Get Happy (23 page)

Not since her father’s death had Judy been so distraught. She had been betrayed, she believed, both by Shaw and by Turner, in whom she had confided her feelings. Shortly after their flight to Las Vegas, she
went to the NBC radio studios for an appearance on Bob Hope’s show. Walking into the dressing room of a fellow singer, Margaret Whiting, she threw herself into Whiting’s arms, then, so complete was her despair, lurched away and started banging her head against the wall. “He said he wanted to marry me,” Judy cried. “I’m going to die. I’m going to kill myself.” Grabbing her, Whiting thrust her into a chair; then, with the help of David Rose, another guest on the show, she did her best to calm her down. “Never,” said Whiting, “have I seen anybody so devastated as Judy was that night.”

Desolate though she was, Judy once again was lucky that one of her crushes had not ended in wedding bells. Describing her marriage as hell, the third Mrs. Shaw walked away from it after only four months. Before he finished making trips to the altar, Shaw could count eight wives, two more than Henry VIII. “I made an unholy botch of every last one of them,” Shaw said, which seems to be about the truth of it. His friendship with Judy was, in fact, more enduring than any of his marriages. Putting on a smiling front, Judy visited the newlyweds a few times, prompting Shaw to inquire why she did not come around more often. Her answer, made without any apparent malice, was as lethal, yet as accurate, as any of Oscar Levant’s cracks. “Lana’s nice,” she said, “but talking to her is like talking to a beautiful vase.”

A beautiful vase, lovely to gaze at but tiring to talk to—that was Lana Turner. Yet if a sorcerer, brewing potions in some damp Malibu grotto, had told Judy he had a concoction that would enable her to trade places with Turner, she would have gulped it down in a second. “Who would you like to look like?” a friend asked her. Judy’s reply was instantaneous: “Lana Turner.
That
is beauty.”

The sultry young woman whom Walter Winchell, the reigning gossip columnist of the day, dubbed “America’s Sweater Sweetheart” had everything Judy longed for: looks, glamour, sex appeal and the ability to land any man she wanted, including the only man Judy wanted. “I liked the boys,” Turner recalled with relish, “and the boys liked me.” Blond buccaneer that she was, Turner liked them still more if she knew somebody else had her eye on them, and she may have gone after Artie Shaw
because Judy had told her of her infatuation: she was to make a mischievous habit of stealing Judy’s heartthrobs. “Every boyfriend I get, Lana comes and takes him away from me,” complained Judy. “I have a date with a guy, I mention him to Lana, and the first thing I know, she’s moved right in.”

Most other women would have reacted with hurt and anger to Turner’s gleeful plundering. Judy’s response was more revealing. She was always hurt and angry, of course. But after the initial shock and despair, she also sounded resigned, as if, deep down, she expected a sex goddess like Turner—a “queen of soft desire,” to use Homer’s happy phrase—to get the better of a mere mortal, particularly one as plain as Judy believed herself to be. Star though she now was, Judy was convinced that she was fat, homely and unattractive to men.

Her feeling of inferiority seemed to peak, perversely enough, in the very year, 1940, in which the rest of the world was starting to say, with genuine but delighted surprise, that the Garland girl had finally lost her baby fat—she was actually pretty, “dangerously near being glamorous,” in the words of one reporter. After a summer preview of
Strike Up the Band
, several comment cards were returned with remarks like “Judy is getting prettier all the time.” One enthusiastic member of the test audience went so far as to make a special plea for more movies featuring the “lovely Judy Garland,” underlining the word “lovely” so that nobody at Metro would miss the point.

What people were, in fact, noticing was not that Judy had lost some weight—though that was the case—but that she had sloughed off the cocoon of a difficult, lumpy adolescence: she was a woman. On June 10, she turned eighteen, an occasion honored by the presence of Mayer, the paterfamilias himself, who helped her cut her birthday cake. Two weeks later, on June 26, came a ceremony of equal significance. Wearing a blue organdy dress and clutching two pink roses, she received a diploma from Los Angeles’s University High School, her official school of record even while she was being tutored at M-G-M. No longer would shooting be interrupted so she could study grammar and geography, biology and American history. Childhood really was over.

Despite her unflattering assessment of herself, many men were beginning to take something more than a friendly interest. Shaw and
Oscar Levant may have resisted her advances, but there were dozens of others who found her captivating—a princess, if not a queen, of soft desire. “She had a great face, beautiful eyes and such a great personality,” said Sidney Miller, one of the gang that so often came to Stone Canyon Road. “I wanted to make it with her—Oh, God!—but to her I was just friend Sidney. ‘Hi, sweetie!’ she’d say, or, ‘Hi, doll!’”

Perhaps the most besotted of her admirers—alarmingly so, as it happened—was nineteen-year-old Robert Wilson. Smitten with the Judy he had seen dancing across movie screens in his hometown, snowy Buffalo, New York, he traveled all the way across the country to grab her and whisk her away to some cozy hideaway in the mountains.
JUDY GARLAND KIDNAP PLOT LAID TO “LOVE,”
declared the March 9 edition of the
Los Angeles Examiner
. Fortunately for Judy, the amorous Wilson, who had apparently staked out her house, succumbed to cold feet and disclosed his intentions to the Culver City police. Sounding as moonstruck as Miller, he told them why he was so irresistibly attracted to her. “Every time she wiggles that cute little pug nose of hers, I fall more in love with her,” he said. “She is my dream girl.”

Leery of love after the Shaw debacle, Judy herself was not irresistibly attracted to anyone, without a crush for perhaps the first time in years. As a result, she went out with not just one man, but several, a diverse list that included a handsome young actor, Robert Stack; a struggling comedian, Peter Lind Hayes; and a fledgling movie agent, Baron Polan. No less notable a Hollywood figure than Spencer Tracy, who was, at forty, more than twice her age, and married to boot, was seen holding her arm at one or another nightspot.

