by Anne Edwards
Yet the failure of the film at the box office led one to ask many questions. Where was the support of the Garland Cult? Was her career coming to an end? Had she lost her audience and their love? Judy fretted about all these things and about most of the other unhappy circumstances in her life. English director Carol Reed lent her his country house in Epsom; but she was terrified, because of Luft’s presence in England, to leave the children alone there. First she hired round-the-clock guards. Then she moved them into her London hotel. Luft now alleged they had been kidnapped. She initiated out-of-court negotiations with Luft, agreeing to give him a percentage of her earnings. Whatever the final agreement was, Luft seemed satisfied. She had the British wardship lifted and, having received permission for the children to leave the country, departed England for Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where she intended to rest and wait out her divorce in familiar surroundings. It was the first of August.
On the night of the fifth of August in Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe took to her bedroom without eating dinner. She was alone in the house except for her housekeeper. The telephone was by her bed and she made a number of calls. A light shone under the door (she did not like to be in the dark). She had been deeply depressed. Her marriage to Arthur Miller had failed. Her last film, The Misfits, had been unsuccessful. She had recently been fired from another film. Friends were deserting her, but perhaps worst of all, she was wholly dependent upon pills —and upon those people either in her employ or close to her who could supply her with the pills. Before morning came, her housekeeper had become apprehensive and called for help. They had to break through the glass door of the bedroom from the garden. Marilyn was lying nude on top of the bed. She was dead, and on the bedside table was an empty pill bottle and a silent telephone.
Judy had known Marilyn through her early years in Hollywood—before she had become the blond sex symbol of the world. She had commented to Marilyn and others that there was a similarity between them as women and as performers. In an interview with Ladies’ Home Journal she tells the following story:
I knew Marilyn Monroe and loved her dearly. She asked me for help. Me! I didn’t know what to tell her. One night at a party at Clifton Webb’s house, Marilyn followed me from room to room. “I don’t want to get too far away from you,” she said. “I’m scared.” I told her, “We’re all scared. I’m scared too.”
The incident had occurred just before Judy’s return to England.
The news of Marilyn’s death sent Judy into a deep depression. For several weeks she kept very much to herself and to her room. Liza, at sixteen, had decided to go to New York and try to break into the theater. There were just Joey and Lorna with her now. It preyed on her mind that somehow—somewhere—she had to make a proper home for them. Having paid all her current and past-due taxes out of what she had earned these past marathon-earning years, and then splitting what was left with Luft, she had a clean slate but certainly not enough money to retire on; and the strenuous nature of her work in those years had left her feeling physically depleted. She did not see how in her present condition she could cope with another concert tour, and no one was submitting film scripts for her approval. Fields and Begelman were discussing television, but it was all tentative. Still, she was heavily on pills and dieting to lose weight if and when it did come through.
Once again, in Ladies’ Home Journal, Judy comments:
I don’t think Marilyn really meant to harm herself. It was partly because she had too many pills available, then was deserted by her friends. You shouldn’t be told you’re completely irresponsible and be left alone with too much medication. It’s too easy to forget. You take a couple of sleeping pills and you wake up in twenty minutes and forget you’ve taken them. So you take a couple more, and the next thing you know you’ve taken too many.
And later in the article she adds:
There have been times when I have deliberately tried to take my life ... I think I must have been crying for some attention.
“Care must be taken; attention must be paid,” Arthur Miller said of the aging salesman Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman, and Judy had commented on the play, “That’s the way I feel about myself, too: ‘Care must be taken; attention must be paid.’”
On the morning of the fifteenth of September, 1962, not quite six weeks after Marilyn’s death, Judy was discovered unconscious on the floor of her room and rushed to Carson-Tahoe Hospital. The chief of staff of the hospital, Dr. Richard Grundy, saved her life; and noting certain medical warnings of serious trouble, ordered a complete examination to determine her true physical condition. He found that she was suffering from acute pyelonephritis in her right kidney, which produces a severe pain similar to that of kidney stones and which she must have been suffering over a long period. To the press he reported that his patient had taken an accidental overdose to stifle the pain she had been suffering and that there had been absolutely no suicide attempt whatsoever. Dr. Grundy prescribed rest and treatment; but Judy was now growing fearful of the future.
