Get Happy (53 page)

With the inquisitive tools of modern electronics, scientists can now trace the path sound takes on its journey from the ear to the brain. Received by receptors called hair cells, it proceeds to the snail-shaped cochlea. From there it goes to the cochlear nerve, then on to the temporal lobe, on again to the auditory cortex—then finally to its ultimate destination in the frontal lobe, that part of the brain that lies behind the forehead. Like passengers in an airliner, who can see lights being turned on in the dark cities below, researchers can peer through flesh and bone to watch a sound switching on the brain’s biological circuits. What happens next, what the brain makes of that sound, science cannot say, however, and no one knows—probably no one will ever know—why one sound is considered an unpleasant noise while another produces a sensation of melting, exquisite joy.

“A dominant aspect of human biology”: that is how one eminent doctor, Lewis Thomas, characterized music, and although its influence cannot be measured, as most other aspects of biology can be, music does have strange and uncanny powers. Very often, indeed, it is the sole key to otherwise impenetrable areas of the brain, to remote regions that remain detached from the centers of thought and reason. Buried deep inside the brain’s tender folds and crevasses, those areas, an inheritance from primitive ancestors, respond to a song or a bar of music long after the reasoning centers have surrendered to internal catastrophes. Stroke victims who have lost the ability to speak can yet sometimes sing; Alzheimer’s patients who must wear tags to remind them of their names can yet remember complicated lyrics from once-popular standards.

If music works such wonders on the ill, is it any surprise that it also has extraordinary effects on the well? Or that, more than any other stimulus, it awakens sleeping memories? A childhood outing, a first kiss, a wedding, a funeral: all flitting souvenirs, perhaps, as elusive as fireflies until a snatch of music captures and returns them to their owner. The beat of the heart. The act of breathing. The movement of
the legs in walking. Each has its own rhythm, and each is part of that larger musical instrument, the human body. When the rhythms are off, illness enters; when they stop, so does life itself.

In an attempt to restore sick bodies to their rightful rhythms, the physicians of the pharaohs, it is said, sang, rather than recited, their prescriptions, for words without music, they believed, lacked the capacity to heal. How good their remedies were for bringing down fevers and mending broken bones is hard to say, but that they were on to something, those Egyptian sawbones, could clearly be seen on the faces of those leaving Judy’s performances at the Palace. As they walked through the lobby, they displayed not merely smiles of happiness, the customary reactions after a good show, but the ecstasy of deliverance. They had not attended a concert; they had participated in an incantation, a rite more ancient than the pyramids themselves. Her altar may have been a stage on Times Square, with the subway rumbling underneath and taxis honking outside, but Judy had more than a little in common with those shamans of old Nile, chanting their cures in the crouching shadow of the newborn sphinx. She was not singing songs: she was dispensing spiritual health and enlightenment, sustenance for the soul. And therein lay the magic.

If New York was the terrible, wonderful test for Judy, then Hollywood, where she took her show next, would be a trial, like performing in front of a skeptical family that, in recent years, had witnessed only her humiliations. But this time Metro would not be around to pick her up. She would be all by herself, on the stage of Los Angeles’s cavernous Philharmonic Auditorium, half again as big as the Palace, with nothing but air between her and the audience. “I’m nervous all right,” she confessed as she waited for the big night—Monday, April 21. “I always am for an opening. But it’s not the kind of nervousness that makes you sick. It’s a kind of joyous nervousness.”

All of Southern California seemed to share that pleasurable anxiety. Hundreds waited for the box office to open—twenty-five hundred tickets were sold within an hour—and nearly everyone she knew, from Lana Turner and Joan Crawford to Arthur Freed and Louis B. Mayer,
was planning to attend her first night. Most of Los Angeles and Pasadena society, that WASP-y elite that rarely mingled with the vulgar movie folk, was also coming, together with a passel of swells from out of state—Henry Ford II had ordered a plane to fly him and his friends from Detroit. The Garland show was fast shaping up as a curious combination of Hollywood premiere and social event, and the local newspapers dispatched their society editors, along with their critics and feature writers, to cover what one of them was to call “one of the most heterogeneous and interesting audiences we have ever seen in Los Angeles.”

Bolstered by her successes in London and New York, and with Sid at her side, the newly confident Judy was up to the challenge. The outcome of the evening was thus never really in doubt, and even Arthur Freed, who was not renowned for his tender heart, was observed to blubber when she dangled her feet over the stage and launched into “Over the Rainbow.” The following day’s front pages told the rest of the story. “‘Rainbow’ Girl Finds Pot o’ Gold,” declared the headline in the
Herald & Express
. “Judy Garland Scintillates in Philharmonic Comeback,” said the more sedate
Times
. But the
Hollywood Citizen-News
put it best, as well as most succinctly—“Judy Returns In Triumph.” Could any four words have sounded sweeter to a woman, who, just eighteen months earlier, had been pronounced dead by those very same papers?

