Get Happy (25 page)

After counting the picture’s unexpectedly large grosses, M-G-M was quick to oblige: if the public wanted Garland and Rooney together, the public would get them together. Judy was written into the scripts of two more Hardys,
Andy Hardy Meets Debutante
in 1940 and
Life Begins for Andy Hardy
in 1941, and she was paired with Mickey in the second installment of what was to be, in everything but name, a four-part
Babes in Arms
series. “You Asked for
another
‘Babes in Arms,’” the studio said in its ads for the sequel,
Strike Up the Band
. “Here it is!” The popularity of
Strike Up the Band
, which was released in 1940, led, in turn, to
Babes on Broadway
in 1942, and the success of that resulted in
Girl Crazy
a year later.

Once it had a winning formula, as it had in the continuing Hardy saga, Metro repeated it again and again, and sometimes again and again after that. A genealogist might argue, in fact, that the
Babes in Arms
pictures were not really a new series, but an offshoot of the Hardys. Mickey is still the central character, concocting schemes, issuing orders and getting himself in and out of trouble. Judy is his right hand, his chief adviser and his conscience, the not-so-gentle voice that informs him when he is breaking Hardyland’s strict code of honesty, integrity and small-town piety.

The only real difference between the Hardy series and its
Babes in Arms
offspring is the music. In each of the
Babes in Arms
installments, Mickey and Judy convince their stagestruck gang to put on a musical to raise money for some worthy cause. Obstacles arise and disaster looms, but ten or fifteen minutes before the film ends, they put on a show that Ziegfeld would have cheered. Judy sings, Mickey struts and dozens of dancers join them to demonstrate what a group of eager kids can do when they have a liberal budget, the most modern equipment and the support of the biggest studio in the world—no one ever claimed that a Metro musical had anything more than a passing acquaintance with reality.

“We performed magic, the two of us, together, on film,” said Mickey, and he was not exaggerating: something rare and remarkable did take place when he and Judy teamed up for the cameras. Those working on their sets were accustomed to their off-camera clowning, to hearing Mickey’s jokes, then, from Judy, a glissando of laughter, as carefree and playful as a waterfall. Judy and Mickey were not two actors who had to pretend to be friends; they were friends. They were, indeed, each other’s biggest fans.

At Metro, Mickey gave Judy what she called her “first real insight into acting.” Though she had already made five movies, it was not until he pulled her aside on her first Hardy that she felt she was on her way to becoming a good actress. “Just before our first scene together,” she recalled, “he took my hands and said, ‘Honey, you gotta believe this, now. Make like you’re singing it.’ And all at once I knew what I had been doing wrong. Good singing is a form of good acting; at least it is if you want people to believe what you’re singing. If you can make yourself
believe
what you’re saying—and you have to say some pretty silly things in musicals—everything else falls into place. Your timing, your gestures, your coordination, all take care of themselves.”

After that, they were a perfect match—sympathetic hearts and quicksilver minds. Blessed with photographic memories, both could glance at a script, then repeat it word for word when the director yelled “Action!” Confident, cocky even, they never stopped trying to shake each
other with lines and movements of their own invention. “With other actresses, I had to play everything straight,” said Mickey. “If I tried to clown around with a novice, fiddle with the timing, or ad-lib, I’d rattle her and ruin the scene. With Judy, it was the exact opposite. We actually tried to throw each other off track, tried to get the other one to mess up a scene.”

Almost two years older, Mickey assumed the role of older brother to the girl he nicknamed “Jootes.” Though the studio publicity machine tried to exploit their affection by hinting at romance, they were, to Judy’s visible chagrin, never more than close friends. Like Betsy Booth in the Hardy movies, Judy obviously adored Mickey, her eyes jealously watching him watching the beauties who populated any Metro musical. “Mickey understood me,” she was later to say. “And he must have known I was crazy about him.” Mickey did know it, but the Hardy pictures had accurately reflected the nature of their relationship: he was as crazy about her as she was about him, but in a nonsexual, arm-around-the-shoulder kind of way. Like Andy Hardy, he was on the lookout for prettier, sexier girls. “I have always loved Judy without ever being
in
love with her” was how he characterized his feelings.

Romance or no romance, their relationship caught the public’s fancy, and by 1943 the combination of Garland and Rooney meant a guaranteed hit for M-G-M. “One of the hottest box office announcements that any exhibitor could make these days,” reported
Box Office Digest
, “is the simple listing of the names ‘Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland’ on his marquee—and not worry about the title of his picture.” Since Mickey was the bigger and more established star, it is not surprising that Metro paid him more than it did her. What is surprising is that it gave him so much more, double or triple what Judy received: $23,400 versus her $8,833 for
Babes in Arms
, for example, and $68,167 versus her $28,667 for
Girl Crazy
. Money talks, and those loquacious figures say two things simultaneously: actresses were generally paid less than actors in Hollywood, and even under her new, more lucrative contract, Judy was grossly shortchanged by M-G-M.

