Judy Garland on Judy Garland (12 page)

That made her sound like a normal 16-year-old. But how could she be a normal 16-year-old? She was a moom pitcher star. She had a career to think about. She disposed of that with: “Everybody my age likes to do some one thing more than anything else. What I like to do is sing good and loud. Or not so good maybe; but loud … I'm luckier than a lot of people, getting paid for doing what I like to do most; but that doesn't make me any less normal than anybody else.

“Of course, what's normal for one person might not be normal for somebody else. But it's normal for me to be mixed up in show business. I've been mixed up in it as long as I can remember. It isn't a career; it's a habit. I don't feel natural
not
working. This vacation right now is the longest I've had, and it's killing me. I wish they'd hurry up and start
Strike up the Band.
It's going to be a follow-up to
Babes in Arms.
Mickey and I are going to play a couple of kids on Broadway.” She added pointedly, “A couple of normal kids—in show business.”

Was she going to sit there, spooning up a large bowl of chicken broth (practically all that she was having for lunch), and try to insist, between
spoonfuls, that anybody who had grown into the teens in show business could be normal? She certainly was going to try.

She said: “It gives me an awful pain when an actress hauls out her hanky and has a good cry about how she missed out on fun when she was a child, being on the stage. It's all in the mind. If you don't have fun as a kid, it's only because you think you don't.

“I had fun. I had a wonderful childhood. I did a lot of traveling, saw all kinds of interesting places. I met interesting people—people with stimulating minds. I learned countless things I'd never have learned just from books, and I liked that. What kid wouldn't?

“I've heard actresses wail that as children they were always with older people; they ‘never knew what it was like' to have friends their own age. It's true that when you're a child on the stage, you're with older people more than most kids are. But I never had trouble finding friends my own age.

“I've heard actresses say, too, that they missed out on the fun of growing up gradually, being in show business. They had to grow up practically overnight. One day, they were doing child roles; the next, they had to play young grown-ups. Maybe that was true once upon a time, but it isn't true now. Pictures like the
Hardy Family
have made people expect adolescents to act their age.

“Nowadays, there's nothing to keep an in-betweener in show business from being as normal as any in-betweener anywhere. Not a thing.”

Nothing except fame. How about the difficulty of doing things other people do, what with autograph-hunters swooping down in droves?

Judy grimaced. “Stars complain about not being able to go shopping, because they're recognized, and stampeded, and stuff. If they don't wear jewels and furs, they won't be bothered. I did all my Christmas shopping last year, myself. I just wore something simple, and I wasn't recognized once. Other shoppers weren't looking for a movie star. They had their own shopping to do.”

She smiled mischievously. “Funny thing about movie stars. Put them in plain clothes and they look like plain people. Without the trimmings of glamour, they don't stand out in a crowd.”

That took care of that. But was it normal for a growing girl to content herself with a chicken-broth lunch?

“Oh, I'm not contented,” Judy said. “I love to eat. But I was eating too much. I used to put away steak and potatoes,
and
pie, at lunch—and then want to go somewhere and lie down the rest of the afternoon…. You should see the breakfasts I eat. No glamour girl ever eats such breakfasts. Truck drivers, maybe—but not glamour girls. Orange juice, scrambled eggs, sausage, toast, coffee. A real meal. It takes something like that to get me out of bed in the morning. Something worthwhile in the line of food.”

She seemed to have a rebuttal for every supposition that she couldn't have a normal life, being a star at 16.

“I have a home. It so happened that I was lucky enough to be able to buy it, myself—and I'm going to get my money's worth out of it. It isn't a showplace. It's a place where I can be myself, and do things with my family. And, with my particular family, I don't get a chance to be a movie star around home. I don't get away with anything. I don't even get picked up after; I have to pick up after myself.

“Some of the things we have in the house are a little nicer than the things we used to have, but our life is just the same as it always was. We do the same sort of things. We have just as many laughs. Our friends are still the same ones we used to have. Mom still doesn't mind how much noise my crowd kicks up, if everybody's happy. She still bakes chocolate cake, and we still like it. My two sisters and I still trade clothes. And I still ask Mom first, if I want to do something.”

