Get Happy (18 page)

Unwilling to waste any more time on such behavior, Fleming stepped in and stopped her in the only way he seemed to know—with a hard slap on the face. “All right now,” he sternly ordered her, “go back to your dressing room.” Brutal though his method may have been, it worked. When she returned, Judy did the scene in one take, without laughter. Fleming could not claim total victory, however. A smile, so quickly suppressed that it is almost spectral, can still be seen mischievously tugging at her face when Lahr whimpers: “Ya didn’t have to go and hit me, did ya? Is my nose bleedin’?”

Once shooting began, most Metro pictures were completed in no more than a couple of months. Some were finished in as little as four or five
weeks. Filming of
The Wizard of Oz
took more than five months, and, with the exception of the midgets, who were bedazzled by the business of show business, few remembered anything but hard, slogging work. For Bolger, Haley and Lahr, who suffered most from the hot lights, one of the high points of the day was the appearance of Judy’s tutor. “School time!” someone would yell, and the lights would be turned off, giving everybody but Judy a chance to relax. “We used to long for that sound,” said Lahr. “It meant we had an hour’s rest.”

Even the disciplined Fleming made mistakes that contributed to the production’s tardy pace. Haley was before the cameras for three days, for example, before anyone realized that his Tin Man, who was supposed to have been standing outside for months, should have looked dirty and weather-beaten, rather than shiny clean as if he had just emerged from the tinsmith’s shop. It was an expensive oversight. The cost of reshooting the scenes with a rusty Tin Man was a cool $60,000. As the budget rose well past projections, Metro’s headquarters in New York, which had been dubious about the picture from the start, became more and more nervous. What was going on in Culver City?

To find out for himself, and perhaps in the process to embarrass Mayer, his often uppity subordinate, Nick Schenck traveled all the way from Manhattan and asked the question directly. Rarely involving himself in the details of production, Mayer, who did not have a ready reply, did what all good bureaucrats do in such situations: he called a meeting. Unfortunately, Mervyn LeRoy, the one man who could have supplied a satisfactory response, was either out of town or playing hooky, and it soon became clear that nobody else could really respond. Schenck, who liked to be addressed as “General,” though the only uniform he had ever worn was a pinstripe, was not slow to emphasize what seemed to be the obvious. “Louie,” he said to Mayer, “you don’t seem to be in control here.” But Mayer was in control.
The Wizard of Oz
was running over estimates not because of wastefulness, or good times on the set, but because it was one of the most difficult and most ambitious films Metro had ever made. By the time Schenck got around to asking the question, however, the answer was beside the point: the picture had already cost too much to stop. Like it or not, the unsmiling General had no choice but to let Judy and her companions continue down the Yellow Brick Road.

They finished their journey with a different escort. In mid-February Fleming was yanked away to replace George Cukor as director of David O. Selznick’s
Gone With the Wind
, in which Metro had a substantial financial interest. Though Fleming had already shot about 80 percent of
Oz
before he departed, the remaining 20 percent, which included the beginning, the end and all the Kansas scenes, comprised perhaps the most crucial footage of all. But luck once again smiled on Production 1060. Fleming had not left at the wrong time; he had left at exactly the right time. The consummate director of action stories, he had been just the man to oversee Dorothy’s adventures in Oz. But a he-man’s he-man, even one with an artistic side, was not the best choice to direct the Kansas segments, which dealt mainly with the tender emotions of a frustrated adolescent. For those scenes, a more subtle, feeling touch was needed.

Enter a man who plainly had that touch; although he was on the set a little less than a month, King Vidor was an essential part of the
Oz
equation. One of Hollywood’s most innovative filmmakers, Vidor, the director of such elegant heart-tuggers as
The Big Parade
and
Stella Dallas
, had the emotional equipment Fleming lacked, together with a singular ability, acquired in the silent days, to tell a story in simple visual images: he made words almost superfluous. Most other directors would have planted Judy in one spot to sing “Over the Rainbow,” for example, keeping her there from first note to last. Not Vidor. Borrowing from the vocabulary of the silents, he moved her around the barnyard, underlining the longing that lay behind Harburg’s plaintive lyrics by leaning her wistfully against a haystack one minute, a harvester the next. “I wanted to keep the movement going,” he said, “just as we had in silent pictures.”

When shooting ended on Thursday, March 16, 1939, it was Vidor who turned the lights off at last on
The Wizard of Oz
. By the time post-production work was completed that summer, the budget for Baum’s gentle children’s fantasy had risen to what was then the enormous sum of $2,777,000. Small wonder that Schenck was worried. For M-G-M,
Oz
had become a costly gamble. For those most prominently involved, Judy included, the stakes were higher still: their reputations, perhaps even their futures, hung on its success.

The first previews of
The Wizard of Oz
were held in mid-June, in such bellwether towns as Pomona, San Bernardino and San Luis Obispo. Nearly two hours long, it had to be shortened by fifteen minutes or more to meet the accepted standards of the day, when most movies were no longer than an hour and forty-five minutes. Several minutes were eliminated by the accumulation of numerous small cuts, a few seconds here, a few seconds there. A few scenes had to be dropped totally, resulting in small inconsistencies that film students always delight in pointing out. Trimmed as well were at least a dozen of the Wicked Witch’s most alarming lines—“I’m here for vengeance” was one—that had proved unexpectedly terrifying to many children. (Even so, some still found her too scary. In England, the London Board of Film Censors ruled that children could see the picture only in the company of an adult.)

