Get Happy (6 page)

“A compact woman with glistening eyes” was the way Shirley Temple, one of Meglin’s pupils, was later to describe Ethel Meglin, and Meglin’s astute training and promotion made her students—Meglin Kiddies, they were called—much sought after by both the movie studios and vaudeville houses. At Christmastime the Loew’s State Theater in downtown Los Angeles usually booked the entire troupe for a week. “One Hundred Meglin Wonder Kiddies … Kute … Klever and Kunning!”
read the theater’s ad in 1928, the year the Gumm sisters joined the contingent. Among the wonderful one hundred who appeared on the Loew’s stage that year, only one stood out, however—the skinny six-year-old with the booming voice. “I’ll Get By,” Babe sang, with a voice that, in the words of one listener, “cut straight through to your heart. The audience went crazy. She had many, many encores.”

Together with other Meglin Kiddies, the Gumm girls did at last break into the movies, in a one-reel short,
The Big Revue
, that was filmed during the summer of 1929. Set in a glossy nightclub, it has a chorus line of not-so-buxom nine-year-olds, an all-boy orchestra, and the three Gumms—the only ones given their own spot—who sing a song called “In the Sunny South.” Mary Jane and Jimmie look nervous, their eyes wandering up and down, left and right, everywhere, in fact, but straight ahead. Babe alone has stage—or, in this case, camera—presence. She not only looks into the camera; she pierces it, transfixes it with her eyes. The camera, that most human of all mechanical instruments, is, in turn, so mesmerized that she might as well be by herself, because she is the only one it seems to notice.

Some managers have a clear plan for their clients’ careers, turning down those jobs that fall outside their guidelines. Incapable of distinguishing between the big and the small, the important and the unimportant, Ethel, by contrast, had no plan at all. As a result, her girls frantically juggled performances in Lancaster with trips to Los Angeles and other, more distant spots like San Diego and Santa Barbara. A big night at the Loew’s State or the Wilshire-Ebell might be followed, for instance, by an appearance before the Eastern Star Lodge in little Tehachapi, an hour or so north of Lancaster. At one tiny theater outside Los Angeles, rowdy teenagers caused a nauseating stench on stage by squashing garlic on the hot footlights, then hurled a half-eaten salami sandwich at Mary Jane. That was too much even for Ethel. “We’re going home,” she declared and promptly drove her brood back to Lancaster.

More and more, bookers and managers were asking not for three Gumms, but just one—the youngest. “Without Babe, the act would
have been very mediocre,” said Maurice Kusell, who produced the “Stars of Tomorrow” variety shows for the Wilshire-Ebell. “Babe was the whole thing, really, even as a young kid of eight years old.” As she grew older, Babe’s voice leaped ahead of her body, developing remarkable timbre, resonance and richness. She thought, acted and looked like a small girl, but she sounded, increasingly and ever more astonishingly, like a woman. In the winter and spring of 1932, she was twice invited to sing at perhaps the last place a chanteuse of nine might have been expected—the Cocoanut Grove, one of the movie colony’s favorite hangouts.

The songs that Hollywood applauded also drew audiences to the Valley Theater, which, like most other businesses, needed all the help it could get in the Depression years of the thirties. “Baby Gumm will feature popular numbers between shows,” announced one of the theater’s ads. No longer could Frank, or anyone else, maintain the fiction that all three sisters were equal.

The reaction of Mary Jane and Jimmie was not what might have been anticipated, however, and neither showed a glimmer of envy. “Mary Jane and Jimmie were sick of the whole show-business thing,” said Dorothy Walsh. “They worked under protest most of the time. They thought: if Babe can do it, wonderful! They wanted to quit.” The sisters would continue to perform as a trio, but from now on the main burden would be on Babe. In the cheers and applause for her, Mary Jane and Jimmie heard their salvation, as the fury of their mother’s ambition was turned on the youngest, smallest and most vulnerable, the child she had not even wanted.

W
hen I was a child,” Babe was later to say, “more than anything else I wanted to be loved by my parents.” But she was really speaking of just one parent, her mother. She did not have to seek her father’s love. He gave it without being asked, in a torrent, a soaking, drenching waterfall of care and devotion. Those same warm waters also showered Mary Jane and Jimmie—of Frank’s affection there was never a shortage—but his feelings for Babe had a singular intensity. “Boy, did he adore her!” exclaimed Glen Settle, a young Lancastrian who listened again and again to Frank’s recitation of her accomplishments. “Adore,” indeed, was the word everyone used to describe the bond between father and daughter. “She adored her father, absolutely adored him!” said Dorothy Walsh. “And he adored her.
There
was a love affair.”

