Somewhere . . . somehow ... I want to find a place without any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. It’s not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It’s far, far away—behind the moon, beyond the rainbow . . . somewhere over the rainbow . . .
—Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz
1If Judy Garland’s mother had walked for eighteen minutes she would have completely covered the east, west, north, and south of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where her husband had purchased a small movie house. It was no wonder that a young woman who had dreamed of playing the Palace in New York would not only despair, but would—in order to survive the ordeal of being forced to live in a small, drab town—weave golden dreams of her own.
All of those dreams took her far away from the town’s muddied streets, from its lineup of Model T Fords and lumber wagons, from the terror of its winter storms, and from the vulnerability of the small, unprotected white frame house in which she; her husband, Frank; and their two daughters, Virginia (Jimmy) and Sue (Susie) lived. The ugliness did not make her despair; the hopelessness did.
Born Ethel Marion Milne, in Superior, Wisconsin, one of a very large family, she was always petite and feminine, and her mother, Evelyn, favored her, giving her every advantage, transferring her own ambitions to her daughter. By the time Ethel was twelve she played the piano and sang badly, but the fantasy her mother had helped create refused to be crushed inside her small-framed body, and she grew to be a pretty woman with dreams of stardom.
While playing the piano in a local movie theater, she met a good-looking, fun-loving Irishman who hailed from Tennessee and was a tenor. His name was Frank Avent Gumm. They married on January 22, 1914, in Superior, Wisconsin. He was twenty-seven and she was twenty. They formed a vaudeville act, billing themselves as Jack and Virginia Lee, Sweet Southern Singers, and made the vaudeville circuit in their home territory, meeting with very little success. By the time their first two children had reached school age, Frank had scraped together all he could salvage or borrow and bought the little theater in Grand Rapids, where his mother lived.
Ethel begged Frank to sell the movie house and go back on the road. He refused. Bolstered by her own aggressiveness and her new awareness of the freer role women in cities now had, she threatened to leave on her own.
It was the fall of 1921. Warren Gamaliel Harding had that year taken over the Presidency, succeeding a tired, partially invalided Wilson. Perhaps not a hick, but certainly humble, Warren Harding was redeemed in Ethel’s eyes only by his imperious wife, Florence, who had already gained the name of The Duchess. It was Florence who drove her husband on to success against all obstacles. A devotee of astrology and necromancy, she believed her husband’s star destined for the highest ascendancy. Ethel, though identifying with the President’s lady, felt it was her star, not Frank’s, that would bring her into the aureole light. She planned to leave, then discovered she was pregnant.
Frances Ethel Gumm, the future Judy Garland, was born on June 10, 1922, about the same time as Benito Mussolini marched on Rome and took up the reins of dictatorship. Not even Ethel in her greatest moments of fantasy could have imagined that her third baby would someday come to represent to a nation fighting the Fascism of Hitler and Mussolini the ideal American girl.
Ethel and Frank Gumm had actually hoped for a boy so strongly that the evening edition of the Grand Rapids Independent carried an announcement of the birth of Francis Gumm, Jr., born to Mr. Francis Gumm, owner and manager of the New Grand Theatre, and Mrs. Gumm. This was corrected on the child’s birth certificate, but Frank could not help showing his disappointment.
Soon, however, this third daughter became his favorite, and he called her “Baby.” She was a snub-nosed, homely baby, who seldom cried and seemed almost unable to contain her great joy at being alive.
Had Ethel not been longing for a glamour that Grand Rapids could not rise to, it is entirely possible that “Baby” Gumm would have grown up in that small town and married a local boy. That would not have been an unhappy choice in Frank Gumm’s opinion. But Ethel’s fantasies drew her on, and eventually “Baby” with her.
As Ethel looked around her, she saw all the young people deserting Grand Rapids for the big cities. Throughout the country a feeling of optimism and prosperity prevailed, and the American Woman appeared to be liberated. At least she could smoke, wiggle the Charleston on a tabletop and travel unchaperoned.
Ethel followed the lives of the famous in magazines and in the tabloid press. She was an avid admirer of the Fitzgeralds, though she never read a line F. Scott wrote. She found Hemingway romantic but she was not sure what sort of books he had written. Hollywood and the films were the only glamorous world she could identify with.
Sitting in her husband’s movie-house matinee after matinee while her mother-in-law minded her brood, Ethel studied Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton as intently as if she were cramming for a university degree. Her determination was to be admired, and her own realization that she did not have the beauty or genius to make it on her own, to be respected. Her predatory eye had already roved away from Frank. He was good, and hardworking—the least creditable traits Ethel could imagine, especially when out in Hollywood one Rodolfo Alfonzo Raffaeli Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla, better known as Rudolph Valentino, had captured the American housewife with an image of dash and daring. Frank Gumm could not be expected to carry any woman off to great adventure. It was, therefore, up to Ethel herself.
Gathering all the ammunition she could, which seemed to be the asset of three daughters, each of whom might grow to be the beauty or great talent she was not, Ethel began her first steps on what was to be her great adventure. She convinced Frank that what his movie house needed was a “live act” every Saturday afternoon. Using all the knowledge she had picked up from the film comedies she had been studying, she proceeded to work out an act for Susie and Jimmy, then eight and five respectively (Baby remaining in the care of Grandmother Gumm). Child stars were all the rage in Hollywood. Ethel set her hopes high, but after only a few performances of “The Gumm Sisters” those hopes began to slip. Even at the New Grand Theatre in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, the girls could not be called a smash act. But their mother persevered.
It was on a Saturday night during the Christmas season of 1924 that Baby made her debut. She was two and a half years old and seated on her grandmother’s lap watching her sisters perform as her mother accompanied them. She began to cry, wanting to be with her sisters, who were onstage. Her grandmother, hoping to quiet her, carried her to the stage and set her down on the edge. Ethel was furious. “Get off. Get off!” she called from the pit, where she was playing the piano. Susie and Jimmy froze, not knowing what to do. The audience began to laugh and applaud. Baby laughed and applauded, edging toward her sisters, slipping and tumbling, rising to her feet with Chaplinesque genius, mimicking all the gestures she had watched her mother instruct her sisters to employ in their act. The audience called out for her to sing. Frank Gumm started out onto the stage to carry her off; but before he reached her, she began a chorus of “Jingle Bells,” the only song she knew.
Something happened in that movie house that blizzardy winter day, and both Ethel and Frank were aware of it. The laughter that was always quick to surface in their youngest daughter rose in her voice, and it transmitted itself to the audience.
Nothing could hold Ethel back now. She was convinced her star had just ascended on the stage of the New Grand Theatre. It was impossible for Frank to stop her. She immediately put Baby into the act and sought engagements in nearby towns. The older girls sang at first as a duet, with Baby coming onstage for a specialty; one of her numbers was a turn as a belly dancer, dressed in a colorful Egyptian costume that Ethel had made.
Ethel’s dream flourished, and Hollywood was its ultimate setting. She whittled away at Frank’s good nature, and it was not long before house and theater were both up for sale. No sooner had both been sold than the Gumm family piled whatever was left of their possessions, took to the road, and working their act in every town they could grab for a booking, headed West.
Months of continuous travel followed. They lived in rented rooms or slept in the car, and Ethel saw to it that all their bookings brought them closer to Hollywood. Frank drove, handled the business end, and appeared in the act as opener and interlocutor, while Ethel prodded and plotted—her small, pretty, plump hands moving across broken keyboards in her own arrangements; prompting the girls from the pit; and taking a turn as a chanteuse before the end of the act. There were one-night stands and split weeks. Work was scarce and bookings hard to come by. The country might have been experiencing a boom, but vaudeville was already beginning its decline, with vaudeville theaters quickly being transformed into movie houses.
Often they performed before a movie was shown. The audiences were impatient and not always approving. And there was the Gerry Society to contend with, for laws had recently been passed that forced children to attend school. If the Gerry Society caught them, the girls were made to attend a school for a minimum of a week. They minded much less than Ethel, who dreaded the delay in attaining her goal.
The two older girls were very close confidantes. Baby was too young to be a participant in most of their adventures or conversations; and as Ethel was always busy working on the act, she grew extremely attached to her father. She had more in common with that laughing Irishman than the others anyway. They had a similar sense of humor. She loved his stories and his singsong voice and was already resentful of the way her mother could say things to him that would bring a sadness to his face. Sitting on his lap or curled up next to him in the front seat of the old car, she was content and happy. And when she was onstage she always wanted to be sure he would be in the audience and where and would direct her glance to that spot.
Prohibition was in, but Frank Gumm always managed to obtain some Irish whiskey. There would be shrill reprimands from Ethel then. Every cent was to get them to Hollywood; at bootleg prices, Frank’s whiskey could cost them precious time. The longer the delays, the more difficult Ethel was to live with. Yet Frank was unable to conquer his need at times to blur the edges.
The Gumm Sisters did not play the big cities. They played the cow towns and farm towns and small factory towns. In those places the discontent was a visible, buzzing thing; farmers were hard up, and there was serious unemployment. What Frank saw on the road disturbed him, made him feel uneasy. He wanted to get his girls to safety, to put a picket fence around them and a great many blossoming rosebushes. Unfortunately, the times he felt this the strongest were the times he drank the most.
Frank opened the act singing spirituals and sometimes closed it with a song—“I Will Come Back.” (Years later this was to become Judy Garland’s closing song on her weekly television show.) He was an Irish tenor with a lovely full-bodied voice. Baby would applaud him frantically from the wings. But when Ethel chose to sing a song—“I’ve Been Saving for a Rainy Day”—Baby would cry. There was something sad and touching about Ethel when she sang—not because her performance was moving but because it was so terrible and Ethel so untalented, and because the audiences were always hostile to her. Even the small child sensed this hostility and remembered it all her life. A sea of angry people and her mother a sinking ship. It was a haunting image. She wanted the angry buzz to stop, the faces to smile; but she was powerless. At times they even threw food at Ethel. Once a piece of cheese missed its mark and hit Jimmy in the stomach. Jimmy didn’t cry, but Baby did.
After three long, torturous months, the five Gumms arrived in Los Angeles. It had seemed a much longer journey. But for Baby Gumm it had brought her close to the two great loves of her life—her father and a live audience.
2Today, except for the signs, it is difficult to know when you enter or leave Hollywood. But when the Gumm family came to the end of their journey and turned onto Hollywood Boulevard, it was bizarre and marvelous. They had traveled all day, part of it through the searing heat of the desert. Frank was exhausted and the three children half asleep, and they had not arranged for rooms; but the brilliant neons were blinding. Ethel wanted first to see the brand-new Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and Ethel always got her way. Holding Baby Frances in her arms, Ethel woke her. Grauman’s—the grand and glorious movie cathedral—was the future Judy Garland’s first glimpse of Hollywood.
The finishing touches were just being put upon a replica of a Polynesian village in the forecourt of the theater. Sid Grauman, veteran showman, had invited a number of the most distinguished stars to put the imprints of their hands and feet in the wet cement of the forecourt, thus preserving in cement the prints of the immortals. Grauman was also the man who invented the “premiere”—the initial public showing of a “super-special” film. Tickets sold for $5; they were purchased by the public to see the stars, and by the stars to be seen by their fans.
The night of a premiere, Hollywood was a carnival. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick describing the scene in the New York Times Magazine in the late twenties wrote:
The elite of the movies crossed a high bridge erected across the street in front of the Theatre. This “bridge of stars” was a temporary gangway ablaze with clusters of huge incandescent flowers and raked by Kleig lights like a battery of suns. The stars were announced by megaphones; in ermines, sables and similar equivalents of the imperial purple, like royalty on a balcony, they bowed to the plaudits of the populace.
The throng was so dense that the pedestrian could not fight his way within a block of the place. The parade took place under an awning a block long, lighted like an operating table, between solid walls of gaping people.
Imagine Ethel’s excitement at viewing such a scene. Or at having Frank buy a guide to the stars’ homes and driving past the giant English manors and Spanish castles with their lineup of foreign cars in the driveways; the stucco sculpture in the forecourts; the swimming pools—some with swans; houses guarded by mastiffs and Russian wolfhounds; and rooftops flying huge American flags. Ethel was mesmerized and at the same time convinced that Baby Frances would transport the Gumms into a world such as she now saw.
Ethel had embarked upon her true career as that great phenomenon, the Movie Mother. Hedda Hopper once said:
They [the youngsters] arrived in Hollywood like a flock of hungry locusts driven by the gale winds of their prompting, ruthless mothers. One look into the eyes of those women told you what was on their minds: “If I can get this kid of mine on the screen, we might just hit it big.” They took little creatures scarcely old enough to stand or speak, and like buck sergeants drilled them to shuffle through a dance step or mumble a song. They robbed them of every phase of childhood to keep the waves in their hair, the pleats in the dress, and pink polish on the nails.
Most of the major studios were located on the edges of Hollywood. The Gumms took rooms within walking distance of them and for several days Ethel worked long and hard to prepare Baby Frances for her debut. There were pink organdy frocks to be sewn, a handshake and bow to perfect, reluctant baby hair to tease into curls, and an audition number to rehearse. Sound was not yet a problem in films—though it was just over the horizon. Ethel concentrated, therefore, on the child’s ability to put over her personality. She taught her how to use her eyes and her hands; how to look as though she were about to cry—how to quiver her lips and still appear piquant; how to laugh and yet retain her poise. There was the Chaplin walk to be mastered if the role called upon was comedy; the Mary Pickford stance if demure. Feeling sure of their prospects, she left the two older girls with Frank and began the rounds with her youngest child.
