by Anne Edwards
Minnelli—tired and overworked himself, and having great difficulty on his own part in coping with his marriage and his position in it—knew only one thing: his life existed on film. What life he could not stir inside himself he would transport to the film he was directing. Judy, in attempting to protect her sensitivity, her womanliness, in trying to hold herself together while outwardly working to be what Ethel and Mayer and Minnelli and her fans wanted her to be, leaned heavily upon her pills for support, courting sleep and, unconsciously, death.
There were times when she thought she was losing her mind and others when she feared she would suffer a nervous breakdown. She seemed to be just far enough off center of the collapse to cope with day-to-day living; but she was, in fact, dead center, already suffering a breakdown but fighting the totality of one. This had been the case for two years—would continue to be for several years more; but by hanging on to whatever hope or outstretched branch was in her path she was able to keep from being carried away and under.
At this time there was the baby, who was christened, at the Episcopal church on Santa Monica Boulevard and Camden Drive in Beverly Hills, Liza May Minnelli. Under her father’s direction, her mother was starring in The Pirate and had managed one day away from the cameras for the baptism of her firstborn. Afterward, all the guests returned to the huge pink Regency house for refreshments. It was one of the only pleasant breaks in the filming of the picture. The other was when Liza May made her screen debut in the film, sharing a close-up with her mother, sitting on her lap. “This was just for fun,” Judy told the press, “and there’ll be no more roles for Liza until she’s able to pick them for herself.” She beamed; she held Liza close to her.
The Pirate was the most sophisticated vehicle Judy had starred in up to that date. The original costume play by S. N. Behrman had been written for Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Changes were made to suit it to the talents of Judy and Gene Kelly, and to advantage. It was also the most strenuous role Judy had undertaken. It required virtuoso acting; dancing like a dervish in an attempt to keep up with Kelly; changing character at the drop of a hat; being volatile, lusty, and comedic; and socking over a Cole Porter score, including the exhausting “Be a Clown.” She played the role with a highly polished sense of comedy that was unique for her and striking. She looked gaunt, more mature, and troubled. Her fighting spirit was beginning to flag.
She was securing as many pills as she wanted from a studio masseuse and still smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. Her weight was now so low that the studio was doing what it could to force her to gain, but eating nauseated her. Her physical condition was weak and growing weaker.
It was the beginning of her working problems. Unable much of the time to bring herself out of drugged sleep, she would appear on the set late, tense, supercharged by the huge quantity of uppers she had taken to counteract the Nembutals. No matter how strenuous and exhausting her day was, she was unable to eat. Suffering from fatigue and malnutrition, she was destroying her health, and she was short with the film’s crew and cast. In the end it was Kelly’s film, his triumph, for he dominated the footage in no uncertain terms.
The film was dazzling, full of vitality, flamboyant; the rough-house session of clowning set to the tune of “Be a Clown,” spectacular. It was the last number in the film to be shot, and Judy rehearsed with exhausting rigor four solid hours before the final take.
She preceded Minnelli home that night. He remained to tie up ends and prepare for the long chore of postproduction: cutting, editing, fine-edging his product for its final polish.
Walking the floors sleeplessly for hours waiting for his homecoming, she was conscious something was happening to her. When he arrived, she begged for enough time away from the cameras to be a mother. That was, of course, the problem—she begged, not demanded. She wanted a happy world and everyone in it happy, but she was at a loss as to how to accomplish this. With all her wit and ability to laugh at herself, she had a melancholy heart. And because she felt such a failure as a person, even Liza caused her deepening loneliness. More and more the small child was being entrusted into the care of her nurse, Miss MacFarlane. The branch had been taken away and seemed out of her grasp.
Dr. Simmel was aging quite badly and had been ill. A serious block had occurred in their therapy sessions. Judy was no longer able to hide the truth from the old gentleman. He had broken through to her, and rather than freeing her, it seemed to make communication more difficult; a deep and lacerating wound was opened. In an unguarded moment at one of her sessions she had revealed the growing doubts she had about her father. It is much easier to speak about those who earn your anger than those who claim your love. Judy had hung on to the image of her father that she had molded out of truth and fantasy. But she had witnessed something in her childhood that had never let her be at complete peace with that fantasy. Some shadowy memory, some overheard conversation when she was still a very little girl intimated that Frank Gumm might have had homosexual relationships. That possibility had enforced her anger toward Ethel; believing her mother must have been responsible built her own guilts and her need to make up to whoever the father substitute was in her life for Ethel’s “destruction” of Frank.
Having exposed herself so openly to Dr. Simmel, she now seemed unable to face him. Therapy was halted temporarily, though the old analyst was never far away. In the meantime, he was wise enough to know that perhaps this was a time when his patient might do better with another doctor. He suggested several, but Judy would not accept his recommendations.
Then one morning she could not wake up.
On July 12,1947, Louella O. Parsons reported:
Judy Garland is a very sick girl and has suffered a complete nervous collapse.
For weeks there have been rumors that all was not well with Judy and Vincente Minnelli, her director husband . . .
