Get Happy (27 page)

I
n the Hollywood of the forties, the matrimonial plans of a teenage star were scrutinized as carefully as those of an heir to the British throne. And for the same reason: the folks in charge did not want to offend the hoi polloi with an unpopular alliance. Judy had reaped the advantages of stardom—fame, money and the admiration of millions of her contemporaries. Now she was discovering one of the major disadvantages: if she valued her career, she needed the studio’s blessing before saying yes to any proposal of marriage. But the studio had no intention of giving its blessing, not anytime soon at least. If her nightclubbing caused annoyance, the possibility of an imminent betrothal brought forth an angry roar from the Metro lion, which saw in any union nothing but trouble.

With the exception of
Little Nellie Kelly
, in which she had portrayed a wife and mother, Judy had never played an adult. Her role had always been that of a virginal teenager, from Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
, to Betsy Booth in the Andy Hardy series, to the bouncy, fresh-faced youngsters in the
Babes in Arms
quartet. Such parts had made her one of Metro’s top money-earners, and such
parts, Metro believed, would continue to provide surefire profits for two or three years to come. “That baby,” Mayer called her, doing his best to ignore the fact that she was growing up—that, indeed, she had grown up. But all those grass-green parts, and possibly all those surefire profits, would disappear the minute she changed the title in front of her name from “Miss” to “Mrs.”

According to conventional wisdom, audiences naively assumed that the star and the screen character were essentially the same, that Clark Gable really was the he-man of
Gone With the Wind
and
Boom Town
, that William Powell really was the urbane wit of the
Thin Man
series, and that Judy Garland really was the corn-fed kid from Hardyland, to whom a peck on the cheek was a daring sexual adventure. By that logic, an actress whose wedding would be covered by all the fan magazines could not very well thereafter pretend that she was an unworldly adolescent, ignorant about what men and women do when the bedroom doors are closed. What if the new Mrs. Rose became pregnant? What would that do to her image? The suggestion sent shivers of terror scurrying down half a dozen well-padded spines on the third floor of the Thalberg Building.

In Metro’s opinion, Judy was not only rushing to the altar, but rushing with the wrong man, a man who was twelve years her senior, who was not good-looking and who was not even divorced—he would not be legally free of Martha Raye until March 1941. If Judy did marry him, she would not be the first, but the second Mrs. Rose. In an era in which many Americans still considered divorce a badge of dishonor, that was a serious and, from Metro’s vantage point, a decisive objection. Lana Turner, to repeat a refrain that Judy was doubtless tired of hearing, could get away with such things. Judy could not. What would her fans say if she married a divorced man? The studio did not want to hear. Its resistance to any marriage was firm; its opposition to Rose, implacable.

Metro’s scowling disapproval underlined Ethel’s own heartfelt objections. She, too, was convinced that Judy was not old enough to settle down; she, too, was convinced that when she did marry, Judy should find a husband closer to her own age, someone who did not carry the
burden of divorce. On the last point, she had good reason to worry. Ignoring her concerns, both her older daughters had married divorced men, and both had suffered as a result. Sue’s marriage to Lee Kahn had long since dissolved, while Jimmie’s marriage to Bobby Sherwood was showing signs of strain and would soon unravel altogether. Kahn and Sherwood were also musicians, which, to Ethel’s way of thinking, put a cloud over any subsequent horn-tootler or piano-pounder who came calling. The hapless Rose had been convicted without a trial. “I wish you girls would find someone who digs a slide rule instead of a slide trombone,” complained Ethel.

Judy’s humor and high spirits had disguised the fact that, from earliest childhood, she had been remarkably docile and obedient, almost always doing what her mother and, later, M-G-M told her to do, rather than what she wanted to do. Now, with her marriage plans under attack, with her lover under siege, missiles peppering him from all sides, she was neither docile nor obedient: she was defiant. Not only did she continue to see Rose in public, but she also saw him in private, using a variety of subterfuges to keep her suspicious mother from knowing where she was going and what she was doing. Ethel eventually learned the truth, however, and when she did, her indignant shouts rumbled along Stone Canyon Road like an earthquake. Faced with such profound hostility, Rose, who had been a reluctant suitor from the beginning, suggested they wait. Since everybody but Judy opposed their union, Louella Parsons assured her readers that it would never take place. “If you ask me”—though of course no one had asked her—“and if it is any comfort to M-G-M, I don’t think there is a chance of Judy and Dave marrying.”

What nobody—M-G-M, Ethel, Parsons or Rose himself—had reckoned with was Judy’s unexpected and unyielding determination: she loved Rose and she intended to become his wife. Every morning, as they were being made up for their parts in
Ziegfeld Girl
, she asked poor Eve Arden to listen to the gushy love poem she had written the night before. “She seemed like such a baby to me,” recalled the patient Arden,
“and so vulnerable.” A few weeks later she invited Rose to the Academy Awards ceremony, so that all Hollywood could behold what a happy pair they made.

Conveniently forgetting her earlier pronunciamento, even Parsons was starting to hear wedding bells ringing in the distance. “I am wondering what will happen when Dave Rose gets his final divorce decree in March!” she wrote. “Judy is frankly in love with him, and although they feel at M-G-M that it is just a young girl’s infatuation, still Judy is a young woman now, and if she decides to marry Rose, I doubt if anyone can change her mind.” No one could, and finally Ethel, too, accepted the inevitable. “If Judy has only a year’s happiness, it would be worth it to me,” she told a friend. “Because if I don’t let her marry Dave, she’ll always say, ‘Well, if you had let me marry him, I might have had some happiness.’”

