understandable, for in the film she was presented as a love object. Her hair was groomed in a glamorous fashion; her clothes were tasteful. When one sees all her films in chronological sequence, this one stands out—and not simply because Judy does not sing in it, but because it is the film that caught her true beauty. She is breathtakingly lovely—the girl who has blossomed into a beauty overnight, transformed by love, by her first sexual awakening.
Never before or after The Clock did Judy ever reach such a cinematic moment of transcendence, turning fantasy into reality, as in the moment when she rushes into Robert Walker’s arms in Grand Central Station after believing they had lost each other for good. Or the scene in which she tries to seek help to find him from a U.S.O. service officer and cannot explain how, having known the soldier only twenty-four hours and not even knowing his last name, nor he knowing hers, her life will be meaningless unless they are
reunited. The film is filled with haunting images: the brutal civil wedding service in which the words are lost in the roar of the subway trains underneath; the wedding “dinner” in the Automat when Judy begins to cry—“It was so ugly—so ugly!”; the delicious banter between Jimmy and Lucille Gleason, playing a milkman and his wife, who befriend the young couple; and the incredible high-angle shot at the end of the film in which, having seen her new husband off to the wars, Judy is totally and completely lost, swallowed up by the mass of crowds in Grand Central Station.
Without lavish costuming, recording, dance rehearsals, and production numbers, the work was not physically taxing, but no other film had asked as much of her emotions. Minnelli seemed to understand this—protecting her all he could on the set, keeping intruders away, spending evenings with her, going over her next day’s scenes for interpretation and understanding. She was experiencing a great new happiness. And a unique thing was occurring: the sense of womanliness, of sexual awakening, of being beautiful and loved transferred itself from her role to her personal life. The door of the world was open again. She could make plans. The future was a thing she might not have to fear. There was someone she could love who she thought loved her. If there were sharp pangs of doubt, some small cavil of reservation, she managed to override these outbreaks and placate her own hesitation.
It was far too difficult to separate the real from the unreal. All she could hope to do was keep one guess ahead. She knew she could not survive alone. She trusted this man with the big eyes and the promise of soul buried there. She believed his own talent and value to the studio was great enough so that he could not be blackmailed or driven to forfeit her on his own altar of ambition.
Later she was to doubt this, to question if Mayer’s approval and Ethel’s enthusiasm for the match had not been founded on the fact that he was a studio, a company man—and that they could control Judy through him. Very soon after they were married, Judy did begin to feel that Minnelli had betrayed her: that his loyalties were to the studio and not to her; that he had never had any intention, as she had hoped he might, of assisting her in breaking away from the torture of making film musicals exclusively, of helping her become a dramatic and comedy actress of the stature of Katharine Hepburn, whom she greatly admired.
But in the beginning and with all the force of a desperation to believe, she convinced herself that if she did not want to work, he would not want her to work; and that if she could not work, he would fight to make the studio understand. And so, on June 15, 1945, just a few days after her twenty-third birthday and the end of shooting on The Clock, they were wed—she for the second time, he for the first.
She had wanted a church wedding, but decided that perhaps she was not strong enough to cope with ritual; so in Ethel’s living room, with Ira Gershwin as best man and with the ceremony performed by Dr. William E. Roberts of the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church (which she had never attended), she was wed to Ben Vincente Minnelli. She wore a pearl-gray jersey gown. Louis B. Mayer took Frank Gumm’s place by her side, giving her in marriage. He also helped them purchase an extravagant hilltop house—not only in setup like some cinematic Valhalla, high on a panoramic hill with a sweeping three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and the Valley, but also set back and approached by a winding, almost inaccessible road. The theory was one Mayer believed in: stars and directors were children who needed expensive toys; and maintaining those toys would force them to behave, would guarantee that they could not afford suspension.
This house was built for great theatrical moments, as though its courts and estuaries hid secret audiences. Vincente decorated it in impeccable taste with rare antiques and a collection of fine eighteenth-century porcelain. Judy’s first home had been baroque but comfortably ersatz, none of the elegance ever seeming more imposing than that of a studio set. She knew that by Vincente’s standards she was wanting in matters of taste and style; although she felt uncomfortable in the house—as if she were a trespasser—she held her silence. But a new inadequacy set in.
In the meantime, The Clock was released. Time said: “[Minnelli’s] semi-surrealist juxtapositions, accidental or no, help turn The Clock into a rich image of a great city. His love of camera booms and dollies makes The Clock, largely boom-shot, one of the most satisfactory flexible movies since Frederick Murnau’s epoch-making The Last Laugh”
Minnelli had directed Judy in her first all-dramatic role with success, but he had also succeeded in making his camera and his art the star, and that star was now very much in the ascendant at Metro. However, Mayer wanted him to return to the area the studio knew would be the most financially rewarding—the Metro musical.
