Get Happy (15 page)

In
Love Finds Andy Hardy
, she is smitten with the irrepressible Andy, who is played by the equally irrepressible Rooney. Although Andy considers her too young to be anything more than a pal, he is glad to accept her aid in straightening out his tangled romantic life, which is always the chief concern of this long-running series. In
Listen, Darling
, Judy is Cupid again. Aided by Freddie Bartholomew, who, until recently, had been the studio’s most important child star, she prevents her widowed mother (Mary Astor) from marrying the stodgy town banker, then leads her to happiness with a more exciting younger man (Walter Pidgeon).

Already, M-G-M has established the persona that will remain with Judy almost to the end of her screen career. She is the wholesome girl next door, the sensitive soul mate boys like but do not lust after, the understanding friend to whom they confide their troubles with prettier, sexier girls. Metro, in short, was asking her to play a girl much like Judy Garland, and its writers had an uncanny knack of providing her characters with lines she herself might have spoken. “I’ll never be able to get a man, much less hold him,” one of them, Betsy Booth, laments in
Love Finds Andy Hardy
. “No glamour. No glamour at all. No glamour. That’s my trouble.” To anyone who would listen, Judy herself was making identical complaints in almost identical words.

Even when they are cast to type, as most stars were in the Hollywood of the thirties, actors usually go through an apprenticeship, a period in which they sometimes stumble and fall as they learn their peculiar craft. Judy was not one of them. She was that rarity, a natural performer who was born, as Joe Pasternak observed, “with what might be called perfect theatrical pitch.” Although her talent matured as she herself grew older, never, except possibly in
Pigskin Parade
, did she appear to be speaking someone else’s words, silly as they sometimes were. “There are moments with other actresses, even the greatest ones, when you think—’She’s acting,’” said Lillian Sidney, drama coach to two generations of Metro players. “Never Judy.” Watching her progress, those in charge in Culver City seemed to take it for granted that she would be a
star, and with each succeeding movie they moved her a rung or two higher on the cast list. Placed near the bottom of the credits when
Broadway Melody
reached the theaters in September 1937, Judy was first, nudging out Freddie Bartholomew, when
Listen, Darling
was released in October 1938.

The studio’s favorite, she could not have been held in higher regard had Leo the Lion, the regal symbol of M-G-M, licked her hand, nuzzled her cheek and given her a ride on his tawny back. Everybody liked Judy, just as everybody had liked Frank Gumm. She was “a kid, a real kid,” observed Mary Astor, and her natural effervescence, combined with her keen, impish sense of humor, caused even Mayer, who possessed neither, to smile indulgently when he was around her. “Judy, none of your tricks on me now!” he said, wagging his finger in her face. “I’m on to you!” Added to her father’s appeal was an attribute a practiced charmer like Frank did not have: a becoming diffidence, an appealing vulnerability that warmed the coldest heart. “There was always something childlike and shy about Judy,” said songwriter Ralph Blane. “You wanted to pet her.”

Yet that endearing, childlike quality, which was one of her greatest assets, was also to prove one of her most serious liabilities at M-G-M. She was, then and later, taken seriously as a performer, but not as a person; she was treated like a minor, an attitude of condescension that pursued her, like an unwelcome childhood nickname, well into adulthood. No one at M-G-M could ever forget that she had grown up on Lot 1; few could substitute the image of the woman for the girl with the giggles. Even after she had reached her majority—and was a certifiable star at that—Mayer still referred to her as “that poor little girl, Judy Garland.” Small wonder, then, that as long as she remained at Metro, Judy also thought of herself as a poor little girl. Small wonder, too, that however high her salary rose, she always felt that in Culver City she was looked upon as a poor relation.

If M-G-M intruded into the personal affairs of its grown-up players, it virtually ran the lives of its adolescents. For them, Mayer’s plush patriarchy was a luxurious reform school, the studio often guaranteeing
around-the-clock obedience by putting their mothers on the payroll. Ethel was one such mother-employee, assigned the single task of making sure that Judy did as she was told when she was told. Praised when they were good, Metro’s underage offspring were scolded and all but spanked when they were bad—“bad” being a word that the studio could define any way it wanted. In the case of Judy, who was cheerful on the set, who learned her lines with phenomenal ease and who caused no disturbances in the world outside, it meant only one thing: she ate too much; she was too heavy.

In the months when it had nothing for her to do, Metro did not much care whether she was thin or fat. Once she actually started making movies and her box-office appeal became apparent—“They love the kid!” exclaimed songwriter Arthur Freed when
Broadway Melody
came out—Judy was subjected to closer and far more critical examination. The camera is sadistically cruel to the overweight, and a fat star was a former star. For Judy, all that was at issue was a few unnecessary inches around the middle; but that bulge at her waist might just as well have been the Maginot Line, so large did it loom in the imaginations of those who controlled her destiny. “My little hunchback,” Mayer himself began to call her. Trying to turn humiliation into a joke, Judy would repeat the line herself. “I am Mr. Mayer’s little hunchback,” she would say with a laugh.

Other pudgy girls of fourteen or fifteen are spared such intense scrutiny and usually slim down as they grow up. A movie star in the making—“plump Judy Garland,” as the
New York Post
called her in its review of
Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry
—was to be granted no such luxury. Her body now belonged to M-G-M, not to her. Every time she picked up a french fry or dipped a spoon into a bowl of ice cream she was damaging a valuable corporate asset. “From the time I was thirteen,” she said, “there was a constant struggle between M-G-M and me—whether or not to eat, how much to eat, what to eat. I remember this more vividly than anything else about my childhood.”

