Get Happy (35 page)

At the beginning, the main problem was Judy. Accepting the role of Esther only grudgingly, she had demonstrated her displeasure, consciously or not, by arriving four hours late for her first day of rehearsal, then at least twenty-five minutes late every rehearsal day thereafter. Even more ominous was her tardiness—an hour and sixteen minutes—on the first day of actual shooting, December 7. A week later, on December 16, she pleaded illness and stayed home altogether; two days after that she was on time, but soon left for home with a migraine. The last week of the year she missed entirely, nursing one of the ear infections that had dogged her since she was a baby, in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital.

So she continued, frequently ill, more often late, during the first few months of the new year, 1944. Again and again a sleepless Judy would telephone assistant director Al Jennings—or Freed himself—in the middle of the night to say that she could not work the next morning. “I’ve had a violent headache all night,” she might say, “and I just can’t come in today.” Sometimes she could be induced to change her mind; sometimes she could not. “Miss Judy Garland phoned Mr. Freed at 4:30 this morning that she was not feeling well and might not be able to work today” was a typical entry in the production notes, which provided a minute-to-minute account of every working day. “At 8
A.M.
Miss Garland’s sister phoned Al Jennings that Judy had been ill all night and unable to rest, and as a result could not report for work today,” was another such notation.

Meet Me in St. Louis
was not the first movie to be slowed by Judy’s illness and tardiness. During the shooting of
Girl Crazy
, only a year earlier, she had, in fact, been sick even more often—seventeen days, one more than she was away from
Meet Me in St. Louis
. Then her absences had seemed an aberration, caused, at least in part, by Busby Berkeley’s
abusive behavior. Now they seemed to be part of a pattern of unreliability, the result of an increasing reliance on the uppers and downers her mother had started her on so long before. “I’ve got to keep these girls going!” had been Ethel’s chirpy rationale for giving her daughters stimulants, and a decade and more later Judy could not function without them. “I always have to be my best in front of the camera,” she later explained to a somewhat bewildered Minnelli. “You should know that. You expect it of me too. Well, sometimes I don’t feel my best. It’s a struggle to get through the day. I use these pills. They carry me through.”

Just as often they stopped her altogether, however, and her unreliability not only cost the studio money, but also irritated her fellow actors, who were forced to arrive early, day after day, then sit around in full costume until she decided to emerge from her dressing room. After one such delay, Mary Astor, who was playing her mother, burst through the door to give her a sound spanking. “Judy, what the hell’s happened to you?” demanded Astor, who had also played the mother role in
Listen, Darling
, six years earlier. “You were a trouper—once… . You have kept the entire company out there waiting for two hours. Waiting for you to favor us with your presence.” After responding with an infuriating giggle—“Yeah, that’s what everybody’s been telling me”—Judy grabbed Astor by the hand and, in a pathetic confession of despair, all but wept: “I don’t
sleep
, Mom!”

Whatever else they did, the pills did nothing to boost her morale or bandage her fragile ego, and, like a tightrope walker, she could be thrown off balance by the slightest jolt. The strongest such jolt during the making of
Meet Me in St. Louis
came from an unlikely source, the mild-mannered, almost overly polite Minnelli. In all but the Busby Berkeley movies, Judy’s instinctive talent, combined with a photographic memory, had usually enabled her to complete each scene in one or two takes, without much guidance from the director. “I just went out there and did what came naturally,” she proudly recalled. But Minnelli was not pleased with her performance in either the first take or the second take—or any take after that. Though he did not say so, he thought that the inexperienced Lucille Bremer was much better, that Judy was making fun of her lines, whereas Bremer, who played Rose, Esther’s
older sister, was reading hers with true and convincing sincerity. “She was wonderful in her approach,” he said of Bremer, “believing every word she said.”

It is doubtful that Judy was intentionally mocking the script, not after the first or second take, anyway. The more likely explanation is that she was unaccustomed to working with a director as subtle as Minnelli, who compared the effect he was hoping to achieve to a fugue in which his actors were expected to play off one another with the contrapuntal precision of musical instruments. In any event, Judy could not understand what she was doing wrong, and Minnelli, whose instructions were as enigmatic as haiku, was incapable of telling her. “You wished he’d come out with a statement—a noun, a verb and something to put them together,” was the wry observation of Irene Sharaff, who was responsible for the film’s rainbow of beautiful costumes.

As the cameras continued to shoot the same scene, take after humiliating take, an almost distraught Judy finally asked Freed to come to her dressing room. Baffled and “scared cross-eyed,” as she phrased it, she announced that she had lost her talent: she no longer knew how to act. Freed assured her that she did know, and work resumed. But with the director and his star all but throwing darts at each other, the tension on the set was palpable. Quiet and restrained in public, Minnelli bitterly complained about her to Irving Brecher, the chief scriptwriter, while Judy, who returned his sentiments in triplicate, entertained the crew with malicious imitations of his maddening but sometimes comical indecision.

