Get Happy (49 page)

Everybody, it seemed, wanted to help. At one of Los Angeles’s evangelical churches, Judy’s name went up on a blackboard along with those of other unfortunates, earthquake victims and the like, for whom the congregation was urged to seek divine intervention. Jane Russell, whose luxuriant bosom had made her RKO’s leading sex symbol, was one of those who bowed their heads on her behalf. As she prayed, Russell later wrote, she heard a command from the Lord: she was to give Judy a heavenly message. Following orders, Russell reached Judy by phone—a minor miracle, all by itself—then, after describing her mission, relayed
the message. “The Lord is my shepherd,” went the familiar words of the Twenty-third Psalm, “I shall not want… .” Judy gave a slight gasp, mumbled a polite thank-you and hung up.

By late July, Judy was well enough to travel with Liza to Sun Valley and Lake Tahoe, then, a few weeks later, to New York with Dorothy Ponedel and Myrtle Tully. It was in Manhattan, amid Gotham’s asphalt and concrete, that her injured ego received the medicine it most needed—adulation. Assuming she would go unrecognized, she sneaked into a Times Square theater for an afternoon showing of
Summer Stock
, only to be spotted as she was leaving, and embraced by an excited crowd, clapping and shouting encouragement. “We’re all for you, Judy!” one person said. “Keep your chin up!” advised another. Another outpouring of warmth and affection came at a Broadway play; as she made her way to her seat, cheers resounded through the theater. Buoyed by such receptions, Judy finally did bounce back, just as Alsop had predicted. Confident—even ebullient—she returned to Los Angeles in mid-September, prepared at last to confront her future: it was time to write finis to her Metro career.

Not long after her brush with suicide, Mayer had paid her a visit. What they said to each other has not been recorded, but their meeting, which lasted an hour and fifteen minutes, was emotional—Louella Parsons got that description from Mayer himself. “Judy Garland has fifty years more to live, if she obeys her doctor, and I believe she will,” Mayer said afterward, and, in accordance with this generous sentiment, he persuaded Nick Schenck to keep her on salary, or part salary, until she was on her feet.

Three months later, when her health had returned, Metro agreed not only to cancel her contract, which had more than a year to run, but to forgive the several thousand dollars she still owed for her trip to Boston the previous year. On September 29, 1950, the studio officially released her from any further obligations, “with reluctance and regret,” as Mayer generously phrased it, “and with a view to serving her own best interests.” Fifteen years after her father had driven her through that storied gate on Washington Boulevard, a small girl with a large voice, she was free, no longer answerable to anyone but herself. In times to come, Judy would look back on M-G-M—her alma mater, she would
call it—with a mixture of bitterness, rue and more than a little nostalgia. But at that instant her chief emotion was relief, and all she could say was, “Isn’t it wonderful!”

“In an oblique and daffy sort of way, you are as much a national asset as our coal reserves,” Billy Rose, the Broadway impresario and columnist, had written. “Both of you help warm up our insides,” he had said. “And the day you stop making pictures you’re going to take a lot of warmth out of the lives of the millions of Bills and Betties who live in furnished rooms and cook their breakfasts on hot plates—me-and-my-shadow folk, for whom a Judy Garland movie is the best available substitute for the kiss in the dark that never happens.” Now, that gloomy day had dawned. Judy had stopped making pictures for all those Bills and Betties, and who was to blame?

The easy answer was Metro, more specifically Dore Schary and the ungallant Stanley Donen, who had delivered the fatal wound with conspicuous and unseemly haste—and over nothing more serious than an hour’s missed rehearsal. Behind them stood Schenck and Mayer, who had long been aware of Judy’s addiction to drugs, but who had chosen, until it was too late, to stand by, scolding rather than helping. No less an authority than Harry J. Anslinger, the U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics and the highest drug enforcement officer in the nation, had put them on notice. Concerned about her well-being—“I believed her to be a fine woman caught in a situation that could only destroy her,” he said—Anslinger had traveled from Washington to New York to talk to Schenck in person.

Anslinger knew Judy’s story in detail—knew both where she was obtaining drugs and why—and he, too, suggested that the only way she could shake her habit was to spend at least a year in a sanitarium. Anslinger’s long experience and weighty credentials meant little to Schenck, however, who had all but sneered at such an outlandish recommendation. “I’ve got fourteen million dollars invested in her,” he had said. “I couldn’t afford your plan. She’s at the top of her box office right this minute.” To Anslinger’s outraged retort that Judy’s death, from suicide or a drug overdose, would cost him his fourteen million
in any case, Schenck had philosophically replied: “We’ll have to take that chance.”

There was blame enough for everybody, Judy’s mother not excluded. But in the end, the responsibility for Judy’s departure belonged not to M-G-M, but to Judy herself. She did not want to stay at Metro; she had not wanted to since 1946, when she signed the contract the studio had now so kindly canceled, and she had regretted and fought her decision ever since. For her, she said, M-G-M was not a golden fiefdom; it was a haunted house, where every time she entered, she felt like screaming—again and again. Nor did she consider herself a privileged princess, waited on “hand and foot,” as Stanley Donen was to claim. In her eyes, she was more like a prisoner.

