Four years ago, on the night before she was scheduled to marry him, Judy Garland sent Vincente Minnelli to her mother's home to pick up some clothes she'd left there.
As Vincente, loaded with garments, staggered out of the house, Judy's mother, Mrs. Ethel Garland, patted him on the back. "Good Luck," she said.
Vincente flashed her his warm, ingratiating Latin smile.
"I have a feeling," Mrs. Garland added kiddingly, "that in the years to come, Vincente, you're going to look back on this last night of freedom with a lot of longing."
Minnelli stopped at that and did a double take. He was so completely in love with his little gazelle-eyed Judy that he couldn't possibly imagine ever wanting to live the life of a bachelor again.
That was four years ago, when he and Judy culminated an on-the-set courtship by going to Mrs. Garland's house and having Dr. William Roberts of the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church transform their director-actress love affair into a well-publicized marriage.
Today, Mr. and Mrs. Ben Vincente Minnelli are separated. And that marriage, according to their own statements, is floundering.
Judy moved out of her husband's Hollywood hillside home on April 7th and rented a little place of her own in Beverly Hills, temporarily leaving her three-year-old daughter, Liza, with Vincente. Then Liza rejoined her in a small house in Westwood. She'll probably file for divorce after she finishes Annie Get Your Gun. That musical may be completed by the time you read this, and Judy may already have ordered her attorney, David Tannenbaum, to file the divorce petition.
Reconciliations in Hollywood are legion, and the possibility exists that Judy and Vincente may have one. In fact they may be giving their marriage another try at this very moment. But the probability seems remote, since Judy has come right out and said flatly, "Vincente and I have come to the realization that we're happier apart. I'm sorry to say that, but it's true. We tried very hard to overcome the difficulties of incompatibility. But it just won't work."
Put yourself in Judy's position for a few moments. Go back to June 7th, 1945. Her divorce from David Rose, the composer, had just become final. She'd had a tough two years with David. He was so taut, so on-edge, especially when he was working and composing such memorable music as "Holiday for Strings."
She'd tried, Lord knows how she'd tried, to make that first marriage a success. But she was young and David was drafted into the Army and there was a war and somehow the two of them just couldn't straighten things out.
a new leaf...
But now that was done with. A clean white page was coming up. Thanks to Vincente, she'd made a successful transition from child pictures to mature roles. Her agents were going to re-negotiate a contract at MGM, and it looked very much as if she'd average $3,750 a week from there on in.
Best of all, she was overwhelmingly in love with Vincente. She was going to marry him next week -- on June 15th, 1945 -- and then there'd be the honeymoon in New York.
Then she became Mrs. Ben Vincente Minnelli for better or worse. She was married at her mother's house, and wore a wonderful silk jersey gown of pearl gray. Ira Gershwin was Vincente's best man, her sister was her bridesmaid. The whole world looked good, golden and glorious.
Nine months later, she gave birth to her first child, Liza. Liza was a cute little trick, with her father's piercing brown eyes and high Latin forehead and just the warmest, friendliest way of cuddling up.
But, somehow, after the birth of little Liza, Judy and Vincente didn't seem to get along too well. Quibbles developed into quarrels. They were both extremely sensitive, both very high strung. Vincente, on one occasion, left home for the night. The studio announced that she was going to appear opposite Fred Astaire in Easter Parade. She knew what a perfectionist Astaire was.
She wondered and worried about Astaire, about her career, about her home, about her child, about her marriage. Her happiness seemed to be ebbing away. The Hollywood gossips began to spread rumors. They said she and Vincente were finished. They said Judy couldn't sleep. They said she was so nervous she had to use sleeping pills all the time. They said she and Vincente were separating.
The rumors continued, and she began to lose weight, and she knew deep in her heart that some of those rumors were true. But she had to deny them. She couldn't admit to anyone, least of all herself, that this marriage was a failure, too.
She lost more weight. She kept making pictures all the same. But the evidence of her unhappiness became clear-cut. Her cheeks became hollow.
L.B. Mayer, chief of the studio, called her in and said, "Judy, I think you need a rest after your last two pictures. You've been working too hard."
