Get Happy (48 page)

Though she came in late—by anywhere from fifteen minutes to three hours and fifteen minutes—on nine of the eighteen days she worked, Judy’s record on
Royal Wedding
was nonetheless better than it had been on most of the films she had made since
Girl Crazy
. But Dore Schary’s efficiency-minded M-G-M was not the same studio that had produced those earlier films, a fact that Freed was reminded of, if any reminder were needed, by the memo from the front office that laid out the schedule for
Royal Wedding
. “IMPORTANT! PRODUCTION!! INFORMATION!!!” it proclaimed in a red banner, three inches high. The letter went on to say that the studio was “making an all out effort” to speed up filming—and knew it could count on Freed’s cooperation.

Judy was a symbol of the wasteful old days, and her smallest misstep was now noted and the memo dispatched to half a dozen eager executives. Consciously or not, the new regime appeared to be itching for a confrontation, and the combative Donen was pleased to provide it. On
June 16, at the end of that third week, he demanded that she come in the next day—a Saturday—for an hour’s rehearsal. “If she doesn’t come in tomorrow,” he warned Freed, “it’s going to be a nightmare.”

And so it was, but for Judy, not for Metro. Pleading illness, she stayed home. Though it was only the first day she had missed entirely—and only an hour’s work, at that—she had handed the studio the excuse it apparently had been waiting for. Within hours, a telegram, dated that very day and obviously readied in advance, arrived on her doorstep from Metro’s corporate office in New York: “This is to notify you that for good and sufficient cause and in accordance with the rights granted to us under provisions of Paragraph 12 of your contract of employment …” She had, in short, been suspended once again.

In baseball, Hedda Hopper was quick to observe, it’s three strikes and you’re out. “With Judy Garland,” she added with a succinct finality, “it’s the same.” Hopper was merely saying what Judy and everybody else in Hollywood knew: this suspension was different from the previous two. This was to be her last. There would be no more chances. Judy was being kicked out of the only real home she had known since she was thirteen.

So distraught that she had to be put to bed under sedation, Judy had dried her tears by Monday afternoon and was steady enough to discuss her post-Metro prospects with Vincente, Carleton Alsop and her secretary, Myrtle Tully. Although she was, for the moment, unemployable in the motion-picture industry, the outlook was less bleak than she seemed to think. Hollywood was not the only place in which she could find pleasure and profit. Broadway beckoned and, across the Atlantic, the Palladium, London’s premiere variety house, had long been paying her court. There was also an altogether new stage for entertainers—television. As soon as it heard the news of her firing, NBC, in fact, offered her a contract, guaranteeing to make things enjoyable for her. “Cheer up,” said the telegram from NBC, “we all love you.” One world had locked her out, but the doors to several others were ready to spring open at the mere mention of her name.

That was the argument reason would have made, and that, or something like it, was probably the argument presented to her that Monday afternoon in her living room on Evanview Drive. But Judy was not listening to reason. Around six o’clock, not long after Alsop had driven to Culver City to try to obtain a reversal of her suspension, she impulsively ran down the hall to a bathroom, locking the door behind her. “Leave me alone, I want to die!” she screamed as Vincente and Tully scurried after her. When she refused to open the door, Vincente broke it down with a heavy chair and saw what he had feared—blood. Smashing a water glass against the sink, Judy had scraped its jagged edge across the right side of her throat. “I wanted to black out the future as well as the past,” she later explained. “I didn’t want to live any more. I wanted to hurt myself and others.”

Calling with the bad news from Culver City—her dismissal was final—Alsop heard the rumblings of still worse disaster on Evanview Drive. “Get over here as fast as you can!” screamed the frantic Vincente. Alsop rushed back to find not one hysterical Minnelli, but two—though a sharp slap on the face quickly returned Vincente to his senses. After that, the two men bundled Judy up, hid her on the floor of a car and drove her to the house she had rented on Sunset Boulevard. Waiting there was her doctor, Francis Ballard, who examined her neck and saw that, despite all the excitement, she had not seriously harmed herself. Slightly scratched, her throat required nothing more than a Band-Aid. He had done more damage to himself shaving, Alsop wryly observed.

That should have ended the matter. But someone, perhaps inadvertently, tipped off the newspapers, which quickly transformed those tiny abrasions into huge front-page headlines. “Judy Garland Cuts Throat Over Lost Job,” shouted the tabloid
Los Angeles Mirror
. “Judy Garland Slashes Throat After Film Row,” headlined the
Los Angeles Times
. So it continued for the next several days, as the papers explored her downfall from every angle. “Hollywood Heartbreaks—Story of Fame, Fortune and Despair,” was the title of one article, which included Judy in a long and pathetic list of actresses ruined by the movies, everyone from Frances Farmer, who was confined to an asylum, to Olive Borden, a star of the silents, who died, penniless and almost alone, in a tiny room
in a downtown mission. It took a war—North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25—to push Judy and her travails onto the back pages.

