Get Happy (24 page)

The reason was obvious: M-G-M was suspicious, as always, of unruly individuality. It made no allowance for the charming deviation, such as the dimple embedded in Ava Gardner’s chin, that made a face not merely beautiful, but memorable. If Gardner, that spunky North Carolina cracker, had not threatened rebellion, Metro would happily have erased one of her most distinctive characteristics, thereby beautifying her into a nonentity.

The other studios also burned incense at the altar of beauty, of course, but none defined the word as narrowly as did Metro. Most of Metro’s competitors also recognized that, through the electricity of her personality, a woman who was not commonly considered a looker—a Bette Davis, for example, or a Barbara Stanwyck—could sometimes be more exciting, more glamorous even, than one who was. At M-G-M, a concession like that would have been branded as heresy, as subversive to the established order as an anarchist’s bomb. Let other studios have the Davises and the Stanwycks, Metro seemed to say—stars who looked like everyone else. Mighty M-G-M would continue to make movies—and profits—with stars who looked the way everyone else wanted to look.

Small wonder that, growing up in a place with such smug and unbending rules, a chunky teenager with a hard-to-fit body would have been awed and intimidated, made to feel more awkward than she actually was. Judy had been at Metro only a short time, in fact, when she
confided to a sympathetic Joan Crawford that she felt like a polliwog—a polliwog on its way to becoming a frog. “until M-G-M I had enjoyed being myself,” she was later to explain. “I had been judged by my talent, but in the movies beauty was the standard of judgment—and definitely I didn’t have it. And so I began to dislike the me I saw reflected in my mirror, especially when I compared myself with the real beauties on the lot, like Lana Turner, for instance.”

In her early years in Culver City, some tactful handling by the people in charge might have saved Metro, as well as Judy herself, untold amounts of future pain. But the studio that thought of its stars as high-paid serfs was not known for its tact. Week by week, month by month, in large ways and small, without any malicious intent and against its own best interests, it confirmed Judy’s opinion that she was an eyesore in an otherwise flawless landscape. From the start Metro simply assumed, and assumed that Judy assumed, that audiences would take one look at her and agree that she was the kind of girl no one would care to look at twice. Billie Burke’s line in
Everybody Sing
—“Poor little ugly duckling! Well, well, Mother loves you anyway”—summed up the tone of genial disparagement.

“Mr. Mayer calling her ‘my little hunchback’!” exclaimed an indignant Irene Sharaff, the inspiration behind some of Metro’s most brilliant costume designs. “Do you know what that did to a girl who was basically shy? A girl who was competing with the glamour pusses? It was torture.” To have been the silent recipient of such ridicule must have been torture indeed. For the advancement of her career, a Mayerrun M-G-M was the ideal studio for Judy; for her psychological and spiritual well-being, it was the worst. Metro made her a star, but it also destroyed, or helped to destroy, her self-confidence. She believed what she had been taught to believe: that she was, in truth, a poor little ugly duckling—an ugly duckling surrounded by swans.

A strong ego, built on a sturdy foundation of parental love, probably could have enabled even a shy girl to withstand Metro’s bombardment of slights and insults. Judy, however, did not have a strong ego. Missing from her makeup, to the astonishment of those who marveled at her
gifts, was a sense of her own merit. From the age of two she had been instructed that her identity was her performance, that the offstage Judy was a mere shadow of the one singing on stage: she was only as good as the folks out front said she was. If they liked her, her value as a person, as well as an entertainer, was ratified; if they did not like her, she had no worth at all. How hard, then, it must have been for her at M-G-M, where hands never clapped and voices were rarely raised in praise. Suddenly she was exposed, alone and vulnerable. “What is Judy so worried about?” someone scribbled on a comment card when
Babes in Arms
was previewed in Inglewood, a town just south of Culver City. “There is terror in her eyes.” So, to anyone who cared to look closely, there was.

Plain and unappealing was what Judy thought she was, in any event. As she blossomed into womanhood, she was persuaded that what she had feared most had come to pass—that the polliwog had finally turned into a frog. A hapless witness to her misery was Metro’s drama coach, Lillian Sidney, who in the autumn of 1940 helped prepare her for a difficult scene in
Ziegfeld Girl
, a musical melodrama in which Judy topped the bill with Lana Turner and Hedy Lamarr. Once again the script called for Judy to play a good girl, the cheery, dutiful and all but sexless daughter who is trying to help her father make a comeback in vaudeville. Turner and Lamarr were counted on for sex appeal—they were the ones men were expected to drool over. For a woman as uncertain as Judy was, the script was bad enough. Worse still, as she lamented to Sidney, was the attitude of the stagehands, who seemed to drool over everybody but her.

