Get Happy (34 page)

She could be a great actress, Joe assured Judy; but only if M-G-M started giving her great parts—parts for grown-up women, not love-starved
teenagers. It was at his urging, then, that in the summer or fall of 1943 Judy gathered her courage and, for the first time, turned down a role Metro had assigned her, that the studio had, in fact, ordered written specially for her. To her suspicious ears, the character, a girl of seventeen, looked like the same part she had played a dozen times over, and the picture itself sounded like a tired old tune, heard once too often. “Perhaps M-G-M should let Miss Garland grow up and stay that way,”
The New York Times
had said when it reviewed
Presenting Lily Mars
in April, and Judy fervently agreed: she was no longer willing to play dewy-eyed teenagers.
Meet Me in St. Louis
, she told the studio, would be a major setback to her career, and she would not go near it.

Logic was firmly on her side. On paper, the girl, Esther Smith, is just Betsy Booth under a different name. She is still in her teens, still in school and still mad about the boy next door, who, for much of the movie, scarcely gives her a second glance. The story line was so pleasingly familiar—“a valentine in the palm of your hand,” was how its creator, Sally Benson, described it—that at one point a delighted Metro thought that it had stumbled on another gold mine like the Hardy series.
Meet Me in St. Louis
might be merely the first of many adventures for the Smith family, four girls and a boy, in turn-of-the-century St. Louis. Such a prospect, so alluring to M-G-M’s accountants, did not fill Judy’s heart with joy.

As they were published, one by one, in the pages of
The New Yorker
, Benson’s stories did have considerable nostalgic charm, particularly for the war-weary readers of the early forties. But charm is hard to convey on the screen, and a valentine, pretty as it may be, is usually not enough to keep an audience in its seats for two hours. A movie demands a plot, and a plot was something
Meet Me in St. Louis
did not have. The world the Smiths inhabited was as sunny as Eden. Was the ketchup boiling on the stove too tart? Would Esther’s date retrieve his tuxedo from the tailor in time to take her to the Christmas ball? Would Mr. Smith, who already had a good job, take a better one in New York? Those were the matters that concerned the household at 5135 Kensington Avenue in the months preceding the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The story line, in short, was purposefully—some thought, perversely—undramatic, thinner than the ketchup bubbling on that cast-iron stove.

Yet even if she had liked the script, Judy would have objected to what appeared to be a secondary role. It was plain to her, as well as to Joe, who was peering protectively over her shoulder, that the movie’s real star would not be Esther, but five-year-old Tootie, the youngest of the Smith sisters—the young Sally Benson herself. With her winsome smile and her endlessly emotive eyes, Margaret O’Brien, who was to play Tootie, had already run away with such pictures as
Journey for Margaret
and
The Canterville Ghost
, and she seemed destined to skip away with
Meet Me in St. Louis
as well. “I don’t think that I come off too well,” concluded Judy, who had been around Hollywood long enough to recognize a scene stealer when she saw one.

Though she did not say so, it is likely that Judy was also unhappy that Arthur Freed, the film’s producer, had given the role of the oldest Smith sister—a big part, almost as large as her own—to a total unknown, a former Radio City Rockette whose sole qualification was that she shared his bed. “A flaming rocket has burst upon Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios!” proclaimed Metro’s publicity department, but the only one who ever felt any heat from Lucille Bremer was the love-smitten Freed himself.

Annoying as it was, the casting of Bremer at least had an explanation. More puzzling was Freed’s selection of director: the shy and often inarticulate Vincente Minnelli, who had little film experience and who seemed, to Judy and many others in Culver City, an odd choice to be entrusted with such a big-budget Technicolor production. Realizing that
Meet Me in St. Louis
represented his chance to break into the front ranks, Minnelli did his best to change Judy’s mind. He saw great things in the script, he told her. “In fact,” he said, “it’s magical.” But nothing he said convinced her; Judy saw no magic, in either the director or the screenplay.

At Metro, unlike more turbulent studios such as Warner Bros., stars rarely refused an assignment, and Mayer had every right to suspend Judy for saying no to
Meet Me in St. Louis
. For once he took her side, however, informing Freed that he was forced to agree with her—the picture had no plot. But Freed was not only one of Mayer’s favorites—“I’ve taken this boy and I’ve made a great producer out of him!” Mayer liked to brag—he was also one of Metro’s biggest and most reliable
moneymakers. After so many successes, Mayer finally decreed, the studio owed Freed a failure. Assuring Judy that the film would not ruin her career, Mayer gave his assent. Plot or no plot,
Meet Me in St. Louis
was Freed’s to make.

A successful producer Freed most assuredly had been. But if his biography had ended with his forty-ninth birthday in the summer of 1943, he would be remembered today more as a songwriter than as a moviemaker. Indeed, even in his palmiest days, Freed looked and behaved more like the bedraggled, sweat-stained song plugger he once had been than the high-paid producer he had become. Mispronouncing words, flashing filthy fingernails and spraying the dinner table with food when he talked, he was almost obstinately sloppy and uncouth—“a slob,” as Irene Sharaff put it.

