Get Happy (26 page)

At the end of January 1943, M-G-M finally called a halt to Berkeley’s megalomania. The breaking point came three weeks into
Girl Crazy
. The first scene to be shot was a college rodeo for which Roger Edens
wanted what he later described as a simple staging. But “simple” was not in Berkeley’s vocabulary. He wanted a genuine Busby Berkeley, a rodeo such as the West had never seen, with guns blazing, cannons blasting, whips cracking and battalions of cowboys and cowgirls doing high steps through the sagebrush. Berkeley won the argument—his rootin’-tootin’ rodeo eventually concluded the film—but lost the picture. His complicated staging added nearly $100,000 to the budget and so outraged Edens that Edens issued an ultimatum to Arthur Freed, who had, even as Mayer had promised, become a producer. If Berkeley stayed, Edens said, he would go.

Confronted with such a stark choice, Freed had no difficulty coming to a decision. Though no one was ever able to define precisely what Edens did on a Freed musical, everyone knew that his contribution was vital: he was involved in a production from script to staging, from conception to preview, advising, arranging and, when needed, writing both music and lyrics. A tall Texan who was kept from being handsome only by a droopy, teardrop nose, he exuded the movie cowboy’s air of casual authority. Almost universally liked and admired, he had already proven himself, at thirty-seven, to be indispensable to both Freed and the Metro musical. Berkeley had not, and in the third week of January Freed fired him, replacing him with the uninspired but reliable Norman Taurog, who had directed Judy in
Little Nellie Kelly
three years earlier.

But inspiration was not what Metro wanted in the
Babes in Arms
series. “Don’t try to make these films any better,” Mayer had said about the Andy Hardy pictures, and his edict applied to their musical relations as well. Audiences had liked the first
Babes in Arms
just the way it was. Why risk failure by tampering with the sequels? Metro wanted the series to be good, but not very good. The result was planned mediocrity: tiresome plots, hackneyed scripts and smothering mountains of the corn the post-Thalberg M-G-M cultivated so enthusiastically. “If a story makes me cry, I know it’s good,” Mayer had once said, and Freed, who produced the entire series, made sure that the boss had plenty to cry about in those stories of good-hearted, all-American kids struggling to put on a show. If the scripts are mediocre, the music is not, however. Freed, the lyricist, knew the difference between good songs and bad, and, aided by Edens, he chose some of the best songs of some of America’s
best songwriters, an exalted company that included Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, and George and Ira Gershwin.

Had they been ten times better, the
Babes in Arms
pictures would still not have been worth the price Judy paid for them. For her, the cost of working with Berkeley could be counted in frayed nerves, sleepless nights and further damage to her emotional stability. In some dim cavern, deep inside her mind, she was to continue, for long years to come, to see his dark brows furrowing and his hand tightly clutching a big black whip. There was a still-worse legacy of the Berkeley years, however: an increased dependence on prescription drugs. Small wonder that when she thought of Busby Berkeley, as she herself was to say, she recalled only gray, numbing fatigue and too many trips to the Benzedrine bottle.

“I won’t marry yet. Not for three or four more years.” So a hurt and disillusioned Judy assured an interviewer after Artie Shaw, the man she had hoped to marry, had run off with Lana Turner. In the weeks after that collision with rude reality, Judy may actually have meant what she said, putting marriage, and all that went with it, off to a time when she would be an almost middle-aged woman of twenty-one or twenty-two. But if she did mean it, she did not mean it for long. Though she was, by the summer of 1940, no longer a girl, she was still acutely susceptible to girlish crushes, and anyone who knew her could have predicted that a new man would soon take Shaw’s place in her heart. She could live without being loved, but Judy could not live without loving. In her romantic fantasies, as in every other aspect of her life, it was more important to please than to be pleased, to present herself to an audience, even an audience of one, and to beg for approval.

Several men passed in and out of her life in the months following Shaw’s abrupt leave-taking, and Judy had an affair with at least one of them, the songwriter Johnny Mercer, whose face was round and homely, but whose huge gap-toothed grin, which looked as if it had been stolen from a Halloween jack-o’-lantern, spread cheer wherever he went. Only thirty-one when they were carrying on their affair, Mercer
had already written the words for such durable favorites as “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” and “Jeepers Creepers;” he was to go on to write many others—“Laura” and “Moon River,” to name just two. That “bouncy butterball of a man from Georgia,” as his friend and frequent collaborator Hoagy Carmichael called him, the irrepressible Mercer had followed Judy’s career since she was a girl. By April 1940, when they recorded a duet of Cole Porter’s “Friendship,” their relationship had become considerably more than friendly, or was about to do so. As besotted with Judy as Judy had been with Shaw, Mercer wandered around in such a lovesick daze that a friend of the family finally pleaded with her to let him go. Judy did as she was asked—Mercer was not a serious crush—but Mercer continued to pine, paying her sly tribute a year or so later with an ode to impossible love, “That Old Black Magic.” Though Judy was loath to admit it, even to herself, occasionally she, too, could play the siren, causing hearts to pound and heads to lose their reason.

