Get Happy (40 page)

All that anger, so long festering, so long suppressed, burst out within weeks, perhaps even days, of the signing of her new contract. Almost immediately she regretted having agreed to it. With a few strokes of the pen, she seemed to believe, she had turned the key to her own prison cell. “The tension that had been building up in me against the studio suddenly seemed to have hit the boiling point” was how she herself described her emotions. “Every day when I went to work it was with tears in my eyes, resistance in my heart and mind. It gave me no pleasure.”

The inevitable explosion occurred when she started her next picture, a musical version of S. N. Behrman’s Broadway play
The Pirate
. A Technicolor romp along the old Spanish Main,
The Pirate
was a comedy of mistaken identities: a retired pirate, Mack the Black, who pretends to be a pillar of Caribbean society; a pretty girl, Manuela, who has fallen in love with the romantic Mack of legend, unaware that he is really the middle-aged bore her family has demanded she marry; and a conceited actor, Serafin, who makes believes he is Mack to win the girl’s love. Judy was to play Manuela; Gene Kelly was the actor who pretended to be Mack; and Walter Slezak, an excellent character actor, was the real Mack. Best of all, as far as Judy was concerned, was the director—Vincente, of course.
The Pirate
sounded like such fun, said Vincente, that she was “quite certain she’d fly through the filming.”

In fact, she could scarcely crawl through it. When she showed up for her first day of prerecording on December 27—songs were always recorded before shooting began, then lip-synched in front of the cameras—she was so frail and depressed that the recordings had to be junked. Partly because of her frequent absences, actual filming did not begin until well into 1947—February 17, to be exact. In all, Judy was to
be gone ninety-nine days out of the 135 in the rehearsal and shooting schedule. Three years earlier, it had been Al Jennings, the assistant director of
Meet Me in St. Louis
, who had been awakened in the middle of the night with the news that Judy would not be in the next day. Now it was the turn of Wallace Worsley,
The Pirate
’s assistant director. At least two or three times a week he would be jolted out of sleep to hear her say, “I don’t feel well—I won’t be able to come in.”

Forgotten was her pledge to stay off pills. Sometimes she appeared on the set in a barbiturate stupor. After keeping several hundred extras waiting for two hours, for instance, she arrived one morning in such a daze that she appeared to be sleepwalking, wandering aimlessly around the set until, twenty minutes later, she informed Vincente that she was going home. Other times amphetamines had the reverse effect, making her tense and occasionally even paranoid. Called upon to dance around open fires in one scene, Judy jumped across the stage in terror. “I’m going to burn to death!” she shouted. “They want me to burn to death!” Finally she was led away—crying, laughing, altogether hysterical.

She suffered a similar attack of paranoia the day Hedda Hopper visited the set. Shaking with fright, Judy declared that everyone who had once loved her had turned against her, claiming that Ethel had gone so far as to tap her telephone line. “She is doing everything in her power to destroy me,” Judy said of her mother. Once again she had to be taken away—actually carried out this time—still wearing her makeup and costume, then driven home to be put into bed.

The feeling of betrayal was further fueled by a very real cause for complaint, a developing collaboration between Vincente and Gene Kelly that pointedly excluded her. No longer the green newcomer he had been when he played opposite her in
For Me and My Gal
, Kelly was now a veteran full of ideas for the picture and, more important from Judy’s point of view, for the expansion of his role. Hurt at being left out of their chummy little club—they did not want to burden her, Vincente lamely explained—Judy accused them of having a lot of fun, but ignoring her. To retaliate against Vincente, the principal culprit in her eyes, she asked Kelly to help stage her numbers as well as his own—and to disregard Vincente while he was doing it. “How,” wondered a puzzled
Vincente, “had we come to this state of affairs where suddenly I could do nothing right in Judy’s eyes?”

Good directors and film editors have salvaged many weak performances with judicious cutting, and Judy’s may have been helped by such excisions. Dropped, never to reappear, were at least two numbers that fell short of her usual high standard. What helped her, however, was to hurt the picture. The loss of those numbers, combined with Kelly’s voracious scene-grabbing, threw the entire movie off balance; Manuela, who should have been at the center, became little more than a secondary character. Judy’s problems were reflected not in what was on the screen, but in what was missing.

Yet even if Judy had been Judy—the Judy of her earlier pictures—
The Pirate
would have been irretrievably flawed. With a few exceptions, Cole Porter’s songs lacked his trademark wit and brio, while Vincente’s direction veered dangerously toward the precious and exotic, allowing sumptuous sets and costumes to overshadow his story. Gorgeous to look at, the picture never quite comes together: it has frenetic movement, but no real energy.

It had no energy at the box office either.
The Pirate
was the only picture Judy was ever to make that failed to yield Metro a profit. “Vincente and I honestly believed we were being so dazzlingly brilliant and clever,” said Kelly, “that everybody would fall at our feet and swoon clean away in delight and ecstasy—as they kissed each of our toes in appreciation for this wondrous new musical we’d given them. Well, we were wrong.” They did not have to wait long to find out just how wrong. “Would have fallen asleep,” was the comment scrawled on one preview card, “were it not for all the noise produced on the screen.”

