Get Happy (37 page)

Effeminate behavior is not a guarantee of homosexuality any more than a fullback’s swagger is a guarantee of heterosexuality. But Vincente was indeed homosexual, or at least largely so. In New York, his almost certain lover had been another artist and designer, a young man so similar that they were almost mirror images. Like Vincente, his companion came from a small town in the American heartland—Hannibal, Missouri.
Like Vincente, he had worked for Marshall Field and Balaban and Katz in Chicago, which is where they probably met. Like Vincente, he had been given the first name Lester, a coincidence so improbable as to defy calculation. Finally, so close was the physical resemblance that Lester Gaba—for that was the friend’s name—could almost have passed for Vincente’s twin.

Though Minnelli and Gaba maintained separate apartments, they were together so often that their friends always paired their names, as if they were a firmly attached couple—“Vincente and Lester.” When Vincente was working at the Radio City Music Hall, Gaba could be found in the front row nearly every night, patiently waiting for him to finish his duties backstage. Though Gaba stayed in New York when Vincente left for M-G-M, Vincente did not suffer for lack of male companionship in his stylish house in the Hollywood Hills—at least two young actors confided to one of Judy’s friends that they had had “a do” with him.

His colleagues at M-G-M did not need to know the details of what went on in his bedroom: most of them simply assumed that he was homosexual, not “marrying material,” as one female member of the Freed Unit diplomatically phrased it. Not marrying material, in any case, was how he was generally perceived at the time he was directing
Meet Me in St. Louis
. Judy had heard the rumors, but she did not choose to believe them. To those who whispered that her new lover might be homosexual, her response was indignation. “It’s not that at all!” she exclaimed. “It’s just his artistic flair!”

There were only two obstacles on the rosy road to matrimony. The first was an all-but-forgotten husband, David Rose, who delayed giving Judy a divorce, prompting an exasperated Roger Edens to write some new lyrics to David’s
Holiday for Strings:

Eventually David did consent, and on June 8, 1944, almost three years after he and Judy had stood before a sleepy justice of the peace in Las Vegas, a judge in Los Angeles severed the ties that bound them together. Judy was at last rid of David and his tiresome trains, always going somewhere, never arriving anywhere.

The second obstacle was not legal, but emotional. After several months, Joe Mankiewicz had come back into Judy’s life. The affair that Joe was to say “just faded away” had not yet disappeared entirely, and in late spring Judy said good-bye to Vincente and resumed her romance with the man who still had first call on her affections.

Hurt and dismayed, Vincente was not too hurt to work with Judy again, however, and in July he directed her in the
Ziegfeld Follies
, a cinematic variety show that included everything from an Esther Williams water ballet to the only number Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly were ever to do together. Yet of all the film’s varied and sometimes spectacular selections, Judy’s ten-minute sketch—“A Great Lady Has ‘An Interview’”—is the most surprising, unusual for her and even more unusual for M-G-M. It not only lampoons one of the studio’s biggest stars, the stately Greer Garson, but it also satirizes the whole idea of stardom—the very ethos of M-G-M.

Affecting a grand manner and a pretentious accent, Judy’s Great Lady, Madame Crematon, slithers around the set in a slinky white gown, holding a press conference in which she gives absurd answers to absurd questions. Though Roger Edens was its co-author, this delightfully wacky sketch bears the unmistakable stamp of Kay Thompson, Judy’s newest mentor and the woman who, after Edens himself, was to have the greatest influence on her performing style.

If Vincente’s model was Whistler, then Thompson’s was Sarah Bernhardt, and, like Bernhardt, Thompson set out to become not only a star but a personality, a figure of such incandescent originality that she would outshine the ordinary twinklers who passed through the studio gates. Thus it was that Catherine Louise Fink, the blond, angular and long-faced daughter of a St. Louis jeweler, transformed herself into the sleek and dramatic Kay Thompson, flying into Culver City in the early forties like some exotic bird, a multicolored quetzal perhaps, to astonish the ordinary cardinals and mockingbirds already in residence. She
was too exotic for Metro’s taste, however, and instead of hiring her as a performer, Arthur Freed gave her a job as a singing coach. In her mid-thirties, Thompson had already enjoyed a full career as an arranger, as well as a singer.

Coached by Edens since she was thirteen, Judy did not need Thompson to teach her how to sing. What Thompson did was to push her singing to a new, higher level, giving it a canniness and sophistication it had not had before. Though it is impossible to pinpoint—it consisted of many small and subtle touches—Thompson’s influence is most evident in Judy’s increasing comfort with complicated arrangements and in her more kinetic delivery. Thompson made her more conscious of her movements, convincing her that singing involves not just the voice, but the entire body, that gestures and movements—the raising of an arm, the opening or closing of a hand, the expression on the face—are as important as tone, phrasing and volume. All that, and what Edens had taught her, too, Judy absorbed and, through some mysterious alchemy, turned into gold, accepting what suited her, rejecting what did not. She was always her own best teacher.

