Judy Garland on Judy Garland (41 page)

The Rolls turned into a Howard Johnson's restaurant when Judy and David decided they wanted ice cream cones. Judy said, “I'm hungry. I looked in the cupboard this morning and there was nothing but cat food from when I had Bluebell.” On the way in, a lady asked Judy, “Are you who I think you are?” Another lady passed David at the entrance wheeling a
baby carriage and David shouted after her into the crowded room, “Take your hands off my child.” We bought ice cream cones and drove on to Forest Hills.

Judy and her luggage were checked into a suite at the Forest Hills Inn, where Stevie Dumler of the Freddie Fields office and her hairdresser, Mr. Kenneth of Lilly Daché were waiting.

We settled down for the long wait till showtime. Fields tried humor: “Ronnie Roye [the local entrepreneur] can't get the sun to focus. I'll tell you right now the stage has to be moved forward 15 feet.” David looked at Judy, who had changed into a frilly, diaphanous robe. “You're too good to be out here, for Christ's sake, singing for these people with grease under their nails.” Freddie: “We're putting the band around you so there won't be any chance of not hearing them.” Judy: “I'm wondering about catching my heels on the grass going over to the stage.” Freddie: “On ‘Over the Rainbow,' let's take the blues and reds out and leave just a spotlight, so you can get on and off without people watching you climb those steps.” David mimicked Judy, who has a fear of falling everywhere but on stage, walking down the steps onto the tennis court. David said they could put up a screen at the steps.

Mr. Kenneth, impeccable and quiet, was watching television, and Judy began talking about soap operas, saying that the similarity of characters, plots and dialog made her think she was lost in a world of heartbreak where 70 people led hopelessly entwined and tragic lives. “You really get a little mixed up,” she said. Judy then passed the time signing checks that Stevie had brought along to pay the musicians' and hairdresser's bills and her own allowance, $100 a week.

Judy wanted to sleep for a little while so Fields and Begelman drove over to the stadium to look at the stage. Fields' first look of anguish was at the piano, which was sitting in the bright sunlight, covered by canvas. Fields spoke to the head grip: “You shouldn't have done that. It will be a full tone off by tonight. Is a tuner coming?” The man replied that he had already been there, and Fields explained that the heat from the sun would
change the tone, asking if they could put the piano somewhere in the shade. They could not.

Fields and Begelman directed the placement of the tiers for the 28-piece band, while the band itself rehearsed under an awning at the rear of the makeshift stage. Fields explained that the thin hardwood flat that extended under the band was installed to bounce the sound of the band to Judy as she sang. “We really use dynamics. Judy is one of the few singers with orchestrations that use dynamics, varying intensities of volume.”

Fields conferred with Myles Rosenthal, a young New York sound engineer dressed in Bermuda shorts, who had installed what he called the “first split-stereo sound system for a concert.”

In a semicircle on the grass facing the audience were 16 James B. Lansing high-fidelity speakers arranged in four clusters. They carried individual and separate sounds from microphones set at intervals through the band and also from Judy's own microphone. Fields and Rosenthal walked the handheld Garland mike forward while the system was turned on, speaking into it at intervals to see whether she would get an echo, or “feedback,” if she should walk past the speakers on the grass during the concert. There didn't seem to be any feedback, but Rosenthal was nervous. He asked if Judy sang with great volume. He was told that she did. Fields cautioned him not to change the volume level during the concert because it might throw her off.

Fields, an old MCA hand now on his own, rhapsodized about his latest client. “Besides pure entertainment, Judy is an emotional experience. The Carnegie audience all ended up on the same level, enraptured. She brought the humanity out of everyone. Carnegie was pure strength, never a moment when she wasn't a giant. She never broke the spell. When she walked on that
Nuremberg
set [Judy had recently finished her role in
Judgment at Nuremberg]
all the stars there were a little bit smaller. If we've done anything, it's to make her career a business. You wouldn't run Macy's with lackeys or relatives.”

