It was moonlight and the air was filled with the fragrance of flowers as a lone little figure, in a white party dress with a gardenia in her thick brown curls, trudged down a winding road in Brentwood, California. Unobserved, she had slipped out a side door of the big white house on the hill, where lights and music told plainly that a party was in progress.
At the fork of the road, the child, for she was discernibly a plump adolescent of teen-age, stopped and waited.
Suddenly, a sedan drove up. The car door opened and she flung herself in, heedless of the fragile ruffles on the dainty frock. Simultaneously, she broke into sobs.
"Why Judy Garland," said her mother, turning off the ignition switch, "what ever has happened? Why did you telephone me to come and get you? Why didn't you stay at the party?"
"I couldn't bear it, mother, they laughed at me! Some of the girls stood in a corner and whispered and poked fun at me," Judy sobbed in her mother's arms. "I heard one of Deanna Durbin's friends say, 'She'll never be an actress. She just thinks she can sing. She's too fat. Imagine her being a movie star!' Then they all laughed."
And then came afresh the release of pent up emotions and disappointment and child heart-break.
A few seconds later the tears suddenly stopped. "I should have slapped their faces," exploded Judy, her quivering chin now rigid with indignation and determination. "But, I'll show them. I WILL be somebody in pictures. I WILL."
And she is.
"I was pretty mad," Judy remembers. "But I really owe some of my spunk to those 'catty' girls!
"When I was making a personal appearance in New York, a boy sent a note back stage to me. It said that I was a hypocrite singing that I loved New York and was happy. "You just live a glamorous life in Hollywood and don't know what real honest clean fun is! And you don't look so hot up there with your petticoat showing a couple of inches -- and you on the stage! Yah!' -- he wrote.
"My temper didn't rise a bit at the note. I felt sorry that anyone should be so bitter about anyone else. I had the usher bring him back stage and we talked. I told him that I wasn't a hypocrite -- and he said well he thought all people who had lots of money were two-faced!
"He'd just been released from a reform school -- and didn't seem to like anyone or anything. I told him I had lots of fun. That I lived with my mother and sister and went with boys and girls my own age, and swam and played badminton, went to movies snd did most anything any boy or girl does.
"Too, I explained that my petticoat was not showing, that my dress was made with a bottom ruffle. Well, he seemed really sorry for being so unkind. Said if he'd thought more, he wouldn't have sent such a note. The next day he sent a letter of apology. I believe he always will feel friendly towards me. Probably, if I had stopped and spoken to those girls at Deanna's party they might have become friends, too. I've thought about it a lot. I know now that the way to deal with people, who want to be unkind to you, is to be so nice, they'll like you in spite of themselves."
Strangely, Judy lives in a new white house on a winding road near the very hilltop where jealousy first reared its ugly head and two thoughtless girls squelched her adolescent pride, but fired her determination.
"This is my very own house," Judy said, proudly showing me through the spacious rooms and out onto the patio where we glimpsed the badminton court and the new swimming pool. A huge St. Bernard dog rounded the corner and all but knocked Judy over in his attempt to bestow affection on his mistress.
"Mother was married shortly before last Christmas," Judy continued as we settled ourselves comfortably in beach chairs on the sun-drenched patio. "She spends part of the week here and the other part at Santa Paula -- where she is Mrs. Gilmore. I really have two homes. Sue, my older sister (she's 24), is here with me. Mother put it straight to us girls whether she should marry or not. We told her to go right ahead. Now some day, when I get to be twenty-one or two and find the right boy, and want to get married, I won't have to worry about mother being left alone. She's very happy."
Judy's mother will tell you that her youngest daughter might make a good press agent. Mrs. Garland had decided to keep her new marriage quiet. But Judy was so thrilled, she called up every columnist and radio broadcaster in town, even wiring Walter Winchell, to give him an "exclusive scoop" that her mother was slipping off secretly to Yuma to be married that night.
Since there's been so much to-do about a romance between Judy and Mickey Rooney, I asked her if it were true.
"Mickey's about the nicest and, at the same time, the funniest boy," she replied. "He's terribly restless and full of energy, you know. He never can sit still for more than a minute -- then he must be up and doing. He'll call up suddenly and ask for a date. If I tell him I already have one, he'll name every day in the week until he gets one. We'll even argue about it. He'll come bursting in breathless and we'll rush somewhere -- to a movie or bowling alley or something. Then he'll bring me home and I won't hear from him for weeks.
"It never occurs to Mickey to bring a girl flowers or candy, but he'll sit down and eat candy from the box the boy the night before brought. That's the way he is," she sighed. "But I like working with him better than anyone else in pictures and I think he likes working with me. Even so, sometimes we tell each other off, but we always make up. I sort of suspect that Mickey reads about us supposed to be going around together in the movie magazines and wants to feel that he has sort of first call on me for dates.
"Right now we're making 'Andy Hardy Meets Debutante,' in which I again play Betsy Booth like I did in 'Love Finds Andy Hardy.' Then we're to make 'Strike Up the Band.' We get a lot of fun out of working together."
I asked Judy to tell me one of the most important of the many things that are happening to her in her rapid ascent to stardom.
