Get Happy (16 page)

It was her singing, not her manner, that audiences found the most appealing, however. When she reached Pittsburgh at the end of February, another
Variety
critic described her effect on them. “Lassie has the mob tearing up the seats, swinging her slight, lithe frame in syncopated jig-time, and dusting off the rafters with her rhythmic bleatings.” What
that meant, translated into English, was that, in addition to the usual menu of ballads, Judy was also delivering songs with a relatively new sound—the sound of swing.

An offshoot of jazz, swing dominated American popular music for about ten years, from the mid-thirties to the mid-forties. Pioneered by black musicians, then made commercial by the big bands of white leaders like Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw, it was the creation of performers, not composers. The “swing” was all in the performer’s timing, inflection and energy, not in anything the songwriter had put on paper. The same tune could swing or not swing, depending entirely on who played or sang it; given a swing rendition, the most familiar music could be transformed into something almost unrecognizably new—even Bach was made to jump and jive. To young audiences, swing was not only joyful, but liberating, with a kinetic vitality that was catching. Under its spell, fingers began to snap, feet started to tap and youthful bodies automatically moved toward a dance floor.

It was a style that Judy, with her congenital bounce, had taken to immediately. The first songs she recorded, in fact, were swing—“Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Swing, Mr. Charlie,” both done with the Bob Crosby orchestra on her earlier trip to New York. With Edens as her guide, she had not merely sung those stomping, swinging lyrics; she had invested them with so much of her own energy that they seemed to have a life of their own, almost leaping off the phonograph record. Capitalizing on her natural bent, Metro made her affinity for swing one of the plotlines of
Everybody Sing:
her character is expelled from a stuffy private school for supposedly corrupting her classmates with its subversive rhythms. “But I can’t help it, Miss Colvin,” she says apologetically. “Honestly I can’t. I don’t know why, but when I hear music, it does something to me.”

Now, on her second trip to Manhattan, Judy alternated between swing and what she called sweet—the old-fashioned ballads she sang so well. Sometimes she sang the same song in two tempos, one swing, one sweet. One such song, “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön,” was probably familiar
to everyone in her audience. No one, including Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin, who had adapted it from its original Yiddish, had heard it sung the way she sang it at the Loew’s State, however. The girl who had so often sung in Yiddish at B’nai B’riths began leisurely, almost chanting the words, as a cantor would. Then, without a moment’s pause, she pushed them into high velocity—swing. “It was the most incredible arrangement of that song I had ever heard,” said Chaplin, who returned again and again to hear it. “There was nothing like it. The way she did it was fantastic!”

After New York Judy journeyed on to engagements in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis and Columbus, Ohio. In Pittsburgh the “Metro moppet,” as
Variety
dubbed her, was the biggest box-office surprise in years, breaking all records at the Stanley. Attendance would have been even higher, indeed, if many who had come to the first show had not liked her so much that they had refused to leave, clinging to their seats for the second, third and fourth shows. Hoping to cash in on the excitement she had aroused, a rival theater, the Alvin, dug up an old print of
Every Sunday
, and ran it along with its first-run feature, giving the short, which lasted no more than ten minutes, top billing in its ads.

Helped along, no doubt, by Howard Strickling’s publicity department, Judy’s fame had preceded her to Columbus, where Ohio State University’s Sigma Chi fraternity named her its official sweetheart. Declaring that she had “personality plus,” the brothers escorted her from the stage of the Ohio Theater to their frat house, where they entertained her with dinner, toasted her success with glasses of milk and bent over—all in fun, of course—so that their swinging sweetheart could whack them with a ceremonial paddle.

She had triumphed in every city she had visited, but it is probably safe to say that nowhere was Judy happier with her reception than she was on the final stop on her schedule—Grand Rapids. Choosing to forget that they had almost run her family out of town, people there had followed her career with a jealous, proprietary interest. “Local Girl Starred in Movie Coming Here,” read the headline in the
Itasca County Independent
when
Pigskin Parade
was making its rounds.

On the morning of March 31, a delegation of leading citizens met Judy’s train at Aitkin, a town to the south, and several cars plowed through a dangerous storm of snow and sleet—the passage of time had not shortened the interminable Minnesota winters—to carry her back to Grand Rapids in time for a gala luncheon at the Pokegama Hotel. After lunch, she was taken sight-seeing. She went back to the house she had last seen when she was four years old, and she visited the schools she would have attended had she remained. That week’s issue of
Life
magazine featured a lavish five-page spread on her frolic at the Ohio State fraternity house
—“Life
Goes to a Party with Judy Garland,” the article was titled—and when she walked into the high school auditorium, the school band greeted her with its brassy version of that old favorite of barbershop quartets, “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.”

