Mark Griffin (17 page)

John Meyer, who befriended Garland in her later years, believes that the vulnerable star had

Like Garland, Minnelli had been frequently and cruelly reminded of his physical shortcomings. By this time, it had been deeply impressed upon him that the only beauty he would ever be associated with was the kind that he could cinematically manufacture. Metro’s wunderkinds may have been kindred spirits, but they were also different enough to keep things interesting. Garland’s outgoing, gregarious personality stood in sharp contrast to Minnelli’s more reserved, introspective nature.

As shooting progressed on
St. Louis
, Minnelli and his leading lady finally seemed to be hitting it off. But exactly what kind of relationship was developing? Vincente gazing adoringly at his star through his viewfinder was one thing—most of the gay members of the Freed Unit were accustomed to worshipping at the temple of Judy Garland—but Minnelli actually
romancing
Judy was another matter entirely. Didn’t either one of them realize what they were letting themselves in for? Hadn’t Judy heard the rumors about Vincente—hardly the boy next door with an alleged affinity for green eye shadow? And like others at the studio, Minnelli must have heard the whispers about Garland’s pharmaceutical dependency. How was it possible that these two hugely talented misfits could be legitimately attracted to one another?

“She surely must have known he was gay,” June Lockhart says of MGM’s odd couple, echoing the sentiments of virtually everyone on the lot. “I mean, I heard that when Minnelli first got to MGM, they had to ask him to stop wearing make-up to work everyday.” Some observers believe that Vincente’s “artistic flair” (as Judy termed it) had given everybody the wrong idea. Meredith Ponedel once broached the subject of Minnelli’s sexuality with her Aunt Dottie: “We talked about it once and Dottie said, ‘Nothing doing. He wasn’t gay.’ I mean, big deal, so he was in touch with his feminine side. And thank god, because look what he was able to produce. He was in touch with the feminine part of himself and not afraid to work with it. I mean, he probably had more courage than anybody else there.” Or, as frequent Minnelli collaborator Hank Moonjean puts it: “He was 98 percent woman and 2 percent man. I mean, the way he walked. The way he dressed. The way he smoked. He was just very feminine. But I never saw him make a gay movement or gesture or proposition to anybody. Ever.”
¹⁵

Nevertheless, virtually everyone around them, from Roger Edens to the guard at the gate, registered surprise that Minnelli and Garland were now a studio-sanctioned item. But they most certainly were, and they didn’t care if the whole world and Louella Parsons knew it, too. In a town known for its unlikely alliances (Orson Welles and Delores Del Rio) and questionable couplings (Cary Grant and Randolph Scott), Vincente and Judy trumped them all.

“I’ll tell you one thing, for the people that worked at MGM when I was there, it made no sense for Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli to be together at all,” says Darryl Hickman, who appeared in
St. Louis
and Minnelli’s
Tea and Sympathy
. “Nobody ever understood it. It didn’t make a lot of sense. I think Judy was a sensitive, lovely person but she was really used and misused by the studio. . . . The fact that she would reach out to Minnelli or that he would reach out to her was just a weird combination. I think they were probably both in their own way hurting on some level and they reached out to one another. They were some kind of consolation for each other for awhile.”
¹⁶

Nineteen years older than Judy, Vincente was another example—though a decidedly more avant-garde one—of the more mature father figure that Garland coveted. First husband David Rose, the professorial, pipe-smoking composer of “Holiday for Strings,” was studious, sexually conservative, and by all accounts obsessed with electric trains. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, whom Judy started seeing before the start of
St. Louis
, was fiercely intelligent, well read, and equipped with the kind of edgy, vitriolic Addison DeWitt-style humor that Garland found wholly irresistible. In later years, the Harold Arlen song “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe” (first heard in
Cabin in the Sky
) would become a fixture in Garland’s repertoire. Although most fans assumed Judy was singing the poignant tune with her youngest child, Joey Luft, in mind, others close to her believed that she carried a torch for Mankiewicz for the rest of her life.

But there was something about Vincente’s gentle, soft-spoken manner that she couldn’t resist. And Minnelli seemed to relish the idea of playing Henry Higgins to Judy’s Eliza. Several Metro veterans recall that Garland, tutored between takes in the MGM schoolhouse and a graduate of Hollywood High, seemed eager to intellectually better herself by seeking out older, erudite mentors such as Mankiewicz and Minnelli. These sophisticated men of the world could provide her with a kind of finishing school by association. What’s more, Vincente treated his star with a courteousness she hadn’t been accustomed to.

