Get Happy (41 page)

“The mind is its own place,” wrote Milton, “and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” And wherever she went, whatever she did, hell—a hell of her own manufacture—was Judy’s home in that bleak year of 1947. Her friend Lee Gershwin, Ira’s wife, caught a glimpse of the penal fires encircling her when Judy came knocking at her door one night, asking for a place to sleep after a fearful argument with Vincente. Lying on the couch in the Gershwins’ spare room, with Lee trying to comfort her by stroking her arm, Judy began screaming—a sound of pain, torment and despair, a keening for all that was wrong in her life, that continued until she fell asleep. Muddling through, as Vincente was attempting to do, was no longer good enough for his ailing wife. To anyone who bothered to look, nothing could have been plainer: Judy was suffering a breakdown. She did not need a smooth-talking psychoanalyst to hold her hand on the set; she required several months in a good clinic, as Karl Menninger had suggested four years earlier.

As it approached its second anniversary, the Minnelli marriage would most likely have been on shaky ground even had Judy not suffered a breakdown. The skeptics had been right all along—Judy and Vincente were an odd and, in the long run, ill-matched couple. Apart from the tiny girl in the nursery, they had little in common except the work that had brought them together. Now they did not have even that, and all that remained were the things that divided them, from an age gap of nearly two decades to Vincente’s uncertain sexuality: neither one, the evidence suggests, received much sexual satisfaction from the other. The result was the usual friction between a husband and wife who can no longer get along, and both made frequent use of the Gershwins’ spare room. Sometimes Vincente would leave Evanview Road in a fury; sometimes Judy would. “After all,” she would say sarcastically, “this is your house.”

By the beginning of February their relationship was showing such visible strain that Louella Parsons, who had been one of the first to give it her blessing, used her column to rebut rumors that they had separated. “Separated my eye,” she indignantly declared. “Those two are in love. It’s only the people who really are in love who quarrel now and then.” Louella was not altogether wrong. It was true that Judy and Vincente had not separated; but it was also true that the ties that bound them together were beginning to unravel. Indeed, those bonds were already loose enough to allow both of them clandestine outside romances.

Judy, for her part, engaged in a brief but spirited affair with Yul Brynner, an aspiring Russian actor who was everything Vincente was not—young, handsome, athletic and consummately virile. The male lead in a play called
Lute Song
, a musical fantasy set in China, Brynner had already been pounced on by several Hollywood stars, Joan Crawford among them; but Judy, according to Brynner’s son and biographer, was the only one he actually loved. Both apparently did their best to keep the romance quiet, but to those who could read between the lines, reliable old Louella said all that needed to be said when she reported that Judy longed to make a movie of
Lute Song
—with Brynner, of
course, as her costar. In any event, Vincente, who talked in his memoir of Judy’s “intense infatuations,” almost certainly knew what was going on.

Judy was soon to know what was going on in Vincente’s love life as well. Shortly before
The Pirate
finished shooting, she returned home unexpectedly and walked into their bedroom to change clothes before crawling wearily into bed. But that, she soon realized, was impossible, for the bed was fully occupied. Locked in loving embrace were two familiar male figures: Vincente and a man who worked for them. Violence would have been the natural reaction of most people who came upon a spouse in such a compromising position—in flagrante delicto, to use the familiar Latin phrase. But Judy’s anger was directed only against herself, and the only blood she spilled was her own. Running into her hideaway, the beautiful bathroom Vincente had designed for her, she started hacking at her wrists with a razor or some other sharp object, continuing until Vincente, jumping from the bed and rushing after her, grabbed it away.

Vincente had stopped her before she could do herself much harm, and Judy’s injuries were mostly emotional. When she appeared at the studio a day or so later, the bandages on her wrists were the only visible reminder of that tawdry drama. Feeling that she could not keep such a corrosive secret to herself, however, Judy did confide in another actress, who, over time, sent the tale of her horrifying discovery echoing through the Hollywood Hills. Eventually it reached the ears of Jacque-line Susann, who concocted a similar surprise for Neely O’Hara, the character she modeled after Judy in
Valley of the Dolls
, her bestselling potboiler of the mid-sixties. But Susann’s fictional account is gray and pallid compared with the one Judy related to her friend at Metro. Listening with mounting indignation, the friend angrily declared: “You should have slashed
his
throat, not your wrists.”

Those who have never suffered a nervous breakdown—or a “major depressive episode,” in current psychiatric jargon—can scarcely comprehend what it means. Those who have experienced it speak of bouts of uncontrollable weeping, an inability to sleep and a lethargy so profound
that the smallest and most routine exertions, such as bathing and dressing, become onerous chores, while larger ones, such as going to work, become as daunting as a climb up Everest. Unable to talk or listen, read or write, many do nothing but lie in bed all day, staring at the ceiling. The world on the other side of their bedroom door becomes an unmapped continent, an Arabia Deserta, that threatens danger with every step. “The mind begins to feel aggrieved, stricken, and the muddied thought processes register the distress of an organ in convulsion” was how the novelist William Styron described his own breakdown. “It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.”