After one screening, several of Metro’s men in dark suits suggested yet another deletion—“Over the Rainbow” and the entire scene that surrounded it. Overlooking the fact that “Rainbow” was not just a pretty song, but the key to everything to follow, “those ignorant jerks,” as Harburg called them, deemed it inappropriate for an M-G-M star to be photographed singing in a barnyard, her only props being pigs, chickens and rusty farm equipment. Ignorant or not, the naysayers held positions of power, and their recommendation posed a real and potentially fatal threat to the movie: without “Rainbow,”
Oz
would scarcely have made sense. But once again, and for the very last time, that watchful guardian angel flew to the rescue. Mayer himself was prevailed upon to stop the attempted vandalism, and Judy was allowed to continue singing of a land she had heard of once in a lullaby. Pared to an hour and forty-one minutes,
The Wizard of Oz
was as short as it was ever to be.

As the August release date approached, Metro mounted the kind of advertising and marketing campaign it reserved for its biggest pictures. With assistance from Culver City, many theaters sponsored
Oz
contests, teenagers formed
Oz
clubs, and manufacturers produced a wide and sometimes odd array of
Oz
paraphernalia, everything from Judy
Garland dresses to writing paper, soap and coat hangers emblazoned with
Oz
decals. In addition to Metro’s own lavish advertising, the studio’s publicity department persuaded more than thirty magazines and newspapers to run feature stories that read like ads; Howard Strickling could not have written more flattering copy. Typical was the two-page color spread that appeared in
Life
magazine. “Dazzling Brilliance Marks M-G-M’s Color Version of
The Wizard of Oz,”
proclaimed the headline.

Ever since filming of
Oz
had stopped in mid-March, Metro had kept Judy in almost constant motion. After a five-week publicity tour of the East in late March and April, she had been hurried back to California to begin work on the film adaptation of Rodgers and Hart’s Broadway hit
Babes in Arms
. Shot on a tight, demanding schedule, that film finished production in early July and was to open in September, just a few weeks after
Oz
. When Judy traveled east in early August, she was thus promoting not just one, but two pictures. Rooney, her
Babes in Arms
costar, went with her, and rousing ovations greeted them on their first stops, in Washington, D.C., and three cities in Connecticut—Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven. Nothing could have prepared them for the pandemonium of Manhattan, however, and not even Metro could have gathered the delirious crowd of ten thousand that defied the August heat to scream their names in Grand Central Station. At five-thirty on the morning of August 17, many of those same fans, quieter but no less enthusiastic, were standing in front of the Loew’s Capitol Theater on Broadway, where, that very morning, Judy and Mickey were to share the bill with the New York premiere of
The Wizard of Oz
.
IN PERSON NOW
, said the marquee,
ROONEY-GARLAND
.

By nine-ten every one of the Capitol’s five thousand seats was occupied, and perhaps ten thousand more people were waiting outside, in a line that stretched all around the block. Prepared for a long stay, some had brought books and knitting; many carried their lunches. “Mickey, Judy, ‘Oz’ Tie Up Broadway,” said the
Hollywood Reporter
the next day. So many people demanded seats that the manager of the Capitol hastily tacked on an extra performance, raising the first day’s attendance to 37,000. At noontime, those two often warring partners, Louis B. Mayer and Nick Schenck, arrived to watch the excitement from nearby
Lindy’s. Indulging in a rare moment of warm good-fellowship, they telegraphed Mervyn LeRoy in California. “We had the best lunch ever,” they said. “Had the crowds for dessert.”

From then on Mickey and Judy did five shows a day during the week and seven shows a day on weekends, seldom escaping the theater for anything other than promotional stunts, such as an appearance with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia at the New York World’s Fair. Supplied with almost superhuman energy, Mickey, who was No. 1 at the box office that year, thrived on the unsparing pace: he sang, he danced, he pounded the drums and he did impersonations; he even conducted the orchestra when its leader fell ill. Judy was not so fortunate. She became so exhausted that she once collapsed in the wings, forcing Mickey to improvise until she recovered, four or five minutes later. But none of that weary strain was visible to New Yorkers, who saw only what the New York
Daily News
described as “the verve and rhythmic bounce of youth.” Rooney and Garland were as big a hit as
Oz
itself. As tickets continued to sell, Metro extended their Capitol run through a second week, keeping Judy on for still a third week when a new Hardy picture took Mickey back to Hollywood.

Despite her hectic schedule, Judy was able to sneak out a few times before leaving New York in early September. One of her dates, improbably enough, was with a young French aristocrat, the magnificently titled Viscount Lawrence d’Yago de la Vernier. After interviewing her for a paris youth newspaper, the eighteen-year-old viscount pursued her with flowers and telegrams until she finally agreed to dinner—then a second dinner after that. Only later did she learn that her ardent swain had acquired his charming accent at a high school in the Bronx; on the Grand Concourse the baby viscount was better known as Lawrence Yago, dentist’s assistant.