by Lorna Luft
I wonder if she ever looked at my father without comparing him to hers.
When I drive with Jesse and Vanessa, my son and daughter, through the old Los Angeles theater district today, Baby Gumm and the Meglin Kiddie Shows she was featured in seem like part of another century to me. What was once one of the most glamorous sections of Los Angeles is now a rundown street filled with seedy stores displaying gawdy gowns that my mother’s most ardent cross-dressing fans wouldn’t be caught dead in. One five-block section of Broadway still houses the remains of the theaters my mother once performed in or went to on Saturday afternoons with her mother: The Orpheus is still in pretty decent shape, its battered old marquee advertising Madonna in Evita. The Rialto is now a discount store (five shirts for $10), and the letters that announce the Loew’s State barely cling to the old brick building—its facade crumbled away under the shock of too many earthquakes.
Our parents’ lives always seem so long ago, so far removed from our own. It’s impossible to really comprehend that they were ever children, too. When I show Vanessa pictures of myself as a child, she smiles sweetly but uncomprehendingly. What does the little girl twirling in a television studio have to do with her mommy? The child in the picture is light-years away from Vanessa’s world. But our parents were children, not so long ago, and their lives continue to interlock with ours until the day we die, as my life will always be a part of my son’s and my daughter’s. I am aware of this every time I look at my little girl and see my mother’s face peering back at me, every time I see a picture from The Wizard of Oz or hear my mother’s young voice on an MGM recording. It’s remarkable, really, how much of our life begins before we’re even born. When I look at my mother’s family, I’m amazed at the patterns that have been repeated in my life.
Generation after generation, we all seem to be born singing, to one degree or another. Childhood friends of my grandfather’s say he was always whistling or singing. As for me, I could always sing better than my friends, and I could always follow the line of a melody and reproduce it on my own. Both of my children have the same innate musical talent, my daughter to a remarkable degree. It’s strange indeed to consider how many of my mother’s best-known moments in film were a replay of her parents’ real-life experiences, from vaudeville to broken hearts.
Yet, in direct contradiction of each generation’s advice, we all seem to be wedded to show business. My grandfather fought long and hard to keep my mother from becoming a “professional kid.” Mama, in turn, always tried to talk us out of going into show business. “You’ll break my heart,” she’d tell us. “I don’t want to watch you go through what I went through.” Yet Liza and I both make our living singing, and as my mother did with me, I tell my own kids not to go into show business. But blessing or curse, we all seem driven to perform, in part because it’s all we really know how to do. When I was a little girl, the only TV show I could relate to was I Love Lucy because Ricky was a performer. The “normal” families might as well have been from Mars. I used to ask myself what on earth I would do if I couldn’t make a living in show business. I still don’t have an answer.
I see other patterns, too: the women in our family can’t seem to stay away from musicians. My sister married one; I married two. My grandmother Ethel married a musician. So did both my maternal aunts, twice. So did my mother, the first time. I’m no different. My first great love as an adult was singer Barry Manilow, and I fell in love with him as much for his music as anything else. My ex-husband, Jake Hooker, was a rock guitarist. My husband, Colin Freeman, is an arranger-conductor.
There’s also the pattern of one family member serving as manager for another. Just as my grandmother managed her children’s careers, and my father managed my mother’s career, Jake managed mine. And just as it destroyed my grandmother’s and parents’ relationships, it caused problems for Jake and me too. Somehow none of us seems able to keep family and business separate.
Luckily, some good things got passed down, too. Just as my grandfather Frank was there for Mama, my father was always there for me, the port in every storm. Whether she realized it or not, my mother did just as well in picking a father for me as Grandma Ethel did picking a father for Mama.
Most important of all, my family passed on a lot of love. Whatever marital struggles we may have, we love our children fiercely. My grandparents had a hard time later in their marriage, just as my parents did, but they gave their kids a lot of love. They may not always have done the right thing for their kids, but it wasn’t because they didn’t love them. I always knew my mother loved me, loved us, more than anything else in life. Everything I know about being a good mother to my children I learned from her.
