Get Happy (56 page)

Hardest hit by the changeover were Cukor and his crew, who had to learn, on the job, a whole new way of shooting a movie. Because the CinemaScope picture was shorter as well as wider than the conventional one, sets had to be squeezed—the top lowered and the bottom raised—to show both ceilings and floors. Nor was the CinemaScope lens as versatile as the old one. Sam Leavitt, the cameraman, was informed that he would cause distortion if he moved the camera up or down or zoomed in for a close-up—or did much of anything, in fact, but hold it stationary, pointing straight ahead. Cukor grumbled about such unaccustomed constraints, but either ignored or successfully navigated around them. “Don’t worry,” he told Gene Allen, his inventive production designer. “We’ll make up the rules for ourselves.”

The least of Cukor’s problems—for the first few weeks, anyway—was Judy, who belied her reputation for tardiness by usually reporting to the set on time, or nearly so. Her newfound reliability did not denote a reformation in character, however; it merely meant that she had found a new man—Harry Rubin was his name—on whom she could lean. Hired to supervise the electrical renovation of the Lufts’ new house in Holmby Hills, Rubin, a self-described “Brooklyn bum,” had stayed on as their all-purpose helper, a combination of majordomo and Mr. Fixit. When Judy failed to appear on one of the early days of filming, it was Rubin to whom Sid immediately turned. “See what the hell’s going on!” he ordered.

What was going on, Rubin quickly discovered, was a hostile standoff at the Lufts’ house. Judy was frightened of any speed much greater than thirty miles an hour, and the driver assigned to ferry her to the studio in Burbank knew only one route—a fast-moving freeway. “Do you know how to get to Warner Brothers without going on the freeway?” Judy asked Rubin. When Rubin assured her he did, she said, “Well, then, let’s go!” and stepped into his car. After that, Rubin, that most unlikely of all duennas, rarely left her side.

Not even Rubin could cure her insomnia or keep her away from drugs, however. By the second week of November, Earl Bellamy,
A Star Is Born
’s assistant director, was being awakened by the excuses so familiar
to his counterparts at M-G-M. “Miss Garland phoned Earl Bellamy at 4:45 this morning,” reported one typical memo, “and told him she had a ‘cold’ and would not be in to work today.”

Still, when she did show up, Judy brought to the set a concentration and intensity new even to her. Watching her play Norman Maine’s grieving widow near the movie’s end, Cukor said he felt that he was in the presence of some awful cataclysm of nature. “It scared me,” he said. “I had goose pimples, it was so extraordinary.” Not satisfied with just one take, no matter how good, Cukor instructed her to do the grieving scene a second time—and witnessed an equally terrifying, slightly different eruption. “Oh, that’s nothing,” joked Judy when Cukor confessed how powerfully she had affected him. “Come over to my house any afternoon. I do it every afternoon.” She paused and gave him a meaningful look: “But I only do it
once
at home.”

Yet even Cukor lost patience when, toward the end of production, she abandoned any pretense of reporting to work on time. “About three weeks ago, strange sinister and sad things began happening to Judy,” Cukor wrote their mutual friend Katharine Hepburn. Judy would insist that she was too exhausted to work, he told Hepburn, then head straight to the racetrack; she would call in sick, then be seen that night at the Mocambo. “This is the behavior of someone unhinged,” he said, “but there is an arrogance and a ruthless selfishness that eventually alienates one’s sympathy.”

Impatient at the best of times—one acquaintance compared him to a Mexican jumping bean—Jack Warner became increasingly exasperated. When a griping call from Judy interrupted his Saturday tennis game, he responded in kind. “Judy, you’ve given us a lot of trouble,” he said. “We gave you everything you wanted, and now you’re calling up to complain to me. I don’t like to be disturbed at my home. Don’t bother me again. You were utterly spoiled by the people at M-G-M. You’ve cost us a hell of a lot of money by going over schedule on this picture. That’s all!” And bang!—down went the phone. Most of Warner’s fury was directed not at Judy, however, but at her husband. “A charming fellow, Sid,” Warner sneeringly wrote in his autobiography. “He’s one of the original guys who promised his parents he’d never work a day in his life—and made good.”

Despite everything, filming finally ended on March 17, 1954, and after viewing the rough cut a week later, everybody was suddenly all smiles: the picture was worth the wait.
A Star Is Born
was a movie of singular power and appeal—a winner, as Cukor confidently proclaimed to Moss Hart. All that was required, it was agreed, was one more number, four or five minutes at most, to show an audience reacting to Vicki Lester, so that those watching
A Star Is Born
could understand what propelled her to the top. Excited by what he had seen, but nervous nevertheless, Warner accepted Sid’s suggestion that instead of inserting a number with only one new song, which audiences might reject, they guarantee success by including several favorites—a whole medley of proven crowd pleasers, much like Judy’s stage show. It would, as Sid later said, be almost a movie within the movie.

About to leave for vacation in Europe, Cukor raised two serious objections. He argued, first, that such an elaborate number, which would run four or five times as long as the one originally proposed, would unnecessarily lengthen an already long picture and would force cuts in other, more essential areas. He contended, second, that a number on such a grand scale would disrupt the film’s narrative flow, destroying the pace and rhythm he and Hart had so carefully constructed. “Big mistake,” agreed Ira Gershwin.

