Get Happy (65 page)

Irrational and often paranoid behavior had bedeviled Judy while she worked on several earlier pictures, of course, but this time there was a difference: she was also frequently mean, nasty even to lower-level members of the crew and studio staff. “Here’s Dorothy Adorable!” she would ominously announce, as if introducing the evil twin of little Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
. “Watch out!” And watch out everyone at Shepperton did, because when Dorothy Adorable walked through the door, trouble came with her. In Hollywood, star trailers boasted private toilets; in Britain they did not. Convinced that she was not receiving the respect she was due, Dorothy Adorable retaliated, as a belligerent child would, by using her wastebasket as a toilet. This caused confusion as well as consternation: who was to be assigned the unpleasant task of carting away Judy’s deposits? By that time a weary Neame was beset by so many other problems that he said to himself, “Well, I’m not going to get involved with Judy’s chamber pot!”

Try as he might, however, he could not escape Judy’s fierce temper. Furious because he had called her to the studio on an afternoon she wanted off—she had spent the morning seeing Liza off at the London airport—she angrily snapped at him when he asked her to repeat a
scene: “You said the first take was lovely, and unless you tell me what was wrong with it, I do not intend to do it again. I-am-not-coming-back-until-I-am-treated-like-a-lady!”

Chaos bred chaos, and some scenes that Judy would or could not do had to be dropped entirely, which probably accounts for the picture’s peculiar and uneven pace. After that dramatic exit, for example, she did not come back to the set for nearly a week, entering a hospital again, two days later, on July 5, to recover from a second attempted suicide. Banging her head against the bathtub taps, she had not only knocked herself out, but had opened a wound that had colored the bathwater a vile scarlet. And that was not the end of her self-abuse; within the next month she twice again tried to do herself serious harm.

“How are things going today?” one of the producers was asked.

“Pretty good,” came the pleased and somewhat surprised response. “She hasn’t tried to kill herself today.”

Perhaps most frustrating to Neame and company was the vision of what might have been, because when she was good, Judy was so good that, in Bogarde’s words, “she left you breathless.” At the beginning of their collaboration, Judy had urged Bogarde to write a scene to match Vicki Lester’s wrenching monologue in
A Star Is Born
, the moment when she tells the head of the studio how agonizing it is to watch Norman Maine slowly destroying himself. Bogarde did as she requested, and the result of his efforts is one of the most arresting scenes in Judy’s long film career. Jenny Bowman’s mission to London has ended in failure—her young son refuses to leave his father to join her on tour—and while hundreds are expecting her to appear at the Palladium, she finds herself in a hospital, nursing a sprained ankle. Enter the boy’s father, her onetime lover, who reminds her that she is keeping an audience waiting.

“I don’t care if they’re
fasting!”
Bowman shouts. “You just give them their money back and tell them to come back next fall… . I can’t be spread so thin. I’m just one person. I don’t want to be rolled out like a pastry so everybody can get a nice big bite of me! I’m just me. I belong to myself. I can do whatever I damn well please with myself, and nobody’s going to ask any questions!” It is an eruption of astonishing force, all the more powerful because not only were the sentiments
Judy’s—so were the words. Bogarde had not written dialogue; he had transcribed it, transforming ordinary soap opera into naked documentary. It is not Jenny Bowman exploding in that hospital room. It is Judy Garland.

A scene of such length—it lasts seven minutes, almost three minutes longer than the comparable scene in
A Star Is Born
—usually requires three or four setups and possibly three or four days of work as well, as the director films from different angles and ranges. But as action progressed, Neame realized that what he was watching was a kind of magic. Instead of stopping the camera where he had planned—“I knew that I would never, ever, get anything like that scene again”—he nodded to his cameraman to keep rolling forward, closer and closer to his two stars. Quick to catch on, the cameraman signaled, in turn, to an electrician, who hastily put a diffuser over a light that otherwise would have been too hot for close-ups.

And all the while, as that frantic dumb show was being played out behind the camera, Judy and Bogarde were enacting an intense drama in front of it. What had begun as a diatribe gradually turned into a love scene, a scene of particular poignancy because it is clear that both people know from the start that it will conclude with a parting—that the only lasting relationship Bowman can have is the one with her audience. Though few other actors could have responded with Bogarde’s instinctive intelligence, the laurels belong mostly to Judy, who, as Bogarde himself phrased it, traversed an actor’s universe, “from black farce right through to black tragedy, a cadenza of pain and suffering, of bald, unvarnished truth.” Many in the crew, who had scant reason to like Judy, nevertheless found themselves with moist eyes when she was through. What had happened? one of them was asked as he left the set. “A miracle,” he answered.

A miracle of a different kind came at the end of July. Filming was at last completed
—I Could Go On Singing
had survived Hurricane Judy and had wobbled into port. “Well, that’s it, Judy, darling,” said Neame after the final shot, a simple close-up on the studio lawn. “We’re finished—really, really finished. The picture’s done.” Looking at him, then at the crew, Judy slowly walked away, saying only: “You’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

The British court did just as Judy had anticipated, and in the middle of August she was allowed to take her children back to the United States. Lake Tahoe, that shimmering blue oasis in the Sierra Nevada, was where they were bound, and there, braced by the scent of pine and warmed by mountain sunshine, Judy finally escaped the fog of anxiety and insecurity that had enveloped her in London. Returning to the concert circuit in mid-September, she proved such a smash at the Sahara in Las Vegas that a four-week engagement was extended to six.

