Song dedicated to her, "I Lost You," made Judy weep.
At end, gasped, "Please play it again - that made me
so happy."
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Nothing Ever Happens to Judy
Nothing but two-fisted fights with drill-totin' dentists, cheering wilted G.I. souls in New Guinea, crying her heart out over Orson Welles...
by Ida Zeitlin
Modern Screen
August 1944
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Nothing's happened to Judy since she got back from her bond tour. Nothing but work. She started right in on "Meet Me in St. Louis," and she's been at it ever since. Nothing's happened to write a story about -
She just gets up and works from 9 to 6 with an hour for lunch, and who wants to hear about that? Dorothy, the maid, gets her up with orange juice. Hands it to her and ducks, Judy not being the type that leaps lightly from slumber, trilling, "Oh, what a beautiful morning!" By the time she's showered and dressed, life begins to look possible. In knee-length skirt and sweater, moccasins, and long socks - to keep her legs warm - she's ready for her truck driver's breakfast. Bacon and eggs and coffee and jam and five slices of toast. The way she eats, she should be a baby Kate Smith. But she works it off -
At 8:15 she's driving through the M-G-M gate to her dressing room. Slaps on her hair - the picture calls for a 1903 wig - puts on her face and bids Vincent (sic) Minnelli, the director, good-morning at 9. Eats all day long. Lunch is a mere item. Dot, Mary and Evelyn see to that. They're in make-up, hair dressing and wardrobe respectively, but their object in life is to fatten Judy up.
Choochoo meets her at the door, goes racing madly round the house to denote joy, then comes back for their dance. Judy hums a tune, and they waltz together, and Choochoo trips her up - on purpose, says Judy. Because she's a rowdy - an aristocrat with a barrelhouse personality.
Being clean depresses her, but not for long, because it's easy enough to go out and roll in the dirt. What really gets her down is being clipped in pompoms, the way any self-respecting French poodle should be. Choochoo can't stand it. The scottie next door hangs around the drive, waiting for her to get home from the vet's. She slinks past him into the house, flops in a corner and refuses to be comforted by food, blandishments or rubber mice.
"You're beautiful," Judy assures her. "You're the ritziest dog in the world."
Her eyes lift, two mournful question marks. "What have you done to me?" It takes a day to mend her broken heart.
moanin' in the mornin' . . .
She'd rather eat nails than bother cooking for herself, but likes to fuss when someone's coming over - the most exciting part's waiting to see whether everything comes out at the same time, which it never does.
Once in a blue moon she has dinner in bed - mostly to use up the bed-tray her mother gave her. She can't say she enjoys it. One end of the tray starts tipping, and things start sliding, and she starts grabbing, and any resemblance to elegance in a maribou jacket and exotic perfume becomes purely ludicrous - you get more of a Joan Davis routine - so the bed-tray goes into mothballs for another six months.
She knows lots of lovely ways to spend an evening. At least twice a week she answers letters from boys in the service.
Naturally she can't answer all the mail herself, or she'd be doing nothing else. It's sorted, and she gets the specials. Like the one from some RAF boys who'd named their plane after her. In Italy they met up with a Yank crew who'd had the same idea. So the Yanks gave the Tommies their insignia - Judy's tilted nose between her pigtails. "And now we're fighting side by side," wrote the English flyers.
A Scotch boy wrote that his company had voted her their favorite leave-at-home girl. Which sounded like a left-handed compliment, till she realized that a leave-at-home was a furlough.
What breaks her up is the kids who write: "I'm nothing but a rookie, but I happen to like you very much. You don't have to answer, but could you send a picture, I'd be so grateful - "
Her impulse is to write back, "I'm nothing but a girl, and suppose I'm busy, what's that compared with your murderous routine, and don't be grateful because I and millions like me are so deep in your debt, there's no word to cover it."
She never knows when she's going to be called for a command performance. Once she was hauled out from her hairdresser's. Of course she knew that these broadcasts went overseas, but a few weeks ago something happened to make her realize it in a very extra-special kind of way.
every day in every way . . .
Artie Shaw, back from duty in the South Pacific, phoned her.
It seemed he'd been ill with dengue fever on that distant island, and the hospital was full, so they'd stuck him in officers' quarters. He could hear people talking and the radio screeching, but no one paid any attention to him, and he was feeling awfully sorry for himself. Then a voice on the radio said, "Here she is," and a girl said, "Hello, fellows," and it was Judy.
