Judy Garland on Judy Garland (42 page)

She introduced the next number, a medley that featured nine jazz musicians from the band: “I'm known mostly for marching songs. I like to sing jazz but they won't let me. We have nine marvelous men in the band. Would nine marvelous men come forward?” She began to help the drummer move his equipment down onto the stage and chased away a stagehand who was trying to help. “Have you got everything you need? You have so much equipment. Have you got your clothespins on your music? I'm supposed to conduct this. What is it? One … two … one, two, three … it works … ‘Who cares if the sun cares to fall in the sea?'” She was off, one arm shooting up on the words
“You
care,
baby,
for me . .

Listening to the jazz group before she began “Puttin' on the Ritz,” she said, “You moan, don't you? What tempo is this? A striptease tempo? I don't do it, I just talk about it.” She finished the medley and the lights came on, to show Judy helping the drummer back onto his stand with his equipment, singing “What Is There to Say?” softly to herself. She turned and told another story: “I've got to tell you something while the plane comes over. Wouldn't it be awful if one saw the lights and landed here?

“The English press … is just horrible. You can sue and they pay and then say something awful again. You sue and they pay again. I didn't want to meet them but I was told I must. There were 20 reporters and 20 photographers jammed into this airless room. One young girl came up to me and said, ‘You look absolutely marvelous,' and she kept coming up and
saying it for two hours. You know, by the end of the party I kind of liked her and I offered to give her a ride to her flat. I wanted to hear more. The next morning I read the paper that the girl worked for and there was a headline: J
UDY GARLAND ARRIVES IN LONDON,
and further down was this girl saying, ‘I met Judy Garland last night and she's not plump, she's not chubby, she's fat!'”

The band swelled into the opening bars of “The Man That Got Away” and the stadium echoed with applause that drowned out the music.

The laughter was real, the tears were real, and the words were real: “When you're smiling the whole world smiles with you … All the music of life seems to be like a bell that is ringing for me … Life is one long jubilee … I know how Columbus felt finding another world … The world is a stage, the stage is a world … We're in or we're out of the money … I believe in doing what I can, crying when I must, laughing when I choose … but I believe that since my life began, the most I've had is just a talent to amuse, heigh ho, if love were all …” Finally, there came the strongest public image of all, the little girl who wants escape: “If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can't I?”

Also in the Garland repertory were a few effervescent expressions of pure joy, where style and virtuoso talent eclipsed meaning, songs like “San Francisco,” the last number before intermission at Forest Hills. She began it with an arch verse in a nasal twang. By the time she had thrown her head back for the last iron-lung delivery of the words “San Francisco,” the audience was roaring in delight. She kicked off her shoes, left the stage, and wandered barefoot on the grass, bowing to applause that didn't stop until after she finally walked into the backstage darkness.

David and Freddie met her at the stairway next to the band and hustled her into the little English car, to take her back to the tennis club for a half-hour rest. Judy took off her clothes and sat in a dressing gown on the cool tile floor of the ladies' room. A huge fan sent a torrent of air through the open door of the room.

Mr. Kenneth rebuilt Judy's frayed and soaked hair: Stevie helped her into black trousers and another bright, jeweled jacket, and it was time to go back to the lions. In the car, Judy had a premonition: “My voice is
going. It's the fresh air, David says. I get sick from too much of it.” She laughed weakly.

Judy delivered the fast “That's Entertainment” and then stopped to let another plane go by. “Let's let him go over. They always come over on the ballads.” She started her slow, quiet, “I Can't Give You Anything But Love.” She was alternately aggressive, loving, wise, despondent and gay, explosive and despairing through “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “You're Nearer,” “If Love Were All,” “A Foggy Day,” “Stormy Weather,” and “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.” An impulsive voice from the top of the stands shouted, “That's my girl,” and other voices said, “That goes for all of us.”

