Get Happy (46 page)

After the debacle of
Annie Get Your Gun
, Nick Schenck and Dore Schary were ready to throw her to the wolves, Judy said, and so it seemed. Her pleas for reinstatement were rejected, and in the week or so that followed her suspension, it appeared that all her fears had been realized—that
Annie
, in fact, had put an end to her career. A defeated, “tragic little figure” was how Hedda Hopper described her during those desolate days, a Judy dressed for January, in a sweatshirt and windbreaker, in the middle of May—a Judy who looked middle-aged at twenty-six.

Rescue from that enveloping blizzard came, and none too soon, from an altogether unexpected source: Louis B. Mayer. A monster in so many ways, the old lion had a soft spot for the sick and distressed; he was, at heart, as sentimental as his movies. It was he who had paid the bills of Marie Dressler, that hatchet-faced comedienne of the thirties, when she was dying of cancer; and it was he who had insisted that Lionel Barrymore be given good roles even after arthritis confined him to a wheelchair. Now Mayer was concerned about Judy. “She is in a terribly bad way,” he told Katharine Hepburn. “She has made us millions of dollars. We should be able to help her.” But Mayer, who could obtain an answer to the most obscure question by simply picking up the phone, was stumped when it came to helping Judy. “What do you think should be done?” he finally asked Carleton Alsop. Alsop’s answer was perhaps too obvious to have occurred to anyone before. “Why don’t you,” he said, “get her away from all the sycophants and the doctors who give her these pills?”

It was a good idea—common sense, really—and Mayer quickly accepted it, recommending that Judy travel all the way across country to a Boston hospital he himself had visited earlier in the year. Going still further, he also suggested that she see his personal physician—a woman, at that—Jessie Marmorston. With Judy herself in full and
grateful agreement, the sole obstacle was money. Judy had none. She was, in her own words, “stony broke,” without the wherewithal to travel much beyond the county limits. Not knowing where else to turn, she put pride aside and requested a loan from the studio that had just suspended her. “By all means,” said Mayer. “That’s the least we can do for you, is to pay for your hospital bill.” But Schenck, whom he called for approval while Judy was still sitting in his office, was not so generous, sounding as much like Scrooge as Scrooge himself. “Mr. Schenck suggests that you go to a charity hospital, because we’re not in the money-lending business,” Mayer said after he put down the telephone.

In the end, however, Schenck did come through—Mayer had promised to pay her bills out of his own deep pockets if he refused—and on May 27, Judy, accompanied by her faithful companion, Carleton Alsop, boarded the Super Chief for Boston.

Unlike Las Campanas and Austen Riggs, Peter Bent Brigham, which she entered on May 29, the day she arrived, was not a psychiatric clinic, but an ordinary hospital. “There’s nothing the matter with my head,” Judy stoutly maintained. “It’s my body that’s tired.” She was at least half right, and after a series of tests, she was put on a regimen to restore her weight and energy: three big meals a day and lights out at nine o’clock, whether she was sleepy or not. She had to relearn how to eat and sleep, Judy’s doctors explained to her.

Free to come and go as she pleased, she relaxed for the first time since her honeymoon with Vincente, attending baseball games and enjoying luxurious weekends at the Hotel Ritz Carlton with the Alsops—Sylvia was playing in summer stock outside the city. Vincente called from time to time, and Frank Sinatra, with whom Judy, like so many of her friends, had had a brief romance, telephoned every day and visited once, keeping her hospital room filled with gifts—flowers, perfume, bed jackets and phonograph records, along with a machine on which to play them. In June, Judy went to New York to meet Liza, whose nurse had brought her all the way from Los Angeles to help celebrate her mother’s twenty-seventh birthday. After a few days in Manhattan, mother and daughter traveled north to Cape Cod for a lazy vacation by the ocean. But it was neither the days in New York nor the weeks on Cape Cod that Liza remembered; it was their farewell in Boston, that
tearful hour when Judy’s nurse gently pulled her one way, back to Peter Bent Brigham, and Liza’s nurse pulled her the other way, back to California.

At the beginning of her stay at Peter Bent Brigham, Judy had been sent to the children’s hospital next door for a brain test, an electroencephalogram. As word of her presence spread through the wards, the small patients, many of whom were retarded or brain-damaged, begged to see her. Happy to oblige, Judy patiently made the rounds on each floor, ending in the ward housing the youngest, the four-and five-year-olds. “Hello, Judy!” they yelled, unable to hide their excitement. Such a greeting, so spontaneous and sincere, was the very medicine she needed, and she returned every day thereafter. “If I was cured at Peter Bent Brigham, it was only because of those children,” Judy later declared. “They were so brave, so darling.” Like draws to like, deep to deep, and Judy was most drawn to a dark-haired girl with eyes so frightened that she turned her head away as Judy drew near. So badly had her family treated her that the girl had not spoken for two years. It was with her that Judy spent most of her time, not at all bothered that the girl never once broke her silence to respond to her stories of Liza,
The Wizard of Oz
, Clark Gable, Mickey Rooney and the Gumm family’s vaudeville act.

