Chapter V: Part 5

The director knew better. “Listen,” he said. “You were so damn nervous you were great. You keep acting that way and you can pick your nose into a fortune.” That bit of advice registered with Coop. After he’d belly-flopped trying to dive into the deep end of acting with pictures like _Saratoga Trunk_, he saw his old director again. “Guess I’ll have to go back to my nose,” he said.

It took an eye doctor from South Bend, Indiana, to set up in the agency business and put the hammer lock on Hollywood; by comparison Myron only twisted arms. Dr. Jules Caesar Stein is the founder and board chairman of MCA, a flesh-peddling octopus with approximately one thousand clients ranging from actors to zither players, before it got rid of them all in a hurry under pressure from Washington’s trust busters. He and his wife, Doris, are also devout collectors of antiques; European furniture dealers used to rub their hands when they saw them coming, but they were soon crying in their porcelain teacups, because Jules had set up his own antique shops.

Dr. and Mrs. Stein have climbed so high since his college days--he worked his way through by playing the violin in little jazz bands--that they are now helping to refurnish the White House. Mrs. John F. Kennedy was pleased to announce last year that the Steins, as a gift to the nation, “will contribute pieces from their collection of eighteenth-century antiques as well as new acquisitions.”

Soon after the Steins moved to California--they now live in a beautiful Beverly Hills hilltop mansion--the good doctor told me at a party: “I’m going to be king of Hollywood one day.”

“You and who else?” I laughed. But I underestimated him. He succeeded, thanks to the shortsightedness of the producers when big stars are in short supply and desperate demand.

Besides Brando, MCA spoke for Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Dean Martin, Jack Benny. That’s just a sample. Agents used to hustle for salary and billing. Jules Stein’s poker-faced assistants demanded lots more than that. They often weren’t satisfied until they got a fat slice of the picture’s profits for their clients.

The first deal like that was made for Jimmy Stewart, whom I originally recommended to MGM after he and I played on Broadway together with Judith Anderson in _Divided by Three_. The slice that MCA carved for him out of Universal-International’s _Winchester ’73_ brought him more than $600,000. Now he’s a millionaire on the investments he made on the advice of a keen-brained business friend from Texas and he’s become a sober-sided industrialist as well as a fine actor.

With Kirk Douglas as a client Jules Stein did even better at Universal. After running up costs of $12,000,000 on _Spartacus_ in which Douglas starred and also produced with Universal’s money, the huge, 400-acre studio fell into a situation where it had to sell out, lock, stock, and acreage. MCA bought the place for $11,250,000 and set to work churning out television series. Now it’s called Revue Productions and it’s the best-run studio in Hollywood. If MCA plans work out now it has beaten the anti-trust suit--it is concentrating on production and stripping itself of the agency business--millions more dollars will be invested in an effort to make Hollywood the movie capital of the world once more.

Once an actor has seen his agent put the pressure on and turn a geyser of cash into Old Faithful itself, the sky’s the limit where his greed for money is concerned. Everything else is forgotten, including, of course, gratitude. William Holden, an MCA prize winner, did mighty well with _The Key_, though Trevor Howard stole the notices; and much, much better before that from _Bridge on the River Kwai_, which brought him millions. The producer of _The Key_ was Carl Foreman.

When Foreman had another picture in the works, _The Guns of Navarone_, he wanted Holden for his hero. “My price,” Holden declared, “is now $750,000, plus ten per cent of the gross.”

“But not with me, not after _The Key_,” Foreman said.

“With you or anybody else, that’s my price,” Holden replied.

Foreman had a few forceful words to say on the subject of gratitude, then hired Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn together for less than Holden demanded. To keep his bulging bank account safe from the hands of tax collectors, Holden moved his family to Switzerland, that temporary haven of fugitive American fortunes--temporary because I understand that President Kennedy has some fancy plans for correcting that state of inequity.

William doesn’t spend much time in his Swiss home, though his wife, formerly Brenda Marshall, does, together with their two sons. Her daughter by a previous marriage preferred staying behind in Hollywood as an interior decorator. When Brenda Marshall married, she was a happy, fun-loving woman. The last time I saw her, at a party Norman Krasna gave for me at Lausanne, Switzerland, her old contentment had gone bye-bye.

* * * * *

When Tony Curtis was fourteen, he wrote me a six-page letter from his family’s one-and-a-half-room flat in the Bronx, where his father worked as a tailor. The boy was then Bernie Schwartz, and he wanted to know how to become a movie actor. He’d beaten a path to Hollywood, but he wasn’t rated as much more than a curly haired pretty boy by most people when MCA started to steer him. No matter how hard he was asked to work to promote his career, he gave the same answer: “I’d love to.” He was eager and fun to be with, and I invited him to all my parties. There he got to know, among others, suave, immaculate Clifton Webb, whom he looked up to as the epitome of social form.

“You’re getting up there,” Clifton cautioned him as the months rolled by, “so you must dress better. That suit isn’t good enough for you, and your tie is awful.”

As soon as Tony could afford it, he bought himself a custom-tailored suit, which he christened at another party of mine where Webb was a guest. “Look, Hedda,” Tony said with pride, “isn’t it wonderful? All hand-sewn.”

“Lovely,” I agreed, “and that’s a good-looking pair of shoes, too.”

“A producer I know couldn’t wear them, so he gave them to me. They pinch a little, but aren’t they beautiful? They cost him $75.”

