Get Happy (10 page)

His bitter tone must have sounded all the more startling because it was so out of character. As his deadline approached in the spring, he obstinately clung to the fiction that, no matter what anyone said or did, he would remain. “I regret that my lease expires April 1 and the building has been leased to an outside party,” he told the readers of the
Ledger-Gazette
at the end of March. “Unless I can obtain this lease I will be forced out of business temporarily but expect to open a new show as soon as possible.” He scarcely sounded rational. He knew, of course, that he could not obtain the lease—a front-page story in the same issue reported the names of the men who had bought it—and he could not have had any expectation of opening a rival theater. His farewell statement was really his way of having the last word with his former friends and neighbors. He was not being run out of town, Frank seemed to be saying: he was leaving merely because his lease had expired. But leave he did, finally joining Ethel and the girls in Los Angeles.

That he had been hurt by his expulsion from Lancaster no one could doubt. When his old barber, John Perkins, sent a card announcing the birth of a daughter a few months later, Frank replied with almost pathetic gratitude. Two or three times, he had been about to write, he told Perkins and his wife, but each time he had stopped because he did not know if his letter would be welcome. “It makes me happy,” he said, “to feel that someone up in that old burg does think of me once in awhile.”

“I’m going to be a movie star,” Babe had told people in Lancaster, but despite an avalanche of raves, she seemed no nearer that goal in 1935, the year she entered her teens, than she had been when she had started auditioning in the late twenties. To the surprise of those who had cheered her stage performances, all the major studios had turned her down. Even
Variety
, which supposedly knew the ins and outs of the motion-picture business, confessed its bewilderment. “Little Frances
Garland seems to have been mysteriously overlooked by local talent scouts,” said one of its reviewers, “because this remarkable youngster has an amazing amount of talent for both stage & pix shows.”

But there was no mystery: remarkable as Babe was, no one could think of a role for her. Hollywood had parts for the cute and cuddly—Shirley Temple, the box-office princess, was proof of that—and it had always been able to find spots for teenage beauties. But it had no roles at all for a somewhat awkward, ordinary-looking girl of thirteen, even if her singing did thrill everybody who heard her. “What can we do with a little Huckleberry Finn?” demanded an executive at Columbia Pictures. It was a good question, but an answer was soon to come. Perhaps it was the result of the years of hard work. Perhaps it was luck. In any event, just as a rush of theatrical bookings had followed a new last name in 1934, so was a movie contract to follow a new first name in 1935.

Babe had never liked either her given name, Frances, or her nickname, Babe, or—worse still, Baby. “That’s a rough rap,” she was later to say, and in the summer of 1935 she renamed herself Judy, after a Hoagy Carmichael and Sammy Lerner song about a girl with a voice as fresh as spring. From then on she stubbornly refused to respond to “Babe” or “Frances,” however loudly they were shouted. “Judy” was the only name she answered to, and it was for Judy—Judy Garland—that Hollywood finally opened its doors.

For years Ethel had dragged her youngest daughter to every film company in town, unsuccessfully searching for at least one person who would take more than a passing interest in her. Suddenly, without her prodding or plotting, there appeared, as if by magic, not one such person, but three: Al Rosen, a movie agent; Ida Koverman, the chief assistant to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Louis B. Mayer; and Roger Edens, a rising star in M-G-M’s music department.

Beginning in August or September, Rosen started ushering Judy through the studios yet again. Though the biggest of them all, M-G-M, or Metro as it was sometimes called, had rejected her at least twice, her third visit found a receptive and influential listener in Koverman. In early September, Koverman dispatched Edens, who had once been
Ethel Merman’s pianist, to listen to Judy in the offices of a music publishing house that happened to be owned by M-G-M. Edens arrived to find Ethel providing accompaniment, as she always did. Unimpressed by her playing, he took her place at the keyboard and turned to her daughter. What did she plan to sing? “‘Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,’” replied Judy. Then, with the innocent audacity of the very young, she posed a question of her own: “Can you change keys?” She might just as well have asked a professor of mathematics whether he could do long division. Edens shot back a cool “Yes, can you?”

After that slightly barbed exchange, it was love at first hearing. Listening to Judy, Edens later said, was like discovering gold where none had been expected. “Mrs. Koverman, Mr. Mayer must hear this girl,” he insisted when he returned, and Koverman immediately set up an audition at the studio. Judy’s summons, which came on Friday, September 13, caught the Gumms by surprise. Ethel was playing the piano at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, and Frank answered the phone. Could Judy come to Metro that very day? the caller inquired. So eager was he to be there on time that Frank rushed her into the car just as she was, in her casual play clothes—slacks, a blouse and sandals. It did not matter. Judy had been summoned because of her voice, not her looks.