“He came in with great respect for Judy,” says Garland historian John Fricke. “As the legend goes, he treated her as ‘Miss Garland’ and not as the thirteen-year-old girl that everybody had seen grow up at MGM. . . . And I think he saw it to his great advantage to present her as glamorously as possible within the confines of a role.”
¹⁷

While
St. Louis
was still in production, MGM’s formidable senior editor, Margaret Booth, sent Minnelli an interoffice memo that expressed the thoughts of many studio veterans working on the picture: “I haven’t written
you for a number of days but the dailies have been wonderful and the photography is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. Judy has never been more beautiful or as sweet, to my way of thinking.”
¹⁸

As Booth and her assistants ran Minnelli’s footage over and over again, it appeared that the only thing wrong with
Meet Me in St. Louis
was that it was too much of a good thing. It would have to be cut. Before one of the preview screenings, Arthur Freed announced that Margaret O’Brien’s nightmarish Halloween sequence would have to go. But that scene was the very thing that had attracted Vincente to
St. Louis
to begin with.

Irving Brecher recalled,

Tootie’s trick-or-treating tour de force was spared the editor’s shears, but other scenes weren’t so fortunate. The Rodgers and Hammerstein song “Boys and Girls Like You and Me” was excised, as was a lengthy episode in which Garland was seen preparing Mary Astor, in full Gibson girl mode, for a night on the town.

With these deletions and other peripheral alterations completed,
Meet Me in St. Louis
was released in December 1944. The picture grossed a whopping $7,566,000, making it MGM’s all-time top moneymaker.

If
Cabin in the Sky
had trumpeted the arrival of a major new directorial talent,
St. Louis
more than made good on that promise. While roundly applauding Garland, O’Brien, and the trio of songs by Martin and Blane, the critics zeroed in on Minnelli’s sumptuous visuals and the evocation of a more carefree era. “Vincente Minnelli has staged the original Sally Benson story craftily, wisely concentrating on the details of the script and the colorful backgrounds,” wrote Howard Barnes in the
New York Herald Tribune
.
Time
famously reviewed the picture as “a musical even the deaf can enjoy,” and in the
New York Times
, Bosley Crowther (borrowing a phrase from the boy next door) dubbed it “a ginger-peachy show.”
²⁰

Esther (Judy Garland) prepares Mrs. Smith (Mary Astor) for a night on the town in a deleted scene from
Meet Me in St. Louis
. Margaret O’Brien’s unforgettable Halloween sequence nearly suffered the same fate. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

When the Best Picture nominees were announced during the 17th Annual Academy Awards,
Meet Me in St. Louis
was not among the contenders. In its place was the interminable
Wilson
and the saccharine victor,
Going My Way
. Astoundingly,
Meet Me in St. Louis
, now recognized as a landmark musical, didn’t garner a single Oscar, though it was nominated in four categories. While Otto Preminger’s nod for
Laura
and Billy Wilder’s nomination for
Double Indemnity
were worthy Best Director candidates, Henry King’s nomination for
Wilson
(a pet project of Fox mogul Daryl F. Zanuck) is almost unforgivable, considering that Minnelli was shut out altogether. Musicals—no matter how innovative or inspired—were frothy crowd pleasers and not considered “important” enough to merit Academy recognition beyond the Best Song category. It would take another seven years and eight films before Oscar would wink at Minnelli with an overdue nomination. In the meantime, he could console himself with the rapturous reviews and a phone call from Gene Kelly, who told Vincente and Judy, “Goddamn it, they don’t appreciate what a fine thing it is. They don’t realize all that went into it.”

But there was no time to remind them. For Minnelli, it was on to the next assignment.

IN APRIL 1938, MGM announced that it had acquired the motion picture, radio, and television rights to the title
Ziegfeld Follies
. The studio promised that a screen version of the
Follies
would go into production “shortly.” Five years later, Arthur Freed, Roger Edens, and a small army of assistants were still poring over the mountainous stacks of material that Metro had amassed concerning showman extraordinaire Florenz Ziegfeld, whom MGM producers seemed single-mindedly obsessed with.

By 1944, virtually every writer, composer, and designer on the lot found themselves contributing to what was regularly being touted in the trades as a “colossal super production.” The Freed Unit’s
Follies
was so spectacular and sophisticated that it had no use for anything as pedestrian as a conventional plot. Like one of Minnelli’s Shubert revues, the
Follies
would forego story in favor of high-toned style. Such an opulent extravaganza would also provide irrefutable proof that MGM really did have “more stars than there are in the heavens,” as studio publicists liked to boast.

As Freed and his minions envisioned it
, Ziegfeld Follies
would showcase every star in Metro’s lustrous galaxy. Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Lucille Ball, and Lena Horne would be featured in the musical sequences. Fanny Brice, Red Skelton, and Keenan Wynn would handle the comedy sketches. William Powell, who had snagged an Academy Award nomination for MGM’s gargantuan 1936 biopic
The Great Ziegfeld
, would re-create his role as the flamboyant impresario, only this time he’d do it in luscious Technicolor.
Powell’s Ziegfeld would mastermind Metro’s
Follies
from his heavenly boudoir. “Just because I moved up here, did the
Follies
have to die, too?” muses a nectar-sipping Ziegfeld as he gazes down upon Culver City.