Get Happy (33 page)

That was the opening Ethel had apparently been waiting for. “So!” she screamed. “My daughter’s crazy!” Up to that moment, Mayer had been giving another performance, Joe later decided, a performance designed more to mollify the mother of one of his biggest stars than to frighten Joe himself. But Ethel’s fury was infectious, and what had
begun as a demonstration quickly turned into the real thing, with Mayer, now furious himself, joining her almost hysterical attack. It was Joe who finally put an end to the uproar with the last witticism he was ever to make at M-G-M, a line to which even Mayer could not manage an answer. “Obviously, this studio isn’t big enough for both of us, Mr. Mayer. One of us has to go.”

Things had got out of hand, and the result—Joe’s departure to another studio—was not at all the one Mayer had intended. By the beginning of August, less than a week later, Joe had been released from his Metro contract and was working at 20th Century-Fox, which not only paid him more money, but also allowed him to fulfill his fondest ambition—to write and direct his own movies. Instead of being an avenging angel, visiting retribution on the man who had come between her and her daughter, Ethel had been an angel of deliverance, opening the door to a new, more rewarding career and a shelf heavy with Academy Awards.

Though Ethel’s meddling had cost Metro one of its boldest and brightest lights, it had gained Ethel herself nothing at all. Judy continued to see both Joe and her analyst, and neither her mother nor Mayer could think of a way to stop her. Conspiring together, the two of them had, in fact, only shown, far better than Joe could have done, how desperately she needed assistance to break their strangling grip. Lying on Simmel’s couch on those chilly California mornings, when the grass was soggy with dew and most of her friends were still climbing out of bed, Judy did not have to reach back to childhood to find examples of her mother’s manipulation; abetted by Mayer, Ethel provided them nearly every day, as regularly as the war bulletins that were broadcast on the radio.

The decision to begin therapy thus marked a critical juncture for Judy, a moment of ripe possibility. She knew she was not in control of her life, and she seemed determined to find out why. Besides seeing Simmel, she took Joe’s advice and read the psychoanalytic pioneers—Freud, Jung and Adler—as avidly as she had read Housman’s poems and Mildred Cram’s novella
Forever
during her romance with Tyrone.
She seemed to be striving as hard as she could, and Joe, who had sacrificed his job rather than see her quit analysis, had good cause for optimism. Everything, in short, seemed to be going right, yet something was wrong, so wrong that in the end her therapy could only be termed a failure, the hopes invested in it to be dismissed, as Joe was so aptly to phrase it, as the foolish fancies of an opium dream. When Judy was finally through with Freud and his disciples, she had benefited, as she was later to say, “not one bit.”

Unlike other branches of the medical arts, psychoanalysis is an intimate collaboration between doctor and patient, equal partners in a common pursuit. Properly tended, a wounded body mends by itself, without any exertion on the part of its owner. A wounded psyche, by contrast, heals only if the patient actively joins in the repair effort. Analysis will work its cure only if the patient is convinced it can work. Belief will not guarantee success, but disbelief will guarantee failure. Encapsulating those requirements in a phrase, Carl Jung said that nothing less than “perfect sincerity” is demanded from those entering psychoanalysis. One should never expect more from a patient, Freud himself cautioned, than lies within the patient’s native capacity.

Given the need for such a close and collegial relationship between doctor and patient, it is hard to imagine why Karl Menninger thought Judy and his friend Simmel would be a good match. The one was a bouncy product of the Swing Age, with a pronounced distrust of authority. The other was an elderly German with a thick and forbidding accent, a man whose dictatorial manner irritated even his colleagues. “The Obermacher”—the Supervisor—was the sarcastic title Herman Mankiewicz pinned on Simmel. It is likely—she herself indicated as much—that Judy viewed him just that way, not as a doctor trying to help her, but as another in the long line of those exercising control. In any event, she began defying him, as she so often defied her mother and her bosses at M-G-M, with small acts of rebellion, missing sessions and, in the sessions she did attend, inventing falsehoods about the problems that plagued her. A “big pack of lies” was how she described the accounts she gave him.

A lie told inside an analyst’s office is different from one told outside: it is a symptom of illness, not a transgression against the moral code. A more sympathetic analyst might therefore have regarded Judy’s big pack of lies as a clue to her underlying problems, as a key that could have opened many doors. Simmel responded to Judy’s bad behavior as her mother or Mayer might have done, however, with understandable but not very professional petulance. When her friend Betty O’Kelly telephoned to cancel one of Judy’s sessions, for instance—Judy was afraid to make the call herself—the exasperated Simmel took the phone from his secretary. “Will you tell Judy that I cannot help her if she does not keep appointments?” he said. He then added, in a frigid voice: “And I cannot help her if she continues to lie to me when she does keep appointments. Give her that message.”

