Get Happy (21 page)

A
s the new decade, the decade of the forties, began, Judy was an audience favorite. But it was a teenager with wide, searching eyes and a tentative, beseeching smile whom people paid to see. Would they line up at the box office for a grown-up Judy Garland? For Judy Garland the woman, not the girl?

That was a question M-G-M did not want to ask, or even contemplate asking. The careers of most child stars ended with adolescence; once they had lost their heart-tugging, playful-puppy innocence, a fickle public quickly became bored with them. Jackie Coogan and Baby Peggy, darlings of the twenties, had long since been shown the door; Jackie Cooper and Freddie Bartholomew, darlings of the thirties, were soon to follow. Even Shirley Temple, whose popularity had seemed as durable as Gibraltar, was beginning to lose her race with time. No one in Culver City wanted Judy to suffer the same fate. Audiences knew her only as a girl in her mid-teens, and if a nervous Metro had had its way, she would have remained that age forever. The studio did its best, certainly, to stop the clock, continuing
to give her the sexless young-teenager parts her fans were accustomed to. In her first picture after
Babes in Arms—Andy Hardy Meets Debutante
, it was awkwardly titled—she again played Mickey Rooney’s lovestruck sidekick, Betsy Booth. Next, starting in April 1940, came filming of
Strike Up the Band
, which, the songs aside, was almost a copy of
Babes in Arms
, a sequel in all but name. Once more poor Judy was Mickey’s junior partner; once more her loving glances went unnoticed as his busy eyes fastened on other, prettier girls. “You’re as important to me as a brass section” was as amorous as the scriptwriters allowed him to get. For the moment, romance was not to be hers—not on-screen, anyway. A perpetual adolescent, with as much sex appeal as a tuba or a trombone, was just the image Metro wanted Judy to have.

The portrait painted by Metro’s artful propagandists was not entirely false: in some ways Judy was an ordinary, all-American girl. She met her friends, mostly other show-business brats, for malteds at the drugstore. She spent hours listening to the latest records. She invited the gang over on Saturday nights to dance and play charades. Handsome, energetic and fun-loving, her friends looked as if they had stepped straight out of Hardy country, which was just what many of them had done. Mickey, Andy Hardy himself, was a regular at Stone Canyon Road. So, too, were a dozen or more other familiar faces from thirties films, a collection that included Leonard Sues and Sidney Miller, both of whom had landed small roles in
Babes in Arms;
Bonita Granville, the lead in the Nancy Drew girl-detective series; Buddy Pepper, who appeared in
Seventeen
with Jackie Cooper; and Frankie Darro. A more attractive snapshot of young America, refulgent in its well-scrubbed wholesomeness, could not have been taken in Grand Rapids, or in any one of the thousands of other small towns that sententious commentators liked to say represented the real United States.

Yet if the studio’s portrait of Judy was not entirely false, it was not entirely accurate either. She was not sixteen when the new decade began, as Metro was still claiming; she was almost eighteen. Nor was she the sexual innocent the studio presented, and persuaded her to present, to the public. “Nobody thinks less about boys than I do,” she
assured one fan magazine. “I don’t want to get married till I’m 24. Why 24? Well, that sounds like a good long while away.”

Even M-G-M could not repeal the biological mandate, however, and the truth was the exact opposite. Not only did boys dominate her thoughts, not only did she dote on their rude and boisterous company, but she had been enjoying sex with them for many months. Marriage? She did not plan to wait until she was twenty-four, twenty, or even eighteen. She wanted—she was desperate, in fact—to say her vows immediately; she would have done so that very afternoon if it could have been arranged. She had the man of her dreams already picked out. He loved her, or so she thought, and there was just one barrier to a quick trip down the aisle: he had not yet asked her to marry him.

In her attitudes toward love and romance, as in so many other aspects of her life, Judy was more representative of American youth of the thirties than the bland and antiseptic teenagers M-G-M was foisting on the world. She probably got her first kiss in her father’s theater in Lancaster; the boy, Galen Reed, was ten and frequently joined her onstage to sing duets, for which Frank Gumm rewarded him with a silver dollar. Also making a claim on her affections was another Lancaster boy, bucktoothed Charles Murphy. When her mother carried her away at last to Los Angeles, Judy cried for hours at the prospect of losing him. “I had a feeling I wouldn’t see you for a long time and here it is going on 4 yrs.,” she later wrote him. “But don’t think there has been a day I haven’t thought of you.”

