Judy Garland: A Biography

by Anne Edwards

  So, as the first days of shooting passed, as Judy became more and more mesmerized by Vicki Lester, as Vicki Lester began to take over from Judy Garland—the torment, the concentration, the invocation that was to plague her for the long, long duration of the film’s production began. Every night before a scheduled morning scene she would have to more or less invest Vicki Lester’s psyche in her own. And all the time this terrible confusion, this first identification with the role of Norman Maine was there to haunt her. Vicki simply could never sway in her love and devotion for Maine. If she did, somehow it was a betrayal of Judy’s own self; for after all, she was also Norman Maine. And the deeper she got into the film, the more inevitable Norman Maine’s—and, therefore, her own—destruction and suicide seemed to be. It was a harrowing and debilitating experience, and there were nights when the exhaustion overwhelmed her and mornings when she simply could not face the pain of the scene she was to play.

  Within a few weeks of the commencement of photography, the trouble began. She had had to submit to a crash diet before she stepped in front of the cameras. Diet pills and sleeping pills once more became a pattern and were interspersed with the severe emotional highs and lows of her performance; the extreme hard work the part required; the tough, unrelenting direction of Cukor; and the total professionalism of James Mason. Then came the incredible decision to reshoot the entire first month’s footage in Cinemascope. From that point, Judy, though she was the only one to adamantly object to this scrapping of a full month’s work and starting over, had Luft always at her heels, pushing her on, giving her no chance to stand still. In a unique agreement, Luffs deal with Warner Brothers stipulated that the entire negative cost of the film be recouped before he and Judy received their share. Originally budgeted at $2.5 million, by the end of principal photography the film’s cost had soared to over $6 million. Luft and Judy were broke during most of the production and deeper in debt than ever at the end; and as the cost rose, so did Luft’s desperation.

  The pressure was felt by everyone connected with the film. Some broke beneath it. Hugh Martin, who was the arranger and composer for the film, walked out. (Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin did the final score with special outside material by Leonard Gershe and Roger Edens. This was the famous “Born in a Trunk” number which Luft had bought outright for Judy.) In all, five cameramen and four costume designers also walked off the film; and new key people had to be found who could still maintain a sense of continuity to the production.

  The press had a holiday. Judy was once again, as in the past, blamed for all the problems a production was having. Finally Judy confronted the reporters. “I’m a little tired of being the patsy for the production delays on this film,” she told them testily. “It’s easy to blame every production delay on the star. This was the story of my life at Metro when I was a child actress. When some problem came up and they couldn’t lick the delay, no matter who caused it, it was always blamed on the star. Whoever was responsible figured that the star could get by without a bawling out. They couldn’t.”

  Cukor at least had a sense of humor. “First they said it would never start,” he commented, “then that it would never stop.”

  Ten months from the first day of shooting it finally did stop. By that time Judy was irrevocably rehooked on pills, and her love for Luft had turned to a churning and extremely painful hostility, a grave sense of betrayal and rejection. To Luft this must have seemed incongruous. He was, after all, only attempting to make her once again top of the heap and the two of them rich. In the end he was to blame Judy for his inability to get another picture off the ground.

  The film premiered simultaneously at the Paramount and Victoria theaters in New York. The opening was televised with Judy as guest of honor. The ads for the film said, “Just about every celebrity in town will be there!”—and they were.

  “Star is a massive effort,” Time magazine said.

  The star, Judy Garland, was a thirty-two year old has-been as infamous for temperament as she is famous for talent. What’s more, all the producers’ worst dreams came true. Day after day, while the high-priced help— including Judy’s husband Sid Luft—stood around waiting for the shooting to start, Judy sulked in her dressing room. In the end Star took ten months to make, cost six million dollars. But after Judy had done her worst in the dressing room, she did her best in front of the camera, with the result that she gives what is just about the greatest one-woman show in modern movie history.

  And Time closed with the line “... Judy Garland makes a stunning comeback.”

  There was that word “comeback” again! Well, at that precise moment, in spite of the difficulties in her marriage, the financial harassments, the physical exhaustion, and the superdependence once again on the pills, her audience loved her; the press forgave her.

  Now the future did look beautiful. She was once more standing at the top looking down. True, the film would never make her rich; the deal Luft had made and the money the production had cost made that impossible. It would not even help her get out of debt with the Government; the interest and penalties mounted terrifyingly on her back taxes, making the amount owing astronomical and seemingly impossible to repay.

  But there was a new interest in her records; she was up for an Academy Award; and she was once again pregnant.

  The night of the Awards she had just given birth to her third and last child, Joseph Wiley (called Joey from his birth), in the new maternity wing of the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Hollywood. She was touted to win, and the excitement in Hollywood was high. Feeling it was right for Judy and good for the film, Luft had gotten both Judy and the hospital to agree to permit a television crew to come in and at the proper moment, when the Price-Waterhouse man at the Awards show opened the sealed envelope for the name of the winner of Best Actress of the Year, to relay Judy’s reaction from her hospital bed across the nation.

