A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (44 page)

The awards were to be given on March 30, just about the time Garland was due to have her baby; Lauren Bacall would accept for her if she
won. Garland gave birth to her son, Joey, on March 29; and the next
night, the evening of the Academy Awards, she later recalled very vividly
in an interview with Joe Hyams for Photoplay magazine: "Just picture
this. There I was, weak and exhausted ... I was lying in bed and three
men came into my room in the hospital with three huge television sets
. . . and I said, `What's this for?' and they said, `When you win the
Academy Award, you've got to be able to talk back and forth to Bob
Hope,' who was emceeing. And I said, `You can't just bring a whole crew
and lights and all that stuff in here; there are other women in here having
babies' and they said, `Don't worry about that,' and they pulled up the
venetian blind and they had built a four-story-high tower outside the hospital for the cameras to point into my room. And there were a lot of
people running around on that tower; what with all that excitement and
everything they got me all worked up, and I was positive I was going to
win so I had the nurse put a new bed jacket on me and there I was flat
on my back trying to look cute. Then they found out they had some
trouble with the sound, so they strung wires all over the room and put a
microphone under my nightgown and taped it to my chest. My nurse had
been assigned to open the venetian blinds on cue, so that the cameras could
get me making my acceptance speech; they scared the poor woman to death
when they told her, `If you open that window while the show is on we'll
kill you!' By this time it's getting near the point ... I was flat on my back
in bed trying to look cute, I was ready to give a performance, then Bob
Hope [opened the envelope] and said Grace Kelly had won and I said
`WHAATT??' I'll never forget it to my dying day. The technicians in my
room all said `Kelly! Aah,' then they started lugging all that stuff out again,
you should have seen the looks on their faces! I really thought I would have
hysterics!"

This was retold much after the fact (on one of her 1964 CBS television
shows), and with the self-deprecating humor that was so much a part of
Garland's defense mechanism; but to someone as insecure and sensitive to
public reaction as she was the pain of not winning must have been intense.
Lauren Bacall, who joined Luft and Garland at the hospital almost immediately after the announcement, relates: "The big night came and we were all
praying-and Judy lost. She carried it off beautifully, saying her son Joey was
more important than any Oscar could be, but she was deeply disappointedand hurt. It's pretty hard to put your heart and soul into something and then
get your face slapped.... Emotionally it was terrible for her. It confirmed her
belief that the industry was against her. She was very upset about it; it was the
peak of her career, and she knew it was then or never. Instinctively, all her
friends knew the same. Judy wasn't like any other performer. There was so
much emotion involved in her career-in her life-it was always all or
nothing. And though she put on a hell of a front, she was bitter about it-and
for that matter, all closest to her were."

Surprise upsets are one of the fascinations of the Academy Awards, and
this one is still legendary. Everybody in Hollywood seems to have been
convinced that Judy Garland would win-or at least everyone professes
surprise that she didn't when you bring up the subject, even now. So, if
everybody expected her to win, why didn't she? Probably because not
everybody wanted her to win. The Hollywood filmmaking community is a very tightly knit society. There are rivalries, resentments, reprisals, and a great deal of hostility toward overachievers, larger-than-life genuine artists, who are volatile and demanding; they are lightning rods for the "who the hell does she think she is?" attitude. In Garland's case, the Hollywood press had been satiated with stories about her; her activities on A Star Is Born were largely public knowledge. And then there was the intratrade gossip: grips, hairdressers, and costumers all knew the stories of Garland's behavior during the making of the film, and these folks are the true citizenry of the town and the industry. Their attitudes differ from those of the creative level above them-executives, directors, writers, agents-in that they seldom harbor grudges, but they have little patience or sympathy for what is considered to be temperamental "star" behavior. Too many of them had seen examples of that kind of nonsense to be anything but resentful of it. Even though Garland was always liked by the crews she worked with, they were uneasy about her ability to lose her temper and throw tantrums. There is a photo in the Life layout on the film that shows a furious Garland clutching a cigarette and evidently raging at someone, and there is a hostility and a ferocity in her person that is most revealing. So there was this perception of Garland on the part of the rank-and-file workers in Hollywood. Then there was the film itself, which many thought overblown, too long, and too much a showcase for Garland; it conjured up images of a monumental ego and a demand for attention that could be off putting. As far as much of the industry was concerned, Garland and A Star Is Born were overdone, overrated, and exhausting.

