Mark Griffin (25 page)

IN MAY 1949, Judy checked into Peter Brent Brigham Hospital in Boston, where she would undergo treatment for her dependency on prescription medication. She had just been suspended by the studio after failing to make it through her latest picture,
Annie Get Your Gun
. Although Arthur Freed had purchased the rights to Irving Berlin’s Broadway smash with Garland in mind, his would-be Annie Oakley was in no condition to headline another mammoth musical. As Minnelli recalled, Judy was down to a dangerously thin 90 pounds. As she struggled to make it through yet another production that was totally dependent on her for its success, she appeared wild-eyed and manic one day, practically sleep walking the next. Her addiction, coupled with exhaustion from years of overwork, had managed to immobilize the ordinarily unstoppable Judy Garland.

The weeks Judy spent at the hospital offered her an opportunity to completely decompress. This was the first time she’d had to unwind since she and Vincente had honeymooned in New York four years earlier. While at
Peter Brent, Judy would endure the agonizing nightmare of withdrawal, and by June she could proudly report to the press that she was “learning to sleep all over again.” Within a few weeks, Judy’s doctors had guided her back to a regular sleeping and eating routine, but it was her visits to a neighboring children’s hospital that proved to have the most therapeutic effects. “If I was cured at Peter Brent Brigham, it was only because of those children,” Judy would later say. “They were so brave, so darling.”
¹²

Once her appetite and health were restored, Judy traveled to New York, where she was reunited with three-year-old Liza, who was accompanied by a nurse. Vincente had remained in California, though he called regularly. He was thrilled to hear that Judy was on the mend but concerned that his marriage—which had been rocked by recent events—would not recover so neatly.

“IT’S A COMEDY-DRAMA about a man whose heart breaks because he loves his daughter and is about to lose her. It’s not a joke. The laughs come out of sadness and reality. We could never do it with Jack.” So said producer Pandro Berman as he attempted to dissuade Dore Schary from casting comedian Jack Benny in
Father of the Bride
.

Schary, who would soon succeed Louis B. Mayer as MGM’s production chief, had offhandedly promised Benny the lead in MGM’s screen version of Edward Streeter’s bestseller. The comic novel concerned the father of a bride-to-be. Stanley T. Banks is overwhelmed by the seemingly endless pre - parations for his daughter’s wedding as well as his own feelings as he realizes he’s losing his beloved “kitten” to holy matrimony. As Minnelli and Berman immediately realized, with Benny in the title role,
Father of the Bride
might be an entertaining diversion, but it wouldn’t be infused with the warmth and dimension that a legitimate actor could bring to it.

Minnelli shot a screen test of Benny as Stanley Banks out of professional courtesy to “the world’s oldest thirty-nine-year-old.” “It was a fine test and technically correct,” Minnelli pronounced. “It had only one failing. His reading lacked the conviction underneath, that only a highly gifted actor like Spencer Tracy could supply.”
¹
And who better than Spencer Tracy to play the hapless head of the Banks household? Husband and wife screenwriting team Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (who had scripted
The Pirate
) admitted that they had nobody but Tracy in mind when they were working
on their adaptation. And yet, the word around the lot was that the actor wasn’t interested in the part.

After Minnelli pleaded his case to Katharine Hepburn, a dinner was arranged. Vincente put his cards on the table, telling Tracy, “With you, this picture could be a little classic of a comedy. Without you, it’s nothing.” As Minnelli later recounted to Richard Schickel, this very personal appeal made all the difference. “Well, [Tracy] blossomed like a rose. . . . He had heard that we were testing people and had other people in mind and he was just one of the boys, and that hurt his ego. . . . He simply wanted to be wanted, and loved the project and agreed to do it. It was as simple as that.”
²

Without question, Tracy was the perfect embodiment of Streeter’s aisle-shy patriarch who comes to discover that he’s fonder of his first born than he realized. Throughout the relatively stress-free shoot, Minnelli found Tracy to be “an inspiration,” and he wasn’t the only one who was impressed. Others who worked on the picture recall that Tracy was both accessible and unfailingly professional.