  Makeup men, hairdressers, and technicians swarmed in her room, and filled her doorway. She was propped up in the bed and nervously waiting as she watched the television monitor that had been set up in her room. The moment came. The envelope was opened and the contents read.

  Grace Kelly had been selected by the members of the Academy as Best Actress of the Year for her performance in The Country Girl.

  There was an insane, surreal moment. No one said anything. Then the crew immediately began dismantling the hookup. In less than ten minutes it was all over and they had left with all their equipment. She was a loser and alone. It was after ten o’clock, and all the hospital-room lights were turned off.

  Judy was still propped up, still made up for the television cameras when the night nurse came in with the sleeping pills.

  28That night ushered a new terror into her life—a series of phobias: fear of appearing onstage, of entering stores and cars, of flying—that was to be difficult for her to overcome. And there was serious trouble at home. Realizing that A Star is Born was not going to ease their financial problems and unable to get another film off the ground, Luft convinced her she must go back to doing concerts. The doctors could not trace the problem, but she had not felt well since Joey’s birth. What she needed was rest, home, a sense of roots, and someone to take care of her. Luft’s answer was to leave her home with the children while he traveled from one end of the country to the other to find her work.

  And he succeeded, for in July—nine weeks later—he booked her for a seven-city West Coast tour. In each city she thought she might not make it through her performance, but she did. In San Diego, during one of her best shows, she asked her audience, “Do you think this kind of figure will ever come back?” She was once again as heavy as she had been four years before at the Palladium; and though she was both starving herself and relying heavily on diet pills, she could not lose weight.

  Before the end of the summer and without a respite, Luft booked her into the New Frontier at Las Vegas for her nightclub debut. She sang for forty minutes straight out of the sixty-eight-minute show and broke all the
New Frontier’s existing records. Then on September 24, 1955, she entered television with a Ford Star Jubilee one-and-one-half hour spectacular. Ostensibly the show was a replay of her Palace performance. She was under pressure, not well, and exhausted. Still she was what The New York Times called “tremendously appealing,” and in the view of the Journal-American she was also “the greatest natural talent in show business.” The show was a success, but Judy was once again near collapse. To add to her tension the Government had swooped in, claiming most of her large earnings for the year yet, because of interest and taxes, still leaving her with a debt close to $300,000. What remained of the salary she was permitted to keep got hacked away by staff expenses, travel expenses, and Luft’s sizable percentage.

  At home there were the three children—Liza, nine; Lorna, not yet three; and Joey, five months. Judy desperately wanted to remain at home and be a mother. But the acrimony between her and Luft grew more intense each month. She claimed his gambling was throwing the family into severe jeopardy, and he countered that her inability to work was responsible. “We were losing our ability to communicate with each other,” Judy has said of that period. “I had learned how to handle audiences again, how to be an entertainer. But I didn’t seem to be learning much from my marriage.”

  For the next few years Judy and Luft were to part, file suit for divorce, and then dismiss the suit again and again. The first time was on February 4, 1956, just three and a half years after they were married. Three days later they were reunited.

  This was a period in which Judy claimed Luft was violent. Peter Lawford tells the story of being called over to her house late at night by a hysterical Judy and arriving there to find her with small jagged cuts all over her face which she insinuated Luft had inflicted and which in privacy the maid confided that Judy had inflicted on herself.

  Whether Judy or the maid spoke the truth, on March 4, 1958, Judy again filed suit for divorce—this time charging that Luft “has beaten and attempted to strangle the plaintiff on many occasions, the last occasion being on February 21, 1958.”

  Directly after this—on March 25 of that year—a tax warrant was filed against her by the New York State Tax Commission. And on April 3, a warrant was issued for her arrest for failure to pay $8,000 New York State tax on income earned in 1952 at the Palace which Luft had never paid. She had to hand over to the court, for bond, personal jewelry and her costumes. The press made much of the matter.

  The “Marie Torre incident” followed. Miss Torre was television columnist for the New York Herald Tribune at the time of the “incident” and in an article quoted an unidentified Columbia Broadcasting System executive as saying that Judy “is known for a highly developed inferiority complex.” Judy sued for over a million dollars, and Marie Torre was ordered by the judge to reveal her source. It was a test case. Miss Torre refused to do so and was sent to prison for ten days for contempt of court. It did not make Judy any more popular with the American press.

  It was understandable that she suffered a great fear of insecurity along with all her other phobias. There were literally dozens of reasons for this, but the most basic at the time was her terrible indebtedness when she had earned so much money and her suspicion that Luft was riding the Garland bandwagon like everyone else in her life had and that he did not truly love her. As always, she blamed herself. She was fat and ugly, and she was not able to perform. The Ethel-Mayer self-recrimination pattern was reset into motion. It was a year after her first television appearance—a year of marital strife, self-loathing, and growing dependence once again on pills—before she was to make a major public appearance again.

