Get Happy (38 page)

Not long after
The Clock
finished filming, Vincente received a gift from Judy. It was a clock—a real clock—and attached to it was a note. “Whenever you look to see what time it is—I hope you’ll remember ‘the Clock,’” she had written. “You know how much the picture meant to me—and only
you
could give me the confidence I so badly needed. If the picture is a success (and I think it’s a cinch) my darling Vincente is responsible for the whole god damned thing.” In fact, she had shown her appreciation from the day he took over, all but smothering him with gratitude. Gratitude is sometimes mistaken for love, and it is hard to say which one Judy felt. The result was the same in either case: she returned his affections, and after a brief and, for Vincente, painful detour, they once again were speeding down the road to matrimony.

This time their romance was not a secret, and during breaks in filming of
The Clock
they could be seen huddled together, deep in conversation. So smitten were they that at least once, when they thought no one was around, they moved beyond mere talk. Returning to the set during lunch hour, three extras, dressed as sailors for a subway crowd scene, were astonished to glimpse them making love in a darkened alcove. Quietly backing away, the trio took a vow of silence. “We will never say a word,” said one. “We didn’t see this.” But the light operators, who often ate their sandwiches where they worked, on the catwalks high above the stage, did see it and made no such pledge. Within seconds everyone in the studio seemed to know what had transpired in that shadowy alcove. “Is it true?” one of the extras was asked when he walked into the music department a few minutes later. “Was Judy really going down on Vincente Minnelli on the subway set?”

Judy and Vincente were as visibly entwined as any couple could be, and at the end of November they embarked on a kind of pre-honeymoon honeymoon, a luxurious trip east, courtesy of M-G-M, for the New York opening of
Meet Me in St. Louis
. Although Judy had been there many times before, Vincente showed her a new side of Manhattan, introducing her to theater friends like Richard Rodgers and taking her to the actual spots where much of the action in
The Clock
was supposed to have occurred—the Metropolitan Museum, the Central Park zoo, an Italian restaurant in Times Square. Her pleasure was his pleasure, and he saw New York afresh through her enthusiastic eyes. When they returned to Los Angeles in early December, he continued his tutorial, ushering her through art galleries and antique showrooms and observing with joy her awakening interest in antiques, painting and jewelry—all the things that gave him enjoyment.

They had begun the year in bitter conflict. They ended it with a midnight kiss at Jack and Mary Benny’s New Year’s Eve party, in the company of a hundred other stars and studio executives. A week later, on January 9, 1945, just a few days before Judy was to begin work on a musical western titled
The Harvey Girls
, her first picture without Vincente since
Girl Crazy
, they announced what many had already guessed: they were engaged to be married.

When he was a boy in Ohio, Vincente had experienced his epiphany: watching his mother dance around the stage of the Minnelli Brothers Tent Theater in a costume he himself had designed. His proudest moment, he called that childhood triumph, which was the key to everything that followed. Like Joe Mankiewicz, his polar opposite in so many other respects, he was a natural-born Pygmalion, a man whose ruling passion was the molding and nurturing of exceptional women. “Vincente loved someone he could make beautiful, someone he could create,” said his friend Lena Horne. “He loved dressing women.” Until he entered into his affair with Judy, Horne herself had been his most conspicuous protégée. Not only did he show her off to advantage on the screen, as the sensuous seductress in
Cabin in the Sky
, but he also
gave her an education in living off the screen, picking books for her to read and paintings for her to look at—even teaching her the right knives and forks to use at dinner.

Some women might have resented such interference. Judy, like Horne, accepted it eagerly. She longed to be Vincente’s Galatea, just as she had been Joe’s. Whereas Joe had instructed her in matters of concern to intellectuals, however, Vincente unlocked the secrets of sophistication, beauty and elegance—things she really cared about. And whereas Joe had denied her his unwavering attention, Vincente concentrated on her as obsessively as he did on his work. “Vincente saw something in Judy that nobody else did,” said Irene Sharaff. “I think he was truly in love with her. But I think she was in love with the idea that somebody took her seriously.”

Old habits die hard, and the engagement ring on Judy’s finger did not deter her from secretly entertaining other men. Her most ardent pursuer during the winter of 1945 was another man who arrived festooned with superlatives—Orson Welles. Still the dashing boy genius who had created
Citizen Kane
, Welles possessed attractions enough for any woman. But an affair with him carried a titillating bonus for Judy, and it must have thrilled her to be able to entice Welles away, if only briefly, from one of Hollywood’s true sex goddesses—his wife, the supernaturally beautiful Rita Hayworth.