Ethel was not prepared for the long queues of mother and child, the rudeness of casting directors, the hopelessness of ever reaching anyone with executive power. But, from the other mothers, she gleaned a bit of knowledge: if she could meet a top agent and persuade him to represent Baby Frances, the child’s chances would be estimably better. She proceeded to change her tactics. Baby Frances in tow, Ethel then made the rounds of agents’ offices. There were the same endless queues, the same rudeness, the same closed doors.
Her stamina wavered, and Frank managed to talk her into moving the family to Lancaster, a small town eighty miles north of Los Angeles. It was a harsh, inhospitable community, situated in a barren semidesert, unacquainted with show people and with sunbaked prejudices as hard as the rocky cliffs that surrounded it. There was a small movie theater for sale there, however, and Frank took what money he had left and bought it.
One can easily imagine Ethel’s state of mind after she realized the full consequence of his move. Refusing to accept the ramifications, terrified at being trapped in a town and a life even more stultifying than Grand Rapids, and frustrated at the nearness yet distance of the Mecca, of the golden gates, of fame and glamour and fortune, she piled the girls into the old car on weekends and drove into Los Angeles, a trip then taking nearly three hours each way.
Ethel could now see that her chances might be greater if a talent scout caught Baby Frances in action. Her new tactic was to place the child on a stage. Jimmy and Sue had to be included, as Baby Frances could not be expected to sustain an entire act by herself. She signed the girls with the Meglin Kiddies, a booking agency for child acts, and it constituted a large compromise on Ethel’s part.
Working from Lancaster, as the older girls had to attend school, Ethel made that grueling trip back and forth every weekend, setting out at five in the morning and driving through dust and sandstorms, desert heat, and torrential rain in a tired car with three sleepy and very irritable children. At times she was rewarded with a booking. Then she had to drive the girls to some small theater not always too close to Los Angeles, rehearse them, and accompany them in their performance.
One weekend while they were playing the Alhambra, just outside Los Angeles, schoolboys who had brought box lunches to the theater, sent the contents whirling toward the three girls with perfect aim. Baby Frances ran from the theater, and it took a half hour to find her and bring her back.
Ethel took bookings for the girls for any price and for any function—luncheons, benefits, fairs. Money appeared to be no object—once, the girls performed for an entire evening for the lamentable sum of 50 cents—the ultimate hope and purpose being that a talent scout or a cousin or sister of some producer or director would catch the act and see the star potential of Baby Frances.
Frank, determined to make Ethel take the girls off the road, concentrated his forces on the business and within a year had expanded and bought two neighboring movie houses. Ethel refused to give in. Aware that the older girls were detracting from, not adding to, Baby Frances’ appeal, and deciding the child had gained experience and confidence, Ethel’s compromise to Frank was to leave the older girls at home and take Baby Frances out as a solo.
Now it was Baby Frances and Ethel, alone, on the road together—sometimes for a one-night spot; more often for a series of one-nighters that would keep them away from Frank and the girls for a week or more.
In spite of all the waves and manicures and fussy homemade costumes, little Frances Gumm was a chubby, awkward child who was beginning to suffer grievously from an inferiority complex born of comparison with Ethel of the tiny pretty hands and with the thin and pretty children who performed on the same bills with her. She was a quiet, pensive child, who, waiting to rehearse in a theater, would play with modeling clay or talk to her dolls, all of whom she called Peggy. She tried communicating with the other children on the bills, but she was invariably much younger and avoided whenever possible—although she made one friend during those years: Donald O’Connor. She was lonely and sad-eyed, hungry for the companionship of her sisters and the love of her father, confused and hostile toward Ethel whom she felt responsible for these forced separations from the only real contact she had with human love. Ethel was undemonstrative and seemed to consider mothering the same as babying and would have none of it. The “Baby” was a sales tag only. Ethel expected the child to act mature offstage, well behaved, patient, quick to learn, while onstage she was to appear precocious but winningly babyish.
The youngster began to weave fantasies that Frank would follow them to whatever town she was in and forbid Ethel to take her any farther. In these fantasies, he would buy first-class train tickets and they would travel back to Lancaster, leaving Ethel behind in the strange town.
But when she was home her sisters were in school, and the other children snubbed her because their mothers felt theater children were unwholesome. Most painful were the fights between Ethel and Frank. As she did in the theaters she performed in, she secluded herself in a room with her modeling clay and her doll—Peggy. At home, another fantasy of the same kind filled her head. Frank would depart Lancaster with her, leaving Ethel behind. Her dream was not that she become a star—but that Frank would become rich and famous and that Ethel and the whole world would have to sit up and take notice of him.
Ethel would never prepare her for a departure. Early in the morning she would come into Baby Frances’ room, always aclutter, and order her to get dressed. The child sensed her mother’s relief at leaving the scorching, unfriendly heat of Lancaster and the constant reprimands and demands of Frank, but she was always grief-stricken at those leavings and much to Ethel’s anger would cry or sulk for most of the journey. If this behavior kept up when they were on tour, Ethel meted out her own form of punishment. No matter how strange the hotel or the city, Ethel would slowly and silently pack her own suitcase and tell Baby Frances she was leaving because Frances was bad. The terrified child would plead with her to remain, the words falling on deaf ears. Then Ethel would take her suitcase and depart, locking the door after herself and leaving the hysterical child alone. After a time she would stop sobbing and just wait and hope; and, as expected, in due course, Ethel would reappear and the frightened child would beg her forgiveness.
Early in her maturity the grown Judy was to say: “I was always lonesome. The only time I felt accepted or wanted was when I was onstage performing. I guess the stage was my only friend, the only place where I could feel comfortable. It was the one place where I felt equal and safe.”
Of course, that was when she did not need to dodge any flying objects. And so all her lifetime she would struggle to win her audiences, pushing herself to the last measure of her endurance to hold them in her grasp.
3It was called Black Tuesday. The date was October 29, 1929. The stock market had crashed. Brokers and investors were hysterical and the nation in utter disbelief. The ranks of unemployed increased at a dizzying speed. President Hoover blindly refused to provide emergency help. The nation seemed unable to cope with all the destitute families, the jobless, the hungry. Families slept in doorways, on park benches, and in subways. A few lucky ones found shelter in municipal lodging houses.
The depression had settled in. Across the country there were, as the young novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote, “. . . scenes of suffering violence, oppression, hunger, cold, and filth and poverty going on unheeded in a world in which the rich were still rotten with their wealth . . .”
But Hollywood had found its voice, and millions of people unable to escape from the bleak reality of their own lives sacrificed food and lodging to see the glamour and opulence of a Hollywood film. For movies, with the double feature now in effect, offered four or five hours’ surcease from despair. The movie moguls poured everything they had into supplying a panacea to a desperate nation. Stars were created, glamourized, lionized: Wallace Beery and Marie Dressier; Joan Crawford; Jean Harlow; Clark Gable; Marlene Dietrich; and such romantic co-stars as Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor. The industry thrived and was the only one abundant in riches.
By 1934, Ethel had seen the inside of a Hollywood sound stage only once. The girls had performed a bit in a film short called La Fiesta de Santa Barbara * The film was second rate and the girls terrible, but still she was one of the fortunate Movie Mothers. Frank’s business prospered. She never knew want for herself or her family. That fact only added to her great discontent. She detested being so squarely middle-class and was determined that the great fortunes and glamour and stardom that only Hollywood could offer would belong to Frances and herself.
What Ethel never took into consideration was what Frances wanted. At that time she was an overweight child with a passion for pistachio ice cream cones and hot dogs. Not athletic, she disliked games and felt terribly inadequate when forced to participate. She was, at ten, still playing with dolls and making doll clothes. What she loved most, next to Frank, was animals, particularly dogs, and to Ethel’s chagrin was always dragging in strays, so that there were few times there weren’t two dogs to feed. The dogs became a source of joy and an area of torture for the child. On the move, she was throughout her life always attaching herself to an animal and then having to leave it behind. The guilt and the longing would remain with her until she found another dog to lavish even more devotion on. It was a terrible, vicious circle of overwhelming love and attachment, desertion and guilt.
Leaving Susie and Jimmy with Frank, Ethel now took Frances, who was ten, and moved into a small hotel, the Hotel Gates. It was the beginning of many long separations between Ethel and Frank. For two years thereafter they would part for long periods and then come together again. It was difficult for Frances to accept or to understand. She longed to be with her father. She wondered if she had anything to do with her parents’ separation.
After six months at the Hotel Gates, Frank sold the theaters in and around Lancaster and bought another theater in Lomita, a suburb of Los Angeles. He and Ethel reconciled and they rented a house in the Silver Lake district (Frances was in ecstasy about it), which Frank later bought, and the girls were entered in Mrs. Lawlor’s School for Professional Students.
There Frances met a sandy-haired, fresh-faced kid named Mickey McGuire (born Joe Yule, Jr.), who was later to become Mickey Rooney. Mickey McGuire was a new experience for Frances. In the era just past when child actors had been starred in short subjects, Mickey had headed the cast of over fifty. Draped in a checkered shirt, a derby slapped on his head, a stogie stuck in his mouth, he re-created the then-well-known cartoon-strip character of Mickey McGuire in a series of the same name. The experience gave him tremendous confidence.
Mickey was just what Frances needed to keep from turning into a morose and totally introspective child, for although she had thought the house in Silver Lake would magically change her life, it had instead made her a closer observer of the violent quarrels between her parents. She overheard accusations made by Ethel to Frank and these had a deep impact on her, for they had something to do with her father’s “immorality,” and he seemed to Frances the loser in these altercations. Mickey was able to make her laugh just as Frank, in his carefree days, had been able to do. They hit it off from the start.
Jimmy and Sue had lost interest in being performers and had not performed for a while. But Ethel had a terrible fight with Frank, and putting all three girls into the back seat of the same old touring car, she drove without ever stopping to sleep until she reached Denver, where she found engagements for the girls in a theater and in a nightclub. They remained in Denver for a week. During that time, Ethel followed all the write-ups on the Chicago World’s Fair.
It was called the Century of Progress Exposition, and it was the biggest show of its kind. Twenty million tourists were thronging through its gates. Profits were astronomical. It was a spectacular repudiation of the conditions that existed across the nation with wonders running the gamut from a reconstruction of a Mayan Temple to Miss Sally Rand, stark naked with fans and an outsized bubble. Reading the Variety coverage on the tremendous grosses in the theaters on the Midway, Ethel decided to take the girls there.
Although she was never able to really communicate with her sisters, there was one good thing about their presence on this journey—Frances did not experience the loneliness and fear at night that she did when it was just Ethel and herself. Never was she able to cast off the terror at night that she would be deserted, left alone. Many years later she was to say: "I’m afraid at night. I didn’t know how to use the telephone when I was a scared little girl. But now, at the age of forty-one, I do know how to use the phone and I make all those nocturnal calls to wake up all my friends about three in the morning. I resent the fact that they’re sleeping and they’re not around here . . . It’s almost like everybody were Mama, and everybody went away and I’m left alone."
Their first booking was at a theater on the Midway. The place was run by gangsters, and acts were seldom paid—and were threatened if they attempted to do something about this. Ethel allowed the girls to work without pay because Frank had given her a sizable amount of money before she had left Los Angeles. And she kept her silence because she felt so sure someone would have to see them at such a major entertainment spectacle as the Chicago World’s Fair. After three months, however, her money ran out. She was forced to go to the management and ask for their wages. The act was thereupon given immediate notice.
Refusing to wire Frank for help even though they were out of money, she went begging for work for the girls at every nightclub and theater. Finally, they were given a spot on the bill of the Oriental Theatre, where George Jessel was headlined. It was Frances whom the Oriental wanted, having heard her sing “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” But Ethel had not prepared a solo act and so the sisters were included, with the proviso that the youngest carry the act.
The night they opened at the Oriental their names went up in lights. All of them ran out to look at this wonder. The last on the bill before ADDITIONAL ATTRACTIONS, their name was misspelled as THE GLUM SISTERS. Ethel was beside herself, haranguing cast and crew to change the name on the marquee. Jessel suggested they change their own, for any review could too easily rhyme Gumm with “dumb,” “crumb,” and “bum.” Robert Garland, a newspaper critic, was backstage, and so Jessel suggested they use the name Garland. Ethel, possibly feeling this would set her apart from Frank forever, agreed.
Sue and Jimmy did not want to give up their Christian names, but Frances had an idea that if she changed hers, she would get away from ever being called Baby again. At that time one of her favorite songs was “Julty” written by Hoagy Carmichael. The lyric began, “If her voice can bring ev’ry hope of the Spring / That’s Judy, my Judy,” and ended, “If she seems a saint and you find that she ain’t / That’s Judy / Sure as you’re born.”
Reluctant to see her Baby entirely disappear, Ethel fought for the name Babe, but Jessel and the management won the battle. Jessel was master of ceremonies and he introduced the act as “The Garland Sisters—featuring little Miss Judy Garland with the big voice.”
The act earned enough money at the Oriental to pay for a return to Los Angeles. They arrived at three in the morning. It had been nearly four months since the newly christened Judy Garland had seen her father. Frank, hearing the car pull into the driveway, had run out to greet them. Judy broke away from her sisters and ran into his arms.
“I cried out of happiness,” Judy said of that reunion—“and that was a first, too. It’s hard to explain, but all the times I had to leave him, I pretended he wasn’t there; because if I’d thought about him being there, I’d have been too full of longing.”
* La Fiesta de Santa Barbara was a two-reel short subject Musical Revue Series, released February 7, 1935, but filmed much earlier, and there remains the possibility that MGM therefore had film footage of Judy previous to her contract. The short, filmed in color, was about a boating party, with glimpses of such stars as Gary Cooper, Harpo Marx, Maria Gambarelli, Warner Baxter, Leo Car-rillo, Adrienne Ames, Robert Taylor, Mary Carlisle, Edmund Lowe, Toby Wing, Buster Keaton, Ida Lupino, Irvin S. Cobb, and Ted Healy.
