Get Happy (32 page)

But if Joe was much like the men she had loved before—except better—Judy was nothing at all like the beautiful and worldly women who had attracted Joe. To him, she was instead an unspoiled creature of nature, like a wood nymph, a wide-eyed dryad he had surprised in some still, fern-shrouded glade, where she was hiding from prying eyes and grasping hands. “She had a fresh kind of a foresty look, as though there were dew on her,” he said. Other, more sophisticated women his X-ray vision could see right through; but he could stare all day at Judy and fail to penetrate her mystery. She was the one woman he could not explain, and that sense of continuing complexity made her all the more interesting: she was a challenge without end. “You can write down everything Lana Turner ever thought and felt and meant, and then put the pencil down,” he said. “That’s it, a closed book. But I don’t think anybody’s going to close the book on Judy Garland.”

Still, Joe did not harbor the same kind of love for Judy, tantalizingly mysterious though she was, that Judy harbored for him. Though she liked to say, and may even have believed, that he would have married her if he had been free—which, with a wife in a psychiatric hospital and with two infant sons to take care of, he definitely was not—marriage was not even a remote possibility. It was, in fact, never even mentioned; nor, as Joe recalled it, did it ever enter his mind. “I wasn’t in love that way,” he said. “I was in love—and I know this is a terrible analogy—the way you love an animal, a pet.”

Although Judy would have been crushed by the comparison, it was not quite as terrible as it may sound. The love lavished on an animal can
be as genuine as any other and, within its limits, no less intense. Indeed, Freud himself, no mean expert on such matters, spoke of his own pet, his beloved chow Jo-Fi, more affectionately than most men do of their wives. “She is a charming creature,” he said, “so interesting, also as a female, wild, instinctive, tender, intelligent.” Very similar was Joe’s love for the wild, instinctive, tender and intelligent Judy. He may not have wanted to marry her, but he did want to see her safe and happy, protected—even if it meant jeopardizing his own flourishing career—from all those at Metro who sought to exploit her.

Yet for all his psychologizing, Joe seemed unaware that, in a curious sense, he, too, was seeking to exploit her; not for money, but for something so fundamental to his own personality that he probably would have been the last to recognize it. He hungered, this man who knew everything about women, to play Pygmalion; he had an incurable compulsion to take what nature had generously provided and to make it better, or what he imagined to be better. He had done it before, and he was to do it again; but in all his experience he was never to find another woman so packed with talent yet so eager to do his bidding as the just-come-of-age Judy Garland. He longed to mold her, and she longed to be molded. More than anything else in the world, she wanted to be his Galatea.

Most of her colleagues would have said that Judy had already reached the peak of her profession. But Joe was convinced that she could climb still higher, higher than anyone at M-G-M knew or could conceive—she could be a great actress. “To M-G-M, Judy was just a piece of equipment,” he said, “a money-making device. I found myself fascinated by her, by the possibilities of a girl who obviously could act,
really
act, but who was very rarely called upon to do so.” As he watched her movies, he saw a gift of fabulous promise being almost thrown away. Judy romping through a piece of fluff like
Girl Crazy!
Masquerading as a stagestruck teenager in a silly soap opera like
Presenting Lily Mars
! It was as if Sarah Bernhardt were reduced to playing radio’s Ma Perkins, or Nellie Melba were forced to sing snappy little tunes for cigarette commercials. It was, to Joe’s way of thinking, intolerable, if not, alas, inconceivable.

His concern did not end there, however. Disgusted by the abuse of her abilities, he was incensed by the abuse of Judy herself. With her mother looking over one shoulder, Mayer looking over the other, she was, he felt, being denied the right to be herself, being robbed of her youth as she had been robbed of her childhood. “I thought she was getting very short shrift from life!” he said indignantly. As she reached her maturity, it was time, Joe believed, for her to make her own decisions and to discover, before it was too late, her own precious identity. Who was Judy Garland? She did not know, and the answer to that question, Joe was convinced, could come only through psychoanalysis: she needed some time on the couch.

For Joe, psychoanalysis was not merely a therapy for disturbed minds; it was a religion, and no Catholic, going to mass every morning and saying fifty Hail Marys every night, could have been more devout. He himself was seeing an analyst; he had dispatched his wife, Rosa, to the Menninger Clinic in Kansas; and when their time came, he was to send his sons to analysts as well. “I was a nut about the potential value of psychotherapy and the study of the human psyche,” he later admitted. Like any true believer, he probably exaggerated his faith’s benefits, but Joe was nonetheless right, absolutely right, in urging psychotherapy on Judy. It did not require Sigmund Freud, or Joe Mankiewicz either, to conclude that there was something amiss with a pretty young woman who peered into the mirror and saw nothing but ugliness, a performer of almost supernal gifts who doubted that she possessed any talent at all. Even Judy knew she needed help. “I wasn’t too bright,” she was to say, “but I knew something was radically wrong.”

Joe probably advanced the idea of psychoanalysis to her as early as 1942, even before their affair began, and it was also then, most likely, that he introduced her to the eminent Dr. Karl Menninger, who was visiting from Kansas. After one session, Menninger proposed she spend several months, perhaps as long as a year, at his celebrated center in Topeka. Although she was beginning to have emotional difficulties, Menninger told her, they could probably be resolved through psychotherapy.
“Just come back and work and see where all these things started,” he said. “If you see what goes on inside yourself, I think you’ll have no problems that you can’t handle.” Since so long an absence from M-G-M was unrealistic, Judy did the next best thing: at Menninger’s recommendation, she began seeing Ernst Simmel, the dean of Southern California analysts and a confidant of Freud himself.