Even when scenes went well, however, as they increasingly did, Judy found the set of
Meet Me in St. Louis
an unnerving place to be. She did not enjoy her many on-camera exchanges with Bremer—“it’s hard to act to a stone wall,” was her chilly explanation—and the cruel manipulation of little Margaret O’Brien was a painful and scarifying reminder of her own childhood. To prepare Margaret for crying scenes, for example, her mother would play a nasty but effective trick on her: her dog was to be killed, she would sadly inform the child. Margaret’s eyes would widen, the tears would flow and the unfortunate pooch would be reprieved until the next time she was supposed to cry, when once again it would be sentenced to die. Just watching this cynical exercise
brought tears to Judy’s own eyes. “It’s awful! Terrible!” she would exclaim. Like her, she said, Margaret would never enjoy a normal childhood.

An active romance might have made a difference to Judy, carrying her over the rough spots; but disappointment in love also added to her cross-eyed misery. Eager to end their affair on a friendly note, Joe had advised her to date other men, and Judy had dutifully, even enthusiastically, obliged. She did not, in fact, have to look far for an attractive candidate, no further than her
Meet Me in St. Louis
costar Tom Drake—the very man she was supposed to fall in love with on the screen. Just as Esther Smith pursued the boy next door, so did Judy pursue Drake, the actor who played him. The moment she saw him smile, Esther sings at the beginning of the picture, she knew he was just her style. And Drake was Judy’s style. Tall, and handsome in a solid, square-jawed way, he had sympathetic brown eyes, a deep, resonant voice and a smile that was indeed engaging, slow to take shape and somewhat shy when it arrived, but altogether sincere, unlike the toothy, thousand-watt grins that blinded the hatcheck girls at Ciro’s. “He’s real” was all Judy said to her friend Dorothy Walsh.

Young Alfred Alderdice—Drake’s original name—was, in short, a walking advertisement for all-American wholesomeness, and if she had written ten thousand pages, Sally Benson herself could not have invented a more appropriate match for Esther, or for Judy either. “She was mad about him,” said Ralph Blane, who, together with his partner, Hugh Martin, wrote most of the film’s songs. “Ooooh! She had to have him—that was all there was to it.” Friendship led to romance, which led to bed—where the affair ended. To Drake’s embarrassment and to her own dismay, Judy could not arouse him—he could not perform. Drake was an all-American boy, all right, but an all-American boy who liked other all-American boys.

A woman more certain of her sexual attractiveness would have realized that his failure in bed was nobody’s fault. But Judy was angry, apparently equating her inability to excite him, or his inability to be
excited, with rejection, seeing it as something akin to an insult. Though they did not know what had transpired, those on the set noticed an immediate change in the weather; the flames in Judy’s eyes turned to icicles. “There was never a harsh word between them,” said Al Jennings, “but Judy shut him out after that, which made Tom awfully unhappy.”

On a less troubled production, Judy’s absences might have occasioned more frowns. But on an illness-plagued set like that of
Meet Me in St. Louis
—“the sickest picture in town,” Jennings called it—they shrank into relative insignificance. Pneumonia kept Astor away for nearly a month; appendicitis, followed by strep throat, put Joan Carroll, who played the second-youngest Smith daughter, out of action for several weeks; and various ailments afflicted Harry Davenport, the septuagenarian grandfather. Most damaging of all was the prolonged absence of Margaret O’Brien. Late in the afternoon of Sunday, January 30, Margaret’s aunt telephoned Jennings with the alarming news that her niece would not work the next day—or for the next two weeks. Margaret was suffering from the flu and hay fever, the aunt said, and she was being whisked away that very afternoon to the warmer, drier climate of Arizona.

Before an astonished Metro could try to stop her, Margaret and her mother were on a train heading east. New York, not generally noted for its warm and dry winters, was their real destination, and Mayer’s boss, Nick Schenck, was the specialist they were traveling so far to see. Determined to get more money for her daughter, Gladys O’Brien had shut down the entire picture simply to demonstrate Margaret’s importance. It was an act of breathtaking audacity; but with an expensive movie barely halfway finished, Metro could not afford to stand on principle. Schenck got the point, Margaret got the money and
Meet Me in St. Louis
got Margaret again. After a thirteen-day suspension, shooting resumed in the middle of February.

By then, nearly two and a half months into filming, the atmosphere on the set, so recently charged and turbid, had begun to brighten. “Judy, I’ve been watching that man,” Mary Astor had responded when
Judy complained about Minnelli. “He knows what he’s doing.” And even Judy, who sometimes stayed late to watch the rushes, the raw, unedited footage that had been shot that day, could see that Astor was right. When the shooting finally ended on April 7, it was clear that something remarkable had occurred on that sickly and often embattled production: a movie of extraordinary power and presence had been created.

On the simplest level,
Meet Me in St. Louis
is superb entertainment—“one of the Great American Family sketches,” as the reviewer for the
Los Angeles Times
instantly pronounced it. Unlike Metro’s other great American family sketch, the tiresome and tendentious Hardy series, it is sentimental without being bathetic, touching without being corny, and uplifting without being preachy. “Make a bee-line right down to the Astor” was the recommendation of the equally enthusiastic critic for
The New York Times
. “For there’s honey to be had inside.”