4Even though she had been well received at the Chicago Oriental, the year that followed brought her one studio rebuff after another. Ethel was still in there trying, making the rounds of the studio front offices with her. It was agreed that she had a big talent to match her big voice, but her appearance and her age blocked any further interest.
The experience of being in Chicago without funds had sufficiently clipped Ethel’s wings so that she was willing to remain close to home. The family was back together again, and Judy could not have been happier. Bookings were made and kept in theaters around Los Angeles during the school year so that the girls could remain at Mrs. Lawlor’s. Two summers were spent at Lake Tahoe at the Cal-Neva Lodge, where the girls had four-week stands. The engagements appeared to be singularly uneventful, but during the second summer they met A1 Rosen, a Hollywood agent.
Rosen had come to the Lodge with a friend who was obtaining an unpleasant divorce and needed someone to hold his hand. Rosen was not a big-time agent, but he was a man who knew how to turn a situation to his advantage. According to Rosen, he recognized Judy’s potential immediately, as had “Bones” Remer, who was one of the owners and operators of the Lodge. He also knew she didn’t stand a chance as long as Ethel and Jimmy and Sue came as part of the package.
As Rosen tells it, the day the engagement ended, Harry Akst, the songwriter, and Lou Brown, at that time a casting director for Twentieth Century-Fox, arrived at the Lodge. Feeling this was the propitious moment, he maneuvered the cast of characters to Judy’s and his advantage.
Rosen’s story has Ethel and the girls already in the old car ready to depart when he called Judy back to the Casino on a pretext, Ethel waiting unsuspectingly in the hot sun while inside the large, cool interior of the Casino, “Bones” Remer, Akst, and Brown played gin rummy. “Dinah” was Akst’s most famous song. Interrupting the game, Rosen insisted Akst play the song while Judy sang, promising Akst he would hear the song as it was meant to be performed.
But another version appeared in McCalls magazine twenty years later. In this one, Judy, Ethel, and the girls were in the old flivver ready to return home when Jimmy remembered that they had left behind a box of hats in a closet, and Judy was sent back to retrieve it. On the way, Judy supposedly met “Bones” Remer, who asked her to accompany him to the Casino, whereupon she met Akst and Brown and Rosen for the first time and in pure innocence requested Akst to play “Dinah” for her, not knowing he had written the song.
Rosen and the McCall's story do agree on what followed.
Judy had never sung without Ethel or her own arrangement. And she was, in her own words, “. . . scared they’d [the girls and Ethel] all be mad at me—or leave.” Standing in the center of that large, otherwise empty casino, she was not at all sure she had made the right decision.
Never having learned how to read music, Judy did not know what key she sang in. She was advised to begin and Akst would follow. The conditions were different and the youngster was nervous. It gave her voice a distinct tremolo. Her mind was on the anger with which Ethel would greet her when she finally returned to the car. She set a hurried and almost frantic pace. Years later, Bobby Cole, one of her musical directors, was to say: “We always set the key and pace so that it seemed that Judy would never be able to reach the last note. That way there was always cheering when she did.”
The men were impressed, but Brown was certain, because of her physical awkwardness, that she had no place in films. Rosen had more faith. He gave her a slip of paper with his name and telephone number on it and told her to have her mother call him in Los Angeles in a few days.
They were halfway home before Judy told Ethel about the “audition” and gave her mother A1 Rosen’s telephone number. To her wide-eyed and grateful surprise, Ethel was not angry.
A1 Rosen became her first agent. This had many ramifications. To begin with, Rosen was interested only in Judy and refused to represent her except as a solo. That was the end of the Gumm/Garland Sister Act. Secondly, Rosen was essentially a film agent and insisted she remain in the Los Angeles area. And thirdly, having formed an immediate and distinct antipathy to Ethel and recognizing the inadequacy of her talent, he tried whenever possible to get Judy another accompanist.
These two—Ethel and Rosen—had swords drawn against each other from the beginning. Both, however, desperately needed the same thing: a star in their stable. No other agent had taken the interest Rosen had. Though Ethel hated the man, she trusted his dedication to Judy’s success. She didn’t always go along with his decisions, but more often than not she was agreeable.
This insecure youngster was now in the center of a hurricane of hostility, always being pushed, exploited, and disregarded in any human sense. First she had been Ethel’s dream; now she was an agent’s meal ticket, his chance for the big time. Because of this she suffered severe and irreparable damage as a human being and as a woman. But these same malevolent forces became the prime movers of her career.
Rosen could not afford the time required for formal voice lessons, and yet he felt Judy needed a more intensified and identifiable style to set her apart. A big voice was not enough. He recognized that her delivery was directed to the heart as well as the ear. Employing the help of a cantor in Boyle Heights (the Jewish ghetto of Los Angeles), he had Judy work with him on the famous “Kol Nidre” and other emotional prayer songs. Then he took her to all the major studios. The answers were always the same. If she had been a toddler or a young woman, they might have signed her. They all thought her voice was sensational. But she was, at twelve, overweight and not very pretty, and no one knew what to do with her.
Though Rosen could at times cut Ethel out of an audition, he could not control her handling of Judy at home. Ethel was still making those pink ruffled dresses, curling the reluctant thin hair, and painting the bitten nails. The youngster could not have been presented more unbecomingly.
Again there is a conflict in stories of how Judy first came to the attention of MGM. In one, A1 Rosen secured an audition for Judy at the Feist Music Company, which was a subsidiary of Metro, hoping for a recording contract. Someone at Feist called Roger Edens, who was to become Judy’s future musical mentor. Edens, a top executive in the MGM music department, was asked to come down and hear this young girl sing. Edens obliged and even agreed to accompany her at the piano.
One cannot help digressing for a moment to conjure up the picture of this youngster—her hair curled atrociously, her clothes ill fitting and in the worst possible taste—accompanied by this sophisticated, handsome young musician—his dress superb, his manners elegant, his speech impeccable. Not yet thirty at the time, Edens had already traveled extensively around the world and was a consummate musician.
Judy asked him if he could play in her key. Years later, she recalled that moment with embarrassment. It was an incredible question to ask a fine musician.
She sang “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.” Edens made her sing it again, this time switching the emphasis on notes, shading the phrasing. By the third time, he was confident his instincts were right. Returning to the studio, he went directly to Ida Koverman, Louis B. Mayer’s secretary, to arrange a studio audition. Rosen was contacted.
That day Ethel had gone out on errands and Judy was home alone with Frank. Rosen called to say that he had just won an executive audition for Judy at MGM and for her to get over to the studio right away. Ethel had left instructions that Judy never leave the house for an audition without her knowledge. At the time Rosen called, Judy was playing in the backyard. She was wearing gray slacks and a white blouse, and her hair was brushed back from her face. It was the way Frank Gumm liked his daughter best. He decided he would not wait for Ethel and that he would take Judy to the studio exactly as she was.
With Edens accompanying her, she once again sang “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”—this time for Frank Robbins, the Metro talent chief (later to become a well-known music publisher), and Ida Koverman. Rosen was nervous and excited. The presence of Mrs. Koverman meant Judy might audition for the great mogul, Mayer himself. Judy was told what was about to happen, but she was not in the least overwhelmed.
After Judy sang, Ida Koverman called Mayer down to hear her. Neither Judy nor Frank knew Mayer’s power in the studio, and both were rather astounded at the electricity in the room as everyone waited for Mayer to appear. He finally did, secretaries hovering close at his heels, furious at Ida Koverman for interrupting his work, glaring at Judy. She sang, her father close to her for support. The expression on Mayer’s face never changed while he listened, and when she was done, he got up without saying a word to her and left, his secretaries once more scurrying behind him.
But though Mayer did not seem to react, he had studied the young girl performing for him: stocky, short, plain, freckled face, big eyes, and pug nose; she was no beauty, but she did look like everyone’s kid sister or the kid next door, and Mayer liked to make films with a true-blue-American-family feel to them. He also recognized the strength and talent of her voice and the electricity its emotional power generated.
Never saying a word to Rosen or his client, he left them to speculate. Frank and Judy thought it had been, in her words, “a big nothing.” Rosen kept calling the studio for word.
Two weeks later it came. Judy Garland was now under contract to MGM.
5Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the 167-acre movie domain, is not in Hollywood. It is five miles to the southwest in Culver City. In 1934, when Mayer hired Judy, the studio was the busiest; the main lot, with its park, artificial lake, private zoo, schoolhouse, restaurant, hospital, raffish collection of old sets and barnlike buildings, stood quietly in the sunlight like an abandoned city. Whatever was going on inside the big white buildings whose doors were guarded by red lights blinking on and off, warning intruders and interrupters away, was in the power of one man. Louis B. Mayer controlled the life of the studio and was responsible for those blinking red lights.
Mayer was the wealthiest and most influential mogul—just as his company was the wealthiest and the most influential company for over three decades. Upon his decisions or instructions rested the fortune and fate of hundreds of persons. The competition for jobs was fierce and emotional involvement intense. Anyone who had the final word on hiring had in his hand the power of bestowing life or death. And no one in the industry wielded more power during those years in the growth of the American film than Louis B. Mayer.
He was more than a man. He was a demigod to some, a monster to others. He was, according to David O. Selznick, “. . . the greatest single figure in the history of motion picture production.”
Mayer insisted, “I want to rule by love, not by fear.” He did not recognize how totalitarian that concept—I want to rule— was. Hollywood was a jungle in those days, and the matter of survival often rested in Mayer’s not-too-lily-white hands, for he was quite capable of using any means to attain his goals. Early in the thirties he was indicted by a Los Angeles grand jury for conspiring to commit usury. He certainly thought very little of working his child performers twelve hours a day, or of starting them off on pep pills to keep them before the cameras.
He had been born in Poland in 1885, son of a poor laborer and a mother of peasant stock. His mother swore he had been born on July 4—fitting for a future great American. His Polish years were marked by hunger and thirst and great privation. By some miracle, his entire immediate family—father, mother, two sisters and himself—was able to emigrate westward together when he was still a child.
He was brought up in Saint John, a small city in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. His father was a ragpicker, and from the very earliest time the boy had been taught to scuttle along the sidewalks, back lanes and alleys searching the ground for discarded scraps of rusted iron, broken bits of anything, stuffing them in a pack he always wore strapped on his back.
The family fortunes slowly improved. By the time Mayer was a young man, they were salvaging metals from wrecked ships along the coast and were respectable junk dealers. Brothers Ruby and Jake were needed to help their father in the main office, but Mayer was sent to Boston to arrange the sale of their salvage. Louis B. Mayer was on his way. But salvage was not to be his future.
The year was 1907, and a new entertainment phenomenon, the nickelodeon, was sweeping the country. For a nickel, one could see a “moving picture.” The theaters were, more often than not, vacant stores equipped with folding chairs, and the film was projected on a cotton sheet. By 1907 there were between 2,500 and 3,000 of these “movie houses” in the United States. Mayer put up $50 on a three-day option for a theater in the neighboring town of Haverhill and struggled just under the deadline to raise the remaining cash. Haverhill was a shoe-manufacturing city with a population of 45,000, most of whom were factory workers. The movie house was an instant success.
Keeping his eye to the ground as he had always been trained to do, Mayer swept across the country, adding new movie houses to the pack on his back. He was now a successful exhibitor in a class with William Fox, Marcus Loew, Carl Laemmle, and Adolph Zukor. He wanted more. He wanted to be a movie producer.
Most films were being produced in New York. Mayer, feeling that more sunlight, allowing for longer hours of outdoor shooting, was essential, went to Los Angeles. It was late in 1918. The country had just emerged from a World War.
By 1924, Mayer had managed a merger with Goldwyn on the Culver City site. The studio was to be called Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The roster of stars and directors was impressive: Erich von Stroheim, Frank Borzage, Rupert Hughes, Mae Murray, John Gilbert, Will Rogers, and Lon Chaney, to mention a few. Only a few years later, Goldwyn and Mayer parted company—the Goldwyn in the title now no more than a name. (Decades later, Samuel Goldwyn was to remark harshly at Mayer’s funeral, “The reason so many people showed up at his funeral was because they wanted to make sure the S.O.B. was dead.”)
By the time Judy was signed to an MGM contract, Louis B. was forty-nine years old, and success and power had overtaken his girth, strengthened his haunches, and settled on his face with terrifying implacability. He was no one to oppose.
In a very candid television interview on the David Frost show, Elizabeth Taylor (who, at the time of the following incident, was approximately the same age Judy was at her first meeting with Mayer) revealed what coming face to face with Mayer could be like for a thirteen- to fourteen-year-old girl. Frost asked her her impression of Mayer when she was a child star at MGM.
“I thought he was a beast,” she replied. “He was inhuman. He used his power over people to such a degree that he was no longer a man. He become an instrument of power and he had no scruples and he didn’t care whom he cut down or whom he hurt.”
Miss Taylor had been announced for a film, Sally in Our Alley, a musical; and as she was not a singer or a dancer, that meant a lot of work. Her mother was concerned and made an appointment for them to see Mayer.
Relating what occurred next, Miss Taylor explained: "I am not a singer and dancer, so Mom and I went up to see L.B. because we had been given this big long lecture about ’I am your father and whenever you have trouble and whenever you need anything, come to me and I will help you. You are all my children and I am your father and all you have to do is come to me.’ So I went to his office, which was like Mussolini’s . . . you had to walk—well, it seemed a mile. And you walked on this white carpet to this white oak desk and all this white kind of carving of leather and the white chair in which this dwarf with a rather large nose peeking over the desk sat and peered at you. It was kind of terrifying because until you sat he’d do—[a kingly gesture: eyes upon work, hand waving to subject]—and then he’d say, ’Yes, what is it?’