Their dalliance was, in any event, a dangerous game for both of them. The jealous and watchful Hayworth came close to discovering it when she spied a huge bouquet of white flowers in Welles’s car, a gift for Judy. Naturally assuming the flowers were meant for her, the smiling Hayworth was about to retrieve them when Welles’s quick-witted secretary, who knew the truth, ran out and removed his card to Judy, then handed the flowers to Hayworth, as if they had been meant for her all along. A similar mix-up almost brought disaster when Judy, confusing her dates, invited both fiancé and lover, Vincente and Welles, to dinner on the same night. Realizing her mistake only when she heard Vincente’s car in her driveway, she rushed out the door with Dorothy Ponedel before Welles could arrive too. The stove was smoking, Ponedel told Vincente—they would have to eat in a restaurant.

Louis B. Mayer had been against all of Judy’s previous lovers, complaining that they were married, divorced or too old. Vincente, who, at forty-two, was the oldest of them all, was, by contrast, embraced as if he were the son-in-law Mayer had always hoped for. The reason, as usual, had more to do with dollars and cents than paternal feeling. She missed the sound of applause, Judy had told Louella Parsons, and when her contract expired in 1947, she would leave Metro for Broadway. Such news from one of the studio’s biggest moneymakers had turned faces gray in the Thalberg Building, and though it could not force her to sign a new contract, Metro could give her a helpful push by encouraging her to marry Vincente. From the studio’s point of view, he was the ideal suitor. How could she star on Broadway, after all, if she was happily attached to an M-G-M director?

Metro had yet another reason for approving the union. Though she had been a model of good behavior during the filming of
The Clock
, Judy was still a shaky reed on which to hang a major musical. A quiet and reliable husband like Vincente would be a steadying influence, the studio reasoned—would “straighten her out,” as Lucille Ryman Carroll, the head of Metro’s talent department, phrased it. As always, Louella Parsons was chosen to convey the corporate line to the rest of the world. Everyone at M-G-M, Parsons assured her readers, was delighted with the Garland-Minnelli alliance. “They say that Judy is a different girl, happy as she can be,” she burbled.

“I want Mr. Mayer of my studio to be at my wedding if I get married,” Judy had said before she became the wife of David Rose. But flattering words had not mollified the furious Mayer. This time he not only showed up, like a beaming father, to give the bride away, but he also presented the happy couple with a munificent wedding present—three months away from the studio for a honeymoon in New York. Their first night as man and wife was to be spent rushing eastward on the Super Chief. If Judy could not be on Broadway herself, she could at least be close to it.

The wedding ceremony took place, as scheduled, at three o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, June 15, in Judy’s mother’s house in the
Wilshire district—Ethel had long since moved from Stone Canyon Road. Metro’s chief costume designer, Irene Gibbons, had designed Judy’s dress, a smoky-gray jersey with pink-pearl beading to match her pearl engagement ring. Betty Asher was Judy’s bridesmaid, and Ira Gershwin was Vincente’s best man. The Reverend William E. Roberts of the Beverly Hills Community Church performed the service, at the end of which he held out a wooden staff that was to be grasped, as a symbol of the just solemnized union, by the four people standing in front of him: the bridesmaid, the best man and the bride and groom. All four did as they were directed. Then, seemingly from nowhere, emerged a fifth hand—Mayer’s—to clutch the knob at the very top of the staff. “We were now man and wife in the eyes of God,” said Vincente. “But what’s more, we also had the blessing of a man upstairs who in many instilled far greater dread.”

“These were our happiest times,” Vincente was to say of the first months of their marriage. Arriving in Manhattan on the morning of June 18, the newlyweds were soon eating breakfast in their honeymoon retreat, a three-story penthouse on tony Sutton Place, with terrace gardens and expansive views of the East River below. “More than halfway to heaven,” murmured an admiring friend. So it was; so were they. “Right away,” said Judy, “we did as we had planned—just moved in and pretended to be New Yorkers.”

It was an exciting time to be in New York, which was very much the exuberant city Vincente had portrayed in
The Clock
. Germany had surrendered in May, and just two days after Judy and Vincente stepped off their train, four million jubilant New Yorkers lined the streets to welcome home General Eisenhower, the conquering commander. In August Japan also called it quits, bringing more crowds and parades and triumphant flags. Never again would that city of tall towers and even taller egos be enveloped in such a halo of friendship and good feeling. “There were no strangers in New York yesterday,” observed a
New York Times
reporter the day after Japan’s surrender.

Expectation was in the very air that victorious summer, as hopes long dormant suddenly revived and old lives were exchanged for new. Inhaling
the rich oxygen of promise and possibility in her cottage in the sky, Judy also looked forward to a fresh start, a life free of the drugs that had imprisoned her for so many years. Walking by the East River with Vincente, she asked him to hold her hand. Then, with her other hand, she threw a small object into the rushing water—a vial of her pills. She, too, had declared victory over a cruel and insidious foe.