Hollywood was always heartbreak town, though most of the world fancied it to be Shangri-La, King Solomon’s mines, and Fort Knox rolled into one big ball of 24-karat gold. We used to see the hopefuls stream in from every state of the Union, tens of thousands of them, expecting that a cute smile or a head of curls was all it took to pick up a million dollars. Many were old enough to know better, but not the children.
They came like a flock of hungry locusts driven by the gale winds of their pushing, prompting, ruthless mothers. One look into the eyes of those women told you what was on their minds: “If I can get this kid of mine on the screen, we might just hit it big.” I used to wonder if there wasn’t a special, subhuman species of womankind that bred children for the sole purpose of dragging them to Hollywood.
Most of the women showed no mercy. They took little creatures scarcely old enough to stand or speak and, like buck sergeants, drilled them to shuffle through a dance step or mumble a song. They robbed them of every phase of childhood to keep the waves in the hair, the pleats in the dress, the pink polish on the nails. I’ve had hundreds of them passing through my office asking for help.
Stage mothers are nothing new. I remember as far back as the Tartar we lovingly called “Ma” Janis, who took care of all the cash her daughter Elsie earned. When “Ma” died, Elsie got so lost in the tangle of her financial standing that she wondered whether she had $100,000 or a million in the bank. She found she had little left except a note signed by “Ma” certifying that she owed Irving Berlin $10,000. Elsie had never made out a check in her whole life, never had more than $5.00 in her pocketbook.
What motion pictures did was to encourage the breed and give them better opportunities to ruin their children while they were beneath the age of consent. Peg Talmadge, mother of Norma and Constance, was a sweetheart. Anita Loos wrote her book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes from choice bits that fell from the lips of Peg, but even she ruled with a whim of iron. We all laughed at Peg when she said these things but didn’t have the wit to write them down. Anita did.
Jackie Coogan’s boyhood earnings were so scandalously dissipated by his family that the law was changed to protect child actors—but Jackie was left penniless.
When I worked for Metro, stage mothers lingered outside the gates at the Culver City studios, waiting to catch some dignitary’s eye or for a chance, which seldom came, to slip past the guards into the maze of narrow streets that wound between the big barns plastered with stucco which were called sound stages.
Some children made it, though not by waiting like beggars at the gates of paradise. Louis B. Mayer needed appealing youngsters for the all-American family pictures which this Russian-born Jew from New Brunswick delighted in making because they earned fortunes for him. There were two children in particular, a boy and a girl, who captured the imaginations of all.
The boy had once had his hair dyed black by his mother so he could get a job in two-reel silent comedies. She wanted to change his name to Mickey Looney, but the “L” became an “R” when he was signed on at Culver City.
The girl’s mother had seen her child walk out onto a vaudeville stage when she was two years old to join her two older sisters in a song-and-dance act. Mrs. Ethel Gumm took her three children slogging through West Coast theaters for years. Frances, the youngest, developed the hungriest drive of them all, battling to show her big sisters that she could sing louder and longer than either of them.
It was a cheap act, and it made very little money for anybody. One Christmas saw the traveling Gumms chewing on tortillas at a corner drugstore near the theater they were playing. Frances Gumm had been rechristened Judy Garland when Lew Brown spotted the trio playing The Lodge at Lake Tahoe and decided she might have something.
In the typical Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance switching that usually makes it possible for half a dozen people to claim they “discovered” a star, Brown put Judy and her mother in touch with an agent named Rosen, who knew Jack Robbins, a music publisher with offices in Culver City.
With Rosen, Judy was in Robbins’ office when he telephoned down to Ida Koverman, who made a point of hunting for fresh talent to keep the wheels turning at MGM. Judy was twelve; round as a rain barrel; stringy hair; dressed in an old blouse, blue slacks, dirty white shoes. Ida heard her sing with a zing in her heart, and she flipped. She called Mayer, who grudgingly came up to see what was causing all the excitement. Ida had got hold of the words to the Jewish lament “Eli, Eli” and coached Judy in the pronunciation. That’s what she sang for Mayer, but he wasn’t impressed. He tossed the ball right back at Ida. “If you want her, sign her up.”