Judy may have let Mercer go so willingly because, even while they were having their fling, she was finding her own black magic with another man. At first glance, the new object of her affections, David Rose—the same David Rose who had helped Margaret Whiting stop Judy’s hysterics after the Shaw-Turner nuptials—looked like the last man who would interest a lively, fun-loving young woman. Short, with a pleasant pudding face and light, sandy hair, he had not a hint of Shaw’s brooding good looks. Quiet and “painfully shy,” according to one profile, he also had none of Oscar Levant’s caustic Gotham wit or Mercer’s hush-puppy charm. At parties he usually faded into the background, not opening his mouth for half an hour at a time; though he was only thirty, one fan magazine said that he sometimes seemed older, which was probably a polite way of saying that some people found him boring. Rose was, all in all, such a well-camouflaged suitor that for months the gossip columnists were blind to the romance blossoming right in front of their quick, ferrety eyes. “Little was thought of their ‘going together,’” wrote one reporter, “until Hollywood suddenly became conscious that Judy Garland and David Rose, sitting there at a floor table at Ciro’s, had been occupying that same table off and on for three months! Judy must be in love!”

So she was, and a closer examination disclosed that Rose, in fact, did possess a few of the features of her previous crushes. Like most of them, he was at least a decade older than she was; like most of them, he made beautiful music—and a talent for music had always been a potent aphrodisiac for the women in the Gumm family. Rose also had one characteristic her other crushes had not had: he was thoroughly nice, and Judy was in need of a little niceness. She saw some of his kind consideration on the day of her great upset. After helping Whiting calm her down, Rose left, then returned with a big slab of his mother’s chocolate cake. “How did you know this was just what I needed!” she exclaimed.

More often than poets and songwriters like to acknowledge, love is the product of time and circumstance. A year earlier, and perhaps a year later, two such peculiarly matched people would probably have ignored each other. In 1940, time and circumstance merged, bringing them together at the exact moment in which they were feeling most vulnerable. Judy was in shock from the news about Artie Shaw; Rose was just emerging from a bad marriage to Martha Raye, the singer and comedienne. Unhappiness, and a bit more, they had in common, and after stopping and staring, they stayed together.

“In-Between Music” was the label Rose gave his compositions, which meant that they were neither classical nor popular, but somewhere in the middle. Like such contemporaries as Morton Gould and André Kostelanetz, he gave symphonic treatment to simple themes. Lush and romantic, his style favored strings over brass and winds: his best-known work is aptly titled “Holiday for Strings.” Though his music never appealed to purists, it was ideal for radio and the movies—and television, too, in later years. “The most appreciative listeners are always those who know nothing about music,” he said. “But they invariably know what they like.” And they obviously liked the music of David Rose, which, like its creator, was congenial and undemanding, if perhaps a bit bland.

Although he was wholeheartedly dedicated to his profession, Rose reserved his passion for his hobby—his own private railroad. “I got my first engine—a little stationary job—when I was seven years old,” he
said. “It was a birthday present, and I flipped over it. It’s been that way ever since.” Like his music, his trains were also in-between: they were too big to be called toys, but too small to pass as the real things. About one-eighth the size of the sleek streamliners that pulled in and out of Los Angeles’s Union Station, they were propelled by coal-burning steam engines and were thus powerful enough, as well as big enough, to carry Rose and his friends around the nearly eight hundred feet of track he had laid around his house in the San Fernando Valley.

So enamored was Rose of the huff-puff of the engine and the clickety-clack of train over track that for a long time he could not make up his mind whether he wanted to be a musician or a train engineer. In the end he decided he could be both—and both he was. After a frantic day at the radio studio, he would go home, put on his engineer’s cap and, happy as a boy on the first day of summer vacation, ride the rails, round and round, up and down, never going anywhere. “Dave Rose—Eccentric Genius, Odd Combination of Youth and ‘Old Man’” was one magazine’s short but accurate description of Judy’s new heartthrob.