by Anne Edwards
Whatever differences Judy and Minnelli had had in the past, it seems he knew that Judy adored Liza and that Liza loved her mother, and that the bond between them was far more important than the rigors Liza might suffer or the circumstances she could possibly be exposed to in spending six months with Judy.
Certainly there was little chance of the child’s becoming “regimented.” She was catapulted from mother to father, from one extreme to the other. Minnelli remained in Hollywood, living out the Hollywood success syndrome, remarrying a socialite, running a formalized home, and attending and giving glittering parties. His wife, Denise, lived in a world of couturier clothes, “in” restaurants, “acceptable” people, and current fashions.
For the time being, however, Liza was to remain with her father. All arrangements had been made and the booking confirmed. Judy would open at the London Palladium on a Monday night, the ninth of April, 1951. Abe Lastfogel handled all the details. Once in London, the Foster Agency, representing William Morris (Lastfogel), was to take over. A very nervous and overweight Judy embarked for England on the lie de France with her secretary, Myrtle Tully, and Buddy Pepper, her accompanist. Pepper and Judy knew each other from childhood when they had both attended Mrs. Lawlor’s school. A product of vaudeville and a former friend of David Rose (who had been the one to encourage him to become a songwriter), he and Judy had much in common, though they had not seen each other for years; this eased the tension of the sailing.
Reporters boarded the ship at Plymouth and seemed shocked at the weight she had gained. (The next day, after reading their comments, Judy told Pepper, “From what I’ve read, I feel like the Fat Lady from Barnum and Bailey’s” and roared with laughter.) When Judy disembarked, crew and passengers remaining on board hung out of portholes to wave her goodbye; ships in the harbor flashed signals spelling out her name; and the lie de France gave a long, thunderous blast of its horn. Friends greeted her in London, and that was reassuring. Kay Thompson was appearing at the Cafe de Paris, and Danny Kaye had just ended an engagement at the Palladium, where he had been received with wild enthusiasm.
To look at her, it was hard to believe that less than six years had passed since the filming of The Clock, for in that short time her soft beauty had become harsh neon. She was twenty-eight and looked fifteen years older. She wasn’t plump. She was fat, weighing over one hundred fifty pounds—the fat devouring her tiny frame, distorting her features into a gargoyle caricature of herself. Her hair was sparse and dyed an ugly rubber-tire black. Dressed badly, but smiling winningly, she nonetheless captured the press. They loved her with a slavish devotion, and so, it seemed, did all of Great Britain. In spite of her feeling that she had been greeted with open arms, the night before the opening she was sleepless and terror-stricken. By daybreak she was pacing up and down her hotel room, still racked with fear. “I kept rushing to the bathroom to vomit,” Judy has said of that night. “I couldn’t eat; I couldn’t sleep; I couldn’t even sit down.”
When the Blitz was at its grittiest, when even the nightingales found it hard to sing in Berkeley Square, there had been Judy singing and dancing up the yellow brick road, giving English romantics a glimpse of happiness even in the darkest days of the war. A grateful nation would not forget this. Though it was springtime, 1951, there was still evidence of the war wherever you looked. Bombing sites waited reconstruction, their brick and mortar entrails still exposed. Charred and crumbling walls loomed darkly through the cold gray rain. Meat and sugar were still rationed. There was a shortage of cloth, paper, and string. Men tediously home-dry-cleaned their one worn suit; women made do with whatever they had.
Industry had virtually shut down for the war years and was slow now in beginning again. This meant that the entire country still had a look of the late thirties to it. Appliances were outdated by American standards—lighting and heating obsolete; cars and clothes were old-fashioned. The British film industry hadn’t yet regained its prewar status, and so American products and Hollywood stars came in for a great deal of idolatry.
The day of the concert, April 14, 1951, the press gave her encouragement and wished her well. It was the first time any press had been kind to her in years, and she drew some confidence from it. Some of the nervousness began to pass, but she still felt she might not be able to sustain herself without Sid.