Clifton wandered over to add a word of praise for the suit. “But you can’t wear that tie with it.”

“What kind should I wear, Mr. Webb?”

“Come over to my house tomorrow and I’ll give you some.”

Tony found a wife who was used to being kept on a tight financial rein when he married Janet Leigh in 1951. Her father, Fred Morrison, who ten years later took an overdose of pills that ended his life, held the purse strings after her career got going. I remember coming across her at Rex, the mad hatter, where she was aching to buy a sweater for $75, but her dad said no. When he died, she was on the French Riviera with Mrs. Dean Martin, guests of Joe Kennedy.

Tony and Janet bought an eighteen-room house in 1958. (“Did you ever believe I’d end up a country gentleman?” he asked me.) They had enough money left to furnish the dining room, but not enough to buy much else. He was around at my house when I mentioned that I had a handsome, carved oak chair down in the basement, which I couldn’t use. “If you want it, take it. Go down and see.”

He came back conveying the heavy chair in his arms. “It’s wonderful,” he said. “I’ll put it in my car.” He’d started the motor to drive straight home before I caught him. “Come back here. We’ve got a party going. Janet can see it when you get home.” It still sits in their front hall, bleached and upholstered in white brocade.

MCA maneuvered Tony’s affairs so astutely that he now owns his own picture company, makes millions, drives a Rolls-Royce. “I hope that in a few years I’ll have enough security so I can drive around in an old battered station wagon if I want to,” he says. He lost Janet Leigh after he made a picture in South America with Yul Brynner, which featured a girl named Christine Kaufman, to whose apartment in the Château Marmont, in the company of her mother, Tony would go to have coffee on his way home.

He sent me another letter after I’d criticized him in the column last year over the postponement of _Lady L._ “I wonder,” I’d asked, “if actors realize they’re killing the goose that laid the golden eggs and are ruining their careers.”

“You might well have asked whether the studios realize what they are doing to actors,” Tony wrote back. “Because of the delays and stalling on this project, I have not made a film for eight months. True, I was paid a salary for part of that time but money alone can never make up for the fact that I might have two films during that period, that I could have been working in my chosen profession, could have been improving in the only way an actor can improve--by working.

“As a star, I have the right to pick my own parts, to decide whether or not a script is right for me. That is clearly understood by everyone who seeks to employ me.

“If the final script does not meet my requirements, the burden must remain with the company and not with me. The studio did submit a script I liked, which is why I signed to do the picture in the first place. Before we could get into production, they began making changes and the script they were finally ready to shoot bore little resemblance to the one I had approved.” He was right, the picture has never been made.

* * * * *

When press agents nudge an actor hard enough, he imagines he can write, produce, direct, and act simultaneously, as busy as a one-armed paper hanger. That was a delusion Clark Gable avoided.

“Why don’t you want to direct, like everybody else?” I asked him not long before he died.

“It’s hard enough to act without going into all those monkeyshines,” he said. “I just want to act and get the money. Let them take the grief.”

Clark loved money all his working life. I don’t remember that he ever gave a party. He nursed a grievance against Metro from the time Mayer loaned him to David Selznick to make _Gone With the Wind_. Clark thought he should have received an extra bonus for that, not simply continue on his salary of $7000 a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

When he cast off from Metro in 1954 and entrusted his business affairs to MCA, he boasted that he had “never really made any big money” until then. Like the rest of the monarchs of the movies, he wanted what they call “the most”--highest salary, biggest percentage.

“Why do you fight so hard for those enormous salaries?” I asked him, as I’ve asked them all. “Why can’t you put back some investment in the industry when it’s done so much for you?”

“I want the most because you’re only important if you get it.”

Money helped kill Clark Gable. That and his refusal to acknowledge that he was growing old. He couldn’t resist earning the most he’d ever get, when the offer came along for _The Misfits_; $750,000 plus $58,000 for every week the picture ran overtime.

On location in the Nevada desert, where the heat jumps to 130 degrees, he roped and wrestled with wild horses to prove to everybody who watched, including me, that he still had his old virility. “This picture will prove he is America’s answer to Sir Laurence Olivier,” said the ever-present Mrs. Paula Strasberg. He was encouraged by John Huston, a director with no qualms about making actors sweat. And he was outraged by the behavior of Marilyn Monroe.

He was habitually early on the set, ready to work at 9 A.M. Some days she wouldn’t show up until lunch time, sometimes not at all. Though he seethed inside, Kay Gable told me, he curbed his feelings by iron self-control. Clark was not a pretty sight when he blew his top, as he did when _The Misfits_ was completed, but Huston wanted one more retake.

The retake was never shot. Huston was still working the final cut of the picture when Clark died, nearly a million dollars richer, leaving a beautiful widow in Kay Gable and a handsome son he never saw.

_Seven_

Hollywood was always heartbreak town, though most of the world fancied it to be Shangri-La, King Solomon’s mines, and Fort Knox rolled into one big ball of 24-karat gold. We used to see the hopefuls stream in from every state of the Union, tens of thousands of them, expecting that a cute smile or a head of curls was all it took to pick up a million dollars. Many were old enough to know better, but not the children.

They came like a flock of hungry locusts driven by the gale winds of their pushing, prompting, ruthless mothers. One look into the eyes of those women told you what was on their minds: “If I can get this kid of mine on the screen, we might just hit it big.” I used to wonder if there wasn’t a special, subhuman species of womankind that bred children for the sole purpose of dragging them to Hollywood.

