Get Happy (42 page)

Stunned, wounded and feeling altogether betrayed, Vincente wondered why Judy, who met him every evening with a warm hello and a kiss on the cheek, had not told him herself. “Why did it have to go through two other people?” he asked himself. “Weren’t married couples supposed to openly discuss such things with each other?” But when he arrived home nursing his disappointment, Judy welcomed him with her usual kiss—and said not a word about the picture. Not that night, nor weeks or months later, did either one acknowledge that she had booted him off what might well be Metro’s biggest movie of 1948.

Just as bad luck had hovered over
The Pirate
, so did good luck now attend
Easter Parade
. Brought in as director was Charles Walters, a handsome former dancer—he had been Judy’s partner in the finale of
Presenting Lily Mars
—who had to his credit only one relatively small movie, the recently completed
Good News
, starring June Allyson and Peter Lawford. Judy liked him, he liked her and the atmosphere on the set was so relaxed—in sharp contrast to the tension that pervaded any Minnelli production—that there was room for fun and banter. “Look, sweetie, I’m no June Allyson, you know,” Judy informed Walters his first day on the job. “Don’t get cute with me—none of that batting the eyelids bit or fluffing the hair routine for me, buddy! I’m Judy Garland and just you watch it.” When Berlin, who inspired tongue-tied awe in most people, boldly suggested how one of his songs should be phrased, Judy walked up to him, put her face two inches in front of his, poked a pugnacious finger into his stomach and said: “Listen, buster, you write ’em, I sing ’em.” Berlin was delighted: the pleasure of hearing Judy sing his songs had been the chief reason he had chosen M-G-M over 20th Century-Fox, which had also offered a huge sum for the rights to
Easter Parade
.

Even bad luck turned out to be good. On October 12, a month into rehearsals, Gene Kelly, Judy’s costar, broke his ankle in a Sunday afternoon volleyball game. He would be unable to dance for months. Since there was no one on the Metro lot to replace him, it looked as if the whole project might have to be postponed indefinitely, or perhaps canceled altogether. But Kelly’s accident, which seemed the worst possible news, was, in fact, the best. Kelly’s unrestrained scene-stealing during
the making of
The Pirate
had almost certainly exacerbated Judy’s sense of being persecuted.

With a possible disaster in the offing, Freed put in an emergency call to Fred Astaire, hoping to coax him out of his premature retirement. Responding, like Berlin, to the lure of an opportunity to work with Judy, Astaire soon said yes. Four days after Kelly’s accident, he was out of retirement and in Culver City, altering Kelly’s routines to suit his own, quite different style. “My compliments to Gene Kelly, and I am glad he broke his ankle last year,” one of the London reviewers was later to say, voicing an opinion many others shared but were too polite to utter. The more sophisticated Astaire was a far better match for Berlin’s succulent melodies and the sleek and glossy picture planned by Metro.

“Did he give me confidence?” asked Audrey Hepburn, who later danced with Astaire in the musical
Funny Face
. “Oh yes,” she gushed, answering her own question, “from the first minute.” And, from the first minute, confidence was what Astaire also gave Judy, who needed
encouragement the way a rose, pale and drooping in the shadow of taller and more assertive plants, needs the sun. Her reaction, like that of the light-starved rose, was foreseeable—she blossomed. Indeed, for a few happy weeks she convinced herself that a love affair would soon follow. “What am I going to do about Vincente?” she fretted, though not too unhappily, to her friend the actress Sylvia Sidney. The answer was that she had to do nothing, because there would be no love affair: Astaire was a famously faithful husband, who, in Sidney’s apt words, would have strayed “about as far as his toenails.”

Curiously enough, a similar scenario—an older man giving a psychological boost to an uncertain young woman—was the one the scriptwriters had devised for
Easter Parade
. A famous dancer of the vaudeville era, circa 1912, is in love with his tall and willowy partner. When the partner, played by Ann Miller, accepts a part in the Ziegfeld Follies, the dancer—Astaire, of course—angrily vows that he can take any chorus girl and turn her into a headliner. Enter Judy, who becomes the Eliza Doolittle to his tap-dancing Henry Higgins, fulfills his vow and then walks him to the altar. There was no more to the plot than that. After Walters took over from Vincente, he had removed from the script the emotional subtleties and ambiguities Minnelli always found so appealing. For his
Easter Parade
, Walters wanted only blue skies.

They were what he got. The skies became even brighter after a February preview, when the audience gasped with pleasure at the concluding scene—Judy and Astaire walking arm in arm down Fifth Avenue in a spectacular re-creation of Manhattan’s Easter Parade. M-G-M knew then that it had a hit; when the picture was released in July, long after Easter, the reviews, almost universally ecstatic, came as an anticlimax. Summing up the raves, the
Hollywood Reporter
said simply that “the Metro monarch has a howling success.” Praising Walters, a couple of critics took an indirect but nonetheless obvious slap at Vincente; one observed that Walters had wisely avoided the “pretentious flourishes” that could easily have ruined such a simple, sunny picture. In any event, the audiences that had stayed away from Vincente’s
Pirate
just a few weeks earlier thronged to see Walters’s
Easter Parade
, which did indeed go on to become Metro’s biggest-grossing movie in 1948.