Mistake or not, the number went ahead with flash, flourish and a vigorous new creative team. The always reliable Roger Edens and his gifted young collaborator, Leonard Gershe, put the segment together, and Richard Barstow, the picture’s choreographer, directed. Thus it was that on June 30 shooting began on what was to be called the “Born in a Trunk” sequence, fifteen minutes in which Judy could display her dazzling collection of talents.

Desperate to finish, and fearful that Judy might return to her cunctatory ways, Warner did something that would have been astonishing for any studio, and that seemed unthinkable for one as parsimonious as Warner Bros. Ignoring the costs of overtime, he allowed production to proceed on Judy’s insomniac schedule, with work starting late in the afternoon or evening and continuing until one, two or even four o’clock in the morning. At last, at two-forty-five on the morning of Thursday, July 29, 1954, the “Born in a Trunk” number staggered to
completion. Nine and a half months after it had begun,
A Star Is Born
was finished.

“Don’t let ’em cut a minute of it,” Judy’s fans shouted as she walked out after the first preview, which took place just four days later, on Monday, August 2. “We could sit through four hours more!” Maybe so; but few others could. Although the audience reaction was enthusiastic—almost frenzied, in fact—
A Star Is Born
, as the director himself conceded, was far too long. “Neither the human mind nor the human ass can stand three and a half hours of concentration,” George Cukor wrote Moss Hart.

Complaints about the picture’s length had been circulating for several months, and Jack Warner, who mistakenly fancied himself a film editor, had already chopped out many minutes. Only at the preview was Cukor able to see what damage he had done. “He snipped here and there, seemingly without reason,” Cukor angrily told Hart. “He succeeded in muddying things up, making scenes pointless and incomprehensible—all this without losing any footage to speak of.” The director’s angry objections restored many of Warner’s excisions, and Cukor himself then sat down in the editing room. He had just seven weeks to make the necessary cuts before
A Star Is Born
was to be unveiled to the world, on September 29 at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater.

Producers usually supervised such efforts—David O. Selznick oversaw every second of
his A Star Is Born
—but Sid had other plans. Despite heated protests from a weary Judy, who wanted to relax at home, he had accepted Warner’s invitation, a kind of peace offering after the squabbles of filming, for them to join him on the French Riviera. “What you should do is stay here with Cukor and help cut the picture,” said Judy, who had been around the industry long enough to know what producers were supposed to do. “Judy, I’ve had it up to my fucking gourd,” replied Sid. “I’m beat. I’d like to go away someplace. Let’s go, we’ll have some laughs.” So Cukor was left alone to wield the pruning shears.

Everyone who had been to the previews agreed that Cukor had lived up to his lofty reputation. A finely wrought film,
A Star Is Born
was a masterful blend of music and drama, each performance as carefully shaded as a figure in a Rembrandt painting. But those subtle touches, that careful chiaroscuro, came at a price, and a typical Cukor scene lasted longer on-screen—often much longer—than it would have if it had been shot by almost any other major director. In directing the first
A Star Is Born
, for example, William Wellman required only nineteen and a half minutes to end the tale after Norman Maine gets into a scuffle at Santa Anita. Even without musical interruptions, the same scenes and essentially the same dialogue consumed twenty-seven and a half minutes under Cukor’s direction, longer by more than 40 percent.

Cukor’s leisurely style had worked well in straight pictures. Never before had he directed a musical, however, and both Sid and Warner should have realized that a musical, which had to make room for songs as well as narrative, demanded a director with a brisker touch. Compounding their error, and apparently giving little thought to the consequences, the two had made Cukor’s task much harder—and the movie much longer—by their insistence on the “Born in a Trunk” number. Superb as it was, it gobbled up fifteen precious minutes without contributing much to the telling of the story.

The result of Cukor’s cutting was still a very long film. At three hours and two minutes, it was an hour and eleven minutes longer than the original
A Star Is Born
and far longer than any of Judy’s other movies—an hour and four minutes longer than
Meet Me in St. Louis
, for instance. What, Noël Coward was to ask, had happened to the famous American sense of timing? “Every song was attenuated to such a length that I thought I was going mad,” groaned Coward. “One in particular, ‘Born in a Trunk,’ started brilliantly but by the time it was over and we had endured montage after montage and repetition after repetition, I found myself wishing that dear enchanting Judy was at the bottom of the sea.”

Extravagance also marked the picture’s opening, “probably the most remarkable premiere ever held in the film city,” according to the
Los Angeles Times
. Klieg lights whitened the sky, an estimated twenty thousand
people waited outside the Pantages, and both TV and radio networks broadcast from the lobby. “Welcome Judy,” proclaimed a huge sign over the entrance to the Cocoanut Grove, where eight hundred select guests partied afterward, and in the following weeks there were “Welcome” signs everywhere for Judy and her movie. “Brilliantly staged, scored and photographed,” burbled
Life
magazine, which put her on its cover. “One of the grandest heartbreak dramas that has drenched the screen in years,” said
The New York Times
. There were only a few quibbles about length. “A mighty long gulp of champagne,” said
Time
, which quickly added that, like champagne,
A Star Is Born
was hard to refuse.