Most of the women showed no mercy. They took little creatures scarcely old enough to stand or speak and, like buck sergeants, drilled them to shuffle through a dance step or mumble a song. They robbed them of every phase of childhood to keep the waves in the hair, the pleats in the dress, the pink polish on the nails. I’ve had hundreds of them passing through my office asking for help.

Stage mothers are nothing new. I remember as far back as the Tartar we lovingly called “Ma” Janis, who took care of all the cash her daughter Elsie earned. When “Ma” died, Elsie got so lost in the tangle of her financial standing that she wondered whether she had $100,000 or a million in the bank. She found she had little left except a note signed by “Ma” certifying that she owed Irving Berlin $10,000. Elsie had never made out a check in her whole life, never had more than $5.00 in her pocketbook.

What motion pictures did was to encourage the breed and give them better opportunities to ruin their children while they were beneath the age of consent. Peg Talmadge, mother of Norma and Constance, was a sweetheart. Anita Loos wrote her book _Gentlemen Prefer Blondes_ from choice bits that fell from the lips of Peg, but even she ruled with a whim of iron. We all laughed at Peg when she said these things but didn’t have the wit to write them down. Anita did.

Jackie Coogan’s boyhood earnings were so scandalously dissipated by his family that the law was changed to protect child actors--but Jackie was left penniless.

When I worked for Metro, stage mothers lingered outside the gates at the Culver City studios, waiting to catch some dignitary’s eye or for a chance, which seldom came, to slip past the guards into the maze of narrow streets that wound between the big barns plastered with stucco which were called sound stages.

Some children made it, though not by waiting like beggars at the gates of paradise. Louis B. Mayer needed appealing youngsters for the all-American family pictures which this Russian-born Jew from New Brunswick delighted in making because they earned fortunes for him. There were two children in particular, a boy and a girl, who captured the imaginations of all.

The boy had once had his hair dyed black by his mother so he could get a job in two-reel silent comedies. She wanted to change his name to Mickey Looney, but the “L” became an “R” when he was signed on at Culver City.

The girl’s mother had seen her child walk out onto a vaudeville stage when she was two years old to join her two older sisters in a song-and-dance act. Mrs. Ethel Gumm took her three children slogging through West Coast theaters for years. Frances, the youngest, developed the hungriest drive of them all, battling to show her big sisters that she could sing louder and longer than either of them.

It was a cheap act, and it made very little money for anybody. One Christmas saw the traveling Gumms chewing on tortillas at a corner drugstore near the theater they were playing. Frances Gumm had been rechristened Judy Garland when Lew Brown spotted the trio playing The Lodge at Lake Tahoe and decided she might have something.

In the typical Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance switching that usually makes it possible for half a dozen people to claim they “discovered” a star, Brown put Judy and her mother in touch with an agent named Rosen, who knew Jack Robbins, a music publisher with offices in Culver City.

With Rosen, Judy was in Robbins’ office when he telephoned down to Ida Koverman, who made a point of hunting for fresh talent to keep the wheels turning at MGM. Judy was twelve; round as a rain barrel; stringy hair; dressed in an old blouse, blue slacks, dirty white shoes. Ida heard her sing with a zing in her heart, and she flipped. She called Mayer, who grudgingly came up to see what was causing all the excitement. Ida had got hold of the words to the Jewish lament “_Eli, Eli_” and coached Judy in the pronunciation. That’s what she sang for Mayer, but he wasn’t impressed. He tossed the ball right back at Ida. “If you want her, sign her up.”

But Ida was too knowing about the foxy ways of Mayer to fall for that. She needed a second opinion, or else if Judy failed, Mayer would never let Ida forget it. She had Judy sing again, this time for Jack Cummings, a producer who just happened to be Mayer’s nephew.

Jack was called one of the “Sons of the Pioneers,” a walking testimonial to the fact that it never hurt to be somebody’s relative at Metro. “A producer produces relations” was a stock gag. Later on, however, in pictures like _Seven Brides for Seven Brothers_, Jack proved that he could fly when they gave him wings.

Long before that, he made a picture with a young girl named Liz Taylor and a collie dog: _Lassie Come Home_. The picture was sweet, sentimental, and I went all out in praise of it. A loyal friend in Metro’s New York office wired me after reading the review: YOU SURE STUCK YOUR NECK OUT THIS TIME HOPPER STOP IT’S NOTHING BUT A POTBOILER. But the picture made a fortune, got Lassie a lifetime contract, helped get Liz _National Velvet_.

Cummings could see the potential appeal of Judy, a roly-poly girl with eyes like saucers and a voice as clear as a gold trumpet “This kid’s got it,” he told Ida. “Let’s sign her up.” While he went off to set the legal wheels in motion, Ida took Judy to the commissary for some ice cream.

She tried to introduce her there to Rufus Le Maire, head of casting, but she got the brush-off. Mr. Mayer hadn’t given the little new girl the nod, so she wouldn’t receive any favors. He was starry-eyed over another schoolgirl MGM had signed. Deanna Durbin was the real talent, in his book. The two children made a musical short together, _Every Sunday Afternoon_, but Deanna was the one given the big build-up. After that, Judy had nothing to do but hang around the lot--and get some education at the school Ida had established with academically qualified teachers to meet the requirements of California law.