“We said we had read that I was going to do a film called Sally in Our Alley and if it were true, then we thought I should start work on it—like dancing lessons and singing lessons. Silence. Dead face. And then he looked at my mother and asked, ’What do you have to say?’ She said, ’We wondered if Elizabeth was going to do the film or not and whether we should start any kind of preparations.’ And he started like foaming at the mouth and said, ’How dare you come into my office and tell me how to run my business? I took you and pulled you out of the gutter and you’d be nowhere if it hadn’t been for me.’
“Now, I promise you, David, I would have been quite happy in my ’gutter’—whatever he thought that was—without him. We said we didn’t come up here to ask for anything. We just wanted to know if we were to do anything, and started to walk out. He said, ’Get out. Get out of here,’ and started to foam—literally foam—at the mouth. ’Don’t you tell me how to run my business! You and your daughter are nothing but guttersnipes. Get out of here.’
“And I said (it was the first swear word I had used), ’Mr. Mayer, you and your studio can go to hell!’ And I ran out of the room in tears.
“I was called about an hour later by the Vice President and the Second Vice President to go in and apologize to L. B. Mayer for telling him and the studio to go to hell. And I said I didn’t see why I had to because I thought the way he had treated my mother and me was wrong and not that what we had done was wrong. Anyway, I couldn’t because I was so offended by the way he spoke to my mother.”
Frost then asked her if she went back and apologized, and Miss Taylor replied that she never saw or spoke to him again.
At the time of this incident, Elizabeth Taylor had already made National Velvet and was a child star. She had had a stable childhood, one much different from Judy’s. Born and brought up in her earlier years in England, she had not become a performer until she was ten. Mrs. Taylor had been an actress; Mr. Taylor, a successful antique dealer. Though Elizabeth’s mother was ambitious for her, there was never the intense need, the desperate drive for her daughter to be a star. Elizabeth never experienced the same pressures as Judy. Mayer could terrify her all he wished and not destroy her by taking away her stardom. She had family to return to where she was loved and accepted just as she was: Elizabeth—daughter and sister.
From the very beginning, Judy was made to realize how important Mayer’s approval of her was and how destructive his disapproval would be. She thought of him at that time, she was later to say, as “the real grand Wizard of Oz”—and she walked the studio streets with the same mixed emotions of hope and fear that possessed Dorothy on the yellow brick road.
She had actually not spoken to Mayer in their first meeting. Not yet knowing his power over her life, she had not feared him. Ethel immediately delineated his importance. As well, the other employees on the lot were graphic in their fear and their opinion of L.B. Judy began to think of the man as one would of a school principal.
He wanted all of his subjects to regard him as an all-holy father figure, but Judy had Frank to greet her at the end of each day. They would share stories or watch films together in his theater, and Frank would mimic the action on the screen, pretending he was all the players—women and children as well as the men. Judy would join in. They shared more laughter than they had ever been able to before. The child was happier than she had ever been. Ethel was satisfied and relaxed for the moment, knowing her Baby was signed to the biggest studio of them all; the girls were relieved that they would no longer be expected to perform; and Judy had her dream clutched tightly in her fist. She would never again have to leave her father.
It was decided that she should be given as many chances to perform as possible. That did not mean that Metro was ready to put her before the cameras. Instead, the studio sent her to sing at parties given by Metro stars and executives. Singing at Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg’s home, or at Gable’s home, she felt awkward and ill at ease. She was later to say she felt like hired help—singing, eating in the kitchen, and returning to her own modest home at the end of each grand and sumptuous party.
The leading night club at that time was The Trocadero, owned by Billy Wilkerson (who also owned the trade paper The Hollywood Reporter). Wilkerson had set up a series of Sunday-afternoon auditions. Studios would send over new players and they would test themselves before a professional audience, gratis. Judy’s appearance at The Troc, as it was called, one Sunday afternoon, is thought by many to have firmly convinced Mayer and Metro that the awkward little girl might be worth top material.
It was almost three months to the day from the date of that first audition that her world crashed. Frank died suddenly and unexpectedly of spinal meningitis. When she left for the studio in the morning he was taken to the hospital. In the evening she appeared on a radio show with A1 Jolson. A call came that her father’s condition was very critical. It was a cruel blow that he died before she was able to see him. Through the years Judy said over and over again, “My father’s death was the most terrible thing that ever happened to me in my life.”
She was never to overcome his loss and sought his image in every man she met, but she was incapable of crying at his funeral. She was so ashamed of this that she feigned it. The following eight days and nights she was inconsolable, melancholy and tearless. Ethel was beside herself, certain that the girl’s attitude and listlessness would reach Mayer’s ears and be met with great displeasure.
On the ninth day, the dam broke. Locking herself in the bathroom at home, she cried and vomited for fourteen hours. None of Ethel’s pleas moved her. When she emerged, she was exhausted, sick, and weak. Ethel demanded she clean up and go straight to the studio, where she was long overdue.
Upon her arrival, they were told that Louis B. Mayer wanted to see them. It was the first time she had an audience with him, but she was never able to discuss that initial confrontation. She did say he gave her some consolation and then went into his now-familiar lecture—“I am your father and whenever you have trouble and whenever you need anything, come to me and I will help you.”
No substitute for Frank, he did supply the devastated young girl with a figure of authority—half Satan, half God. Ethel regarded him in the same light. For once, her mother’s word would not be the last.
6It must always remain in the area of speculation whether or not Mayer’s intentions toward Judy were honorable and paternal, or either. It is a widely accepted fact that he had a penchant for very young girls and that he was possessed of an acute God complex which made the young women he felt he had created the most attractive to him. Before, during, and after the time Judy was on the lot, “below-stairs” gossip linked Mayer with many of the very young female players. Further, such gossip intimated that Mayer never promised stardom if the young girl did comply but that he threatened destruction if she did not. There was no need to doubt his power to do so.
The talk “belowstairs” involving Judy and Mayer began when she was not yet fifteen. It persisted during most of her MGM contract years. For most of her life Judy denied any such liaison. But certainly Mayer’s influence over Judy’s life while she was at MGM was more powerful and God-like than over that of any other player. For nearly seventeen years she worked, slept, ate, appeared in public, dated, married, and divorced at his command. He even exerted supreme authority over any medical crisis in her life.
Frank’s death made Ethel financially dependent upon Judy’s earnings. He had not provided for the years ahead; the estate was small; and she had Jimmy and Sue to feed, clothe, and educate. Judy was earning $150 a week, less A1 Rosen’s 10 percent. No king’s ransom, but in 1934 it was a sizable salary. Ethel now employed a new tactic if Judy misbehaved or threatened any small rebellion: “I’ll tell Mr. Mayer!” she would yell. From the very inception of their three-sided relationship—Judy, Ethel, and Mayer—Judy never doubted that Ethel was on Mayer’s side. In her younger years, therefore, she was much too fearful to do anything but comply.
In 1934 there was no provision made by law to protect a child actor’s earnings. Legally, these earnings belonged to the parents, but morally one would expect some future protection for the minor. Judy signed her checks over to Ethel without question. She continued to do so for the next five years as the checks and her career rose to stellar heights. But no part of those moneys was ever put aside for Judy.
At the time Judy signed at MGM, Jackie Coogan was a star on the lot. Though nearing twenty-one, he still commanded $1,300 a week. During his long career as a child star, he had earned over $4 million. Publicly, his parents had declared they were protecting a large slice of those earnings by putting it into a trust fund for him to receive when he reached twenty-one. Arriving at that age, Coogan found there was no trust fund. His father had died and his mother had married their business manager, Arthur L. Bernstein. Claiming disapproval of young Coogan’s conduct, they forced him to leave the house his earnings had bought. With the haunting vision of his lost millions, Jackie Coogan went to court to try to salvage what he could. By 1935, his contract had ended at MGM. He was jobless, homeless, and broke.
It was not until May 4, 1939, that a committee of the State Assembly at Sacramento was to recommend passage of “The Coogan Act”—or the Child Actor’s Bill, Through this bill, the court had the power to set aside 50 percent of the child’s earnings in a trust fund or other form of savings. For Coogan it was a Pyrrhic victory. He managed to retrieve $126,000 from the Bernsteins, but five years of court battles almost entirely devoured the amount.
During those years (1934-39), Judy never concerned herself about money. Once the cameras began to roll for her, she had no time for anything outside the studio. Her financial needs were small. Ethel had sold the house in Silver Lake, and they moved closer to the studio. She was driven to the lot early in the morning and returned home late at night. Later, when she and Mickey were making films together, they often slept in the studio hospital rather than return home for the few hours allotted them.
Having Mickey on the lot was Judy’s one great compensation after her father’s death. Together with Deanna Durbin, they attended the studio school daily from nine to twelve. All three were still waiting for the big chance. Math was Judy’s weakest subject, as it was Mickey’s. They had much in common. Returning to memories of their days together at Mrs. Lawlor’s, Mickey says: “At Ma Lawlor’s, during math lessons, Judy and I swapped mash notes. The notes said such bright and original things as ’I love you’ and ‘I’ll always love you’ and ‘You look beautiful this morning.’ The passion was counterfeit and we both knew it. Only our love of fun was real.”
Years later, Rooney’s mother was to ask him why he didn’t marry Judy, and he was to reply, “I couldn’t do it. It would have been like marrying my sister.”
Mayer had signed her without any role in mind. He also had not insisted on a screen test, which was unusual. He had hired her by instinct; his comment to Ida Koverman had been to the effect that she had a very special charisma that he sensed he could channel to star quality if she did as he said.
His manifesto went out: “Groom that girl and slim her.”
Orders were issued to the commissary that she was not to be served anything but chicken soup no matter what she ordered, and no matter how hungry or hard-worked she was. After her four-hour session, she attended exercise classes, dance classes, and song-styling sessions with Roger Edens, who was her one studio support. This routine continued for almost a year. Judy—still chubby, but not fat—had learned how to walk gracefully, and talk and sing without distorting her face. It was time, the studio felt, to see how she looked on camera.
The short, Every Sunday (also known as The Sunday Afternoon and Every Sunday Afternoon) was ostensibly made as a screen test for Judy and Deanna. It was a two-reel short subject directed by Felix Feist, and in it Deanna sang a classical song while Judy sang swing. (Judy was later to sing a similar duet—“I Like Opera and I Like Swing”—in Babes in Arms with Betty Jaynes.) Sid Silvers appeared in the film with the two girls.
Mayer was in Europe when the short was finished. Coincidentally, Deanna’s option renewal arose at the same time. Though it has never been determined whose decision it was, Deanna was dropped.
Joe Pasternak was producing for Universal, and he had a script that was written for a young hot or swing singer. Having heard about Judy, he asked the executives at MGM if Universal could see the short. Studios often lent out players for large fees to other studios. A request of this nature was not unique.
Pasternak could not get over how both the young girls belted out their songs or the tremendous screen presence each had. But the script was for a swing singer. Pasternak went back to MGM and asked to borrow Judy for the film to be called Three Smart Girls.
By this time Mayer had returned from Europe. According to Arthur Freed (who later produced many of Judy’s films), he was responsible for Judy’s not being dropped at the same time as Deanna. Ida Koverman claimed there was an edict that no decision regarding Judy Garland was to be made without Mayer’s authorization. Whichever is the truth, or if both are, Pasternak’s request revived Mayer’s attention. He ran the film, refused to lend Judy—and at the same time was furious that Deanna Durbin had been dropped. But Pasternak never forgot Judy, or his belief in her.
What was MGM’s loss was Universal’s gain. Rewriting the script to suit a classical girl singer, Universal signed Deanna. The film was to make her an international star overnight and one of her studio’s biggest money-makers.
The year that followed was a difficult one for Judy. Mickey had made his Metro debut in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and having also broken his leg while tobogganing, he had little time to spare. Immediately after the preview of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he was put under special wraps. Freddie Bartholomew was the leading child star at Metro, having just made David Copperfield. But Mickey was being groomed. He was earning the comfortable salary of $500 a week in mid-Depression. (By the end of the decade he would be making close to $5,000 a week.) Several strong roles were immediately set up for him. He went straight into Aft, Wildernessl and then Riff-Raff (with Tracy and Harlow), The Devil Is a Sissy, and Little Lord Fauntleroy (Bartholomew still the star attraction) without much time between. Judy had lost much of her old friend’s companionship. The acceleration of his career and Deanna’s sudden stardom pointed up the fact that she was marking time. By the end of the year, Darryl Zanuck, now at Fox (he had been at Metro but could not get along with Mayer), asked Mayer to lend Judy for Pigskin Parade, which he was producing. Mayer, perhaps remembering that he might have had a star on his hands if he had lent Judy to Pasternak at Universal for Three Smart Girls, consented.
Pigskin Parade was a run-of-the-mill film, with a formula plot but The New York Times did single out Judy, after noting first the Fox debut of a pretty blonde in the cast—Betty Grable: “also in the newcomer category is Judy Garland, about twelve or thirteen now, about whom the West Coast has been enthusing as a vocal find . . . She’s cute, not too pretty, but a pleasingly fetching personality, who certainly knows how to sell a pop.”
7Across the nation, while millions were starving, a crime wave machine-gunned itself to an ominous din. G-men were matched against Public Enemies. War was declared, and among others of the criminal elite, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde were shot down. It was apparent that Mayer’s decision was to let them (film audiences) “eat cake.” MGM began a twenty-year cycle of what Mayer considered clean and wholesome entertainment.