Yesterday, Minnelli said, “Judy is a very sick girl, and the only thing that is important now is to get her well. She is under a doctor’s care and in a highly nervous state.”
Minnelli went on to say he was sure that if Judy could only recover her health, they could work out their domestic problems.
She was moved to a private sanitarium that Dr. Simmel recommended. An attempt was made to keep this secret, but the word was out—the world knew. Judy Garland had cracked up. She was twenty-five years old.
19“I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!” So said Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire. The Tennessee Williams play was the smash hit of the 1947 theater season. Blanche Dubois’ now-famous speech was relevant to the times. The country was suffering the postwar blues. The economy was slack, unemployment high, wartime marriages falling asunder. The people of the nation wanted a panacea for their fears and insecurities. They wanted “magic,” and they found it in the new world of television and the golden world of films.
For years Judy had been grinding out “magic.” Her daily chore was to misrepresent the truth, and like Blanche she no longer was able to tell the truth. Instead she presented what everyone wanted to hear. She was now being damned for it.
She sank into a severe depression, and she was so incapable of coping with day-to-day living that even Minnelli and the studio agreed she had to be temporarily hospitalized. A private sanitarium for rich patients with mental disorders was chosen. It was to be the first of many such institutions that Judy would go to in the next few years. Her career was like stale air around her. It seemed to be suffocating her. She was being plagued by frightening visions. There was no doubt in her mind that the pills had affected her sanity.
Outside her small bungalow hospital room, she viewed through iron bars the charred California desert. Inside there were constant surveillance, hushed voices, and great loneliness. She was being treated for severe melancholia, addiction, and malnutrition. She was placed next to Ward Ten, the “vi
olent” ward, and the sounds that emanated through the thick stucco walls frightened her.
“About the second day,” Judy says in McCdll’ss, “I noticed that [the patients] all used to gather on the lawn near my bungalow. I finally wandered out on the lawn one day and joined the group. ... As far as I could gather, not one of them was demented in the common sense. Most of them were just too highly strung and too sensitive for reality. ... I realized that I had a great deal in common with them, in the sense that they had been concentrating on themselves too strongly, the same as I.”
At five in the morning she would lie wide-eyed while it was supposed she was asleep and a nurse would search her room.
“Every bottle, every drawer, every stitch of clothing, every corner,” Judy reports. “It took me about five mornings to get up enough courage to ask her what she was looking for. The first time I asked her, she didn’t even answer me. She just kept looking.”
They were constantly on surveillance for pills that Judy might have smuggled in. She was managing to obtain them from somewhere. Probably the other patients. They confined her to her room. The loneliness became more than she could bear, and she begged to see Minnelli, wanting to persuade him to bring Liza to visit her. Minnelli, however, was hard at work on a major film; and anyway, it seemed more sensible for him not to visit her often, for she slipped into deeper fits of depression after each departure.
The cost of the treatment—and it was coming out of her own funds—was astronomical: $300 a day. At the same time, the Federal Government had slapped a lien on her earnings and bank accounts for back taxes that Ethel and Gilmore had not paid, and the studio had put her on suspension, which meant she did not receive her salary until she returned to work. The staff feared she was growing dangerously suicidal. After consultation, and at Judy’s insistence, it was decided Minnelli should bring Liza to see her mother.
“She toddled into my bungalow and into my arms,” Judy told McCall’s. “I didn’t know what to say to her. She wasn’t two years old. I just held her, and she just kept kissing me and looking at me with those huge, helpless brown eyes of hers. I jabbered a little but mostly held her. But we laughed, too. After a short while they took her away. I lay down on the bed and started to cry. There have been many blue moments in my life, but I never remember having such a feeling.”
Her hospital bills were presented directly to her. She was overwhelmed at the cost and began to suffer severe anxiety. But something more frightening occurred. A pattern was forming in her life, and as ill as she was, she recognized it. She would from this time say over and over again, “I’d trade a shopping cart for the stage any day,” and deeply mean it. “I’ll try to put them both together someday,” she would add.
Recalling sessions with Dr. Simmel, there was a reawakening of her great and desperate need for the man in her life to take over her financial support, to be manly, protect her from the outside world, cleave together with her. What she wanted was all the paternal security she believed Ethel had stolen. And what she was doing was punishing herself because she felt she had no right to the refuge she sought. If she didn’t perform, she was a naughty girl. Ethel had repeated that refrain so often that it was indelible. And Ethel must have been right, because her father had sanctioned those road trips; and she would rather believe Ethel right than that her father might want Ethel and the girls away for other, more carnal motives. She rationalized this by convincing herself that Mayer, Rose, and now Minnelli all had been reproving—their attitudes toward her objurgatory, their disappointment grudging and reproachful when she was unable to perform.
For the second time a husband had taken the studio’s stand against her. Thinking to get her back on her feet, Minnelli had already begun the drumbeat—“back-to-work-back-to-work.” They had lived on a grand scale befitting a movie star and her director husband. There was no money put aside for hospitalization or back taxes. Minnelli earned a good salary, but it had not been of such long duration for any savings to have accumulated, and their life-style was above his means and included, and was dependent upon, her ability as a big-income earner.