At thirteen or fourteen, she was holding hands with Freddie Bartholomew at screenings in Louis B. Mayer’s darkened living room—“Judy and I were very much in love,” Bartholomew recalled—and sneaking kisses with Jackie Cooper on the beach. She dropped both of them for the older, manlier Billy Halop. The leader of the “Dead End Kids,” six boys who had come from New York to play tough street kids in such pictures as
Dead End
and
Crime School
, Halop warmly returned her tender feelings. Judy, he rather fetchingly confessed to one reporter, was his “weak moment.”

Who finally introduced her to the pleasures of sex, and where and when, is a question without an answer: what is certain is that Judy had lost her virginity by the age of fifteen. One who went to bed with her then was Buddy Pepper, her senior by just seven weeks, who had several trysts with her in his apartment. Another, most likely, was Frankie Darro. Nor were they her only partners during that period. Where sex was concerned, Judy was a free spirit, unencumbered by guilt or inhibitions. On occasion, indeed, she was almost breathtakingly bold and aggressive.

No one would have been surprised to hear that Lana Turner—the “Kissing Bug from the Andy Hardy film,” as Metro billed her—had engaged in sex at an early age. Nor would anyone have been astonished to learn that Mickey, who visited prostitutes, who fondled girls’ breasts in
the car that drove him to the commissary for lunch, and who said that Turner had “the nicest knockers” he had ever seen, claimed to have made her pregnant—an assertion Turner stoutly denied. But many, it seems safe to say, would have been shocked to discover that Judy was probably just as active as Turner, and probably just as early.

In fact, Judy’s sexual history was likely not much different from that of many other girls, and no different at all from that of most of her own girlfriends—the boys usually started earlier. In Hollywood, sex was not just sex. It was a commodity, an article of merchandise that was put on constant, conspicuous display, like a high-powered car or a diamond bracelet. Is it any wonder that in the movie world, as in all others, the young emulated their elders? Or that Judy, Mickey and all those other fresh-faced teenagers who came to Stone Canyon Road did what comes naturally?

Most teenagers go through periods in which they fall in and out of love with almost comic frequency. Judy differed from the norm only in degree: her crushes, most of which went unrequited, came and went with unvarying regularity. A deep-dyed romantic, she was the kind of girl whose heart pounded when she listened to the sweeping strains of a Rachmaninov concerto and whose eyes watered when she read the pensive verse of A. E. Housman. She was an enthusiastic, if not very inspired or polished, poet herself, and she undressed her emotions in several compositions, which, with disarming naïveté, she proudly had bound and sent to her closest friends. Laden with rue, as Housman’s were, as well as with clichés, as Housman’s were not, her poems speak of “forbidden treasures,” “trembling lips” and “racking desires.” Love, as the young Judy viewed it, almost always ended in distress and desolation.

Romantics are as fond of shadow as sunshine—“hail divinest melancholy,” proclaimed Milton—and Judy’s gloom-shrouded poesy cannot be read as a direct rendering of her state of mind, like a progress chart hanging from the end of a hospital bed. Still, it is a critical clue, which, combined with all the other clues, offers an insight into her psyche, disclosing what her close friends already knew: her feelings, her highs as
well as her lows, were always exaggerated. At the start of a romance she was happier than most other girls; at the end she was more miserable. “She laughed more than anybody else, and she cried more than anybody else,” said Buddy Pepper.

The result was a series of heartbreaks. Jimmie’s boyfriend, the blond and amiable Bobby Sherwood, was one of those who inadvertently caused unhappiness. Judy had a secret crush on him, and when she learned that he was to marry Jimmie, she could not stop her tears—“because I’m so happy for you,” she lamely explained to her suspicious sister. For Judy, the teen years were an emotional roller coaster—thrilling, dizzying ascents quickly followed by wrenching, harrowing descents. “People like me don’t grow up easily,” she was later to explain. “They bounce. One day they’re adults with a head full of wisdom, and the next day they’re stubborn children who have to be led by the hand.” That was the Judy who was taking title to her womanhood at the beginning of the forties, a wise adult and an obstinate, mercurial child.

The years spent rushing from stage to stage, job to job, had deprived Judy of that period in which, as Mickey was to observe, “kids learn to cope with life’s problems, test their equipment, learn what works and what doesn’t.” With her contemporaries, as a consequence, especially those outside of show business, she was often shy and uncertain, like a child in a new school who has not yet learned the local do’s and don’ts. She desperately wanted to be accepted by the group, to go to football games and high school proms, to enjoy, in short, all the ordinary things she had been denied; but that part of America, the part experienced by most middle-class Americans, she knew mostly from the movies. Without a script, she did not know how she should behave; without Metro’s costume department to guide her, she did not even know how she should dress.