Love plus Appreciation equals Performance: L + A = P. That was the equation that lay behind both Judy’s successes and her failures. If she felt loved and appreciated, she could perform wonders; if she did not, the equation was reversed and catastrophe would inevitably follow. Quick to grasp that elemental truth, Stan Irwin, the Sahara’s executive producer, coddled and cosseted her like a favorite child, going so far, during her last two weeks, as to schedule her show to fit her insomniac’s clock. Two-thirty was the time she bounced onto the stage—two-thirty
A.M.!
But the canny Irwin knew what he was doing. Even at that drowsy hour Judy filled the house.

Jack Paar, the era’s reigning television talk-show host, had also figured out Judy’s motivating math, and when she appeared on his
Tonight Show
in early December, he all but threw bouquets at her feet. Though she sang three songs, Paar was more interested in her speaking than her singing voice. “One of the great talkers in show business,” was how he introduced her, and talk she did. She told stories of her days in vaudeville, of Happy Harry, the world’s most depressed comedian. She told stories of her school days at M-G-M, of Lana Turner, Mickey Rooney and Deanna Durbin. Durbin, she confided, with a small, malicious smile, had come to Culver City possessed of just one eyebrow—though that one was a whopper that stretched from ear to ear. On a later occasion Paar asked if one of her friends was a nymphomaniac. “Only if you can calm her down,” Judy shot back.

The appearance of such a relaxed and engaging Judy—“a picture of mental and physical health,”
Variety
called her—was widely noted. Capturing the moment, Fields and Begelman approached the three networks
with an astonishing proposal: a Judy Garland show not once or twice a year, but every week during the TV season—twenty-six weeks in all. Even more astonishing, the networks took them seriously, entering into a bidding war which CBS won only by offering an unusually rich contract. Judy was guaranteed somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000 a show, as well as full ownership of the tapes. After CBS was finished with them, Judy’s corporation, Kingsrow Enterprises, could sell them again and again in syndication.

Judy was back on the road to riches from which she had been so precipitously bumped by the financial failure of A
Star Is Born
. If her show ran for only two or three seasons, she would be secure for life. “David Begelman told me there was no reason I shouldn’t have a steady home with my children,” she said, “be very rich, and do a weekly show—that I should have been very rich a long time ago, like Bob Hope or [Perry] Como.”

Long before
The Judy Garland Show
went on the air—at nine o’clock on Sunday, September 29, 1963—television insiders were writing its obituary. “The Great Garland Gamble” was how
TV Guide
billed it. Judy, said the skeptics, could not keep up with the murderous weekly pace. A day missed on a movie set could be costly, but was not necessarily catastrophic. On TV, even with shows taped in advance, it could be both. A network had an hour to fill, and performers were obligated to fill it whether they were well or ill, ready or not. The question in many minds was not whether Judy would collapse, but when. “Thousands of dollars were bet in Las Vegas that I wouldn’t even do the first three shows,” she said. “They thought that I wasn’t going to finish a performance or even show up.”

Thanks in part to George Schlatter, the show’s producer, who all but drowned her in love, flattery and every comfort a spendthrift network could provide, she did both. When she arrived at Television City, CBS’s vast production facility in Los Angeles, she was happily surprised by a dressing room as big as a small house: forty feet long, with wall-to-wall carpeting, antique marble tables, a piano, a stereophonic sound system, a bar and a refrigerator stocked with Blue Nun.

Thrilled by the attention, Judy was also thrilled by Schlatter, who joked when she was tense, rushed to her new house in Brentwood when she was anxious and at all times made sure that everybody treated her like a star. Slimmed down to a hundred pounds, she looked the role, more attractive than during the filming of
I Could Go On Singing
—more attractive, in fact, than she had been at any time since
A Star Is Born
. When taping began, on June 24, she was in fine form, clearly delighting in the company of her first guest, Mickey Rooney. And so she remained through June and July, “having a ball,” as Schlatter phrased it.

The predicted disaster struck on August 2, at the end of the sixth week. It came not from Judy, however, but from CBS, which surprised everyone, including the advertisers, by firing Schlatter and most of his team. His mistake, in the network’s eyes, was to try to make each week the equivalent of an opening night at the Palace, a “special event,” as he called it. But television viewers, CBS argued, were creatures of habit. They did not want special events, at least not every week. When they sat down to watch a program, they expected the same comfortable and familiar feeling they had when they put on their slippers.

“Judy Garland will have to adjust to television,” said CBS’s president, James Aubrey, Jr.—“the Smiling Cobra,” he was nicknamed, so quickly and ruthlessly did he strike. “Television is certainly not going to attempt to adjust to Judy Garland.” For five weeks, for all of August and part of September, production was halted while CBS installed a new crew. “I was stunned and bewildered,” said Judy. “It came as such a shock.”

The show’s new producer, Norman Jewison, shared the network’s pretzels-and-beer philosophy.
The Judy Garland Show
required not only a more conventional pattern, he was convinced, but a more conventional star. Judy was too glamorous and needed to be brought down a peg. “In TV,” Jewison explained, “you have to make the sacred cow less sacred.” He did that by throwing her onto the barbecue and making her the butt of an endless barrage of humorless, denigrating jokes—reminders that she had recently been fat, that she had a reputation for unreliability and that she had made more comebacks than a revolving door. “This isn’t the original, this is the twelfth Judy Garland,” said
Jerry Van Dyke, the show’s woefully miscast comic. “The original,” he added, “went over the rainbow years ago.”