Get Happy (69 page)

Some of those who did give her jobs had cause to regret their generosity. In November 1965 she won praise and plaudits for hosting
Hollywood Palace
, ABC’s Saturday night variety show. But her second appearance, in the spring of 1966, saw her lock herself in her dressing room midway through taping—“That beautiful voice! It’s gone!” she
was heard to cry—and refuse to come out until someone climbed through a hatch in the ceiling and opened the door from the inside. Because of such delays, taping did not conclude until one-thirty in the morning, four hours late.

Angry because ABC had forced her to perform despite a case of laryngitis, Judy took her revenge, staying behind after everyone else had gone home and all but wrecking her expensively decorated dressing room. She smeared its paintings with lipstick, she dumped ashes and cigarette butts between the keys of its piano and she set its sink and toilet to overflowing.

Yet there remained a few who were either brave or foolhardy enough to give her another chance, and on March 1, 1967, 20th Century-Fox announced that it wanted her for one of its splashiest productions, the film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s
Valley of the Dolls
, which included the pill-popping character Neely O’Hara, modeled after the young Judy herself. Too old to take that part, the real Judy was to play Neely’s nemesis, a bold and brassy Broadway star named Helen Lawson.

Small as it was, with less than ten minutes on-screen, it was a good role that demanded little and paid well, $75,000 for about ten days’ work. Treating her like visiting royalty, the studio provided her with everything but a scepter and crown. Someone mentioned that she was an avid pool player—together with a few male friends, she often visited the pool halls along Santa Monica Boulevard—and when Judy opened the door of her dressing room, there, right in front of her, was a pool table, complete with cue sticks and balls.

Trouble began on the first day of shooting, however. From Betsy Booth in the Hardy series to Jenny Bowman in
I Could Go On Singing
, Judy’s characters had always been sympathetic. Now she found herself incapable of playing one who was unsympathetic, who was, in fact, a certifiable bitch. “Just a little bit stronger, Judy,” Mark Robson, the director, would patiently say. “Just a little meaner.” But try as he might, Robson could not obtain what he thought should have been Helen Lawson’s nasty snarl. Judy, it seemed, did not want to end her film career as the Wicked Witch. “I don’t want to be a harridan on the screen,” she explained, “and I don’t think people want me to be.”

One day of frustrating takes was enough for her, and after that Judy could not be pried out of her dressing room. The morning she was finally fired, Abby Mann, her friend since
Judgment at Nuremberg
, happened to walk by her dressing room. Unconscious after yet another overdose, she was sprawled out on the pool table Fox had so considerately provided, her dress disheveled, pulled up so high that Mann could see a dark fringe of pubic hair.

Some artists are blessed with ignorance. Though they know the difference between good and bad, they cannot distinguish between good and brilliant and, as a result, find good quite sufficient. Judy was not so fortunate. However slurred her words, however shaky her walk, she did know the difference—her ear, that spiteful organ, told her—and she was mortified when she fell below her own sometimes unreachable standards. She thus knew—all the time, she knew—how badly she was doing during her second appearance on
Hollywood Palace
. “Oh, Bill, that’s terrible,” she exclaimed to William Harbach, the show’s producer, as she came to the end of her opening number, “What the World Needs Now,” a new, slightly complicated jazz waltz by Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

That she could not get it right obviously rankled, and at four-thirty in the morning a night watchman saw her emerge at last from her dressing room. Slamming the door behind her, she staggered onto the stage, which was lit, as all stages are at such an hour, only by a work light—a naked bulb atop a pole. Grabbing the light as if it were a microphone, so that her face was the only thing visible in the vast blackness of that empty theater, she slowly began singing, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love… .”

Several times in the sixties Judy sat down to write her autobiography. “I think I’ve got something to write about at last!” she said excitedly, speaking into the tape recorder to which she was confiding the story of her life. “It’s going to be one hell of a great, everlastingly great book,
with humor, tears, fun, emotion and love.” When the news got out that she had begun working on it, publishers from several continents snapped to attention, and Judy, assured of a best-seller, interviewed possible ghostwriters. With the help of one of them, her old friend Fred Finklehoffe, she actually put words on paper—remarkably candid and revealing stories about her childhood, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and her first two marriages. Judy did, indeed, have something to write about.

