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Crowning a beautiful building on the ultra-fashionable Sutton Place in New York City there is a triplex penthouse. The beautiful rooms on all three of its floors open on lavishly furnished terraces where trees and gardens grow fabulously in painted tubs.
A guest, standing on the upper terrace of this penthouse during a party recently, looking down at the city lights far below and then up at the stars, said: "More than halfway to Heaven..."
An amusing remark this but also something of an understatement. For it was here, through the long summer, that Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli honeymooned. It was here they found their way to the same quick and sensitive understanding as man and wife that they have enjoyed this last year as star and producer.
From the first there was a creative affinity between Vincente and Judy. It would, of course, take a man as sensitive and shy and also as brilliant and as much fun as he is to comprehend a girl as wholly the artist as she.
Vincente says of Judy proudly, "She's the most responsive actress I've ever worked with. When we have rehearsed a scene I have only to say, 'Judy, I wish you could do it more--' and before I have finished I know by her eyes she understands. And when we do the scene, then, it has just the essence I wanted for it."
Judy, in turn, says of Vincente: "We have known each other for about four years, but not well. Vincente was the producer for 'Ziegfeld Follies,' 'Meet Me in St. Louis' and 'The Clock.' But it wasn't until 'The Clock' that we began going out together.
"Everything about that picture was wonderful. We had such fun making it -- Vincente and Bob Walker and I working always so close -- that we didn't know how the dickens it would come out. Seemed almost as if we were enjoying it too much."
A long time ago Judy and Vincente worked together too. When she and Mickey Rooney were doing those old Busby Berkeley pictures Vincente designed many of their production numbers.
"Only I never knew it," Judy says. "After all I just got a script and it never said who had sat at a desk in one of the offices and planned what went into it....
"But when Vincente told me the numbers he had worked on I realized that even then -- before we met -- he understood me better than any one else. For the numbers he worked on always were my favorites."
Judy and Vincente, as you know, planned to be married in New York. Manhattan really is his home. He has many dear friends there; all the theater people and writers and musicians and charming cosmopolites who have adored him ever since he produced the delightful Music Hall shows and presented Bea Lillie and Bert Lahr in his own production, "The Show Is On."
With a New York wedding in mind Vincente, busy in California, telephoned Mr. John of John Frederics in New York to ask if he knew of an apartment. John offered to look around. Finally he called Vincente back. Martin Block, the radio star and producer of "The Make Believe Ballroom" would lease his triplex penthouse, ringed with terraces and furnished with a French decor.
John went on, in effect: "You enter an L-shaped corridor, Vincente. On that floor is a guest room and bath and a master bedroom and bath and dressing room. Also, at the end of the corridor there's a dining room, kitchen, pantry and servants' quarters... A curving stairway leads to the second floor and the living room, about fifty feet by twenty-two... The third floor is smaller; has a playroom and bar, including a slot machine..."
"We'll take it!" Vincente decided promptly.
When at the last moment Mrs. Garland was unable to come east for the wedding, Judy decided to be married in her mother's house. This also meant that Louis B. Mayer could give Judy away. Often Mr. Mayer must have wished, together with all those who love Judy, that somehow she might find the happiness and fulfillment personally she knows professionally; even though this is not too often given the true artist. For there's an excellent chance that Vincente, another true artist, as her husband may bring the same bright magic into her life that he has, as her director, given her pictures.
Certainly the few close friends who saw them married, heard their quiet steady voices making their vows, saw the deep tenderness of their marriage kiss, believed it was a happy day.
Judy wore a pale blue-gray jersey dress that had a little bustle and that was embroidered with pink pearls. A La Boheme bonnet sat far back on her reddish gold hair. She carried pink peonies almost as big as herself. There was a bride's cake, three tiers high, which Judy and Vincente cut with an old silver knife tied with gardenias and white ribbon. In the garden they posed for color pictures for Photoplay. Between time everyone must admire the black and gold wedding band, set with tiny pearls, which complemented the pearl engagement ring, set in gold and black enamel, which also was Vincente's design. Then they were off for New York.
"When we arrived the apartment was waiting," Judy said. "Vincente had thought to have it filled with flowers. And right away we did as we had planned -- just moved in and pretended to be New Yorkers..."
A cook and a maid were waiting too. And when Judy and Vincente had bathed and changed, breakfast was served on the upper terrace, so very high that only a few of Manhattan's tallest spires stood between them and the blue dome of the sky.
"It's all been wonderful," Judy says. "Especially this chance to meet Vincente's friends who love him... And, of course, I keep hoping, in time, they'll be my friends too..."
"Whenever I came to New York before," Judy says, "I lived in a hotel -- for two weeks perhaps -- and rushed, rushed, rushed. I had to cram about one hundred and sixty three things into that time -- shows, mostly. Now we go to the theater two or three times a week and take our time about it."
