Get Happy (51 page)

“I’d like to go to England,” the fifteen-year-old Judy had wistfully remarked in only her second movie at Metro,
Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry
. “Maybe I will someday with a show.” Now, half a lifetime later, she had that opportunity. Rejecting all the offers from her own country, she chose the one from England: $70,000 for four weeks at London’s Palladium, the last great variety house in the English-speaking world. Nearly two decades after she had left, Judy would be returning to her roots—vaudeville.

“The history of my life is in my songs,” she was to say, and the act she put together was a biography in song. With the help of two of the brightest talents in Culver City, Roger Edens and Chuck Walters, she selected highlights from her fifteen years in film, from “You Made Me Love You,” which she sang in her very first movie for Metro,
Broadway Melody of 1938
, to “Get Happy,” which she sang in her very last,
Summer Stock
. There were several from those in between, including two from
Meet Me in St. Louis
and two renditions of “Over the Rainbow,” which was not only her signature song, but a particular favorite of Londoners, who had been comforted, during the dark days of the Blitz, by its sentimental message of hope and longing. She was, in short, producing, directing and starring in an M-G-M musical in miniature—
The Judy Garland Story
, it might have been called. Hollywood may have declared her anathema, but Judy was still a movie star, and a movie star was what people expected to see.

Despite their impending divorce—a judge dissolved their marriage on March 29—Judy also asked for advice from the master of the Metro musical, driving up to Evanview Drive with her pianist, her old friend Buddy Pepper, to give Vincente a special preview. Perfectionist though he was, Vincente could come up with no more than one suggestion.
Because she was often referred to as the greatest entertainer since Al Jolson, he said, she should include “Rock-a-bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” one of Jolson’s standards. Reviewing the performance she gave that evening, Vincente said that Judy’s voice “was better than ever, for it had a new-found maturity. The heartache in the sad songs and the frenetic drive of the upbeat numbers created an extraordinary impact. She’d developed marvelous gestures which put the stresses on the most unexpected words. The effect was awkward and occasionally graceless, but strangely, it was right.”

The patterns of the past are sometimes harder to break than the bars of a jail cell. Despite Vincente’s praise, despite her own hard work and the effort and sweat of Edens and Walters, Judy began having second thoughts. Although she had sung on the radio many times, she had not performed before an audience, paying to hear her alone, since the summer of 1943, when she sang at Philadelphia’s Robin Hood Dell. What if she went all the way to England and nobody wanted to hear her? “I’ve
heard that the British can be awfully quiet if they don’t go for an actress,” she had fretted when first approached by the Palladium.

Though Sid and her agent, Abe Lastvogel, did their best to reassure her, Judy seemed prepared to cancel the whole trip until Fanny Brice, her costar in her third Metro movie,
Everybody Sing
, came crashing through her door. Placing her hands on her hips like an exasperated mother, Brice all but shouted: “Good lord, girl, do you think you’re the only person on earth who has problems? I know every heartache in the book. But I never sat down on my heels and gave up—and you’re not going to either! Not if I have to get out my old spanking brush and give it to you where you need it most. Now, you keep your head up and your eyes on tomorrow—and the hell with yesterday.”

Fearing Brice and her old spanking brush perhaps even more than she did the standoffish English, Judy kept to her plans and traveled to New York with her three companions—Myrtle Tully, Dorothy Ponedel and Buddy Pepper—for their March 30 date with the French liner
Ile de France
. “Honestly, I’ve hit my stride,” she said shortly before sailing, revealing not a hint of anxiety. “Things have been pretty rough these past few years, but I’ve snapped out of my depression. I’m in fine voice, I’ve lots of energy—and well, the future looks fine.”

She would need that good humor when she read what the London reporters were to write in the days before her opening. For several years, since the time of
The Pirate
, her weight had gone up and down almost as fast as a yo-yo—thin, fat, thin, fat. When she disembarked at Plymouth, the yo-yo was stuck at fat: she was as heavy as she had been a year earlier, during the first weeks of
Summer Stock
. “Plump and jovial” was how one paper described her. “Tubby,” said another. To all of which Judy had the perfect, unanswerable comeback. “I may be awfully fat,” she admitted, “but I feel awfully good.”

Her fans—most of England, it seemed—would not have minded if she had been as big as Big Ben, just so long as she sounded like Judy Garland. As she walked down its gangplank, the
Ile de France
wished her well with a long blast from its horn, while the other ships in Plymouth harbor spelled out her name in nautical signals. Smiling crowds stood at the pier, and hundreds more waited at the train station in London, merely to say hello.

