Get Happy (31 page)

Some romances, like Judy and David’s, are doomed, and obviously so, from the start. Others, like Judy and Tyrone’s, bear the stamp of smiling fortune, and fail only because the lovers lack the endurance and
grit to see their problems through to a conclusion. If Tyrone was shy the grit, Judy was short the endurance. Though she turned twenty-one on June 10, a few days after she came back from New York, emotionally she remained an adolescent, an impatient child who demanded too much, too soon, and, as a result, wound up with nothing. If she had waited for her man until the end of the war, as millions of other women were loyally doing, the icy barriers that blocked her way in the spring of 1943 probably would have melted to little puddles. Until the fighting stopped, Power could have been no more than a distant, absentee husband in any case, his address a remote island in the Pacific. Waiting would have cost her nothing.

Judy might have shown more patience if she had been able to ignore the poison her best friend, that artful Iago, Betty Asher, was pouring into her ear. The most damaging story Asher passed on to her, the one that killed any possibility of reconciliation, was that Power was entertaining his Marine buddies with her love letters. Such tawdry behavior was so alien to Power’s character that Asher’s story was almost certainly a brazen falsehood. Astonishingly, Judy believed it, however, and she was, of course, grievously wounded at being made sport of. Retaliating, as she often did, with humor, she nicknamed poor Tyrone “Tyroney the Phony,” refusing thenceforth to acknowledge his cards or messages.

Just a few months earlier they had identified with the young lovers in Mildred Cram’s
Forever
, whose devotion was so strong that it survived death itself. “We’ll find each other. Somewhere. Somehow,” the hero assures the heroine, and so, on the last page, they do. But that was a happy ending Judy and Tyrone were not destined to see, and when they talked about each other afterward, they could not hide a note of regret, which echoed through their words like the faint sound of a lonely cello, for what might have been—for the “land of lost content,” as Housman so aptly named it. “It really was different between Tyrone and me,” Judy was to say. “It was no small affair.”

It was no small affair for Power either, and months after their breakup he confessed that she still occupied his dreams. When her latest movie,
Meet Me in St. Louis
, reached his island outpost in February 1945, he was reminded, more sharply than he probably liked, of all that he had given up. Her first color picture since
The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me
in St. Louis
caught, in a way that black-and-white had never been able to do, the full vibrancy of her personality and the warmth and fire in her brandy-brown eyes. What delicious agony, then, it must have been for Tyrone to sit watching her for nearly two hours in a makeshift outdoor theater, surrounded by dozens of other men—far, far from Hollywood and even further from the good times they had shared. “My God,” he wrote Webb, his words drenched with longing, “but she never looked more beautiful.”

T
he end of their romance was probably harder on Tyrone, who had long, vacant hours to brood and ponder at remote and lonely bases, than it was on Judy, who was almost constantly busy, caught up, when she was not working, in the carnival excitement of wartime Hollywood. In the months since Pearl Harbor the entire motion-picture industry—studios, performers and the thousands of technicians who supported them—had been recruited for the war effort, and from Culver City to Burbank there was an almost audible, ceaseless hum from the studio moviemaking machines. Besides churning out innumerable patriotic shorts, documentaries and even cartoons, the studios released dozens of features designed to stir the soul and stiffen the backbone—films with titles like
Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Stand By for Action, Salute to the Marines, They Were Expendable
and
A Guy Named Joe
. In a statement that might have surprised his admirals but was well received in the Thalberg Building, Winston Churchill himself said that the propaganda value of
Mrs. Miniver
, a Metro tearjerker about an English family bravely bearing up under German bombs, was worth a hundred battleships.

Even films that, like most of Judy’s, ignored or scarcely touched on the war were considered essential to the battle: they raised spirits simply by reminding fighting men what they were fighting for, said General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commander of American forces in Europe. “Let’s have more motion pictures!” ordered the general. Pleased to accept accolades for doing what they had always done, and had always planned to do, the studios ascended new heights of prosperity as more Americans than ever before—ninety million of them, or nearly 70 percent of the population—lined up every week just to see a picture show. By October 1942, many of the men who would have made those films were wearing uniforms themselves. More left each day, and by the end of January 1943, both Judy’s current and prospective husbands, David Rose and Tyrone, were dressed in government issue.

