Get Happy (45 page)

But not for long. Less tolerant of Judy’s problems than Mayer had been, Schary himself met with her, then telephoned Nick Schenck in New York to offer his own solution: she should be removed from the
picture. “This is a tough one,” he said. “But our feeling is to take her out because otherwise you’re going to be in a hole—and you won’t have a movie.” To which Schenck laconically answered: “Do what you have to do.” The decision to fire Judy had thus been made, and its implementation awaited only the right opportunity. Poised and ready, Metro found that moment on the morning of May 10, when Judy, who was due on the set at nine, did not even drive through the gate until ten-ten. Waiting for her in her dressing room, where Pasternak’s rose had once winked a friendly greeting, was a warning letter from the front office. “We desire to call your attention to the fact,” it said, “that on a great many occasions since the commencement of your services in ‘ANNIE GET YOUR GUN,’ you were either late in arriving on the set in the morning, late in arriving on the set after lunch, or were otherwise responsible for substantial delays or curtailed production, all without our consent.” Any further tardiness, the letter added, would result in her suspension.

Considerably chastened, Judy rushed to the set, rehearsed until the lunch break, then responded immediately when Jennings called her at one-twenty for her first scene of the afternoon. Before she could leave her dressing room, however, there was a knock at the door. Assuming that her absence from the set meant that she was late, two men from the front office handed her a second letter, notifying her that since she had not heeded the earlier warning, she was being taken off the picture. Still a third man, realizing that the first two had jumped the gun, huffed and puffed onto the set seconds after they had left for her dressing room. “Oh, they weren’t supposed to deliver that letter yet,” he said.

They succeeded in their mission, nonetheless. Although it was premature, and therefore not legally binding, that second letter sent Judy into hysterics. When Jennings, on orders from Mayer, who knew that the legal niceties had to be preserved, summoned her to the set a second time, at two o’clock, she angrily refused, vowing not to return “now or ever again.” Those were the rash words the studio wanted to hear, and she was not allowed to retract them. Appearing on the set ten minutes later with the breathless message that Judy had changed her mind and would soon follow, Dorothy Ponedel was surprised to see
both the cast and crew heading for the exits. “Where’s everybody going?” she asked Jennings.

“They’re all through,” he told her. “We’re finished.”

“Well, get them back. Judy’s on her way.”

“Too late,” Jennings replied. “Too late.”

And too late it was—too late for Metro, too late for Judy and too late for common sense: for the second time in less than a year, she was suspended, off the payroll. The next day the studio sent a memo to all those who might have dealings with her: “For your information Judy Garland’s contract has been suspended as of May 10, 1949. She is not to be called or requested to render services of any kind whatsoever unless the matter is cleared with Mr. Mannix or Mr. Schary.” Betty Hutton, a brassy-voiced comic who was undiplomatic enough to say that she had been praying for the role, became the new Annie. “I’d stand on my head in Macy’s window to get that part,” said Hutton. “There never will be another character like Annie Oakley—a regular barrelhouse sort of dame.” A barrelhouse sort of dame was the Annie she played, crude and broadly comic, without the subtlety and pathos a healthy Judy might have given the portrayal. Released in 1950, the picture was a huge success anyway, making more money than any previous Freed musical and putting Hutton herself on the covers of several national magazines.

For Judy the studio had no further plans. “Judy Garland out of Films for Year,” read the front-page banner headline in the
Los Angeles Examiner
. Although she publicly accepted all blame—“I’ve been a bad girl,” she admitted—Judy was portrayed in the press as spoiled and temperamental, a performer unworthy of sympathy, according to Louella Parsons. “Certainly,” said the indignant Parsons, “after all the breaks she has had at M-G-M they have a right to expect her to cooperate and not fail to report for work.”

A
year earlier, in the summer of 1948, a local scandal sheet,
Hollywood Nite Life
, had printed three front-page articles about the drug problems of one of the world’s biggest stars. “Miss G,” the paper had helpfully dubbed her, on the unlikely chance that any of its readers had trouble guessing her identity. Although Judy’s surrender to pills was well known within the industry, never before had it been advertised to the public—in bold, black headlines, moreover. Suddenly one of Hollywood’s worst-kept secrets was secret no longer: the girl next door, wholesome and winsome Judy Garland, was a drug addict. Those who read the articles—and everyone in town seemed to have done so—now had an explanation for her erratic behavior on the set: she was, as
Hollywood Nite Life
indelicately phrased it, a “pill-head.”