Like most of the other Metro moguls, he regarded sex as a job benefit, and Lucille Bremer was only one of many attractive women who thought the couch in Freed’s office would carry them to stardom. “I have something made for just you,” he promised little Shirley Temple after she moved from Fox to Metro. “You’ll be my new star!” he added, forgetting that Temple already was a star. With no more prelude than that, Freed abruptly rose from his desk, proudly displaying something Temple had never seen in all her eleven years—a man’s penis. But Temple’s reaction, nervous laughter, was not what he had expected, and Freed indignantly ordered her out of his office. “Get out!” he shouted. “Go on,
get out!”

The most prominent sycophant in a studio crowded with sycophants, Freed was the object of innumerable jibes. “If you want to shave Arthur Freed,” went one, “you have to lather L. B. Mayer’s ass.” The jokes were not far off the mark, and no bulldog, panting love with every slobbering breath, could have been more devoted than Freed was to his silver-haired master. He frequently drove to Mayer’s house at the beach for breakfast, sat beside him as Mayer had his hair cut in the Metro barbershop, patiently followed him around the lot, one deferential step behind, and joined him again at night for a drink in his office or a visit to
the clubs on the Sunset Strip. Though the venue changed, the talk never varied—“Boss, what d’ya think?” Freed would ask, and Mayer would be happy to tell him.

Vulgar, crass, obsequious to superiors and often brutal to inferiors—that was Arthur Freed. But the authors of mighty movements and the doers of great deeds do not always look or act the way the history books would like, and Freed the vulgarian was also Freed the visionary, a man with large and scandent dreams. Although he could not put it, or much of anything else, into words, somewhere in the back of his disorderly mind he was forming an image of a new and more ambitious kind of movie musical.

His vision was all the more remarkable because he was one of the chief inventors of the old-style musical he now found so tiresome. Irving Thalberg had employed Freed and his partner, Nacio Herb Brown, to write the songs for Hollywood’s first all-talking musical, 1929’s
The Broadway Melody
, and Freed had been involved, either as songwriter or assistant, in most of Metro’s subsequent musical efforts. Yet though the first pictures he himself produced never ventured far from the traditional formula, in which the romantic story was little more than an excuse for songs and dances, Freed was, in fact, inching his way toward something different. “I felt a lot of the stuff they were doing in musicals was stale,” he said. “It had become a cliché.”

Since moviemaking, more than any other art form, is a collaborative enterprise, Freed could not do anything truly innovative until he had a production team of his own choosing, people not tied to the stale old ways. With Mayer’s approval, Metro’s money and the assistance of Roger Edens, who was his junior partner and artistic conscience, Freed therefore set out to find the best writers, musicians and designers in the country, traveling most often to New York for what he described as “a whole new crowd of people.” Just as money begets money, so does talent beget talent, and many of Broadway’s best—Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, to name just a few—were soon flocking to what had become known as the Freed Unit. So slowly
that no one noticed what was happening until it had happened, Freed was building a virtual studio within the studio—“my own little Camelot,” he called it.

It was about the time of
Girl Crazy
that Freed realized how bored he was with harebrained plots. By then he had not only the desire but also the means to strike out on his own—to create an original musical, right there in Culver City, that contained songs no one had ever heard before and that presented real people in real situations. Still, no one in the fall of 1943, probably even Freed himself, could have guessed that all his previous pictures had been little more than practice exercises and that now, with
Meet Me in St. Louis
, he was ready to show what he could really do.

Freed had prevailed against almost universal opposition, and a tangible sign of his success soon appeared on Lot 3. There, not far from its more modest Andy Hardy street, Metro built a little bit of old St. Louis: eight imposing Victorian houses, each surrounded by a lush lawn and manicured shrubs and flower beds.
Meet Me in St. Louis
, the picture without a plot, was going ahead. Freed’s victory had come at a price, however. Both he and Minnelli knew that they were gambling their reputations, and perhaps their careers, on the fate of a movie nearly everyone, including the star, had warned them against. If
Meet Me in St. Louis
scored a hit, it would be a long time before anyone again questioned their judgment; but if it flopped, if audiences insisted on a more conventional story, as most people at Metro believed they would, it would be even longer before they escaped an endless drizzle of recriminations and I-told-you-so’s. For both of them, the stakes could scarcely have been higher.

It must have been a great disappointment, then, to immediately stumble on one of the facts of moviemaking life: somber men in dark-blue suits can say yes to a picture, and highly skilled people can spend months readying it for the cameras, but it is the actors, quirky and often temperamental, who must appear on the screen. If they show up late for their calls, or show up unprepared, tempers flare, schedules crumble and carefully constructed plans are shredded into confetti. On a
movie set, where dozens of people are usually working just outside camera range, time really is money, and as little as a day’s delay can send the budget soaring. But that was the dismal scenario—delay and interruption, stop and go—that destiny had ordained for
Meet Me in St. Louis
, which finally began production on November 10, 1943.