Mayer had decided to let Judy go and keep Deanna, but the plan turned sour. Universal, looking for a youngster to play in _Three Smart Girls_, wanted Deanna. By a fluke, Metro had let her contract lapse. Mayer was away on one of his many trips to Europe. He knew nothing of this until he returned and found his prize pigeon had been allowed to fly the coop. He went berserk.

For days he ranted and raged at everybody in sight until some anonymous prankster won revenge. In Mayer’s exclusive, private bathroom one morning, Louis found that on every sheet of toilet paper the face of Deanna had been printed overnight.

Deanna got stardom and the royal treatment from Universal with _One Hundred Men and a Girl_, which followed _Three Smart Girls_. There was a fancy premiere, and she planted her footprints in wet cement in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, a pastime which was one of the glorious bits of nonsense in those days. Deanna is now quite plump and leading a happy married life with husband and children in Paris. Once a year newspapermen descend upon her home, but she won’t receive them or allow photographs to be taken. She’s had her fill of Hollywood and you couldn’t lure her back for a million dollars. The only singing she does is with her children.

Judy was living in a little rented house with her mother. Her father, Frank Gumm, was not in Hollywood. Judy’s mother telephoned Ida the morning after Deanna’s big show: “I can’t do a thing with Judy. She’s been crying all night. What shall I do?”

“Bring her right over,” said Ida. With no children of her own, she was a mother hen to everyone who needed her. Judy was as close to her as a daughter. She fell into Ida’s lap and buried her head on her shoulder, sobbing: “I’ve been in show business ten years, and Deanna’s starred in a picture and I’m nothing.”

Frustrated ambition has to be treated gently. “You’ll get your feet in cement, too,” Ida soothed her. “You’ll be starred, you’ll see. Don’t forget, I’ve told you so.”

Mayer schemed to turn the tables on Universal. Nobody was going to laugh at him for keeping the wrong girl. “I’ll take this fat one, Garland, and make her a bigger star than Durbin,” he boasted to his associates. How to start was the puzzle. He began by insisting that she be coached in acting and dancing, though she’s never had a formal singing lesson in her life. She still doesn’t know what key she sings in. She’ll say, “Play some chords and I’ll pick one.” He had orders sent down to the commissary: “No matter what she orders, give her nothing but chicken soup and cottage cheese.”

Her one dear friend in approximately her own age group was Mickey Rooney. They were nuts about each other. They went to school together, along with Metro’s Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew, and other child stars whom Mickey rapidly eclipsed. Mickey, who remains today one of the greatest underrated talents in entertainment, was brash, cocksure, and growing up fast. He was doing calisthenics in the schoolyard one day under an instructor’s eye when Frank Whitbeck, the studio advertising director, passed by.

“Hi, Uncle Frank,” yelled Mickey. “Ain’t this the damndest thing for a grown man to be doing?”

The crush Judy had on Mickey would have burned up a girl twice her age. An explosive mixture of emotion and ambition churns inside her. “I have to have a crush on somebody,” she once cried to Ida, “but they don’t last.” Mickey had a shield of toughness, which she lacked, and a heart as big as Ireland, but he mostly regarded her as a kid, too young for him.

She’d played minor roles, two of them with Mickey as star, when _The Wizard of Oz_ came along. Producer Mervyn LeRoy, typically, was all set to have Shirley Temple as Dorothy, but Twentieth Century-Fox wouldn’t release her. So he reluctantly settled for Judy--and she had it made.

The top executive offices at Culver City are located in the Thalberg Building, otherwise known as the “Iron Lung” by reason of its much-envied air-conditioning system. Before it was built, Metro tried to buy a little piece of corner property, on which stands a long-established undertaker’s parlor. He refused to sell, so today his establishment stands like a sore thumb next to the handsome structure named for Irving Thalberg. The undertaker occasionally peers into the “Iron Lung” and says: “Well, I’ll get you all, sooner or later.” He’s had most of the old-timers already.

From the executive offices you could look across the street at four big twenty-four-sheet billboards standing side by side. On them were displayed posters that shouted the claims of the studio’s newest hits, listing names of the stars, featured players, producer, director and, if they were lucky, the writers.

Since actors are vain, Mayer and his aides, like soft-spoken Benny Thau and burly Eddie Mannix, could sweet-talk them into accepting bigger billing in lieu of more money in many a contract. With _Oz_, Judy’s billing grew like a mushroom. It jumped above the picture’s title, making her technically a star. The size of the lettering that was used to spell out her name expanded year by year. Now she’s reached the peak, where one name, _Judy_--like _Garbo_ and _Gable_--does all the selling needed to pull in an audience.

Then Metro smelled gold in billing Mickey and Judy together for _Babes on Broadway_, and some of her cruelest years opened up for her. Compared with Mickey’s greased-lightning ability to do everything and anything and get it right instantly, Judy was a slow study. Dance rehearsals were a torture. She was driven frantic, dancing, singing, improvising, putting a picture together. The director, Busby Berkeley, was a taskmaster who extracted the last ounce of her energy.

“I used to feel,” she told me later, “as if he had a big black bull whip, and he was lashing me with it. Sometimes I used to think I couldn’t live through the day. Other times I’d have my driver take me round and round the block because I hated to go through the gates.”

I saw him work her over in one picture, where she stood on a truck and sang. He watched from the floor, with a wild gleam in his eye, while in take after take he drove her toward the perfection he demanded. She was close to hysteria; I was ready to scream myself. But the order was repeated time and time again: “Cut. Let’s try it again, Judy.”

