Get Happy (55 page)

The
Mirror
visited Ethel again on June 12, after it learned of Judy’s marriage to Sid. “Garland’s Maw Blisters Luft—Judy’s Mother Says Luft Is a Nogoodnik,” proclaimed the
Mirror
’s front page, in letters large enough to announce a declaration of war. “Well, I’m not surprised,”
Ethel said when she was told about the wedding, “but I’ve been hoping it wouldn’t happen. He’s a bad guy. I couldn’t tell Judy anything. She has to learn everything the hard way. She’s a big girl now—30 years old the day before yesterday—but when will she grow up?”

Once released, Ethel’s resentment could not be contained; in the weeks that followed she poured out a torrent of bitterness and bile. “Judy and I never had a quarrel, she just brushed me off,” she complained to the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. “If you have a daughter, don’t let her sing or dance,” she advised Graham. Sounding more defensive than she probably realized, a response, perhaps, to whispers that she had not been the most affectionate of mothers, Ethel maintained that Judy’s problems were not the result of too little maternal love, but of too much—she had spoiled her. “Judy has been selfish all her life. That’s my fault. I made it too easy for her.”

Some wedding present her mother had dispatched! A slap in the face could not have been more hostile, and although she remained mute in public, Judy was savage in private. “My mother’s a fucking riveter at Douglas,” she said, “and that’s where she belongs. It’s too good for her.” But when Lorna was born in November, Judy exacted her revenge, informing the hospital that her mother was not to be permitted to see her new granddaughter. That was the most hurtful action she could have taken, and Ethel, who conveniently ignored the harsh words that so recently had tumbled out of her own mouth, was appropriately wounded. “What have I done wrong?” she wailed to a friend. “What did I do that she hates me so?”

Americans have always idealized that abstract figure, the mother—“her very name stands for loving unselfishness and self-abnegation” was Theodore Roosevelt’s platitudinous tribute—and in the days after Ethel’s death, the newspapers raised the same questions. Why had Judy turned on the woman who had started her on her spectacular career? How could she have stood by and watched her own mother, who had contributed so much to her success, conclude her life so pathetically—broke, angry and alone? Even a few of Judy’s friends attacked her for what they saw as ingratitude, if not outright matricide. Apparently forgetting their night of alfresco passion before her opening at the Palace, a drunken Johnny Mercer confronted her as she walked into a party.
“Why did you let your mother die in a parking lot?” he snarled. Judy’s sorry reply was to burst into tears and retreat to a bathroom, where, following a now familiar pattern, she cut her wrists, bringing an ambulance screaming to the door. “Naturally,” said the host, “the incident was so macabre that everyone left.”

It was fitting that Ethel died, as she had lived, rushing to beat the clock. Never was there a time, even in those last discouraging months, when she was not engaged in a frenzy of movement. No one, in fact, had ever been able to keep pace with the Ethel Express: not Frank Gumm, not Sue or Jimmie, and not Judy, who had been chained to it nonetheless, bouncing along like a dejected caboose, since she was two. Judy could not recall a time, indeed, when her mother was not forcing her to do something she did not want to do, subjecting her to pressures that few adults, let alone children, ever encounter.

Other women her age could look back on picnics, parties, first dates—the multitude of everyday experiences Judy had been denied. But the lack of those pleasures would have counted for little if Ethel had not also deprived Judy of something much more valuable—responsibility for her own life. Her take-charge mother had made almost all her decisions for her. The few decisions Ethel did not make, Metro did. Judy had had even less chance than most young stars to grow up. Now, at the age of thirty, it seemed she never would. And for what had she sacrificed? Money? Fame? Power? Judy believed she knew. “Maybe I fulfilled Mother’s ambitions,” she said with quiet bitterness, “and maybe she fulfilled hers.”

Mothers usually protect their children. Ethel did the opposite, and no conquistador, hacking his way through soggy jungles or scaling icy Andes heights in search of Inca gold, could have been more ruthless. Yet of all Ethel’s betrayals, one stands above the others as permanent indictment: it was she who had forced Judy to take drugs; it was she who had made her a slave to a kaleidoscope of brilliantly colored pills and capsules. What had she done to cause Judy to hate her? Ethel had inquired. What could Judy have answered? That there was not one reason, nor two or three, but thousands, one for every pill she took.

“As is the mother, so is her daughter,” says the Old Testament, and Judy, in the end, proved no less obstinate than her mother. “She was a lonely and determined woman,” Judy said, “and I guess I’m the same way.” For most people, the years bring a mellowing. Anger cools, quarrels recede, wounds heal. Battlefields become sacred shrines, and onetime enemies exchange embraces rather than blows. Nostalgia rules. Where Ethel was concerned, however, Judy’s heart only hardened. As she grew older and better realized the damage done to her, she seemed to dislike her mother more and more, finally arriving at a point where she blamed her mother—“this hideous woman, this outrageous, awful woman”—for nearly everything that had gone awry in her life.

“Nothing, ever, wipes out childhood,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, a statement that is as melancholy, yet as incontestable, as a tolling church bell. Judy, certainly, knew it to be true, and nothing, ever, was to wipe out the injuries inflicted on her by that ambitious little dynamo, her mother.

