Get Happy (11 page)

A life cannot be measured in dollars, however, and by most other standards Frank’s life had been a gnawing disappointment. Three times his indiscretions with teenage boys had brought ruin to his reputation; three times they had forced him to leave the place in which he had made his home and living. For a decade, moreover, he had watched impotently
as, ignoring him altogether, his wife robbed his daughters of their happy childhoods. Yet his submission had not made her respect him, and Frank probably knew that, bad as it was, his marriage would not outlive poor Laura Gilmore. No wonder that he remembered his years at Sewanee, that honeysuckle Shangri-la, as the happiest he had known. No wonder that, in the fall of 1935, he concentrated his hopes and dreams on the one signal success of his nearly fifty years—his golden-voiced Judy.

The acclaim she received thrilled him perhaps even more than it did Ethel. Dorothy Walsh recalled his childlike excitement when he first spotted her name on a theater marquee, then rushed pell-mell for his camera to make a photograph of the historic sight. The M-G-M contract had brought an end to Ethel’s hustling. With Judy no longer being dragged away from him, Frank saw more of her than he had since she was a small child. Now he drove her to the studio nearly every morning, often walking her to Metro’s one-room schoolhouse. “Judy’s mother was a fighter, but Judy and her father were gentler, more poetic people,” said Mary MacDonald, who taught Judy and seven or eight other underage actors. “He had a kind of spiritual quality, just as Judy did, and he was very concerned about her. The last time I saw him he said to me, ‘Will you take good care of Judy, Miss MacDonald?’”

It was, as it turned out, a particularly poignant question. On Friday, November 15, not long after he had made that request, he left his Lomita theater early, complaining of an earache. For years he had suffered from recurrent ear infections, as Judy had when she was little. “Oh, it’s that ear again!” he would exclaim when anyone wondered why he looked so troubled. On this occasion the pain was worse than usual, and it became more severe as the night progressed. Marc Rabwin was called, and on his orders the semiconscious Frank was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital at one-forty Saturday afternoon. He had spinal meningitis and the prognosis could not have been grimmer: death was all but inevitable.

Unaware how desperate her father’s condition was, Judy kept a date to perform on the radio that night, her second appearance on the
Shell
Chateau Hour
in less than a month. “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” was the song she had chosen. Before she went on the air, Rabwin telephoned to say that he had placed a radio beside Frank’s bed. Sing for him, Rabwin said, and the urgency in the doctor’s voice told her that Frank was dying. Knowing that her father would never hear her again, Judy sang her heart out for him, as she herself phrased it, embracing those pedestrian lyrics—a recording of her performance still exists—with a warmth they had probably never known before.

It is doubtful that Frank, who was falling deeper and deeper into a coma, actually heard those tender words. He died at three o’clock the next afternoon, Sunday, November 17—Ethel’s birthday. The conjunction of death and birthday was an unfortunate coincidence, made more unfortunate still by the fact that, unbeknownst even to the girls, Frank had planned a surprise party for his wife. Laden with presents, guests arrived all afternoon, cheerfully shouting “Happy birthday!” as they walked through the door, then backing out in embarrassment when they learned the bad news.

Other than showing exhaustion from two sleepless nights and many trips to the hospital, Ethel seemed remarkably unaffected by Frank’s death. Not once, then or later, was she seen to cry or otherwise to display real emotion. Indeed, that very night, a few hours after their father had died, she left her daughters alone in their grief, allowing Dorothy Walsh and Frankie Darro to supply whatever comfort they could. Nor, incredibly enough, did she stay with them the following two evenings either. Too upset to cook, the girls sent Darro out for hamburgers all three nights. Ethel offered no explanation and no one asked where she was going: everyone assumed that she was meeting Will Gilmore.

Frank’s funeral was held Wednesday morning, November 20, in Glendale, at Forest Lawn’s Little Church of the Flowers, which had been constructed, stone by stone, to resemble an English village
church. Boyd Parker, the rector of St. Paul’s in Lancaster, conducted the Episcopalian services, and many of Frank’s former friends also traveled over the mountains—forgiving, now that he was dead, behavior they could not accept while he was living. It was Judy’s first funeral, and, unfamiliar with the customs, she watched with indignation as the mourners stopped at the open coffin to pay their respects. “Oh, Dottie! Don’t let them do that!” she said to Walsh, who had been assigned by Ethel to shepherd her through the ordeal. “Don’t let them come up and stare at my daddy like that! I don’t like it. It’s just not right. Tell them to go away!”

The casket was closed soon enough, and Frank’s story came to its conclusion. Judy was later to say that his death, so sudden and so shocking, was the most terrible event in her life, and with that statement there can be no arguing. Within less than two months she had gained everything she had wanted and worked for, but had lost what she treasured most, her devoted father. Weak and flawed though he was, Frank had loved her as no one else ever had or was ever to do again. “Now,” she thought bleakly, “there is no one on my side.”

