Get Happy (52 page)

That was its sorry condition, in any event, when Sid passed by on the afternoon of August 12 and, in a moment of inspiration, stopped at a pay phone to call Sol A. Schwartz, the president of RKO Theaters, which owned the Palace and many other movie houses. Though Sid did not know it, Schwartz had long wanted to restore the Palace to its former vaudeville glory, and within five minutes the two were exchanging hellos in the lobby. “Sid,” said the eager Schwartz, “are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Sid was, of course, and two weeks later
Variety
announced that, after eighteen years, vaudeville would return to the Palace, with Judy Garland topping the bill. On the evening of Tuesday, October 16, Judy would at last realize her fondest ambition—to see her name in lights on a Broadway marquee.

Rushing back to California, she once again enlisted the Freed Unit to help put her act together. Roger Edens wrote introductions, Chuck Walters did the staging and Irene Sharaff designed some of her costumes. At the piano, taking the spot once occupied by Buddy Pepper, who complained that Sid had shortchanged him during the British tour, would be a distinguished Freed alumnus: Hugh Martin, coauthor of the
Meet Me in St. Louis
songs, which would be a prominent part of her repertoire. As work progressed, it was evident that the Palladium had merely been a rehearsal for the Palace. Not only would her New York show be at least ten minutes longer, forty-five minutes in all,
but it would also be considerably more elaborate. In London, Judy had been by herself; at the Palace she would be assisted by eight chorus boys and a partner. Dirtying his face, Walters himself would join her for “A Couple of Swells,” the tramp number she and Fred Astaire had romped through so exuberantly in
Easter Parade
. Broadway was where her show would be playing, but Culver City was where it had been manufactured.

As Judy prepared her act in Los Angeles, RKO prepared the Palace in New York. On October 4 the house went dark; workmen hurried in to give it a much needed face-lift. Crystal chandeliers were returned to their proper places, new carpets were laid and fresh coats of paint were applied to every wall in sight. But if RKO was gambling thousands of dollars on Judy, Judy herself was wagering much more. Anywhere else, a flop might be forgotten. At the Palace it would gain a perverse immortality. A hit, on the other hand, would reverberate equally loudly. There was no escaping the core of the matter: it was on the island of Manhattan, and nowhere else, that the new Judy would succeed or fail. “The Palladium experience was grand,” wrote the Broadway columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, “but it was, after all, England. New York is the terrible, wonderful test.”

Nobody knew that better than Judy. When she arrived in New York in the second week of October, she was suffering from such a bad case of pre-curtain jitters that Hugh Martin asked his music-minded friends Bob and Jean Bach to divert her with a party the night before the opening. “She’s going to be appearing before strangers,” he said, “and it might just ease things if she could groove a little bit.” Arriving without Sid, Judy sat in the living room of the Bachs’ brownstone apartment in Greenwich Village, and, sipping bourbon and singing “Over the Rainbow,” she did groove—and after the party grooved some more.

As the hosts were emptying ashtrays and preparing for bed, Jean Bach looked out the window and saw Judy’s limousine still waiting to take her home. Suspecting she might have fallen asleep, the Bachs searched every corner but found no Judy. They did not realize what had happened until they heard their front door slam the next morning. Judy
had spent the night outside on their terrace with another of their guests, one of her long-ago lovers, that bouncy butterball from Georgia—Johnny Mercer. Fortunately for her voice, which was to be actively employed a few hours later, the skies were clear and the temperature was warm, never dropping below fifty-four degrees.

It was even milder when the taxi carrying Judy and Chuck Walters neared the Palace the following evening, only to find the street blocked off. “What the hell’s going on here, driver?” inquired an angry Walters. “Everybody’s here for Judy Garland’s opening,” replied the driver. There was, in fact, no rush. Judy was last on the bill, preceded, in true vaudeville fashion, by five acts: a sextet of teeterboard acrobats, a brother-and-sister dance team and no fewer than three different sets of comics. Introduced by her eight chorus boys, Judy came on after the intermission. Too heavy still, she forestalled any whispers about her weight by dismissing it with a joke, as she had done at the Palladium. “Call the
Mirror
,” she sang, “call the
News
, tell ’em I’ve another nineteen pounds to lose.” The real songs quickly followed, some made famous by Palace headliners of the past—“Shine On, Harvest Moon,” for example, which was Nora Bayes’s signature song, and “My Man,” which was Fanny Brice’s—and some, such as “The Trolley Song,” made famous by Judy herself.

At the end came her two big production numbers, “Get Happy” and “A Couple of Swells,” after which, still wearing her tramp costume, she sat down at the front of the stage to sing her own signature song. Slow and subdued, almost a whisper at the start, her rendition of “Over the Rainbow” was like the final scene of a play, the scene that draws together half a dozen different threads and provides the audience with the quiet catharsis it needs after such an emotional outpouring. Night after night, the result was the same: tears streaked down Judy’s cheeks as she tried to follow her rainbow, and many more tears—a rivulet, then a salty waterfall—came from all those watching and hearing her.

When she was through, the Palace, in the words of one reviewer, was “bedlam superimposed on bedlam,” giving her an ovation that one reporter clocked at three minutes and eighteen seconds, something close to eternity as time is measured in the theater. The critics joined in the applause the next day. Vaudeville, dead for eighteen years, turned out to
have been a sleeping beauty, said one. “The kiss that awakened this beauty last week came from plump and lively Judy Garland—singing and dancing at the Mecca of old-time vaudevillians, New York City’s Palace Theater.” RKO’s gamble had paid off—and so had Judy’s.