“A career is a curious thing,” says Norman Maine, the movie-star hero of
A Star Is Born
. “Talent isn’t always enough. You need a sense of timing—an eye for seeing the turning point—or recognizing the big chance when it comes and grabbing it.” The person to whom he is giving such perceptive advice is Esther Blodgett, the character Judy was to play. But he might as well have been speaking to Judy herself, for in 1953 she, too, had arrived at a turning point. If her remake of
A Star Is Born
succeeded, her career would be secure as far as she could see; if it failed, she really would be through in Hollywood. She had been given a second chance; a third would be in the nature of a miracle. Her whole future was riding on just one picture, and Judy knew it.
A Star Is Born
, she told one columnist, could not merely be very good—it had to be the greatest.

A product of some of the brightest talents in the business, the original, made in 1937, scarcely needed improvement. David O. Selznick had produced it, William Wellman had directed it and Dorothy Parker was one of those who had shaped its shrewd and knowledgeable script. Janet Gaynor, the recipient of the very first Oscar for best actress, for
1927’s
Seventh Heaven
, had played Esther, the Midwestern innocent who dreamed of movie glory. Fredric March, who was to win an Oscar for 1946’s
The Best Years of Our Lives
, had played Norman Maine, the alcoholic Pygmalion who not only transforms Esther into a star—Vicki Lester—but makes her his wife as well. What elevated that otherwise predictable plot above the ordinary was the rude reversal of fortunes in the picture’s second half. Maine, the matinee idol, finds his own career falling as fast as his wife’s is rising, and, rather than ruin her prospects, too, he drowns himself in the waters off Malibu.

The birth of one star inevitably meant the death of another—there was limited space in the Hollywood heavens—and in a town where many careers had plummeted as precipitously as Norman Maine’s,
A Star Is Born
was a film that had touched many. Belying his cynical screen reputation, Humphrey Bogart, for instance, ran it on a home projector every Christmas, crying each time as if he had never seen it before. It was a movie both loved and admired, and anyone who attempted to do it again, with music no less, was following a tough act indeed. But that was the challenge chosen by Judy and Sid, who was assuming Selznick’s role as producer.

“Those two alley cats can’t make a picture,” Arthur Freed said of the Lufts, and he may have been right. But the crafty cats at Warner Bros. could. With the studio’s help, Judy and Sid assembled some of the finest talents of their own day. Moss Hart, whose collaborations with George S. Kaufman were among Broadway’s wittiest plays, was hired to revise and update the script. Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin were picked to write the songs, and George Cukor, whose very name signified class and distinction in the movie world, was brought in to direct. So it went down the credit list, the best being added to the best.

The only real problem was the male lead. Who could play Norman Maine? It was a difficult role, requiring a combination of bluster and sensitivity, egotism and charm. Cary Grant, the personal favorite of Judy and Sid, refused the part; so did Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier. Tyrone Power and Richard Burton were busy on other projects. Three stars who did want the job—Bogart, Frank Sinatra and Erroll Flynn—were turned down. “Understand Want Me for Star,” the vacationing Flynn telegraphed Warner Bros. But he was wrong. “James
Mason Set Starborn,” replied the studio. And so Mason, an English actor who had not attracted much attention in the United States—the German field marshal Erwin Rommel in
The Desert Fox
was probably his biggest role—was offered, and instantly grabbed, the lead in the most talked-about picture of the year.

By autumn everything was in place. Even before the first scene was shot,
A Star Is Born
had the look of a champion. Everything about it—script, songs, cast and crew—had the feel of quality, Hollywood moviemaking at its very best. As an expression of his regard, Jack Warner assigned Judy the dressing room that had belonged to Bette Davis, the onetime queen of the Warners lot, and on Monday, October 12, Judy went before the cameras for the first time in more than three years. The bad habits of the past seemed behind her, and shooting progressed smoothly until, about ten days later, Warner Bros. abruptly slammed on the brakes.
A Star Is Born
, it decreed, was not to be filmed in the traditional way, but with an entirely new process called CinemaScope. The most important movie in Judy’s career was caught in the middle of the biggest cinematic revolution since the introduction of sound.

The revolution had been under way for more than a year, in fact, since the premiere, on September 30, 1952, of
This Is Cinerama
, which used a wraparound screen and three projectors to give filmgoers the illusion that they were watching a film in three dimensions. In the ensuing months other gimmicks were tried and discarded—one required viewers to wear special stereoscopic glasses—before CinemaScope emerged as the wide-screen victor. Using a camera with a new kind of lens, it projected images two and a half times as wide as normal, making the traditional, almost boxlike screen seem small by comparison: in CinemaScope, spectaculars really did look spectacular. Audiences were captivated, in any event, and after seeing box-office figures for the first CinemaScope feature, a biblical epic called
The Robe
, Warner Bros. belatedly embraced the new technology for
A Star Is Born
. Everything that had already been shot was scrapped—a loss of close to $300,000, or about 10 percent of the budget—and filming was started all over again.