But Ida was too knowing about the foxy ways of Mayer to fall for that. She needed a second opinion, or else if Judy failed, Mayer would never let Ida forget it. She had Judy sing again, this time for Jack Cummings, a producer who just happened to be Mayer’s nephew.
Jack was called one of the “Sons of the Pioneers,” a walking testimonial to the fact that it never hurt to be somebody’s relative at Metro. “A producer produces relations” was a stock gag. Later on, however, in pictures like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Jack proved that he could fly when they gave him wings.
Long before that, he made a picture with a young girl named Liz Taylor and a collie dog: Lassie Come Home. The picture was sweet, sentimental, and I went all out in praise of it. A loyal friend in Metro’s New York office wired me after reading the review: YOU SURE STUCK YOUR NECK OUT THIS TIME HOPPER STOP IT’S NOTHING BUT A POTBOILER. But the picture made a fortune, got Lassie a lifetime contract, helped get Liz National Velvet.
Cummings could see the potential appeal of Judy, a roly-poly girl with eyes like saucers and a voice as clear as a gold trumpet “This kid’s got it,” he told Ida. “Let’s sign her up.” While he went off to set the legal wheels in motion, Ida took Judy to the commissary for some ice cream.
She tried to introduce her there to Rufus Le Maire, head of casting, but she got the brush-off. Mr. Mayer hadn’t given the little new girl the nod, so she wouldn’t receive any favors. He was starry-eyed over another schoolgirl MGM had signed. Deanna Durbin was the real talent, in his book. The two children made a musical short together, Every Sunday Afternoon, but Deanna was the one given the big build-up. After that, Judy had nothing to do but hang around the lot—and get some education at the school Ida had established with academically qualified teachers to meet the requirements of California law.
Mayer had decided to let Judy go and keep Deanna, but the plan turned sour. Universal, looking for a youngster to play in Three Smart Girls, wanted Deanna. By a fluke, Metro had let her contract lapse. Mayer was away on one of his many trips to Europe. He knew nothing of this until he returned and found his prize pigeon had been allowed to fly the coop. He went berserk.
For days he ranted and raged at everybody in sight until some anonymous prankster won revenge. In Mayer’s exclusive, private bathroom one morning, Louis found that on every sheet of toilet paper the face of Deanna had been printed overnight.
Deanna got stardom and the royal treatment from Universal with One Hundred Men and a Girl, which followed Three Smart Girls. There was a fancy premiere, and she planted her footprints in wet cement in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, a pastime which was one of the glorious bits of nonsense in those days. Deanna is now quite plump and leading a happy married life with husband and children in Paris. Once a year newspapermen descend upon her home, but she won’t receive them or allow photographs to be taken. She’s had her fill of Hollywood and you couldn’t lure her back for a million dollars. The only singing she does is with her children.
Judy was living in a little rented house with her mother. Her father, Frank Gumm, was not in Hollywood. Judy’s mother telephoned Ida the morning after Deanna’s big show: “I can’t do a thing with Judy. She’s been crying all night. What shall I do?”
“Bring her right over,” said Ida. With no children of her own, she was a mother hen to everyone who needed her. Judy was as close to her as a daughter. She fell into Ida’s lap and buried her head on her shoulder, sobbing: “I’ve been in show business ten years, and Deanna’s starred in a picture and I’m nothing.”
Frustrated ambition has to be treated gently. “You’ll get your feet in cement, too,” Ida soothed her. “You’ll be starred, you’ll see. Don’t forget, I’ve told you so.”
Mayer schemed to turn the tables on Universal. Nobody was going to laugh at him for keeping the wrong girl. “I’ll take this fat one, Garland, and make her a bigger star than Durbin,” he boasted to his associates. How to start was the puzzle. He began by insisting that she be coached in acting and dancing, though she’s never had a formal singing lesson in her life. She still doesn’t know what key she sings in. She’ll say, “Play some chords and I’ll pick one.” He had orders sent down to the commissary: “No matter what she orders, give her nothing but chicken soup and cottage cheese.”
