Get Happy (39 page)

“Whenever I came to New York before,” said Judy, “I lived in a hotel—for two weeks perhaps—and rushed, rushed, rushed.” On this visit she was able to slow down and enjoy herself, to be a woman of leisure with money to spend and a maid, a cook and a devoted husband to look after her. Joining in Metro’s campaign to convince her to sign another contract, the usually dour Nick Schenck pasted a smile on his face and descended from his Times Square office to take her shopping at Tiffany’s. “Metro wants to buy you a wedding present, Judy. Pick out something you like.” Like a good girl, taught never to order the most expensive dish on the menu, Judy chose a simple gold brooch. “Nonsense!” thundered Schenck. “You must choose something much gayer.” “Much more expensive” was what he really meant, and after some hesitation Judy selected a bracelet of square diamonds and emeralds, with a pin to match. It was then the groom’s turn. After a similar good-mannered pause, Vincente pointed to a gold wristwatch, and that became his gift from Leo the Lion.

On their trip the previous year, Judy had met a few of Vincente’s friends. Now she met the rest, including his old companion, Lester Gaba, who joined them for dinner one night. Seeing the man he obviously still loved so firmly attached to someone else was an unsettling experience for Gaba. Recalling the evening years later, he was, indeed, so saddened that tears came to his eyes. “Vincente was the only big thing in his life, and Lester was crushed,” said Gaba’s friend James Loyd.

But Gaba was the only one unhappy with Vincente’s wife. Amazed at how quickly she won hearts, Vincente perceived that, without even trying very hard, Judy could simply will people into adoring her. “She’d been doing it all her life with far larger audiences. When all else failed—
the wit, the self-effacement, the warmth and the genuine concern for others—she fell back on her greatest weapon. How can you resist a woman when she shows you her vulnerability?” No one could. When the visitors from California strolled around the city, ordinary New Yorkers greeted her as if she actually were the girl next door. “Hi ya, Judy!” a truck driver might shout. “Howza kid?” Or, squinting as if she spied a friend she had not seen for years, a stooped old woman might ask, “Is that you, Judy?”

Denying a newspaper report that she and Vincente planned to adopt a child, Judy said that they hoped to have a baby of their own someday. “And another,” she added defiantly. “And another. Until we have a good-sized family.” That someday was to arrive sooner than anyone, including Judy, had anticipated. At the end of August, a week or so before they were to return to Los Angeles, she discovered she was pregnant—really pregnant this time. Phoning California, Judy said, “I’m going to have a baby, Mama.” Remembering how her mother had insisted on an abortion when she was married to David Rose, she then asked a question that should have given even the thick-skinned Ethel pause: “Do you mind?”

To Judy’s happy surprise, however, both Ethel and Metro professed delight with her news. Hoping to use her once more before her pregnancy began to show, the studio speeded up its timetable and rushed her into her next project, a biography of Jerome Kern titled
Till the Clouds Roll By
. The picture was not so much the story of Kern’s life—a woefully miscast Robert Walker played the composer—as it was an excuse for a parade of his glorious songs, which were sung by just about everybody on the Metro payroll who could carry a tune. With just three songs, Judy’s part was relatively small, and Metro, still seeking to smile her into a contract, assigned Vincente to direct her, leaving Richard Whorf, one of the studio’s traffic-cop directors, to handle everyone else. Beginning rehearsals on September 17, about two weeks after her return from New York, Judy went before the cameras in early October.

Clever cameramen and ingenious costume designers managed to disguise her increasingly delicate condition. But delicate it was, and
after one arduous scene Judy told Dorothy Ponedel that “if I have to do this again, I don’t think I can make it, because whoever is in my belly is going to come right through my navel.” Judy’s work ended on November 7—just in time. If filming had gone on much longer, no amount of camouflage could have hidden the fact that she was in the fifth month of her pregnancy; her baby was expected in March.

Liberated from a studio schedule, Judy was then free to prepare for a role she had long wanted, that of mother. Many newly marrieds start life in a new home. Judy and Vincente chose to stay put in his hilltop pink stucco at 8850 Evanview Drive, with its aviator’s views of Los Angeles. “I like it so much I didn’t want to go to a new place,” explained Judy. To make it big enough for three, they bought the vacant lots on either side and expanded, building a nursery for the baby and, for Judy, a huge bathroom and dressing room, which Vincente decorated with antique glass walls and a fur-covered chaise longue. Judy’s piano sat next to the bay window in the living room, which Vincente had painted dark green and furnished with black marble tables, white marble lamps and bright chintz couches.

Though she was no longer the naive teenager of her first marriage, Judy was still unable to manage servants—a cook, a housekeeper, a nurse and a chauffeur—leaving Vincente to impose what little discipline existed on Evanview Drive. A child of whim and short attention span, as Vincente described her, Judy sometimes ignored the servants to play housewife herself, scrubbing the kitchen floor one day, making chicken fricassee the next, baking a cake the day after that. Whatever she cooked was like an M-G-M production, requiring the dirtying of nearly every pot and pan on the shelves and a full crew to clean up. Vincente watched her attempts to play Betty Crocker with a mixture of amusement, resignation and dismay. His part of the household chores, he learned, was to write good reviews, passing out at least ten compliments for each dish she set in front of him. “Her desire for constant approval was pathological,” he sadly concluded.