After several overseas calls entreating him to join her, he hopped a plane, arriving only a few hours before her first appearance. He stayed close to her side, helping her fight her way into the theater through a cold, gray drizzle—hundreds of screaming, kerchiefed girls snatching at her, kissing her, shoving placards that read GOOD LUCK, JUDY in her face, and scrambling for autographs. When Sid finally got her to her dressing room, she was only half conscious. She kept repeating her fears and reminding everyone that she hadn’t worked at all in almost three years and had given a show in public only a few times since she had been a child.
Talking to Joe Hyams (then of Photoplay magazine), she said of those last moments before she went onstage, “There were only minutes left. I had to get hold of myself. I said to myself, ‘What’s the matter, you dope? If you don’t cut this out, you won’t be able to sing’. . . . Standing in the wings, waiting to go on, I became paralyzed. My knees locked together and I walked on [stage] like a stiff-legged toy soldier.”
She should have had no professional doubts, for the only things off-key in her entire act were the two dresses she wore. The first, a flared lemon-yellow organza shot with glitter, made her look like a barrel of melting butter. It was still better than the black dress that followed. But that hardly seemed to matter —for when she finally stepped out of the shadows of the wings onto that huge stage, she was welcomed with a real Palladium roar that caused her to stumble. In a moment she had regained her footing. “Good old Judy!” yelled the audience. She blew them kisses; and when they had quieted, told them, “This is the greatest moment of my life.” Her voice trembled as she spoke, and her audience rose to their feet and cheered her.
One of the most striking features of her show was its thoroughgoing music hall quality. None of it was accidental. The early years were now paying off. All of Ethel’s training, Roger Edens’ coaching, Mickey Rooney’s goading were put to use. She approached the act in a typical variety manner, treating it as pure entertainment, never allowing herself to be overproduced, placing herself on an equal footing with her audience, consciously working to give everyone a good time, and firmly secure in the knowledge that audiences reacted to good lyrics. She gave each song a clear and lively interpretation.
After the first applause had subsided, she sang an introductory song telling how Danny Kaye had impressed upon her that she must play the Palladium. Then she went into a full-throated rendition of
It’s a long, long way to Piccadilly,
But at long last here I am!
Clutching the mike, she joked about her size.
“More to love!” her audience yelled back.
In her first number she was so overly anxious that the fury of her voice made the microphone tremble with her. She opened with “The Boy Next Door,” “Embraceable You,” and “Lime-house Blues.” Then she kicked off her shoes. “My feet hurt,” she confided. The audience laughed heartily. She thumped around the stage in her stocking feet and kept time to her singing with her big toe. She mopped her brow and wiped the tip of her nose with the back of her hand. “It’s not ladylike but extremely necessary,” she confessed. The audience was in the hollow of her hand.
It was to be a retrospective performance of all her past hits, and she began by being casual, discreetly hoydenish, her voice rich and vibrant—filling every nook and cranny of the gargantuan theater, expressing a new joyousness, a new aspect of herself. Toward the end, all lights but one went out. There was Judy in her stocking feet, sitting on the edge of the stage, the microphone so close to her lips that each tremor was echoed. The eyes were wide with wonder, scanning the darkness overhead, looking for bluebirds. There was an incr
edible transference. Judy sat trembling in adolescent wonder and hope and trust. She was the universal child of dreams.
In the moment of striking blackness that followed the last soaring note (Would she make it—would she? Yes! She did! Bravo! Cheers!) of the song, she replaced her shoes and, doing a small turn as the lights came on, as she began to exit, tripped over a microphone wire and fell flat and hard on her rear. Sid immediately shouted from his box seat out front, “You’re great, baby. You’re great!” And Kay Thompson, who was standing at the side of the stage, screamed, “Get back up! They love you!” The audience rose en masse as Buddy Pepper rushed to her and helped her to her feet. She was laughing nervously.