Ah, that's a gruesome thing about being in the teens—still having to “ask Mom first.”

“The way I look at it,” said Judy, “it's a good thing—having somebody who has your best interests at heart and won't let you do anything unless it's safe and sane. You get a lot of crazy ideas.”

Judy gave a short laugh.

“The only time Mom really slipped up was when she let me talk her into letting me have a motorbike. My idea of a place to try it out—with my girl-friend, Patty McCarthy, in the sidecar—was the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. The studio heard about it and told me to keep out of traffic. So
I tried the bridle path in the middle of Sunset Boulevard, out Beverly Hills way, where there wasn't even horse traffic. Somebody phoned the studio: ‘Your Judy Garland is going up and down that bridle path at what looks like eighty miles an hour.' That was the last straw. A few executives had nervous breakdowns, what with
The Wizard of Oz
not yet finished, and I had to give up motorbiking.”

Something that makes 16 terrible for most people is the self-consciousness that goes with it. Was she ever afflicted, even if she was an actress?

“Yes—when I can feel people getting the wrong impression. Like the time I went to the opera with [Peter] Lind Hayes, Grace Hayes' son, and on the way home he wanted to stop ‘for five minutes' at Grace Hayes' Lodge. She asked me, in front of the crowd, to sing a song. I was embarrassed into doing it, not wanting to offend Lind's mother. But I could see what some people were thinking: That I was there just to show off. It was agonizing. And the next day five people phoned the Board of Education to see ‘if something couldn't be done about keeping Judy Garland home nights, not chasing out to nightclubs.' And
that
got in the papers. And everybody was unhappy. Especially me…. Life doesn't get complicated like that very often, thank goodness.”

A popular misimpression of Judy is that she is probably the hottest of Hollywood's jitterbugs. “I was a jitterbug for three weeks—but I couldn't stand the pace.”

The columnists kept insisting that she was smitten first with this boy, then that. The impression was out that she was boy crazy. “Nobody thinks less about boys than I do,” said Judy airily. “I don't go out much with boys, and the only reason I go out at all is, a girl has to have an escort. When I do go out, it's usually with Jimmy Cathcart. He isn't in the movies. We've known each other a long time.

“In one breath, people accuse me of being 12 years old. And in the next breath, they suspect me of having ideas about eloping. It's a great life.

“I don't want to get married till I'm 24. Why 24? Well, that sounds like a good long while away.”

School isn't one of the terrible things about the teens, to Judy. “It was, while I was taking geometry. But now that that's behind me, life is worth
living again. I really finished school last June. What I'm taking this year is a sort of postgraduate course—appreciation of arts, music appreciation, Shakespeare and French. All of which ought to do me some good.”

You might not suspect it, but Judy, the jazz singer, collects the records of Tchaikovsky and Debussy, not the composers of Tin Pan Alley. She's serious about her music. She's considering voice lessons. (Something she has never had, up to now.) On her last trip East, of her own accord, she went to a famous teacher at the Metropolitan to have an audition—to see if the woman could do anything for her.

“She thought maybe she could help me sing soft. I don't know. I'm sort of sentimental about those loud notes. I've screamed this far.”

Something else she did for the first time while East was to go skiing at Lake Placid. “I knew I was going, so I went shopping for a ski suit in Chicago. They talked me into buying a regular Swiss one, complete even to goggles. I got to Lake Placid, put on my suit, and strolled down into the lobby, looking like probably the most professional skier this side of the Alps. Everybody trooped out to watch me—and they thought I was only kidding when I went out to the beginners' slope. I started down, and I saw a couple of trees looming up a hundred feet ahead. I didn't know what to do to avoid them. I had visions of bashing my nose into my head. So—I just sat down. Ignominiously.