Those who remained did their bit in other ways. Other stars had quickly followed Judy in traveling the country to entertain homesick troops and sell war bonds to gawking civilians. At home in California, the stars assisted the war effort by doing what they did best—entertaining. Judy made frequent appearances on radio programs beamed directly to the battlefronts, shows with names like
G.I. Journal
and
Mail Call
, and, like nearly everyone else, she lent her talent to the Hollywood Canteen, which for three frantic years was probably the best nightclub in the world, a place where ordinary guys could meet and even dance with their screen favorites.

In the overheated atmosphere engendered by war, with death an unseen but palpable presence, every second was urgent and compelling, and at the Canteen, as well as at dozens of other clubs, restaurants and dance halls throughout Southern California, the crowds arrived early and stayed late. Everyone was determined to have a good time. At such a moment and in such surroundings, it would have been difficult for a fun-loving young woman like Judy to suffer very long from the pains of broken romance. And it would have been altogether impossible once her wandering, searching heart had found a replacement, initiating a relationship no less electric than the one she had enjoyed with Tyrone.

Her new lover, Joe Mankiewicz, was, at thirty-four, Metro’s wonder boy, the producer of such memorable pictures as
Fury
and
The Philadelphia Story
, the possible successor, some thought, to the illustrious Thalberg. Mankiewicz’s German-born father was a professor of linguistics at the City College of New York; his older brother, Herman, was a celebrated screenwriter, the chief author of Orson Welles’s
Citizen Kane;
and Joe himself was formidably intelligent. He had entered Columbia University when he was fifteen, he had spent several exciting months in Berlin when he was nineteen, and he had begun writing Hollywood scripts when he was twenty. “Harvard College,” Mayer had nicknamed him, a reference not only to his brains, but to his tweedy, pipe-smoking, professorial style.

Harvard College generally went his own way at Metro. “I’ve followed very few of the rules,” he was to boast. In a business in which top actresses were either extravagantly flattered or outrageously bullied, often in shameless succession, but rarely taken seriously, Mankiewicz did something so unusual as to be noteworthy: he talked to them as equals, earnestly listening to their ideas about what their roles should be. They returned the compliment, and Mankiewicz gained a reputation as a man who had a winning way with the weaker sex. The result, of course, was that he was assigned more than his share of pictures with prickly and temperamental females. “Joe knows more about women than any man I’ve ever met,” said Anne Baxter, one of his leading ladies. “We’re all just glass to him, and he sees everything that makes us tick.”

A man with such remarkable X-ray vision, especially an attractive man with what June Allyson called “wonderful laughing eyes,” was bound to find success with women off the set as well as on, and Mankiewicz did not have to seek romance—it sought him. What looks did for Tyrone, brains did for Joe. “Everyone,” recalled one woman, “was in love with Joseph L. Mankiewicz.” How could Judy have been an exception?

They probably did not begin their liaison until the late winter or spring of 1943, when both were both suddenly alone, eager for companionship. Tyrone, who was away at Marine camp, was sending Judy
discouraging messages about their future prospects, and Mankiewicz’s second wife, the Austrian actress Rosa Stradner, was at the Menninger Clinic in far-off Kansas, undergoing psychiatric treatment for a psychological disturbance so serious that it had brought about a catatonic fit. Discovering that they had something in common, namely a sardonic sense of humor, Judy and Joe, the two who were left behind, formed an instant attachment. “We made each other laugh a lot,” said Mankiewicz, “and we became used to each other very quickly.” So quickly did matters proceed, indeed, that not long after Judy said her final good-byes to Tyrone she transferred her affections, fully and unreservedly, to Joe and his laughing blue eyes.

For Judy, Joe was the very model of a man, the ideal that all the other men she had loved, and was to love, could aspire to but could never
quite reach. He was, to her bedazzled eyes, as witty as Oscar Levant, but without Levant’s debilitating hang-ups; as intellectual as Artie Shaw, but without Shaw’s sophomoric pretensions; as nice as David Rose, but without Rose’s stupefying blandness; and as charming as Tyrone, but without Tyrone’s sexual ambiguity. There was no question which gender Joe preferred, and the fact that he had made so many glamour pusses, a list that included Joan Crawford and Loretta Young, swoon and surrender only added to his musky appeal. In Judy’s opinion, Joe, or “Josephus,” as she called him in private, was nothing less than perfect. “Oh, he’s so brilliant,” she told her sister Jimmie. “God, he knows everything! He’s the most wonderful man that ever lived!”