  In September, 1956, for the second time, she played an engagement at the Palace. As she entered her old dressing room, she was overcome by the shiny gold plaque that hung over the door: THIS WAS THE DRESSING ROOM OF JUDY GARLAND WHO SET THE ALL-TIME LONG-RUN RECORD, OCTOBER 16, 1951-FEBRUARY 24, 1952. R.K.O. PALACE THEATRE. Her appearance, as received by critics, was not so triumphant as her previous engagement. She seemed to lack the naturalness she had had before. Her weight certainly slowed her movements, but there was something mechanical in her performance that all the critics called attention to.

  This point in her life also saw the phenomenal rise of The Garland Cult. It had begun years before. There had been followers like Wayne Martin—lonely people who worshiped her in the privacy of their homes; fans; collectors—but the slavish devotion of what was to become the full phenomenon of The Garland Cult did not swing into frenetic motion until the mid-fifties.

  For a complete understanding of Judy and the Garland Cult, this period in her life supplies the most valuable clues. For years she had suffered pill addiction, insomnia, multiple neuroses, pressures, tensions, armies of creditors, ill health, traumatic relationships, and lost illusions. Her personal fears were at a peak, and she had fallen prey to such acute stage fright that Luft had to push her out onto the stage to perform. She did not perspire, according to her own words, but sweated so profusely during a concert that the costume changes were a necessity; and even so, when she came offstage, her body odor was so gamy that stagehands often visibly backed off. She would drench herself in Joy perfume, its pungent sweetness often causing fits of nausea right in the middle of a performance. Compounding all these horrors was the new fear plaguing her that her voice would go. There were times when it would crack or slip away during a performance. She was never sure when she could depend solidly on it. No longer the wide-eyed, dreamy Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz, she was now a woman who had been through it all and knew what it was about. Yet no matter how great the indignities she suffered offstage, onstage she exuded a sense, a feeling of dignity even in her lowest, her worst moments of performance.

  It was this last that might be called her magic quotient—the ingredient that whipped her audiences into a frenzy and had such a hypnotic effect upon them. Judy appeared to be super-strong, able to endure superhuman trials. That was why when she was good, audiences went wild; why Luft and her musical arrangers made her test herself in each performance, allowing her no respite once she was onstage, setting her keys so that end notes were tough to reach; why with each concert her production was staged more and more with an eye to playing up this magic quotient; why, in the end, she made her entrance very often from the back of the audience, looking small, ill fitted, and proceeded down the aisle to stand alone on a huge, barren stage, one small light picking her out, clinging to a microphone as though it were her only connection to life. This was the image that the Garland Cult was dedicated to. Audiences reacted, were mesmerized and frenzied alternately. When those high notes at the end of a song seemed out of reach, they would pray softly, “Please, please make it!” If she did, they would cheer wildly; and if she did not, they would still cheer wildly to let her know they knew she could and would next time.

  Jerry Lewis once said it very well:

  People now know the troubles Judy has been through. Who among us isn’t plagued with troubles too? So people of all kinds, with worries and problems and heartaches, go to see her; and they identify with her. And when she sings, she is communicating for them all the emotions they can’t communicate themselves because they don’t have a stage and a microphone and talent. The stout women in the audience identify with her; and the people who remember their own unhappy childhoods identify with her. All the people whose in-sides have been torn out by misery identify with her, and she is singing for all of them. In a way, she’s singing with a hundred voices.

  There were a lot of concerts in the years between 1956 and 1959 and too many ups and downs to even recount, but the press diligently did so, dogging her heels and rehashing the old sordid stories whenever they related any new crisis in her life. Seldom was a review of a performance printed in which her personal tragedies and problems weren’t dragged in, and always it referred to her as being “on the comeback trail.” During all this time her marriage to Luft had become a series of psychotic actions and reactions. She could not live with him and
she could not live without him. Luft certainly did everything possible to achieve the latter, for he had set himself up in control of her finances, her career, her health.

  On October 29, 1958, Louis B. Mayer died at the age of seventy-two of acute anemia. That previous July he had embarked upon a fight to regain a voice in the operation of MGM—or Loew’s, Incorporated, of which MGM was now a production arm. Mayer had joined with millionaire Canadian road builder Joseph Tomlinson, a Loew’s director, and the two men had initiated what was termed the Mayer-Tomlinson Scheme to obtain control of the company. Court fights had followed, but Mayer was terminally ill and could not conduct the final battle. Richard Nixon, then Vice President, made a public announcement of sympathy at Mayer’s passing: “I was among those fortunate enough to be a close, personal friend to him,” he began; then told of Mayer’s genius. Mayer’s death deeply affected Judy. She slipped into a period of depression. The past must have come flooding back to her then; and much of it was hard to face, painful to recall, difficult to bury.

  For New Year’s 1958, she returned to Las Vegas, appearing at the Flamingo Hotel. It was a drunk and celebrating audience, and she wasn’t at her best. After she had struggled through five numbers performed in a jam-packed, smoke-filled room, having to compete with a noise level that forced her to overreach for her notes, a woman screamed out from the audience: “Get outta here. You’re too overweight and we don’t want to hear you anyway!” Then two women climbed over the footlights and began to dance. Judy walked offstage—and into another lawsuit for breach of contract. Luft declared he would never allow her to appear in a nightclub again.