An attempt was made to shame the pounds off her. Stood in front of a mirror, she was told to compare herself with the clothes dummy standing next to her—the figure of a fat woman. “Now look at yourself,”
she was instructed. “Do you want to look like that dummy or do you want to be a star?” As any first-year psychology student could have predicted, such rough tactics inevitably backfired. By undermining her confidence, Metro made her only more eager to find solace in old friends, sweet, fattening treats being among the oldest. The girl who had grown up with a candy bar in her hand found it devilishly hard to live without sweets. “My idea of a good time,” she confessed, “was a caramel sundae at Wil Wright’s ice-cream parlor in Hollywood—oodles of sauce and whipped cream. Whenever I could, I used to slip off and gorge myself.”

Increasingly frustrated, the studio also took more direct steps to bring down her weight: as long as she was on the lot, she was to be starved into slimness. No matter what she asked for when she sat down for lunch in the studio commissary, waitresses were told to serve her nothing but chicken soup. It was good chicken soup, filled with light, fluffy matzoh balls made according to a recipe from Mayer’s own beloved mother; but it was still chicken soup. Metro was not playing games; to prevent cheating, she was discouraged from eating at the teenagers’ table, where one of her friends might have sneaked her a forbidden morsel, a bite of hamburger or a piece of cake. If she ignored all the hints and sat there anyway, Roger Edens was quickly dispatched to join her and prevent transgressions. Though Judy later joked about what she termed her “prisoner’s menu,” there was always an angry edge to her humor. Mayer’s chicken soup, she said, had been well salted—with her tears.

All the spies on the lot and the one at home—which is to say, Ethel—could not watch her twenty-four hours a day. Despite all the eyes fastened on her, she still managed to escape to Wil Wright’s and to find hiding places in her studio dressing room for cookies, chocolates and candies. In desperation, the studio finally brought out a new weapon to curb those renegade desires. Ethel had been giving her pills, pills to wake her up and pills to put her to sleep, since the Lancaster days. Now, Metro added diet pills, combinations of Benzedrine and phenobarbital, to that already potent mixture. The studio had found the ultimate weapon.

To a later generation, which can count the victims of prescription drugs, the dangers of such a course are obvious. They were less so in the Hollywood of the thirties and the forties, when amphetamine-based stimulants like Benzedrine and, later, more sophisticated offshoots like Dexedrine and Dexamyl, were nearly as common as aspirin. To many, they seemed like miracles of science. Some used them for dieting, as Judy was forced to do; others, for energy and concentration. The day after trying his first Benzedrine, Joseph Mankiewicz, who was then a rising young writer at Metro, was back demanding more. “Give me a roomful of them! I never wrote so much and so well in my life. I want them!” So did many others, and at most of the big studios there was a doctor who carried a bag stuffed with variously colored pills, each formulated to have a different effect on the mind or body.

Not far off was a time when everyone—Mayer, Ethel and, most poignantly, Judy—would regret Metro’s drastic solution to her weight problem. For the moment it seemed to work. The pounds began to disappear. But her fight to stay slim was unrelenting and remorseless, coloring her whole existence from the moment she woke in the morning until the instant she fell asleep at night. Indeed, if the truth could be known, the battle probably continued, more fiercely and ferociously still, in the privacy of her dreams. For Judy, it was a war without end, or hope of end.

At the beginning of 1938 Metro placed an ad in
Variety:
“It’s a little early to predict but here’s a prophecy for 1938! JUDY GARLAND STARDOM!” Not counting on fate to decide the matter, it soon put Judy on a train to Miami, the first stop of a two-month publicity tour to promote
Everybody Sing
and, of course, herself. The last time the studio had sent her east, in the spring of 1936, she had been a contract player with an uncertain future, and her mother had been her only company. This time, thanks to her new stature in Culver City, she was accompanied by an entourage. Ethel went along, but so did Roger Edens, her older sister Suzanne, and her tutor, who, in obedience to California state law, would be teaching her the three R’s until she turned eighteen.

Arranged with all the care given a presidential campaign, Judy’s tour actually began in Houston, where her Miami-bound train stopped for half an hour on its way from Los Angeles. At the station to meet her were the mayor and a high school guard of honor, twenty-five girls. Six younger girls, each dressed in a copy of one of her
Everybody Sing
costumes, presented her with a box of pralines. Even more elaborate was her reception in Florida, where she traveled in a motorcade to her hotel on Miami Beach and where searchlights lit up the night for the movie’s world premiere. Accustomed to visitors from Hollywood, New York City, next on the itinerary, gave her a cordial but more restrained welcome. Several papers sent interviewers to her hotel suite; all came away impressed by the confident and unassuming demeanor of a girl who was soon to top the bill at the giant Loew’s State Theater in Times Square. “M-G-M’s Sensational Singing Star,” as the ads were calling her, was assured but far from brash, said one admiring reporter.

Judy could have used some of that assurance a few hours later. Stepping out in front of her first New York audience on February 10, she suffered a potentially disastrous case of stage fright, so anxious that she lost control of her voice and all but shouted her first song. Nonplussed, the house responded with an epidemic of nervous coughs. Awakened, or perhaps frightened by her earsplitting volume, a baby howled, and the coughs suddenly turned into chilly laughter. Halting in mid-song, Judy also started laughing. Her giggles, which proved that M-G-M’s Sensational Singing Star was, after all, just a girl, broke the tension and brought on a second round of laughter, warm and friendly this time around. The unhappy baby had saved her. Nervous no longer, Judy started all over, not stopping again until, twenty-four minutes and two encores later, she had made what
Variety
called an undeniable smash. “Kid has an unspoiled, bashful manner that is irresistibly appealing,” said the
Variety
critic.