Films, since their earliest inception, have been a tremendous social force, whose control in the day of the movie moguls gave these men power to mold opinion and attitude. Mayer’s intimates were William Randolph Hearst and Herbert Hoover. (Ida Koverman, Mayer’s secretary, had once been Hoover’s secretary and had brought the two men together.)
Mayer’s friendship with Hearst went back to 1919, when Paramount had let Marion Davies (Hearst’s girlfriend) go as a flop and Mayer, needing money for his new studio, had sold himself to Hearst on the proviso that he make and continue to make films starring Miss Davies. In all the years Marion Davies was at MGM, only one film ever made back its cost—Little Old New York. But Mayer held up his end of the bargain. Hearst, for his part, and with his gargantuan power, aligned himself with Mayer whenever called upon.
In 1935, Mayer was known to a wide circle of Hollywood “society” as “Trocadero Lou.” His wife, Margaret, was bedridden in their home in Malibu. He was now making $800,000 a year, and his power to sway opinion was second only to that of one man—Hearst.
He was also Hollywood’s leading host, throwing Lucullan banquets for his friends and visiting dignitaries that rivaled any kingly affair.
“Troubadors greet the guests as they enter,” Joel Faith reported in a 1935 issue of Theatre. “Splendid food is served. The honor guest is usually surrounded by a bevy of film cuties. Sometimes the ultimate in juxtaposition is reached, as when Miss Harlow is placed next to Bishop Cantwell and Miss Crawford is beside Rabbi Magnin. When George Bernard Shaw toured America he was the guest of Mayer and Hearst. He sat at table beside Miss Marion Davies. When he rose from his chair to view the studio, Miss Davies clung to his arm with a grip of iron. Nor would she let go until news photographers snapped their shutters. Next morning pictures of these intellectuals graced the pages of all the Hearst newspapers.”
It was obvious that Mayer both identified with and envied Hearst. In his office, throughout his life, was a larger-than-life-size portrait of Hearst. It was to be expected that the Hearst philosophies would be the message of Metro films. Bank presidents and politicians always fared well. The true condition of the country was never shown. Young men fought and died in historical wars for Mom, the family back home, and the American flag. Contemporary dramas and comedies had the hero fighting for the same causes.
But as powerful as Hearst was, he was not a match for the gangsterism of Al Capone. From Chicago, Capone viewed the golden rooftops of Hollywood and sent his emissaries out to shake down the film industry for a cut of the take. A man named Willie Bioff arrived in Hollywood along with George E. Browne. Both men immediately took over the IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees). In this position they could threaten a strike which would stop the cameras from rolling on any lot. For six years they blackmailed the majors in this fashion. MGM was not exempt, and even Hearst could not squash men like Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, Paul “The Waiter” Ricca, Louis “Little New York” Campagna, Charles “Cherry Nose” Giou, and Francis “Frank Diamond” Maritote, who were Capone henchmen.
Bioff demanded $2 million from Mayer, pared it down to $1 million, and settled for $200,000 plus a yearly stipend to guarantee the safe production of Metro films.*
Mayer was forced to listen to Bioff brag how he had everyone in the industry toeing the mark; how men like Mayer, Schenck, the Warner brothers, and Austin C. Keough, the vice-president of Paramount, were at his beck and call; how he blasphemed them when they did not respond quickly enough to his demands; that in five years’ time he would be running all the studios in Hollywood; that he was the big power and that Mayer, like the rest, had better play ball.
A man now caught between two awesome powers—Hearst and the Chicago syndicate—Mayer exerted his own form of ego power on his lot. He was “king” of Metro, and if now not entirely in control of his studio, he held his subjects in an iron fist.*
Each year on July 4, Mayer would throw himself a birthday party that lacked only a twenty-one-gun salute in its royal pretensions. For the event he took over the commissary, and all of Metro’s star performers, directors, producers, and supporting players were commanded to attend, and those who could sing or dance to perform. Judy’s first performance under her Metro contract was at one of these parties, and for many subsequent years she was expected to sing at them.
“We all had to assemble at L. B. Mayer’s birthday party in the commissary,” Elizabeth Taylor, giving her impressions on the David Frost show, related, “and everybody—the writers, the directors, the stars, everyone—and he would sort of stand up and have a ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to him. And the little kid stars like Margaret O’Brien and Butch Jenkins, and one year I was with them and I felt kind of awkward, stiff; for we had to sort of sit around him and pay homage to this man who was obviously slightly crazy. Anyway, at one of these huge things, Perry Como got up and sang, ‘Happy Birthday, dear L.B. and fuck you!’ [Bleeped out in final T.V. cut.] It was like a death toll all over the huge commissary, because he had done the unforgivable. He had broken the sacred bond and he had told the old man what everybody else in their own hearts were dying to tell him, and he finally came out and said it; and it was glorious; and it was joyous; and it was one of the happiest moments of my life and I was only fourteen.”
Frost asked Miss Taylor how Como’s career was affected by this incident.
“He was blackballed from every studio in Hollywood for four or five years—maybe more,” she replied.
Frost pressed on, asking her if she thought it had been worth it.
“Oh, you bet it was worth it! I think that was one of his [Perry Como’s] golden moments,” she said.
The one party Judy apparently did not object to appearing at was given for Clark Gable. She was, in fact, very much excited about it, as Gable was her idol. She spent a good deal of time rehearsing with Roger Edens the number she was to sing. Her selection had been “Drums in My Heart”—a Merman song. Edens insisted she drop it, as it was not for a fourteen-year-old girl. Reluctantly, Judy agreed to sing, in its place, a preface—“Dear Mr. Gable”—composed by Edens for “You Made Me Love You.” It told the story of a teen-ager who had a crush on Gable. At the party, Judy was placed inside a huge birthday cake, and as Edens began the song, she popped out. (According to Judy, years later Gable told her, “Judy, I had a birthday the other day and I hid. I was afraid you’d jump out and sing that song again!”)
Mayer liked the song and the way Judy sang it. With Judy, it was included in Broadway Melody of 1938 (made in 1936 and released in 1937). Before the film was released, Judy was cast in three others—in one, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, opposite Mickey. The studio, feeling certain Judy’s star was in the ascendant, wanted to be prepared.
Metro’s Broadway Melody series had begun several years before and primarily introduced new contract talent. Paramount did the same thing with the Gold Diggers series and Fox with George White’s Scandals. Robert Taylor was the star of the ’38 Broadway Melody, while Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Binnie Barnes, Buddy Ebsen, Sophie Tucker, Robert Benchley, Billy Gilbert, and Judy supported him.
Bosley Crowther’s review of Broadway Melody of 1938 in The New York Times confirmed their confidence:
There are individual successes in the film . . . the amazing precocity of Judy Garland, Metro’s answer to Deanna Durbin . . . Miss Garland particularly has a long tour de force in which she addresses lyrical apostrophes to a picture of Clark Gable. The idea and words are almost painfully silly—yet Judy . . . puts it over—in fact with a bang.
Her best review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter, which had as a headline:
NEW “B’WAY MELODY OF ’38” PEAK OF EXTRAVAGANZAS
TUCKER, GARLAND, MURPHY HIGHLIGHTS
The second paragraph of the review carries these accolades for Judy:
The sensational work of young Judy Garland causes wonder as to why she has been kept under wraps these many months. She sings two numbers that are show stoppers and does a dance with Buddy Ebsen. Hers is a distinctive personality well worth careful promotion.
Judy was a hit, but not yet a star. Nearly two years were to pass before she would be considered one. In the meantime, in Judy’s words, “Metro thought they were raising me. They were just dreadful . . . They had a theory that they were all-powerful and they ruled by fear. What better way to make young persons behave than to scare the hell out of them every day? That’s the way we worked . . . that’s the way we got mixed up. And that’s the way we lost contact with the world.”
At home she was being called Baby, Monkey, and Pudge. At the studio the image she saw of herself was short, fat, and unglamorous. Even Mayer referred to her as “my little hunchback.” At the same time, she was surrounded daily by the most beautiful women in the world; this made her painfully self-conscious. Doubts about her ability began to obsess her. Called to Mayer’s office, she was told by him that she had to stop cheating on her diet procedure (she would sneak off for a malted or an ice cream cone at the corner drugstore, but studio spies always turned her in); that the studio had a big investment in her; and that without the studio she was nothing. She was, therefore, immediately placed in the hands of a studio doctor and started on a new diet pill. She began slimming down, but as a side effect had trouble sleeping at night. The Metro doctor had a cure for that: Seconals before bedtime.
She was fourteen years old, and her lifetime battle with pills had begun.
* All of the Chicago mobsters mentioned were finally brought to justice in 1941 and convicted and imprisoned on extortion charges. Nitti committed suicide the day the indictments were returned. Bioff was blown to bits after his release from prison by an explosive device wired to his car’s ignition system so that it was detonated when he stepped on the starter. Giou and Maritote were shot to death after their release.
* In 1935 the studio listed the following as stars: Lionel Barrymore, Freddie Bartholomew, Wallace Beery, Joan Crawford, Nelson Eddy, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Gladys George, Helen Hayes, Charles Laughton, Myrna Loy, Jeanette MacDonald, the Marx Brothers, Robert Montgomery, Eleanor Powell, William Powell, Luise Rainer, Norma Shearer, Robert Taylor, Spencer Tracy, and Warren Williams. Still considered supporting players were, among many others, Melvyn Douglas, Judy, George Murphy, Maureen O’Sullivan, Walter Pidgeon, Mickey Rooney, Rosalind Russell, James Stewart, Franchot Tone, Sophie Tucker, Johnny Weissmuller, and Robert Young.
8“Oh, the early days at MGM were a lot of laughs,’ Judy once told an interviewer. “It was all right if you were young and frightened—and we stayed frightened. Look at us—Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, and me—we all came out of there a little ticky and kooky.”
To coin a cliché, the studio was a great place to visit, but not to live. It was very exciting, but no part of life there was real. Consider the impact of being faced with an army of cavalry in full attire upon leaving a schoolroom; and behind the cavalry, the infantry—followed by a circus. Imagine the result of, at the age of thirteen, living daily with truckloads of soap flakes to simulate snow, ketchup for blood, cupboards filled with cardboard food, celluloid swans in front of cellophane waterfalls, buildings with no backs, jungles made of paper, rocks of plaster—and everywhere you looked, the baroque, the outdated, the discarded.
It is quite easy to speculate that Judy, having lost her father and being insecure in this unreal environment and needing acceptance, would do everything in her power in a desperate desire to please Ethel. From this point of her life until the end of her Metro days, she was forced to suppress her own personal needs and desires. For one solid decade she was to eat what others wanted her to eat, wear what they set out for her, see the people they desired. Her day was ruled by the studio, her private life policed. She led a robot existence, controlled by Ethel and by Mayer. Mickey Rooney was an outside force, but he fed her dreams of fame and fortune that seemed to substantiate Mayer’s and Ethel’s philosophies.
But one person—Roger Edens—was contributive to her growth. A brilliant musician, a sensitive man, Edens was the only one to truly extend compassion during those painful years of her adolescence. And all he wanted from her was for her to be the great artist he believed she was. She trusted him completely, always bowing to his artistic and musical knowledge, confiding the most personal things in her life, confident he would never betray her—and he never did.
He was a genuinely beautiful human being, but he lacked a fighting spirit. He was always in Judy’s corner, ready with the towel, the comforting words, the caring; but he did not know how to send her out into the ring with advice on how to win—nor was he able to step in and do battle for her. To the frightened, insecure girl he gave his devotion; he represented all that was good in life.
Another man, Arthur Freed, now came into her life. Freed was a songwriter on contract and had written the lyrics of “Singin’ in the Rain,” “I Cried for You,” and “You Were Meant for Me,” among other songs. But songwriting did not satisfy his ambitions. He wanted to produce film musicals. There is no question that Arthur Freed recognized Judy’s potential, but first and foremost he saw his own future in that talent. Not powerful enough to get on another star’s or director’s bandwagon, he concentrated, and indeed chanced Judy’s eventually having one of her own.
Freed coauthored songs for most of her early films. By his own admission, no one else, before or since, ever was able to interpret and phrase a lyric of his as Judy did. “She got into the hearts of her audience,” he said. Freed, however, never won Judy’s heart. She trusted him because Edens assured her of his musical know-how.
After her part in Broadway Melody of 1938, Judy was cast in a happy, unpretentious racing film—Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry. The film had been written for Freddie Bartholomew, but Bartholomew was tied up in the unfortunate sequence of custody trials between his parents and his Aunt “Cissy.”* The film was delayed, the studio waiting as long as it could for Bartholomew. Finally, another English boy—Ronald Sinclair—was cast in the role of the son of a lord who brings his horse to America to recoup the family’s fortunes.
Mickey Rooney appeared as a jockey (a forerunner of many future roles) and Judy as the teen-age daughter of the woman (Sophie Tucker) who ran a boardinghouse for jockeys. It was the first time Judy and Mickey were onscreen together. The chemistry was unquestionable. The film was appealing, but little more. Judy sang one Arthur Freed-Nacio Herb Brown song —“A New Pair of Shoes.” She gave it all the heart and all the energy she had. She was above the material, and MGM now knew they had a property. Further, they decided they had a team. But Rooney was lined up for another film. There would be a four-to-five-month hiatus before they could appear together again.