One of them was contract player Carleton Carpenter, who can be glimpsed throughout
Father of the Bride
, first appearing as a “be bop hound” in a delightful montage featuring Elizabeth Taylor’s rejected suitors. “All told, I have an elbow or an ear lobe in every other shot in the picture,” says Carpenter, who managed to make an impression on the film’s legendary star. “I only had one little scene with Spencer Tracy but he was very nice to me,” Carpenter recalls. “At one point, he said, ‘You’re from New York, aren’t you, Carp?’ And I said, ‘Yeah . . .’ and Tracy said, ‘I could tell. You don’t seem like a movie actor. You seem like a stage actor.’ And I thought that was very sweet. It just started things off in the right way.”
³

Russ Tamblyn made one of his first film appearances in
Father of the Bride
as Tracy’s youngest son. “It was an incredible experience,” Tamblyn says of being part of an ensemble that included Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Bennett, Billie Burke, and Leo G. Carroll. Though duly impressed with the star power, Tamblyn says he was unaware of the stature of their director. “I was so young, I really didn’t know who he was.” Though even as a teenager, Tamblyn recognized that there was something different about the man at the helm: “He seemed to pay unusually close attention to details—the way a suit looked on an actor and that sort of thing. What I remember about Vincente Minnelli is that he was very gentle, very quiet, very calm. . . . I guess he’d have to be, being married to Judy Garland.” Four years after the release of
Father of the Bride
, Tamblyn would star in
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
, directed by
Stanley Donen, MGM’s other important director of musicals. Tamblyn noted that Metro’s preeminent pair seemed to have more than just a studio in common: “Both had an effeminate side that I wondered about, quite frankly.”
⁴

Stanley T. Banks (Spencer Tracy) about to lose daughter Kay (Elizabeth Taylor) to holy matrimony in
Father of the Bride
. Minnelli’s movie made the
New York Times
Ten Best List for 1950 and it was in the running for Best Picture but lost to
All About Eve
. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

The film was a turning point for third-billed Elizabeth Taylor, seventeen at the time and transitioning to more adult roles. If the plots of Taylor’s movies often seemed to mirror her off-screen exploits,
Father of the Bride
was no exception. On May 6, 1950, just days before the premiere of the movie, Taylor would marry hotel heir Nicky Hilton in a star-studded ceremony that seemed executive-produced by MGM’s front office. Taylor’s screen mother, Joan Bennett, remembered: “The whole more-stars-than-there-are-in-the-heavens crowd was out . . . and you’d jolly well better show up, because the studio sent out invitations, promoting
Father of the Bride
.”
⁵

Though the first of Taylor’s many marriages would fail, the movie was the kind of gargantuan hit that studio executives sell their mothers for. In its initial release,
Father of the Bride
earned $4,150,000, making it one of the top grossers of the year. The picture ranked third on the
New York Times
“Ten Best Films of the Year” list. And for the first time, a Vincente Minnelli production was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award (though it would lose to the more cynical and sophisticated
All About Eve
). Spencer
Tracy was nominated as Best Actor for a role that he had initially resisted (he lost to José Ferrer’s bravura turn in
Cyrano de Bergerac
).

Spencer Tracy and Vincente receive a visit from Judy Garland on the set of
Father of the Bride
. At the time, Garland was shooting
Summer Stock
, her final film for MGM. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

Boxoffice
bestowed its “July Blue Ribbon Award” on the film and gushed: “As blithe and breezy as spring itself is this comedy which goes with the season like orange blossoms and tulle.” Entitled “Gay Occasion,” Otis L. Guernsey Jr.’s review summed it up nicely: “The occasion is well ordered, the people charming, the lapses not serious and the end achieved before the conviviality is exhausted.”
⁶

Those who regard MGM as a factory that cranked out motion pictures the same way that General Motors made Frigidaires would scoff at the notion that a domestic comedy like
Father of the Bride
could have been attempting to “say” anything. But for Minnelliphiles, who believe his work is layered so that it can be appreciated on many different levels, Spencer Tracy’s separation anxiety goes deeper than “Who giveth this woman?”

From the moment Kay Banks announces her engagement, her hapless father is simultaneously pulled along and shut out of the preparations for her impending nuptials. Stanley Banks is lost—and not only in terms of his encounters with caterers and prospective in-laws: He is suddenly displaced within his own family.

As the father of the bride, Stanley is asked to do his bit in carrying off many time-honored traditions, even though the role he’s been thrust into seems alien and uncomfortable to him. While his wife and daughter are actively engaged in planning the wedding, Stanley is a detached observer, playing a role that is as ill-fitting as his twenty-year-old cutaway. Stanley even has a nightmare (complete with surrealist imagery straight out of German Expressionism) in which he single-handedly destroys his daughter’s wedding. He’s late, doesn’t know his lines, and isn’t as well rehearsed as the rest of the wedding party. In Streeter’s novel, Banks is jeered by his friends and relatives: “How could a man like that have such a beautiful daughter? They say she isn’t his. It’s a joke. He’s a joke.” There in the midst of a wedding ceremony—one of society’s sacred rituals—Stanley T. Banks is revealed as a fraud.

“I think there’s probably a Minnelli autobiography in every one of his films,” says film scholar Beth Genne: