Get Happy (43 page)

As proud of his high principles as many in Hollywood were of their winning racehorses, Schary was not universally admired. So widespread was his reputation for holy attitudes that one acquaintance sent Christmas greetings with a telegram rather than the usual card. “Happy Birthday” was all it said. But sanctimony did not trouble Schenck and Mayer, and Schary was lucky enough to be available at a time when Schenck was so desperate and Mayer so enfeebled that he could demand whatever he wanted. What Schary wanted, it turned out, was absolute authority over everything produced on the lot. Mayer would retain titular power, but Schary would be the real boss, czar in all but name, answerable to no one but Schenck himself. The fiefdom Mayer had ruled for so long thus fell without a struggle, like a fortress that has fought off fierce and mighty armies but, faced with sudden starvation, opens its gates to the first stranger who bothers to knock. It was that dispirited Metro that on July 1, 1948, greeted its conqueror.

The only productions Schary agreed to leave alone were the musicals, which were also the only ones that gave Leo reason to purr in those grim months. Without its musicals, Metro’s small 1948 profit would have been replaced by a large loss;
Easter Parade
alone earned well over $3 million, a huge sum in the forties. That picture’s success—and Metro’s profit—could be attributed, in large measure, to Judy. Of all the actors and actresses employed by the studio of the stars, she was perhaps the last one who still spelled magic on theater marquees. After
listing some of M-G-M’s other fabled names—Clark Gable, Greer Garson, Van Johnson and Walter Pidgeon—one reporter pointed out that, celebrated as they were, they were not in the same category as Judy. According to box-office figures, he said, Judy was in a “draw class” by herself. She was, in short, not just an asset; she was Metro’s prime asset.

Though he was never in love with her, as Judy had fantasized, Fred Astaire did like working with her. Her showmanship, he said, was uncanny, and he regarded the numbers he did with her in
Easter Parade
as high spots in his career—exalted praise indeed. Astaire was therefore as elated as Judy was when, even before
Easter Parade
completed shooting, the studio decided to put them together again. In Garland and Astaire, Metro thought, it had stumbled on a winning combination, another Rooney and Garland—or Rogers and Astaire.

The Barkleys of Broadway
, their new picture was to be titled, and it promised to be a frolic. They were to play a married couple this time around, musical-comedy stars who begin feuding when the wife, disdaining the fluff that has made them famous, longs for serious roles that will show she can do more than sing and dance. Not until the end does she realize that, for a performer, there is no ambition higher than spreading joy—“fun set to music,” as her husband calls it. After the writers, those talented hams Betty Comden and Adolph Green, did a run-through of their screenplay in Arthur Freed’s office, an enthusiastic Judy turned to Astaire. “If we can only do as well as they did reading those parts, we’re okay,” she said. With Chuck Walters directing, employing the same velvet touch that had proved so successful in
Easter Parade
, the weeks ahead did, in fact, look like fun set to music. After two of Judy’s oldest friends, Oscar Levant and Billie Burke, were added to the cast,
The Barkleys of Broadway
began to assume the genial atmosphere of a house party.

A house party it was not to be, however. As much as Judy had enjoyed her collaboration with Astaire,
Easter Parade
had worn her out. Emotionally, she was back where she had been a year earlier, during the
terrible days of
The Pirate
—tense, nervous and continually exhausted. In early June she pulled herself out of a sickbed to do just one number in
Words and Music
, Metro’s ponderous salute to the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Singing a duet of “I Wish I Were in Love Again” with her old pal Mickey—the last time they were to appear together on film—she was so pale and gaunt that not even Dorothy Ponedel’s makeup wizardry could make her anything more than a shadow of the young woman who was romping across the screen in
Easter Parade
.

Given her poor health and low spirits, it was almost inevitable, then, that when rehearsals for
The Barkleys
began a week later, Judy was soon calling in sick, a refrain that was repeated with increasing frequency as June gave way to July. By now, Judy believed, she was nothing but a mechanical hoop that Metro was rolling around for its own pleasure, and it was obvious to her, if to no one else, that she would never be able to finish
The Barkleys
. “The rehearsals began,” she said, “and my migraine headaches got worse. I went for days without sleep, but I kept on. I just wanted to go somewhere to lie down and stop.” And stop is what she eventually did, ignoring the pleas of both Freed and Mayer, who journeyed all the way up to Evanview Drive to plead with her to return to the set.

At last, on the afternoon of July 12, the sixth day in a row she had failed to come in, Freed telephoned her doctor. “He said that she possibly could work four or five days, always under medication and possibly blow up for a period and then work again for a few days,” Freed reported in a studio memo. “He was of the opinion that if she didn’t have to work for a while it might not be too difficult to make a complete cure but that her knowledge of having to report every morning would cause such a mental disturbance within her that the results would be in jeopardy.”