Judy was cast in two films without time to breathe between them or after the one she had just completed. Both were strenuous films and the hours grueling, and Judy had to slim even more for the roles. Surviving on Mayer’s dictate of a chicken-soup diet and diet pills, she was to faint several times from hunger. It was suggested that she needed more sleep, but all the pills she took were “uppers” (pep pills). A new system was inaugurated. Between setups and other performers’ scenes (time lags of one to three hours), Judy would be escorted to the studio hospital and given a strong enough dosage of Nembutal to put her immediately to sleep. Fifteen minutes before she was to appear before the cameras, she was awakened, fed a handful of uppers and sent back onto the stage.
* Aunt Cissy had brought the boy to America with his parents’ consent; but when he was earning thousands weekly, his parents and his sisters wanted a whopping percentage of his earnings or custody. The boy chose to remain with his aunt. After several years of costly court appearances, Aunt Cissy won custody—Bartholomew being ordered to pay his parents 20 percent of his weekly earnings and an additional 15 percent to the support of his sisters.
9Everybody Sing came next. Harry Rapf produced the film, which co-starred Judy with Allan Jones and Fanny Brice. It was the first time she received stellar billing. Advertising for it stated: “Here comes the funniest musical comedy of 1938! It’s MGM’s star-packed swing treat! Funny Fanny Brice brings her famous Good News radio character, Baby Snooks, to the screen! Allan Jones sings those love songs as only he can! Adorable Judy Garland zooms to stardom on wings of song!”
Everybody did sing in the film—too often, and with inferior material. But Judy, aided by Roger Edens’ arrangements and “interpolations,” displayed her talent as a superb vocal technician. Expert cameraman Joseph Ruttenberg photographed the film and, using extra closeups, captured the essence of Judy’s appeal. The trembling lip, the mouth that was fighting despair to laugh, the quivering chin, the dewy about-to-cry eyes filled the screen. Judy was no longer just a prodigy voice. She was a vulnerable young woman who registered pain and past indignities. She was insecure and humble, but never down. She was plain, uneducated, a brown sparrow who had a natural golden voice that made her feathers gleam and the world take note. Audiences walked out of the darkened theaters forgetting both the film and the other cast players; forgetting their own private post-Depression blues. What they remembered was the throb of the small sparrow heart, the quick glad-to-be-alive smile, and the voice that contained both laughter and tears.
Rosen and Ethel were aware of what had happened and that Judy’s contract, though providing for semiannual raises, did not pay well enough for her new position. The front office was implacable on the terms, but Rosen did obtain a $200-a-week salary for Ethel as compensation. Supposedly Judy’s coach and manager, Ethel was now on the Metro payroll, owing her first allegiance to Mayer.
For Judy, there was little time to think about what was happening to her. Listen Darling began shooting within twenty-four hours of the roll-up of Everybody Sing. Once again Edens was by her side. Directed, as the last picture had been, by Edwin Marin, Listen Darling was superior material in all areas. The script was natural and sensible; the cast excellent (Mary Astor, Freddie Bartholomew, Walter Pidgeon and Alan Hale); and the songs—“Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” “On a Bumpy Road to Love,” “Nobody’s Baby,” and “Ten Pins in the Sky”—tailored for Judy, who was also given more of an opportunity to act.
Mickey was now preparing a new Andy Hardy film. He was Metro’s leading boy star. The studio had cast him opposite Bartholomew in two films—The Devil Is a Sissy and Captains Courageous. The contrast of personalities served him well. The scrappy, tough kid who also had heart was a crowd pleaser. Metro put him in every film that had a role for him. He was all over the lot—doing impersonations; singing; dancing up a storm; being tough and rough with a heart of pure butter; being mischievous, moving and merry. In 1938 he won a miniature Oscar as the outstanding boy juvenile (Boys Town) that year. It is incredible how fast his star had ascended. In 1937 he had placed 104th in the Motion Picture Heralds annual popularity poll. By 1938 he was number 3, topped only by Clark Gable and Shirley Temple.
Mickey made the first Andy Hardy film, A Family Affair, in 1937. It was a low-budget picture based on an old play, Skidding, by Aurania Rouverel that Metro owned and dusted off in its harried efforts to keep Mickey before cameras and public. No matter what the studio anticipated as audience reaction, it did not expect the clamoring for more following the release of the film.
Immediately the studio fed to exhibitors Judge Hardy’s Children and Out West with the Hardys. The series had caught on and was snowballing. It was proving to be, among other things, a great showcase for new young talent. It was natural for Mayer to want Judy to make her second appearance with Mickey in a Hardy film. Love Finds Andy Hardy was quickly readied. In this film, Judy, the daughter of a musical-comedy actress, was a young girl visiting the Hardys’ next-door neighbors. Andy finds her a nuisance until he discovers she can sing. But even then he is torn by his feelings for his high school sweetheart (Ann Rutherford) and a teen-age vamp (Lana Turner). It was the best of the series to that point, although Judy’s role was the least effective. In order to allow her to sing several numbers, the scenario suffered.
In many respects it was a backward step from Listen Darling. But once more electricity crackled when Rooney and Garland were onscreen together. Confident that it had found a golden team—double moneymakers like Eddy and MacDonald, Beery and Dressier, Rogers and Astaire—the studio sent out its order: line up a series of starring vehicles for these two.
Mickey was Judy’s first attraction to a boy in her own age category and her oldest friend and confidant. They had shared much, knew each other well—yet Mickey was squiring other girls to parties and restaurants, all of them more glamorous than Judy. The insecurities, the inferiorities became more ingrown.
At the same time, she was attending the studio school with a select few—Lana Turner, Ann Rutherford, June Preisser, Ava Gardner—and surrounded on the lot by the most beautiful women in the world. Garbo, Lamarr, Colbert, Myrna Loy, Luise Rainer—the list seemed endless, and beauty and glamour appeared endowed upon all but herself. Never in her lifetime did she consider herself a beautiful woman, always very conscious of the absence of two ingredients she equated with beauty: a good figure and lovely thick, long hair. Forever starving herself and being harassed about her figure, she also was continually attendant to the “faults” of her natural hair. It was thin, and onscreen she wore pieces and falls; a naturally mousy brown, it was reluctant to curl or grow. Sitting in the small MGM schoolroom surrounded by the luxurious and lovely tresses of Turner and Gardner—both girls Mickey dated—could not have helped raise her desperately flagging ego.
For over a year Arthur Freed had buttonholed Mayer whenever and wherever he could and spoken to him about the possibility of his producing a film. Freed lacked charm and even a cultural veneer—qualities Mayer admired in men who did not have power or money. Although Mayer thought the young man was capable, he was not swayed to play God in his case or to make it easy for him. “You find a property, a story—maybe then,” he said in passing.
Freed took the bait. Two things appeared certain. His first film had to be a musical, in which he would be sure of his footing, and it had to have a star role for one of the young contract players. It was natural that he should think of Judy Garland.
Employing the help of readers, secretaries, friends, and family, he scoured the available properties. Nothing. But then, someone mentioned The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. It was owned by Sam Goldwyn and had been for several years, but Goldwyn had shelved the project. To Freed’s credit, he saw the tremendous musical potential of the property, which Goldwyn had not. And from the moment he read it, he could visualize Judy as Dorothy.
Working with as much secrecy as possible so that no one else could step in and grab the rights away from him, Freed began negotiations with Goldwyn. During this time Mayer had been on an extensive European trip buying all the foreign talent he could. Greer Garson and Hedy Lamarr were two of the acquisitions from that trip. On his return Freed went to see Mayer and told him he owned The Wizard of Oz and that he saw it as a fantasy musical and as a vehicle for Judy.
Sixteen at the time, Judy was full-bosomed and looking very mature. Her Metro image since Love Finds Andy Hardy was now of yearning young womanhood. Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz, was a little girl no more than eleven. Mayer thought Judy was wrong for the film and vetoed her inclusion in the package. But he did like the property and agreed with Freed that it would make a good musical. Shirley Temple was under contract to Fox. Mayer set out to borrow her, but first he struck a low blow to Freed.
Quoting Bosley Crowther’s The Hollywood Rajah:
Mayer himself got great enjoyment from exercise of power and from feeling himself responsible for advancement of someone’s career. “I’ve taken this boy and I have made a great actor (or director or producer) out of him!” That was one of his favorite and oft-repeated remarks. He felt he needed to make people grateful and beholden to him. He literally bathed in the sunshine of his own esteem.
At the other extreme, Mayer could not stand being wrong about anyone; and the year before he had lured Mervyn LeRoy (Harry Warner’s son-in-law) away from Warner’s with an astronomical bribe of a $300,000 yearly salary. LeRoy had already proved his competence and genius at Warner’s with Little Caesar, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and Anthony Adverse. Mayer gave him Luise Rainer (who was then a big star) and a feeble script entitled Dramatic School to produce. It was a disaster. Finding this a bitter pill, he was still determined LeRoy would produce great films for him, greater than those he had produced for Harry Warner.
It seemed no one could miss with Shirley Temple. Calling Freed into his office, Mayer let him have the news. The studio was buying the property from him and would give him the grand opportunity of being associate producer. LeRoy was to produce, and Metro was borrowing Shirley Temple. Knowing that if he refused his Metro days would be over and that Mayer would see to it that the other studios wouldn’t touch him, Freed had little other recourse than to accept.
Mayer had taken it for granted that Fox—owing him a favor for the future use of Gable in Gone with the Wind (to be produced by his son-in-law David Selznick for Fox but with an unusual agreement that it be a Loew’s release)—would agree. To his amazement, Fox refused to lend La Temple.
Judy and Ethel were brought before the high Rajah and told of their good fortune, being warned at the same time of his ability to replace Judy if she did not buckle down and deliver. While the screenplay was being prepared, she was to go on alternate days of fasting. Dorothy had to look wide-eyed and gaunt.
Judy was delivered into the hands of the trainers. The fasting regime was put into effect. Her teeth were capped; her hair dyed, then bewigged; her body girdled and strapped tight, and hours of supervised practice imposed in how to walk and dance while so restrained. At the same time, she attended classes from nine to twelve in the little schoolhouse that was then next to the film library on the lot, struggling to keep up the B’s and C’s that she was expected to make for credit to graduate from high school.
Publicity releases went out that Metro was sparing no expense in this venture. It was to be one of the top-budget pictures of the year, filmed in both black-and-white and color, with a star supporting cast, directed by the inimitable Victor Fleming, who was one of the greatest directors of that period (Treasure Island, Captains Courageous, Red Dust, Test Pilot—and after The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind). Harold Arlen and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg were brought from Broadway to write the score.
Judy was getting the star treatment, but much to Ethel’s chagrin, the studio was paying them the combined salaries of $350 a week—and at that, Ethel received the larger amount. Mayer refused to grant Rosen an interview. Before the cameras rolled on The Wizard of Oz, Ethel knew Rosen had to be replaced. In one of the most scurrilous sellouts in Hollywood history, Mayer persuaded Ethel to sign with his pal Frank Orsatti. This meant Judy no longer had free representation, for Orsatti was bound by what might be called a “Devil’s pact” with Mayer. Orsatti was famous for introducing beautiful girls to studio executives in exchange for personal favors. Through Mayer’s help, he was now a successful film agent. But there was no way he could chance opposing him on any issue or contract. To appease Ethel, Orsatti agreed to a figure of $500—a raise of $150 a week when at the same time Mickey Rooney, with good representation, was making close to $5,000 a week.
“You can’t kill a talent like Judy’s,” Yip Harburg said. “Only bad material can do that.”
Judy was given the best material and surrounded by the best talents in the business. The ad copy announced, “Dreams Come True! Metro-Gold wyn-Mayer’s Technicolor wonder show is the greatest since ’Snow White.’ ”
At last Ethel’s dream was about to come true.
10While Metro spared no expense constructing the fantasy world of Oz, the Munich Peace Pact had been signed; Hitler had paraded through the streets of Asch; the swastika was blazoned on everything; and the world moved toward war.
But the fact that occupied most of Judy’s thoughts was that on completion of Oz she planned to graduate with a class at Hollywood High School. Customarily, when young contract players had passed all high school requirements, they would be sent to a local high school for graduation and for the few days preceding it. Being well-known performers set them apart, but it did have meaning to the teen-agers.
The filming of Oz was Judy’s most difficult to date. There was the sheer physical exhaustion of wardrobe and makeup demands, aggravated by the strain of rigorous dieting. It was impossible for her to spend much time in the schoolroom, so a teacher, Rose Carter, was assigned to remain with her for eight hours of the working day. That way, when a stand-in was taking her place while lights and camera were being adjusted, or when she was briefly out of a scene, lessons could be conducted. But imagine the difficulty of such a procedure amid the noise and confusion of forty or more set workers striking and constructing sets; actors rehearsing; sound being adjusted; cables, dollies, and cameras being dragged across the crowded stage, causing anyone in their direct path to jump out of the way, while the lowering of microphones and overhead wires caused the rest of the company to duck for their lives.
Judy’s problems were intensified by pressures from the front office, critical of every shot she was in; by Ethel standing constant surveillance like an agent from a foreign country; by the anxiety, the nervousness, and the supercharged energy created by the pills; and by the atmosphere of combat on the set caused by Judy’s being cast with a group of seasoned older veterans.
According to Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West), there was little love lost for Judy on the part of the four main male stars (Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Frank Morgan). Fearful that she might upstage them, Miss Hamilton claims they played against her—not with her. Judy was also much aware that she had been second choice on the film. There was no question that apart from some of the studio technicians; Edens; a young man named Barron Polan, who was Mervyn LeRoy’s secretary/assistant; and Maggie Hamilton, she was delivered daily by Ethel into an arena of supermagnified hostility.