Did our parents love us? Damn right they did. That’s another family tradition.
I wonder sometimes what would have happened to us all if Mama had just stayed Baby Frances Gumm, daughter of Frank and Ethel Gumm of Lancaster. But she didn’t. She became Judy Garland. She became a legend.
Collection of the author
Mama when she was still Baby Gumm.
CHAPTER 2
Judy, Judy, Judy
Recently my seven-year-old daughter and I took an afternoon walk. It was one of those crisp, clear winter days that are so rare in Los Angeles, and we were enjoying the exercise after being cooped up in our house by the rain. As we strolled down Rodeo Drive, window-shopping as we went, we noticed a new shop—one of those Franklin Mint stores. I was looking in the window at one of the displays when I was startled by Vanessa’s voice asking me, “Mama, isn’t that Grandma?”
I turned to look where Vanessa’s finger was pointing, and there to my right was a display of Wizard of 0{ memorabilia, with my mother memorialized in a series of porcelain figures. Caught off guard, I thought, “Here we go again,” as I told Vanessa that yes, that was her grandmother.
It is strange being the daughter of a screen icon, especially one who died so young. As one of a very small group of celebrities’ children, I am reminded daily of my mother’s life—and, of course, her death. When most people lose a loved parent, they go through a process of grief and bereavement and then move on with their lives. When your parent is a public idol, you never really have a chance to lay that parent to rest. I was painfully reminded of that reality when my friend Diana, Princess of Wales, died recently in a car accident. I understand as few people can what her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, will have to deal with for the rest of their lives. I’m still approached in public places by strangers who grab my hand or even my shoulders, sometimes with tears in their eyes, and offer their condolences as if my mother died last week instead of almost thirty years ago. To them, my mother will never really die. To them, my mother will always be a wide-eyed little girl in blue gingham holding her dog.
No child thinks of her mother as a legend. However famous parents may be in the eyes of the world, they remain “Mama” or “Daddy” to their children. My mother wasn’t just my mom, though; she was Judy Garland—“our Judy” to legions of her fans. That reality affected my life long before I was old enough to understand it. It will affect my children’s lives as well.
None of this might ever have happened if my grandfather Frank had had his way. Much as he loved show business, he wasn’t at all sure that becoming a “star” would be the best thing for my mother. For him, vaudeville was a family business, something the whole family could do together. After all, “Jack and Virginia Lee” had always been a family act. Until she was nearly twelve, my mother performed with her sisters, which was how she liked it. It was one thing to be Baby Gumm, youngest and cutest of the three Gumm Sisters, strutting her stuff while her sisters harmonized in the background. It was quite another to climb up onstage alone, without her sisters next to her and her parents in the front row. Like it or not, though, my mother was headed for stardom.
A lot of things began pushing my mom into the limelight. The first was simply the effect of time. Mama’s sisters grew up. Being so many years older, Aunt Suzy and A
unt Jimmy inevitably grew out of the sister act. Like every other teenager, they wanted to date, go to dances with boys, and, eventually, to get married. Suzy, the oldest, was the first to marry. Jimmy would soon follow.
Then there were the changes in the entertainment industry itself. With talkies taking over the movies, “Jack and Virginia” were soon out of jobs as performers. Grandma Ethel was no longer needed to play the piano during the silent films, nobody was interested in “illustrators” to point out lyrics anymore, and fewer and fewer theaters wanted performers to entertain audiences between pictures. The result was that more and more vaudeville performers like my grandparents were out of jobs. Vaudeville was a dying art. If my mother hadn’t made the change from vaudeville to film when she did, I might be teaching singing at the local junior high today instead of carrying on my own show business career.