There were scenes to be reshot on The Pirate, and the studio had purchased a script from Albert and Frances Hackett (who later scripted The Diary of Anne Frank), tailored for Judy and Gene Kelly. The thinking was that Judy and Kelly could become an adult team as Judy and Rooney had once been a juvenile duo. It was apparent that the studio executives had never seriously concerned themselves with her illness, that they expected a few weeks’ “rest” in a sanitarium would get her back on her feet and able to appear before the cameras. And it was also quite clear that Minnelli agreed wholeheartedly with this theory.
By this time her marriage was irreparably damaged. Too many hostilities, too many doors closed between husband and wife existed. But there was no place else to go but to the home they had shared. And there was Liza. Judy refused, however, to work under Minnelli’s direction; and though they remained legally married several years longer, The Pirate was the last film they were to do together.
Also, there were the mounting hospital bills, the pressuring of the Internal Revenue officers, and the terror of an insolvent future. Against all medical and psychiatric advice, and without consulting Dr. Simmel, Judy returned to Beverly Hills and notified the studio that she was ready to begin work on Easter Parade.
Charles “Chuck” Walters—former dancer, the dance director of the Freed Unit, and the man whom Judy had called “the man with the whip”—was the studio’s directorial choice. Walters had been given his first film, Good News, to direct that same year, and the studio was pleased with the end product. Judy and Walters were to be involved professionally for the next three years. It was to be a stormy, difficult association.
Judy agreed to Walters as director and was elated at the thought of being reunited with Gene Kelly, who was also to star in the film. But shortly before the cameras began to roll, Kelly broke an ankle during a dance rehearsal, and Fred Astaire stepped out of so-called “retirement” to replace him.
Once more the image Judy had created for the screen was reinforced in this film. She was the Plain Jane, the wallflower, the awkward girl who appears to be without hope of winning the leading man. Always she had to prove herself, to show him that the other women who clustered around him might be far more attractive but that she alone could help him achieve his true goals. She had to work harder than anyone else, take more abuse, swallow her ego and pride; but in the end she was noticed and accepted for just those reasons. Insecure as Judy was in private life, one can just imagine how each of these film roles tore at her own confidence—while conversely, her tremendous “believability” in them, no matter how unreal the situation and script, was what made each film a winner and Judy a greater star.
The score was written by Irving Berlin and contained the great “A Couple of Swells,” “Better Luck Next Time,” and “When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam’ ” (a tremendous song-and-dance duet). Judy received top billing over Astaire, and as the small-time chorus girl chosen by Astaire on a bet as an experiment to prove he could make even this awkward, unattractive, untalented girl a star under his tutelage, she rose once again “like a phoenix” and in Easter Parade gave one of her best performances.
Memorable is the scene on a city street in which Astaire tells her she has no sex appeal. Hurt to the bone, suppressing tears while displaying a game and fighting spirit, she walks ahead of him down the street, undulating, hands on hips, to show him men will turn and look at her. But they don’t, and desperate and out of Astaire’s sight she grimaces in a grotesque and hysterically funny manner; and of course, passing men do turn and look at her, and Astaire is puzzled but impressed. A funny, winning scene—but for Judy a Pyrrhic victory.
Wan, pale, exhausted, her marriage a sham, attempting to fight the extremes with which the pills tortured her body, “putting on a face” for Liza, for the camera, for the public, Judy was in worse shape than she had been when The Pirate had be
en completed. Easter Parade called upon her to dance strenuous routines with Astaire, and there had been some reshooting on The Pirate at the same time. Internal Revenue had claimed most of that hard-earned salary. She was not very far ahead of where she had been when she collapsed.
A guest shot in Words and Music, the Rodgers-and-Hart biography, was next. She played herself and sang “Johnny One-Note,” and with Rooney outrageously cast as lyricist Lorenz Hart, she sang “I Wish I Were in Love Again,” which had originally been cut from the film Babes in Arms because of the sophistication of the lyrics. Words and Music was a lame film based on a weak plot line. Metro had thrown in all the stars it could as guest performers to salvage it, but only Lena Home singing “The Lady Is a Tramp” and Judy singing “Johnny One-Note” ever succeeded in bringing the film to its peak.
This was to be the last appearance Judy was to make on film with Rooney. On the set, none of the old camaraderie could be struck. Rooney was struggling with his own loose footing. Approaching thirty and a skeptical third marriage, with Andy Hardy dead and parts for a thirty-year-old perennial juvenile difficult to come by, Rooney was nearly broke himself and being labeled “washed up.” He was not much in the mood for his old mugging, the practical jokes; his life had run down like a watered watch. Being reunited with Rooney did not help to buoy Judy’s flagging spirit.
Migraine headaches were now plaguing her. Minnelli had taken an unsympathetic stand with regard to her “illness.” He felt she could control the pill intake; he was embarrassed by her behavior; he withdrew more and more, so that more and more she was alone. The studio had promised her a six months’ rest with pay if she did Words and Music. She counted on it. She tried to occupy her mind in order to fight the pills.