Four weeks Judy played to sold-out houses at the Philharmonic; then, on May 26, she moved north for four more weeks at the Curran Theater in San Francisco. So well had she done on both coasts that plans were afoot to take her show to other parts of the country as well, starting with Chicago in September. But those schemes had to yield to a higher plan. Judy was pregnant—she probably had been since February or March—and she would soon have to give up her strenuous routine. Although she had made no secret that she expected to marry Sid, she had probably not anticipated that the wedding date would arrive so swiftly. Yet there it was and on Sunday, June 8, midway through her San Francisco engagement and just two days shy of her thirtieth birthday, Judy and Sid drove a hundred miles south, to the small town of Paicines, where they promised to love and cherish each other at the
ranch of one of Sid’s friends. “It was,” said the bride, “a beautiful wedding and a beautiful day.”

That was a distinctly minority opinion, however, and not many in Hollywood saw much to admire in the union. “If Judy had a dollar for every friend who’s whispered in her ear that Sid was a far-from-ideal matrimonial bet, she’d have a hefty bankroll to show,” said one fan magazine. A columnist was openly disdainful. “So Sid Luft,” was his sarcastic wedding present, “is what a girl finds over the rainbow?”

Judy, in fact, did not need anybody to whisper in her year. During the nearly two years they had been together she had seen firsthand why so many people distrusted Sid. The first disquieting sign probably came in London, where Sid, who had assumed control of her finances, managed to find his way to the best tailors and shoemakers on Savile Row, yet scrimped on the paychecks of the faithful little entourage that had accompanied Judy from America—Buddy Pepper, Myrtle Tully and Dorothy Ponedel. Not even given the wherewithal to eat, poor Pepper was reduced to scrounging meals from Tully and Ponedel, who were at least allowed to order from hotel room service. Angry and puzzled both, Ponedel finally confronted Judy and demanded to know what was happening to the piles of cash the Palladium was dumping in her lap every week. “All my money is tied up in an attaché case,” replied Judy, “and that is tied to Sid’s wrist.” And that was where it remained, in London, New York and Los Angeles. With Sid writing the checks, Judy soon gained an unenviable reputation for shortchanging many of those who worked for her.

A second disturbing sign came on October 1, 1951, a few days before Judy left California for her opening at the Palace. Driving home after a late dinner at a restaurant called the Ready Room, Sid ignored a stoplight at the intersection of La Cienega and Beverly Boulevards and slammed broadside into one car, which then careered into another. “I had a beer—well, maybe three,” admitted Sid. “I can feel it, but I’m not drunk.” Although there was only one slight injury, a dispute erupted in which Judy smacked one of the other drivers, a seventeen-year-old, and broke his glasses. When a passing dentist volunteered that he had seen
the collision and that Sid was at fault, an indignant Sid popped him too, breaking his nose, as well as his glasses.

Two hours later, at 3:15
A.M.
, Sid was booked on four counts—drunkenness, drunken driving, driving without a valid license and carrying a concealed weapon—and shoved into a jail cell until his lawyer arrived with bail money. It is hard to say who was more befuddled that night, Sid or the dim-witted cops who did not even think of searching his car until he asked whether anybody had seen his gun. The dutiful gumshoes then peered under the front seat of his car and discovered a loaded .38-caliber revolver—one of two, it transpired, that had been reported stolen from Douglas Aircraft during the period of Sid’s employment. Most of the charges were eventually dismissed, and Sid was let off with a $150 fine for drunken driving.

Still more ammunition against him was provided by Lynn Bari, who, early on, took Judy aside and presented a list of an ex-wife’s complaints. Judy did not listen, of course. “You’re bitter,” she said, “so you see everything in a distorted light. He’s a wonderful guy. I’ve grown to understand him better than anyone ever has.” Such condescending comments could only have made Bari more hostile, and when she read, months later, about Judy’s sellout crowds, she took Sid to court, claiming that, as a participant in Judy’s profits, he could now afford to pay more for the support of their three-year-old son, John. In 1951, her lawyers pointed out, Sid had spent almost twice as much—$4,329.25, to be exact—on his three racehorses as he had on his own son. Asked how much he received as her manager, Judy, who testified for half an hour, looked hopelessly blank. Sid handled her finances, she said simply, and he could “draw anything he needs.”

Quickly pouncing on this vague statement, Bari’s lawyer, S. S. Hahn, denounced Sid as a Machiavelli who was able to make Judy do whatever he wanted. “I’m sorry to say that all the money Judy makes goes into Luft’s pocket,” he said. Apparently persuaded, Superior Court Judge Louis H. Burke ordered Sid to double his support payments, to $400 a month. The judge also let it be known that his opinion of Sid was not much higher than Hahn’s. Sid had been a very uncooperative witness, said Burke, and his testimony had been “nowhere near the truth.”

Whether Sid was right, wrong or somewhere in between was a question of no concern to Judy, who knew at least one thing to be true: he had restored her to life, something no one else had been able to do. Without him, she might never have finished her British tour. Without him, she would never have played the Palace, or the Philharmonic, or the Curran. Without him, she might already have become one of Hollywood’s has-beens. “None of this would have been possible without Sid,” she said. “He and I have accomplished so much in the last year. He’s the kind of person you can lean against if you fall down. He’s strong and protects me.”