Get Happy (28 page)

Punctuated only by radio and publicity spots, that rare sabbatical also gave Judy an opportunity to do something close to her heart—war work. War in Europe had begun less than two months after
Babes in Arms
was completed in the summer of 1939, and war, or the threat or war, was to make its presence felt, however obliquely, in almost every movie she made during the next six years. The bugles sound loudest in
For Me and My Gal
, which is actually set during wartime—World War I. It is the story of vaudeville troupers—Judy and Gene Kelly, a newcomer from Broadway—who rise to the top, but break up when the ambitious Kelly, putting his career ahead of his country, schemes to escape service. Only after he has been shamed by Judy, whose brother has been killed in the trenches, does he repent, sail off to France and become a hero in the ambulance corps. To every young American who watched it at the beginning of another war, the picture’s message was clear: do your duty.

Even the sunny
Babes in Arms
movies were affected in odd and unpredictable ways by the ongoing battles. After
Babes in Arms
itself, Mayer ordered Arthur Freed to begin
Strike Up the Band
. “It sounds so patriotic,” he explained. Freed, who was always the first to agree with Mayer, instantly dumped another project, for which writers had already been hired. “I guess you’re right, boss,” he said. “I’ll get on it immediately.” So he did, and as a result of Mayer’s concern, a jarring note of jingoism was inserted into a film that, stripped to its basics, is about nothing more serious than Mickey and his pals chasing girls and trying to win a high school band competition. “Look at George Gershwin,” says Mickey, in a dubious tribute to the composer of
Strike Up the Band
’s title song. “Why, his music’s as good as Beethoven or Bach—better, maybe. Best of all, it’s American.” Lest anyone miss the point, the picture ends with a raising of the Stars and Stripes, over which are superimposed the faces of Judy and Mickey: in the eyes of M-G-M’s image makers, they, too, were symbols of America.

Judy, who believed every red, white and blue line that the scriptwriters handed her, did not need to see the flag waving to do what she thought was her part for her country. Without prompting from Mayer or anybody else, she made several appearances in 1941 to sell Treasury bonds and to raise money for America’s friends, the embattled Britons, Greeks and Chinese. Early in December, she also made her first trip to an Army camp, traveling with David, who played the piano for her, to Fort Ord in Northern California, more than three hundred miles from Los Angeles. They were there on Sunday, December 7, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States was finally yanked into the maelstrom.

Like the vaudevillian she was to play in
For Me and My Gal
, Judy now volunteered to spend much more of her time entertaining the troops. One of the first stars to respond to the War Department’s call for morale-boosting visits to Army camps, she set out in January 1942, with David at her side, on an extensive and exhausting tour, journeying east to do three shows a day, eight songs a show—and that did not include appearances to sell war bonds and war stamps in the towns they passed through along the way. Unfortunately, her eagerness to help was stronger than her constitution. Her schedule was too rigorous, and the conditions, poky trains and cold, drafty halls, proved too harsh. After visiting five camps and a hospital, she collapsed at Camp Walters, Texas, with a severe case of strep throat. Forced to halt her tour, Judy returned to California in early February, pale, thin and still quite sick, yet promising to go out again when she had recovered.

She was as good as her word. Several months later, in the summer of 1942, she and David went on the road once more, entertaining at seven camps in seven states. At the end of July they celebrated their first wedding anniversary at Camp Robinson, Arkansas, where the cooks, who had learned the significance of the date, surprised them with a giant cake, complete with a tiny bride and groom perched high atop its frosty summit. The cake was more than a little late, however, and the real bride and groom must have viewed their miniature counterparts with sad irony. For the fact of the matter was that Judy and David were no longer the happiest couple in the world; they were, indeed, not happy at all.

As early as April 1942, less than nine months after their flight to Las Vegas, gossips were wondering whether Judy’s wan appearance was the aftermath of her bout with strep throat, or a symptom of an unhappy marriage. “Judy hasn’t been well for the last few months,” reported Louella Parsons, “and because she has been rundown and thin rumors have been gathering fast and furious that she and Dave Rose, her musician husband, had reached a definite parting of the ways.” Never reluctant to pose an awkward question, Parsons then asked Judy whether the reports were true. “Gosh,” replied Judy, “I wish I knew who started that gossip. Honestly, Dave and I haven’t had any trouble and I am just starting to feel better. I wish people wouldn’t try and separate us.”

At least the last part of her answer was accurate. People, mostly the dark-suited people in the Thalberg Building, were trying to pry her away from David—and had been from the beginning. Still angry at her unaccustomed disobedience, Mayer and his men acted like sour in-laws, incessantly sniping at a union of which they so thoroughly disapproved. Indeed, said Hedda Hopper, “they turned on Judy like rattlesnakes. On Academy Awards night, she had sat for years at the number-one table along with the rest of the M-G-M stars. As Mrs. David Rose she was deliberately humiliated and seated at a much less desirable spot on the side and out of the spotlight… . They actually believed that she belonged to them, body and soul. They’d created her; why couldn’t she show more gratitude?” Studio hangers-on tried to poison their relationship, added Hopper, by convincing her that David was trading on her popularity to boost his career; when she walked with him through the streets of Culver City, such people would greet her but ignore him. Judy herself thought that the studio used its influence to keep David from getting jobs.

