Get Happy (58 page)

Only six months earlier, when
A Star Is Born
was breaking box-office records, the Lufts were speeding along the road to riches, with a mountain of dollars, as green and inviting as the Emerald City of Oz, awaiting them at the end. Now, in the spring of 1955, they were confronted with an unpleasant fact: they were broke, really and truly broke. Hauled into court yet again by his ex-wife, Lynn Bari, this time for failing to contribute to their son’s college education fund, Sid said that he could not afford even the stipulated $500 a year, for he and Judy were living on borrowed money themselves. As if to prove that dolorous point, a deputy sheriff waylaid him in the courthouse corridor to present a second allegedly unpaid bill: $600 owed on a grand piano.

Under the limelights, singing for her supper—that was where she belonged, an ebullient Judy had said in 1951, after her opening at the Palladium. What she could not have guessed was that in four short years she would have no choice: she would be singing not only for her supper, but for the suppers of three children, a husband and more than half a dozen servants and helpers. Whether she liked it or not, she would be spending the rest of the fifties in nightclubs, concert halls and sports arenas, serenading the world—just a wandering minstrel girl, as she liked to say.

With no money in the till and a sheriff, or at least a deputy sheriff, banging at her door, Judy began planning her new act during the winter, even before the Academy Awards. In July she took it on tour, visiting seven West Coast cities, from San Diego to Vancouver, British
Columbia. Though she sold out in the south, in San Diego and Long Beach, she had a mixed reception in the woodsy north; in Seattle, the box office was so poor, in fact, that a second night had to be scratched. That spotty record, combined with logistical difficulties, put the quietus on plans for a subsequent tour of the East and Midwest, leaving the Lufts as strapped at the conclusion of the summer as they had been at the beginning.

Enter a savior: television, a medium Judy had hitherto avoided. TV shows were not taped before broadcast in those days, and the prospect of performing live in front of a national audience terrified her. Now she had no alternative, and when CBS held out a bag of money, $100,000, for a single program, a ninety-minute version of her Palace act, she quickly grabbed it. A little nervous itself, CBS smothered her with kindness. What would it do, after all, if its star stayed home the night of the broadcast with one of her infamous migraines? To prevent such an untimely attack, Paul Harrison, the show’s director, sat down with his technicians before the first rehearsal and laid down the law: they would have to be careful what they said and did around her. Judy was like a child, he said, and the slightest criticism, even a helpful reminder that her nose was shiny, might cause her to walk off the set and never return. “But remember,” Harrison added, “she’s one of the greatest talents any of you will ever work with. Keep that in mind and love her.”

All the love in the world could not cure Judy’s jitters—“I’m the original stage fright kid,” she joked a few days before airtime—and no one at the network ever knew how close the broadcast had come to disaster. Sometime around dawn on September 24, just a few hours before her flickering image was supposed to appear on millions of TV sets, Judy took an overdose of sleeping pills that left her not only groggy, but virtually speechless for most of the day. During the final run-through she astonished CBS executives by not uttering a word, pointing to her throat and pretending that she was saving her voice for the real event. Not until the curtain went up did her voice reappear, hoarse and raspy at first, then progressively stronger and smoother.

She could have croaked like a frog, however, and still have obliterated the competition; she drew a viewership of forty million, triple the number watching either of the other two networks. Signing her up for
three more such shows, one a year through 1958, CBS wasted no time in putting her before its cameras again. It broadcast her second special, just thirty minutes this time, only six months later, on April 8, 1956.

A debut of another kind followed in July, when Judy made her first appearance in what was, for entertainers, the land of the big bucks: Las Vegas, Nevada. The new earnings record she set there, $55,000 a week—$5,000 more than anyone else had ever received—was the confidence builder she seemed to need. “I’ve never seen her like this,” exclaimed Sid, “so happy, singing like a lark, no problems—and at an opening yet!” She attracted so many people to the New Frontier that its grateful owners took out an ad in a trade paper: they wished, they said, that she could stay forever. But five weeks was all Judy could give them, and at the end of September she was back in her most cherished venue, renewing her love affair with New York audiences at the Palace. Booked for eight weeks, she stayed seventeen, almost as long as she had on her first visit. “New York is good for her,” said Sid. “It’s one place faster paced than she is.”

For Judy, 1956 was the last unblemished year of the decade, however, the last year of uninterrupted good news, and the succeeding years alternated, in perfect but monotonous rhythm, between success and failure, fair weather and foul. The first days of the very next year, 1957, began, indeed, with the termination of her lucrative television contract, the result of a rancorous dispute with CBS over the format of her third special. CBS wanted one kind of show, Judy and Sid wanted another and, rather than give in, the network canceled both her show, which had been scheduled for February 25, and her contract. “We just think she doesn’t want to work,” an unnamed CBS spokesman told a reporter for the
New York Herald Tribune
. Judy, he volunteered, was “known for a highly developed inferiority complex,” and that, along with her fear that she was too heavy, may have led to the impasse.