The hostility toward both performer and film is evidenced by the fact that out of the six categories in which it was nominated, A Star Is Born did not win a single award.*
There was also the perception of the picture as an expensive flop; Academy voters in those days seldom gave awards to pictures that had failed financially. Moreover, Warners had not aggressively promoted the picture during the voting period and had even shown the short version of it for the nomination and voting screenings. These screenings were important, since this is where many of the Academy members finally get to see the films that have been made in the past year.

"Judy Garland [gave] a brilliant performance," stated George Cukor, "marred only by the way in which the picture was cut by the studio.... I'm convinced that it cost Judy [the] Academy Award." The cutting had elimi nated much of the vulnerability, warmth, and humor of her character; what
was left was a slightly overbearing performance, both vocally and dramatically. Grace Kelly was young, patrician, unassuming, and well liked. Her
performance in The Country Girl had startled most people, as the popular
perception of her was of a well-bred ingenue; here she was effective primarily
because she was cast against type, allowed herself to be "deglamorized," and
gave a restrained yet intense performance. Both MGM, where she was under
contract, and Paramount, where she had made The Country Girl, mounted
large advertising campaigns in the trade journals on her behalf. So all of these
factors must be considered when trying to analyze why Garland lost an award
that everybody thought she would win. And then, of course, there is the
inescapable fact that Academy Awards are given on the basis of a simple
majority; Garland could have lost by a single vote.

The loss of any Academy recognition more or less sealed the commercial
fate of A Star Is Born. It played off the balance of its theatrical engagements in the short version, going on record in Variety's list of top U.S.
grossers for 1955 as having taken in $6 million. The figure was supplied
to Variety by Warners, which evidently was doing a little creative bookkeeping: according to the studio records, the picture had grossed only
$4,355,968 domestically by November 1955; it had taken in another
$1,556,ooo overseas. (A Star Is Born had opened in London on May 29,
1955, in the short, 154-minute version. As it played in Europe, the local
Warners distributor kept cutting until it ended up running loo minutes,
in which version it played from 1956 through 1970 and then was taken out
of release and put on television.)

Warner did not want to admit just how big a failure his gamble had
been. If the picture grossed $4.3 million, that meant it returned roughly
$3.5 million to the studio-a loss of approximately $2 million on just the
negative production cost. At the inflated $6 million gross, A Star Is Born
placed fourteenth on Variety's list, following White Christmas (Paramount, $iz million), Gone With the Wind (MGM reissue, $q million),
The Caine Mutiny (Columbia, $8.7 million), Mister Roberts (Warner
Bros., $8.5 million), Battle Cry (Warner Bros., $8 million), 20,ooo Leagues
Under the Sea (Disney, $8 million), Not as a Stranger (United Artists, $7.1
million), The Glenn Miller Story (Universal, $7 million), The Country Girl
(Paramount, $6.9 million), Lady and the Tramp (Disney, $6.5 million),
Strategic Air Command (Paramount, $6.5 million), To Hell and Back
(Universal, $6 million), The Sea Chase (Warner Bros., $6 million), and The High and the Mighty (Warner Bros., $6 million). At the actual $4.3 million gross, A Star Is Born came in at twentieth place, after Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (MGM, $5.6 million), Rear Window (Paramount, $5.3 million), Magnificent Obsession (Universal, $5.2 million), Three Coins in the Fountain (loth Century-Fox, $5 million), and Desiree (loth CenturyFox, $4.5 million). After the year's tally was in, Ben Kalmenson wrote to Jack Warner: "It became apparent a few months ago that, while Judy Garland is young enough to be the daughter of Mary Pickford ... she is in a way like her in that she is the little girl who grew up and is a favorite of adults. There is no question but that we overrelied on our star on this one."