She then asked if anyone liked “A Foggy Day” and they did, even more so after she sang it. Then, “There's a lovely song that Noël Coward wrote for
Bitter Sweet.
I can never remember the words so I have to look at them,” and she did. It was “If Love Were All.” In “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” Judy became athletic, dancing, leaping, kicking and bouncing across the stage. At the end you felt that there was nothing she or her voice could not do.

Judy began a medley of “You Made Me Love You,” “For Me and My Gal,” and “The Trolley Song.” The people in the aisles and the first rows began to spill out onto the grass to be nearer Judy, and policemen lined up in long rows to keep them away from her. The crowd continued to desert their seats and to press forward. Judy started her last number, “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” to a swelling roar of applause that drowned out everything. She stomped on the hardwood with each beat of “a million baby kisses I'll deliver” and exploded at the final “melody.” The audience answered explosion with explosion.

Fields, Begelman, her press agent John Springer, and the cordon of policemen watched anxiously as Judy took her bows again and again, walking close to the growing mass of Garland-lovers on the grass tennis courts. Springer said, “This is where the madness starts,” as if the audience reaction up to this point had been calm. Judy walked back to Freddie and David and they led her slowly back to the stairs, while she caught her breath in gasps. A minute later she shook her head like a prizefighter after a nine-count, and broke loose to return to the frenzied audience.

Judy sang “Over the Rainbow” for her first encore, hiding her exhaustion, and walked around the field again in a small spotlight, blowing kisses during the applause. The crowd on the edges of the field was growing larger with each song, many of them taking pictures. The policemen had to hold hands to keep them back as Judy sought out Freddie and David for a second breather. The roar of applause never stopped from the end of “Rainbow” to the beginning of “Swanee,” as she came back again, determined, asking David for the ‘‘hat, hat, hat” she needed for her second encore. She clapped it on her head and rolled through “Swanee,” building to her biggest note yet on the ending.

This time the noise and the surge of uncontrolled fans
was
madness, as Springer had predicted. You could not tell whether the crowd was clapping, shouting, screaming, laughing, or crying. The sound suddenly had no character. It was just an expression of total approval and acceptance. The audience closed in until there was only a small open circle. The policemen tried but couldn't stop one lady, who broke through and kissed Judy. Judy herself was completely exhausted, winded, and hardly able to walk once she was out of the spotlight. But she mopped her face, took her familiar deep, deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and went back for the third round on will alone.

Fields said, “You know what creates panic? Cops. If we left her alone, they'd never touch her.” Judy was off and into the most demanding song of the concert, “Chicago,” with apparent ease. As she sang “You will never guess where,” the audience answered spontaneously “Where?” and Freddie yelled, “Go, go.” Another voice yelled, “Come on, Judy,” and the audience began to clap with the beat. The concert had become a religious rite. She strutted as the tempo built, and when it was all over, at last, and Freddie walked in to pick up the pieces, she became playful and pulled Freddie back to the spotlight, pirouetting. Freddie walked her back to the car. Even though the professionals there knew that there weren't any more songs, they felt that Judy wanted to go back again.

A boy that she recognized leaned into the car and kissed her. She told him that she had seen him on the sidelines during the performance. The audience had impressed her: “They were so sweet … Look at my hair … I'm sweating gallons …”

Back in her decompression chamber, sitting again on the tiled floor of the dressing room, Judy told Freddie, “I missed doing that. I'm no good without a particular date to look forward to. I think I got a little out of shape. You need a concert to do a concert.”

Half an hour later, she was ready to go back to the hotel, and the entourage pushed its way through the fans outside the tennis club. At the street, where the Rolls stood waiting, three young men burst into a parody of a song from
Bye Bye Birdie,
“We love you, Judy, oh, yes we do, we love you Judy, we love you true, when you're not with us, we're blue …” Judy stopped Freddie and asked the boys to sing it again. She was charmed. In the car, Judy cried with happiness: “You two are the luckiest thing that ever happened to me,” and Freddie replied, “You're the best thing that ever happened to me.” Judy sobbed again, “What a terrible thing. What if I turned out to be a sentimental slob?” Freddie dispelled sentiment with some practical news. Forest Hills had brought in 13,704 paid admissions for a gross of $54,621, over twice as much as either of the two Carnegie Hall performances.