But of course, Mama did make the change. She stopped being Baby Frances Gumm and was rechristened Judy Garland. There are several stories about how my mother got her name, but they all involve George Jessel. It happened at the World’s Fair in 1934. This fair wasn’t in St. Louis as in Mama’s movie, but in Chicago. That year the fair was billed as “The Century of Progress,” and Grandma Ethel thought it would be a great experience for her girls to go. Grandma managed to book the Gumm Sisters in a vaudeville show hosted by George Jessel—a huge stroke of luck, since Jessel was already popular.
When George Jessel introduced the sister act, though, everybody laughed. They thought the name “Gumm” was just another of Jessel’s jokes. During the break following the second performance, Jessel told my grandmother she had to change the girls’ name. It wasn’t hard to convince her. All three girls and Grandma Ethel had been thoroughly sick of the name “Gumm Sisters” for quite some time. Over the years they’d been called everything from the Glum Sisters to the Dumb Sisters to the Wrigley Sisters (and every brand of gum you can think of). Jessel told Grandma that he’d think of a new name for them before the next show, so the next time they went on, he announced them as “The Garland Sisters.” Jessel’s version was that he got the idea from an old friend of his, the New York theater critic Robert Garland, who happened to call him between shows that day.
My mother had a different story, though. Mama always said Jessel chose it because she and her sisters were “as pretty as a garland of flowers.” I like Mama’s version better. Whatever the reason, everybody liked the new name, and it stuck.
Mama chose her new first name herself. She got the idea from the Hoagy Carmichael hit, “Judy.” Mama said it was a “peppy name,” and she liked the lyric it came from: “If you think she’s a saint, and you find that she ain’t, that’s Judy.” My mother never said so, but she obviously knew that the line described her perfectly. The result was that at twelve years old, my mother stopped being Frances Gumm and became Judy Garland. Not coincidentally, “Judy” became the most popular name for American girls for more than ten years after The Wizard of Oz was released. “Baby Frances” soon became a distant memory for my mother. Nothing made her madder when I was a kid than being called Frances. Gene Palumbo, her musical director on her concerts years later, would do it occasionally to set her off. It worked.
With a new name that had considerable marquee appeal, all that remained was for Mama to be discovered. By this time she had her own agent, and it was clear that if any of the Gumms were going to be stars, it was going to be Mama. She was a standout in any group. Mama had started getting some serious attention around town, and it all came to a head one day in the autumn of 1935. There are several versions of what happened that day, but as I heard the story, my mom was playing outside in sneakers and dirty playclothes when her agent called. He said she had to come to Metro immediately for an audition. She’d auditioned for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer once before, but it had come to nothing. Mama protested, saying she was a mess and needed time to fix herself up, but my grandfather told her she looked fine and stuck her in the car, sneakers and all. (Grandma Ethel had a fit when she found out.) An hour or so later Mama was taken into the office of Mr. Louis B. Mayer himself and told to sing. She did. When she finished, Mr. Mayer didn’t say a word, so Grandpa took Mama home in a huff.
The next day, though, the agent called back. Could Mama sing for Mr. Mayer again, this time on a soundstage? This time around Grandma got the call, and you can bet that she fixed my mother up in her very best outfit. A short while later Mama was taken into a huge, empty sound studio to wait for Mr. Mayer. As usual, Mama rose to the occasion. When L.B. arrived, Mama sang again, this time ending with Mr. Mayer’s favorite—the Jewish song “Eli, Eli.” Legend has it that L.B. was moved to tears. Two weeks later Mr. Mayer signed my mother to a contract—no screen test, nothing. Judy Garland was on her way.
But on her way where? MGM wasn’t really the lollipop land of the movies. It was a pretty overwhelming place to work, especially for a thirteen-year-old kid. Ready or not, though, my mother was processed into the MGM studio system.
It’s hard for us to imagine now what the system was like in the thirties. Things are so different today—most actors would kill for a multipicture deal. When my mother signed with MGM, though, that was the only kind of contract an actor could sign. There was no such thing as an independent agent. When you signed up with Metro, you weren’t just signing up for a job—you were signing over yourself, body and soul.
