Judy Garland on Judy Garland (44 page)

The occasional break to make a motion picture, tape a television show, or to record an album is necessary for Judy's own well-being and is also the variation that could prolong the present near-mystical Garland craze indefinitely.

Mystical, mysterious, mystery—there is indeed a certain mystery which divides the great artist from the technically accomplished or merely “talented” performer. No artist of our time has shared her gift with such complete, almost thoughtless abandon. This sharing is at the center of Judy's mystery, and it is for this that the American audience loves Judy so much.

*
Part II of the feature appeared in the issue dated November 14, 1961, with Part III following on November 28.

†
From “Playboy Interview: Hefner on Branding,”
Advertising Age
, November 3, 1997.

*
Edens recollections here seem foggy and somewhat abbreviated, and other sources within this volume seem to offer a more reliable timeline for Judy's arrival at Metro.

*
Edens had, of course, seen and taken part in numerous concerts given by Judy, so Goode's remark is puzzling.

*
Judy's special with Sinatra and Martin aired February 25, 1962.

What originated as a reporter's tape-recorded interview with playwright Noël Coward became a fly-on-the-wall look into a fascinating friendship. It was during the week of August 11, 1961, that Judy traveled with Kay Thompson and publicist John Springer to attend a preview of Coward's
Sail Away
at Colonial Theatre in Boston. Peppered with various exclamations by Thompson (the woman responsible for introducing the two), the conversation between Judy and Noël was taped the following day and later edited for
Redbook.

They seem poles apart: America's Judy Garland, who can warm 50,000 hearts singing familiar songs in a huge, open stadium, and England's Noël Coward, who acts, writes and directs his own sophisticated plays and musical comedies. But they are devoted friends, and deep admirers of each other's talent. They are equally outspoken about the theater, the public, and life backstage, which they discuss with unusual honesty in the following dialogue tape-recorded in Boston shortly after the opening of Coward's new musical
Sail Away.

NOËL COWARD:
Let's just—before we start talking—decide what is interesting about you and me, Judy. I'd say it's first of all that we're very old friends, so that takes care of itself. What is interesting about us both is (a)
you are probably the greatest singer of songs alive, and I … well, I'm not so bad myself when I do my comedy numbers, and—let's see, what else?

JUDY GARLAND:
And (b), Noël, is that we both started on the stage at about the same age, didn't we?

NC:
Yes. How old were you when you started?

JG:
I was two.

NC:
Two? Oh, you've beaten me. I was ten. But I was—

JG:
What were you doing all that time?

NG:
Oh … studying languages! No, I started at the age of ten in the theater, but before that I'd been in ballet school. I started in ballet.

JG:
You were going to be a dancer?

NC:
Yes. I was a dancer for quite a while. Fred Astaire designed some dances for me in 1923. I was older than ten then, of course.

JG:
How marvelous! I didn't know that! Did Fred—

NC:
I don't think he was very proud of the dances, because I don't think I executed them very well. There was a lot of that cane-whacking tut-tum-ti-ti-tum in them.

JG:
But, to go back, where did your theater … Did you have any background? Was there anyone else in your family at all that was—

NC:
Theaterly?

JG:
That's it … theaterly.

NC:
No theater. Navy.

JG:
No theater? How—

NC:
We didn't know anything about it. My father's attitude was always one of faint bewilderment. But my mother loved the theater, you see, and she took me to my first play when I was five years old. It was my birthday treat. Every sixteenth of December I used to be taken to a theater. And then I was given a toy theater for Christmas.

JG:
By your mother?

NC:
By my mother. She adored—she loved the theater, you see.

JG:
Yes. Yes!

NC:
And I was wildly enthusiastic about it and so that's how it all started. I had a perfectly beautiful boy's voice, so I was sent to the Chapel Royal School, where I trained to be ready for the great moment when I gave an audition for the Chapel Royal Choir, which is a very smart thing to be in. I did [Charles] Gounod's “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” and I suppose the inherent acting in me headed its ugly rear, because I tore myself to shreds. I made Maria Callas look like an amateur. I did the whole crucifixion bit—with expression. The organist, poor man, fell back in horror. And the Chapel Royal Choir turned me down because I was overdramatic.

JG
(laughing):
That's divine!

NC:
Then Mother was very, very cross and said the man who had turned me down was common and stupid anyway. After that we saw an advertisement in the paper that said they wanted a handsome, talented boy, and Mother looked at me and said, “Well, you're
talented,”
and off I went to give an audition. That's how I got on the stage.

JG:
Divine! But it was different for me. I came in with vaudeville. I … You know, it was sort of rotten vaudeville, not good vaudeville. I told you this once before, I think. I came in after the real great days and before television. Really, it was awful vaudeville, you know, so there was nothing very inspiring. But my children are being exposed to all the best.

NC:
Of theater?

JG:
Yes. I want them to be exposed to it. I think it's rather stupid to be involved in making movies or whatever, and just leave your children every morning—

NC:
“Mother's going out now.”