By the end of July it was clear, even to Judy, that her affair with Joe had no more future in the summer than it had had in the previous winter. Joe was not about to divorce his wife to marry her, and their final days together had been no more than a fling, a kind of holiday before they both returned to less exciting partners. That was not the conclusion of their relationship, however, and just recalling their days together was to give pleasure to both of them for many years to come. “I guess I’ve had my share of affairs with women,” Joe was later to say. “But they only exist as affairs with women. Every year, as I grow older, the memory of what we did and what we went through when we did it grows dimmer and dimmer. That isn’t the case with Judy. I remember her as I would remember an emotion, a mood, an emotional experience that is an event.”

Equally vivid was Judy’s image of Joe, which, like an old photograph, wrapped in plastic and reverent good wishes, she pulled out from time to time to hold up and admire. More than Tyrone Power, Artie Shaw,
David Rose or any of the other men she had known or was to know, Joe occupied a continuing place in her heart. He was the love of her life—so she often said—and it was to him she seemed to be speaking when she slowly caressed, almost purred, the lyrics of one of her favorite songs of the forties—“Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe.” In the fifties her friends Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin wrote a new ballad for her, “The Man That Got Away.” Asked to sing at Hollywood parties, she would fix her eyes on Joe, in a way that he alone would notice, and, borrowing Gershwin’s mournful lyrics, remind him that, for her, no other love would ever be the same. Embarrassed, Joe would take her aside afterward and whisper crossly: “Come on! Cut the crap!” Judy would laugh, but refuse to obey. For her, Joe would always remain the man that got away.

Vincente was not to get away, and their work together in
Ziegfeld Follies
reintroduced Judy to some of his persuasive virtues. Even in her short segment he had distinguished himself, endowing her with the two qualities she most coveted, beauty and glamour. It was only natural, then, that when her next film,
The Clock
, ran into difficulties a few weeks later, it was to Vincente that she turned. Offering her the chance to play her first straight role—she was not required to sing a note
—The Clock
was the only movie she had ever lobbied for, her opportunity, she thought, to demonstrate her abilities as a dramatic actress. But now, in the waning days of August, it was in such deep trouble that it was in danger of being scrapped—unless, of course, she could convince Vincente to rush to the rescue.

Some blamed the picture’s problems on Judy herself, who had made it no secret that she thought the director, the relatively inexperienced Fred Zinnemann, was not up to the job. “I don’t know—he must be a good director,” she told Freed, “but I just get nothing. We have no compatibility.” In a conflict between a fledgling director and a major star, the star will always win, and on August 23, Freed, accepting the inevitable, fired Zinnemann and closed down the picture until another director could be found.

As far as Judy was concerned, that director had to be Vincente, and, with Freed’s permission, she made her pitch to him over lunch at the Players Club. Whatever the club was serving that day, it could not have
tasted as good as the sweet satisfaction Judy piled on Vincente’s plate. A year earlier he had begged her not to drop out of
Meet Me in St. Louis
, and she had responded with a cold stare. Now she was pleading with him to save a picture she cared about. Such a big request from a woman who had just dumped him for another man! Rarely is a spurned lover offered such a gratifying present, and Vincente grabbed it. On September 1,
The Clock
resumed shooting with a new name stenciled on the director’s chair—Mr. Minnelli.

Judy was right about Vincente: he was the ideal director for
The Clock
, perhaps the only one on the lot who could have prevented it from being drowned in a gush of sentimentality, the Metromush the studio ladled out so generously during World War II. Its teary-eyed plot, a whirlwind wartime romance, was familiar to anyone who went to the movies during those years. In New York on a two-day pass, a G.I. meets a girl in Pennsylvania Station. They fall in love, are separated, then find each other again and rush to get married, saying their good-byes as husband and wife in the same place they started, where the soldier catches a train that will carry him back to camp and, by implication, into battle. That was all there was, a patchwork of small and seemingly trivial dramas—just the sort of challenge Vincente had confronted in
Meet Me in St. Louis
.

Vincente began his rescue mission by introducing a whole cast of fascinating bit players: he was to become famous for the unusual attention he lavished on such small parts. He then gave a costarring role to a whole new character, New York itself. Meticulously re-created on Culver City soundstages, the city was more than a passive backdrop for romance; it became a lively participant, pushing the lovers together in some scenes, separating them in others. When shooting ended on November 21, it was apparent that Vincente’s salvage operation had succeeded. Although
The Clock
does not merit the kind of superlatives that are attached to
Meet Me in St. Louis
, it is, at its best, so good, as James Agee, the era’s most astute film critic, phrased it, that “it inspires ingratitude for not being great.”

If it was not great,
The Clock
was good enough to have justified Judy’s strenuous exertions on its behalf. It did exactly what she had hoped it would do, demonstrating “for the first time beyond anybody’s
doubt”—to quote Agee again—“that Judy Garland can be a very sensitive actress. In this film Miss Garland can handle every emotion in sight, in any size and shape, and the audience along with it.” Joe Mankiewicz had been right: given a chance, Judy could be a fine, possibly even great, actress. What Joe had not reckoned with was the corollary to that proposition: she needed Vincente Minnelli to show her how to do it.