Get Happy (14 page)

The one who was keeping the closest eye was Judy, who was horrified and dismayed by the unattractive, clumsy-looking girl she saw in
Pigskin Parade
. A “fat little frightening pig with pigtails,” was how she described herself. No one else saw such an apparition; but it was undeniably true that she was overweight—not really fat, but too pudgy, by Hollywood standards anyway, to be thought of as anything but slightly comic. Gone was the skinny child of the Lancaster years, who had eaten and eaten but who had never gained an ounce. In her place was a teenager who was beginning to show the unfortunate proportions she was to have as an adult. Small—she was just under five feet in 1936—she had a disappearing neck, a big chest, a very short waist and long, long legs. Even a few excess pounds, which might have been invisible on a more conventional figure, were, and were to be, cruelly apparent on hers. To make matters worse, in
Pigskin Parade
, Fox actually accentuated her weight, dressing her, in her opening shots, in a tattered, shapeless bag of a dress. She was supposed to be a figure of fun—and so she was. Squirming in her seat as the film unrolled, Judy was convinced that her first movie would also be her last.

Even talk of a part in a new picture,
Broadway Melody of 1937
, did little to brighten her return to M-G-M. She had heard similar promises before, and once again she spent her mornings in Miss MacDonald’s schoolroom, her afternoons with Roger Edens. “What I like to do is sing—good and loud,” she was to say; but Metro still let her do that only at parties. The M-G-M machine, which had worked so hard on her behalf a year earlier, was now all but silent. Although Ida Koverman was still pushing her, Mayer was not, his excitement in 1935 having turned to indifference in 1936. “The Boss has lost interest in Judy,” Koverman told screenwriter Frances Marion. “Whenever I suggest her name for a small part in a musical all he says is, ‘Stop bleating! I’m running this studio, not you!’” Yet she would not be intimidated, Koverman insisted. Judy had become her cause. “I’ll never give up! Somehow I’ll manage to get his interest back to Judy again.”

If Deanna Durbin’s experience was any indication, it was better to be fired than hired by M-G-M. The loser in the Metro sweepstakes, Durbin was the clear and almost instant winner in the bigger contest to become a star. After her tearful exit from Metro, she became a regular
on Eddie Cantor’s show, perhaps the highest-rated program on all radio, and a darling of Universal, her new studio. “Universal’s New Discovery,” the studio called her. “Universal’s Savior” would have been equally appropriate. Released in December 1936,
Three Smart Girls
was such a big hit that, all by itself, it rescued the company from bankruptcy and transformed its dimpled lead into a genuine star. “When am I going to get my chance!” Judy demanded after seeing it at a preview. “I can’t wait!”

If the success of Durbin’s picture was unsettling to her, it was positively galling to Mayer and his men, who belatedly realized their mistake in letting their little soprano go. How could they have chosen chubby Judy over the slim and pretty Durbin? How could those famous starmakers have passed up such an obvious star? “Mayer let Tiffany go and held on to Woolworth,” went one widely repeated wisecrack. After reading Durbin’s ecstatic reviews, Judy may have been saying the same thing to herself, crying so much that a worried Ethel took her to see Koverman. Throwing herself into Koverman’s lap, Judy started sobbing all over again. “I’ve been in show business ten years and Deanna’s a star and I’m nothing!” she told Koverman.

“You just wait,” replied the determined Koverman. “You’re going to get your chance, you’ll be starred, and you’re going to have your footprints in Grauman’s Chinese—you’ll see.”

A chance of sorts did, in fact, come a few weeks later. On February 2, 1937, Judy was scheduled to appear on a radio variety show run by Ben Bernie, otherwise known as the “Ole Maestro.” She was longing to sing a hot love song, “Drums in My Heart,” that Edens had arranged and played for Ethel Merman. After working with Judy for more than a year, however, Edens had concluded that the torch songs that had caused such a stir in her vaudeville days were now hindering, not helping her career. Audiences were indeed amazed to discover a woman’s voice coming from a child’s body, but it was a phenomenon that, at the same time, made them vaguely uneasy. It seemed almost indecent to hear sexy lyrics sung by a girl who had barely reached puberty. Judy
would do better, Edens reasoned, with songs more appropriate to her age.

Confident in his analysis, he informed her that she was too young for “Drums in My Heart.” It was a song for a woman, he said, not a girl. That was the last thing Judy wanted to be told, and after an angry exchange she stalked out of his office. When she later returned—she could not remain mad at Edens very long—he made a deal with her. He had an idea for a number he thought she would like. Give it a try, he said, and if he was wrong, she could sing Merman’s song.

It was a gamble Edens was not in much danger of losing. What he had come up with was all but irresistible: a torch song with a funny twist. His notion was to present her as a moonstruck fan who falls for Bernie’s voice on the radio. She writes him a musical love letter that soon turns into “You Made Me Love You,” a romantic ballad of such ancient vintage that Frank and Ethel might have sung it on the stage of the New Grand before Judy was born. Since the cigar-chomping Old Maestro was perhaps the last man in Hollywood who would inspire such a love song, Edens figured that Bernie’s listeners would get the joke. So long as nobody took it seriously, Judy could sing a torch song.