Ginger Rogers was given the role originally scheduled for Judy in The Barkleys of Broadway, and Judy broke down and wept.
Gradually, her health improved and she was put into In the Good Old Summertime, but simultaneously, her marriage to Vincente seemed to be going on the rocks.
When The Good Old Summertime was over, she realized that she and Vincente couldn't keep on like this. Before she started Annie Get Your Gun, which may turn out to be really the greatest role in her career, she had to make a decision.
She talked it over with Vincente. It was useless to pretend any longer; it was senseless to attend all the parties around town and play-act that they were divinely in love. Too many people knew or suspected the truth.
It was like sticking a knife into her own heart, but she just had to do it. She picked up the phone and rang Hedda and Louella. "I'm very sorry," she managed to blurt out, "but Vincente and I have separated."
That's the position Judy Garland is in at the moment of this writing.
Actually, the major difficulty in Judy's marriage was and is that she and Vincente are too much alike. They don't complement each other. They have the same strengths, the same weaknesses.
Both of these charming people are high-strung and extremely tense; both are subject to artistic and temperamental moods of elation and despair. They are both incredibly sensitive -- the key to their great talents, of course -- but it is the kind of aroused, attenuated sensitivity that wears the nerves and eventually plays havoc with one's outlook. It has done so particularly in Judy's case.
At this moment Judy will talk to no one about the feelings locked tightly in her soul. And her Hollywood friends, of which there are dozens, are genuinely worried about whether Judy is capable of loving and marrying again -- or wants to.
Some believe that she is so disillusioned about matrimony that from here on, she may devote herself exclusively to her career and her child. She sees little Liza every day, as does Vincente. And they both would be tickled silly if Liza developed into an actress.
The baby has already played with her mother in In the Good Old Summertime, and Judy says, "Liza can be in any picture that I'm in or any film that her father's directing. I started in show business when I was three, and I'm sure it didn't hurt me a bit.
Show business may not have hurt Judy, but two unsuccessful marriages have left their mental scars on her -- and it may be some time if ever, before she tries a third.
Meanwhile, she may be remembering the advice David Rose gave her when they separated. "Listen, Judy," he'd said, "Don't go home to your mother. Live your own life for a while. Find yourself. Find out what you're like and what you really want."
Perhaps she never did give herself this chance. Caught up in the rush of her career, and emotionally exhausted, she found a haven in Vincente. If she had waited longer, if she had thought it over more carefully, she might have chosen a different sort of man -- one who would have been as good a husband for her as Vincente was a director.
To have loved and lost twice at 26 is surely no heinous crime -- although it may have a bitter taste. But bitterness comes slowly to the girl who found it in herself to say to David Rose, "I'll never in my life be sorry I married you... you've always been so kind, David. I'll never forget it. I'll never be sorry."
learn by living...
And later, after testifying for her divorce, she rushed to the phone to call him. "David, I didn't mean any of those horrible things I had to say about you. Don't read the papers, David..."
It is Judy's nature to live fully and to learn by the acceptance of life, however stern its teaching. She's been learning for a long time. When she was 14 and they kept promising to put her in pictures they later gave to other youngsters, she grew restless and miserable and sick. Her mother even asked Mr. Mayer to give the whole thing up, at least till Judy was older.
"I didn't know you had a glass chin, Judy," said Mr. Mayer.
Her hand flew up to it.
He smiled, "You've got to take things on that chin every so often," he'd said. "As long as it's not glass, we don't have to worry."
Lessons learned in childhood are not easily forgotten -- especially not by Judy, who today feels that failure in any field is unthinkable. To fail as a woman, at 26, would not be Judy's way.
She is not the kind to shut herself off from love or marriage, or to deny them as unnecessary for happiness. Her intelligence and her zest for life would not come through so beautifully in her screen performances if they did not stem from depths within her.
So it isn't hard to believe that, once she's straightened out emotionally, she again will find a partner with whom to share the joy and pain of everyday living. Perhaps the man in her life will once more be Vincente Minnelli. Perhaps it will be another. But whoever it may be, Judy Garland will again love and be loved in return.
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