Freddie was interrupted as Judy walked onto the tennis courts for a rehearsal. She was dressed in turquoise slacks, a dark green shirt, white loafers, and she wore a pair of dark glasses. Freddie put his arm around her as she sang “Never Will I Marry,” in a low voice, rehearsing the song for the first time with the band. Judy then opened up so that she could be heard over the band without a mike. David said, “I've heard of warming up, but this is ridiculous.” Judy turned to leave, and David admonished Howard Hirsch, the bongo player, “Play the hell out of them tonight, Howard.”

Judy walked out onto the makeshift stage and slid her feet back and forth on the varnished wood, to see whether there were any rough edges. Then she tried the mike. Myles Rosenthal smiled at the strength of her voice and said to Freddie, “I see what you mean.” Judy then tried the mike out on the grass, walking forward, beyond the speakers, again despairing at the size of the enormous stadium that she had to fill with sound that night. She told Myles not to take the mikes away from the brass section. Remembering that she once had swallowed a moth during an outdoor concert, she asked Freddie if he had brought a bug bomb.

Judy and David went back to the Forest Hills Inn so that Mr. Kenneth could start on her hair. It was now six o'clock, two and a half hours until the concert would begin. Mr. Kenneth had set up an elaborate dressing table and had unpacked a portable hair dryer. Judy asked him, “What will we do with my hair tonight?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I thought we might try glue.”

David called room service and ordered Judy's dinner: two lamb chops, a side order of mashed potatoes, lima beans and a tossed salad with Roquefort dressing. A teenaged rock 'n' roller performed silently and lasciviously on the television set, while Mr. Kenneth set Judy's hair before turning on the dryer.

The long hose attachment and the blower at the other end gave Judy a Martian appearance which she didn't like. “Kenneth, we've got to do something about that wig so I won't have to go through this. Couldn't we take a tuck in here and there?” Mr. Kenneth was obdurately watching the television set, which had switched from the rock 'n' roller to the last 30 seconds of an old Henry Aldrich picture.

Stevie Dumler called the house that Judy had just rented at Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod, to find that Liza, Lorna, and Joe had arrived safely that afternoon. Judy's voice was warm as she talked to her children. “Liza? How is the house? Do you like it? Do you think we're going to have fun? Lorna? Hi, baby, how are you? Did you like it? You got a swim in already?” The voice grew still more affectionate as Joe came on the line: “Hello, darling, how's my baby? … The cold icy water? I miss you, Joe. I miss you very much.”

In a few minutes Judy and David were laughing again, about some silly names they had invented for business people: “George Gross, Ned Net, Tim Tax, Sam Subpoena, Leonard Lien,” and Judy added, “Freddie Foreclosure.” It was getting late, and dinner had not arrived. David called room service and got special treatment. Dinner was wheeled in and Judy looked at her watch. “Dare I eat? I won't be able to breathe!”

David said, “Even if you don't breathe, you're still the best singer around.” Judy laughed. “I wonder if Marguerite Piazza has as much fun as
we
do?” Judy trifled with her dinner, then napped under the hair dryer. Mr. Kenneth couldn't watch television any longer.

Judy woke up. “What do you think, Kenneth? Shall we finish my hair?” Mr. Kenneth did, and Judy began to make up for the concert, now only a half hour away. “These are my 14,500-people eyelashes.” She was referring to her three sets of false eyelashes—for small, average and large audiences. Forest Hills would require the longest ones. “I have a line on my head from the dryer, Kenneth.” Mr. Kenneth, wryly: “I like it.” Judy: “It looks like a skull operation.” Mr. Kenneth: “Didn't you know what I was doing?” He combed her hair and Judy was almost ready.

I asked Judy whether she thought about a performance before she went on. “Every once in a while I think about it. I find too much concentration isn't good for me. It may be good for the Method people, but I have a general picture and I try to let things happen spontaneously. I never know what's going to happen anyway. The mike may blow, or
anything.
I used to suffer awful stage fright. Now it's such a relief to be without it, I enjoy every part of the day. My God, it used to be agony. Now I get an
exhilarated feeling from the audience and the singing. I
do
like to sing. It's a lot of fun, you know, with good orchestration. The whole thing is kind of a romp, which it should be. It comes through much better. You have a feeling everybody likes you. Why else are they there?”

Mr. Kenneth interrupted: “Do you think I'll ever get to do the president's wife?”