“Come on, Judy! Move! Get the lead out.” By now, she was determined to keep her name in the billing, but I doubt if she would have pretended to anyone that she enjoyed being an actress. She was jealous of Mickey, forever running to Ida to complain: “He got the break, I didn’t.” For all the friendship of the two young people, she wanted to best him in everything they did together.

The two of them sat together in the darkened theater. On one side of them was Irene Dunne; on the other, Sonja Henie; behind them, Cary Grant. When the house lights came on, Judy was crying through the applause. “I know what you’re thinking,” Mickey said. “We’re two kids from vaudeville, and we didn’t mean a damn thing for so long, and now it’s happened to both of us.”

Years later, after Judy had fallen into a bottomless pit and climbed out again, the Friars Club gave a banquet at the Biltmore Bowl and proclaimed her “Miss Show Business.” She had just had the British eating out of her hand at the London Palladium, played the Palace in New York for nineteen sensational weeks; toured the United States and finished her triumph at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles. Mickey’s career was running downhill. Somebody remembered to send him an invitation to the Biltmore Bowl, but it was to sit way over in a corner.

“Everybody was slapping each other on the back,” he reported without bitterness, “and I said to myself: ‘Poor Judy, how many of these people really care about you?’”

I said: “You two were like ham and eggs. You helped her more than anybody.”

“Yeah, but the people who gave the party forgot that. That was the only thing that hurt. Because I felt so close. I haven’t seen her much lately. It’s all a kind of whirl.”

Adolescence can give a rough ride to any girl--and her mother, if she’s around to share her daughter’s fears and confidences and dry her tears. Judy’s thinned-out body was not given time to readjust. The public idolized her. The exhibitors couldn’t get enough Garland-Rooney musicals. She had to go on churning them out one after another. They’d been sent to New York for the Capitol Theatre opening of _Babes on Broadway_. They went back again and broke every house record.

“We’d been doing six, seven shows a day and having about forty minutes between shows,” Mickey recalled. “This one afternoon we’d just gone off stage to come back and take a bow together, and she collapsed in the wings. I didn’t know what to do. I filled up with tears. I felt as though something serious had happened. I came out on stage and just felt lost without her. She wasn’t dieting at this time. She was just going too fast.” And with the wrong companions.

That was Louis B. Mayer’s doing. His suspicious brain came up with the idea that Ida had too much influence over Judy. She might be tempted to think of what was good for the girl before she thought of the studio, so he flatly told Ida: “You’ve got too much work to do to look after the Garland.” By order, the old intimacy was ended.

The studio brushed off somebody else in Judy’s life, too--her first husband, David Rose, the serious-minded, preoccupied composer to whom she was married at nineteen. She made two mistakes in that. She married him without consulting Mr. Mayer beforehand, which was a fracture of MGM protocol. Even worse was the fact that she married at all.

A star’s life was supposedly controlled twenty-four hours a day by the studio. She was told what to do, both at work and after working hours; where to go; what to say; whom to mix with. Mayer didn’t want any star to marry because that introduced a foreign influence in the control system. A husband could often influence a star against the studio for her own good and sometimes for his own power.

They turned on Judy like rattlesnakes. On Academy Awards night, she had sat for years at the number-one table along with the rest of the MGM stars. As Mrs. David Rose she was deliberately humiliated and seated at a much less desirable spot on the side and out of the spotlight. That year she called to ask if I’d like to sit with her.

“Love to,” I said, then proceeded to give the tsar hell by telephone: “Louis, you are treating her outrageously. Even if you personally don’t like her, think of what she has done for your company. You should be ashamed of yourself.” But he was immune to shame or compassion. I wasted my breath.

They actually believed that she belonged to them, body and soul. They’d created her; why couldn’t she show more gratitude? The marriage hadn’t a chance. The studio told her so. David Rose was the wrong man for her, said the sycophants who clung to her like leeches. “He’s trading on your popularity. You’re a star; he’s a struggling composer.” If they passed the two of them in the Culver City streets, they’d greet her but ignore him.

After Judy left him, as she inevitably did, her private life changed in many ways. Her father had died and her mother remarried to become Ethel Gilmore. Both sisters were married, too. Metro assigned a publicity writer, Betty Asher, to stay with Judy, and they lived high, wide, and not particularly handsome.

She turned from her mother and her old friends. When they warned her about the new set she was going with, the rainbow girl screamed: “I’m old enough to know what I want. When I want your advice I’ll ask for it.”

The dismal cycle of benzedrine and sleeping pills began again. The studio kept up the illusion of Judy’s perfect health. She plunged on, beating her thin chest and saying: “I feel fine.” Of course, she knew she wasn’t, but she was too riddled with ambition to let someone else take over a picture scheduled for her.

She listened to anybody who flattered her ego. Joe Mankiewicz, the director who suffered the tortures of the damned on _Cleopatra_, was a great ego booster. “You could be the greatest dramatic star in the world,” he told her. “Anything Bernhardt did, you can do better. I’ll write material for you, make you another Bernhardt.” That was something he never did.

Metro smiled on marriage number two--to Vincent Minnelli, who had directed her in _Meet Me in St. Louis_ and _The Clock_. They felt this gentle man would bring her under control. Judy was married in her mother’s home. Louis Mayer gave the bride away; Betty Asher was matron of honor; Ira Gershwin the best man. Ida Koverman was not invited, nor was I. Judy was then twenty-three.