More concerned about satisfying their stockholders, the glum-looking men in Culver City refused to join the rosy epithalamium. Feeling an unaccustomed chill coming from “that cold storage plant they call the Thalberg Building,” as Raymond Chandler once described it, an obviously worried Judy turned to Parsons for reassurance. “I don’t see how a happy marriage could possibly hurt a career, do you?” she plaintively inquired. Aside from issuing veiled warnings, there was, in fact, nothing Metro could do to stop a woman who, made misty-eyed by love, seemed immune to its threats, and on May 28 the newspapers carried word of her betrothal. “I want a home wedding,” said Judy, “with bridesmaids and all the trimmings. I don’t believe in silly elopements and since I only expect to be married once, both Dave and I consider it a very solemn occasion and we want a minister to officiate.”

A little more than two weeks later, on the afternoon of Sunday, June 15, her mother gave a combination engagement and birthday party—Judy had just turned nineteen, Rose, thirty-one. Tables and umbrellas were set up on the broad back lawn of the house on Stone Canyon Road, and perhaps as many as six hundred people watched the happy couple cut into their huge cake, which had been baked in the shape of hearts entwined. Much of Hollywood, from Joan Crawford, who was
photographed admiring Judy’s three-and-a-half-carat diamond engagement ring, to Lana Turner and Tony Martin, who gave her a set of huge cocktail mugs, drove up Stone Canyon Road on that flawless spring day. Nowhere to be seen, however, was Louis B. Mayer, who usually showed up at such occasions to honor favored stars with his thin-smiled benediction.

The wedding itself was tentatively scheduled for late summer, when both partners thought their work schedules would allow enough time for a honeymoon. But once having started down the road to matrimony, Judy was eager to reach the end, and on the evening of Sunday, July 27, over dinner at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills, she and David decided to end the wait—they would say their vows that very night. A phone call brought Ethel and Will Gilmore hurrying to the restaurant, and all four were soon aboard a Western Air Lines flight bound for Las Vegas. There, at exactly one-twenty on Monday morning, in his office in the courthouse, Justice of the Peace Mahlon Brown said the words that made Judy and David husband and wife.

Expected later that morning in Culver City, where shooting on
Babes on Broadway
was about to go into its third week, Judy dispatched a hasty telegram to Arthur Freed, begging for a few days’ honeymoon:
DEAR MR. FREED. I AM SO VERY VERY HAPPY DAVE AND I WERE MARRIED THIS AM PLEASE GIVE ME A LITTLE TIME AND I WILL BE BACK AND FINISH THE PICTURE WITH ONE TAKE ON EACH SCENE
. In no mood to indulge a star who had all but thumbed her nose at it, M-G-M answered with a deafening no: she must be back on the set that day, she was told. Thus it was that on Monday afternoon, July 28, less than twenty-four hours after they had left, bride and bridegroom were back in Los Angeles. “Even if we don’t get any sort of a honeymoon right now we’re the happiest couple in the world,” the new Mrs. Rose gamely told reporters. Theirs was not to be an ordinary Hollywood marriage, she added—“it’s the real thing.”

The Roses did, in fact, seem to be as happy as any two people could be. At last Judy had found the romance she had dreamed about, that she
had written soulful, tear-drenched poems about. “Would that my pen were tipped with a magic wand that I could but tell of my love for you,” she had written, “that I could but write with the surge I feel when I gaze upon your sweet face… .” But the new Mrs. Rose needed no magic wand to say what she felt when she gazed upon David’s sweet face: her eloquent and adoring eyes said it all. “She was insanely in love with him,” declared her old friend Sidney Miller, and no one could have accused him of exaggeration.

Since her own house was occupied by the Gilmores and since David’s house in the Valley was small and inconvenient, the newlyweds started married life at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, moving, at the end of October, into a place of their own on hilly Chalon Road in Bel Air. Quickly making himself at home, David laid his railroad tracks and was soon riding his trains over the almost mountainous terrain. Judy’s adjustment was somewhat harder. The house itself was her terrain, but she did not know how to navigate it, how to cook, clean, or hire help—anything. For all those domestic chores, she had always depended on her mother, and marriage had not made her less dependent, but more: now she had not only herself, but a husband and a big house to look after. She would have been lost if her mother, with her usual efficiency, had not stepped in to take charge. It was Ethel who engaged two servants to run things, and it was Ethel, living just a few minutes away, who supervised them.

Once settled, the Roses entertained with dinner parties and excursion trips on Bel Air’s only railroad. The “Gar-Rose Railway,” David named it, in a rather touching gesture to the bride who had given him a little train station as a wedding present. If anyone had wanted a portrait of marital bliss, it could have been found at 10693 Chalon Road. That, at least, was the opinion of those who visited there. “David was small and Judy was tiny, and they just made a darling-looking couple,” said Ann Rutherford. “You wanted to pick them up by the ankles and put them on the mantel.” For the first few months of their residence, Judy and David spent much of their time in their new house, near the mantel, if not on it. David did most of his arranging and composing at home, as he had always done, and Judy was enjoying a long break between
pictures:
Babes on Broadway
finished shooting on October 15, and rehearsals for
For Me and My Gal
did not begin until February 19, 1942.