Through the years Judy claimed a close friendship with Miss Hamilton, though after Oz they saw very little of each other. Meeting Maggie Hamilton clarifies this; for in person, more honestly cast as the mother of us all, she is an irrepressibly warm, demonstrative, chatty lady whose voice soothes, eyes communicate, and easy touch assures. She was and remains symbolically everything Ethel was not. Happily for Judy, she could confide to Miss Hamilton the things that were troubling her.
Maggie, a seasoned performer herself, found her own smaller role exhausting, hardly able at the close of a shooting day to drag herself home. But Judy, coping with much, much more, never seemed at a loss for energy. The older woman, fearing the truth, asked about this; and Judy told her she was being given “a lot of pills to sleep and a lot of pills to stay awake.”
Maggie was horrified. “Why do you take them? Why don’t you refuse?” she demanded.
“Well, I just can’t seem to either get up or go to sleep without them anymore,” the young girl replied.
As the end of the film and graduation grew closer and closer, Judy’s spirits soared. “Isn’t it marvelous? I’m going to graduate with a class,” she told Maggie excitedly. “Would you like to see my dress?”
The answer, of course, was Yes, and Judy ran into the dressing room to bring it out. It was nothing like what might have been expected—just a very simple little dress that met all the requirements a graduate must have; but it was the biggest thing in Judy’s life, and she was absolutely thrilled about it.
Judy, however, was sent on a tour with Mickey Rooney as soon as the film was complete, meaning she had to forfeit graduation. Maggie was so upset that she called the girl who headed the publicity department and who had organized the tour.
“Do you realize what you have done? This is a terrible thing,” Maggie told her.
“Well, it’s only a graduation. It’s not so terrible,” the girl responded.
Maggie said, “It is! It’s just really terrible. It’s one thing in the world this girl wanted to do and it’s just an awful thing! Is there anyone I can call who could be helpful?”
“There’s nothing you can do, Miss Hamilton,” she was informed. “The orders for this tour came directly from Mr. Mayer.”
And of course, there was nothing Maggie Hamilton could do. (Subsequently, Judy received her high school diploma from University High School.)
Working along with the scenarist, Harburg and Arlen tried through the musical score to transpose the emotional yearnings that could motivate a young girl leading a drab existence to make a dream come true.
“Here was Dorothy,” Harburg says, “a little girl from Kansas, a bleak place where there were no flowers, where there was no color of any kind. What does a child like this want? The only thing colorful in her world was a rainbow.”
Arlen got the melody of “Over the Rainbow” first, but the lyrics did not come easily. When the song was complete, no one was sure about it. It was included in the first rough cut, but during the running of the final it was decided that the song was too cloying and sentimental and should be removed; and it was. Only after the initial sneak preview was it spliced back into the print—and then because it was felt the picture at that point was slow and needed a change of pace and it was too late to shoot a new musical sequence.
Oz was a dream come true, but filming it was a continuous nightmare. Seven assistant directors came and went. Tensions were evident and the emotional temperatures high among cast and crew. The front office pulled out all the stops, and the film was finally brought in for over $2 million—an unprecedented budget for a film in this category. The cast, including a troupe of midgets, grew to over nine thousand. All of Metro’s twenty-nine sound stages were ultimately utilized to construct sixty-five spectacular sets. The special-effects department had to produce tricks with actors never before attempted. Cameramen had to film people flying without photographing the telltale ropes. A tornado was to be created, and Dorothy and Toto, her dog, carried off into the sky on it as if it were a giant black bird. Then Maggie Hamilton, as the Wicked Witch of the West, was to be melted down to a black pool.
To accomplish the last, the set was constructed above the ground with a platform elevator thirty inches square in the spot where the witch, Miss Hamilton, was to stand. Her dress was nailed all the way around and covering the platform. When she began to melt, the platform descended and the air rose into her dress until finally, nothing was left but the hat.
No one who has seen the film could forget Dorothy’s wonder-lit eyes as she wandered through Oz, the innocent child, the little-girl-lost sighing with deep pathos, “Why, then, oh why can’t I?” as she watched the bluebirds fly over the rainbow.
Judy stated later in her life, “I think the American people put their arms around me when I was a child performer, and they’ve kept them there—even when I was in trouble.” It was true, and it was because of her characterization of Dorothy. The portrayal was not just wistful or charming, nor did it contain the quality of endearing cuteness that would have been brought to the part by Shirley Temple.
A desperation to believe crept into Judy’s performance. She was much more than a young girl in jeopardy as she pursued a dream. Achieving the dream was where the spirit of survival existed. And in the end the dream was one shared by the majority of the American people—that their small, brown lives would be touched with wonder; that there could be a Land of Oz in their own backyards. It was not a children’s tale, for it was adult in philosophy; and Judy’s eyes and voice mirrored severe human suffering, which they knew and identified with. In Judy’s Dorothy, there was a plea for love and protection. It communicated itself with alarming depth.
From the time of the sneak preview of Oz the studio was certain the film would be a box-office bonanza, and that Judy was potentially, and next to Mickey, their hottest young property; but they treated her like a poor relation, told her she was only the result of their publicity and that she had a long way to go as a performer. Then the studio sent her by train on that cross-country personal-appearance tour with Mickey (the one Margaret Hamilton attempted to halt), convincing Judy she needed his audience, his charisma to bolster the film. The train ride across the country was the one delight of the trip. Judy loved trains; they took her back to her early childhood and the trip across country with her father, Ethel, and her sisters. She remembered how her father had told her made-up stories of the sleeping towns and the darkened houses as they drove through the strange cities. Train rides allowed her the same fantasies. She would always like them from that date, always take a train before she would drive or fly. She even liked their smell and the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks. On a train, she was herself. There were no pressures; there was no place she had to be.
They arrived at Grand Central Station in New York and went without any time to spare to the theater, where they were billed as America’s Sweethearts and did five shows a day (Judy and Mickey, years later, claimed seven, but the theater advertised five). From the moment they arrived at Grand Central, they were mobbed. Police reinforcements were brought in to help protect them at the Capitol where they were appearing, but one can just imagine the bedlam of 15,000 people trying to gain entry to every performance in a house that seated 5,400.
“Come on, toots, we’ll knock them dead,” Rooney shouted as they made their first entrance.
Judy Garland was back before a live audience. They stamped their feet, whistled, clapped their hands. Ethel was in the wings along with a long line of studio “trainers”—ready to reprimand her if she seemed too tired or reluctant; ready with a handful of pep pills and a glass of water whenever the bell sounded and she could step back to her corner.
The Wizard of Oz opened on a Thursday—August 17, 1939—at the Capitol Theatre on Broadway at 51st Street. The advertising proclaimed that Mickey’s and Judy’s appearances inaugurated the fall season. But Major Edward Bowes, the managing director (later to conduct his famous radio amateur hour), remembered it as one of the hottest days of a long, hot summer and that fall seemed as far away as the other side of the rainbow.
In between performances they went to luncheons, dinners, benefits, broadcasts, and interviews.
One day halfway through their forty-five-minute appearance, Judy collapsed in the wings. Mickey was pushed back onstage. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he managed, “my partner has taken ill.”
“She’ll be all right! Stall them!” somebody shouted from backstage.
Rooney began a routine about a tennis match and an announcer, interspersing it with comedy sound effects such as zot, plop, plang, following it with a similar routine about a Joe Louis fight with crowd noises, bells, et cetera. Becoming nervous, he stole a glance toward the wings. Judy was being helped to her feet by the retinue of handlers. Pushing them aside, she stood alone, and then, catching Rooney’s eye, made her way toward him. Back onstage, she continued as though nothing had happened.
11While the rest of the world was beginning to recognize film as an art, Louis B. Mayer discovered the high-gross potential of the film musical. No other studio had the players, personnel, technicians, or space to photograph the grand-scale productions that were part of the prototype called “the Metro musical”: glossy, Technicolored, dance-packed, song-jammed, star-loaded, chorus-crowded with hundreds of rhythmic robots. Nothing lived, breathed, or contained any semblance of reality. Whatever humanity survived these films did so through the power of star personalities. Rooney and Garland were prime examples.
Oz proved to be blockbuster box-office and sent the story department out on an immediate search for musical properties for Judy. Convinced that two stars meant three times the gross, Mayer sent the department back to look for stories that could co-star Judy with Mickey.
Confident now that Arthur Freed was the man rightly cast as Judy’s next producer, Mayer gave him the go-ahead on a Rodgers and Hart show—Babes in Arms—that the studio owned. Not the sort of man who did not back up his investment, Mayer insisted Busby Berkeley (the most successful musical director on the Metro lot) become a major part of what came to be known as the Freed Unit.
The Freed Unit had as its nucleus Berkeley, Edens, dance director Charles “Chuck” Walters, music director Georgie Stoll, art director Cedric Gibbons, scriptwriter Fred Finklehoffe, and cameraman Ray June. They worked together (except for Finklehoffe, who did only three) on the four big musicals that co-starred Rooney and Garland (Rooney still retaining star billing in all of them): Babes in Arms, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway, and Girl Crazy. Except for the third, all were based on hit Broadway shows.
Having foisted Judy as an eleven-year-old Dorothy on the public and won it over, Freed now had to help Judy successfully make the transition to portray a girl her own age (seventeen) in Babes in Arms and yet not lose the large audience she had won in Oz. This he achieved by establishing Judy’s character in the film as a humble Plain Jane (Mary, in this case) who stood back while Rooney took the lead—hoping, praying (always in song) that he would just look at her once as though she were a girl (which he did at the end of the last reel). Ray June, the cameraman, following Joe Ruttenberg’s lead, zoomed in—to the desperate need to be accepted in those wide velvet brown eyes, to the fear of always being the loser that caused that lip to tremble; and in the end—though the film was Rooney’s, and Judy’s role a supporting one despite star billing—it was the quality of pathos conveyed by Judy that kept the audience enthralled, and that same searching soulfulness that shot the bright moments so sky-high.
The grind on the film was relentless; the pressures overwhelming. Judy had first suffered the exhausting filming of Oz; had been sent on the five-shows-a-day tour; had been cast immediately upon her return in Babes in Arms; and then—twelve hours after shooting had ended on that film—stepped into Andy Hardy Meets a Debutante (the debutante of the title being played by Diana Lewis). Again with no time between films, she was rushed into the strenuous schedule of the Freed Unit’s follow-up to Babes in Arms—Strike Up the Band.
“. . . they had us working days and nights on end,” Judy complained in McCall’s. “They’d give us pep-up pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they’d take us to the studio hospital and knock us cold with sleeping pills—Mickey sprawled out on one bed and me on another. Then after four hours they’d wake us up and give us the pep-up pills again so we could work another seventy-two hours in a row. Half of the time we were hanging from the ceiling, but it became a way of life for us.”
This appalling situation caused Edens to go to Freed, who claimed he had his hands tied. Edens did not think Freed was responsible and, in fact, always defended him, but he recognized that neither of them was a match for the man who ran the studio and was their boss. Babes in Arms and Strike Up the Band had huge budgets for their day (over $600,000). Longer shooting schedules could not be afforded if each film was to have a cast of hundreds; and as Mayer felt not one extra should be cut, the shooting schedule was adhered to, the budget left intact, and Judy and Rooney expected to continue as the studio demanded.
The people in the front office were still concerned about Judy’s weight and kept reminding her that without their vigilance she would be a fat, awkward, unattractive teen-ager. Judy suffered the indignities of being told she wasn’t really a good performer, that they were making her look good, and again and again that there was always someone to step into her shoes.
The premiere of Babes in Arms at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on October 10, 1939, was the culmination of Ethel’s dream. To all but Ethel the dream might have seemed unreachable. But Baby Frances was a bona fide star—her footsteps in the cement of the forecourt of Grauman’s along with threescore of filmdom’s greatest, triumphant in The Wizard of Oz and acclaimed for her co-starring role with Rooney. Ethel held her hand as Judy stepped onto the wet cement and assisted her as she stepped out again. Then she did a very curious thing.
Judy knelt beside the block of wet cement and with her finger inscribed her name, then planted her hands in the cement for a handprint. As Judy did the last, Ethel leaned over her daughter and with her own finger straightened a letter in Judy’s signature.
Stardom changed very little in Judy’s life. Ida Koverman had interceded to convince Mayer that Judy’s public would accept her in a sophisticated dress, and he had permitted a gown to be designed for her for the premiere. But as she looked around her at the sexy dress Lana wore, her own lost its glamour. It seemed to Judy that Lana was everything she wanted to be. She was not exactly envious of Lana, but she did admire her and constantly put herself down in comparison.
Her inferiority complex was at its apex. Seventeen and a star, she was earning only $500 weekly—$200 of it payable to Ethel. She did not have a bevy of admirers. Her dates—like the ones she had with a young contract player, Robert Stack—were arranged by the studio, not for her benefit, but to place the man’s name before the public.
She went to parties given by the young Hollywood set—Rooney, Rutherford, Jackie Cooper, Richard Quine, Sidney Miller, O’Connor, Leonard Sues. She always joined in and performed. On the outside she gave the appearance of a spirited, talented, fun-loving girl. Her sisters were now out of the house. Privately, she was a loner. She had two large German shepherd dogs on which she lavished affection; read a lot—romantic poetry, mostly; drew dress designs—always glamorous in execution; but deep doubts plagued her, sending her into spells of abysmal depression. Much of this could be attributed to the effect the pills were having on her. But other forces were at work. Having now completed her high school studies, she was on her own—her grades not warranting college acceptance; those around her unable to contribute to her intellectual growth. Roger Edens would discuss music and musicians and books and authors with her, but she was too embarrassed to tell him she had never heard the names before; and her schedule was such that there was never any time to go to libraries to find out for herself. She was beginning to look for the meaning of things, but it was a lot like stumbling about in a heavy fog.
Waking dreams haunted her—thoughts that would not remain buried. There were men in closets peering lasciviously through solid wood doors. She dressed in the bathroom, locking herself in. She insisted on wearing a slip under everything, even if Wardrobe felt it was unnecessary. From the very beginning her studio biography revealed the truth about her background, while other players were given glamorous pasts. She hated interviews. “There’s nothing to say about me,” she would confess. The story she would repeat was about her father’s death. “He was a gay, handsome Irishman and we loved each other madly,” she confided to one and all.
As Christmas, 1939, approached, she decided (though she did not tell Ethel) that when her contract was over, she would become a writer. She spoke to her close friend Barron Polan about this, telling him, “There are just so many things locked up in my head. I feel that if there was a can opener that could open my brain, all these thinkings and feelings would gush out like some unstoppable water tap.” She was encouraged to write some of them down.
In whatever few moments came to her, she composed fragments of verse. Soon she had enough to fill a small book. In perhaps one of her first totally private acts, she hand-copied the poetry, giving the copy to a printer to bind in tan leather. Polan had many of the same qualities as Edens—the polish, the charm, the intelligence, the gentle understanding. They had become good friends during The Wizard of Oz, and when his birthday came around she presented him with her book of poems which Polan has held on to throughout the years.*
The poems do not unveil Judy as another Emily Dickinson. However, they do indeed reveal a great deal about Judy. They reflect all the Rupert Brooke, Shelley, Keats, and Browning she had been reading (later she was to admire Edna St. Vincent Millay), and a deeply sensitive romantic nature is exposed.
Whatever the critical assessment, the need to compose and publish the poetry screamed out for attention to be paid to that need. But there seemed no one close enough to hear her.
* See Appendix for poems.
12As 1940 rolled into high gear, Judy and Mickey were propelled from Andy Hardy Meets a Debutante directly into Strike Up the Band. Neither had very much free time, but what there was seemed provident to spend together. “Somehow,” as Mickey declares about that period, “it was easier to withstand public pressure when we were together. Wherever either of us went we were recognized.”
They would frequent the nearby amusement piers—Venice, Ocean Park, Santa Monica—riding the roller coasters, wandering through the fun house. Rooney threw big parties at his new, fairly palatial house on Densmore Drive, playing the drums and doing impersonations; or the two of them would sing duets like “Manhattan” or “How About You?” As Rooney says, “Work and fun were inextricably interwoven. It was impossible to tell just where one ended and the other began. Our work was our fun, and our fun was our work.”
On Sunday mornings he would drive to Judy’s house in Hollywood and they would have breakfast together, followed by long talks. “I was going to write a musical comedy for her,” Rooney recalls in his autobiography. “She was going to sing the songs I wrote. We’d do our own play. We’d capture Broadway. We’d be the most successful team in history.”
It was, ironically, as their scriptwriters had divined. They would dream together, and in a crowd Judy would encourage him to go on, standing back, performing with him, but seldom alone. But that was where it ended. His dates were tall, gorgeous, and always by his side when Judy stepped away from the piano.
Playing opposite Judy, though, he stood in constant admiration. “Her timing was like that of a chronometer,” he continues in his autobiography. “She could deliver a comic line with just the right comic touch or say a poignant line slowly enough for the poignancy to hit hard but still stay short of schmaltz. She could turn on intensity, as I could turn on intensity, memorize great chunks of script, as I could, ad-lib, as I. Alone, she could take an ordinary scene and by sheer strength of talent make it a scene that people everywhere remembered.”
And later he says, “We were a couple of teen-age kids, proud of our talent and our poise ... I couldn’t rattle Judy and she couldn’t rattle me. God, we had fun.”
Actually, those early months of 1940 were halcyon ones for Judy. The work was as grinding, but she had Rooney and Barron Polan and Roger Edens to talk to; and her home situation was the happiest it had been since her father’s death. Ethel had met a man named Bill Gilmore and had fallen in love.
William Gilmore was no replacement for Frank Gumm. He lacked the warmth, charm, and communication that came from mutual talents and interests. Broad, weathered, and masculine, he looked as if he might have wandered off a Western set. A “dress” extra, perhaps—because he was not of the stuff of real cowboys. For that matter, his background was unclear, and so was his occupation. He possessed very little knowledge of films and the industry; stocks, mines, and investments punctuated his conversation. It was obvious he had bummed around the country, had held a variety of different jobs, and had come to California in search of a golden dream.
Judy did not take to him, but so relieved was she that Ethel’s attention was diverted that she welcomed him into the family. Yet from the day Bill Gilmore married Ethel and moved into the house, Judy planned her own departure. Being only seventeen made that difficult. It was a waiting game—but a short one. In six months she would be eighteen, an age when it seemed plausible for her to have an apartment of her own.
And a place of her own had become imperative—for those early months of Ethel’s marriage to Gilmore reopened doors that had been sealed shut for a long time. For a number of years the pressures of Judy’s career had been so intense and Ethel’s vigilance so consuming that sex had played only a small part in either of their lives. At the same time that she wanted to appear glamorous, to attract the young men she fancied, and to be thought of as the belle of the ball, Judy had desperately tried to bury all thoughts of sex, choosing a more romantic attitude. Ethel’s seducing, touching Gilmore was difficult for a young daughter to observe—and, as Ethel had not been as affectionate with her own father, impossible for Judy to accept.
On the screen Judy was being confronted with an image of herself as America’s sweetheart—Andy Hardy’s next-door neighbor, the girl one eventually marries but with whom one never has premarital sex. Rooney ran off with all those sex bombshells, but Judy and the audience were convinced—because Judy represented what she did—that he would eventually come home to her.
But offscreen there was Ethel being unfaithful to her father’s memory; and there was Mayer, who, with his wife ill, with his power and money at its zenith, and with the encroachment of middle age, had—after a number of years spent in the pursuit of his ideal of the American woman (Jeanette MacDonald and Myrna Loy falling into this category)—let loose the satyr in him. His old pal Frank Orsatti took a house in Santa Monica. There was a great deal of lecherous humor about the libidinous forays conducted at the beach house and much talk referring to the place as Metro’s Casting Couch.
Judy was, therefore, affronted and confronted daily by a man who had set himself up as a father image and who was, at the same time, an outspoken moralist and a dirty old man.
Mayer was famed for saying, “A son can hate his father but he must respect him.” In view of Mayor’s behavior, this was damned near impossible for the “children” on his payroll.
13Nineteen hundred and forty was a leap year; and on February 29, both Judy and Rooney were in the audience of the ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel as nominees for an Academy Award. Bob Hope emceed the second half of the program, which was broadcast live on radio. The Awards to be given were for films released in 1939. It is the height of incongruity that Rooney had been nominated for his performance in Babes in Arms as Best Actor of the Year, whereas Judy’s nomination for the same film was as Best Juvenile Performer of the year (totally sexless, therefore).
Nineteen hundred and thirty-nine was the year Gone with the Wind had been released. (Judy had attended the premiere at the Cathay Circle Theatre with Barron Polan.) The majority of awards—Best Film Director, Script, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, etc.—went to that film. However, Rooney lost out not to Gable, but to Robert Donat for Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
The award for Best Juvenile Performer was won by Judy, who had also sung the winning song, “Over the Rainbow.” Publicity pictures of Judy standing with winners David O. Selznick, Vivien Leigh, Robert Donat, Leslie Howard, and Hattie McDaniel reveal a piquant young lady, badly dressed and poorly coiffed, looking like a youngster dressed in her mother’s clothes.
Although Judy was escorted by Rooney to the Awards, another girl stood by as his date for the party immediately following. It was fate, because at that party Judy met the man who was to be her first grown-up romance—Tyrone Power. Not only was Power young and beautiful, he was the most popular rising star in Hollywood, having made In Old Chicago and Alexander’s Ragtime Band the previous year. Power told her she had a woman’s body and had to dress accordingly. He recognized that rather than a child in adult clothing, Judy was a restless, searching young woman. He found that “nervousness” exciting, her need for masculine attention compelling.
There were stars in Judy’s eyes, and Mayer saw them immediately. Word went out to Louella Parsons that no mention of Power and Garland must be made in her column. Louella, who was answerable to only one god—Mayer’s friend Hearst—obeyed. Judy was called into Mayer’s office. She was never to see Power again. Mayer’s main reason was the sophistication factor. Films portraying Judy in the same All-American Girl role were being prepared. Babes in Arms was doing extremely well, and Strike Up the Band would soon be released. Judy was under eighteen; Power had dated all the worldly young starlets in Hollywood. There were accepted codes, laws to be respected. This was a period when girls under eighteen were called “San Quentin Quail,” implying that a man could be sent to prison if the girl claimed he had molested her. It was a time in which Errol Flynn and Charlie Chaplin had been loudly and openly condemned for relationships with young women. It was the height of hypocrisy for Mayer to cast the first stone, and it was incredibly insensitive of him not to realize how important this first affair was to Judy—making her for the first, and perhaps the only time in her life feel beautiful and loved. Mayer, in pursuit of winning his case through Ethel, now began to talk about her great future and a new contract making her a very rich young lady.
Only a few days had passed when on March 9 an anonymous telephone call was made to the West Los Angeles police about a plot to kidnap Judy. A nineteen-year-old youth was taken into custody, and he confessed that he and an older man had planned to kidnap Judy, take her into the mountains, and hold her for $50,000 ransom. The older man, identified as a “Frank Foster,” was at large, and the police had organized a search for him and placed a guard around Judy’s house.
Terrified, Judy called on Power, who immediately took things into his own hands. Believing Judy should be away from the area of danger, he drove her down to Tijuana, leaving himself open to the scandal of a possible arrest on charges of the Mann Act (transporting a minor across a state line for immoral purposes). Ethel was told. Within hours, Judy and Power were forced to return to Hollywood. It was the last time they were to see each other as young lovers. Upon his return, Power began to date Lana Turner. It was the ultimate blow to Judy’s ego. Power offered no explanation; but of course, studio pressure could very well have been responsible for his breaking off the affair so coldly and so sharply.
The kidnap scare faded into the past and Frank Foster was never found, but the episode and the disappointment in Power had unsettled Judy. The pressures and work schedule at the studio had increased to an even more frenetic pace. She was suffering extreme insomnia, and no quantity of pills seemed to help her sleep. No longer was she able to be “knocked out” for an hour or two between scenes. Nights were intolerable, sleepless; and the presence of Ethel and her stepfather troublesome. The house was too small and privacy impossible. She was a harassed, desperate young woman who did not know where to turn to find her own happiness and maturity.
On Tuesday night following the Power fiasco, she appeared with Bob Hope on his radio show (she was making weekly appearances at the time). There she met David Rose, who conducted the orchestra. He was thirty years old, married to but separated from comedienne Martha Raye, and he had a quiet, intelligent, and mature manner. Born in London and educated at the Chicago College of Music, he also was a fine musician and a cultured, knowledgeable man. He was an established orchestra leader who specialized in symphonic arrangements of popular songs. He spoke to Judy about her musical phrasing, her cadence, her vibrato. She was certain she had fallen in love.
They began to see each other in any free time she had, and on June 10, her eighteenth birthday, he presented her with a ring and they announced their engagement. Earlier that day she had posed with Ethel and Mayer in Mayer’s office for reporters to announce her birthday and had given no indication to Mayer or the studio of the news release she was to issue later on her own. As soon as the press was informed, Mayer was contacted. She was called back to Mayer’s office. He was beside himself. Rose had two strikes against him: one, he was not yet legally divorced; and two, he had once dated Jeanette MacDonald (whom Mayer had courted). This time Judy resisted, but she did agree that they would see each other on a more private basis until Rose was free and they would postpone marrying until a suitable new film image could be devised for her. In the meantime, she announced that she wanted to move out of her mother’s house and into an apartment of her own. Mayer said he would condone this only if she had a “chaperone.” There was a young woman employed on the lot with whom Judy had been friendly. Mayer suggested the girl, whom he thought to be of good character and fine reputation. Judy agreed.
Moving into an apartment of her own filled her with newfound self-assurance. She was overworked, overmedicated, and underfed; but she was eighteen, in love, and on her own. More happiness did not seem deserved, but it was to come. Barron Polan had left MGM and was now an agent with Leland Hayward. Convincing Ethel that Judy was being “had” in the Mayer-Orsatti arrangement, he persuaded her to sign with Hayward, thereby representing Judy himself. It was not as simple as that would seem. After long and angry negotiation with Orsatti, Hayward bought Judy’s contract from the Orsatti agency for $25,000. Judy, at that time, was still getting $500 a week and as a “bonus” being permitted to retain the money she would earn from guest radio appearances. By this time she had already made millions for Metro.
However, on September 26, Mayer presented her with a new contract that Hayward and Polan had fought for vociferously. It was for seven years, and she was to receive $2,000 a week for three years, $2,500 for the two years following, $3,000 for the last two years, with a guarantee of forty weeks’ work each year. A total of $680,000 over seven years.
Ethel went with her to get the contract approved in Los Angeles Superior Court (Ethel receiving a sizable percentage of Judy’s salary until Judy reached twenty-one). That evening the blond, deeply tanned Rose and Judy, celebrating in Judy’s apartment, planned an early and secret elopement.
The next day, Judy was commanded back to Mayer’s office with Rose. The girl with whom she had been sharing her apartment turned out to have been a studio spy and had betrayed the lovers’ plans.
Under threat of his being blacklisted from every radio station and film lot, Rose agreed that they would wait the year Mayer, as stern patriarch of the studio, had originally demanded.