Get Happy (44 page)

Alsop delivered his threat with a smile, however, inducing Mayer to devise a solution that satisfied everybody: he gave Judy bonuses for her two songs in
Words and Music
, a sum sufficient to cover most, perhaps all, of Metro’s claims. Thrilled that she had at last found a man who could stand up for her against Mayer and the studio, Judy prevailed upon Alsop to become her permanent agent and manager. But Alsop truly was like a father—Judy nicknamed him “Pa”—and, unlike the other men in her life, he could stand up against her as well, steadfastly refusing to bow to her tantrums and neurotic anxieties. When Vincente could not handle her, which was frequently the case, he telephoned Alsop, who showed up, even in the middle of the night, to give her a verbal spanking. “Now, goddamn it, Judy,” Alsop would say, “you go back to bed and go to sleep, or get your ass up and go to work.” Cursing him in return, Judy, more often than not, would nevertheless do as she was told.

The musical comedy Arthur Freed had bought for her—she was to play the gunslinging Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s Broadway hit
Annie Get Your Gun
—was not ready when she reported for work again, sleek and rested, in the fall of 1948. Taking advantage of the delay, Joe Pasternak, whose production unit rivaled Freed’s, borrowed her for
In the Good Old Summertime
, a tuneful remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 comedy,
The Shop Around the Corner
. If Freed was the bold pioneer of the movie musical, then Pasternak was the genial guardian of the old order. “Pasternak Land,” his part of the Metro lot was named, a reference to his light, schmaltzy comedies, which always seemed to take place in a smiling country where even the snow was as sweet as powdered sugar. “I want to make folks forget about troubles,” was Pasternak’s unapologetic explanation. “Let the newspapers take care of fact.”
Presenting Lily Mars
, the only other picture he had done with Judy, had been just that kind of confection. So was
In the Good Old Summertime
, an old-fashioned romance about two feuding clerks in a music store who fall in love with their anonymous pen pals, unaware that they are, in fact, corresponding with each other.

Familiar with the problems that had bedeviled other productions Judy had been in, Pasternak saw to it that the atmosphere on the set was as sunny as that on-screen, extracting a pledge from everyone involved, from the director, Robert Z. Leonard, to Judy’s costar, Van Johnson, to treat her gently. “There was never a word uttered in recrimination when she was late, didn’t show up, or couldn’t go on,” said Pasternak. “Those of us who worked with her knew her magical genius and respected it.” As a tangible symbol of that respect, he gave orders for one red rose to be placed in her dressing room every morning, along with an unsigned card that read: “Happy day, Judy.” Mystified, Judy assigned Dorothy Ponedel to ascertain the identity of her secret admirer; but not even Ponedel, whose sources spanned the Metro lot, could learn his name. The result of all that kind attention was a Judy who was rarely ill and a production that was completed five days ahead of schedule. “What did you do to Judy?” a delighted Mayer asked Van Johnson. “We made her feel needed,” Johnson answered. “We joked with her and kept her happy.”

Those high spirits were reflected in the film itself, and when
In the Good Old Summertime
opened at Radio City Music Hall in July 1949,
one of Judy’s songs, a boisterous rendition of “I Don’t Care,” elicited a spontaneous burst of applause from the audience—a sound rarely heard in the dark recesses of a movie theater. Further rounds of applause came from the reviewers. “Great troupers come seldom in a theatrical generation,” wrote one, “but when one does arrive on the theatrical scene there is no mistaking the special magnetism that is their art. If ever there existed doubts that Judy Garland is one of the great screen personalities of the present celluloid era the opportunity to alter the impression is offered in ‘In the Good Old Summertime.’”

Arthur Freed was in enthusiastic agreement—he said so many times. Even so, it was not in his blunt, obstinate and often crude nature to do anything out of the ordinary, as Pasternak had done, to make Judy happy. With
Annie Get Your Gun
, which finally began production in March 1949, he did just the opposite, in fact, hiring the one director in Hollywood most likely to cause her anguish. That director was Busby Berkeley, of course—the same Busby Berkeley who had caused her so much grief on the
Babes in Arms
series, the same Busby Berkeley whom Freed himself had fired three weeks into the filming of
Girl Crazy
. Freed could not have made a worse choice, or one more puzzling and perverse, and catastrophe arrived with foreseeable speed—on only the second day of shooting, April 5. As it happened, Berkeley’s first victim was not Judy, however, but Howard Keel, the tall, strapping baritone who played the cowboy lead. Instead of allowing Keel to slowly trot his horse across the soundstage, as both prudence and the smooth floor dictated, Berkeley ordered a faster and more dramatic gallop. The unsurprising result was that the poor animal slid and fell, taking Keel down with him.

“He’ll be all right! He’ll be all right!” Berkeley shouted as Keel was carried away.

“Buzz, his leg’s broken,” retorted Al Jennings,
Annie
’s assistant director, who had cut the boot off the actor’s injured leg and knew what he was talking about. “He won’t be all right.” His leg encased in a cast, Keel was out of action, and for several weeks the cameras had no one to focus on but Judy.

A reasonably contented Judy, the Judy of
Easter Parade
and
In the Good Old Summertime
, might have soldiered through the more intense schedule now assigned her. But for Judy there was no contentment, reasonable or otherwise, in the spring of 1949. Her marriage to Vincente was in its last days—on a treadmill to disaster, as Vincente aptly described it—and the Minnellis rented a second house on Sunset Boulevard, so that, after a fight, Judy would have a place to get away. Relations turned particularly bitter in March when Vincente, alarmed by an upsurge in consumption, snatched away her pills. Though he acted in her best interest, Judy did not see it that way, and at the end of the month she announced their separation. “I’m very sorry, but it’s true,” said Judy. “We’re happier apart.”