“Judy, dear, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Sidney asked anxiously when Judy, shrouded in gloom, walked into her office.

“I don’t like myself” was Judy’s short but devastating answer.

“Judy, hate yourself, but love your talent!” remonstrated Sidney. “You’re loaded!”

“Yes,” replied Judy. “But when Lana walks onto the set, all the guys whistle until she gets across. When Hedy walks on, there’s a sigh of I don’t know what. And when I walk on, they say, ‘Hi, Judy!’” To anyone who could not see, as Sidney did, the anguish in her face, such dialogue would have sounded more like farce than tragedy. It was not funny to Judy, however, and not all of Sidney’s heartfelt praise could boost her
anemic spirits—she listened, but did not hear. Deaf to all those who were now calling her pretty, blind to the evidence of her own eyes, Judy peered into the mirror and saw reflected back not the attractive young woman everyone else saw, but the comical hillbilly of
Pigskin Parade
. The silhouette of the pudgy girl she once had been was burned on her retina, and there it would remain. Completely coloring her existence, the ineradicable conviction that she was ugly affected virtually every thought she had, every move she made and every relationship she entered into.

Like the savage rites of the Aztecs, M-G-M’s religion of beauty demanded human sacrifice—an offering of spirit if not blood. Judy, who was its most devout believer, also sacrificed the most: she surrendered her self-regard. What she never was to realize was that her faith in the gospel according to Louis B. Mayer was woefully misplaced. The god that was celebrated in Culver City—that is, the moviegoing public—did smile on the beautiful. But it reserved its special blessing for a still rarer breed, those lucky few, who, beautiful or not, could keep it entertained. On them it did not merely smile; it positively beamed, grinning
with the crazy enthusiasm of first love. Judy belonged to that small and select group. For her, more than for Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr, or any of Metro’s other glamour pusses, audiences were always to have a tender affection.

The proof of that simple proposition came at the end of 1940, when the
Motion Picture Herald
, a trade journal, published its annual list of the stars whose films had made the most money in the previous twelve months. Only two women were among the top ten, and neither was among the perfect specimens so much admired in Culver City. One was Warner Bros.’ bug-eyed but electrifying Bette Davis—“Popeye the Magnificent,”
Time
magazine had facetiously anointed her. The other was Mr. Mayer’s little hunchback—Judy Garland.

Mayer, who had been counting the receipts all along, did not need the
Herald
to tell him how one of his stars was doing at the box office. Three months earlier, at the end of September, he had acknowledged Judy’s popularity by tearing up her old seven-year contract, which still had two years to run, and giving her a new one. Her salary was quadrupled, jumping from $500 a week to $2,000. Another rise, to $2,500, was scheduled for 1943, and a third, to $3,000, for 1945. His ears attuned to the sound of ringing cash registers, Mayer had belatedly realized, even if Judy had not, that though the swan may be more pleasing to the eye, the nightingale has greater powers of enchantment.

“The success of the little Garland girl has been one of Hollywood’s most interesting stories,” wrote Louella Parsons, and for once the dragon was right. From the spring of 1939, when she began shooting
Babes in Arms
, through the spring of 1943, when she finished
Girl Crazy
, Judy made ten pictures, dashing breathlessly from project to project, sometimes starting work on one while still doing final scenes for another. As if that hectic pace were not enough, she also maintained a busy radio schedule, appearing on the Bob Hope show every Tuesday night in 1940 and accepting a variety of guest spots in 1941 and the years thereafter.

Although it usually took longer to make a musical than it did to make other kinds of films, such a crowded agenda was not uncommon in the
Hollywood of the thirties and forties. What was uncommon was that in six of the ten movies she made during that period, Judy had the same costar, Mickey Rooney. What was more unusual, extraordinary even, was that in six of the ten, she was also directed, in whole or in part, by the same man—Busby Berkeley. The first partnership brought her nothing but smiles and joy; the second, little more than anxiety and exhaustion.

Judy’s collaboration with Mickey had actually started in 1937 with
Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry
, then had continued with
Love Finds Andy Hardy
in 1938. Though the sparks they struck provided the single flicker of interest in either of those two otherwise unmemorable pictures, it was not until their third film,
Babes in Arms
, went into previews that Metro awoke to what a potent and profitable combination they might be at the box office. “After such a hit Judy and Mickey should never be parted,” was the advice offered on one preview card. “Would appreciate Garland and Rooney again,” said another.