A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (20 page)

Her disposition was not improved the following day by a late-night fire
in her bedroom, caused by "faulty wiring," which almost got out of control,
necessitating the evacuation of the house while the Beverly Hills fire department handled the situation. The next day she was back at the studio,
recording "Gotta Have Me Go With You," the song which Esther Blodgett sings with the band at the Shrine benefit-a rhythm tune, and vocally
very tricky. Garland was nervous and edgy from the fire and from the pills
she was taking to help her lose weight; once again she differed with Martin
over the manner in which the song should be sung. Voices were raised and
remarks verging on insult were exchanged, according to the gossip columns
in the trades.

On Friday, September 4, at three-thirty in the afternoon, Garland reported to stage 9 for the all-important rendition of "The Man That Got
Away." Heindorf had spent several days and nights working on the arrangement with Skip Martin. An ex-saxophone and clarinet player for the Benny
Goodman and Glenn Miller orchestras and a highly regarded arranger for
Goodman, Charlie Barnet, and Les Brown, Martin had joined MGM in
the late 194os and worked on The Barkleys of Broadway, Singin' in the
Rain, and The Band Wagon. He and Heindorf embellished Arlen's slow
and steady beginning with a trombone playing a low blues phrase while
Garland hummed. Martin had set the song for an on-screen jazz sextetpiano, bass, guitar, drums, trombone, and tenor sax-shaping the complex
song so that it built properly to its climax. (He had written in solos for some
of the best jazz talent in Hollywood at the time: Irving "Babe" Russin on
tenor sax, Buddy Cole at the piano, and Hoyt Bohannon with the moodsetting trombone solo at the start.) Heindorf then gave the underlying
orchestral track a throbbing, intense beat in the drums and the bass, played
over an insistent rising and falling figure in the (off-screen) strings and
woodwinds, with the full orchestra blasting out on the climactic phrases of
the lyric; the entire piece builds to a pounding climax, with a diminuendo
on the final phrase-the last statement of the title. The Martin/Heindorf
version has turned out to be the best arrangement the song has ever
received. Virtually every version recorded over the years has used it or a
variation thereof, and Garland used it for years in her concert appearances;
the first four bars of trombone solo never failed to evoke appreciative bursts
of applause from audiences, who recognized what was coming.

"It was a difficult song to sing because of the range," recalled Heindorf. "When you do an arrangement for someone, you have to take into account
the lowest note that they can sing well, and the highest note they can sing
well. No two people sing alike. Now, over the years, I'd heard Judy sing so
much that I knew exactly how she'd sing: her phrasing, her intonation,
where she'd take a breath. Any good singer will sing a lyric like they would
speak it-where there's a comma, they take a breath-and that's just about
what good singers do that ordinary singers don't do.

"On `The Man That Got Away,' the arrangement was made in two keys,
B major and D-flat major. It turned out that one arrangement was half a
tone too low and the other was half a tone too high, so I transposed it to
C and she sang it in that for the recording."

They worked for two hours and did four takes; once again, time was
taken up by arguments between Garland and vocal coach Hugh Martin.
According to Lawrence Stewart, who witnessed the scene, "She wanted to
sing it loud and brassy, but Martin wanted it sweet and in a lower key. After
much difficulty, the song was recorded both ways, and Judy's preference
was adopted for the picture, because the lower and sweeter version lacked
brilliance and all of those dramatic qualities which had to be developed in
the song, not only in terms of itself but, more particularly, in terms of its
function in the story." Martin was furious at Garland's insistence on doing
the song her way, and their long-standing differences over technique and
interpretation reached the explosion point. The next day Daily Variety
reported that "a heated verbal hassle over the way [the song] should be sung
resulted in Martin walking off the set in a rage. Later that night he was
on a plane back to New York, leaving pic without a vocal coach."

By now, the announced start date of September i had come and gone,
leading the proverbial "industry observers" to nod sagely and mutter "uhhuh." The incident with Hugh Martin only intensified the speculation that
Garland was up to her old ways. When Warners announced a new start
date of September i6, Mike Connelly, in his Hollywood Reporter column,
remarked, "Write it in ice and set it in the sun."