In the glow of good feeling, Judy’s behavior on
The Pirate
was all but forgotten. Working with Astaire, Berlin and Walters, she had been reliability itself, rarely sick or very late. As a result,
Easter Parade
, which went before the cameras on November 25, 1947, finished shooting on February 9, 1948, on schedule and well under budget. “How’s it going, Fred?” Vincente had asked Astaire one day on the lot. “How’s my girl doing?” Both pride and chagrin must have greeted Astaire’s reply. “Just great!” said Astaire. “Judy’s really got it.”

In
Easter Parade
, one reviewer exclaimed, Judy had truly come of age—she had grown into “something touching golden currency.” The men in the Thalberg Building agreed, but they were thinking not of her talent, as the reviewer was, but of her singular ability to fill theater seats. With the box-office returns for
Easter Parade
coming in, the totals rising higher every week, the executives viewed her as exactly the kind of currency Metro needed in 1948, the kind they could take to the bank. For the unthinkable had happened: rich and haughty M-G-M, the only studio that had smiled through the lean years of the thirties, was suddenly in financial trouble, fighting for its existence.

The entire motion-picture industry was, in fact, under siege in that third year after the war. Attendance, which had reached its peak in 1946, had been dropping ever since, as Americans, freed from wartime restrictions, found other ways to occupy their leisure hours. Saturday night at the movies was no longer a national habit. Hollywood’s most fearsome competition appeared, at first glance, to be little more than a fad, almost a joke: a big box with a tiny screen that brought fuzzy black-and-white pictures into the living room. “Who in hell,” Louis B. Mayer had demanded, “is going to look at those pygmy screens?” But the answer—just about everybody—came soon enough. The million television sets of 1948 were to quadruple in 1949, and were to nearly triple again the year after that, to eleven million. To the men who ran the studios, the arithmetic was as frightening as the equations that resulted in the atomic bomb.

More bad news came from Washington, where the Supreme Court decided that it was a violation of antitrust laws—a criminal conspiracy—
for the studios to own the theaters in which their films were shown. A corporation could make movies or it could show them, but it could not do both: the studios would have to sell their theaters. Though they were given some time to comply—a temporary stay of execution—the court had pronounced a death sentence on the studio system. A film featuring top stars would always find an outlet, but without their theaters, the studios would not have a guaranteed market for their other, less glamorous products, the profitable B-movies, shorts, cartoons and newsreels that helped hold up the structure. If the court’s edict had come down ten years earlier, Metro, for instance, might not have been able to find an audience for the first Hardy picture, and the whole series—sixteen movies in all—might have died aborning.

Though the late forties were hard on all the studios, they were hardest by far on M-G-M, which had yet to wake up to postwar realities. A generation that had been in battle abroad and had endured privation at home found hopelessly quaint and out-of-date the sermonizing that many Metro features still spouted. “I worship good women, honorable men and saintly mothers,” Mayer liked to say. But a movie theater was neither a church nor a lecture hall, and when they did leave their pygmy screens for the big one in a theater, moviegoers wanted stories that more closely reflected the gritty and often unsavory world they saw and read about every day: the greed and backstabbing in Warner Bros.’
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, for example, or the horrors of alcoholism in Paramount’s
The Lost Weekend
.

“There are no bad M-G-M pictures!” was another Mayer aphorism, but in 1947 and 1948 Metro, which had once hogged the Oscars, received not a single nomination in any of the major categories. It was a stunning slight, proof that the men and women who ran Metro were out of touch with their colleagues as well as with their audience. Not all the stars in Culver City could overcome limp and unimaginative stories, and too many dull films, coupled with a bloated, overpaid bureaucracy, quickly translated into shrinking corporate profits. The industry leader became the industry laggard, and in 1948 Metro made a mere $4.2 million, its poorest showing since 1933, the worst year of the Depression.

Increasingly alarmed, Nick Schenck finally issued a decree: there
would have to be a shake-up in Metro’s high command. Mayer, he said, would have to find a new hand—another Thalberg—to oversee film production and give it the life and vigor it so conspicuously lacked. In the fat years, Mayer had been strong enough to stand up to his wily old adversary. In 1948, a year of hunger and deprivation, he did as he was told, and after receiving a couple of turndowns, he announced his choice. Dore Schary, he said, was the man to fill Thalberg’s long-vacant chair. Though he was not considered one of Hollywood’s young giants, as was David O. Selznick, Mayer’s first choice, Schary did seem to have the requisite qualities for the job, combining the vitality of youth—he was forty-two—with the experience of age. In the early forties he had been in charge of the unit that produced Metro’s low-budget productions; most recently, he had been RKO’s head of production.