Whether Judy would have reacted differently to a less rigid analyst—or whether psychoanalysis was, in fact, beyond her capacity for looking inward—is, of course, impossible to say. What can be said is that she could not work with an analyst as starchy and imposing as Simmel. “I could never ‘associate freely’ with him,” she confessed. “I was too self-conscious.” After a promising start, she seemed to lose faith in the entire process of analysis. “Imagine whipping out of bed,” she said, “dashing over to the doctor’s office, lying down on a torn leather couch, telling my troubles to an old man who couldn’t hear, who answered with an accent I couldn’t understand, and then dashing to Metro to make movie love to Mickey Rooney.” Why did she persist in a treatment that made her so unhappy? asked Jimmie. “Well, Joe thinks I ought to do it,” replied Judy.

It was probably a relief, then, for her to get away from such pain and pressures, leaving Los Angeles for much of the summer and fall of 1943 to enjoy a happy reunion with an old and always ardent admirer—the live audience. On June 28, she journeyed east for an outdoor concert in Philadelphia, where she performed before the largest number she had ever encountered, fifteen thousand jamming a space that was supposed to seat sixty-five hundred, with perhaps another fifteen thousand who
could not get in carpeting the surrounding slopes and dales. To have said that she was a hit would have been inaccurate, wrote one reviewer; “cyclonic is the only word to describe with any degree of adequacy the 21–year-old, red-headed film star’s success.” If the Liberty Bell had pealed “Over the Rainbow,” staid old Philadelphia could not have given her a lustier reception.

Similar hosannas were heard throughout July, as Judy followed her conquest of the City of Brotherly Love with an almost month-long tour of military bases in the East and Midwest. August she spent at home in California, but on September 4 the “amazing Judy,” as one Philadelphia critic had titled her, was on the road again, this time with something called the Hollywood Cavalcade, a train full of stars—from Fred Astaire and Greer Garson to Mickey Rooney and Betty Hutton—that crisscrossed the country pitching war bonds. Ten thousand miles the stars traveled together, entertaining an estimated seven million people and selling well over a billion dollars’ worth of bonds.

She could not stay away from home forever, however, and when the Cavalcade returned to Hollywood, twenty-three weary days later, Judy came face-to-face with some hard and unwelcome facts. Having completed her stay at the Menninger Clinic, Joe’s wife Rosa had come back from Kansas, and it was obvious that the story of Judy and Joe was rapidly approaching its conclusion. That was fine with Joe—romance with Judy brought him more trouble than he wanted—but Judy was not so complaisant. Having found the most wonderful man who had ever lived, she was unwilling to let him escape so easily, and sometime in the final few weeks of 1943, or perhaps the first few weeks of 1944, she announced to Joe what she had earlier announced to Tyrone: she was going to have his baby. Nothing else, Judy had learned, captures a man’s attention like the news that he is about to become a father.

To Tyrone, she may actually have been telling the truth. To Joe, she was either lying or fantasizing, and Joe knew it—knew it from the inappropriate times that she picked to talk about her pregnancy, knew it from the blank and noncommittal expressions on the faces of her sisters when she did. He also knew why she was inventing a story that would be so quickly discredited. “She didn’t feel I took her seriously enough,” he explained. Aware of all that, he was also aware, Freudian
that he was, that if he called her bluff, he would only further damage her already fragile ego. He had but one choice, he felt, and that was to pretend to believe her. “She herself had to tell me it wasn’t true,” he explained. “It was one of those things you have to play straight through.”

Even Judy realized that, this time around, there was not the smallest hope of marriage—Joe could not leave a woman who had just come out of a psychiatric clinic—and they agreed that she would have to have an abortion. Still playing it straight through, and then some, Joe joined her on a secret trip to New York, where the procedure was to be performed. To prevent word of their arrival from reaching the newspapers, Joe’s friend Mark Hanna, a Manhattan press agent, met their train at one of the last stops before Grand Central Station, then drove them to his own East Side apartment. There, unbeknownst to the gossip columnists, they stayed while Judy belatedly took a pregnancy test. To their feigned astonishment, the test came back negative. Judy was not pregnant after all; their trip had been for nothing. “A little happy, a little sad,” in Joe’s words, they boarded a train for the return to Los Angeles, leaving New York as silently as they had arrived.

Imaginary though it may have been, Judy’s pregnancy had achieved its purpose. It had made Joe take her seriously, seriously enough, in any event, to travel all the way across the continent and back on what he was certain was a fool’s errand. If that was not love, it was a close approximation. For Judy, their hush-hush trip east was also her last opportunity to have Joe all to herself, and when she looked back on the days they had spent together, locked in cozy train staterooms or in Mark Hanna’s Manhattan apartment, she surrounded them with a halo of rosy nostalgia, as she might have a honeymoon. For Joe, on the other hand, that peculiar journey signaled the beginning of the end. When they finally disembarked in California, he was resolved to gently lead his charming but troublesome dryad to the glade in which he had found her. “We didn’t break off our affair,” said Joe. “It just faded away. That was what was so wonderful about it.”