It was nearly midnight by the time Judy was dressed for dinner and went downstairs to the hotel's sidewalk café to celebrate yet another Garland victory. Judy, David, John Springer, Abby Mann, the screenwriter who had written
Judgment at Nuremberg,
Rowland Barber, a freelance magazine writer, and myself sat at one table. Next to it were Freddie, Dorothy Kilgallen, and some friends. The hotel dining room trio, consisting of a guitar, a bass fiddle, and an accordion, came out to serenade Judy and she sang along with them, giving them requests, just as if she hadn't sung a note since the day before. The two tables, led by Judy, sang for three hours, without a pause for dinner, running through 38 songs, starting with “Just in Time,” and finally ending with “The Party's Over,” Judy, Freddie, and David sang loudest when they came to “No more doubt or fear, I've found my way” in the first song, looking at each other and smiling.

Finally Freddie said that it was 3:30, and the G-F-B Corp. collected their mountain of luggage and settled into the of the Rolls. Just as they were leaving, a very proper lady put her head in the window and said with great emotion, “Judy, Forest Hills
loves
you.”

NEXT ISSUE: In
Part III
Judy conquers a reluctant Newport; she neighbors with the Kennedys at Hyannis Port, and elucidates the Garland philosophy of life.

Part III
: “For the ending I fall off the stand” • “What are you doing tonight? Would you like to see a movie at the Kennedys?” • “I could never cheat on a performance, or coast through. My emotions are involved” • Judy in the sun at Newport • Judy across the street at Hyannis Port • Judy and friends discussing how she stays on top.

Judy's afternoon concert at Newport July 3 did not have the compelling emotional quality of Forest Hills and Carnegie Hall.

It was not that Judy gave less than she had before: if anything, she worked harder to compensate for unfortunate physical conditions. The
Music at Newport
concerts, their popularity undermined by the riots the year before, were held on a football field, the folding chairs of the audience strewn along its length. There was a tiny square bandstand, 10 feet high, at one end. Loudspeakers, a changing complement of jazz performers, and two hot-dog stands constituted
Music at Newport.
It might have been a political rally in Indiana.

There was no sound quality, not even that provided by the stadium shell of Forest Hills which held the sound briefly and took some of the curse from an open-air performance. Judy sang facing into the sun, and each song was marred by a breeze that was picked up by the microphones hanging above the band. Technically it was a disaster, but Judy won her audience. If not so completely as at Forest Hills, the crowd was nonetheless hers by the end of the first act. That afternoon 7,650 people attended, but an equal number of empty chairs at the back and the generally undisciplined audience, half of them modern-jazz addicts who roamed aimlessly through the rows during the performance, made it look more like a sales convention than the worshiping congregation that Judy usually commanded.

Judy spoke frankly between songs: “What have they got this fence here for, to keep me from getting to you? What baby, you
want
to? You'll be deported if you do….I've never seen so much wandering around in an
audience. Well, it's a moving audience and we'll just have to keep moving with them…. Are you supposed to sing over the top of this thing? …. I must get a stagehand's union card. Did you put that there, darling? Was it to
help
me? My goodness, it's funny in the daytime, isn't it? …. For an ending, I fall off the stand…. Let's do the Noël Coward if it hasn't blown away…. This show is not without incident…. [Then, reading from a slip of paper handed to her] This is an emergency, a Dr. Victor Madeiros is wanted in the Pinkerton tent….”

It was over, but not too soon. As far as Judy was concerned, the only good thing about Newport, aside from the money (a $25,500 gross for the afternoon), was the house trailer that Sid Bernstein, the 1961
Music at Newport
producer, had given her for a dressing room. After the concert, 50 old friends stood outside the trailer and filed through, two by two, emerging through a door at the other end as if it were a mobile-home exhibit.