The amount of work still to be done before the picture could begin
photography was enormous, but Cukor, hard worker though he was, refused
to be rushed into decisions until all possibilities had been thoroughly discussed and tested. Costumes were being designed by Mary Ann Nyberg,
a new young designer who had impressed Cukor and Garland with her work
at MGM on The Band Wagon and Lili. Cukor was looking at location
photographs trying to decide on a suitable site for the wedding sequence; he wanted to use real locations as much as possible instead of back-lot sets.
Cukor had always liked the verisimilitude that actual places gave to the
staging of dramatic action, but it wasn't until after the war that he'd had
the opportunity to utilize locations extensively for his exterior shots. Beginning with Adam's Rib in 1948, he made it a practice to go on location
whenever it would add to the impact of a scene. On A Star Is Born, twelve
different locations had to be chosen, among them the studio itself, a
Hollywood drive-in restaurant, the Malibu beaches, a Beverly Hills church,
a cheap rooming house in downtown Los Angeles, the oil fields of Baldwin
Hills, and the Lincoln Heights jail. Moreover, there were decisions on the
interior sets, sections of the script that needed work, and the casting of the
important subsidiary roles.

For the part of Oliver Niles, veteran actor Charles Bickford was signed
in early September. Bickford, whom Cukor described as "a reasonable and
intelligent man," had a career that dated back to the 1920S on Broadway;
he had made his first film, Dynamite, for Cecil B. DeMille in 1929. Though
Cukor felt that he had the strength and dignity needed for Niles, Bickford
was in fact second choice. Efforts had been made to interest William
Powell, free-lancing after twenty years as one of MGM's top stars; but he
declined, feeling the part was not big enough. Because of his refusal,
considerable discussion was given to the idea of rewriting the role to give
Niles the Danny McGuire "pep talk" speech near the end, in the hope of
attracting a big name for the role, but Hart quickly vetoed this idea: "I feel
that it is more dramatic and unexpected if a minor character tips the scales
at this point. It would be the normal and conventional way to have the head
of the studio, her great friend, persuade her to go on. There is no excitement or surprise in this because throughout the picture Oliver has been
functioning more or less in this way."

Several actors had been considered for the part of Matt Libby, the
abrasive studio press chief, among them Howard Duff, Pat O'Brien, and
Murvyn Vye, but the role finally went to Jack Carson, a former Warner
Bros. contract player and an adept light comedian, who had reached fame
of sorts co-starring with another Warners contract player, Dennis Morgan,
in the Two Guys from ... series in the late forties. After leaving Warners,
Carson had starred on Broadway in an unsuccessful revival of Of Thee I
Sing, then went on to great success in a production of Girl Crazy at the
Dallas State Fair. Carson was known primarily for his considerable comedic
talents, but his abilities as a straight dramatic actor had impressed Cukor as far back as Mildred Pierce in 1945. At work, he was a bright, funny man,
always "on," but at home he was given to fits of moroseness, sitting for
hours drinking, not talking to anyone. Jack Warner liked Carson and asked
Cukor to interview him for the part, and afterwards Carson commented
in an interview: "We found that we were both in agreement about what
a press agent is really like . . . he's nothing more than a businessman
... he has to be sharp, of course, but primarily he must be a level-headed
businessman. Generally, he's a pretty solid individual who works regular
hours, then goes home to his wife and kids. The first Matt Libby [in the
1937 version] was too tough to be believable; he was such a heel that all
the press people were offended, but they've toned him down considerably
this time."

Cukor had several choices for the small but pivotal role of Danny
McGuire, the combination of Esther's best friend and her grandmother
from the original. He had been favorably impressed with a young actor at
Both Century-Fox named Casey Adams (formerly Max Showalter), but he
turned out to be unavailable. Moss Hart mentioned to Cukor that he "saw
an actor in Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical play Me and Juliet by the
name of Ray Walston ... he's exactly the right age and has a wonderfully
right face for Danny. He also happens to be one of the best young actors
to have come along in the last ten years." But getting him released from
his play commitment was too complicated, and Cukor decided to give the
part to a young actor named Tom Noonan, who had just achieved a certain
degree of recognition by playing Marilyn Monroe's nebbish boyfriend in
Howard Hawks's film of the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Noonan
was a nightclub comic who with his partner, Peter Marshall, had headlined
such high-visibility night spots as Hollywood's Mocambo, Chicago's Chez
Paree, and New York's Latin Quarter. In show business since the age of
eleven, the young actor had been in only two films, and the role in A Star
Is Born would be his first dramatic part.