In those days Metro was turning out a film per week. Doing this required incredible planning and organization, and Metro had it. They kept a large group of screenwriters, producers, and directors on staff year-round. All of them were assigned projects as part of their contracts and had little say-so in what projects they worked on.
The creative heads were just the tip of the iceberg, though. Besides the seemingly endless costumers, musicians, and set painters, there were thousands of secretaries, nurses, doctors, teachers, and the like. And, of course, there were hundreds of actors and actresses, contract players who moved in and out of parts as the studio heads chose. Not only was Metro a big company; it was a small city. Everything its “citizens” needed was right on the lot.
The school my mother attended was a storybook building right in the middle of the soundstages. It was a tiny replica of a one-room schoolhouse, complete with a front porch, a rocking chair, and a cobblestone lane leading to the front entrance. My mom’s class included Mickey Rooney, Freddie Bartholomew, and Deanna Durbin. Mama had met Mickey before, when they’d both attended Mrs. Lawlor’s Academy in Los Angeles, so they became instant best buddies. My mom was a good student, and she got plenty of attention in a classroom that averaged five children.
Traditional school subjects were only the beginning for these children. Every day there were voice lessons, of course, and dance lessons. There were also diction lessons, drama lessons, makeup lessons, charm and deportment lessons, and so forth. Mama was instructed in how to walk, talk, stand, and breathe—literally. She was also stripped down, measured, photographed and analyzed, all in the most humiliating fashion, and all as puberty was first beginning for her. The studio was not pleased with what they saw. My mother was written up as too short and too chubby, with a round spine and no neck. She had a bad bite, and her nose turned up too much, they said. Her eyes were the only thing that got a good review from the MGM makeover artists. Nobody ever mentioned her beautiful skin.
My mother was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. I always longed to look like her (instead of my dad!). But she wasn’t good enough for Metro. They thought she should fit the movie star stereotype: slender, glamorous, and preferably blonde. My mother was tiny, dark-haired, and barrel-chested. Not what MGM had in mind. They loved her voice, but they weren’t crazy about her looks.
So they set to work to remake her. They put her on a diet. They squeezed her into corsets to make her middle look thinner, and they bound her chest to make her look younger. They inserted little rubber disks into her nose so it wouldn’t turn up so much. They made caps for her teeth. To make her feel
better about the caps, her musical mentor, Roger Edens, gave her a little music box shaped like a piano to keep the caps in. My aunt Jimmy still spent a lot of time with Mama in those days, and she told me my mom accidentally broke the tooth caps one afternoon when she shut the music box lid on them. My mom got so scared when she saw what she’d done that she begged Aunt Jimmy to say that she had done it. Aunt Jimmy told me, “There was no way I was going to tell Mr. Mayer it was me because I could have gotten in big trouble.” When it got right down to it, my mother and her sister were still just a couple of kids from Lancaster who didn’t want to get into trouble with the grown-ups.
Overall, though, my mother loved being at the studio. People are always saying that my mother never had an adolescence. It’s not true; she did have an adolescence. It just happened to be on a movie set. My mother never, ever told me she was unhappy growing up on the MGM lot. When I was a kid, she told me she liked it, that it was fun. It was exciting to work at the biggest movie studio in the world. Mama got to meet some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, and she got to watch as Metro created the magic of films.
Besides, along with the unkind remarks from the makeup department, there was also the flattery. Mama got a lot of attention for her singing. She got a lot of attention, period. The studio aimed to please. And there was the money, lots of money, remarkable amounts for a kid her age. She was guaranteed $100 a week to start and $1,000 a week by her twentieth birthday, huge sums in the middle of the Depression, even for a six-day work week. In reality, it turned out even better than that, for MGM repeatedly raised her salary over the years, paying her far more than their contractual obligation. For the Gumm family, this was overwhelming prosperity after the years of struggling financially in Lancaster.