Get Happy (29 page)

Despite their problems, the Roses might have struggled on had Judy not made an unsurprising disclosure—she was pregnant. For her, the discovery, which probably occurred in the fall of 1942, must have been a moment of both joy and anxiety. Joy, because she doted on children; one of the reasons she had married David, in fact, was so that she could have a child of her own. Anxiety, because she knew that the men at Metro did not look at babies with her dewy eyes; a pregnancy, even one unaccompanied by any hint of scandal or embarrassment, was the news they had most dreaded.

It was bad enough that she had tarnished her wholesome, youthful image by selfishly taking a husband; motherhood would obliterate it altogether. “We simply can’t have that baby have a child,” Mayer had thundered; though he was speaking only of the character she played in
Little Nellie Kelly
, his words applied with equal force to Judy herself. What panic, then, what sweaty faces and desperate scurrying around,
there must have been on the third floor of the Thalberg Building when, at the end of November, the
Los Angeles Examiner
reported the following bit of Hollywood gossip: “The rumor comes straight that Judy Garland and Dave Rose are expecting a baby.”

Unsure how her undemonstrative husband would react, Judy left it to Ethel to break the news to him. She heard them speaking upstairs, then watched her mother come down alone. “Now, Judy, you understand this is impossible,” Ethel said. “This baby. You can’t have it.”

“Can’t have it?” Judy interjected. “Why not? It’s mine. I have to have it.”

“You don’t seem to understand,” her mother patiently replied. “You can have lots of babies at the right time, but this is not the right time… . I’ve talked it over with David and he agrees with me.”

When she married David, Judy later said, she thought he had a “strong hand to guide me.” A strong hand David did not have. In marrying him, she had stood up against the studio, her mother and even David himself, all but pushing him to the altar. Now, as he stood politely aside, like one of the audience rather than the lead actor in the intense little drama that was swirling around him, a lonely, besieged Judy reluctantly agreed to an abortion. “I’ll handle everything,” her mother said, and the day after that conversation, Judy sat silently in a car between her mother and her husband and was driven to what she described as a dreary little establishment just outside Los Angeles’s city limits. There her pregnancy was terminated.

Terminated as well, after less than a year and a half, was the union she had bragged would be the real thing. Ailing for months, it died the moment she consented to the abortion. After that, she told June Allyson, “the marriage was never the same. Something was gone. It broke my heart.” With nothing keeping them together and everything driving them apart, the Roses announced a temporary separation. “We regret that it is necessary to issue a statement saying that we have parted,” they said at the end of January 1943, “but we have both agreed that a matrimonial vacation now is the only way to settle our mutual differences.” The skeptics had been right all along. Judy had not been the right woman for David, and David had not been the right man for Judy.

“I do like to be in love,” Judy was later to say. “A woman is incomplete when she’s not in love.” So it was that as she was falling out of love with David Rose, she was falling in love with someone else. But unlike David, whose appeal had eluded most of her friends, her new lover was obviously, demonstrably desirable, as close to perfection as a mere mortal could be: amusing, intelligent, talented and so handsome that it could be said, without quibble or contradiction, that no man was more handsome. “The most beautiful man I ever saw. No question,” adjudged Anne Baxter, one of his many lovely costars. His dark good looks, combined with a virile athleticism and a voice as warm and rich as a Brahms symphony, had made Tyrone Power—for that was the name of this paragon—into 20th Century-Fox’s biggest star, several rungs above Judy herself on Hollywood’s top ten list. Every time the camera lingered on his deep and ever-so-understanding eyes, millions of hearts pounded like so many libidinous tom-toms.

Imagine, then, the commotion Judy’s own heart must have made when, at their very first meeting, at a party in Brentwood, Power leaned down from his slim six feet, focused those long-lashed eyes on her and all but knocked her over with praise and attention. Adding force to his words was his transparent sincerity. A week or so earlier—on October 16, 1942, to be exact—he had seen her in her first full-length adult role, as the aspiring vaudevillian of
For Me and My Gal
, and since then he had been raving about her magical transformation from awkward teenager into interesting woman. Now, here she was, here he was, and out of town for several days was his wife, a chic, glamorous French actress who went only by the name Annabella.

A better recipe for romance could not have been devised. “There was an immediate attraction between them,” said Watson Webb, Power’s best friend and chief confidant, “and by the time Annabella got back—and it wasn’t that long—Tyrone was already pretty well smitten.” By the first week of January 1943, when Power entered the Marine Corps, he and Judy were deeply in love, and Judy, who had largely forsaken the house on Chalon Road for a place of her own in nearby Westwood, was ushering a few select friends into her bedroom to show them his
photograph. Where was the fun in having one of the most ravishing men in the world mad about you, after all, if you had to keep it all to yourself? “Oh, he’s wonderful!” she exclaimed to her friend Anne Shirley. The last thing she saw before she fell asleep at night, Power’s smiling face was the stuff her dreams were made on.