If Judy symbolized the old M-G-M, her exit symbolized its demise. Its structure remained—some of Arthur Freed’s best pictures were, in fact, yet to be made—but not its spirit. More interested in educating audiences than entertaining them, Schary let performers’ contracts lapse, and, one by one, the studio of the stars said good-bye to its most valuable creations, its Gables, Garsons and Tracys. “Isn’t God good to me?” Mayer had often exclaimed, but as he watched his power daily dwindling, he must have harbored some doubts. About Schary, all he could say was “I was a sheep who invited a hungry wolf to dinner.”

Less than a year after Judy left, the embittered Mayer gave Schenck—“Mr. Skunk,” he called him in private—an ultimatum. “It’s either me or Schary,” he said. “Which?” For Schenck, who had been conspiring against him for more than twenty years, the choice was obvious. Mayer represented the past; Schary, who had succeeded in reversing the studio’s financial losses, was the present. The outcome, as Mayer should have realized, was foreordained, and his resignation was immediately accepted, effective August 31, 1951. “I know how you and Nick schemed to kick me out, you son of a bitch,” he snarled at Schary. Then, as the offended Schary angrily stalked away, Mayer shouted after him: “Sit down and I’ll tell you everything, you little kike.” Beaten at last, the wounded old lion had nothing left but his roar.

I
n Hollywood, Judy had been written off by just about everybody—“still a mixed up dame” was the contemptuous appraisal of one record company executive. The chief dissenter was Judy herself. “The slate of the past is wiped clean,” she defiantly declared. “Insofar as I’m concerned, the world is good, golden, and glorious. My best years and my best work lie ahead of me, and I’m going to give them everything I’ve got.” To do that, however, she had to leave Hollywood, with its skeptics, pessimists and bad memories, and at the beginning of October, a few days after Metro’s announcement, Judy and her companions, Myrtle Tully and the omnipresent Dorothy Ponedel, once again boarded a train for New York. “What I want to do now,” Judy said before heading east, “is to rest and have fun.”

That is exactly what she did. Not long after she alighted at Grand Central, her old friend Fred Finklehoffe, a screenwriter on several of her early movies, received a telephone call. “Freddie,” Judy said, “let’s go out on the town.” Finklehoffe was not the only one to receive such a summons, and Judy’s escorts were soon being listed in the gossip columns, causing caustic comment
back home. Vincente, said one writer, had to be “the most broad-minded husband in the land.” But that was not quite the case. Vincente was not so much broad-minded as he was indifferent, as eager as Judy to bring their partnership to its conclusion.

Their marriage, like their movies, was a product of M-G-M, and it was probably inevitable that when Judy broke with the studio, she would also break with Vincente. In her mind, the two were one. What rankled most, perhaps, was her discovery that Vincente’s real spouse, the one to whom he had pledged his primary allegiance, was the studio. He was, in fact, to remain under contract to Metro for a total of twenty-six years, longer than any other director; he outlasted not only Judy, but Louis B. Mayer, Dore Schary and that master conniver, Nick Schenck himself. A man whose odd clothes and face makeup had once caused a minor scandal was thus to become the quintessential Metro director, almost as much a symbol of M-G-M as Leo the Lion. No roar was ever to be heard from Vincente, however, and a career of such durability was not made by talking back to the people in power. For Judy, the sad corollary to his remarkable endurance was that not once during the five years they were together had Vincente stood up for her against Mayer, Freed or anyone else in the Thalberg Building.

“Judy needed a strong man, someone to lean on,” one of her friends explained. “And Minnelli, though understanding and anxious to help, was sort of an ethereal guy. He wasn’t strong enough to cope with Judy and her problems.” Vincente himself acknowledged as much. “I’d obviously failed Judy,” he admitted in his memoir, adding that he could not overlook the bleak fact that the years of their marriage were also the years in which she had seemed least able to cope with the world. “It was an indictment I couldn’t ignore.”

It is probably safe to say that, on balance, they had failed each other in equal measure. If Vincente had disappointed her, so had Judy disappointed him, worn him out with her scenes and suicide attempts, one crisis following another in never-ending succession. It was tiring to live in the path of a perpetual hurricane. If they stayed together, Vincente had finally come to realize, their life would always be marred by her indulgences and compulsions. Still, he might have accepted all that. What
he could not accept was her almost gleeful admission, her “shocking confession,” to use his words, that she had lied to her many psychiatrists—that she had not really tried to get well. For that, Vincente said, it was “damn near impossible” for him to forgive her.

Their once-promising collaboration was now only a memory, and on December 21, 1950, they announced the end of their marriage. “So characteristic of quiet, gentle Vincente Minnelli that he never said a word when Judy Garland walked out,” clucked Louella Parsons, who made it clear whose side she was on. “Perhaps Vince was too easy and too gentle with her.” Although they were always to remain friends, for Liza’s sake, if not for their own, occasionally one or the other would let slip a disparaging remark. “Oh, Vincente Minnelli,” Judy would say, with more than a hint of sarcasm, “the man with perfect taste.” With Judy gone, Vincente would look for another Galatea, a woman his perfect taste could mold into a beautiful work of art. But Judy’s search for a protector had already ended: she had found a man who was neither quiet nor gentle. She was in love again.