It wasn't, of course, completely idyllic. Nothing ever is. The second day they were in New York the cook and maid moved out, displeased over what neither Judy nor Vincente have the least idea. For five days after that they had no one to help them. They called every agency. Like a thousand other New Yorkers they would have packed and moved to a hotel - if they could have gotten accommodations. Then, through an advertisement in the Times, they interviewed a maid. "I'm the luckiest person in the world," Judy insists. "She's a wonderful woman, this maid! And the self-same day she arrived I went downstairs and in the lobby was a woman waiting to see me. She's now our most magnificent cook, a Creole, and she has agreed to go back home with us!"
Also, in typical New York fashion, Judy and Vincente have weekended all summer in the country with friends and have also visited Nick Schenck at his Long Island villa; where the talk of pictures and the theater and actors and artists and writers is the talk both Judy and Vincente dearly love.
The very week they arrived, Nick Schenck took them shopping in Tiffany's.
"Metro wants to buy you a wedding present, Judy. Pick out something you like."
Hesitantly, Judy chose a simple gold brooch.
"Nonsense!" exclaimed Mr. Schenck. "You must choose something much gayer."
After considerably more hesitation, Judy selected a bracelet of square diamonds and emeralds and a companion pin that broke into two clips -- all so beautiful that they left her breathless.
Then Mr. Schenck insisted that the groom choose a wedding present for himself. After some demurring, Vincente selected a handsome gold wrist watch as his gift from Leo, the Lion.
Speaking of weddings, Judy's mother, appropriately enough, gave them a clock. "Such a beautiful, old, rare clock - from England," Judy explains. "It will sit on our bedroom mantel or bedside table. It strikes with beautiful chimes. And on either side of the face are porcelain figurines, a little boy and a peasant girl.
"It's the sort of thing you want to pass on in your family -- to your children and their children..."
She spoke of her prospective children several times. For in spite of a foolish newspaper item, she and Vincente have no idea of adopting a baby. "We expect," she says, "to have a baby of our own someday. And another. And another. Until we have a good-sized family. For what could be more exciting than having children and watching them develop and grow and helping them on their way? That is something that would last for always."
The party the Minnellis' gave -- one of a very few -- was to honor Judy's sister on her birthday and the eve of her opening at La Martinique. Unwilling to trade on the name Garland she is known professionally only as Miss Dorothy.
Many of the sixty-odd guests were Dorothy's friends, many more were Vincente's -- so many were strangers to Judy. With sweet naturalness, therefore, she made no attempt to introduce people or to call them by name. But she moved from group to group with simple friendship. Even if Judy hadn't been a famous star, eyes would have followed her the night of that party. For she was lovely in a pale blue brocade hostess gown with a tight bodice, low square neck, long sleeves, flaring peplum and wide trailing skirt.
At one end of the lantern-lit terrace stood the long buffet table. And in the center stood a chocolate cake, Dorothy Garland's favorite, ablaze with candles.
Throughout the party there was a fine musician at the piano. And the Merry Macs moved from group to group, serenading. Dorothy sang, too, while Judy stood half hidden and applauded, if possible, even more enthusiastically than all the rest.
Finally Judy sang, too. "Embraceable You" came first. Then, with the Merry Macs as background, she sang "The Trolley Song." And always her eyes sought Vincente and always her voice as well as her eyes turned warmer to answer his smile.
"Vincente forgets to be shy when he looks at Judy," an old friend said. "Because he completely forgets himself. It's such a wonder he ever found her. Men like him -- charming and gay and kind, with his elfin humor -- are so likely to marry women who aren't able to share their interests. Judy looks up to him. You might almost say -- if they weren't such friends -- that she is terrifically impressed by him. So Vincente is stimulated. And they're both happy."
Soon now, when Judy and Vincente return to California, they'll live in his house. "I like it so much I didn't want to go to a new place," Judy says. "However, since it was a typical bachelor house and not large enough for two we bought the lots on either side. Now we're building on a little bath-dressing room for me. And when we can get priorities we'll put a dining room on the other side."
The Minnelli house sits on top of a high hill midway between Beverly Hills and Hollywood. You travel winding roads to get there. But the view, looking out over trees and gardens and town and sea, is unbelievable. The house itself has the feeling of houses in Mediterranean countries. It's sea-shell pink outside and predominantly dark green inside. Vincente has furnished it with the beautiful eighteenth century pieces he's collected for years. And it's done in bright colors and quilted chintzes and pale rugs, with lovely pictures, rare porcelains. It presents a quaintly dignified facade to the road. But on the other side terraces furnished and gardened luxuriantly lead to the badminton court which is a gathering place for the wittiest and the most brilliant and charming people in all Hollywood.
At night, at the Minnellis', when the lights come on in the town below and the stars come out overhead, you seem to be suspended between two skies. All of which bears out the prophecy of Judy's and Vincente's friends that even when the honeymoon is over they'll go right on living halfway to heaven.
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