He never had anything give him quite such a lift. Lifted him right out of his miseries. Sounded so friendly and home-like. Across thousands of miles of water, the voice of a girl he knew. And even if those other guys didn't know her personally, she still meant home to them - home and the neighborhood movie and a soda at the corner drugstore with their own girls. "So keep it up, Judy."
As if she wouldn't, anyway. Only now when she gives these command performances, it's as if she were planting herself over there right amongst the boys.
Sometimes she phones her pal, Betty Asher, and they go to a movie. You can have the musicals, they'll take the tear-jerkers. Judy's a fall guy for love and patriotism. All a fellow'd have to do to get her Academy Award vote is walk in tempo to the Army Air Corps song and walk out again. They wept through "Jane Eyre" in a projection room. The projectionist couldn't believe his eyes.
"We loved it. Oh Judy, couldn't you die, just watching that Orson Welles stalk across moors - "
Judy nodded dreamily. "In a cloud of capes and whips and horses and dogs and Joan Fontaine."
Sometimes she just stays home with the radio, Choochoo and a book. Her reading's interrupted at intervals by Choochoo and the rubber mouse. Choochoo's no dope, why should she play by herself when that girl's around? So she takes her nose and shoves the mouse under the couch and comes scratching at Judy. Judy digs the mouse out, plants it in the middle of the rug, tells Choochoo a thing or two, and goes back to her book. Things are quiet for a while. Judy looks up to make sure they stay that way. "Choochoo! Stop edging over to that couch!" Her head drops on her paws. What couch? Who's edging? Next thing Judy knows, the black head's at her knee.
Bedtime's around eleven, but that doesn't mean sleep. Judy's bought books on how to fall asleep, yet the art escapes her. When everything else fails, she sticks a pillow under one arm, a blanket under the other and trails from bed to bed. She's been known to cast a speculative eye at Choochoo's ample bed on the back porch, but generally winds up on the living room divan.
It's true she's had an occasional day off during the making of "Meet Me in St. Louis," but these have been mostly consumed by the dentist. Because Judy doesn't just go to the dentist and done with it. She needs a day to let the idea begin to seep in and another couple of days to steel herself and a day to decide that maybe she doesn't have to go afterall - till at last comes the day when the tooth's really jumpin' and she goes.
Once in the chair, panic grips her.
"Look," says the dentist, "have I ever once hurt you badly?"
"No, but some day you will, and then I'll have to punch you right in the nose."
He's reaching for that fiendish drill. She's got to stop him!
"How can anyone like a dentist?"
"Why, don't you like me?"
"That's beside the point. What I mean is, how can a girl like a guy who, when he was 12 and you asked him what he wanted to be, he said a dentist!"
"We're very helpful people. Open your mouth."
"Helpful! The only way you could help me is to pull 'em all out and give me false teeth."
"Open, Judy."
the yanks are coming . . .
The drill gleams closer, she scrounges down in the chair, lower and lower, but she can't get away from the drill, the drill keeps chasing her.
"Look, I really don't feel very well, I'm underweight, I just got out of the hospital, I'll come back next week."
"Now wait a minute."
"No, I don't have to wait a minute, it's my tooth, it aches me, not you, let it decay, did I ask to have teeth?"
Novocaine, gas and ether don't work on Judy. He reaches for a needle.
"You can't give me a shot. I have no veins."
"You have wonderful veins. Like forget-me-nots in spring."
"Ouch!"
And a few minutes later, "Feel better now, Judy?"
"Like forget-me-nots in spring," she murmurs.
Judy attempts Gargantuan job of answering
G.I. letters without benefit of secretary.
Her name graces two bombers in Italy;
one RAF, other, American.
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Writing poetry under an assumed name, she
refuses to let studio handle it under her real
moniker. Surprised mom on birthday with a
bound volume of her verses. Only 21, she
is at work on her 17th picture,
"Meet Me in St. Louis."
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Then, of course, she has Saturday evening and Sunday, which she frequently spends at her mother's in the valley. The times are out of joint unless she sees her niece twice a week. Judaline's five now. She's named after Judy, she looks like Judy, she's left-handed like Judy and has a habit of passing on Judy's stale jokes.
Except for bad jokes, Judaline wants no part of show business. She hates movies. "They're all sad," she says.
"Don't you want to be in pictures when you grow up?"