Liza tells stories of their life at this time—of how, whenever reporters or photographers wanted an “at home” story on Judy, she would borrow a friend’s house and, bringing pictures and personal memorabilia with her, place them all over before the interview and then whisk them away directly afterward. Life was truly a series of borrowed houses and hotel rooms during this period, and Judy fretted constantly over this way of life.
The following February found her with Lorna and Joey at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York and Luft there at the same time. Liza was appearing out of town in Carnival at the Mineola Playhouse. One night when the younger children had gone to see Liza, Judy was found unconscious on the bed by the hotel maid. She was suffering cuts on her forehead and mouth, and was rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital. The first editions claimed she had once again attempted suicide, but the doctors counterclaimed that she had suffered a fall (Judy had said she had tripped and fallen in the bathroom and could not recall how she had gotten back to the bed). They had feared cerebral bleeding but in the end, released her after treating her for minor wounds.
A few days later Judy and Luft were reconciled, the divorce action seemingly set aside. They flew together to London for the premiere of I Could Go On Singing; then, rushing back to New York, gave a large party for Liza, who had just made her New York professional theater debut in Flora, the Red Men-ace.
The Lufts were now registered at the St. Regis Hotel together, but Judy appeared to be alone most of the time. Once more she was found unconscious. Again the press shouted “Suicide!” and another time a doctor issued a statement of denial adding, “Miss Garland is just suffering from exhaustion.”
Luft was taking back the reins of her career. Fields and Begelman were ostensibly her agents, but Luft was her manager. All of them convinced her she had to remain before her audiences. They booked her into Harrah’s in Tahoe as a compromise. She managed to get through the first week of the engagement, but then collapsed. Mickey Rooney stepped in and finished the engagement for her. Just barely recovering, she flew back to London to do a live television spectacular at the Palladium (a very popular English variety show called Sunday Night at the Palladium). Twice she missed song cues, and once she went to leave the stage by the wrong exit. She was confused and appeared out of it. Directly after the show, which was kindly but poorly received, she flew back to the States to do a television special there.
It was infinitely better than the English show, but the press still found it disappointing; and because of it, negotiations that Fields and Begelman were having with James Aubrey for her to do a weekly sixty-minute television show on CBS were temporarily set back.
The roller coaster had gone over the top and now seemed to have no place to go but down.
32Jim Aubrey, then president of CBS, was responsible for the final decision to sign Judy for a weekly one-hour series at $30,000 a show. After paying the huge entourage that wound up in her personal employ, Sid’s managerial fees, agents’ fees, and taxes,
Judy cleared perhaps $5,000 a show. But as she did not shoot one each week (the first thirteen took twenty weeks), that amount was actually reduced to approximately $3,250 take-home—not much of a percentage, and a far less awesome figure than $30,000, but a fairly solid chunk of money all the same. Judy returned to the Coast and moved into her house on Rockingham Drive in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles.
Mel Tormé functioned as musical arranger on the show. He was brought in by the producer, George Schlatter, and from the first rehearsal, Judy felt insecure with him. Their music followed two separate philosophies: as musical arranger Tormé felt the need to introduce new material all the time, and Judy preferred to rely on her standards. There was a professional hostility that carried itself over to their personal relationship.
However, there is no question that Judy was as emotionally off center and difficult to work with during the filming of this series as she had been during the filming of I Could Go On Singing. Both crews must have experienced the same unbearable conditions. She was, for one thing, trying to maintain a crash diet in order to remain slim for the cameras; was heavily on “speed”; suffered insecurity because of her lack of know-how in this new and devastating industry; and though she refused to face the whys of it, experienced excruciating physical pain.