Judy had been trapped in the middle of such dark and impenetrable clouds since the final weeks of 1946, when she signed her new Metro contract. Now, in the aftermath of the astonishing scene in her bedroom, she was whirled into even deeper despair. “Judy Garland is a very sick girl and has suffered a complete nervous collapse,” Louella Parsons reported on July 12, two days after Judy finished shooting her scenes in
The Pirate
. Parsons was not exaggerating. Now, at long last, Judy was allowed to go where she should have gone at the beginning of the year—into a psychiatric clinic. “Mama went away for a little while,” Vincente explained to Liza. “But she’ll be back very soon.”

Several miles southwest of Beverly Hills, Las Campanas, the clinic she checked into, appeared pleasant enough, with rolling lawns, trees and private bungalows. But it was not the Beverly Wilshire or the Waldorf-Astoria, and early every morning Judy was awakened by a nurse rummaging through her bungalow, searching for contraband—pills and liquor. Shy and self-conscious at first, Judy eventually wandered out onto the lawn, where she discovered, to her surprise, that most of the other patients were just like her, not crazy, but, in her words, “desperately and impossibly exhausted.”

She requested and was refused permission to see Liza. After much insisting on her part, however, as well as much whispering on the part of the doctors, her baby was driven down from Los Angeles for an emotional reunion—an outpouring of kisses, tears and laughter. It was clear that Liza, just sixteen months, had been as lonely for her mother as her mother had been for her, and when they were forced to say goodbye,
Judy lay on her bed and wept. “There have been many blue moments in my life,” she recalled, “but I never remember having such a feeling. It’s hard to believe, but I almost literally died of anguish.”

In those days there were no drugs to fight depression—the first antidepressant, Iproniazid, did not come on to the market until 1957—and whatever therapy Judy was receiving at Las Campanas was not doing her much good. On the recommendation of her newest psychiatrist, Dr. Herbert Kupper, she therefore left Las Campanas after a couple of weeks and traveled east to the Austen Riggs Foundation, a more serious clinic in the town of Stockbridge, in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

Unlike Las Campanas, Riggs seemed the ideal place for a successful treatment. It was in the very center of the kind of small town Judy professed to like—a town so pretty, in fact, that it might have been a product of Metro’s art department—and Dr. Robert P. Knight, who treated her, was the kind of doctor she seemed to need. He was an esteemed alumnus of the Menninger Clinic—the “premier Menninger therapist and analyst,” according to one history. Unlike the German-accented analysts of Los Angeles, he was a friendly, sympathetic Midwesterner, a good-looking man, several inches over six feet, at the vigorous peak of what was to be a sterling career. A frequent contributor to scientific journals, he had spent many years, moreover, studying the borderline state between neurosis and psychosis, the gray and foggy no-man’s-land in which Judy seemed to spend much of her life. He was, in short, an impressive practitioner of the psychoanalytic arts, and she was obviously in the best of hands. The fact that her therapy did not go well—that it was, indeed, another failure—can be blamed on no one but Judy herself.

Frightened perhaps of the loneliness and isolation of Las Campanas, she had made the cardinal mistake of persuading Kupper to travel with her from California; she had then compounded that error by further persuading him to stay with her in Stockbridge, in a room near hers at the Red Lion Inn, almost across the street from Riggs. His continuing presence was, of course, an obstacle to Knight’s own work: it was as if one surgeon were looking over the shoulder of another during a delicate
operation, then grading his performance for the patient on the table. Knight apparently said as much, and Kupper returned to California.

In what can only be called another mistake, worse even than the other two, Judy soon followed him, abruptly ending her treatment and raising the suspicion that Knight had come uncomfortably close to the painful origins of her illness. But that was not the reason she gave him. “I can’t stand it here in Stockbridge,” she grumbled. “It’s too quiet.” Knight’s response to this spoiled and nonsensical complaint was unanswerable. “When you don’t have a lot of noise around you,” he said, “the noise inside you becomes overwhelming.”

It was not too quiet in Los Angeles, and by late summer Judy was back on Evanview Drive, preparing for her next picture, Irving Berlin’s
Easter Parade
. “She has made such a remarkable recovery that she can return months before anyone expected,” wrote Louella Parsons. So, indeed, it seemed. If nothing else, the extended rest had brightened her spirits and swept away the clouds, at least for the moment. Putting aside their conflicts, the Minnellis exhibited all the signs of amity, and Judy’s friends were pleased to welcome home, instead of the terrified hysteric of a few months before, the feisty young woman they had known in earlier years.

Despite all the hugs and smiles on Evanview Drive, the climate had changed, however. Judy and Vincente still shared a bed, but they no longer shared a professional life. After
Meet Me in St. Louis
, Judy’s admiration for Vincente had been so great that she trusted almost no one else to direct her. Three and a half years later she continued to respect his skills as a director—but of someone else’s movies, not hers. Through the good offices of Kupper, she let Arthur Freed know that she wanted Vincente, who had already been assigned
Easter Parade
, to be replaced before she started work. Giving in to her demand, an uncharacteristically chastened Freed summoned Vincente to his office. Judy’s psychiatrist, Freed informed him, believed that Vincente symbolized all of her problems with the studio: it would therefore be better if somebody else directed her.