Get Happy (22 page)

No one, for instance, had told her what real college girls wore. When one boy arrived to take her to his fraternity pledge party at USC, she greeted him in a slinky split skirt, with a white-fox stole draped around her neck—the kind of outfit a sexy starlet would wear to a premiere. Fearing hoots of laughter from his fraternity brothers, the boy feigned
a sudden headache and fled in horror, only to be sent back by his angry father; he had made a date, his father informed him, and he would have to keep it. The second time he knocked, Judy had changed costumes, putting on a quieter, if duller, party dress: she had learned her lesson.

The years in which kids spend their time mostly with other kids Judy had spent with adults. She was, therefore, perfectly at home with her elders, gliding so easily through the grown-up world, even when she was fourteen and fifteen, that most people soon forgot that she was not, in fact, grown-up. By seventeen, she was an adult—in her own eyes and the eyes of everybody but the executives in Culver City—and males her own age no longer caught her fancy. She was interested only in mature men, men of a particular type, musicians mostly, and of a particular talent. Good looks were not mandatory; keen intelligence and a sharp, jabbing humor were.

To that potent mixture add the adjective “neurotic,” and a picture of one of her major crushes begins to emerge. The “wit’s wit,” as one critic dubbed him, Oscar Levant was a concert pianist and composer; the lovely, bittersweet ballad “Blame It on My Youth” was his most memorable song. Until 1938, when his humor found him a home on the radio, he was known chiefly for his friendships with the famous, George Gershwin most notably, and for his devastating one-liners. When a date upbraided him for yawning in a nightclub, for example—“I hope I’m not keeping you up,” she said sarcastically—Levant retorted: “I wish you were.”

Thirty-two when he met Judy in New York in the summer of 1939, Levant, who had the sad eyes and droopy face of an aging basset hound, had divorced one beautiful woman, a Broadway chorus girl, and was courting another, a 20th Century-Fox starlet named June Gale, a “demure Jean Harlow,” was how he described her. Neither his age nor the fact that he had already proposed to another woman stopped Judy from making a play for him herself.

“What do you think of me?” she demanded shortly after they met.

“You’re enchanting,” he answered.

“Don’t give me that. What do you really think of me?”

“You’re like a Mozart symphony,” he said, a reply that so pleased her that she went out to buy recordings of all Mozart’s many works—
symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music and operas. This time, however, one of Levant’s one-liners had missed its target. Judy was nothing at all like a Mozart symphony—cool, classical and finely balanced—and after listening to all her new records, she angrily told him so. “She couldn’t make contact with the purity of Mozart’s music” was all Levant would say. Still, she was not angry enough to stop pursuing him, or to put an end to an avalanche of phone calls, letters and copies of her poems. Though their relationship remained platonic, his choice apparently, not hers, the attraction was mutual. Despite the wide, almost cavernous age gap, he was captivated, Levant confessed, by such a “throbbingly emotional girl.”

Judy’s tireless pursuit did at last bring Levant to the altar, but not with her: she was the catalyst that made June Gale, the woman Levant really loved, say yes at last. “I had been taking Oscar too much for granted,” remembered the ultimate Mrs. Levant. “And Judy came on very strong about men. She didn’t give up.” Gale finally accepted Levant’s proposal, a date was set and on December 1, 1939, the wit’s wit had a new wife on whom to practice his craft. It was just as well that Judy got no further with him than she did. Suffering from too many of the same problems, with addiction to prescription drugs heading the list, they undoubtedly would have made a quarrelsome and unhappy couple. “If we had married,” Levant later joked, “she would have given birth to a sleeping pill.”

If Judy was not distraught at Levant’s marriage—and she did not seem to be—it was because she had fallen for someone else. And not just any someone, but the man who seemed to have captured every female heart in Hollywood, Artie Shaw. “Oh, my God … what a beautiful man!” Ava Gardner said to herself when she first met him. Along with the usual attributes of a lady-killer—he was, of course, tall, dark and handsome—Shaw possessed one that was not so usual: he could make musical magic with a clarinet. Benny Goodman’s rival for the title “King of Swing,” he was, in the words of jazz historian Gunther Schuller, “an uncompromising searcher for the lofty and the expressive,” a musician who was virtually incomparable in the beauty of his tone.

Shaw had found fame in the summer of 1938, when his sweet and satiny recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” had the whole nation dancing. From then on, he was, in his own words, a “sort of weird, jazz-band-leading, clarinet-tooting, jitterbug-surrounded Symbol of American Youth.” His newfound celebrity, combined with the edgy, almost dangerous quality in his personality—no one could guess what he would say or do next—made Shaw a headline writer’s delight. He carried with him a sense of drama. Attracting more attention than most movie stars, he could scarcely make a move without causing a commotion.