Minnelli, ten years her senior, had never married before. Though he controlled hundreds on a sound stage, he wasn’t successful in seizing the reins as husband. He was too gentle. She continued to mingle with her old crowd; sought and found her sensations; quarreled with her mother.

By this time, we knew many of Judy’s problems and were delighted to hear that she was pregnant. Maybe motherhood would bring her back to her senses. Before Liza was born, I wanted to give her a different kind of baby shower, with only men invited. Judy was in a depressed mood. She bowed out with a note: “I’d have been a dull guest of honor, but it was a wonderful idea. Thanks for thinking of me. Forgive me, and after March I’ll be rarin’ to go. I’ll be my old self again.”

Unfortunately motherhood rarely produces miracles. Though the birth left Judy weakened, she scurried back to work again. Metro issued glowing reports about her health, but her previously ravenous appetite had strangely deserted her, and she stayed pathetically thin. She got through her pictures only on nervous energy and doctors’ help. She was so near the borderline that when I visited her in her dressing room on the set of _The Pirate_, in which she was co-starring with Gene Kelly, she was shaking like an aspen leaf. She went into a frenzy of hysteria. Everybody who had once loved her had turned against her, she said. She had no friends.

Even her mother, Judy said, tapped her telephone calls. “She is doing everything in her power to destroy me.”

I said: “You know that isn’t true. Nobody in the world loves you as your mother does--and has all your life through all your troubles.”

But she cried out against her mother; against Ida Koverman; against all those who had helped her out of so much potential trouble. She was carried out of the dressing room, put in a limousine, still wearing make-up and costume, and put to bed. But she rallied and finished the picture.

The gulf between her and Minnelli widened. He tried to force her to eat, but she couldn’t. In fits of temperament, the couple parted many times. But he was always on hand to help.

The road got rougher. Something desperate was happening to her. The sad chronicle of studio suspensions began. Then Metro bought _Annie Get Your Gun_ for her and assigned as director the “man with the bull whip,” Buzz Berkeley. She went into a weeping rage when she was told she’d have to work for him again and refused point-blank to do it. So the studio gave her Charles Walters in his place. But then nothing could have improved the situation for her.

She recorded the songs which are collectors’ items--I often sit and play them in my den at night. Then day after day, with a million dollars of Metro’s money already invested, she didn’t show up for work. Her bosses took her off the picture. Betty Hutton was brought in to replace her, which was one of their biggest mistakes. They should have waited until Judy got well.

When Judy walked into my den after hearing the news from Mayer himself, she looked middle-aged. She stared into space, blamed herself for her troubles. “I understand the studio’s problems at last. I’d been there so long I’d forgotten you have to conform to their plans. Mr. Mayer promised to take care of me. He said he’d give me so much to live on while I’m out of work.”

She was in the throes of another separation from Minnelli. “I’m broke. How can anyone save money in this business? When Vincent and I were together, I spent $70,000 decorating our house. Since our separation I’m paying $1000 a month rent on another. It’s tiny; no nursery for my baby. But I have to keep working.”

I begged her to go to the Menninger Clinic. Treatments there had done much good for Robert Walker, her co-star in _The Clock_. “There’s nothing the matter with my head,” she replied. “It’s my body that’s tired.”

A few days later she entered the Peter Brigham Hospital in Boston, with Louis Mayer personally paying the bills, and stayed there for several months. Back in Hollywood, fighting to lose weight again, she finished _Summer Stock_ with Gene Kelly. Then, during rehearsals for _Royal Wedding_ with Fred Astaire, the headlines screamed that Judy Garland, suspended for refusing to work, had cut her throat in the house she’d spent $70,000 decorating. Stories told of her racing into the bathroom, breaking a glass, slashing her throat. In fact, the scratch could have been as easily made with a pin. The cut wasn’t serious. It was more a case of nerves than anything else.

Her mother had long since given up the hopeless task of staying close. She was working as a theater manager in Dallas. When she heard the news, she got in her little jalopy and drove thirty-six hours nonstop to go to her daughter. “Judy,” she said enigmatically, “will never kill herself.” She stayed on in California, working in a job in an aircraft plant that Ida Koverman helped obtain for her. She died of a heart attack in the parking lot there. Previously, she used to plead with her friends: “Please don’t introduce me as Judy’s mother.”

Judy has walked the rocky road back to the top of the mountain with Sid Luft by her side for most of the miles. Sid is her husband, “manager,” and a gambling man who can kill $10,000 in an afternoon. He loves horses and fast motor cars. It was Sid, with whom she has led an on-again off-again life as Mrs. Luft, who arranged her first tour that opened at the London Palladium, where she was an absolute sensation. She has two more children by him: Lorna and Joe.

“I don’t think there’s any actress in the world that can produce like she can when she’s going,” said one member of the group that accompanied her to London. “When she’s going, she’s the greatest thing on wheels. When you’re with a dame that’s fantastic like that, and you don’t know if she’s going to get on or off or anything, you’re bound to crack under the strain.”

Many people wondered how Judy Garland got her amazing contract from Jack Warner to make the musical version of _A Star Is Born_. There was a clause in it she didn’t have to work before 11 A.M. If she was ill they wouldn’t expect her to work. It was a fantastic deal. Here’s the story.

When it came time for Jack’s beautiful daughter Barbara to have her coming-out party, he promised to get her anything she wanted. What she wanted was to have Judy Garland sing at the party. Her father told her that was impossible. “But, Daddy, you promised to give me anything I wanted, and I thought you could do anything.” Then she burst into tears and hung up the telephone.