Afraid that she would lose her baby, or that it would otherwise be harmed, Judy stayed off pills, steadfastly keeping the pledge she had made in New York. “I just don’t know how it’s ever going to work out,” she confessed to Dorothy Walsh. “I’m scared to death.” But the effort
exacted a price, and worry and strain, along, perhaps, with the pains of withdrawal, whirled her downward into depression. A couple of months before the birth was expected, Hedda Hopper decided to give her an unusual shower—men only, all the male stars, producers, directors and technicians Judy had worked with during her busy career. Although Hopper received an enthusiastic response—one guest was going to bring a miniature baby grand piano for the nursery—she was forced to cancel the party when Ethel phoned to say that the excitement would be too much for Judy. Writing Hopper a note of apology, Judy herself said that she would have been a dull guest of honor. “Forgive me, and after March I’ll be rarin’ to go. I’ll be my old self again.”

On the afternoon of Friday, March 8, 1946, she entered Cedars of Lebanon Hospital for a cesarean section, which was scheduled for the following Tuesday, March 12. That morning, at 7:58, she gave birth to a girl weighing six pounds, ten and a half ounces. Liza, she was named. When the pregnancy had been announced the previous summer, some at Metro, judging Vincente only by his effeminate mannerisms, had joked that it must have been the result of immaculate conception. But the tiny girl in the crib was not the product of a miracle. With dark hair, long lashes and brown eyes as big and inquisitive as a lemur’s, she was, clearly and unequivocally, Vincente’s child—“the most beautiful baby in the nursery,” he proudly proclaimed.

As soon as her baby was born, she would be raring to go, Judy had promised. But a month later she was still confined to her bed, the result of follow-up surgery to correct a problem caused by the cesarean and also of what seems to have been severe postpartum depression. While there was no reason for alarm, Louella Parsons wrote in her column, Judy had gone through “a really miserable time.” Two weeks later, at the end of April, Judy did get up—too soon, as it turned out. Collapsing on a sidewalk in Beverly Hills, she was carried into a music store, where she fainted again. Ordering her back to bed, her doctor instructed her to remain there until she was fully recovered. There were so many rumors about her circulating in the weeks that followed—“the impression was given that my health was being despaired of,” Judy
complained—that she gave an interview to the
Los Angeles Times
just to say that she was all right. “Actually,” she asserted, “I haven’t felt much better than now during my whole life.”

By July she was, in fact, well enough to sing on the radio and at a memorial in the Hollywood Bowl honoring Jerome Kern, who had died of a cerebral hemorrhage the previous November. By fall she seemed to have regained her strength, inviting the fan magazines to Evanview Drive to photograph her with her baby. “She really loves the water,” Judy assured one reporter who watched as she gave Liza her daily bath. “I expect she’ll be at least a champion swimmer.” But that aquatic exercise was mostly for show. Liza’s nurse usually handled such chores, and when the time finally came for the nurse to have a day off, Judy admitted to having stage fright, terrified and excited both at the prospect of spending her first day alone with her six-month-old.

For a whole year, since she had finished her part in
Till the Clouds Roll By
, Judy had not had to worry about the studio. Not since she was a baby herself had she been allowed the luxury of so much idleness. That undemanding existence was soon to end. In November she gave in to Metro’s pleas and signed a new five-year contract that would carry her all the way into the 1950s. The people in the Thalberg Building had been correct in thinking that marriage would confine her to California: how could she leave both husband and baby for the bright lights of Broadway? The studio was so eager to have her before the cameras again that it tore up her old contract, which had a year to run, and almost doubled her salary, boosting her from $3,000 a week to nearly $6,000, a sum comparable to the salaries paid other top Metro stars and more than double the $2,500 Vincente was making. “She’s always said M-G-M was home,” Parsons told her readers, “and when you get right down to it, there’s still no place like home, even to a movie star.”

M-G-M was indeed home. By the fall of 1946 Judy had worked there eleven years, nearly half her life. She had grown up inside its protective walls, and, like a princess of a reigning house, she had navigated the perilous passage through adolescence, broken love affairs and two marriages in full view of her colleagues. But if Metro had protected her
and often catered to her, it had also imprisoned her. Nick Schenck could have given her a hundred Tiffany bracelets—could have showered her with all the treasures in Ali Baba’s cave, for that matter—and it would not have made any difference: she would still be subjected to early morning calls, unrelenting pressures and what she thought were condescending attitudes. Inside those walls she would forever remain the ugly duckling, Mr. Mayer’s little hunchback. The damage to her ego had been done years before, and as long as she remained at M-G-M it was past curing.