Powerful as it was, however, Metro was not omnipotent. David did work, Judy’s real friends did greet them both and Judy did attend the Academy Awards. In a neat riposte to those who had relegated her to a table in Siberia, she even invited Hopper to join her chilly exile. “Love to,” said Hopper, who then told Mayer how shabbily she thought he was treating Judy. “But he was immune to shame or compassion,”
Hopper wrote in her memoirs. “I wasted my breath.” The fact was that although Metro’s petulance may have exacerbated the difficulties in the Rose marriage, it did not create them, and two contented people could have ignored Leo the Lion’s peevish snarls. Judy and David had only themselves to blame, and their unhappiness was entirely of their own making.

There was, to begin with, the disparity in their ages. When they were dating and spending only a small part of their time together, the twelve years that divided them had seemed trivial—so Judy had liked to say, anyway. On Chalon Road, where they shared a life, the distance between them stretched wider than the Grand Canyon. If Judy had been a more mature nineteen, or if David had been a more youthful thirty-one, it might have shriveled into insignificance. But Judy was, to use her own words, “a mixed-up little girl,” and David was more staid and settled than many men in their forties and fifties—inhibited, prudish and dull, Judy later confided, even in their sexual relations. “He acts like an old man,” she complained to her friend Dorothy Walsh.

Yet the calendar alone could scarcely have explained the yawning gap between them, and the real difference was not so much in age as in temperament. Like her father, Judy delighted in company, in laughing and making those around her laugh. She loved to dance, and when they were first married, she unsuccessfully tried to persuade David to take lessons. But David was neither a laugher nor a dancer. He enjoyed few things more than being alone, putting on his engineer’s cap and toot-toot-tooting along the Gar-Rose Railway. “Judy was outgoing, fun, vivacious, with energy to the hilt,” said Dorothy Raye, a Metro dancer who knew them both. “Dave gave her nothing to attach to.”

Beneath his placid exterior, his smooth, smiling imperturbability, David was as mixed up as she was. “Always churned up inside,” as he himself said, he was a repository of anxieties and emotional conflicts, a man who, within a couple of years, was to be hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. The other men in Judy’s life had said what was bothering them—Artie Shaw had never shut up about it. David, by contrast, dealt with his problems quietly, all by himself, venting his anger not through words, but indirectly, through long, ominous silences and acts of what psychologists call passive aggression. In perhaps the most glaring
example of the latter, Judy came home one afternoon to find her grand piano lying flat on the floor—David had sawed off its legs. His only reply to her outraged screams was that he thought he could compose more comfortably lying down.

More disturbing than the things he did, however, were the things he did not do—his protracted silences. With David, the calm before the storm
was
the storm. “Sullen” was the label Martha Raye, the first Mrs. Rose, had applied to him. “Brooding” was the adjective the second Mrs. Rose preferred. Both words meant the same thing: self-absorbed to the point of solipsism, David could very well have lived alone on a desert island. Late at night Judy would find herself gazing forlornly out the window, watching her new husband riding “his little toy trains,” as she later called them, in endless, maddening circles. “I am very much in love,” she had said on what seemed like a long-ago day in Las Vegas. But she had not spoken for David, who, she now bitterly acknowledged, would rather be outside, running the Chalon Road Choo-choo, than inside with her. “I’m miserable,” she at length told a friend. “I’m just plain unhappy.”

Though he maintained his silence, David, too, had reasons to complain. One of the most prominent reasons was Ethel, who, having finally given her blessing to the marriage, automatically assumed that she would manage David’s money as well as Judy’s. Although he managed to evade that particular snare, David could not escape Ethel herself; whether he liked it or not, she was indispensable to the operation of his house. Yet even under her commanding eye, life on Chalon Road could be uncomfortably bumpy, and Judy, whose vision of wedlock had been all hearts and flowers, was unequal to the task of maintaining anything resembling a stable and well-ordered home. Dinner guests once knocked at the front door, for instance, to find their host and hostess already dining in bed—Judy had forgotten she had asked them. Other times, because she had not learned to keep an engagement book, she and David would invite different people for the same night, or realize too late that they had accepted conflicting invitations. The result was inevitable: needless confusion and hurt feelings.

Elsa Maxwell, the well-known forties columnist and gadabout who repeated those stories, said that she had no idea what David did wrong
in their marriage, but that she did know that the Judy of those years was “completely unfitted to be a wife.” Judy herself would not have disagreed with that harsh indictment—“I was in a cocoon emotionally,” she admitted—and at home, as at work, she watched helplessly as other people pulled the strings. Acting as if Judy were a child of nine, the married couple Ethel had hired to run things addressed her by her first name instead of her last, as they would have done with any other employer, and generally did what they thought best, rather than what she asked them to do. She told them what she wanted for dinner; they told her what she would be eating.

Thus, to the long list of those who bullied and bossed her, the overbearing Ethels, Mayers and Busby Berkeleys, she now had to add her own servants. “Sometimes I’d, I’d, I’d want to feel—um—as though I had some dignity and was really capable,” she said a few years later, still stuttering with resentment at their demeaning, patronizing behavior. “I’d get so indignant with them.” But her indignation did her no good at all: they still did exactly as they wanted to do, or as Ethel had instructed them to do.