One small role in the film was filled through a series of events that could
have been lifted from Moss Hart's script. In the story, a young starlet
evidently is living with Norman Maine; she chatters away while he is trying
to distinguish Esther's voice in a television commercial. It's a tiny part, but
important in pointing up Norman's appeal, his loneliness, and the vacuous
world of film starlets. At Columbia in 1952, Cukor had tested a young
actress named Sheree North; he later commented to Warners' casting
director William Orr that "she is very attractive, amusing, and has person ality. I was impressed with her possibilities . . . I think that properly
handled, she could become quite a personality. She is an excellent dancer
as well." But prior commitments made North unavailable, much to Cukor's
disappointment.

At Warners, one afternoon in early September, Cukor was walking by
a projection room with Bill Orr when he heard a voice singing. Orr told
him it was the screen test of a twenty-year-old actress from the Pasadena
Playhouse named Lucy McAleer. She recalls: "Bill Orr told me that Mr.
Cukor looked in at the test and he said, 'That's the little girl I think we'll
use for the starlet, Lola Lavery.' So he wanted to meet me. For the test
I had done "S Wonderful' by Gershwin; Merv Griffin was playing the
piano and I sang and danced around the piano, ending up sitting on it for
the finale.

"So Bill Orr sent me over to Mr. Cukor's home. It was a kind of walled
villa above Sunset Boulevard, stucco white walls, and I walked into this
heavenly patio. And there was a stairway that led up to the second story
from the patio, and the first time I saw Mr. Cukor he was standing at the
top of the stairs. He leaned over and said 'Come on up, little one, I'm
George Cukor and I want to see what you can do.' So as I was coming up
the stairs he said, 'So do you think you're an actress?' and I said, 'Yep, I
sure do.' We sat for a few moments and he asked me if I would be willing
to do a scene from The Voice of the Turtle with a young man who was going
to have a screen test at Metro. Mr. Cukor was helping him. So in that room
he coached us in Voice of the Turtle, and I'm giving it everything I've got,
and he kept saying to me things like 'Now, don't give me any of that
Pasadena Playhouse junk ... I want to see what's in you come out.'

"So we worked a week together at his house, and when it was over I was
thanking him because he told me I had the part, and I was so excited, and
he said, 'Okay, where do you get it?' And I said, 'Get what?' And he said,
'It's in the blood, little one-you've got it in the blood. And I want to know,
there must have been some actress somewhere in your family.' So I told
him, 'Well, nobody you'd know. My great-aunt was an actress on the New
York stage-her best friend was Ethel Barrymore.' Well, now, I didn't
know that Mr. Cukor's best friend was Ethel Barrymore, so he looked at
me somewhat suspect and he said, 'Oh really, who would that have been?'
So I told him her name was Anita Rothie and he went, 'Oh my God, not
Schatzi!' It turned out he knew her, very well. He said, 'That woman was
out of her mind ... she was crazy! If ever there was a ham, it was Schatzi. So that's where you get it!' So we had a very nice feeling to start off with."
McAleer was given a term contract by Warners at Cukor's urging.

The same week that she was added to the studio's roster, Warners lost
one of its mainstays when Humphrey Bogart and Warners agreed to cancel
the remainder of their nonexclusive contract, thus putting an end to a
twenty-year professional relationship. There has been some speculation
over the years that Bogart was angry at not being given the role of Norman
Maine; but more than likely Bogart just wanted his freedom, and his
one-picture-a-year deal with Warners was interfering with his ability to take
on all the choice roles that had been offered to him since winning an
Academy Award the previous year for The African Queen. He was the last
of the major prewar stars to leave the studio, and his departure marked the
end of an era.