Unlike many of his colleagues in Southern California, the worst of whom were quacks and charlatans, the best of whom were often name-droppers and glory seekers, Simmel was a serious therapist with unassailable credentials. A onetime president of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society, he had been one of the founders of a psychoanalytic sanitarium, the renowned Schloss Tegel, that was, in many ways, a model for Menninger’s own clinic. Fleeing the Nazis in the mid-thirties, he soon became one of the most respected practitioners in Los Angeles, analyzing so many famous patients from the movie industry that one of them, Joe’s brother, Herman, joked that, like the members of a football team, they all ought to wear sweatshirts emblazoned with the letter “S.”

At the outset, anyway, Judy took analysis more seriously, sacrificing her sleep for an hour’s session each morning before she went to the studio. What she said in those early morning meetings can never be known, but if her elderly Herr Doktor was doing his job properly—and his background suggests that he was—he was at the very least shining a light on her past, helping her see both herself and her problems with newfound clarity.

If such an examination is painful for the patient, it is sometimes just as painful for the patient’s parents, who are also put under close scrutiny. As Judy’s therapy progressed, Ethel, in any case, began noticing a change in her attitude, a disquieting hint of self-assertion. Judy had disobeyed her before, certainly, but that had been the disobedience of a child; she had never questioned her mother’s ultimate authority. Now she did so, and Ethel, increasingly alarmed, summarily demanded that she stop seeing Simmel, and Joe along with him. Judy’s response was what her mother had most feared—a declaration of independence. “I’ll live my own life,” Judy told her. “I will do what I want to do. I’m not a child. I’ve been married. You have to stop treating me like a little kid.”

It was rebellion, a threat to her mother’s own position, and an angry Ethel drove to M-G-M to alert the one man she thought could put it down, complaining to Mayer about psychoanalysis in general and Simmel and Joe in particular. Disliking independence in his employees and distrustful of analysis, as many people were in those days, Mayer concurred on every point. “Mr. Mayer and I agreed that Judy shouldn’t be going to the analyst,” Ethel triumphantly informed Jimmie. But what good was an agreement that left out the person who had to keep it? There was only one voice Judy would listen to, and that belonged to Joe, the source of all the trouble. Joe would have to be confronted, and the only question was how Mayer would deal with a man who was just as strong-willed, just as stubborn and just as determined as he was.

The inevitable showdown came not in Mayer’s vast white-on-white office in Culver City, but in a compartment on the Santa Fe line’s luxurious Super Chief, speeding west in the early summer of 1943. Joe, who had been visiting his wife at the Menninger Clinic, had boarded the train in Kansas City sometime after midnight. Already aboard, by unhappy coincidence, was Mayer, on his way home after a trip to New York. Since the sleek and supremely comfortable Super Chief—“a grand hotel on wheels,” the railroad liked to boast—was Hollywood’s favorite conveyance, Joe should not have been too shocked when Mayer’s traveling companion, the loyal Howard Strickling, knocked on his door the following day. Mr. Mayer had heard he was aboard, Strick-ling said, and wanted Joe to come to his compartment.

Gone were the days when Mayer patted him on the back and called him Harvard College—Joe had embarrassed him with one witticism too many. Now, wasting little time on small talk, Mayer got right to the issue: how dare Joe carry on with Judy, a woman thirteen years his junior? Thus began a bizarre onslaught, a seemingly endless stream of ancient platitudes and newer bromides of Mayer’s own concoction. “He talked to me about God and motherhood and wifehood and parenthood and the studio,” recalled Joe. “How when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. How a fish starts to stink from the head. How you have a responsibility to your wife and when you are not with
her, you must live like a monk. But what he was really saying was, ‘You mustn’t mess with our property.’”

Though it sounded extemporaneous, Mayer’s colorful rant was, in fact, a practiced and polished performance. It was his peculiar but usually effective method of disciplining an errant employee, and it finished, as such performances usually did, on a conciliatory note. “You understand that I’m talking to you strictly as the head of a studio,” Mayer concluded, a remark so sanctimonious and insincere that Joe, who had listened in amazed silence, finally spoke up. “No, you’re not, Mr. Mayer. You’re talking like a jealous old man.” Had Joe struck him, Mayer could not have been more outraged. “Get him out of here!” he shouted to Strickling, and Joe retreated down the gently swaying corridor to his own compartment.

If it not been for the relentless Ethel, the matter might have been left there. Not only was Joe protected by a contract, but Mayer was also too shrewd an executive to dismiss one of his most important producers because of a few heated words. Ethel did not give up, however, and two or three weeks later, back in Culver City, Joe once again received a summons. Waiting for him in Mayer’s office, besides Mayer himself, were Eddie Mannix, who often appeared when trouble loomed, and an unsmiling Ethel. Not bothering to rise from his desk, Mayer launched into a new diatribe even as Joe was walking through the door.

“All right,” he said. “I told you on the train—stop filling this girl’s head with all sorts of talk about psychiatrists. Are you her father? What’s your relationship to her that you’re telling her how to live her life? Don’t you think her mother knows a little bit about these things?” This time Joe, having seen the show once before, did respond, trying to inject some reason into the discourse and pleading with Mayer to give both Simmel and psychoanalysis a chance. “You’ve never met him, Mr. Mayer. You don’t know what he thinks about Judy. This girl needs help.”