The passage of time has made the inequity all the more glaring. Though Mickey was an actor of diverse and exceptional gifts, he often seemed overwhelmed by his own talent, and his uncontrolled mugging,
which Metro unwisely encouraged, is now embarrassing to see. He could do everything, as
Time
magazine’s critic tartly remarked, except behave himself. It is Judy alone who prevents his runaway ego from turning the
Babes in Arms
stories into portraits of Mickey. Despite the scripts, which spotlight him rather than her, she is the still center around whom the pictures rotate. What is clear today, as it was to some then as well, is that whenever they are together, Judy, without even trying, steals the scene from Hollywood’s most shameless scene stealer.

Busby Berkeley, Judy’s other collaborator in the early forties, was also both uniquely gifted and conspicuously out of control. The driving force behind the Warner Bros. musicals of the early thirties, a landmark list that includes
42nd Street, Footlight Parade
and the
Gold Diggers
series, Berkeley was the master of the motion-picture extravaganza, the Cecil B. DeMille of the movie musical.

Berkeley had learned the craft of choreography, oddly enough, not on the stage, but on the parade grounds of France, where he drilled American troops during World War I; his innovative screen numbers owed more to West Point than they did to Hollywood, Broadway or the Ballets Russes. Interested less in individuals than in masses, Berkeley deployed scores, sometimes hundreds, of dancers in a myriad of different and arresting ways: his signature number was a giant kaleidoscope in which each dancer was but a tiny piece in an ever-changing, mesmerizing pattern. By 1939, Berkeley’s reputation for cinematic derring-do had already made his name part of the American vernacular: in the
American Thesaurus of Slang
, a “Busby Berkeley” was defined as “a very spectacular, elaborate, and original number.”

The trouble for Judy, who worked with him on
Ziegfeld Girl
and
For Me and My Gal
, as well as the four
Babes in Arms
pictures, was that the creation of a Busby Berkeley could be a wrenching, nerve-racking experience. Like most obsessives, Berkeley never knew when to stop. He always demanded too much—too much from the scenes he directed, too much from his actors, too much from his crews, too much even from himself. “There was fun and there certainly was excitement,” he said, “but what I mostly remember is stress and strain and exhaustion.”
Convinced that he was always on trial, that he always had to top himself, Berkeley rehearsed endlessly, oblivious to the clock. Once shooting began, he would think nothing of keeping his cameras rolling long after midnight, until one, two, three o’clock in the morning. On one picture,
Lady Be Good
, he forced poor Eleanor Powell to dance so long and so hard that she limped away covered with bruises, as if he had beaten her with his fists, which, in a sense, he had.

Judy’s bruises were only emotional, but far more painful in the long run. At the end of each picture she, too, felt as if she had been beaten. An alcoholic with what Mickey called an “alcoholic’s perfectionism,” Berkeley had a mean and vigilant temper that turned the slightest misstep into an occasion for a public denunciation. “If you couldn’t toe the line,” said Mickey, “make it just so for Buzz, he’d go crazy.” Always a quick study, Judy had never had much difficulty pleasing other directors. But she was unable to satisfy Berkeley, who seemed to take sadistic pleasure in berating and belittling her. Although he perceived, quite correctly, that her animated eyes were one of her best assets, she could never open them widely enough to make him happy. “Eyes! Eyes! I want to see your eyes,” he would bellow, forcing her, in some shots, to push them out so ostentatiously that she appeared to be suffering from a thyroid condition. The effect was startling enough for one London critic to remark, in a review of
Girl Crazy
, on the “pop-eyed Garland charm.”

The cruelty of Berkeley’s tongue shocked even Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons’s chief rival in the Hollywood gossip trade and the possessor of a pretty cruel tongue herself. Visiting one set, Hopper noticed a wild gleam in his eyes, as, in take after take, he yelled and screamed at an increasingly nervous and agitated Judy. “She was close to hysteria,” wrote Hopper. “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.’” Conjuring up the image of Simon Legree standing over a cringing Eliza, Judy told Hopper that she felt as if he were lashing her with a big black bullwhip. “Sometimes I used to think I couldn’t live through the day,” she said. “Other times I’d have my driver take me round and round the block because I hated to go through the gates.”

The torment of working with “that crazy old Busby Berkeley,” as Esther Williams was to call him, began to take its toll. By the end of
Strike Up the Band
, Judy was so tired, emotionally as well as physically, that even her mother, the pusher and the prodder, became alarmed, brusquely informing the studio that thenceforth she would not let her daughter work more than eight hours a day. Metro’s response was not recorded; but whatever it was, it was unfavorable. Mayer would not let Ethel, or anybody else, tell him how to run his studio, and it was probably then that he barred Ethel from the lot, not allowing her to return for several months, by which time she presumably had learned to mind her own business.