“That’s probably one of the most ungraceful exits ever made,” she said in that voice that often sounded as though it had tripped over microphone cords itself. Then she introduced Buddy Pepper.
The audience shouted back at her, “Good old Judy!” as they had before. She went offstage, but returned for an encore.
“Good night,” she finally yelled out over their whistles and screams. “Good night. I love you very much!” But she was brought out again—this time the stage looking like a conservatory, so filled with floral tributes was it.
The next morning the London Times reported: “Miss Judy Garland not only tops the bill at the Palladium this week, she also runs away with the show.”
All the Palladium reviews were raves. Not one faulted Judy’s performance, though they humorously criticized her costumes.
With the nightly excitement of her Palladium appearances, she was in very high spirits. After each performance her dressing room was mobbed and at least one celebrity would come backstage to congratulate her. She was up all night and slept most of the day. London was the Ritz Hotel or the theater or the Cafe de Paris.
When her engagement ended, four weeks later, a severe depression set in. It was a rainy May. London was gray and damp and shabby. For the first time she looked around her. There was a sense of the unreal, and she felt both longing and guilt at being separated from Liza for so long. Tension began between Sid and herself. She was, therefore, in the beginning, anxious and looking forward to the tour before them. Foster had set a tour of the provinces; but she decided to first go to Paris with Sid to buy some new dresses, and came back with two Balmain originals that, at least, were tasteful.
She opened at the Empire in Glasgow on May 21, at the Edinburgh Empire on May 29; spending June 10, her birthday, in Paris; returning the following night to open at the Palace in Manchester. A man in the audience called out for her to sing “Embrace Me.” “I’d love to,” she called back. She forgot lyrics to a song—and admitted it, and the audience encouraged her onward. When someone asked for “The Trolley Song,” she said, “I’m glad you asked for that one—we rehearsed it.”
On she went, the smell of train stations in her nostrils, the sound of thundering applause in her ears. The Empire in Liverpool, June 18; the Royal in Dublin, July 2; the Birmingham Hippodrome, July 9. In Birmingham she even made an 11:30 A.M. personal appearance at Lewis’ department store.
So closed her tour of Great Britain.
It took thirteen hours then to fly back across the Atlantic, but all that long distance Judy could recall to mind those last moments in Birmingham.
“Good night, good-bye, I love you very much,” she called out.
And to the last member of the audience, they stood and sang to her—"Auld Lang Syne.”
25In no fewer than twelve films she had played the wide-eyed, stagestruck girl who did or did not make the Palace. When she returned to New York after her triumph at the Palladium, that celluloid fantasy became her one real, main, and driving force. Walking through the streets of New York alone, as she was now able to do, she would end up always in front of the Palace, sensing more than irony in the fact that the Palace had become a cinema cathedral, and overcome with the injustice of that fact. Somehow, she told friends, the management must be persuaded to reinstate the two-a-day at the Palace—to bring back vaudeville.
No matter how triumphant her Palladium appearance had been, in her eyes she had not yet played the top until she played the Palace. She discussed it with Luft, and he went to Abe Lastfogel.
It was not difficult to understand the lure the Palace had for Judy. From 1913 to 1933, it had been the quintessence of the tops, the most refined in vaudeville, with the nation’s greatest entertainers performing twice a day, including Sunday. All the great stars of the past had played the Palace—Nora Bayes, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Eva Tanguay, George Jessel, the Cohans and the Foys, Gallagher and Shean, the Dolly Sisters, “The Divine Sarah” Bernhardt, Ethel Barry-more, Lillian Russell, Will Rogers—all the top entertainers of the early twentieth century.
Then came the harsh times of the Depression. It was a losing scrimmage, but the Palace fought to keep vaudeville alive and the theater solvent by combining motion pictures and vaudeville acts. After three years vaudeville “died” more or less officially, and the Palace adopted a straight picture policy, which it maintained until 1949. In that year the theater again combined feature films with live entertainment; but it had lost the breathlessly young quality, the tingling excitement, the splendor and glory of vaudeville in its vigorous prime.
