Get Happy (62 page)

Responding to a request from the Kennedy campaign, Judy also found time to sing for American troops stationed in West Germany. She traveled to Wiesbaden at the end of October, a few days before absentee ballots were to be sent home. It was thus with special pride that, two weeks later, she celebrated Kennedy’s victory at an election-night party in London’s Savoy Hotel. The next day she telephoned the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, where Kennedy had gone to hear the returns. “Greetings, Mr. President,” said Judy. “Hello, Madame Ambassador,” replied Kennedy.

For ten years Sid had been Judy’s lover and manager, roles so intertwined that it was impossible to separate one from the other. Now he wanted to strike deals of his own, and he thought he had a sure moneymaker, a novel system that would give airline passengers a selection of music at their seats. Sid could not make the rounds of the airlines and manage Judy, too, however, and at the end of 1960 he convinced her to accept a replacement: Freddie Fields, who had just left the Music Corporation of America, the Goliath of talent agencies, to start his own
company. For a 10 percent fee, Fields would oversee a performer’s entire career, becoming manager, mentor and guide—everything but mother and father. With Fields in charge, an entertainer would be free to do nothing but entertain.

To such a lofty ambition Judy held the key. Though he had never wanted to have more than a dozen clients—a select dozen, of course—Fields had thus far been able to recruit only two, Phil Silvers and his own wife, the singer Polly Bergen. Acquiring Judy would give his struggling company the credibility it was so clearly missing. At Sid’s behest, Fields flew to London to make his pitch, and in December, Judy designated Fields her “sole and exclusive Manager.” What Judy almost certainly did not know was that Sid was also to receive a fee. In exchange for handing Fields his biggest client, Sid was later to say, Fields promised to give him a thousand dollars for “each single television show or theatrical performance” in which Judy appeared, plus another half a million dollars for such things as Judy’s musical arrangements and lighting charts. Sid may have relinquished his role as her manager, but he did not want to give up his share of her profits.

Though Sid’s motives were not altogether pure, his choice of Fields was sound, and as much as Fields needed her, Judy needed him, or someone like him. The truth was that, under Sid’s haphazard direction, her career had wandered aimlessly since the mid-fifties. Despite two Hollywood marriages, Sid had never grasped a simple but crucial axiom: a show-business career has to have a shape and a purpose. An entertainer who merely follows the dollar signs, as Judy had been doing, may do well for a few years, but is likely, in the end, to wind up broke and unremembered.

Fields claimed a broader vision. He was not a job hunter, he declared years later, but an opportunity seeker, a man who had a plan. His plan for Judy had the logic of necessity: he was going to show the world that the unreliable Judy of the bad old days had vanished and that a new Judy—a “completely revitalized” Judy, as Fields called her—had taken her place. He proposed to work her so hard that, by the end of 1961, even the most cynical skeptics would be bidding for her talents.

Returning to the United States, clutching his passport to the future—Judy’s signed contract—Fields wasted no time in making good
on his promise. By the second week in January he was able to present her with the beginnings of a new career: a wide-ranging concert tour; a small but key role in one of the most prestigious movies of the year, Stanley Kramer’s
Judgment at Nuremberg;
and CBS’s agreement to a new Garland spectacular. “With Freddie, something clicked,” said Judy. “He seemed to know how to do exactly what I could not do: channel my work.”

To hold her hand—she still required constant attention—Fields took in a partner, another high-powered defector from MCA. Even smoother and more charming than Fields himself, David Begelman also delighted her, and Judy was heard to sob with happiness, thrilled at having discovered her saviors at last. “You two are the luckiest thing that ever happened to me,” she cried. “Leopold and Loeb,” she nicknamed them, an affectionate if somewhat ambiguous reference to the teenage geniuses who had murdered a Chicago neighbor just to prove that they were smart enough to get away with it. Not yet forty, Fields and Begelman were also young, smart and, beneath their well-tailored suits, ferocious—just the agents Judy wanted.

The only one who was not pleased with their cozy relationship was Sid, who had issued the invitation, then found himself excluded from his own party. She no longer wanted Sid involved in her professional life, Judy told Fields. Excluded, too, was any prospect that Sid would continue to receive a share of her profits. If there had ever been a gentlemen’s agreement regarding Sid’s fee, Fields chose to ignore it. Instead of the huge sums he had expected from Fields, all Sid ever got for his gift of Judy was a measly thousand dollars.