The Harvey Girls was scheduled for Minnelli and Judy, with The Ziegfeld Follies and Till the Clouds Roll By after that. Three vigorous, expensive, backbreaking musicals. Judy turned to Minnelli for help, expecting him to fight the studio’s decision for her. She thought she had the winning trick up her sleeve, that Vincente would now insist she be given time away from the cameras—for almost immediately after her marriage she discovered she was pregnant.
Minnelli, instead, managed to arrange the shooting schedule so that as little time as possible would be lost as a result of his wife’s approaching motherhood.
18Her daughter Liza was to describe Judy years later as “a beautiful chameleon, whom you knew best when you knew you didn’t know her.” Judy, through her entire life, tried to be what everyone wanted her to be and thought she should be something other than what she was. When she married Vincente Minnelli, she had made eighteen films in eight years; she was in poor health, addicted to pills; and appearing before the cameras did not come as easily as it once had. Her marriage to Minnelli, in spite of whatever attraction existed, was a plea for attention and understanding. There was a quiet sureness about Minnelli that gave her a sense of well-being. He was an older man and in a work situation was decisive about what was best for her. He had taste and talent and held Mayer’s respect, which was a good deal like gaining parental approval. He was also solvent. For Judy, therefore, marriage was to be an escape from debts, anxiety, and fears. It was supposed to be like coming home for the first time. But it was none of these things.
The self-assurance Minnelli projected was merely one face of ambition. For him films represented a special glamorous world, and stars a special, glamorous race. True, there was a flashiness to films, but still their satellites were fairly acceptable in all societies. It was a partial guarantee of a social passport. Appearing to be a shy man, possessing a great sense of style, he lived greatly on externals. He needed the admiration of his peers far more than the affection of a young wife, and acceptance in the social world more strongly than the bond Judy expected in their union.
There was no question that left to her own devices at that time, Judy could be an embarrassing figure. She was self-indulgent, self-deceiving, needing constant attention. She was also very ill. Mickey Rooney refers to the period of time just previous to her years with Minnelli as “the time before the illness set in.” It was obvious to her co-workers and early friends that Judy was not the same girl they had known. She was fighting pill addiction and struggling to avoid a complete nervous collapse. With the strength only the weak can possess, she managed to survive the rigors of three full-scale musicals and the birth of Liza during the first two years of her marriage to Minnelli.
Liza was born on March 12, 1946, by caesarean section. The pregnancy and the delivery had been painfully traumatic, and following the birth Judy suffered a severe depression, accompanied by a fear of having sexual relations that lasted a very long time. But, as well, she was weakened by the birth and on her feet and back at work too soon. One day she fainted on the street. Upon Dr. Simmers advice, a family conference including Minnelli, Ethel, and Gilmore was held at which retirement was discussed. But Judy was committed to several films that had been written and/or purchased specifically for her. The idea was vetoed, and after only a few weeks’ rest
the work grind resumed.
The films Judy made during these early years with Minnelli and after Meet Me in St. Louis and The Clock were the least inspired of her career, but they were entertaining and, in the case of The Harvey Girls and Ziegfeld Follies of 1946, all-time box office champions. Till the Clouds Roll By, a film biography of Jerome Kern with Judy playing Marilyn Miller, was a failure, the few highlights of the film being Judy’s singing of “Who” and “Look for the Silver Lining.”
To quote Norman Zierold in The Child Stars:
Unfortunately, the star of these joyous extravaganzas was ill, plagued by nervousness brought on by the tensions at the studio, the competition, the staggering work load, the desperate attempts to gain weight, to lose weight, and sleeplessness. A jumpy, irritable Judy dragged herself to work with tears in her eyes and muted resistance deep in her heart. As the relentless drain on her energies continued, that resistance occasionally turned on the director. And the director, unfortunately, was sometimes her husband.
“I was employed by the studio and Judy was now against the studio,” Minnelli was later quoted as saying. “Juty was full of fears. I urged her to enjoy being the great star she was and is, but she didn’t know how to do that and still doesn’t.”
Minnelli was always concerned with film budgets and production schedules. Viewing Judy as his star, he tried to immerse her in these discussions, to make her aware of her responsibilities. This left little time for him to be a husband. Judy increased her pill taking. What a difficult swallowing of ego and pride she must have suffered with each pill—what a frightening loss of self. And at the same time how much anger and hostility was she suppressing in order to present the tender but joyous and exuberant image she had created on the screen? Even with Minnelli’s presence on their huge estate, she was utterly lonely and yet afraid to be alone. Thinking kept her awake, and the nights were long. She began to take more sleeping pills than she had ever taken before. Doors were now shut between husband and wife, and each of them was living a separate and single life; both were protecting what they cherished most, and in both cases, it was not each other.