Her one dear friend in approximately her own age group was Mickey Rooney. They were nuts about each other. They went to school together, along with Metro’s Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew, and other child stars whom Mickey rapidly eclipsed. Mickey, who remains today one of the greatest underrated talents in entertainment, was brash, cocksure, and growing up fast. He was doing calisthenics in the schoolyard one day under an instructor’s eye when Frank Whitbeck, the studio advertising director, passed by.
“Hi, Uncle Frank,” yelled Mickey. “Ain’t this the damndest thing for a grown man to be doing?”
The crush Judy had on Mickey would have burned up a girl twice her age. An explosive mixture of emotion and ambition churns inside her. “I have to have a crush on somebody,” she once cried to Ida, “but they don’t last.” Mickey had a shield of toughness, which she lacked, and a heart as big as Ireland, but he mostly regarded her as a kid, too young for him.
She’d played minor roles, two of them with Mickey as star, when The Wizard of Oz came along. Producer Mervyn LeRoy, typically, was all set to have Shirley Temple as Dorothy, but Twentieth Century-Fox wouldn’t release her. So he reluctantly settled for Judy—and she had it made.
The top executive offices at Culver City are located in the Thalberg Building, otherwise known as the “Iron Lung” by reason of its much-envied air-conditioning system. Before it was built, Metro tried to buy a little piece of corner property, on which stands a long-established undertaker’s parlor. He refused to sell, so today his establishment stands like a sore thumb next to the handsome structure named for Irving Thalberg. The undertaker occasionally peers into the “Iron Lung” and says: “Well, I’ll get you all, sooner or later.” He’s had most of the old-timers already.
From the executive offices you could look across the street at four big twenty-four-sheet billboards standing side by side. On them were displayed posters that shouted the claims of the studio’s newest hits, listing names of the stars, featured players, producer, director and, if they were lucky, the writers.
Since actors are vain, Mayer and his aides, like soft-spoken Benny Thau and burly Eddie Mannix, could sweet-talk them into accepting bigger billing in lieu of more money in many a contract. With Oz, Judy’s billing grew like a mushroom. It jumped above the picture’s title, making her technically a star. The size of the lettering that was used to spell out her name expanded year by year. Now she’s reached the peak, where one name, Judy—like Garbo and Gable—does all the selling needed to pull in an audience.
Then Metro smelled gold in billing Mickey and Judy together for Babes on Broadway, and some of her cruelest years opened up for her. Compared with Mickey’s greased-lightning ability to do everything and anything and get it right instantly, Judy was a slow study. Dance rehearsals were a torture. She was driven frantic, dancing, singing, improvising, putting a picture together. The director, Busby Berkeley, was a taskmaster who extracted the last ounce of her energy.
“I used to feel,” she told me later, “as if he had a big black bull whip, and he was lashing me with it. Sometimes I used to think I couldn’t live through the day. Other times I’d have my driver take me round and round the block because I hated to go through the gates.”
I saw him work her over in one picture, where she stood on a truck and sang. He watched from the floor, with a wild gleam in his eye, while in take after take he drove her toward the perfection he demanded. She was close to hysteria; I was ready to scream myself. But the order was repeated time and time again: “Cut. Let’s try it again, Judy.”
“Come on, Judy! Move! Get the lead out.” By now, she was determined to keep her name in the billing, but I doubt if she would have pretended to anyone that she enjoyed being an actress. She was jealous of Mickey, forever running to Ida to complain: “He got the break, I didn’t.” For all the friendship of the two young people, she wanted to best him in everything they did together.
The two of them sat together in the darkened theater. On one side of them was Irene Dunne; on the other, Sonja Henie; behind them, Cary Grant. When the house lights came on, Judy was crying through the applause. “I know what you’re thinking,” Mickey said. “We’re two kids from vaudeville, and we didn’t mean a damn thing for so long, and now it’s happened to both of us.”