Father went to work. He called Judy. Her answer was: “Why would I do that? No.” He called her again: “What would I have to give you to change your mind?”

Then it was that Sid Luft came on the phone and said: “We want _A Star Is Born_,” naming an astronomical price for Judy and special clauses in the contract. Warner had to buy the story from David O. Selznick at a cost, I believe, of a quarter of a million.

But Judy survived the flop that _A Star Is Born_ proved to be, as she has survived all the incredible excesses of her life. In every performance--at concerts, on television, in her new pictures--she has the power to stir an audience to the depths of their hearts, like an old-fashioned revival meeting. “We have all come through the fire together,” she seems to say, “and none of us is getting any younger, but we’re here together, and I’ll love you if you love me.”

This feeling she gives out to and gets back from an audience may be the one crush of her life that will last. She used to be her own worst critic. Before she went into a number for the screen, her co-workers had to keep telling her: “You’re wonderful, wonderful!” But she never thought she was good. “I was awful” was her own self-judgment whenever she’d finished. But now, as she literally tears her way through her songs, her audiences go crazy listening to her. They crowd around to touch her, and she believes in what she can achieve.

Ethel Barrymore, one of her greatest boosters, told me: “I think she has a tremendous frustration. She’s always felt she wasn’t wanted. She has a complex common among women--she wants to be beautiful. I told her: ‘God is funny that way. He divides these things. When you open your mouth to sing, you can be as beautiful as anyone I’ve ever known.’ But you’ve got to keep telling her.”

Judy suffers from nightmares concerning her mother. She has lost something of herself somewhere along the road. But so long as she has millions of people loving her and fighting for her, she’ll keep the ghosts in the background.

Her performance in Carnegie Hall was one of the most amazing things I ever witnessed. Her fans screamed and applauded after every number. She gave encore after encore, promised: “I’ll stay all night if you want me.” She threw her head back and used the mike like a trumpet.

She repeated the same frenzied performance in the Hollywood Bowl, this time in the rain, and nobody moved. You sat enthralled because she’d cast her magic spell as she did first when she sang “Over the Rainbow.” This was our little Judy, who came home and persuaded the natives that skies really were blue and that dreams really do come true.

_Eight_

One bright morning last spring, a fat young woman with a baby carriage ambled along Hollywood Boulevard. First to catch my eye were the pink Capri pants and her wabbling _derrière_ that was threatening to burst right out of them. Next item I spotted was the cigarette dangling out of her mouth, sprinkling ashes on the baby. I put on speed to catch up with her, though I didn’t know her from Little Orphan Annie.

“I wonder if you know how you look from the rear. You should be ashamed of yourself, and you a mother, too.”

That stopped her dead in her tracks. “And who might you be?”

“Doesn’t matter, but you’re disgusting.” With that, I walked on, feeling I’d done my bit for the cause. I wasn’t exactly running any risk. Though she outweighed me by thirty pounds, I knew she couldn’t leave the baby to come after me.

The cause is glamour, for which I’ve been fighting a losing battle for years. Our town was built on it, but there’s scarcely a trace left now. Morning, noon, and night the girls parade in babushkas; dirty, sloppy sweaters; and skin-tight pants. They may be an incitement to rape, but certainly not to marriage. Unless the era of the tough tomboy ends soon, the institution of matrimony is doomed to disappear forever.

The geniuses who conduct the motion-picture business killed glamour when they decided that what the public wanted was not dream stuff, from which movies used to be made, but realism. They took the girls out of satin, chiffon, velvet, and mink, put them first into gingham and then blue jeans. So what happened? They converted the heroine into the girl next door, and I’ve always advocated that if they want to see the girl next door, go next door. Now they’ve thrown the poor kid out to earn her living on the streets.

The milliners, especially the males, have helped stitch glamour’s shroud. Deep inside whatever they call their souls, they hate women. They made the most ridiculous concoctions for women to wear on their heads. Hats like table doilies, little pot holders, coal scuttles, dishpans, crash helmets, bedpans. Husbands were ignored when they complained: “Where in God’s name did you get that thing? Whoever made it must hate your sex.”

Not until other women laughed at them did the glamour pusses discard their psychotic chapeaux and go bareheaded. By then the designers had ruined their own racket; they’d killed the sale of hats. I can walk six blocks today in any city and see nothing more than hair or a scarf covering anybody else’s hair but mine.

Studio wardrobe departments that employed cutters, seamstresses, and embroidery hands by the dozens are empty, staffed by skeleton crews. The stock rooms were crammed with bolts of magnificent brocades, satins, laces; now most of the shelves are bare. One odd sight you’ll see, though--rows and rows of realistic breasts cunningly contoured from flesh-colored plastic, complete with pink nipples, hanging in pairs, labeled with the name of the underprivileged star they were created for. Some deceivers are made of rubber and inflate to size.

Everything else in Wardrobe was real--furs, fabrics, and feathers. The cost of sheer labor that went into making the clothes drove the accountants cross-eyed. One costume Garbo wore in _Mata Hari_ took eight Guadalajaran needlewomen nine weeks to complete. In my wardrobe I have the most beautiful coat I have seen anywhere, which Travis Banton of Paramount designed. The embroidery alone cost $4000.