What attracted her was obvious: his unsurpassable looks and a charm so exundant that few could withstand it. It was as if a light came on whenever he walked into a room, said one woman; another recalled the aura that seemed to surround him. In such awed tones had the Greeks and Romans spoken of their gods. Few earthly men had Power’s natural advantages, and he was able, with no more effort than it took to flash one of his high-voltage smiles, to bed nearly every female who caught his fancy. “We’ve had them all, haven’t we?” bragged one of his friends at the studio, pointing to a wall covered with photos of the Fox women. It was a banquet of beauties, that much-admired wall, and Power, who was only twenty-eight, had had more than his share.

What few knew at the time—some secrets were safe in Hollywood—was that the sword-wielding, fistfighting, swashbuckling hero of such adventures as
The Mark of Zorro
and
The Black Swan
, a man who insisted on doing most of his own stunts and who was to whistle through the harshest and most strenuous training the Marine Corps had to offer, had also had more than his share of men. A bisexual, Power seemed equally excited by both genders, and even he probably could not have said which he found more to his liking.

Despite his many dalliances, during three years of marriage he never before had allowed anyone, male or female, to threaten his relationship with Annabella, however.
That
, Judy did almost instantly, and he was as much in love with her—“he was crazy about her,” was Watson Webb’s succinct assessment—as she with him. What did Judy have that so many other, prettier and more glamorous women did not have? The answer to that puzzling question is preserved, for all to see, in
For Me and My Gal
, the movie that first piqued Power’s interest: she had grown into a woman of intelligence and spunky resolve, but, through some miracle of her own making, she had managed to retain the freshness and dewy innocence of girlhood. She was Dorothy—the Dorothy of
Oz
—grown up, and the combination of youth and maturity was, for
many people, infinitely more alluring than a flawless face or a voluptuous figure. “Miss Garland has the faculty (wonderful for her but tough on an audience) of melting your heart,” said one critic, “and in a sympathetic part she’s murder.”

Murder she was for Power, in any event, touching subterranean emotions that other women had never known of, let alone aroused. He had been an object of flattery for so long that he accepted admiration as his due; what he really wanted was what he did not already possess: someone who would understand him totally and completely, with unreserved, unthinking and unstinting sympathy. He had, to quote from his favorite author, a popular novelist of the time named Mildred Cram, a “longing so intense, so consuming, that it got into his eyes and betrayed him.”

It was a youthful, almost adolescent yearning that the practical Annabella, who was six years his senior, who had been married twice before and who had a daughter just three years younger than Judy, could scarcely comprehend. But Judy, barely out of adolescence herself, not only shared that longing but embraced it—her eyes betrayed her, too. She and Power thus came together not merely as man and woman, but as soul mates, celebrators of everything romantic from the wistful music of Rachmaninov to the elegiac, doom-shrouded verse of A. E. Housman. To that rather distinguished list Power added Cram’s little potboiler
Forever
, a novella that Judy had not previously read, but that she could now quote word for word. Its sentimental message of love surviving death itself was as comforting to her as it was to him, as it was, in fact, to many Americans whose lives were shadowed by war in those grim years. “This is forever,” sighs Cram’s heroine as she walks with her lover into a pearly eternity; and forever was how long those two besotted stars also thought their own love story would last.

Where their spirits led, their bodies eagerly followed. After sharing a bed with an older, rather reserved spouse, each found the other to be an exciting and uninhibited sexual partner. Few other women had aroused Power as much as Judy did. Aware, for her part, that he was bisexual, Judy nonetheless convinced herself that she could transform him into a man who loved only women—and only one woman at that. Power gave her good reason, indeed, to believe that she might succeed where
so many others had failed, and in the months after their meeting, it was his turn, for perhaps the first time, to fall under the spell of that old black magic called love.

There was just one cloud, small at first, then larger and increasingly ominous, intruding into their sun-drenched paradise: they were both married. Judy’s marriage had crumbled, in her eyes, if not in the law’s, before she had met Power. But Power’s remained firmly intact, and as they were soon seen strolling arm in arm into the Fox commissary, alarms once more started howling in Culver City. Little Judy, screamed the men in the Thalberg Building, was endangering her career again.

Metro had been wrong when it told Judy that marriage might wreck her career. Audiences liked “the now-come-of-age Judy Garland,” as the studio had taken to calling her, as much as they had liked the younger version.
For Me and My Gal
, her biggest hit by far, drew long lines around the country, overturning a house record of eighteen years at Manhattan’s huge Astor Theater. “Box-office honey,” the editor of
Film Daily
called the picture. But if the studio had been wrong about her marriage to David, it was not necessarily wrong about her romance with Power, which
was
cause for concern. It was one thing for Judy to have publicly held hands with a man who was already rushing toward the divorce court, as David had been. It was quite another thing to break up the seemingly tranquil marriage of a popular star like Power. “To be involved with a married man was serious, something you really weren’t supposed to do,” said Anne Shirley. And you absolutely were not supposed to be involved with a man who was about to go off to war and risk his life for his country. Small wonder that Mayer himself summoned her to his office to warn her of quicksand ahead.