Years later, after Judy had fallen into a bottomless pit and climbed out again, the Friars Club gave a banquet at the Biltmore Bowl and proclaimed her “Miss Show Business.” She had just had the British eating out of her hand at the London Palladium, played the Palace in New York for nineteen sensational weeks; toured the United States and finished her triumph at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles. Mickey’s career was running downhill. Somebody remembered to send him an invitation to the Biltmore Bowl, but it was to sit way over in a corner.
“Everybody was slapping each other on the back,” he reported without bitterness, “and I said to myself: ‘Poor Judy, how many of these people really care about you?’”
I said: “You two were like ham and eggs. You helped her more than anybody.”
“Yeah, but the people who gave the party forgot that. That was the only thing that hurt. Because I felt so close. I haven’t seen her much lately. It’s all a kind of whirl.”
Adolescence can give a rough ride to any girl—and her mother, if she’s around to share her daughter’s fears and confidences and dry her tears. Judy’s thinned-out body was not given time to readjust. The public idolized her. The exhibitors couldn’t get enough Garland-Rooney musicals. She had to go on churning them out one after another. They’d been sent to New York for the Capitol Theatre opening of Babes on Broadway. They went back again and broke every house record.
“We’d been doing six, seven shows a day and having about forty minutes between shows,” Mickey recalled. “This one afternoon we’d just gone off stage to come back and take a bow together, and she collapsed in the wings. I didn’t know what to do. I filled up with tears. I felt as though something serious had happened. I came out on stage and just felt lost without her. She wasn’t dieting at this time. She was just going too fast.” And with the wrong companions.
That was Louis B. Mayer’s doing. His suspicious brain came up with the idea that Ida had too much influence over Judy. She might be tempted to think of what was good for the girl before she thought of the studio, so he flatly told Ida: “You’ve got too much work to do to look after the Garland.” By order, the old intimacy was ended.
The studio brushed off somebody else in Judy’s life, too—her first husband, David Rose, the serious-minded, preoccupied composer to whom she was married at nineteen. She made two mistakes in that. She married him without consulting Mr. Mayer beforehand, which was a fracture of MGM protocol. Even worse was the fact that she married at all.
A star’s life was supposedly controlled twenty-four hours a day by the studio. She was told what to do, both at work and after working hours; where to go; what to say; whom to mix with. Mayer didn’t want any star to marry because that introduced a foreign influence in the control system. A husband could often influence a star against the studio for her own good and sometimes for his own power.
They turned on Judy like rattlesnakes. On Academy Awards night, she had sat for years at the number-one table along with the rest of the MGM stars. As Mrs. David Rose she was deliberately humiliated and seated at a much less desirable spot on the side and out of the spotlight. That year she called to ask if I’d like to sit with her.
“Love to,” I said, then proceeded to give the tsar hell by telephone: “Louis, you are treating her outrageously. Even if you personally don’t like her, think of what she has done for your company. You should be ashamed of yourself.” But he was immune to shame or compassion. I wasted my breath.
They actually believed that she belonged to them, body and soul. They’d created her; why couldn’t she show more gratitude? The marriage hadn’t a chance. The studio told her so. David Rose was the wrong man for her, said the sycophants who clung to her like leeches. “He’s trading on your popularity. You’re a star; he’s a struggling composer.” If they passed the two of them in the Culver City streets, they’d greet her but ignore him.
After Judy left him, as she inevitably did, her private life changed in many ways. Her father had died and her mother remarried to become Ethel Gilmore. Both sisters were married, too. Metro assigned a publicity writer, Betty Asher, to stay with Judy, and they lived high, wide, and not particularly handsome.
She turned from her mother and her old friends. When they warned her about the new set she was going with, the rainbow girl screamed: “I’m old enough to know what I want. When I want your advice I’ll ask for it.”
The dismal cycle of benzedrine and sleeping pills began again. The studio kept up the illusion of Judy’s perfect health. She plunged on, beating her thin chest and saying: “I feel fine.” Of course, she knew she wasn’t, but she was too riddled with ambition to let someone else take over a picture scheduled for her.
She listened to anybody who flattered her ego. Joe Mankiewicz, the director who suffered the tortures of the damned on Cleopatra, was a great ego booster. “You could be the greatest dramatic star in the world,” he told her. “Anything Bernhardt did, you can do better. I’ll write material for you, make you another Bernhardt.” That was something he never did.