Warners and Transcona had called off their three-picture deal after A Star Is Born proved so troublesome and unsuccessful. *
Warner had unkind words for both Garland and (especially) Luft in his autobiography, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood. Luft, never a man to dodge a fight, related: "I sued him. Jack was nuts-he got carried away.... [In his book] he accused me of all this nonsense: 'Aw, the son of a bitch,' he'd say, 'he stole all the furniture.' That's the kind of guy he was-he'd make a joke out of everything. There was no loyalty with Jack. All this crap he put in his book-he made up all this stuff for self-aggrandizement." The lawsuit was settled out of court and over the years, many people have insisted that one of the reasons A Star Is Born was mutilated was because Warner wanted to "get back" at Garland and Luft for causing him so much personal and financial trouble with the film. This is nonsense. Warner, as we have seen, was ordered to cut the film by his brother Harry; he put up a good fight to maintain the integrity of Cukor's work but finally had to back down when faced with the intractability of his brother and of Ben Kalmenson. The only thing Jack Warner can be faulted on was not keeping a full-length version of the film for archival purposes. Even the studio print, the last existing "long version," was cut to conform to the 154-minute edition, as was the master negative; and the footage cut from this print and from all the prints playing around the country was sent back to the studio and put through a silver reclamation process.

Warner's acquiescence in this, and the finality of it, were certainly known to Cukor. Gene Allen recalls: "He would never discuss it, but his lips would go white if you brought it up. I remember once the USC cinema department asked him to come down and talk about the film, and he said
he would if they would show the original version. So they told him they
did have the long version and he was very excited. So we went down and
sat there, and when the first cut came on, he grabbed me and we got up
and left and we walked around till it ended and then we went back in and
he apologized and said he just couldn't stand to see it that way."

As Elsa Blangsted pointed out, "the big ones don't blame each other."
Cukor never spoke to Blangsted again, but he remained on cordial, even
friendly, terms with Warner. He later referred to Warner as "tough ... but a
showman. Quite a remarkable showman, I might add. He's very intelligent
... he is a perfect gentleman ... generous ... and courageous." This was said
in 1964, ten years after A Starls Born and just after Cukor had finally won an
Academy Award for his direction of Jack Warner's personal production of
My. Fair Lady. In an extreme bit of circular irony, Cukor won his award with
work based on Moss Hart's stage direction of the play.

The failure of A Star Is Born marked the end of Judy Garland's career
as a major film star. Thereafter, she confined herself primarily to concerts,
including one legendary appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1961. That same
year she did a short dramatic bit in Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg, following this with a critically acclaimed straight dramatic lead in
another Kramer-produced film, A Child Is Waiting. Her film career came
to an end after she starred in a 1963 British production called, ironically,
I Could Go on Singing. Luft continued to advise her on her career,
including a series of weekly hour-long television shows on CBS in 1963-64;
they were finally divorced in May 1965.

A Star Is Born is one of Sid Luft's proudest accomplishments, and he
recalled a poignant memory of it to Gerold Frank. It was the night of the
first national telecast of the movie; Garland and Luft had been separated
for some time. Luft was watching the film in his hotel room in New York;
at midnight,

there was a telephone call from the lobby. "This is Miss Garland's chauffeur,"
came a man's voice. "Miss Garland is here in her car, and she would like to see
you." ... When he went downstairs and walked outside, there was Judy,
dressed to perfection, sitting in the rear seat of a limousine, a fur blanket over
her knees, beside her was a bucket with a bottle of champagne...... Hi,
darling," she said, as though they'd seen each other a few hours ago. "How are
you?" He said, "Just fine." She said, "You watched the picture?" He nodded,
not trusting himself to speak. "Wasn't it great?" she asked. And then: "You produced a great picture, Sid." He said, "Judy, it was your picture and you
were great in it and it's great to see you again." She said, and her voice broke,
"Let's celebrate." They did-at El Morocco. That night ... on the drive back,
he noticed she was wearing neither her wedding ring nor the engagement ring
he had bought her.... "Where are they, darling?" he asked. She snuggled up
to him. "Somewhere between here and Scarsdale," she said.... "I got sore at
you one night and threw them out of the car."