Unwilling to leave bad enough alone, the Lufts pounced on these disparaging comments, claiming libel as well as breach of contract, and sued CBS for $1,393,333. But all they wound up with was a hail of unfavorable publicity. When Marie Torre, the
Herald Tribune
reporter, refused
to reveal the name of the anonymous CBS spokesman, she was held in contempt of court and sent to jail for ten days. “I’m sorry if anyone has to go to jail,” said Judy, who did not sound very sorry. “But if she wants to go, and be a martyr, I guess she will.” There was no doubt who had the world’s sympathy. The Joan of Arc of her profession, the sentencing judge called Torre, who left behind two small children when she donned her blue-and-white-striped jail uniform. Dorothy Kilgallen doubtless spoke for many when she wrote: “I must say I never thought I’d live to see the day when anyone would be tossed into the jug for saying Judy Garland had problems.”

To the columnists she may have sounded like the Wicked Witch, but to the public, she was still golden-voiced Judy. She made her second appearance in Las Vegas in May 1957, then, in the months that ensued, sang all over the United States: in Detroit, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, too, where, for more than a week, she sang outdoors at the Greek Theater. In October she journeyed to London—her first visit since Palladium days—for what
Variety
described as a “devastating triumph” at the huge, three-thousand-seat Dominion Theater.

Still, the monotonous rhythm persisted, like the ticking of some perverse clock. Devastating triumph was soon followed by equally devastating failure, and Judy ended 1957 as she had begun it, with a bitter and, for her, losing argument. On New Year’s Eve, six days into a three-week engagement at Las Vegas’s Flamingo casino, she got into a shouting match with some unruly patrons.

“Why don’t you shut up?” Judy demanded.

“Why don’t
you
shut up?” someone shouted back.

“I don’t have to sing for you people,” Judy responded.

“We don’t have to listen to you, either,” came the even nastier reply.

Nor did they. Judy not only departed the stage, but Las Vegas as well, forfeiting $100,000 and generating a new flurry of unflattering headlines. “Judy Garland Quits Vegas Show in Huff,” said the
Los Angeles Mirror News
.

Three months later there was another scene on another stage, clear across the continent in Brooklyn, New York. Ten days into a three-and-a-half-week engagement at the vast seventeen-hundred-seat Town and Country Club, Judy sang two songs and stopped, unable to continue, she said, because of laryngitis. But the real strain was financial. Judy said she had not been paid, while Ben Maksik, the club’s owner, said she had. As always, the sole winners were the lawyers, who busied themselves with liens and lawsuits, and the newspapers, which had more fodder for uncomplimentary stories. “Judy Garland,” wrote the Broadway columnist Earl Wilson, “is close to hitting the bottom of the show business ladder for the second time in her career.”

If failure attended her successes, however, so, too, did success attend Judy’s failures. By July she was in top form again. Though she had gained so much weight since
A Star Is Born
that her once-vibrant eyes had become mere slits in a huge moon of a face, no one seemed to mind. The more there was of Judy, the more audiences seemed to like her, and night after night she brought star-packed crowds to Los Angeles’s Cocoanut Grove, where she had last sung when she was nine years old. Moved by what it termed the heart-lifting sight of a comeback, the
Los Angeles Examiner
honored her with a teary editorial that gave an inky smile to “talent emerging from eclipse.” She bathed in that bright light for the rest of the decade, in 1959 making much-praised appearances in all three of America’s major opera houses—New York, Chicago and San Francisco. In New York, her seven nights at the Metropolitan grossed an estimated $190,000, close to a record for any theater, anywhere.

I
’ve found our house,” Judy exclaimed in the summer of 1953, and it was in that house, into which she and Sid moved soon afterward, that they resided for the rest of the fifties. Located in Holmby Hills, a privileged pocket between Beverly Hills and Bel Air, Judy’s discovery had been built by a mogul from the old Hollywood—Hunt Stromberg, producer of such Metro hits as
The Thin Man
and
The Women
—and it seemed just right for two moguls from the new Hollywood, which Judy and Sid confidently expected to be after the release of
A Star Is Born
. It was large—“baronial” was how Jack Warner described it—and it had such old English elegance that it could have sat as comfortably in Surrey or Sussex as it did at 144 South Mapleton Drive, two doors south of Sunset Boulevard.

That English accent did not appeal to Sid, however. Doing his best to expunge it, he replaced the garage with an open carport, he paved over the quaint cobblestone driveway, and he brought in truckloads of dirt to do away with the slight slope in the backyard, obliterating Mrs. Stromberg’s garden in the process. Inside, he bleached the dark wood paneling to blond, and he transformed
Stromberg’s private pub into a suburban den, with a record player, a TV set, a mirrored bar and a fourteen-foot couch, long enough to seat the Lufts, their collie, Sam, and their entire staff. Nor did Sid stop there, and for the next several years his family lived amid the noise and dust of construction. As soon as one section was redone, he would summon the contractors and start on another. “Sid took a castle and made a stable out of it,” said Harry Rubin, who watched, with mounting disbelief, as walls were torn down in some places, then put up in others. “I had no class, but even I knew what Sid was doing was wrong.”