What was startling to Judy’s fans, however, was an old and increasingly tiresome subject in the Thalberg Building, where Mayer had convened many high-level meetings to consider one topic: how to wean Judy away from drugs. “We did everything we could to try to get her back to normalcy,” said Lucille Ryman
Carroll, who, as head of the talent department, attended such sessions. “We spent several years trying to straighten her out.” More than once Judy herself was summoned to the meetings in Mayer’s office, only to annoy and frustrate everyone present by blandly insisting that she did not need straightening out—she was not a drug addict. “No, I’m not taking anything,” she would say. If anyone accused her of lying, which everyone knew she was doing, she would, in Carroll’s words, “just open those big brown eyes and look at us.”

But it did not require the services of Metro’s spies to ascertain that Judy had organized a supply system that Metro’s own purchasing department might have envied, that she had not one doctor prescribing for her, but four, five or more, and not one pharmacy filling her prescriptions, but nearly every one listed in the Yellow Pages. The Alsops saw just how many suppliers she had lined up when she stayed with them during her
Barkleys of Broadway
crisis. Each evening, between seven and eight o’clock, something like half a dozen motorcycles would roar up their driveway, bringing drugstore deliveries from miles around.

Judy was not the only one in Hollywood who was hooked on pills, of course. Nearly everyone was ingesting some kind of sedative or amphetamine—“bolts and jolts,” they were called. The bolts, the sedatives, were the most sought after; the stars were willing to try almost anything that promised a good night’s sleep, an absolute necessity in a business that required bright eyes at dawn. Noël Coward, for instance, blessed Marlene Dietrich for the gift of a magical suppository. “I rammed it up my bottom,” he reported to his diary, “and slept like a top.” Judy was satisfied with the more conventional sleeping pill. What else can you do, she asked a fan magazine, when you are working so hard? “Golly,” she added, “you know you just have to have sleep.”

If Judy was not the only star consuming drugs, she was the most visible. So insatiable was her appetite that even her network of doctors and drugstores could not keep up with the demand, and what she could not buy, she would beg, borrow or steal. At parties, for example, while most people were having fun downstairs, she was upstairs prowling the bathrooms,
shamelessly burgling medicine chests—she even stole allergy pills. The day after escorting her to a gathering at Rosalind Russell’s, Evie Johnson, Van’s wife, received an irate call from the hostess.

“Jesus Christ, Evie! Why didn’t you warn me?”

“About what?” inquired the astonished Johnson.

“About Judy!” Russell exploded. “She rifled my medicine cabinet. It’s empty!”

Mornings would sometimes find her knocking on Gene Kelly’s door—the Kelly house was midway between her own house and the studio—to ask if she could use the bathroom. Kelly’s wife, Betsy Blair, would say yes, then be surprised to watch her brush past the downstairs bathroom and boldly march upstairs to the Kellys’ private bath. Only when her husband began noticing the disappearance of his sleeping pills did Betsy learn that a weak bladder was not the real reason for Judy’s visits. Word of her acquisitive habits soon got around, and when Judy was expected, bathrooms were emptied of almost everything but shaving cream and toothpaste.

Desperate people do desperate things, and nothing Judy did in her pursuit of pills, no matter how humiliating or outrageous, seemed to embarrass her. William Tuttle, who became head of Metro’s makeup department, caught a glimpse of that desperation when he accidentally dropped one of his own Benzedrines. Like a dog jumping for a scrap, Judy grabbed it almost before it hit the floor. Still, nobody wanted to be blamed for giving her drugs, and after
Hollywood Nite Life
shone the spotlight on the pill-popping “Miss G,” the real Miss G felt a chilly breeze when she walked to her table at Ciro’s or the Mocambo. “It was a terrible thing in this town,” said Judy, “because people really stayed away from me as though I were a leper.” It was harder still to shrug off the even more frigid reaction of her own daughter. On one particularly bleak day, Liza joyfully jumped into her arms, then instantly recoiled, screaming in shock and horror at the foul smell emanating from her mother’s pores—the unpleasant by-product of a knockout drug with the lethal name paraldehyde. “Ye gods!” exclaimed Sylvia Sidney, who witnessed that pathetic scene. “It had the most awful odor.”

Sidney was also present for another, equally scarifying encounter. After examining a bedridden Judy at the Alsop house, a group of doctors
compared notes at the far end of her darkened bedroom. Hearing their whispered buzz, Judy sat up and glared at them. “There is something you fools do not understand,” she said. “I am an addict. And when I want something, I can get it.”