Get Happy (57 page)

Though James Mason also received warm rounds of applause, most of the attention was directed at what
Time
called “just about the greatest one-woman show in modern movie history.” Yet even if she had never sung a note, Judy would still have dominated the screen, asserted Moss Hart. “It is a curious instinct that she possesses,” he told one columnist. “Give her a scene and instinctively she’ll play it right. Watching her, you get the almost weird impression that she’s—I don’t know quite how to explain it—but it’s something like a great musician plucking strings on a harp.”

Celestial sounds also came from theater box offices. Contrary to the studio’s fears, the audiences, like the critics, did not seem to object to such a long musical. “Sockeroo” was how
Variety
described the receipts in Los Angeles and San Francisco, “mighty” in Detroit, “whopping” in Seattle, “terrif” in Cincinnati and “wow” in Louisville. And in New York, where the film premiered on October 11 at not one but two Times Square theaters, business was “radiant.” Jack Warner, who had gambled more than $5 million on the picture, had won his bet, and so had two hungry alley cats, Judy and Sid.
A Star Is Born
was a hit, perhaps even the biggest hit of the year.

Warner Bros. had other ideas, however, and less than two weeks after the Los Angeles opening, while the critics were still raving, while the public was still clamoring, it rushed to turn victory into defeat. The problem, as always, was length. The critics and the public may not have been unhappy with a three-hour picture, but many theater operators were. They
could run
A Star Is Born
only three or four times a day, they grumbled, rather than the five or six times they could run a conventional, two-hour show. That, of course, meant a commensurate loss of revenue.

One obvious answer, which had worked well with other high-visibility features, was for the studio to have treated
A Star Is Born
as a special event, with reserved seats and higher-than-usual prices. Another answer was to have simply brushed off the complaints with the argument that it was better to have packed houses three times a day with
A Star Is Born
than half-empty ones five or six times with something less popular. But Harry Warner, Jack’s older brother and the actual head of the studio, rejected those reasonable suggestions in favor of one that was totally unreasonable: rather than make the schedule conform
to the picture, he said, make the picture conform to the schedule.
A Star Is Born
, he decreed, would have to be cut.

To order such major surgery on a movie that had already been released, reviewed and embraced by the public was so capricious that it defies easy understanding. Indeed, it was so rash and reckless, so out of character for sober, stolid Harry, that it is tempting to speculate that it was not an ordinary business mistake, but the product of an ancient sibling rivalry: Harry’s hatred for his parents’ darling, his flamboyant, joke-cracking younger brother. Overlooking Jack’s many achievements, Harry saw him only as an egocentric, womanizing wastrel—and constantly told him so. “I’ll kill you, you son-of-a-bitch!” Harry once screamed, dropping his dark-suited dignity to chase Jack through the Burbank lot with a lead pipe. Jack escaped;
A Star Is Born
did not. Now, with his order to slice and dismember, Harry was doing his best to kill the picture with which his despised brother was most closely identified.

Who determined what sections were to be removed is unclear—Cukor was in India, working on his next production,
Bhowani Junction
—but someone lopped off large chunks, for a total of almost half an hour. Left in were most of the big, spectacular scenes, including the “Born in a Trunk” number; taken out were many of the small, intimate scenes that explained character and motivation. “A star is shorn,” said Bosley Crowther, the
New York Times
critic, who went on to say that “every cut leaves a gaping, baffling hole. Not only the emotional pattern but the very sense of the thing is lost.” The crippled survivor of such mindless butchery was, for Cukor, a source of endless sorrow, and neither he nor Judy could bear to watch it.
“Marvelous
things were cut out,” said Cukor, “marvelous, marvelous.”

Most depressing of all was the disposition of those marvelous things. The discarded footage was not stored in the studio vault, a simple enough thing to have done, but destroyed—recycled for its silver content. Thus, unless someone finds a print that escaped the studio dragnet, the celluloid equivalent of the yellowing manuscripts that are occasionally discovered in the attics of great writers, no one will ever again see the
Star Is Born
that caused such excitement in 1954. “It is our destiny to be always in the hands of assassins,” cried the Italian director Luchino Visconti, when his own spacious masterpiece,
The Leopard
,
was also mutilated by its American distributors. And “assassin” is not too strong a word to apply to rusty-minded Harry Warner, the man who, through error or subconscious design, killed
A Star Is Born
.

