Get Happy (13 page)

When Lena Horne aroused his ire by refusing a role, Joan Crawford offered her the counsel of a battle-wise veteran. “You’re perfectly right in what you feel,” Crawford told her, “but you can’t get away with being proud. You must go and cry and beg Mr. Mayer to forgive you. I’ve done it. I’ve had to. They were going to can me a couple of times.” With children to feed, Horne wearily agreed, and her tears sent tears cascading down Mayer’s cheeks as well. “I always knew that you were
the humble good girl that you seemed at the beginning,” he said. “You’ve been a bad girl, but we’ll forgive you.”

Men who defied him quickly discovered that Mayer’s anger could be as terrible as Jehovah’s. “A man of temperament” was how he euphemistically described himself, but he sometimes behaved more like a disturbed adolescent, striking out with his fists the way he had when, as a boy in Canada, he was up against the Jew-baiting bullies of St. John, New Brunswick, the fishing port where he grew up. The list of those he assaulted, actually sent sprawling, included important producers and box-office stars—Charlie Chaplin was one. Sensing the menace in his small but muscular physique, the British director Michael Powell likened him to a raging bull. But a lion, like the commanding beast that roared three times at the beginning of every Metro movie, would have made a better comparison. Short in stature, Mayer was big in every other way: he talked big, he thought big, he acted big. In his own mind, and in the minds of everyone who knew him, he was big.

He was a man of almost infinite contradictions: the kind father and the ruthless tyrant; the generous boss and the small-minded bully; the indefatigable moralizer and the greedy libertine. Yet after everything else has been said about him, after all of his faults have been enumerated, it must also be said that he was one of the twentieth century’s supreme showmen. Few loved the movies, the movie business or M-G-M with as large a passion. He had not only given his last name to the corporate title: he
was
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. And it was to this man, this congeries of opposites, that Judy looked for support and approval at the end of 1935, and for many years thereafter. “When Dad died,” she later said, “M-G-M took over as my father. In our house the word of Louis B. Mayer, who ran the studio, became the law. When Mother wanted to discipline me, all she had to say was, ‘I’ll tell Mr. Mayer.’”

When he first heard Judy sing, Mayer had sat stony-faced, walking out without a word after she had finished: to have shown enthusiasm, after all, might have raised her price. Once he had signed her to a contract, however, he wanted all Hollywood to know about his discovery. “We
have just signed a baby Nora Bayes,” he exclaimed, which in 1935 was praise of the highest order: endowed with a voice that soared past the second balcony, Bayes had been one of vaudeville’s biggest draws.

Given their cue by the boss, Metro’s starmakers immediately went to work on Judy. Thenceforth she belonged to the studio, which controlled nearly her every waking hour. Her weekday mornings were spent in Miss MacDonald’s schoolhouse—California law mandated a minimum of three hours of study a day for child actors—but her afternoons were the studio’s. Not only did she attend the usual beginners’ classes, but she also spent two hours a day with Roger Edens, who had displaced Ethel as her vocal coach. Their sessions achieved a modest renown within the studio walls. Dependable as a clock, a small audience gathered around Edens’s office windows every afternoon to hear the results of their collaboration. On a lot crowded with famous faces, Judy had quickly managed to make a distinct impression, and as her reputation spread, she was recruited to entertain at the homes of Metro’s top stars and executives. Everyone at M-G-M had heard about the Garland girl.

Her first champion, Ida Koverman—or Kay, as she preferred to be called—remained her most ardent promoter. Celebrated for her austere and forbidding demeanor, Koverman seemed to enjoy the unfamiliar role of fairy godmother. A childless, white-haired widow, she kept track of Judy at the studio and watched over her outside as well, often inviting her to dinner parties at her house in Beverly Hills. “Make no mistake about it: Kay was a tough lady,” said Rita Maxwell, whose parents were Koverman’s close friends. “But as much as she could care about anybody, Kay Koverman cared about Judy.”

With all Metro delighting in her voice, how could Judy fail? Left with almost nothing when Frank died—$256 in cash and a stock certificate worth $150—Ethel felt sufficiently confident to move from Mariposa to a more expensive address closer to Culver City. The new house, on McCadden Place, even boasted a swimming pool, one of the most obvious badges of success in the movie world. “It looked as though Judy was going to be doing something,” said Dorothy Walsh, “so Ethel thought she’d step up a little.”

There was every reason, in fact, to believe that Judy soon would be doing something: she had tentatively been cast in at least one film, with others in the offing. But in the offing is where they remained; the pictures were either postponed or not made at all. Not once was Judy actually given lines to say, a role to fill. Too young to be considered sexy, too old to be thought cute, she was exactly where she had been before M-G-M hired her: in limbo. As she herself ruefully remarked, “They didn’t know what to do with me because they wanted you either five years old or eighteen, with nothing in between. Well, I was in between.”