Judy laughed and asked if she had told me about the Judy Garland kit that David and Freddie had invented to sell at concerts. “It consists of one long eyelash, a tear-soaked handkerchief, a tiny bottle of Liebfraumilch, a used Life Saver and a baby fan.” David burst into the room. “You don't know what's going on outside. The whole town is agog.” He went to a closet to get a dress for Judy. “How did this get in here? Judy, you can have your choice. Kenneth's jacket or any one of these costumes.” Mr. Kenneth: “She can wear it if she'll autograph it afterwards.” Judy: “There was a ridiculous woman who came up to me in a dining car and said, ‘Would you sign this piece of toast for me?'”

It was time to go. Stevie and Mr. Kenneth packed all the clothes, the makeup table and the hair dryer, and everyone moved downstairs to the Rolls to drive one block to the West Side Tennis Club which, since there was no adequate dressing room at the stadium, would be Judy's base during the concert. Judy took over the ladies' room of the club, and a guard was posted outside to keep people away. It was dark, and the stadium lights facing the club illuminated a wide green lawn and the tennis courts. Judy was dressed in a black sheath and a sequined jacket, and we climbed into a small English convertible for the short drive down a private walk to the stadium. Mr. Kenneth and a photographer rode on the fenders of the car.

Mort Lindsey, the orchestra leader, greeted Judy with a kiss, and Judy asked, “Where do they let the lions out?” The bandstand was brightly lit but the audience sat in total darkness, making the stadium look even larger than it was. Jeff Hand, of the Fields office, handed Judy some Life Savers. Freddie said, “Go tell Mort we're ready.” David said, “Nobody can
find him.” A phone rang in the lighting booth at the left. Freddie was nervous: “That's not going to go on during the concert, is it?” He called Rosenthal in the sound-control room, as the band began the overture. “Jack it up really high,” Freddie ordered.

Judy listened: “You do lose the impact of the orchestra outside.” David called for a flashlight so Judy could walk down the short steps to the stage. Judy asked, “Have they got the sound up? Is there a runway out there or do I walk tippytoe like the wolf in
The Three Little Pigs?
Is there a handkerchief?” The band had reached “Over the Rainbow” in the overture, and Judy began to walk on, to deafening applause, and sang “When You're Smiling.” Halfway through, a plane flew over, cutting half of the sound, but Judy didn't stop until after the first song, and said to the audience, “A small, intimate room.” There was laughter and a voice in the top rows shouted “Louder! Sing louder!”

Judy said, “Sing louder? I've got a frog in my throat.” Then, as more planes began to fly over the stadium, “Here they come! I'll be right back. Mill around.” She walked off to their laughter to get a glass of water to clear her throat and was back in seconds, asking, “Now, can you hear?” She began “Almost Like Being in Love” with a slight throaty quality, and was completely relaxed as she sang “Do It Again.”

The banks of 54 red and blue lights dimmed down by prearrangement, leaving a single pin-spot as she sang the words “Turn out the light” from “Do It Again.” The darkness was broken only by the spot and the occasional flare of matches in the audience and then the quiet spell was shattered as Judy began the loud cha-cha-cha arrangement of “You Go to My Head,” taking the mike from the stand and doing quick little cross steps over the stage.

Judy stopped again to talk to the audience and catch her breath. A man's voice behind me said, “She's terrific, she really is.” Judy looked up at the man running the big spotlight who couldn't seem to find her on the stage. “Have you got trouble up there?” she asked. Then Judy started to talk about her hair, just as if she were back in the hotel suite. “I have this
friend. She's darling. She's so chic you can't stand it. She sent me to her hairdresser. He clipped and cut and it got higher and higher. I tried it at a concert, looking like an overweight Balenciaga model. I walked on balancing my hair. I get very warm when I work and it started to fall. I looked Neanderthal. The varnish was running …” Her voice trailed off and the crowd laughed at her story. Judy cued the band and sang “Alone Together,” reaching the words “to cling together” just as another plane came over. It didn't matter. People were standing, shouting “Bravo, bravo!” and the applause lasted for several minutes. Judy spoke: “I think that last 707 went right down my throat.”