After making an appearance at the Rialto Theater, the successor to Frank’s New Grand, Judy was driven to a nightspot outside of town, where several teenagers threw a spur-of-the-moment party in her honor. Defying the blizzard outside—“It was a murderous night, a real corker,” recalled one—they drank sodas and danced to a jukebox. One boy, Bill Binet, who had played with Judy when they were both small, gave her his military-school pin, in return for which he received her warm and grateful kiss in the coatroom. Attaching it to her coat a few weeks later, Judy wore it when she was shooting
Love Finds Andy Hardy
. Captured on film, Binet’s pin, two shiny crossed rifles, can be seen still, a cherished memento of that snowy night.

The next day, April 1, she was on her way back to the warmth and sunshine of California. Summing up her stay, the
Itasca County Independent
seemed mildly surprised to find itself full of her praises, reporting that Grand Rapids’ most famous daughter was “a sweet, wholesome young person, unspoiled by the success she has made in her chosen work and by the way people have made much over her wherever she has appeared.”

Despite the cheerless weather, Judy was perhaps even more pleased with Grand Rapids than Grand Rapids was with her. In her twenty-four hours there, she had seen only smiles, heard only kind and flattering words. She believed it was always like that in that “gracious little town, full of trees and porches and people who know how to live in
simple goodness.” During bleak moments, she would occasionally wonder what her own life would have been like had she never left. In a scene that might have been lifted from an Andy Hardy movie, she pictured herself carrying her schoolbooks in a strap, sighing over the milkman’s son and passing her days in perfect safety and security. Her roots, she thought, would have been as deep and solid as those of the rugged snow-covered pines that guarded Grand Rapids on every side. For her, that frosty utopia was not a real place but a symbol. Her imaginary life there was a movie she sometimes ran in her mind, a sentimental M-G-M production with a guaranteed happy ending.

J
udy was in Pittsburgh, midway through her tour, when she heard surprising news from California. “Metro has acquired the screen rights for ‘The Wizard of Oz’ from Samuel Goldwyn and has assigned Judy Garland to the role of Dorothy,”
Daily Variety
reported on February 24. “Mervyn LeRoy will produce the Frank Baum childhood fantasy.” Much beyond that a tight-lipped M-G-M did not go, and the absence of the hoopla that accompanied most new Hollywood projects, the trumpet fanfares and the excited chatter of typewriters, was, in retrospect, almost startling. For the film announced that day—Production No. 1060—was not to be just another product of the Culver City machine: it was destined to become the most popular motion picture in the history of the cinema.

Metro probably said so little because it knew so little. Inspired by the unexpected success of another children’s story, Walt Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, which had been filling the theaters since December, M-G-M had indeed acquired screen rights to
The Wizard of Oz
. Judy was to portray Dorothy Gale, the
orphan who is transported by a cyclone from the arid plains of Kansas to the magical land of Oz, and Mervyn LeRoy was to produce. The production department had even prepared a budget: to build an imaginary world, create the necessary special effects and deploy a huge cast would cost in excess of $2 million—an enormous sum to spend on a picture in 1938.

The star, the producer and the budget: that much the studio knew; but that was about all it knew. Probably never before had it committed so much money to a project about which it still had so many basic questions. Would its
Oz
be funny or serious? Metro did not know. What kind of music would be sung? Opera, swing or Broadway-style ballads? Metro did not know that either. Having paid $75,000 for the film rights, M-G-M could make of
The Wizard of Oz
exactly what it wanted. The trouble was that it was not sure what it wanted, and in the absence of guidelines, almost all options were open, bad as well as good.

Chance played a larger part in these decisions than the studio would likely have admitted. More than once, circumstances forced it to settle for its second or third choice and steer a different course from the one it had intended. Mayer’s boss in New York, Nicholas Schenck, president of Loew’s, had, in fact, suggested that the lead go not to Judy, but to Shirley Temple, the nation’s box-office queen for three years running. But Temple could not sing—“her vocal limitations are insurmountable,” Roger Edens gleefully reported—and, in any event, 20th Century-Fox would probably not have loaned her out.

Time and again, luck—or some guardian angel—thus saved
Oz
from its handlers and prevented such mistakes. Perhaps the biggest wonder of a movie whose theme is the wonderful is that though M-G-M often went astray, sometimes far astray, it invariably returned to what can now be seen as the one true path. The final choice—whether it was first, second or third—was always the right one. It was by fits and starts, by trial and error, that the film progressed, slowly but persistently overcoming all obstacles to arrive at last at its destination. Unlikely as it would have seemed to those mired in the day-to-day confusions,
Oz
, like all genuine works of art, was to emerge from its long gestation with the unblemished appearance of inevitability. Who can imagine the Mona Lisa
without her smile?
A Christmas Carol
without Tiny Tim? And
The Wizard of Oz
in any way different from what it is?