Judy’s success at the Palladium, the phenomenon of the mushrooming Garland Cult, her amazing versatility which enabled her to communicate quivering emotion and follow it with comic pratfalls, the driving vibrato that leaped, soared, swept across the footlights straight up to the second balcony of the great English music hall, encouraged the management of the Palace to go along with Luft and Lastfogel. The Palace could return to a live two-a-day routine, and Judy Garland was the only, the natural choice to launch the historic event. And so it was made public that on October 16, 1951, Judy Garland would open at the Palace, playing two shows a day, Sundays included.
Before her concert years Judy had always portrayed a wholesome, vulnerable, determined, and cheerful young woman, graciously childlike, always seeking to please, smiling bravely in the face of adversity. She was, of course, still that same woman, but now a new side of her personality had emerged. She no longer had to pose. She could do what she wanted: she was able to glut herself with food; say all the outrageous things she had always thought but not said; demand the love she had previously believed she might not deserve; sleep late; dress flashily; and live in an unmarried state with a man she loved. In effect, she was rejecting her past as all those in her past had once rejected her.
A wave of understanding swept across the nation’s rejects— the men and women who had never been accepted as they were. Judy’s incredible rebirth; the unleashing of her true spirit; her defiance of convention; and most of all, the true beauty of her soul that soared from her in song, the honest pain and anguish she exposed when singing, caused them to rise up and at any cost to reach her, to let her know she was not alone, that they would protect her, that they understood, that they accepted her for herself and perceived her need for both a dialogue and an outstretched hand.
This was Judy’s new audience. They were to be not only in the palm of her hand, but also staunchly in her corner. As soon as the announcement hit the papers that she was to reopen the two-a-day at the Palace, they hitched, walked, bused until they reached New York; and once there, they let Judy know of their presence. This army of protectors was a new experience to her. There was no question that she immediately encouraged their devotion.
It was October in New York—a brisk, beautiful autumn. Vivien Leigh was the talk of the film world with her screen performance of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire; Gertrude Lawrence was thrilling audiences on Broadway opposite newcomer Yul Brynner in The King and I. Katharine Hepburn had returned to the theater to do Shakespeare in a brilliant production of As You Like It; and at Madison Square Garden, Marlene Dietrich startled a circus audience by appearing as ringmaster, dressed in a brief costume of her own design—black tights, top hat, and a scarlet cutaw
ay jacket. She stood in the dark immensity of the ring, took the microphone, and said to the entranced audience in her inimitable deep, warm, cavernous voice, “He-looo, are you having any fun?”
Harry Truman was in the White House, with Alben Barkley as Vice President. North Korea had invaded South Korea, and the United States had sent in troops. Joseph McCarthy and the Senate Investigating Committee filled the press and the television screens as the “Hollywood Ten” went “on trial” before an unconstitutional committee of which a young man named Richard Nixon was a prosecuting attorney. Jacqueline Bouvier had not yet met John Kennedy, but she had just written the winning essay for Vogue’s Prix de Paris stating that the three men she would’ve liked to have known were Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Sergei Diaghilev.
Ladies’ skirts were at an all-time ugly length—mid-calf; but this time Judy’s gowns were designed for her by Irene Sharaff, the well-known MGM designer, and good taste and good sense established a style for the performance that had not existed in her appearance at the Palladium. In fact, there was the ambience of a Metro extravaganza about the entire production.
Under Luft’s supervision the Palace had been completely renovated, the decor having an essence of Hollywood grandeur and a heavy-handed Hollywood touch. Judy’s act was staged and directed by that old bullwhipper himself, Charles Walters; Roger Edens did all the special lyrics and musical arrangements; and Hugh Martin, who had written the score of Meet Me in St. Louis and given her the great hit “The Trolley Song,” accompanied her. All of these artists were mentioned in the program as “appearing through the courtesy of MGM Studios.” One might, with a sense of irony, say Judy was as well!