Sixty-eight pages of that everlastingly great book were all she managed to finish, however. “When you have lived the life I’ve lived,” she reluctantly conceded, “when you’ve loved and suffered, and been madly happy and desperately sad—well, that’s when you realize you’ll never be able to set it all down. Maybe you’d rather die first.” But there may also have been another explanation for her decision to stop. When she began her book in 1960, its final pages would have been upbeat, full of hope. When she abandoned it in the late sixties, that happy ending had disappeared. How, after all, could she have concluded? By saying that she was broke and increasingly desperate?

For that was the case. When she and Mark completed their eight months of globe-trotting and returned to California at the beginning of 1965, welcoming them home were all the old problems: lawsuits, creditors and battles with Sid. The only good news was that her fights with Sid were about over. On May 19 a Superior Court judge granted her a divorce, along with custody of Joey and Lorna. She had already announced her choice of a fourth husband, and six months later, on November 14, she and Mark said their vows in the Little Church of the West, a small commercial wedding chapel on Las Vegas’s neon-lit Strip. How did she feel? Judy was asked. “I feel like Mrs. Herron,” she answered. “I’m so happy.”

If that was so, it was not so for very long. Despite his good looks, his fine manners and his intelligence, Mark was not the ideal mate Judy had thought he was, and the mystery is not why they married, but why they married when they did, after so many months of miserable cohabitation. The complaint, on Judy’s side, was mostly about sex—or the lack of it—and she later claimed that the marriage was never consummated. That may have been true. Until he met Judy, Mark’s sexual experience had almost certainly been limited to other men, most notably
Henry Brandon, a highly regarded character actor, and Charles Laughton, whose interest in him had not been entirely professional.

Judy was also to allege that Mark had married her only to further his career, and his career
was
probably part of his motivation. But most relationships are combinations of advantage and affection, and the fact that Mark had hoped to make use of her did not prevent him from loving her. He said he loved her, anyway, and those who watched him meekly accept her abuse and hostility were convinced he was telling the truth. “Mr. Herron, don’t let it upset you,” said Judy’s maid, the faithful Alma Cousteline, when she saw him crying after one of Judy’s tirades. “Well, it does upset me,” Mark replied. “I love Judy, and I don’t want her to be like this. I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know what to do.”

Nor did anyone else, for the condition from which Judy was suffering—probably manic-depression, or bipolar disorder, as psychologists and psychiatrists often label it—grew worse after her return from England. By whatever name, her illness led to extreme and unpredictable mood swings: happy to sad, playful to mean, lethargic to restless. During the sluggish periods, she would sometimes stay in bed for days, denying entrance to her bedroom to everyone but Alma and Lionel Doman, her butler and houseman. During the unsettled periods, she would do just the opposite, roaming the house in sleepless agitation and alienating everyone she knew with middle-of-the-night phone calls, often threatening suicide. Such Jekyll-and-Hyde conduct, typical of those who suffer from manic-depression, was, in Judy’s case, doubtless exacerbated by drugs. In addition to all her other pills and capsules, she was apparently now also using heroin and morphine, both of which Alma found in the garage.

Anger, more potent than the most powerful drug, was the chief fuel for her illness, however, turning what might have been a manageable fire into a roaring, five-alarm conflagration. Anger at Begelman and Fields. “They took me for a ride,” she shouted into that sympathetic tape recorder. “They used me. They sold me out.” Anger at Sid, who was “just as bad or worse.” Anger at Mark, whom she derided as a “faggot.”
Anger even at her adored audiences. “I’ve sung. I’ve entertained. I’ve pleased your children, I’ve pleased your wives, I’ve pleased you! You sons-of-bitches!”

New rage was piled atop old rage, old rage atop even older rage, resentment and rancor growing higher and higher until, at last, they formed an edifice, a skyscraper of fresh hurts and ancient grievances, that overshadowed everything else in her life. “I’m goddamned mad!” she screamed. “I’m an angry lady! I’ve been insulted! Slandered! Humiliated! I wanted to believe, and I tried my damnedest to believe in that rainbow that I tried to get over—and I couldn’t! So what! Lots of people can’t… . I hate anybody’s guts who used me, because I wanted to be a nice girl.”

In the past her fury had been directed only against herself. Now she was a danger to everyone around her. “I have felt the wind of the wing of madness,” wrote Baudelaire, and many years later and half a world away, that same wind whistled through the dry canyons and arroyos of the Hollywood Hills, through palms and eucalyptus and across habitations of such riotous variety that even Baudelaire might have gasped in wonder. And there it touched Judy, too.