W
ith Frank gone, Judy’s home, the place where she spent most of her time and energy, was no longer the address on Mariposa Avenue, or any of the other houses she was to share with her mother. Her real home was several miles to the west in Culver City—in that tiny principality, that singular realm of imagination and make-believe, known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

A more unlikely spot for a fantasy factory could scarcely have been found. Although it was only four miles from the surging Pacific, Culver City, which had a population of about six thousand, had a decidedly provincial, Middle Western flavor. Sitting at the foot of the Baldwin Hills—brown hillocks, really, with a sprinkling of oil derricks in place of vegetation—it even looked like a town in the Middle West, with a slow-paced main street, blocks of small but well-kept houses and acres and acres of empty fields, some of which were still used for farming. One resident kept a couple of cows, whose milk he delivered in a horse-drawn cart, and much of the town was suffused with the
homey aroma of baking bread, a gift of one of its biggest employers, Helms Bakeries. Had it not been for the indisputable fact that it was almost entirely surrounded by the fifth largest municipality in the United States, little Culver City could have been situated in the wheat fields of Nebraska, the birthplace of its founder, the go-getting Harry Culver.

Yet fate had endowed it with four movie studios, and to that homely town came, every day but Sunday, dozens of the most glamorous people on the globe, stars whose faces were more familiar to the earth’s multitudes than those of presidents and popes, generals and kings. They, and the hundreds who worked with them, were the spinners of cinema magic. Appearances aside, Culver City was one of the most extraordinary cities in the world: it manufactured dreams the way Detroit made cars and Pittsburgh produced steel. “The Heart of Screenland” were the words emblazoned on the city’s official seal.

The entrance to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, by far the largest of the four film factories, was proclaimed by the Corinthian columns lining Washington Boulevard—mute symbols of the studio’s grandeur. Inside the gates was yet another city. With a weekday population of more than four thousand, M-G-M had its own police force, fire department, hospital and telephone exchange. Metro even had its own transit system, cheerful-looking open-sided jitneys that constantly plied the ten miles of roads that lay within the six-lot complex.

The heart of that vast establishment was Lot 1, which occupied forty-five of the studio’s one hundred and eighty acres. There, jumbled together in no discernible order, were soundstages, offices, rehearsal halls, dressing rooms, wardrobes, laboratories, film vaults, warehouses and shops for all the craftsmen, from electricians to tinsmiths, who labored behind the scenes. On the five outlying lots—the back lots, they were called—were such necessary appurtenances as the studio’s zoo and stables and the permanent outdoor sets that, with a few artful changes, looked different each time they were seen on screen.

For westerns there was Billy the Kid Street, lined with dusty-looking adobe buildings. Verona Square, with its ornate fountains and statuary, was constructed with Renaissance Italy in mind, but it also doubled for towns in Spain and France—even twentieth-century Cuba. Copperfield
Street represented Old England, Brownstone Street stood for New York, and Fifth Avenue, which was wider and a little more modern, could give a good imitation of New York, London or Chicago. On the back lots, too, were the water tanks and ponds that could simulate oceans and rivers, the turbulent Atlantic or Tom Sawyer’s swimming hole. There was nothing in nature, nor any work of man, that could not be duplicated in Culver City.

The M-G-M Judy joined can only be described in superlatives. It had the most of everything required for the production of motion pictures. It had the most stars—“more stars than there are in heaven,” the studio liked to boast—and the greatest success in creating still more stars. But it also had the most feature players; the most producers, directors and writers; the biggest budgets; the most advanced film laboratory; the largest accumulation of art, furniture and antiques; and the best research library. Its hoard of original musical manuscripts, for example, dated back to the dawn of history, to Sumerian hymns written in cuneiform in the eighth century B.C. Without leaving the lot, M-G-M’s researchers could provide the appropriate sound, as well as the right look, for any picture, however ancient or foreign its setting. The other big studios—Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century-Fox and Universal—also had their own stars, talented technicians and collections of art, of course. But whatever they had, Metro had more.

There had never been, nor probably ever will be again, such a splendid moviemaking machine. Nothing was allowed to stand in its way. No problem was too large to take on, or too small to notice; an obsessive attention to detail was built into the system. At other studios, good was often good enough. At M-G-M, it could invariably be better. As Mary Astor, who was one of its chief feature players, recalled, a painting never hung crooked in a Metro production, a door never squeaked and stocking seams were always straight. “Retake Valley,” Culver City was nicknamed, so frequently were casts and crews reassembled to reshoot flawed or troubled scenes. Irving Thalberg, Metro’s creative genius, set the standard when he said, “Films are not made, they’re remade.”

Even when everyone at the studio was satisfied, a feature was not considered finished until at least one test audience had announced its
approval at one of Metro’s most sacred rituals, the secret preview. On the designated night all those concerned would board a chartered Pacific Electric trolley car—in those days Southern California was crisscrossed by electric trolleys—and depart for someplace like Pomona or Santa Ana, a farming or working-class community supposedly untainted by the worldly attitudes of Hollywood. There, in a small theater much like the ones Frank Gumm had run, they would strain to hear the laughs and sighs of the first paying customers. If the test crowd’s verdict was favorable, the picture would be left alone; if not, yet more changes would be made.

Such a rigorous structure of checks and balances caught most big errors, and M-G-M’s highly centralized apparatus guaranteed a quality no other studio could consistently match. The worst Metro movie usually had a sheen and polish that declared that no corner had been cut, no effort had been spared. But if it turned out few truly bad movies, Metro also turned out few truly great ones, particularly after Thalberg’s death in 1936. Greatness thrives in an environment of independence and innovation, and both were viewed with profound suspicion at M-G-M. Talent was prized only as long as it worked within the tight framework of a team; anyone who attempted anything radically new was deemed a malcontent.