Metro smiled on marriage number two—to Vincent Minnelli, who had directed her in Meet Me in St. Louis and The Clock. They felt this gentle man would bring her under control. Judy was married in her mother’s home. Louis Mayer gave the bride away; Betty Asher was matron of honor; Ira Gershwin the best man. Ida Koverman was not invited, nor was I. Judy was then twenty-three.
Minnelli, ten years her senior, had never married before. Though he controlled hundreds on a sound stage, he wasn’t successful in seizing the reins as husband. He was too gentle. She continued to mingle with her old crowd; sought and found her sensations; quarreled with her mother.
By this time, we knew many of Judy’s problems and were delighted to hear that she was pregnant. Maybe motherhood would bring her back to her senses. Before Liza was born, I wanted to give her a different kind of baby shower, with only men invited. Judy was in a depressed mood. She bowed out with a note: “I’d have been a dull guest of honor, but it was a wonderful idea. Thanks for thinking of me. Forgive me, and after March I’ll be rarin’ to go. I’ll be my old self again.”
Unfortunately motherhood rarely produces miracles. Though the birth left Judy weakened, she scurried back to work again. Metro issued glowing reports about her health, but her previously ravenous appetite had strangely deserted her, and she stayed pathetically thin. She got through her pictures only on nervous energy and doctors’ help. She was so near the borderline that when I visited her in her dressing room on the set of The Pirate, in which she was co-starring with Gene Kelly, she was shaking like an aspen leaf. She went into a frenzy of hysteria. Everybody who had once loved her had turned against her, she said. She had no friends.
Even her mother, Judy said, tapped her telephone calls. “She is doing everything in her power to destroy me.”
I said: “You know that isn’t true. Nobody in the world loves you as your mother does—and has all your life through all your troubles.”
But she cried out against her mother; against Ida Koverman; against all those who had helped her out of so much potential trouble. She was carried out of the dressing room, put in a limousine, still wearing make-up and costume, and put to bed. But she rallied and finished the picture.
The gulf between her and Minnelli widened. He tried to force her to eat, but she couldn’t. In fits of temperament, the couple parted many times. But he was always on hand to help.
The road got rougher. Something desperate was happening to her. The sad chronicle of studio suspensions began. Then Metro bought Annie Get Your Gun for her and assigned as director the “man with the bull whip,” Buzz Berkeley. She went into a weeping rage when she was told she’d have to work for him again and refused point-blank to do it. So the studio gave her Charles Walters in his place. But then nothing could have improved the situation for her.
She recorded the songs which are collectors’ items—I often sit and play them in my den at night. Then day after day, with a million dollars of Metro’s money already invested, she didn’t show up for work. Her bosses took her off the picture. Betty Hutton was brought in to replace her, which was one of their biggest mistakes. They should have waited until Judy got well.
When Judy walked into my den after hearing the news from Mayer himself, she looked middle-aged. She stared into space, blamed herself for her troubles. “I understand the studio’s problems at last. I’d been there so long I’d forgotten you have to conform to their plans. Mr. Mayer promised to take care of me. He said he’d give me so much to live on while I’m out of work.”
She was in the throes of another separation from Minnelli. “I’m broke. How can anyone save money in this business? When Vincent and I were together, I spent $70,000 decorating our house. Since our separation I’m paying $1000 a month rent on another. It’s tiny; no nursery for my baby. But I have to keep working.”
I begged her to go to the Menninger Clinic. Treatments there had done much good for Robert Walker, her co-star in The Clock. “There’s nothing the matter with my head,” she replied. “It’s my body that’s tired.”
A few days later she entered the Peter Brigham Hospital in Boston, with Louis Mayer personally paying the bills, and stayed there for several months. Back in Hollywood, fighting to lose weight again, she finished Summer Stock with Gene Kelly. Then, during rehearsals for Royal Wedding with Fred Astaire, the headlines screamed that Judy Garland, suspended for refusing to work, had cut her throat in the house she’d spent $70,000 decorating. Stories told of her racing into the bathroom, breaking a glass, slashing her throat. In fact, the scratch could have been as easily made with a pin. The cut wasn’t serious. It was more a case of nerves than anything else.