The studio’s folly was soon evident. Instead of increasing box-office receipts, the cuts, which were the object of wide and almost always unfavorable publicity, did the reverse, and after a few frantic weeks, attendance dropped dramatically. “Congratulations!” an irate moviegoer wrote Jack Warner. “It isn’t easy to foul up a great picture, but you people out at Warner’s seem to be doing a bang-up job… . Don’t you think people in Podunk are going to feel cheated when it reaches them in its butchered up version?” These remarks proved prophetic, and one manager in Podunk country—the state of Maine—said the studio should at least have given theaters a choice between the two versions of
A Star Is Born
. He reported that he had received many letters and phone calls from customers who refused to pay full price for a less than full movie. “Consequently,” he said, “we lost money on the picture.” And so did Warners.

Judy, the Associated Press had said, was “virtually a lead-pipe cinch” to win an Academy Award, and though the truncated
Star Is Born
was largely ignored, she and James Mason both received nominations. But Judy herself was forced to spend one of the most momentous evenings of her life not at the Pantages Theater, where the awards were to be given, but in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. There, on March 29, the day before the big night, she gave birth to her third child, the boy she had so fervently desired: Joseph Wiley Luft, five pounds, eight ounces. If she could not go to the Oscar ceremonies, however, the ceremonies could go to her. Certain of the outcome, NBC had gone to the expense of erecting a tower outside the hospital so that its camera could peer in her third-floor window and catch her happy reaction when she was declared the winner.

That moment was never to come. The name that was announced belonged to Grace Kelly, who, playing against type, had portrayed the dowdy wife of an alcoholic in
The Country Girl
. Even as Kelly was walking to the stage, the TV technicians were leaving Judy’s room, along
with the camera into which she had been expected to smile and the microphone into which she had been expected to mumble her gratitude. Her friends and fans were as stunned as she was. “This is the biggest robbery since Brinks,” wired Groucho Marx, and even John Kelly, Grace’s father, seemed embarrassed by his daughter’s unexpected triumph. “There should have been two awards,” he graciously acknowledged, “and Judy Garland should have had one of them.” In fact, there should have been only one award. Good as it was, Kelly’s performance did not begin to approach Judy’s, which, even in its abridged form, showed immeasurably greater depth, range and amplitude.

But if Judy had been robbed, who was the thief? Some believed that it was Judy herself. Her colleagues, they suspected, were punishing her for what they thought had been unprofessional conduct on the Warners set—and several Metro sets before that. Cukor, on the other hand, was convinced that the culprit was Warner Bros., whose clumsy cutting had eliminated much of the warmth and humor of her characterization, its subtlety and nuance. Beyond that, by making such public amputations, the studio had signaled its lack of confidence in
A Star Is Born
, the most expensive film it had ever made, and everyone connected to it. Warners had repudiated its costly problem child, and so, in March, did those who bestowed the Oscars—Hollywood liked winners, not losers. Even the film’s theme song, the raw and haunting “The Man That Got Away,” was passed over for a trite jukebox jingle, “Three Coins in the Fountain.”

“I admit I want to win very badly,” Judy had said, and whatever its cause, her rejection left her devastated. “It confirmed her belief that the industry was against her,” said Lauren Bacall, whom she had asked to accept the award in her absence. “She knew it was then or never. Instinctively, all her friends knew the same. Judy wasn’t like any other performer. There was so much emotion involved in her career—in her life—it was always all or nothing. And though she put on a hell of a front, this was one more slap in the face. She was bitter about it, and, for that matter, all closest to her were.”

Yet Judy’s chagrin over the loss of the Oscar was small compared with her disappointment over the fate of
A Star Is Born
, to which she had indeed given her all. A year of her life, as well as all her hopes and
dreams, had gone into it, but in the end she was left with nothing: no award, no money and no prospects—Warner Bros. had seen enough of the Lufts. “It’s only the beginning, folks,” she had said at the Pantages premiere, certain that there would be many more such gala openings. But she was wrong. Blamed, however unfairly, for the film’s many delays, she was once again unemployable in Hollywood. What had gone wrong with
A Star Is Born?
Sid offered perhaps the best, if also the most heartbreaking, explanation. “We did too much of everything,” he later confessed. “Too much movie and too much music. It was good too much.”