One of Judy’s standards, as happy chance would have it, was a Jewish religious song she had learned in her days of performing before B’nai B’rith groups: “Eyli, Eyli” (My God, My God), which she sang in its original Yiddish. Its dirgelike notes invariably made Mayer’s eyes glisten, and when Koverman was certain Judy could sing it, she called the great man. She had a new singer he should hear, Koverman said. Koverman’s strategy worked, and on Monday, September 16, a memo was sent to M-G-M’s legal office: “Please prepare contract covering the services of JUDY GARLAND as an actress.”

The contract, signed on September 27, was to begin October 1 and to run for seven years, with Judy making a hundred dollars a week at the start and ten times that much, a thousand dollars a week, at the end. To eyes accustomed to thirties poverty, that final figure must have looked like a staggering sum; even a hundred dollars a week was a boon to the financially beleaguered Gumms. As far as M-G-M was concerned, there was nothing unusual about Judy’s contract—the studio
wrote dozens just like it every year—but to Ethel it was more than a typical legal document: it was the Holy Grail she had been seeking all those long years. Her search was over. She had what she wanted.

For the Gumms—or the Garlands, as now even Frank called himself and his family—life had settled down to a conventional routine. Their household had been diminished by one in August, when Mary Jane, who had taken the name Suzanne, had married a musician, Lee Kahn. Another defection seemed likely; Jimmie, now eighteen, was engaged to Frankie Darro, her boyfriend of many months.

Judy, too, Frank told John Perkins, was starting to give the boys the “once over,” although M-G-M gave her scant time for romancing. She spent every day at the studio, where she took academic classes in the morning and was coached by Edens and others in the afternoon. Already her name was being mentioned in connection with two or three upcoming movies. Eager to put her before the public, M-G-M twice procured her a guest spot on NBC radio’s
Shell Chateau Hour
, which was broadcast throughout the country. “We have a girl here who I think is going to be the sensation of pictures,” said the show’s host, Wallace Beery, when she first appeared on October 26. “I take great pleasure in presenting to you Judy Garland. Wait until you hear her!”

The family had moved from the hills of Silver Lake to a more conveniently located two-story house at 842 North Mariposa Avenue, in a pleasant, if nondescript, neighborhood south of Hollywood. No longer scurrying from stage door to stage door with her daughters, Ethel kept busy nonetheless, working at the Pasadena Community Playhouse and teaching singing to private pupils. Also busy was Frank, who had found another small theater in Lomita, a tiny suburb near the harbor of San Pedro, about twenty miles south of Los Angeles.

Although Frank and Ethel had exchanged frequent visits, they had not lived together full-time for more than two years, a separation that may have prolonged an otherwise doomed marriage. On Mariposa Avenue it was evident, as it had been on Cedar Avenue in Lancaster, that they were unalterably unhappy together. Fighting resumed—it probably had never really stopped—and Ethel was almost certainly still
deeply involved with Will Gilmore. That, anyway, is what the girls believed. Many nights, while Frank was in Lomita, their mother would say she was going off to play bridge with the Gilmores, but anybody who saw Laura, whose entire left side was now paralyzed by a stroke, knew she was an unlikely bridge partner. “Awfully pitiful” was how Frank described her.

Uplifted by good news, undampened by bad, Frank’s high spirits had returned—Frank without a smile was not Frank at all. But a trace of nostalgia, a touch of autumnal melancholy, had crept into his voice. Ethel was to turn forty-two on November 17, he himself was six months shy of his fiftieth birthday, and he was, he said, feeling old. He could envision the day when all three daughters would be gone, and he and Ethel would be left alone with little Phooey, their Pekingese. Even the Grand Rapids newspaper conspired to turn his mind to the past. One day that fall he picked up a copy and was startled to read the announcement of the birth of Mary Jane, the new Mrs. Lee Kahn, in the “Twenty-Years-Ago” column. “Gosh just think of it,” he said, indicating that he himself had thought much about it, of the roads he had taken—and had not taken.

Despite his money worries, Frank was dealing with the Depression as well as most and better than many. Although he had often had to fend off bill collectors—he had departed Lancaster owing more than two thousand dollars in back rent for the Valley Theater—somehow he had always been able to give his wife and daughters a comfortable house in a good area, as well as many luxuries. In an era when many middle-class people could not afford a car, the Gumms had not one, but two, one of which was a brand-new 1935 Ford. His creditors may have had reason to complain; his family did not. No one could have accused him of being anything less than a good provider.