At that point Koverman stepped in, as she so often had at crucial moments in Judy’s career. The day before Judy was to appear on Bernie’s show, Mayer was planning a surprise birthday party for his leading male star, Clark Gable. Realizing that the party provided her with the long-awaited opportunity to bring attention back to Judy, Koverman put in a call to Edens: she wanted Judy to sing. The audience would be small, but it would be select; all of Metro’s top executives were expected to pay tribute to Gable, “the King,” as he was known in Culver City. With no time to work up a new number, Edens changed “Dear Mr. Bernie” to “Dear Mr. Gable.” Judy had her song.

So it was that on the afternoon of February 1 a festive group surrounded Gable on the set of his latest movie,
Parnell
After the birthday cake had been cut and the gifts opened, piano notes were heard and a spotlight illuminated a dark corner, where Judy was sitting nervously atop Edens’s piano. It was, she later said, her first experience of stage fright. “Dear Mister Gable,” she began. “I am writing this to you, and I
hope that you will read it so you’ll know.” Explaining that every time she saw one of his movies her heart went bang, bang, bang and she was so giddy she could hardly speak, she decided to let him know how she felt in a letter:

When she ended by telling him that he had the brand of kisses she would die for, Gable went over and really did kiss her, causing Judy to burst into tears (“maybe,” as Mickey Rooney impishly suggested, “because Gable had such terrible halitosis”). Flustered as she was, wrote Rooney, Judy was not so overcome that she lost her senses, however. “Out of the corner of one eye, she spied Mr. Mayer, beaming with his arms held out to her. She left Gable’s side, went over, and climbed into Mr. Mayer’s lap. At that, everyone just about went nuts.”

By coincidence, Judy was scheduled to entertain that night at a charity benefit at the Café Trocadero, along with such big names as Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor and her old mentor, George Jessel. It was an ideal opportunity to test her love letter to Gable before another kind of crowd. Would the Trocadero’s sophisticated show-business audience have the same visceral reaction as Gable’s friends and colleagues? If the answer was yes, Metro’s assembled executives realized that in Judy and her new song they had a guaranteed moneymaker. That night’s applause told the story. Judy, wrote columnist Sidney Skolsky, was the sensation of the evening, overshadowing everyone else on that illustrious bill.

Three more times that winter and spring an audience heard Judy sing “Dear Mr. Gable.” The third occasion, Metro’s annual show for theater owners and exhibitors, brought the loudest roar of all. “I have never seen such enthusiasm from an audience,” said Ann Rutherford. “They banged the tables!” By that point nobody at Metro needed convincing that the Garland girl had a future in the movies.
Broadway Melody of 1937
was at last under way—so late that it was retitled
Broadway Melody of 1938
—and both Judy and her new song, “Dear Mr. Gable,” were in it. Never again was she heard to complain that M-G-M was not giving her enough to do.

So at last, after a year and a half of false starts and disappointments, Judy’s movie career really began. The M-G-M machine sprang to life, then began whistling and whirring on her behalf. Now, instead of looking for excuses to keep her out of pictures, Metro searched for reasons to put her in, inserting songs into stories that otherwise would have had none at all. Its ingenuity in finding films was such that she was kept almost constantly busy: from the spring of 1937 through the summer of 1938 she made no fewer than five movies, an average of one every three months.
Broadway Melody of 1938
was followed by
Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry
and
Everybody Sing;
they, in turn, were succeeded by
Love Finds Andy Hardy
and
Listen, Darling
.

Her smallest, but perhaps most noticeable part was in
Broadway Melody
. In a film that included Eleanor Powell’s knockout tap dancing and the brassy voice of Sophie Tucker, Judy more than held her own. As Metro had anticipated, just about the whole country responded to her love letter to Clark Gable, which one critic described as “heartrending.” Many reviewers also agreed with the
New York Daily Mirror
, which said that Tucker and “small Miss Garland” walked off with the show. So visible had she become that Judy was considered for the role of one of Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sisters in the most talked-about movie of the decade,
Gone With the Wind
. (That part eventually went to a somewhat older Metro player, Ann Rutherford.)

If she walked off with
Broadway Melody
, Judy ran away with her four other pictures. Without her, they would scarcely be worth looking at today. Though all have fine casts, the usual M-G-M polish, and an undeniable congeniality, they are, like so many other Metro products of the post-Thalberg era, deeply mired in Mayer’s gluey sentimentality.
Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry
is, of course, a racetrack yarn. Mickey Rooney plays a smart-aleck jockey, and Judy, whose aunt runs a boardinghouse for riders, teaches him humility, a lesson she was to repeat many times in the eight other movies they made together. A screwball comedy with music,
Everybody Sing
is pleasant entertainment, but it does not make the grade as either a comedy or a musical. What it does is give Judy, who plays the youngest member of a scatty theatrical family, a chance to
show the wide range of her talent: with equal aplomb, she sings, bounces comic lines off that old vaudevillian Fanny Brice, and sheds a small bucket of tears in her first crying scene.