Get Happy (20 page)

“I’m going to be a movie star,” Babe Gumm had told people in Lancaster. Now, transformed into Judy Garland, she had achieved that extravagant ambition, sooner and more spectacularly than perhaps even she could have conceived. By the fall of 1939, just four years after coming to Culver City, she had become one of M-G-M’s hottest properties, the crown princess, if not the queen, of the lot. Audiences were still lining up to see the
The Wizard of Oz
when
Babes in Arms
opened to yet bigger crowds, surpassing
Oz
and all of Metro’s other big-budget pictures to end up as the studio’s biggest grosser of the year. Judy had made only two movies in 1939, but both ranked among the year’s top ten at the box office. Radio, a medium she had helped pioneer back in 1928, magnified her fame still further; beginning September 26, she became a regular on Bob Hope’s
Chesterfield Radio Hour
, which was heard by millions every Tuesday night.

In 1936, when Deanna Durbin had rocketed past her, Ida Koverman had comforted a tearful Judy with the promise that her day would also come: her footprints, too, would adorn the pavement in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, the closest thing Hollywood had to a hall of fame. On October 10, the night of
Babes in Arms’
West Coast premiere, Koverman’s prediction came to pass. Dressed in a gown by Adrian, Metro’s chief costume designer—“I wanted to look glamorous that night,” she said, “as I had never wanted to before, or since”—Judy reenacted one of the oddest rituals in a town that venerated the odd and peculiar. With Mickey Rooney helping on her right side, her mother on her left, she pressed her feet and hands into a slab of wet cement, so that, like the image of some girl of Pompeii, immortalized by a belch from Vesuvius, her lithic impression would remain long after she herself was gone. “For Mr. Grauman, All Happiness,” she scrawled. “Judy Garland, 10–10–39.” She had arrived: she was a star, really and truly.

A movie star needs a movie star’s house, and in 1939 Judy moved into hers. In a landscape dotted with theaters in the shape of Oriental
pagodas and Egyptian temples, restaurants that resembled men’s hats, coffee shops that masqueraded as giant hot dogs, and gasoline stations that were topped by flying horses, the stars felt free to indulge their own most opulent fantasies. Some chose Spanish haciendas and the tinkling fountains of Seville; others preferred the half-timbered wainscoting of Elizabethan England, the pointed turrets of medieval Normandy, or one of a dozen other styles they might have gleaned from the
National Geographic
—Old World whimsy with New World plumbing.

Judy’s fantasy was just the opposite, but, in its own way, just as whimsical. Since leaving Lancaster, she had changed addresses ten times or more; she had no place she could call her own, no tree she had watched grow from a sapling, no memorabilia-stuffed attic she had explored on rainy days. “We’re going to move again!” her mother, who disliked staying very long in one place, would gaily announce, and once more they would begin packing. Now, with her career firmly established, Judy yearned for roots, for a sense of belonging. Her idea of a house was not something strange or exotic, mock Tudor, pseudo-Spanish or bastardized Chinese; she wanted a house that spelled home, the kind of all-American home she had had, or liked to think she had had, in Grand Rapids.

She got what she asked for at 1231 Stone Canyon Road in Bel Air, a section of Los Angeles that was as exclusive as nearby Beverly Hills, but quieter and more countrified, with pungent eucalyptus scenting the air and pesky deer descending from the hills to graze on lawns and hedges. An idealized vision of New England, her house had a brick exterior, a covered front porch, rustic shingles and a white picket fence. “Friendly” was the adjective one reporter attached to it. Suggesting hot cider and a cozy fire on a cold and blustery day, it was Connecticut as the M-G-M art department might have imagined it, which is to say that it was more Connecticut than Connecticut. Not grand enough to be described as a mansion, the house was roomy enough, nonetheless, for an ever-changing cast: Ethel; Ethel’s mother, Eva Milne; and Judy’s sister Sue, who was now divorced from her musician husband. Judy’s other sister, Jimmie, who had also married a musician—her engagement to Frankie Darro had not resulted in a wedding—often came by with her husband and baby daughter, Judalein. Judy herself had a suite
upstairs, with a private bath, a mirrored dressing room and a large bedroom, complete with a fireplace and sofas, in which she could entertain.

What Judy was really seeking in her Christmas-card house was, of course, a Christmas-card atmosphere, those sentimental things carolers sing about once a year—a welcoming hearth, cheery company and the security that can be found in a loving family. But Frank, who had supplied all that and more with just a smile, was dead, and warmth and intimacy were perhaps the only things the capable Ethel was incapable of providing. In their absence, the rosy, rutilant glow of Stone Canyon Road was rendered bogus and counterfeit. Like the period houses that lined the stage streets on Metro’s Lot 3, Judy’s dream house was little more than a set, a beautiful façade, with nothing, nothing at all, behind it.

Hoping to make some money when she was living in Lancaster, Ethel had written a song about a parent’s love for a daughter—“Deep, Deep in My Heart,” she had titled it. “Did I hear you sigh little girl?” began her lachrymose lyrics. “Life’s too short to cry little girl. Let those eyes of blue just keep smilin’ thru’ and, remember I love you.” But it was just a song; she harbored no such sentiments deep in her own heart, or, if she did, she neglected to let her own girls see them. Much as she tried to believe that her mother loved her, Judy could never be certain. Although publicity photographs from the time show them in happy, smiling embrace (“Mother and I—we’re almost one person,” Judy told a fan magazine), off-camera the embraces were infrequent and the opposite of what might have been expected: Judy would hug her mother, but her mother was never seen to hug her. “Ethel didn’t love Judy the way Judy’s dad did,” was the sad observation of Dorothy Walsh, who had known the family since Lancaster days. “But then Ethel was not affectionate to anyone. Hugging wasn’t her way of doing things.”