Despite such turmoil, until Keel’s accident Judy had seemed equal to the demands of what promised to be a difficult picture. During prerecording sessions—she recorded the picture’s entire score between March 25 and April 1—her voice was strong and vibrant, as sassy as a trumpet in Berlin’s humorous songs, as tender as an oboe in his romantic ballads. As shooting began, however, she seemed unsure of herself, tiptoeing around the character rather than jumping into her role as she usually did. Portraying the blustery, gun-toting Annie was a stretch for her, different from any part she had ever before attempted, and she seemed uncertain how to proceed. She was also intimidated, she confessed, by the prospect of playing a role so strongly identified with a powerhouse like Ethel Merman, the original Broadway Annie.

Even the best actors sometimes find themselves lost and confused when they venture into unfamiliar territory, and it is the director’s job to lead them down the right path, avoiding quicksand on one side, dangerous precipices on the other. Another director—a Vincente, for example—might have guided Judy through the treacherous spots in
Annie Get Your Gun
, pointing out the possibilities of a Garland Annie, an Annie more vulnerable and therefore more sympathetic and believable than Merman’s had been. A comparison of the different ways the two women rendered Annie’s songs—both versions have been preserved—suggests, indeed, that Judy could have put her own stamp on the role.

That old World War I parade master, Busby Berkeley, was more accustomed
to giving marching orders than to offering guidance, however. He did not instill confidence; he destroyed it. “This monster treats me the same as when I was fifteen!” a bitter Judy complained, and his bullying soon did to her fragile ego what it had previously done to Keel’s strong body. “Judy would come to work feeling fine,” said Jennings, who had last worked with her on
Meet Me in St. Louis
. “Then Buzz would see her, and he would start screaming and yelling and hollering the way Buzz did. Ten minutes later I would be called to her dressing room. ‘I’m sick,’ she would say. ‘I can’t stand it. I’ve got to go home.’ And that would be the end of that.”

The scenes that Berkeley did manage to shoot filled her with dismay. Ever since she had arrived at M-G-M, Judy had yearned to be glamorous, to wear costumes designed by Adrian and other top designers. Starting with
Meet Me in St. Louis
, she had finally got her wish. Now, playing a smudge-faced and disheveled Annie, she was back where she had started, looking and sounding exactly like little Sairy Dodd, the pigtailed, barefoot hillbilly she had portrayed in
Pigskin Parade
. Watching herself in the daily rushes, she shrank into her chair with stunned embarrassment, then turned to Berkeley. “How could you make me look so bad?” she hotly demanded.

The destructive behavior she had exhibited on the set of
The Pirate
, then on
The Barkleys of Broadway
, now reemerged. She began to arrive at the studio late or not at all, often staying home, unable to rise from her bed. Her weight dropped to ninety pounds, and even her hair began to fall out, a side effect, most likely, of her profligate use of amphetamines. In an effort to lift her out of her depression, a new doctor, Fred Pobirs, persuaded her to undergo a series of electric shock treatments, a total of six. But if all that voltage did any good, it was not apparent to Jennings. Once again, as in
Meet Me in St. Louis
days, he was being awakened in the middle of the night—and occasionally two or three times a night—by her frantic phone calls, moaning about a migraine or wistfully wondering whether the morning would bring sunshine or clouds. Not that it much mattered: on a Busby Berkeley set, the weather was always turbulent, the menacing sound of thunder never far away.

Freed could have intervened to stop Berkeley’s abuse, but in at least
one instance he himself was equally brutal. He happened to be on the set one day when, too tired (and perhaps too drugged) to continue, Judy slid to the floor with the cameras rolling. Rather than help her to her feet, a furious Freed rushed over and shook her by the shoulders. “What’s the matter with you?” he snarled. “Get up off your ass and let’s film this scene.”

In the end, it was Berkeley’s incompetence, not his treatment of Judy, that brought about his demise. To everyone’s astonishment, a director whose reputation rested on his fluid and freewheeling use of the camera had succumbed to a kind of paralysis. He, too, seemed trapped in the shadow of the Broadway musical, directing his film version as if it were still confined to a handkerchief-sized space in a Times Square theater. “There was no real action, nothing,” said Jennings. “It was as if he were photographing a stage play.” Watching the rushes, Freed reluctantly agreed. He fired Berkeley on May 3, then put in an emergency call to the man who probably should have been in charge from the beginning—Chuck Walters.

After seeing the footage Berkeley had shot, Walters concluded that nothing, not so much as a skinny inch, was worth saving. “My God—it was horrible!” he said. “Judy had never been worse. She couldn’t decide whether she was Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Martha Raye or herself.” Trying to give her the help she should have received weeks earlier, he made it his first task to invite her into his office for nearly three hours of intense discussion. “It’s too late, Chuck,” Judy sadly replied. “I haven’t got the energy or the nerve any more.” Nor had she. “I couldn’t learn anything,” she recalled. “I couldn’t retain anything. I was just up there making strange noises. Here I was, in the middle of a million-dollar property, with a million-dollar wardrobe, with a million eyes on me, and I was in a complete daze. I knew it, and everyone around me knew it. But I desperately tried to go on. I knew that if I didn’t finish this one, it was the finish of me. So I kept on.”