Her mother had long since given up the hopeless task of staying close. She was working as a theater manager in Dallas. When she heard the news, she got in her little jalopy and drove thirty-six hours nonstop to go to her daughter. “Judy,” she said enigmatically, “will never kill herself.” She stayed on in California, working in a job in an aircraft plant that Ida Koverman helped obtain for her. She died of a heart attack in the parking lot there. Previously, she used to plead with her friends: “Please don’t introduce me as Judy’s mother.”
Judy has walked the rocky road back to the top of the mountain with Sid Luft by her side for most of the miles. Sid is her husband, “manager,” and a gambling man who can kill $10,000 in an afternoon. He loves horses and fast motor cars. It was Sid, with whom she has led an on-again off-again life as Mrs. Luft, who arranged her first tour that opened at the London Palladium, where she was an absolute sensation. She has two more children by him: Lorna and Joe.
“I don’t think there’s any actress in the world that can produce like she can when she’s going,” said one member of the group that accompanied her to London. “When she’s going, she’s the greatest thing on wheels. When you’re with a dame that’s fantastic like that, and you don’t know if she’s going to get on or off or anything, you’re bound to crack under the strain.”
Many people wondered how Judy Garland got her amazing contract from Jack Warner to make the musical version of A Star Is Born. There was a clause in it she didn’t have to work before 11 A.M. If she was ill they wouldn’t expect her to work. It was a fantastic deal. Here’s the story.
When it came time for Jack’s beautiful daughter Barbara to have her coming-out party, he promised to get her anything she wanted. What she wanted was to have Judy Garland sing at the party. Her father told her that was impossible. “But, Daddy, you promised to give me anything I wanted, and I thought you could do anything.” Then she burst into tears and hung up the telephone.
Father went to work. He called Judy. Her answer was: “Why would I do that? No.” He called her again: “What would I have to give you to change your mind?”
Then it was that Sid Luft came on the phone and said: “We want A Star Is Born,” naming an astronomical price for Judy and special clauses in the contract. Warner had to buy the story from David O. Selznick at a cost, I believe, of a quarter of a million.
But Judy survived the flop that A Star Is Born proved to be, as she has survived all the incredible excesses of her life. In every performance—at concerts, on television, in her new pictures—she has the power to stir an audience to the depths of their hearts, like an old-fashioned revival meeting. “We have all come through the fire together,” she seems to say, “and none of us is getting any younger, but we’re here together, and I’ll love you if you love me.”
This feeling she gives out to and gets back from an audience may be the one crush of her life that will last. She used to be her own worst critic. Before she went into a number for the screen, her co-workers had to keep telling her: “You’re wonderful, wonderful!” But she never thought she was good. “I was awful” was her own self-judgment whenever she’d finished. But now, as she literally tears her way through her songs, her audiences go crazy listening to her. They crowd around to touch her, and she believes in what she can achieve.
Ethel Barrymore, one of her greatest boosters, told me: “I think she has a tremendous frustration. She’s always felt she wasn’t wanted. She has a complex common among women—she wants to be beautiful. I told her: ‘God is funny that way. He divides these things. When you open your mouth to sing, you can be as beautiful as anyone I’ve ever known.’ But you’ve got to keep telling her.”
Judy suffers from nightmares concerning her mother. She has lost something of herself somewhere along the road. But so long as she has millions of people loving her and fighting for her, she’ll keep the ghosts in the background.
Her performance in Carnegie Hall was one of the most amazing things I ever witnessed. Her fans screamed and applauded after every number. She gave encore after encore, promised: “I’ll stay all night if you want me.” She threw her head back and used the mike like a trumpet.
She repeated the same frenzied performance in the Hollywood Bowl, this time in the rain, and nobody moved. You sat enthralled because she’d cast her magic spell as she did first when she sang “Over the Rainbow.” This was our little Judy, who came home and persuaded the natives that skies really were blue and that dreams really do come true.