“I try
so
hard to be an outdoor girl, but I'm just not it. I'm awful at tennis. I can't hit a golf ball. I splash when I swim. The only sport I'm good at is skeet-shooting—and I don't know how that happens. I get most of my exercise with my eyes, reading.”

One thing that makes the teens terrible for some people is the conflict of ambitions within them.

“Up to the time I was fifteen,” said Judy, “I had all kinds of ambitions. Every time I passed UCLA, I wanted to go to college. Every time I read a fashion magazine, I wanted to be a designer. When I read
An American Doctor's Odyssey,
I could see myself in my lab with my test tubes.

“But now that I'm 16, I realize that if a person is having a good time doing something, that's what he or she ought to continue doing—instead
of getting impossible ideas. If I'm lucky, I'd like to go on like this for five more years, and then quit.

“That's what everybody says, isn't it? Everybody likes to believe he or she will be able to quit ‘five years from now.' But I'm not kidding myself one bit. I know I'll be keeping on till rigor mortis stops me.”

The teens aren't so terrible—with Judy Garland representing them.

Judy updated her fans in the spring of 1940 with news of another installment in the Andy Hardy series. She also detailed some favorite hobbies, including painting and golf.

Dear
Picture Show and Film Pictorial
Readers,

I am now hard at work in
Andy Hardy Meets Debutante.
I'm Betsy Booth—if you remember
Love Finds Andy Hardy,
you'll know it—and I once again join forces with the Hardys. As I have to confess, clothes seem mighty important to me nowadays, and in this new picture Dolly Tree has made me some darling things. But, best of all, today I bought myself my first fur coat. It is a ruby fox and I couldn't resist wearing it to the studio today, even if it wasn't exactly appropriate. But then, Sue, my sister, won a part in
The Mortal Storm,
with Margaret Sullavan, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Young, and Frank Morgan, so I took her to lunch and told her I was wearing my new coat in celebration of her career. Not a bad excuse, eh?

With the start of the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture, I went back to my three-hour schedule. Before that I had been in school more than the required three hours just because I was so fascinated with it. Not with school, exactly, but with my artwork. Mrs. Carter, my teacher, says that I am not half bad at it, and after I finish my French and music lessons, she lets me spend the rest of the time painting. Yesterday I copied a picture of a girl by the artist Petty, and today I sketched my new coat on her.

Speaking of Sue working in pictures, the laugh is on her. For the last few years I've been the only one in the family who had to get up before six every morning in order to be at the studio made up and ready for work by nine. This morning Sue set her alarm for five-thirty, and when she woke up, she started to wail because it was still dark. Did I giggle! Now you should see how much more respectful she is to me. “To think you have been doing this for four years,” she says—and looks astounded.

But I was glad she was working, for it gave me a chance to visit
The Mortal Storm
set this morning. There I met Robert Stack. You know, he is the young man who played with Deanna Durbin in
First Love.
I had met him before, but this was our first real talk. And we are going out together Saturday night. Isn't that grand?

I have started something new. It's golf, and I'm in love with it. Every morning at seven-thirty I go to the Bel-Air golf course and take a lesson. Now that I'm working I'll have to wait until Sundays to play, but I'm not going to let up on it. Do you know that I can drive one hundred and twenty yards already? My instructor tells me that is quite good. I hope so, because my one ambition is to be able to beat Mickey Rooney at golf. I wonder if I'll ever be able to do it?

Best wishes to you all, from

Judy Garland

Judy added to the legend of a feud with Deanna Durbin and responded to the elopement of Artie Shaw with Lana Turner in this fan magazine feature.

It seems only yesterday when Judy Garland left a party in tears because friends of Deanna Durbin poked fun and laughed at her and said “Imagine her being a movie star!”

It was moonlight and the air was filled with the fragrance of flowers as a lone little figure, in a white party dress with a gardenia in her thick brown curls, trudged down a winding road in Brentwood, California. Unobserved, she had slipped out a side door of the big white house on the hill, where lights and music told plainly that a party was in progress.