T
o Judy, Joe Mankiewicz observed, a man meant more than love and companionship: he was her guard and protector, her bulwark against a world ever eager to exploit her spectacular gifts. She had thought that Vincente, who had brought out her beauty in
Meet Me in St. Louis
, her acting ability in
The Clock
and her sly humor in
Ziegfeld Follies
, was such a man. Now, in the weeks following the signing of her new contract, her confidence in him evaporated, vanishing so swiftly that Vincente was left stunned, shaking his head in wonderment. Part of the reason may have been that she held him responsible for the contract, that document that destroyed her dreams of Broadway glory. And indirectly he was: had it not been for Vincente—and little Liza, too, of course—she would have been looking forward to the roar of applause rather than the jangle of an alarm clock, summoning her to a job she had grown to hate and fear. Things had become so bad, she told Dorothy Ponedel, that every time she entered the studio gates she felt like vomiting.

Until
The Pirate
, the Minnellis had seen only the benefits of
their professional partnership. In the winter of 1947, as Judy’s emotional problems worsened, they began to see the drawbacks. The abrupt reversal was probably harder on Vincente, who suddenly found himself torn between two allegiances, to his wife on the one hand, to his Metro career on the other. His wife was in trouble, but if
The Pirate
failed, his career might also be in jeopardy. After three successful pictures, he had already suffered a bad fall with a costly curiosity called
Yolanda and the Thief
. If he now stumbled a second time, with his very next picture, Metro might agree with some of his detractors, who thought his taste too rarefied and arty for a mass audience, and never again entrust him with a big production. How frustrating and dismaying it must have been, then, for Vincente to watch Judy’s erratic behavior and to realize that his future rested, as it had at the start of
Meet Me in St. Louis
, in her unsteady hands. “As director, I should have insisted on her fulfilling her assignment,” he said. “As concerned husband, I couldn’t. So I made excuses.”

Those were harrowing months for him, “agonizing times,” as he later recalled. Wallace Worsley could—and finally did—refuse to pick up the phone when Judy called after midnight with news of a migraine or stomachache that would keep her away from the cameras. Vincente did not have such a luxury. Her troubles were his as well. The first to see a storm approaching, he was also the last to see it leave. Morning to night, night to morning, his anxiety never lifted. At least twice, he and Judy were halfway to Culver City when she forced him to return home. Several times she arrived at the studio, worked for an hour or so, then asked for the studio doctor, complaining that she was not well.

If Vincente squirmed under his competing obligations, so did Judy. In her eyes, he was no longer a husband in whom she could confide, but the voice of a despised authority, the drill sergeant pounding on her dressing room door and rudely shouting: “Miss Garland, we’d like to have you on the set, please.” Vincente never used her first name in front of the cast and crew. Almost overnight he had been transformed from protector to persecutor; he was the man from Metro, a studio surrogate who shared her house and bed. On Evanview Drive she felt truly alone only when she closed the door to her dressing room and bath. Those
two rooms became her hideaway, a place where she could relax and lie quiet and undisturbed in the arms of her fur-covered chaise longue.

By those who possess it, privacy is taken for granted, like the air they breathe or the water they drink. But to Judy, who had never known it, it was a treasure denied. For as long as she could remember she had been under surveillance, first by her mother, then by Mayer and his operatives, and now by Vincente. Judy was not imagining the prying eyes that surrounded her: they were real, everywhere she looked, a whole tapestry of them—piercing, suspicious, accusing. Now, as her problems piled higher and higher, those eyes were joined by equally inquisitive ears. Hedda Hopper had assumed that Judy was having delusions when she said her mother was tapping her telephone. In fact, someone, though not Ethel, was indeed listening.

Kathryn Grayson, who was on the other end of some of those conversations, could have testified to that. Late at night, Judy would sometimes wake her, begging her to come and sit with her. Moved by the desperate tone in her voice, Grayson would say yes. But within minutes, before she could dress and leave her house, Grayson would receive a second call, this time from either Ida Koverman or Mayer’s henchman Benny Thau. “Kathryn, don’t go,” one or the other would sternly command. “Do Judy a favor and do yourself a favor. You have to get up at six o’clock and be at the studio at seven. You can’t stay over there until two or three or four o’clock in the morning. You can’t help Judy. The situation can only drag you down.” Following orders, Grayson obediently returned to bed.

Who was the spy? Who alerted Metro the minute Judy put down the phone? When Grayson inquired, she was politely told to mind her own business. There were, however, only two possibilities: either someone in Judy’s house, Vincente most likely, was eavesdropping; or Metro was monitoring Judy’s calls with a telephone tap. Taps were illegal, of course, but the studio that made it a practice to examine its stars’ personal telegrams, which was also against the law, would not have scrupled to tap their phones as well. In the Los Angeles of the thirties and
forties, M-G-M did exactly what it wanted. Was Metro spying? Or was Vincente? The answer remains a mystery, but the result does not: Metro knew almost every move Judy made, every word she uttered.

Caught between his rival loyalties, Vincente did what he frequently did in confusing and ambiguous situations: he tried to muddle through, doing his best to satisfy both sides. When Judy was unable to work, he shot around her. When she was able—and she had many good days—he shot as much as he could, as fast as he could. If such a resigned and passive course satisfied M-G-M, which eventually got its picture, it did nothing for Judy, whose condition seemed to deteriorate daily. With encouragement from Vincente, who often drove her to sessions, she returned to Dr. Simmel, her analyst from the Joe Mankiewicz days. Since Simmel did not treat patients outside his office, Louis B. Mayer, who not long before had derided Simmel and all other disciples of Freud as so many quacks, also hired a second analyst, Frederick Hacker, to keep her calm on the set. Simmel was still unable to do her much good, however, and Hacker, a smarmy young Viennese who loved to gossip about his famous patients, was not there to provide lasting help, but merely to prevent her from falling apart before the picture was completed.