JG:
Yes, and say, “I'm going to work now, but you mustn't know where because I don't want you exposed.”

NC:
Well, also the children might adore being exposed. Why not enjoy themselves?

JG:
So I take them along with me. They have been on movie sets. They have been backstage in the wings. They know what I do when I go to work. Sometimes I think that actresses who say they don't want their children exposed to publicity and don't want their children photographed … Well, I have a strange, uncanny feeling that maybe Ma doesn't want any attention taken away from her, you know?

NC:
You can't have secrets from them. If your mother happens to be an actress, you've got to take it on the jaw and understand that you're the daughter of an actress….

JG:
And you know, it isn't a bad atmosphere. It's fun for our children to go to the theater. And I think that as long as I have a good relationship with them and our home life is a good one, the entertainment world can't possibly hurt them. I don't know whether any of them will become entertainers or not. We'll see. My oldest daughter, Liza, is talented and sort of stuck on the business.

NC:
I'd love to see Liza.

JG:
She started to dance when she was five.

NC:
And you encouraged it?

JG:
Yes. And she's a brilliant dancer, really. But now she has grown up with the best of—of talents. She has seen you. Her father, who is a very, very talented man, has exposed her to the best of the theater, so she does have taste and she does have a talent. Now she's in summer stock. My other daughter, Lorna—she's eight—is the Gertrude Lawrence of Hyannis Port. She's just impossible, and the most beautiful creature who has ever lived, I think. And she's so shocking and bright and cunning and hep. She's such a great actress that we don't know what we're going to do with her. We really don't. I'm sure she's going to turn into something important. I don't have any idea at all what it will be, but it will be startling and flamboyant and—But I'm taking over the whole darn conversation.

NC:
No, darling, you should.

JG:
It's funny how Liza is so much like me, a quietness much of the time, a little sedentary, and Lorna is just the opposite, a mercurial child.

NC:
When I saw you first, Judy, you were a little girl, although you talk about the vaudeville and all those things … But of course, that is the way to learn theater, and not acting school—playing to audiences, however badly.

JG:
Trial and error. Trial and error.

NC:
Whenever I see you before an audience now, coming on with the authority of a great star and really taking hold of that audience, I know that every single heartbreak you had when you were a little girl, every number that was taken away, every disappointment, went into making this authority.

JG:
Exactly. Exactly, and it's all—it sounds like the most Pollyanna thing to say, but it is truly worth it—the heartbreak and the disappointments—when you can walk out and help hundreds of people enjoy themselves. And this is only something you can learn through trial and error.

NC:
Nobody can teach you … no correspondence courses, no theories, no rehearsals in studios.

JG:
No, you can only learn in front of an audience.

NC:
And if there are people who cannot withstand these pressures, and if they are destroyed by these pressures, then they are simply no good and are just as well destroyed.

JG:
Do you really mean that, darling? What do you mean?

NC:
Well, my dear, the race is to the swift. In our profession the thing that counts is survival. Survival. It's comparatively easy, if you have talent, to be a success. But what is terribly difficult is to hold it, to maintain it over a period of years. You see, nowadays, when everything is promotion and the smallest understudy has a personal manager and an agent rooting for her and a seven-year contract with somebody, they don't take
the time to learn their jobs. Then after their first success they run into difficulty—they have personal problems. And when public performers allow personal problems to interfere with their public performances, they are bores.

JG:
Yes, and if they're haunted and miserable off stage, they are still bores. Because they are entertainers, and entertainers receive so much approval and love—and for heaven's sake, that's what we're all looking for, approval and love. And they receive it every night and in every way. If they are good, they receive adoration, applause …

NC:
Applause, cheers, flowers.

JG:
And if they insist on leaving the stage and going—Well, I did this for many years. I was the most awful bore. I went offstage and I'd go into my own little mood and remember all the miserable things and how tragic it was—and it wasn't tragic at all, really. I was just a plain bore. And I think anybody who clings to this tragic pose is a
poseur—a
phony.

NC:
Self-pity.

JG:
It's self-pity, and there's nothing more boring than self-pity.

NC:
And it's a very great temptation—particularly when you're a star and you know that you have an enormous amount of responsibility, you are liable to fall into the trap of self-pity. If somebody doesn't please you or something goes wrong, you fall into the trap—you make a scene, which is quite unnecessary. If you're an ordinary human being working in an office every day, you wouldn't behave like that. No, an entertainer has to watch his legend and see that he stays clear and simple.

JG:
But you've always done this, Noël. Now, I've known you for years. You've always done this. You are a terribly wise man who in spite of many facets of talent and brilliance and so forth has kept your mind in complete order and your emotions in order. You have great style and great taste. Weren't you ever inclined to fall into a sort of self-pity?

NC:
Oh, yes, yes, yes.

JG:
Oh, good. It makes me feel much better, because I really did it for a long time.

NC:
After all, Judy, darling, I'm much older than you.