Get Happy (63 page)

Secure in the snug embrace of a hall beloved by all musicians, warmed by the smiles flashing from every seat, she could, it seemed, do anything, from Broadway brass to whispered ballads, pure and plangent. All that—Judy triumphant! Judy
in excelsis!
—can be heard on the recording that was released by Capitol Records the following July, when it quickly rose to the top of the charts. What cannot be heard—what only those present could see—was Judy in action, dancing, prancing and strutting. She was her own chorus line, her own comedian and acrobat; she was all of vaudeville wrapped up into one small package.

To say, however, that Judy gave a perfect performance that night is accurate, but curiously insufficient. What made the one hundred and fifty-five minutes so electric was something everyone could share—something everyone can still share: a human triumph, a triumph not of combat or competition, but of spirit and determination in the service of art. In one bright evening, all of Judy’s potential, a lifetime of waiting, had blossomed into thrilling, exuberant flower. It was as if, after years of trying, and after several signal successes, a writer, or a painter, or a composer had at last brought everything together—talent, experience and the artist’s anguish—to produce one great and definitive work. That was Judy at Carnegie Hall. She had shown what she could do and what she could be, and, through the miracle of her music, she had opened a brief, shivery window into a realm beyond ordinary understanding.

Carnegie Hall was validation, proof that Judy really had changed. “The new new Garland,” one magazine dubbed her. Fields’s strategy had worked, and reporters, who are almost as excited by comebacks as they
are by downfalls and disasters, rushed to her side. All the articles that appeared in the ensuing months were flattering; several were shrewd and insightful. But the most revealing look at the phenomenon of the Garland concert—that combination of “revivalism and the ancient rites of Dionysus,” as one magazine called it—came not from a reporter sitting in the audience, but from a screenwriter standing backstage at one of her performances in New Jersey, where he was gathering material for a movie,
The Lonely Stage
, that Judy was scheduled to make several months later.

The screenwriter, Mayo Simon, arrived at the concert hall in the afternoon, as the lights were being adjusted and the orchestra was starting to rehearse. Wearing a babushka and looking, in Simon’s opinion, like “dumpy Gussie Schlump, the woman who cleans up after the show,” the star herself did not arrive until seven-thirty, half an hour before the curtain was supposed to go up. Though her stage fright was notorious—Judy herself joked about it—she seemed not at all nervous that night. Sipping a glass of white wine in her dressing room, she gossiped, told stories and managed to ignore both the clock, which soon announced eight, and the sound of clapping that followed from her impatient audience a few minutes later. Finally, at eight-thirty, she jumped up. “Let’s do a show!” she exclaimed, and disappeared behind a screen to don her costume. When she emerged, she had discarded the babushka, but, to the disappointed Simon, who had expected some magical mutation to have taken place behind that screen, she still looked like Gussie Schlump. Where, he wondered, was the woman who was causing such hysteria night after night?

But the sorcery was not in her costume or makeup. Now, as she stood in a corner of the stage, listening to her overture and waiting for her entrance cue, Judy underwent an amazing metamorphosis. Straightening up, she appeared to become both taller and thinner. “It was stunning,” said the astonished Simon, “the most fantastic transformation I have ever seen. It was like watching Mr. Hyde turn into Dr. Jekyll, or seeing black-and-white change into Technicolor. When she walked out onstage, she was not just a wonderful singer; she was a presence!” Through an act of will or alchemy—or perhaps both—the ugly duckling had become a swan, and Gussie Schlump had become Judy Garland.

L
ike the calendar, Judy’s career can be neatly divided into decades, each following an increasingly familiar pattern: a brilliant start, several years of spectacular success—and then disaster. The forties, her movie-star years, had begun in a flurry of excitement, but had concluded in heartbreak and recriminations. The fifties saw resurrection on the stages of the Palladium and the Palace, but they, too, ended in sorrow, with her doctors despairing of her life as she lay immobile in a New York hospital.

And now the sixties had brought a second miraculous recovery, the clamorous triumph of Carnegie Hall and a welcome back to both movies and television. After
Judgment at Nuremberg
, Judy was to provide the musical meows for Mewsette, a sexy French cat in a feature-length cartoon,
Gay Purr-ee
, that boasted eight new songs by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg. She was to make
A Child Is Waiting
, her second picture with Stanley Kramer and Abby Mann. And then, in the spring of 1962, she was to fly to England to star opposite her old friend Dirk Bogarde, in
The Lonely Stage—I Could Go On Singing
, it was later to be called.
Sandwiched between
Gay Purr-ee
and
A Child Is Waiting
was an hour-long TV show, with guest appearances by two of the day’s hottest entertainers, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. As impressed as everyone else by her remarkable revival,
Time
magazine anointed her with a title—“Judy Garland III.”