As lines formed at the box office, her run, originally scheduled for four weeks, was extended, then extended again, and again after that. Despite a brutal schedule of two shows a day, during that entire period she revealed only one sign of the troubles that had attended her at M-G-M: a collapse onstage in November, the product of exhaustion and a new doctor’s prescribing too high a drug dosage. Returning after a few days, she continued, at a slightly slower pace, well into 1952. “‘JUDY’ BREAKS ALL-TIME LONG RUN RECORD AT PALACE! 12TH TERRIFIC WEEK!” proclaimed the ads at the beginning of the new year.

For the Palace, Judy had been perhaps too successful: a replacement was all but impossible to find. Knowing that, after such a triumph, even a modest hit would look like failure, every star Sol Schwartz approached shied away, horrified at the dismal prospect. “Who can follow that?” demanded Betty Hutton, who, with almost obscene glee, had grabbed at the lead of
Annie Get Your Gun
two years earlier. “If you did four flips in the air, cut your head off and sewed it on again,” said Hutton, “it wouldn’t mean a thing.”

It was Judy, not the public, who finally called it quits. After nineteen weeks and 184 performances, she lowered the curtain at last on February 24. At the end of that final show, the audience, some three thousand, including standees, rose and serenaded her with “Auld Lang Syne,” a gesture that caused her to place one foot behind the other, like a little girl, and grin in delight—then cry, with equal delight. “Shout; for the Lord hath given you the city,” Joshua told the children of Israel. But Judy did them one better. To take title to New York, all she had to do was sing.

Judy’s conquest was so complete that critics and commentators, hard pressed to account for it, eventually gave up, likening it to a miracle—and miracles can only be described, not explained. “Where lay the
magic?” inquired a bewildered Clifton Fadiman, who saw her not at the opening, but many weeks later, at a point when many shows have lost that first-night fervor. “Why did we grow silent,” Fadiman went on, “self-forgetting, our faces lit as with so many candles, our eyes glittering with unregarded tears? Why did we call her back again and again and again, not as if she had been giving a good performance, but as if she had been offering salvation?”

Since she had received similar receptions in Britain and Ireland, the answer could not be found in a quality unique to New York, its press or its people. Nor, since she was to cast the same spell in many places during the years that followed, could it be found in anything particular to the time, or to big cities, or to a special group. Young and old, male and female, city folk and small-town dwellers, the sophisticated and the unsophisticated: when they were in a Garland audience, all were self-forgetting, their faces lit as with so many candles. Judy’s appeal was universal.

Where, then, lay the magic? The question puzzled Judy herself. “I have a machine in my throat that gets into many people’s ears and affects them” was one of her less than helpful answers, although it was true that she had a most remarkable musical instrument, a warm, violalike vibrato—vibrato is a gentle fluctuation in pitch—combined with the blasting force of a trumpet. The sound that emerged was what the critic Henry Pleasants called “the most utterly
natural
vocal production” he had ever heard. “Probably because she sang so much as a child, and learned to appreciate the appeal of her child’s voice, she made no effort as she grew older to produce her voice in any other way,” wrote Pleasants in his astute critical survey,
The Great American Popular Singers
. “It was an open-throated, almost birdlike vocal production, clear, pure, resonant, innocent.”

Voice alone barely began to explain the magic, however. Several of her contemporaries also possessed remarkable machines—some better, in fact, than Judy’s, with wider ranges and more artful technique—yet failed to raise the blood pressure in the seats out front. But Judy was not merely a singer; she was a singing actress. “Good singing is a form of good acting,” she declared, and she did the reverse of what most other singers do. She put the words before the music, instead of the other
way around, treating the lyrics with all the reverence due them, as one of her longtime arrangers, Nelson Riddle, so aptly phrased it. “I really mean every word of every song I sing, no matter how many times I’ve sung it before,” Judy herself said to one interviewer. “The whole premise of a song is a question, a quest,” she told another, making the same point in a slightly different way. For her, a song was not just a song; it was a story, and neither she nor her audience could ever be sure of the ending. Or so she made it seem.

Yet all of that—her voice and the way she used it—still only partially explains Judy’s peculiar magic. Nora Bayes, her most illustrious predecessor at the Palace, probably came closest to an answer when she said that the real artist confides a secret to the audience, embracing it as an old and trusted friend. The secret varies from performer to performer, and Judy’s was so obvious that few could see it: she was desperately in love with those who came to see her—and she had been since she was two years old. Metro had torn them apart before their romance reached full bloom, but now that they were together again, she and her audience, Judy realized how much she had missed it, how lonely she had been without it. Her second secret was less obvious: she needed her audience more than it needed her. She was happy—“truly, truly happy,” to use her own words—only when she was onstage. Offstage, Judy was uncertain who she was. Onstage, she knew. All those who applauded her, who stood up and cheered, were doing more than thanking her for a memorable performance. They were providing her with an identity.

And so, to a lesser degree, was Judy providing them with one. In her songs they heard not just her triumphs and disappointments, but their own as well. As she exposed her inner emotions, so, too, did they expose theirs, if only to themselves. As Judy confessed her vulnerability, they, for perhaps the first time in their lives, also confessed theirs. Contributing to that revival-meeting atmosphere was her studied informality. Pausing between numbers, Judy made jokes, wiped her sweaty brow, drank a glass of water and took off her shoes, which she complained were hurting her feet. Emotions flowed in both directions, and, as the show progressed, between artist and audience occurred a kind of chemical bonding, an exchange that infused both with new energy. “It was like breathing again,” Judy herself said, “having people let me know
I still meant something to them; that they loved me and still wanted to hear me sing.”