By the end of August Judy had recovered her weight and energy, and it was time to say good-bye. On her last day in Boston, she paid her final visit to the children’s hospital, where each of the patients, scrubbed and smiling, held a tiny bouquet of flowers in her honor. “Well, my friend, I’m going now,” she said to the girl who refused to speak, “and I want to thank you for all you’ve done for me. I’m going to miss you.” As Judy leaned over to kiss her, the girl reached out and clasped her as tightly as she could, and all the words she had not uttered for so many months poured out in a seemingly endless torrent. “Judy!” she screamed. “I love you! I love you! Don’t leave! Don’t leave!”

Watching that poignant drama, the rest of the ward was all but awash in tears: the nurses cried, the other children cried, Alsop cried and so, of course, did Judy. When Alsop warned her that they would miss their
train, Judy waved him away. “Well, we’ll just have to miss it,” she said. “I’m not going to leave this child right now while she’s talking.” And there she remained for the next two hours, listening to her little friend’s excited babble and bringing the nurses over, one by one, so that the girl would continue to speak even after Judy herself had returned to California. There had been other gratifying moments in her life, Judy later said, but nothing approached that one. “I didn’t give a goddamn how many pictures I’d been fired from. I had done a human being some good. She had helped to make me well, and I had helped her.”

Released at the end of June,
In the Good Old Summertime
had once more demonstrated Judy’s appeal at the box office, and she soon began hearing friendlier sounds from Culver City: Metro wanted her to do another movie. Judy was eager to resume work—the catastrophe of
Annie Get Your Gun
had clearly frightened her—and she interrupted her eastern idyll for two weeks of story consultations at the studio. She dutifully returned to Boston to complete her treatment, however, and when she came back to California in early September, she was feeling better than she had in months, perhaps years. Peter Bent Brigham seemed to have succeeded where the psychiatric clinics had failed. “I’ll never work or worry so hard again,” she vowed. “It’s too wonderful to feel good.”

Since one of Arthur Freed’s pet projects, a high-gloss remake of
Show Boat
, that greatest of all American musicals, would not be ready for another year, she was rushed instead into
Summer Stock
, another of Joe Pasternak’s congenial confections. Judy was to play a Connecticut farmer who loans her barn to a troupe of actors, then steps in to save their show when the star, her spoiled younger sister, walks out. As he had done with
In the Good Old Summertime
, Pasternak assembled a cast and crew Judy knew and liked—Gene Kelly, Phil Silvers, Eddie Bracken, Marjorie Main and Gloria DeHaven. Chuck Walters was to direct, and Al Jennings, the patient recipient of so many late-night phone calls on previous pictures, was to be his assistant director. Louis B. Mayer himself came down to the production office to ensure that the right attitude prevailed. “We’re going to bring Judy back,” he said,
“and I want everybody on the set to cheer her on and make her feel happy.” Informed that Jennings knew her best, Mayer fixed him with his owlish gaze and said: “Then you be the head cheerleader.”

There was only one problem. In one respect, Peter Bent Brigham had done its job too well. Those three big meals a day had restored the weight Judy had lost and then some—a lot, in fact. Thin and frail when she had left Los Angeles in May, she was plump and robust when she came home three months later, too heavy, by fifteen pounds or more, for a woman who was supposed to excite Gene Kelly more than the slim and pretty Gloria DeHaven.

She had not been so overweight since she was in her early teens, and the studio did what it had done then: it ordered her to lose the pounds. “Excess Baggage Banned,” read the headline in the
Los Angeles Times
. A crash diet followed, and the old illnesses and frenetic pill-popping followed that. “The less I ate, the more nervous I became. Then the migraines started to come back, and then no sleep. It was like a bad dream that I thought I had put away. I was in the trap again.” And so was Metro. Even as rehearsals began, the betting around the lot was two-to-one that
Summer Stock
would never be completed.

Judy seemed determined to prove the doubters right, calling in sick so frequently that Kelly organized basketball games in the main rehearsal hall to maintain morale. “Please, just knock on wood,” Chuck Walters would say when she did appear. “She’s here.” Even then, she often ignored scheduled calls, however, and Jennings and others had to coax or fool her into performing. For a barnyard scene, for instance, the company traveled to the San Fernando Valley, only to find Judy so sick when it came time to shoot that she had to be helped to the car that was to drive her home. Hiding his dismay, Jennings nonetheless persuaded her to stay a few more seconds, long enough to hear her playback, the song she had recorded weeks earlier and had been brought to the Valley to lip-synch for the cameras.

“Gee, that’s great!” Judy said when she heard her own voice, lush and vibrant, booming across the yard.

“Why don’t you climb onto the tractor and rehearse it for a minute?” suggested the wily Jennings. She did as he requested, and just as he had anticipated, she soon forgot how sick she had been, not only remaining to finish the shot but even comforting him when a technical glitch forced her to do it again. “Don’t worry,” she earnestly assured him. “We’ll get it.”

Sometimes she really was ill or incapable, so drugged and unsteady that she had to depend on supports to keep herself upright. Most frightening were her episodes of hallucination, first noticed on the set of
The Pirate
. “What am I doing here?” she inquired in the middle of one
Summer Stock
scene, suddenly looking around in bewilderment. “Why doesn’t Vincente take me home?” At another point she believed that everyone on the production was standing around her, pointing disapproving fingers in her direction. “Everybody is against me here!” she wailed to Sydney Guilaroff, Metro’s chief hairdresser. “I know they’re trying to get rid of me. Nobody cares about me! Nobody!”