A poor Jewish boy—Arthur Arshawsky was his real name—who had grown up in the shadow of Yale’s privileged towers, Shaw was to spend his long life in pursuit of an education. He never stopped reading, and he never stopped talking about his reading, lecturing one bewildered beauty after another on the merits of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Freud, Thomas Mann and numerous other umlaut-sprinkling Middle Europeans. Whatever the cause, Shaw was all but irresistible to Judy and any number of other stars and starlets. “I got Ava Gardner, I got Lana Turner, I got whoever was around,” he recalled, running down the list like a sport fisherman showing off his prize-winning trophies. “With their cooperation. I didn’t ‘get’ them: they came after me. It’s true.” It was indeed true, and Judy, who was not one of the most beautiful women of Hollywood, was yet the one who went after him the most aggressively and tenaciously of all.

They had met when Shaw was playing in New York, probably on Judy’s second visit in the winter of 1938, a few months before his “Begin the Beguine” was bouncing off the top of the charts. Excited by his innovative style—“she flipped out over what I was doing”—Judy introduced herself and handed him a bright bouquet of praise, one musician complimenting another. Though he was flattered by the attention and impressed by her precocious musical sophistication, Shaw was conquered by her high spirits and zest for living. “Judy was marvelous!” he said. “Bubbly, laughing, full of joy, just starting life. I was enchanted by her, crazy about her. I ‘dug’ her. That’s better than ‘loved’ or ‘cared for.’”

So began a friendship that sprouted and flourished despite the fact that when it began, Judy was only fifteen, little more than half Shaw’s age. Even so, she was a livelier, more sympathetic companion than the grown women he dated. “I felt that she was the best friend I had had in a long, long time,” said Shaw, who saw himself in desperate need of such companionship. Supremely confident in the eyes of most of the world, he was, in fact, plagued by doubt and self-loathing, so scarred by childhood encounters with anti-Semitism, among other things, that he was ashamed of being a Jew, ashamed of being himself. Judy, who was afflicted with different but equally corrosive insecurities, could understand such feelings better than anyone else. To Shaw, she was like a sister: they were born of the same anxieties.

But Judy did not regard Shaw as a brother. He was, indeed, the very definition of everything she desired in a man. Despite Ethel’s furious objections to such a renowned womanizer—a man who had been twice divorced before the age of thirty, moreover—Judy was not in a mood to obey. Still smarting from her mother’s marriage to Will Gilmore, she engaged in an elaborate ruse to throw her off the scent, recruiting Jackie Cooper to pick her up for a date, then deliver her to Shaw. When Cooper tired of the game, Jimmie provided cover, telling Ethel that Judy was with her rather than the man Judy now considered her lover.

In fact, Ethel’s fears were groundless. Though they were often together, Shaw was not Judy’s lover, not even her boyfriend. According to him—and it is hard not to believe him—they never so much as approached the bedroom. “She was the closest thing to a little sister I ever had,” he said, “and sex with her would have felt incestuous. It would have been utterly impossible.” Besides, he admitted, Judy was not the kind of woman he invited into his bed, not the “all-American, long-legged beauty” he favored.

But as Levant had discovered, when Judy cared about a man, she was relentless. Blind to both the competition and common sense, she did all she could to arouse her clarinet-tooting hero. Every time Shaw leaned down to give her a brotherly good-bye kiss, she greeted him with her lips instead of her forehead. When they came close together, she would rub her body against his. “Cut it out!” he would command. “Now watch that, kid!” he would say. But Judy regarded such comments as
come-ons, not rebukes. Disregarding all the evidence, she had convinced herself that Shaw was not only in love with her, but wanted to marry her. Soon, she told herself, she would be the third Mrs. Artie Shaw.

That much-contested title was won by someone else, however. On February 8, 1940, Shaw was making a recording on the Metro lot. Together with a friend, the comedian Phil Silvers, he paid a visit to the set of
Two Girls on Broadway
, where, Silvers had said, one of the two girls, Lana Turner, wanted to see him. “And zoom! Like a bee making for the honey,” to use Silvers’s words, Turner rushed over. She made a date with Shaw for that very night. Shaw talked, as he usually did, about Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but he was more interested in Turner’s flawless face than in philosophical verities. “It really was The American Dream,” he said, with something approaching reverence. “Unbelievably beautiful.” Before the night was half over, Paul Mantz, the “Honeymoon Pilot,” was flying them to Las Vegas, where, roused from his sleep, a justice of the peace united them in holy matrimony.

Like everybody else in Hollywood, Judy learned about their marriage from a newspaper headline the next morning. Her mother, who had brought her the paper on a breakfast tray, heard a shriek from her bedroom and ran back to find her sobbing uncontrollably, staring at the horrifying news. “Well, so what?” responded Ethel, who had been taken in by her deceptions. “But I love him!” wailed Judy, who was so completely shattered that Ethel telephoned Shaw to complain. “You’ve broken her heart!” she screamed. Shaw was astonished. Wrapped up in himself, unable to look beyond his German philosophers and his Hollywood starlets, he had not realized until then that his best friend, his little sister, also wanted to be his wife. When he later tried to make amends, he only made matters worse: “Lana is a whole different thing, Judy. Lana is a woman I’ll have sex with… . I never thought of you in that way and I didn’t think you thought of me in that way.”