"No, thank you just the same."
On the other hand, she feels no prejudice against actors and developed a mad crush on Peter Lawford, when Judy took him out there to dinner one night - went all gay and feminine on him.
Being an only child presents no problems since she creates brothers and sisters at will. Right now she's got a pair of each, good and bad. For reasons clear only to Judaline, the good brother makes barrage balloons at Douglas. But it's the bad sister that comes in handiest.
"Now, Judaline, you know that was naughty to do."
"Oh, but I didn't do it. That was my bad sister Alice."
No one, thinks Judy, ever paid her mother a prettier compliment than Judaline. It was Mrs. Garland's birthday, and Judaline was helping her in the kitchen.
"Nanna, how old are you today?"
"Forty-eight."
"Goodness, that's pretty old, isn't it? But don't you mind, I'll love you, no matter how old you get."
"Oh pooh! You'll grow up and get married and forget all about me."
She thought that one over. "By the time I'm old enough to get married," she said slowly, "you might be flying around with the angels." The small figure pressed close, earnest eyes uplifted, "You know something, Nanna? I bet when you're up there, you won't be just a plain angel. I bet you'll be God's partner."
When Judy's not at her mother's weekends, she may go out dancing on Saturday night - with Van Johnson or Peter Lawford or Freddie De Cordova. Any place where they play a nice rumba - Clover Club or Mocambo or a little place on Sunset called the Serapi that she and Van like. Or wherever Joe E. Lewis happens to be billed. She'd walk barefoot to hear him sing "The Guy's Got Me on a Blitz." Of course, if she can talk her escort into the Orpheum, that's so much velvet.
She'll wear a suit or black dress and preferably no hat. The ways of Judy with clothes are strange and wonderful. She likes them well enough but hates to buy them. Driven to it, she'll run into a store, grab a dress off a hanger and get out.
Three months later Betty says, "I've never seen you in that new dress."
"Neither have I. It hasn't been altered."
About a year ago she bought the hat of her dreams, and she's worn it once. It was photographed in Vogue - toast straw with a toast-colored veil - had a page all to itself and deserved it. She called John Frederics. "I want the hat on page 35." When it came out, she swooned. No week goes by that she doesn't put it on for her own pleasure, but since that first night she's never worn it out. Somebody might turn and look and say, "Get her!"
On the night of the Academy Award show, she got out her four-year-old mink to wear and thrust it hastily back into the closet. The lining wasn't ripped, it had quietly fallen away, so that the skins showed. "Some gentleman," said Judy, "would help me off with my coat and yell, "It's alive!" So she wore her ermine bolero - bought when she was fifteen - and people said, "How pretty. New, isn't it?"
That proves you should never throw anything away - a rule Judy lives by. Why buy hats, when you can cut a lei of shell-pink flowers apart and run them up into a snood? Or twist two strips of lace around hairpins, stick one here, one there.
the well-dressed tapeworm . . .
As for dresses, the possibilites are endless. When Judy stands meditatively at the door of her wardrobe, Betty hands her the shears. Once she took a violent dislike to the turquoise vest in her black dress, just as she was ready to leave for a party. So she ripped the vest out, folded a black lace veil and had Dorothy tape it to her.
At the party a girl asked where she'd bought the dress.
"Oh, a little shop called What the Well-dressed Tapeworm Will Wear."
For Sundays at home there's a regular routine. Betty comes over. They both sit all week, they both need exercise, they don't feel like a rip-roaring game of tennis, so they walk four miles up the canyon and four miles back. Their walk is enlivened by dogs and bees. No dog has ever bitten Judy, no bee ever stung her, but she knows that some day they will.
So the strange dog comes out, and she tries to underplay it. Stares straight ahead.
"Think he's going to bite?"
Betty, the intrepid, steals a glance. "No, his tail's wagging."
"Don't look now, but here comes that nasty character."
The nasty character's an Airedale, whose name can't be Jenny, because he won't make up his mind. Won't bite and won't wag his tail.
"Maybe our stocking seams are crooked," Judy suggests. "There's a bee headed this way, and to me he looks hungry."
"Ignore him," says Betty.
Safe home again, they fix some food and relax with their favorite Sunday night broadcasts - Drew Pearson, Winchell, Fred Allen, The Weird Circle...
That's all Judy's done for three months, just work. Nothing's happened. Nothing to write a story about . . .
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