Nineteen sixty-one, Judy was to say, was the best year of her life—the year in which everything finally went right. “Completely revitalized,” Freddie Fields had called her, and as she began her concert tour in January, it was clear that whether he had known it or not, Fields had been telling the truth. The first critic to note the alteration was in Texas, one of her earliest stops, where the reviewer for the Dallas
Times Herald
wrote that though she had been fine in 1957, on her previous visit to the Big D, she was now a wonder, displaying a hundred times more
fire, warmth and greatness. In Houston, where she appeared two days later, on February 23, the response was perhaps even more enthusiastic.

Elated by such shouts of approval, Judy stopped singing only long enough—for two weeks in March—to make her first picture in six years. A movie with a mission,
Judgment at Nuremberg
attempted to explain the seemingly unexplainable: how decent Germans could have been seduced by the dogmas of Nazism. To do that, screenwriter Abby Mann had chosen to focus not on the first and most celebrated Nuremberg trial, in which Hitler’s top henchmen were prosecuted, but on a later round in which German judges were put into the dock.

To play his leads, Stanley Kramer, who produced as well as directed, had brought together a formidable cast: Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, Richard Widmark and Maximilian Schell. For two lesser roles, emotionally disturbed victims of Nazi brutality, he had chosen Judy and another famously disturbed actor, Montgomery Clift. “He treated me like an actress,” Judy said of Kramer, grateful that someone in Hollywood would give her another chance. “And what it did for me! If Stanley ever wants me to play a leper on Molokai, I’ll do it.”

Only once, on her first day of shooting, did the new Judy cause any of the old consternation—and that was a false alarm. For six takes she tried to cry, but the required tears refused to come. “Damn it, Stanley,” she at last complained, “I can’t do it. I’ve dried up. I’m too happy today to cry.” The floodgates finally opened on the seventh take, and though her three scenes were to take up no more than fifteen minutes on screen, they packed enough raw emotion—“she gave the impression,” said Kramer, “that she almost wanted to be hurt”—to bring her a nomination, if not the Oscar itself, for best supporting actress.

After a brief family vacation in Florida, Judy resumed a tour that was to last for many months, sending her to every corner of the continent, from San Antonio to San Francisco, from Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall, with its flawless acoustics, to outdoor arenas like the Hollywood Bowl, where she gamely sang through lightning, thunder and two hours of a drizzle that soaked both her and her audience. “Judy Doesn’t Fizzle in a Drizzle,” applauded the
Los Angeles Times
. Though she missed a few
engagements, particularly toward the end of that relentless schedule, she did not fizzle anywhere. In a year of high spots, however, one, the tallest peak in the range, towered above all the others: Sunday, April 23, 1961—Carnegie Hall.

Schoolteachers like to tell their students that because human perfection is an impossibility, the word “perfect,” when it is applied to the achievements of men and women, should always be modified by an adverb such as “almost” or “nearly.” Fair enough, but how, then, would the schoolteachers describe Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall? She had been superb, genuine and touching, at the Palladium in 1951, and better still at the Palace a few months later. There had also been many other “almost perfect” or “nearly perfect” appearances in the years that had followed. But the Carnegie Hall performance was to stand alone. It was so good that it could not have been better, and it therefore needs no modifier: it was, even by the strictest definition, perfect. Two decades earlier, Al Jolson had called Judy the greatest female singer he had ever heard, adding only that what she was then was yet nothing compared with what she one day would be. That day, that moment of apotheosis, had now arrived.

For more than two and a half hours, from eight-forty-five until eleven-twenty, with just one intermission, she was onstage alone—Judy without comedians, acrobats, bicyclists, dance teams, chorus boys or jumping dogs. Judy without her tramp costume, her dirty tear-stained face or her legs dangling over the edge of the stage. Judy without gimmicks, in short, singing twenty-six songs, from some of her old favorites, like “You Made Me Love You” and “The Man That Got Away,” to others she had rarely sung before, such as the Gershwin brothers’ “A Foggy Day” and Noël Coward’s bittersweet “If Love Were All.” After the twenty-fourth number, she confessed that she had almost run out of songs. “Just stand there,” came a reassuring shout from one of the boxes. Judy did better than that, however, belting out two more, “After You’ve Gone” and “Chicago.” A year earlier she had questioned whether she would ever sing again. But at the end of a concert of extraordinary length, her voice sounded as strong as it had at the beginning.

There was, in fact, magic in Judy’s singing that night. Her pipes, as
Variety
called them, had ripened into the rutilant maturity of midsummer—she was to turn thirty-nine in just eight weeks. Yet they still retained, undiminished, a springlike freshness. Her voice had achieved greatness in the past, but only occasionally, never for a whole evening, never through twenty-six numbers. At Carnegie Hall, greatness, true greatness, was hers, and on that soft April night in Manhattan she ascended to heights untrodden by any of her contemporaries. Her mastery of herself, her songs and her audience was complete.