The nature of a relationship is sometimes best delineated not by dramatic, landmark events but by seemingly trivial moments, candid snapshots that catch their subjects unawares and record the give-and-take of an ordinary day. So it was that a small incident during the making of
The Wizard of Oz
offered a glimpse of unrehearsed life with Ethel. There was a little party in Judy’s dressing room, the end of which found Judy sitting on the floor at her mother’s feet, her arms wrapped fondly around her mother’s legs. Then, thinking perhaps of similar occasions when her father was alive, she startled everybody with a flood of tears. “Why can’t it be like the good old days in Grand Rapids?” she cried. “Why can’t it be like the olden days?” Embarrassed, and not knowing what to say, her friends waited expectantly for her mother to reach down, hold her tightly and blanket her with words of comfort and reassurance—to do what their own mothers would have done. But the words and gestures that come so naturally to most mothers were altogether alien to Ethel: she made not a move, said nothing.

All children want and need affection from their mothers and fathers. For adolescent stars like Judy the concern was more urgent. They were dependent on their parents, as all children are; but, in a reversal of the usual order of things, their parents were even more dependent on them—the children were the family breadwinners. Without them, there would have been no house, no car and no new clothes, and Mommy and Daddy would have been scratching, as most Americans were in the thirties, merely to survive and put food on the table. The young stars knew all that—they were told often enough—and, like it or not, they had to ask themselves some unsettling questions. Did their parents take such good care of them because they loved them? Or because they brought in a paycheck every week? Where Frank was concerned, Judy had never had any doubts. Above her mother, however, hung a permanent question mark.

What seemed like incontrovertible evidence of the stoniness of Ethel’s heart came in November 1939. On her forty-sixth birthday the Widow Gumm—or Mrs. Garland, as she was now known—traveled to Yuma, Arizona, just over the California line, to stand before a justice of the peace. There, in his office, she exchanged vows with Will Gilmore, a widower himself after the death of the long-suffering Laura. Ethel’s old paramour had been her frequent escort, and the marriage should have caught nobody by surprise. Yet surprise it did, and the reaction of Ethel’s daughters, all of whom detested their mother’s sour-faced lover, was disbelief followed by anger. “They were absolutely dumbfounded,”
recalled Dorothy Walsh. “The general feeling was, ‘Oh, no, not Will!’” But Will it was.

It is not uncommon for children to disapprove of second marriages, and Ethel, well into middle age, could scarcely be faulted for ignoring their unhappy faces and making her own choice, bad as it may have been. What Ethel could be faulted for—what was dumbfounding—was not her decision to marry Gilmore, but her choice of a wedding date. November 17 was not only her birthday; it was also the anniversary of Frank’s death. If she had spat on his grave, Ethel could not have shown greater contempt for her children’s father and all their years together. “That was the most awful thing that ever happened,” Judy was to say. “My mother marrying that awful man the same day that my daddy died.”

Making separate arrangements for his own children, two of whom were old enough to be on their own, the bridegroom soon exchanged his address in Santa Paula, a town north of Los Angeles, for the one on Stone Canyon Road. There, in a photograph taken a few weeks after the wedding, Gilmore, caught in a rare smile, can be seen taking part in the traditional gathering around a tinsel-draped Christmas tree.

But the smiles soon faded, and Ethel’s cynical daughters may have been right in suspecting that Gilmore had married their mother for the money made by Judy—Judy, whom he had so delighted in mocking and disparaging and belittling. He gave the impression that he was after her money, anyway, when, his bags barely unpacked, he made a bold grab for control of his new family’s finances. “From here on in,” he declared, “I intend to take over all the handling of business in this family.” To which Ethel quite predictably replied: “Like hell you will! Judy’s money? Never!”

The temperature on Stone Canyon Road plummeted from there, and Gilmore may soon have wondered whether he had made a mistake in going to Yuma. Judy fumed at the thought that her hard-earned dollars were helping to support Will and his children—Ethel bought one of the Gilmore boys a car—and she did her best to avoid him. Ethel’s Milne relations were not much more cordial. “He was a fast-talker, a slicker, a used-car salesman who reeked of insincerity,” said her nephew James Milne. “I didn’t want anything to do with him.” As lovers living
apart, Ethel and her Will might have continued for many years; as husband and wife, they could not go on. Marriage had doomed their relationship—not because they were too dissimilar, but because they were too much alike, impatient, bossy and controlling. They were both bulldozers, accustomed to pushing aside anybody, spouses and children included, who had the misfortune to stand in their way.

The only surprise is that they lived together as long as they did, three and a half years. They finally confessed failure and separated on March 17, 1943, receiving their official divorce papers on August 2, 1945. To Judy the damage had been done several years earlier, however; it had been done, indeed, on that terrible day in November 1939. In betraying her father’s memory, she felt, her mother had betrayed her as well, and it would be hard to say that she was wrong. The wound never healed. Many years later, when her girlhood friend Muggsey Ming started to give her an update on the Gilmore children, Judy’s reaction was almost violent. “Don’t even mention their name to me!” she shouted. “I don’t want to know anything about them. Nothing!”