There is also no question that in the last six years of her life Judy Garland fought for her survival with superhuman endurance—and that there were periods when it appeared she had won the battle. It was during these periods that she gave her best performances, and it was because she could bounce back so rapidly that those around her were often unaware of or insensitive to her grave physical condition.
Judy now drank only small quantities of hard liquor due to her recent past history of hepatitis, when she had been told alcohol would kill her. She drank Liebfraumilch, sipped wine or vodka mixed with tonic or juices, but actually consumed very little. However, even a small quantity of alcohol combined with the amount of narcotics she took a day (and she was now taking morphine along with her heavy dosages of “uppers” and “downers”) would give anyone who might not know her true condition the idea that she was drunk.
According to Bobby Cole, she would ask, “Will you fix me a drink?,” then would take two sips, put it down, and ask, “Will you make me another?” As Cole tells it, “By the end of the evening there would be eighty bucks’ worth of vodka and six bucks’ worth of tonic sitting around in stale glasses, but she never drank it. The only reason she drank was because she was being dehydrated. Dexedrine dehydrates you. Some people who didn’t understand might not have seen the truth . . . she was never drunk. I wish she had been drunk as a skunk. At least with booze you go to bed; you wake up the next morning. But all the time she was on pills.”
In his book (The Other Side of the Rainbow) Tormé recalls an incident when Judy takes what his wife fears is an overdose of sleeping pills and is out cold. Tormé frantically calls the doctor he knows has been treating Judy and the doctor is calm and refuses to come to see her, claiming she is used to the dosage she took. In the morning Tormé goes off to CBS figuring he will have to make excuses for her not showing up at rehearsal, but not too much later, he reports, Judy came literally bouncing in looking sharp and singing great. He deems it a “miracle.” Perhaps—if the use of twenty to thirty Dexedrines taken at one time to wake up from a sledgehammer of Nembutal could be called a “miracle.”
The producers in the beginning decided Judy should talk and do skits as well as sing. With seven cameras glaring at her from all angles and one looking down her throat as she sang, Judy felt anxious and threatened. She always had a slight stutter under trying conditions; now it became more pronounced. And every week she had the weight over her head that the show’s rating might not be so high as that of the top-rated program Bonanza, which was on NBC, the competitive network. Judy commented with humor at the time, “You know, I used to watch Bonanza all the time; and if my show doesn’t get better, I’ll go back to watching Bonanza!”
The series’ first executive producer, Norman Jewison, commented after the show’s first shift in personnel, “This show is the Cleopatra of television.” Certainly nothing was spared once Schlatter entered the picture. A forty-by-one-hundred-ten-foot house trailer, air-conditioned and emblazoned with red and white candy stripes, was hoisted to a second-floor ramp and converted into her dressing room. Behind the trailer’s kissing-Cupids door knocker, an interior decorator had created a miniature replica of the star’s home, complete with wall-to-wall carpeting, antique marble tables, and indirect pink lighting. The furnishings included a piano, a stereophonic sound system, a tape recorder, a serving bar, and a refrigerator containing Judy’s favorite wine, Blue Nun Liebfraumilch.
Adding to that extravagance, nearly $100,000 had been spent to raise the stage and to embed a separate revolving stage with new electronic Marconi cameras that the technicians claimed removed wrinkles from faces. Workmen had also painted the long corridor from her dressing room to the stage door to resemble the winding yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz.
An amusing incident occurred shortly before the series began shooting. Facing a gathering of several hundred representatives of stations affiliated with CBS, Judy sang a parody of the Carolyn Leigh song “Call Me Irresponsible,” to wit: “Call me irresponsible/ Call me unreliable/ But it’s undeniably true/ I’m irrevocably signed with you.” All present cheered loudly.
The show premiered on September 29, 1963. “What should never happen to Judy Garland did last evening in the premiere of her weekly program over the Columbia Broadcasting System,” said Jack Gould, the New York Times television critic.