The one she really wanted to hear say hello, however—Sid, of course—had stayed behind in New York. On Judy’s instructions, Dorothy Ponedel had telephoned him from the ship, midway across the Atlantic, and had begged him to join her. After settling into London’s Dorchester Hotel, Judy had Ponedel call again—Judy needed Sid for emotional support, Ponedel told him. The second call persuaded him, and within hours he was on a plane to England. Thus it was that on opening night, Monday, April 9, Judy had everything and everyone she desired. As she and Pepper walked arm in arm to the stage, she made a small confession, however. She felt, she said, as if she were walking to her execution.

Storytellers cherish that dramatic moment when a courageous person takes on the odds. A Stanley, setting off through unexplored jungles in search of the missing Livingston. A Lindbergh, slowly rising from Roosevelt Field on his lonely flight to Paris. A Ben Hogan, so severely injured in a car crash that he has been told he will never play again, walking onto a golf course to win the U.S. Open. Soldiers and statesmen, adventurers and athletes. Those are the heroes who make the blood race, who bring a tear to the eye and who inspire poets and playwrights and filmmakers. But what of the writer and artist, the composer and entertainer, who risk career and livelihood to try something radically new? Are they, too, not brave, those explorers of the mind and the imagination?

And what of a Judy Garland, fired by M-G-M, written off by Hollywood and “on the slippery slope to a fadeout,” as she so accurately phrased it? How much courage must it have taken for her to have walked onto the storied stage of the Palladium that evening in early April? As the orchestra began playing her entrance music, Buddy Pepper, who was waiting for her at his piano, peered back into the wings and saw her mouth form just two terrified words—“Oh, no!”

If courage is not the absence of fear, but its defeat, then Judy displayed courage that night, going ahead despite an attack of nerves so serious that it made her choke on several words of her introduction. “Never mind!” came the shouts from out front. “You’re doing a good
job.” Thus encouraged, she went smoothly ahead until, just after the fourth number, she twirled to make a brief exit. As she turned, she tripped and fell—landing smack on her backside. Seeing that she was hurt only in her dignity, Pepper let out a whoop of laughter as he rushed to pick her up, and Judy laughed with him. “That’s one of the most ungraceful exits I ever made,” she said—the cue the audience was waiting for. Suddenly that huge theater was one happy howl. Of such accidents are triumphs made, and from then on, from the first row in the orchestra to the last row in the second balcony, the Palladium belonged to her.

Still, it was not until Judy had started her final number—“Over the Rainbow”—that Pepper, like a soldier too caught up in the battle to know which side is winning, began to appreciate the dimensions of her victory. Even before she concluded, the audience was roaring its approval, a sound so ear-shattering that Val Parnell, the Palladium’s managing director, called it the biggest ovation he had ever seen or heard. Her eyes misting, Judy could doubtless have said the same. In return, she offered the only gift in her possession—a promise to sing her heart out.

She kept her word, selling out her entire run at the Palladium—two shows a night and two matinees a week. “I doubt if Sarah Bernhardt, Jenny Lind and Vesta Tilley would ever have asked for more from their admirers” was how the
Evening Standard’s
critic characterized her almost ecstatic reception. When she had finished in London, Judy proceeded to conquer the rest of England—and Scotland and Ireland too—with a week each in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Dublin, Liverpool and Birmingham and one night in the seaside resort of Blackpool. “Not bad for a kid from Lancaster, California, hmmm?” she joked to Pepper.

What would happen to Judy Garland? a Hollywood columnist had demanded in January. Her British audiences had now answered him and all the other doubters. “Where do I go from here?” Judy herself asked. “One thing is certain. I have found out where I belong—out there under the limelights singing for my supper. I have been asked to make more movies, and of course I will. Maybe I’ll make one over here. But from now on it’s the stage that has first call on me.”

It was almost inevitable that, given such sentiments, Judy would follow up her British successes with stage appearances in America. But what kinds of appearances? And on what stages? Those were the questions she was asking herself when she set sail for New York on August 7. Some were urging her to tour the United States with one-night stands based on her Palladium act;
Inside U.S.A.
, it was to be titled. But Sid and Abe Lastvogel had a better idea: a single stage in a single city—New York. There was only one problem: vaudeville was dead, and Times Square, its onetime capital, no longer possessed a variety house like the Palladium. The greatest of them all, the Palace, on the southeast corner of Broadway and Forty-seventh Street, still stood, but as a movie theater, and a seedy, woebegone movie theater at that.