The studio designers were brilliant men and would have succeeded as artists, painters, decorators. One or two were addicted to the bottle, but they all blazed with talent. Travis at Paramount, Adrian at Metro, Omar Kiam at Goldwyn, Orry-Kelly, now free-lancing and making more money than ever. He designed the clothes for Marilyn Monroe in _Some Like It Hot_, but she recut them to suit herself, and he refused to do her next picture.

There are only two women associated with the movies now who make sure they look like stars, and they both live in New York. Joan Crawford won’t venture out of her Fifth Avenue apartment to buy an egg unless she is dressed to the teeth. Marlene Dietrich does more--she’s made herself a living legend of spectacular glamour around the world.

For her opening night the first year at the Sahara in Las Vegas I had a front-row seat. She came on in a white dress that was poured over her. She wore layers of sheer soufflé, infinitely finer than chiffon, but only one layer to protect her chest from the evening air. The audience let out a gasp that threatened to blow away the tablecloths. The next night she wore the same gown, but she’d had two little circles of seed pearls sewed strategically on the bodice and forever after swore she had never appeared any more naked than that. But I’d seen both of them.

Every year she outdoes herself. One season she succeeded with a full-length coat of rippling swan’s-down that for sheer beauty surpassed anything in fabulous fashion. Jean Louis designed it, but it was made by my furrier, Mrs. Fuhrman. In her shop one day, where the coat was kept in cold storage, she asked me to try it on. I felt like a maharaja’s mother.

“We had a terrible time getting the swan’s-down,” said Mrs. Fuhrman, as I preened my borrowed feathers. “You know, you have to pull the feathers off the living swans--”

“You what?” I gulped. “I don’t want to see it again.”

Marlene was invented as a fashion plate just as Pygmalion created Galatea. The first time Travis Banton saw her, I thought he’d pass right out at her feet. Soon after she landed here, as Josef von Sternberg’s protégée, she turned up at an afternoon tea party wearing a black satin evening gown complete with train, trimmed with ostrich feathers. Her hips were decidedly lumpy. Except for her beautiful face and perfect legs, which we’d seen in _The Blue Angel_, she could have passed for a German housewife.

Travis, a Yale man, took her in hand, taught her everything he knew about art, clothes, and good taste. She slimmed down, was made over into the most strikingly dressed clothes horse on the screen. She had some keen competition to contend with at Paramount. Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Kay Francis, Evelyn Brent, and, later, Mae West fought for Travis’ most stunning designs.

For one picture Mae insisted upon having only French clothes. She had posed for a nude statue and sent it to Paris to have the clothes fitted on it. They were beautiful clothes that arrived back, but when they were tried on Mae, they didn’t meet by ten inches. Everything had to be remade at the studio.

There aren’t any Marquis of Queensberry rules when an actress wants to win, but Marlene walked off with the honors. She was Travis’ favorite. Nothing was too good for her. As top star at Paramount, she allowed herself the luxury of a raging temper unless she got her own way, but she took care not to rage at Travis.

At Christmas time she showered him with presents by way of thanks. He invited my son Bill and me to help trim his tree one Christmas. I saw him unwrap twenty-two separate packages from Marlene, covering the whole gamut of giving, from sapphire-and-diamond cuff links with studs to match, to Chinese jade figures and a kitchenload of copper pots and pans.

She is a complex woman. A different side showed when she wanted a hat, made almost entirely of black bird-of-paradise feathers, which she was going to wear at the race track. Trouble was that federal agents had just swooped down on the Wardrobe Department and confiscated its entire stock of egret and paradise feathers--$3500 worth. The law said that importing, buying, or possessing them was forbidden, though these particular items had been carried on the inventory for years.

So Marlene’s precious hat had to be made of substitute plumage by a staff of expert milliners--one of them even came out from New York for the occasion. Marlene took one look at the result, tried the fine feathers disdainfully on for size, then in silence ripped them to shreds. The milliners worked for days before they came up with a hat she’d wear.

The same perfectionism blazed again when Ouida and Basil Rathbone announced a costume ball they were giving at the old Victor Hugo Restaurant in Beverly Hills. This was going to be the diamond-studded social event of the season. Our hosts counted the invitations they’d sent out, then thoughtfully had the restaurant install extra plumbing and built two complete extra powder rooms, ladies’ and gents’.

Marlene, as ever, was intent on outdoing everybody. She decided to come as Leda and the Swan. Paramount’s sewing ladies labored for weeks on the costume. The studios in those days took care that wherever a star appeared, she lived up to the glittering image of a star that they--and the public--carried in their minds. If she showed up at a private gathering looking less than immaculate, she’d be hauled on the carpet next morning by a head executive and advised to mend her manners.

On the evening of the Rathbones’ party Marlene made up at home and went to the studio at 8 P.M. to be poured into her Leda gown. She regarded herself in the mirrors, then cried: “It won’t do. I can’t possibly wear a swan whose eyes match mine.” So the sewing girls fell to, and the embroidered blue eyes were picked out and green ones substituted. Marlene sent out for champagne and sandwiches for them all to have an impromptu celebration in Wardrobe. She arrived at the Rathbones’ shivaree five hours late and was the sensation of the evening.

I’d intended to go in a borrowed brocade that had a coronation look, with a jeweled crown to match, toting a baby lamb with gilded hoofs on a leash. But the lamb submitted to his pedicure for nothing. I was working on a picture with Louise Fazenda until midnight. When I got home, I was too tired to look at the lamb or do anything but flop into bed.