A suicide attempt, even one as halfhearted as hers had been, has many motives. Judy was doubtless telling the truth when she said that she had wanted to die. But she was probably also telling the truth when she whispered to Dorothy Ponedel that she had been trying to gain public sympathy—and to put the blame for her suspension on M-G-M. If she was unable to achieve her first goal, Judy succeeded admirably in her second.

Florabel Muir, the
Mirror
reporter who first broke the story, set the pro-Judy tone of the coverage when she wrote that her desperate action was “a black reproach” to all of Hollywood, but a particular embarrassment for M-G-M, which had asked her to work against her doctor’s advice. When one of Louis B. Mayer’s racehorses, a mare named Busher, injured her leg, Muir noted, Mayer had put her to pasture for more than a year, until she had fully recuperated. “It would seem,” Muir tartly remarked, “the same consideration could be given to the little Garland gal whose golden voice and great acting ability are worth saving perhaps as much as Busher was.” Also in Judy’s corner was Hedda Hopper. After saying that Judy’s was “the greatest talent ever developed in this city, and I’ve known them all,” Hopper, too, chided Metro. “Poor little Judy,” she concluded. “So much talent, so much pressure, so much bad advice.”

Seeking to counter such sentiments, the studio that was so adept at protecting its stars now proved equally skillful at smearing one of them. In a lengthy statement, Metro portrayed Judy as a reckless ingrate, an emotional cripple whom it had often employed against its better judgment. Denying her the respect suffering is usually accorded, the studio did its best to turn her troubles into a public joke. “Judy, as everyone who knows her realizes, is a very hysterical girl,” one unnamed executive told Louella Parsons, the only columnist Metro could count on to relay its side of the story without blinking. “At least ten times before she has pretended to end her life when she was in trouble with the studio.” In like manner, Ralph Wheelright, a balding, bespectacled Metro press
agent, lifted his pudgy chin to show photographers exactly where Judy had cut herself, creating a picture so comical that it seemed designed to make her brush with tragedy seem slightly ludicrous. “Goddamnit,” Alsop bitterly complained, “how could you do such a fucking, stupid thing, and do it to Judy?”

The answer, which even the canny Alsop had not yet grasped, was that Judy was now perceived as a liability: she had outlived her usefulness; she was expendable. “I tried to do everything in my power for Judy,” said Mayer, neatly absolving himself of any responsibility. “I couldn’t have done more if she had been my own daughter.”

“Judy’s the bouncy type,” said Carleton Alsop, who had, indeed, witnessed some remarkable recoveries. “She’ll snap out of this in a hurry.” But Alsop was wrong. Judy did not snap out of it in a hurry; she remained in bed for several days, with nurses in constant attendance. In a pattern that was repeated over and over, she was awakened to eat, then, when she soon started to cry, was given a sedative that put her back to sleep. “She apparently still doesn’t know whether she wants to go on with life,” Alsop was finally forced to admit. The newspapers and their blaring headlines were kept away from her, and Judy believed that the baskets of telegrams that came to the door every day were all in response to her suspension.

A year or so earlier Mayer had pleaded with Katharine Hepburn, that paragon of Yankee virtue, to give her a helping hand. “Do you feel that you could do anything?” he had asked. After talking to her, however, Hepburn had decided that there was nothing she could do: someone like Judy, she explained, was a full-time, twenty-four-hour-a-day job. Oddly matched as they were, the two women nonetheless became good friends, and when Judy was fired from
Annie Get Your Gun
, Hepburn had offered her the use of her homes in Connecticut and Manhattan. Thus it was that on the morning after Judy’s encounter with the broken glass, the invincible Kate was the first notable to be allowed into the house. Looking not at all like a movie star—her freckled face was bare of makeup, her red hair flew in the breeze and her angular body was
clad in a sweatshirt and slacks—she beat her way through the assembled press and threatened death to the first photographer who dared to take her picture. Hearing the commotion outside, Judy awaited her arrival with both anticipation and apprehension. “Oh, golly,” she thought, “here comes Hepburn health.”

Then, with the brisk authority of a celery tonic, Hepburn marched into Judy’s bedroom. “Oh, dear, dear, you rally are sick,” she said. “I think you’d better come stay at my house for a few weeks.” Judy translated that as an invitation to six weeks of basic training—sit-ups, weight lifting and regular dunkings in Hepburn’s pool—but before she could say no, Hepburn remembered that she was about to start a movie and would be unable to play drill instructor. Next to come through the door was someone equally formidable, Judy’s earliest advocate at Metro, Ida Koverman. Sent by Mayer, Koverman, too, refused to talk to the gathered newshounds. “You have your job to do and I have mine,” were the only words that tough old Scotswoman would give them.

Though no other friends were let into the sickroom, many people seemed genuinely touched by Judy’s plight, and expressions of sympathy came in from all around the world. One of Florabel Muir’s readers telephoned the reporter to say that Judy’s voice had brought her not only pleasure but hope—that after hearing Judy sing “Over the Rainbow” in
The Wizard of Oz
, she had been able to overcome some very rough times. “I wish that song could do the same for Judy,” the caller added wistfully.