As the weeks slipped aimlessly by, optimism gave way to anxiety. Always ahead of her, blinking ominously, like an amber light at a dangerous intersection, was her contract’s option clause: she was bound to M-G-M for seven years, but M-G-M was not bound to her. At the end of every six months, the studio had the right to let her go, as it had so many other promising newcomers. Although she passed her first six-month test in March 1936, it was far from certain that she would be as lucky in September. If Metro could find nothing better for her to do than entertain at studio parties—a demeaning chore she did not much relish, in any event—she, too, would eventually be pushed out the gate. To Walsh, Judy plaintively kept saying, “I want to
do
something. Why don’t they give me something to do?”

Causing still more alarm was the sudden appearance, at the end of 1935, of a pretty rival, a budding opera singer by the name of Deanna Durbin. For the new girl, who was just six months older than Judy, Metro did have a part. She was to play the young Ernestine Schumann-Heink, a much-loved opera singer whom Metro had just signed to a contract. Not long before shooting was to begin, Schumann-Heink fell ill, however. The movie was canceled and M-G-M suddenly found itself with not one, but two teenage singers for whom it had no parts, no plans and no prospects.

For Judy, the suspense was interrupted in June 1936, when she was sent to New York City for appearances on Metro’s radio affiliate WHN. Accompanied by her mother, the “youthful chanter,” as
Variety
dubbed her, was to remain in New York indefinitely, singing on WHN every
Thursday night until she was notified to return to California to make a film. “‘Baby Nora Bayes’ Sings on WHN Awaiting Pix” was how
Variety
described her uncertain situation. Judy’s first visit to the big city did not give her much time to spend gazing up at skyscrapers, however; scarcely had she arrived when Metro ordered her home.

Once more the studio was to disappoint her. The picture she was needed for was not a picture at all, but a short, one of those snippets of film the studios turned out, along with newsreels and cartoons, to fill up the time between features.
Every Sunday
it was titled, and she was paired with Durbin, who sang opera while Judy sang swing. Though it eventually did find its way into the theaters,
Every Sunday
was, in essence, a screen test to help Metro executives decide which of their gifted teenagers they wanted.

Though Judy won the contest, she, too, found herself fighting tears, almost as upset as Durbin was. “If they don’t want Deanna,” she wailed, “I’m sure they don’t want me either.” She was probably right, or nearly right. Metro did not want to lose her, yet it could not bring itself to use her, a stalemate that could not last forever and that seemed destined to end as unhappily for her as it had for Durbin.

It doubtless came as a great relief to everyone, therefore, when not one, but two other studios asked to borrow her. Her first suitor was Universal, where producer Joe Pasternak was looking for a girl with “indefinable charm,” as he termed it, for his romantic comedy
Three Smart Girls
. A long search had led nowhere, and Pasternak was about to give up and change his title to
Three Smart Boys
when he saw Judy in the screen test with Durbin. “That’s the girl!” he shouted, persuaded that she not only had that indefinable charm, but also “sang in a way to win your heart.” Her second suitor was 20th Century-Fox, which was planning a spoof on college football—
Pigskin Parade
was to be its name—and which needed a younger sister for its touchdown hero. Only one of her admirers could have her, and Metro picked Fox. After making some changes in his script, a disappointed Pasternak settled for the other girl in that screen test, Deanna Durbin.

By the end of the summer of 1936 both Judy and Durbin were doing what they had so long dreamed of doing: making movies. But neither was doing it for the studio that had discovered them. They had the
comfort and satisfaction of at last being wanted, but not by Louis B. Mayer’s starmaking enterprise in Culver City—glittery, glamorous M-G-M.

Although it was made later,
Pigskin Parade
beat
Every Sunday
to the theaters. Thus, through an accident of timing, Judy’s introduction to movie audiences was not as the ordinary-looking, ordinary-sounding teenager she had been in the Metro short, but as the barefoot, mush-mouthed hillbilly she was in the Fox comedy. “Y’all stop for melons?” were her first words. “I’m Sairy Dodd and I can sing—you want to hear me?” she goes on to ask. The songs will have to wait. The visitors to the family farm are more interested in her brother, who can throw a melon the length of a football field and who is just the man, they think, to help their Podunk college beat snooty Yale on the gridiron.

There are several twists to the story before Yale receives its comeuppance, but
Pigskin Parade
is not about football. It is about jokes, songs and pretty girls, and it is nothing but an amiable and predictable B-picture until, nearly halfway through, Judy appears to give it a jolt of high voltage. She sings only three mediocre songs, all of which would probably slip by unnoticed if they came from any mouth but hers: as she sings them, they are incitements to riot. She poured so much power into one of them, which she sang on the playing field of the Los Angeles Coliseum, that it could be heard all the way out to Figueroa Street. “The voice!” exclaimed June Levant, who was a bit player sitting in the bleachers. “The voice! I can hear it now, it was so remarkable.”

Released in mid-October,
Pigskin Parade
received surprisingly good reviews. “Daffy and delightful,” declared the
New York Herald Tribune
’s Howard Barnes. “One of the season’s most entertaining contributions,” added Frank S. Nugent of
The New York Times
. Judy, who was ranked ninth on the cast list, was mentioned in passing, if at all. One of the few who singled her out was Robert Garland, the very man whose name George Jessel had bestowed upon her two years earlier. “Judy Garland is a girl to keep an eye and ear on,” Garland wrote in the
New York American
.