Although he was a little late in getting around to it, Freed had posed the right question, and the doctor had given the right answer: forcing Judy to continue in
The Barkleys
would be good for neither her nor the studio. She had to be removed from the picture—that much was clear. Less understandable—altogether baffling, in fact—was the callous way
in which Metro chose to inform her. On July 19 it sent her a registered letter to notify her that not only had she been dropped from
The Barkleys
but her contract had also been suspended—she had been thrown off the payroll. From most valuable asset she had been downgraded to potential resource. She had been set aside for repairs, like any other piece of studio equipment.

As he had done after Gene Kelly broke his ankle, Freed quickly picked another star, hiring an airplane to fly
The Barkleys’
script to Ginger Rogers, who had made eight pictures with Astaire in the thirties. There she was, Rogers coyly told a reporter, lolling around her four-hundred-acre ranch in Oregon, communing “with the cowsies and the chickensies,” when the precious pages arrived. Almost pathetically eager for her to say yes, the studio made an offer she could scarcely turn down—$12,500 a week, more than double what Judy had been making. For that kind of money, Rogers did not mind kissing the cowsies and the chickensies good-bye, and two days later she was in Culver City. Though she had wanted out, an envious Judy now felt left out. “I’m missing the greatest role of my career,” she wailed to Louella Parsons.

Judy’s troubles with
The Barkleys
did not end there, however, and a few weeks later she made the mistake of visiting the set. During a break in filming she posed for photographs with Rogers and Oscar Levant and traded jokes with her many friends on the crew. But the presence of the first Mrs. Barkley was unsettling to everybody, which was probably the aim of her visit, and unnerving to Rogers, who retreated to her dressing room, refusing to go before the cameras again until Judy had gone. Taking Judy aside, Chuck Walters told her of Rogers’s feelings, and a minute later a hurt and angry Judy was striding toward the door. “I’ve been asked to leave the set,” she explained to one astonished onlooker. Astaire, who had missed the whole exchange, walked in the door as she was stalking out and saw nothing but her furious face. “What,” he asked, “are they doing to that poor kid?”

But the kid was no longer doing so badly. There had never been any doubt that she would quickly regain her strength if she were made to feel good, safe and secure, and that is precisely what had happened. A
surprising pair of guardian angels—Sylvia Sidney and her husband, Carleton Alsop—had brought her down from Evanview Drive and installed her in their own house in Beverly Hills, where they treated her like a cherished member of their family. “I was crazy about her,” said Sidney, “and I thought it would be absolutely criminal if somebody didn’t do something to preserve that talent.” While Alsop, a sometime agent and radio producer, fought Metro over her salary suspension, Sidney played the good Jewish mother, bringing Judy endless trays of her favorite foods. “I felt just like a goose being fattened for the market,” a grateful Judy recalled.

By September that pampered goose had gained seventeen much-needed pounds, and Metro asked her to sing another song for
Words and Music
—preview audiences had complained that one number from Judy was not enough. It does not take sharp eyes to notice that the Judy who sang “I Wish I Were in Love Again” in June is not the same Judy who belted out “Johnny One Note” during the September retakes. The first Judy is distressingly thin, her cheeks heavily rouged to hide their hollows; the second Judy is blooming, the vibrant and robust star of
Easter Parade
. Such discrepancies are the bane of moviemakers, but in this case Judy herself welcomed them. The difference in her appearance between the first song and the second, she said, was the difference between sickness and health.

During all of Judy’s struggles with M-G-M, Vincente, like David Rose before him, stood curiously idle, a bystander rather than a helpmate and husband. “These were my most ineffectual times,” he wanly admitted. If anything, his sympathies lay with the studio, and he did his best to convince her, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that Metro really did care for her as a person, and not merely as a box-office draw Is it any wonder that, with a man like Vincente at her side, continually telling her that she was at fault, Judy felt so helpless, encircled by enemies on all sides? “There was no one to fight for me,” she lamented, and it is impossible to say she was wrong.

For half her life, since the death of her father in 1935, Judy had been seeking someone to replace him, someone who would advise and protect
her. So her psychiatrists had told her; so she believed; and so she behaved, falling in love, time and again, with older and presumably wiser and stronger men. In one way or another, all had disappointed her. From Artie Shaw and Oscar Levant to David Rose and Vincente, she had demonstrated infallibly bad judgment in her search for a masculine protector. Now, with Carleton Alsop, she was to have such a protective shield.

Trying to make sense of her tangled finances, Alsop quickly learned that her financial health was as precarious as her physical and emotional. M-G-M’s zealous accountants, he discovered, had tallied up the cost of every minute by which she had delayed
The Pirate
and
The Barkleys of Broadway
, as well as every day she had been away at Las Campanas and Austen Riggs, the two psychiatric clinics. The total of what Metro’s money people called “retroactive penalties” came to approximately $100,000, an enormous debt that was to be deducted from her salary when she did start working again. “I don’t believe you have any legal claim for taking that penalty,” Alsop informed Mayer. “And I feel strongly enough about it that we may just have to establish that point in a law court.”