A long list of other words, a whole dictionary of them, could have been used to describe the far more complicated relationship she had with her mother. Her own Milne relations had thought Ethel a nag, and where her daughters were concerned, nothing
that could be seen by the eye or heard by the ear escaped her notice and possible correction. “She was somehow just too fussy with those girls,” said Grace Pickus, who worked in the Valley Theater box office. “She was always combing their hair, or straightening their collars, as if she couldn’t wait to get them just right so that she could take them off somewhere.” Yet as much as she fussed with Mary Jane and Jimmie, she fussed that much more with Babe.

There are many stories of her vigilance, but one is enough to illustrate the sharpness of her eye, the tightness of her grip. Behind the Gilmore house on Twelfth Street, there was a sloping stretch of ground on which Muggsey’s brother Wilber had set up a rope slide. With ingenuity Tom Sawyer would have admired, Wilber and a friend had tied one end of a rope to a cottonwood tree at the top of the slope, the other end to a tree at the bottom, a hundred feet away. Holding on to a sling attached to a pulley, the boys would then launch themselves from the high end and slide down the rope, flying between the two trees like Tarzan through the jungle. Since their descent never actually took them more than ten feet off the ground, the chance of injury was slight, and girls also took rides on Wilber’s rope.

Babe was not to be one of them. Visiting the Gilmores with her mother, she wandered out to play and, with Wilber’s help, eagerly prepared to take her first flight. She was climbing a ladder to reach the sling when Ethel burst out of the Gilmore house, crying hysterically—a sight that no one in Lancaster had ever seen or had ever expected to see. “No! No! No! No! No! Don’t take a chance!” she screamed. “Babe wanted to be a regular kid” was Irma Story’s sad commentary, “but her mother didn’t give her a chance. She didn’t really have a free kid’s life like the rest of us.”

Ethel also tried, with less success, to curb some of the kids who were free—Irma, Muggsey and just about everyone else who came into contact with her daughter. If they included Babe in their Halloween plans, for instance, her friends knew that they would have to abide by her mother’s rules, which meant spending the evening safely inside the Gumm house rather than walking the streets, knocking on doors and making minor mischief, as they preferred. If they failed to include Babe and went their own way, on the other hand, they knew that Ethel would
call their parents the next day and inquire why, then invite them to a party that would make them all feel guilty.

Such tactics usually backfired, and Babe, the unwitting victim of her mother’s clumsy machinations, was frequently excluded from group activities. Ignorant of her friends’ feelings, she was later to express her resentment, claiming that there had been a bias against her in Lancaster because she had come from a show-business family. What she did not know was that her friends were only doing what she herself could not or would not do: they were rebelling against Ethel. “Everybody wanted to be Babe’s friend,” said Story. “But we didn’t want to be bossed by her mother. I wouldn’t say that I disliked Mrs. Gumm. But I was glad she wasn’t my mother.”

Many others felt the same way. Despite her care, her concern and her watchfulness—despite all the things she did—an essential ingredient was missing from Ethel’s notion of motherhood. Perhaps it was something as simple as tenderness. Not once in all the years the Gumms lived in Lancaster did Babe’s young companions see Ethel open her arms to hold or to hug her, as Frank so often did. Not once did they witness an open display of affection. If Frank’s love was like Niagara, unending and unstoppable, Ethel’s could be compared to the flow that comes out of a faucet: a meager stream that she could turn on, and turn off.

Was it, in fact, love Ethel felt? Babe herself was uncertain, but some of her Lancaster friends believed that they knew the answer. To their skeptical and unblinking eyes, Ethel seemed to regard Babe as an asset to be exploited, rather than as a child to be cherished. This was a harsh but probably accurate judgment. The fact of the matter was that Ethel did seem to look at Babe with chilling detachment, more like a manager studying a promising talent than a mother looking at her own flesh and blood.

“Drive, drive, drive! That’s the way Ethel was,” said Dorothy Walsh, and Ethel drove Babe not only beyond reason, but beyond need, which was worse. For Babe did not have to be prodded to perform, any more than she had to be prodded to eat or sleep. To her ears applause was a sound made by angels, as soothing as a lullaby, yet as exhilarating as a bugle call. To sing was to be loved: it was as simple as that. Walking onto
a stage was like stepping into a warm embrace. What did she want to be when she grew up? people in Lancaster asked her. “I’m going to be a movie star,” she said. No one laughed, because no one doubted that she would be.