Through all the years, the relentless cycle of ups and downs, there was, however, one constant. Judy did well only when she felt confident—and she only felt confident when she was holding the hand of a man she could trust. “Only
you
could give me the confidence I so badly needed,” she had written Vincente at the end of work on
The Clock;
but when her confidence in him vanished, so had her marriage, her M-G-M career and her emotional equilibrium. Along came Sid with a new boost to her ego, sending her soaring through the first half of the fifties. When her faith in him disappeared, buried under an avalanche of debts, her career, marriage and self-esteem started to disappear as well.

Freddie Fields and David Begelman had come next. It was they who had made Carnegie Hall possible, and it was they who had enabled her to pay off that pile of debts—$375,000, by her estimate. “I hated owing money,” she confessed. “It’s—humiliating, especially if you’re capable of
not
being in debt.” In Dallas, where she was publicly embarrassed by the presentation of a hotel bill left over from her 1957 visit, she grumbled that despite the many thousands she had made, she had never actually seen any of her money, had never touched it to know it was hers. Always ready to humor her, Fields and Begelman, those two Johnnys-on-the-spot, listened to that complaint and came to her room after the concert with exactly the right medicine for such psychic pains—a brown paper bag bulging with that night’s receipts. “I’d never seen so much money,” she said. “I giggled like a schoolgirl, throwing it in the air and letting it cascade down around my head.”

Only when it was too late did Sid wake up to what he had done in giving up his manager’s title. Judy now looked not to him, but to Fields and Begelman for guidance and protection. A title was not all Sid had given up, however, and it was probably not a coincidence that Judy ceased to love him at about the time she discovered she no longer needed him—in January 1961, to be precise, a few weeks after Fields had been hired. She took a walk through the streets of a snowy Manhattan,
she said, and in that whirl of white, suddenly realized that, after ten years, she did not “give a damn” about Sid.

From the beginning, the Lufts, with their loud arguments, separations and skirmishes with creditors, had provided rich copy for the gossip columns. It was perhaps not surprising, therefore, that Sid, who was accustomed to so much noise in his marriage, seemed deaf to a genuine howl of distress. He may not have understood how troubled the relationship really was until July 1961, when Judy pointedly excluded him from a family vacation on Cape Cod, where she had taken a place just a hundred yards from the Kennedy compound. Showing up nonetheless, Sid checked into a motel and telephoned her; but her voice was so chilly that he kept his distance for a couple of days. When he finally did visit her, she had warmed only slightly, greeting him with the cool politeness she might have shown a casual acquaintance.

“You know, Sid,” she said, after pouring him a drink, “I’m going to divorce you.”

Spoken so matter-of-factly, her words unsettled him perhaps more than any others she had ever uttered, and Sid returned to his lonely motel room, opened a bottle of liquor and promptly proceeded to fall apart. In an instant, Judy had reversed the roles of a decade, and it was Sid who called her, sobbing uncontrollably. “Sid, what’s gotten into you?” she asked after rushing to his side. “I don’t know,” he cried. Remaining until he had regained his composure, Judy then left, still cool and unruffled.

That icy reserve thawed somewhat in the fall, when the Lufts tried yet again to bridge their differences. “You just don’t toss ten years of marriage aside easily,” Judy explained. In December, when she fell ill in Europe, a few days after the Berlin premiere of
Judgment at Nuremberg
, Sid went all the way across the Atlantic to bring her home. He then stayed to celebrate the Christmas holidays with her and their children, Liza included, at a house Judy had rented outside New York, in suburban Scarsdale. When Judy flew to Los Angeles to work on her CBS special and
A Child Is Waiting
, Sid followed her there as well, bringing the whole family together in a house less than a mile north of their previous
address on South Mapleton. That house had been sold several months earlier to pay off lingering debts—three mortgages, eighteen attachments, numerous liens, unpaid child support for Sid’s son John and loans from two of Sid’s friends.

Taping the first week in January, Judy almost waltzed through her television show, which went on to smash an opposition that included NBC’s popular western series,
Bonanza
. Signs of trouble, hints of the old Judy, began to resurface during filming of A
Child Is Waiting
, which was set in a school for retarded children. Stanley Kramer, who had made her feel so secure in
Judgment at Nuremberg
, was busy with another project, and he had assigned the directing chores to a brash newcomer, John Cassavetes. Unlike Kramer, Cassavetes believed in keeping his actors off balance, convinced that from nervousness would spring spontaneity.

From Judy and her costar, Burt Lancaster, he received little but resentment, however. “That boy doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Lancaster complained to Abby Mann. “I’m going to kill him,” Judy herself said. She settled for infuriating him instead, frequently arriving late and unprepared, using that old but always reliable weapon, passive aggression. Unhappiness ruled from beginning to end—and well beyond—and everyone involved, Cassavetes included, was dissatisfied with a film that offered a glimpse into a world few moviegoers knew or, as dismal box-office returns were to demonstrate, wanted to know.