The busybodies got so in the way that the singer never had a chance to sing out as only she can. To call the hour a grievous disappointment would be to miss the point. It was an absolute mystery . . . The thinking of C.B.S. executives was to develop a “new” Judy, one who would indulge in light banter and make way for suitable guests to share the weekly tasks . . . Those telephones on the twentieth floor of C.B.S.’s home should buzz this morning with but one directive to Hollywood—Free Judy.
And CBS talent chief Michael Dann replied with this statement: “We have decided that she [Judy] should never appear in sketches and never play any character but herself. And she’ll be singing more medleys, more standards. Songs are her babies. We told her what we think and she’s listening. She’s far too insecure about television to exercise her own judgment. She knows what’s good for her.”
And Judy replied, “I’m the original take-orders girl.”
But now that was no longer true. She had a temperament clash with Jim Aubrey which she could do nothing about, but she could try to get rid of other unsympathetic personnel. She wanted familiar faces around her—people she felt she could rely on. Thus there was a mass “firing” after the fifth show, and for whatever reasons—personal or professional—she had turned against Tormé and was demanding a new musical arranger.
Finally asserting her own wishes, she brought Mort Lindsey and the orchestra onto the stage and, with an onstage tent in which to change costumes, did a one-hour concert which highlighted many of the great numbers she had performed at Carnegie Hall. She was alone except for one number in which she sat on the edge of the stage singing “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe” to Joey, and a very beautiful new lyric, “Lorna,” put to the show’s theme music by Johnny Mercer, to Lorna. She also sang “Liza,” but Liza was not present on that show. That hour was one of the greatest ever recorded for television. (It was recently re-aired, to overwhelming enthusiasm, and received an exceptionally high rating.) But unfortunately, as many shows were already shot that had not been shown, and as CBS had high-salaried commitments to the stars it had lined up as future guests, Judy was not allowed again to get out there in front of the band to sing.
The decision was to appeal not to her cult, who they felt wanted to treat her like a goddess and not share her, but to the “camera and sneaker clan.” An attempt was made t
o dispel the legend surrounding her. Instead of guests’ flattering her, they would “bring her down.” “Judy, you used to be so fat,” guest star Steve Lawrence needled. “This isn’t the original, this is the twelfth Judy Garland; the original went over the rainbow years ago,” resident comedian Jerry Van Dyke quipped, adding, “There’s a little farm in Pasadena that grows Judy Garlands.” Often Van Dyke would repeat the same “joke": “What’s a nice little old lady like you doing on television?”
“The absurd notion of debasing Judy’s reputation as a legendary figure,” television critic Richard Warren Lewis said in Life, “and molding her show into an imitation of other prosaic variety shows has been a disaster where it hurts most, in the audience-rating polls.”
But her producers never gave up. She was forced to make chitchat with her guests and to take a back seat while they performed. Only one guest show truly stands out. In that one she had Barbra Streisand and Ethel Merman as guests, and there are two classic numbers—one in which all three ladies try to “outbelt” one another, and one in which Judy sings “Get Happy” as Barbra sings “Happy Days”; and according to Tormé’s book, that idea was Judy’s.
“I went down to see her,” he writes. “She was playing Streisand’s record of ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ on a portable phonograph. She took the arm off the record, invited me to sit, and said, ‘Listen.’ Then she began to play the record from the beginning again. As Streisand’s voice came through the speaker, Judy started to sing ‘Get Happy’ in counterpoint to ‘Happy Days.’ The result was electrifying, one of those chance discoveries in which two great songs jell into one extraspecial opus.”
When Barbra came into his office, Tormé writes that he told her, “Since you sing in any key, try ‘Happy Days’ in this one.” Then, beginning the introduction in a key suitable to his own range, he motioned to her to start, whereupon he joined in, as Judy had, with “Get Happy.” “Barbra kept singing as she half-turned to me, a wide smile on her face. When we finished she exclaimed, ‘That’s terrific! I mean it! Your idea?’