Escorted by such a changing cast of men, Judy hit the nightclubs almost as often as Turner, who had her own table at Ciro’s. Though Judy, along with nearly everyone else in the industry, was also a Ciro’s regular—“everybody that’s
anybody
will be at Ciro’s to-night,” boasted the club’s ad—she continued to patronize old standbys like the Cocoanut Grove and the Trocadero and adopted new favorites like the Victor Hugo and La Conga. For an insomniac like Judy, the evening did not end when the nightclubs closed. Very often she went on to one of the after-hours places that had a sleek, homosexual sheen: amusing spots like the Café Gala that guaranteed good, offbeat entertainment
and offered an urbane, liberated atmosphere. “It was kind of ‘in’ to go to gay clubs,” said one young actress, who often saw her in such places. “A lot of us did that. It was considered sophisticated.”

“Sophisticated” was not a word Metro wanted attached to Judy, and her nocturnal wanderings soon set off alarms in Culver City. It was all right for Turner to be labeled as a party girl; that only added to her onscreen allure. But it was not all right for Judy, whose girl-next-door image had become an important asset to the studio. Though Metro’s publicists, one of whom was stationed in every major club every night, made sure that its stars were never photographed smoking, drinking or doing anything else that their fans might consider naughty, they could not stop the columnists from reporting who was where—and with whom. Worried that too many such sightings might tarnish her innocent reputation, studio caretakers privately urged Judy to stay home more often. When their warnings were ignored, at the end of July they asked an authentic Hollywood dragon to help out by blowing a little smoke and fire in her direction. Glad to oblige, the dragon—Louella Parsons, whose widely syndicated movie column could make or break a career—wrote that “Judy Garland’s boss, who knows what’s best for the lively Judy, has requested that she curtail her night club activities.”

Even that public reprimand was not enough to stop the lively Judy. If Lana Turner could club-hop every night, why couldn’t she? She was tired of being regarded as the kind of girl a boy might safely take home to the family, a “nice, old-fashioned girl,” as Andy Hardy’s mother called her in
Andy Hardy Meets Debutante
. Nor did she want to be admired for her cute little pug nose, as if she were a child to be patted on the head or chucked under the chin. What she wanted was to be a seductress, a temptress who could look into a man’s eyes and cause him to reel with lust and longing, abandoning everything for just one delirious night with her. She wanted to smile at an Artie Shaw, as Turner had done, and cause him to tootle to her tune and her tune alone. She wanted, in short, to be Lana Turner.

Millions of others, including a few of Judy’s friends in Culver City, indulged in similar fantasies. That was one of the main reasons M-G-M movies were so popular. For an hour and forty-five minutes, ordinary people could forget their troubles, pretend that they were the gorgeous
leading lady or the virile leading man, and watch their daydreams unroll in front of them. But when the lights went back on, most of those once-a-week fantasists blinked their eyes, returned to reality and appeared content to be who they were. Judy was not so content: the movie star had become a prisoner of movie myth. More fervently than any Woolworth’s salesgirl, she believed that beauty was the ticket to romance and that if she only looked like Turner, she, too, could have any man she desired. Unable to accept the fact that she herself was merely pretty, Judy viewed Turner’s physical perfection, and the perfection of Metro’s other dazzling divinities, as a personal rebuke, a painful reminder of all she was not.

When Judy arrived in 1935, Culver City was the beauty capital of the world, and Metro’s lots were awash with several dozen of the most gorgeous females on the face of the globe. Greta Garbo. Jean Harlow. Joan Crawford. Myrna Loy. Norma Shearer. The list stretched on and on. From all over the world they came, actresses, dancers and contract players, many of whose names were known only to the casting department. At the end of the thirties came a second wave of ostentatious pulchritude—Hedy Lamarr; Greer Garson; Esther Williams; Lana Turner, of course—and another catalogue of anonymous lovelies. Wowed by the glamour parade in
Ziegfeld Girl
, the fourth picture Judy was to make in 1940,
Time
magazine allowed that beings so sensational did not need to act—undulating would be sufficient.

Glorious as they were—blond, brunette or redheaded—Metro’s glamour queens were all of a certain type, however. Wherever they came from, the united States, Canada or Europe, they all looked the way Louis B. Mayer, a Jew born in Russia and reared in Canada, imagined American women should look: fair-cheeked and vaguely Anglo-Saxon, with roots that seemed to extend all the way back to the
May flower
. Excluded from Mayer’s platonic conception was anyone who appeared at all “ethnic,” which in those days meant southern European or Jewish. A studio that was run almost entirely by Jews, as most of the Hollywood studios were, was thus, incongruously enough, perhaps the world’s most artful and successful purveyor of the myth that
only Gentiles could be beautiful. Even more incongruous was the fact that, no matter how handsome they might have been, none of the women in Louis B. Mayer’s own family could have been employed as a leading lady in a studio he controlled.

Sitting in their offices on the third floor of the Thalberg Building, Mayer and his myrmidons were convinced that they were Hollywood’s beauty experts. They had no doubt that they could grade a woman’s attractiveness as accurately as a jeweler could grade gems, or a metallurgist gold. They were at least partly right: the women who passed the third floor’s test were undeniably lovely, each and every one. Yet there was, it must also be said, an equally undeniable sameness, a perceptible blandness, to the group overall. Just as all gems of a like size and quality look much the same, so, too, did most of M-G-M’s standardized, homogenized beauties share a kissing-cousin resemblance.