"Going to the premiere of 'Babes in Arms,' my first co-starring picture, and having my hand and footprints taken in the forecourt of the Chinese Theatre," she replied without hesitation. "You should have seen my mother that night," she continued with a roll of her brown eyes. "This was really my first big starring role. I asked mother if I could have a very special dress to wear. She said that I might look around and find something and then I could let her know about it.
"My stand-in and I went shopping. Just for fun, and because it looked so impressive, we stopped in at Bernie Newman's. He had the most gorgeous white dress I've ever seen. It was terribly expensive, the kind Norma Shearer and the really big movie stars wear to premieres. He said it was so fragile, I really shouldn't even sit down in it. It was just made to stand and be seen in.
"I telephoned mother and coaxed her until she said I could have it. She spoils me terribly when I really want something very much. Well, when she saw me on my knees, in that dress, putting my hands in the cement at the theatre, I thought she was going to faint. And that wasn't all! After the premiere, we went to the Cocoanut Grove and rode hobby horses -- and, well, there wasn't much of my dress left but shreds by the time I got home. But somehow mother seemed to understand that it wasn't all my fault and she was a darling. She didn't scold."
The telephone interrupted. It was Cleveland calling Judy.
"That was a friend of mine. I met him on my personal appearance tour," Judy said on returning. "He's the nicest boy, calls up almost every day. His telephone bill will be as big as the national debt, I'm afraid. His family has invited Sue and me to spend a week with them in Ohio. We're going to soon, I think."
Since Judy's name has been closely linked, and romantically, with Artie Shaw's I commented on his marriage to Lana Turner. "It was a surprise to everyone," I ventured.
"Not at all," said Judy. "Artie's like that. Does whatever he feels like doing when he feels like doing it. He disbanded his orchestra and quit because he really didn't like leading a swing orchestra and playing for jitterbugs." The truth is that Artie long-distanced Judy and asked her advice before he quit, but he didn't mention his intention of eloping with Lana when he took Judy out to dinner at the Victor Hugo the week before he flew to Yuma to ring the wedding bells. Despite the difference in their ages, there was a strong bond of friendship between the former Swing-King and the little Swing-Singer.
At present, Judy and her sister are going with brothers, Jimmy and Jack Cathcart, age 21 and 24, respectively. "And made to order," laughs Judy. "We make a fine brother and sister act."
The younger of the brothers, who squires Judy, is a member of Ray Noble's orchestra. The other night Judy's mother arrived home at midnight to find Judy in the kitchen busily engaged in pouring cake materials into the electric mixer. "I'm baking a cake so's Jimmy and I can have cake and coffee when he stops by," Judy explained. Jimmy has to play with his orchestra practically every night, so much of his courting is being done over sandwiches and cold snacks in the Garland kitchen on the way home, or they play badminton in the mornings.
Judy makes three times her movie salary on the radio. Her present M-G-M contract has three years to go, and although she is one of the studio's best box office attractions, her weekly stipend remains around $750 a week. Even so, Judy has practically everything that a girl her age could desire. There's her home in Bel Air with its lovely bedroom and sitting room upstairs designed for her. Then comes her sports roadster and her dog and cat. In her closet is a sports skunk coat and a winter one trimmed with mink, for her mother believes that Judy is still to young for an entire mink one. There're rows of simple girlish dresses and the one elegant but now bedraggled Bernie Newman model. Judy still loves to look at it and its price tag and visualize it as it once was. Some day she hopes to be able to afford another like it. She dreamed of a star ruby, but later reasoned that she hadn't better buy her own jewelry, for after all she wants something left for a fiance to buy her, if and when she decides on the boy.
When Judy was born almost seventeen years ago, her parents retired from vaudeville and bought a theatre in Grand Rapids, Michigan [sic], and settled down to make a home for their three daughters.
"One Christmas Eve, when I was two," Judy says, "Daddy let me go out on the stage and sing, 'Jingle Bells.' Mother says they couldn't get me off. Finally, daddy had to walk out and carry me off.
"When my parents moved to California and bought a theatre, they enrolled us in a school for training children for the stage. I was four-and-a-half when I played Cupid in a prologue at a downtown Los Angeles theatre. I sang 'I Can't Give You Anything But Love Baby,' with a big sty on my eye. It came the morning of the show, but since I was supposed to be a trouper, I went on in spite of it.
"Gus Edwards saw us and said we sisters should be a trio. So, we became the Gumm Sisters and sang at benefits and wherever we could.
"A friend of mother's booked us into Chicago. By a mistake on the marquee, the sign read the Glum Sisters. That was perfectly tragic to us. George Jessel, who was on the same bill, suggested that to avert such a mistake, we should call ourselves the Garland Sisters. That's how I adopted my name.
"After an engagement at the Chicago World's Fair, we returned to California to settle down to school. Suzanne married and Virginia and I continued on singing together.
"A talent scout heard me sing at Lake Tahoe during a summer vacation and arranged my audition with Louis B. Mayer. Then I was signed to an M-G-M contract.
"My family and friends thought of course I would be a movie star right away. But I wasn't. It appeared as though they weren't going to do much with me. It was during that discouraging time that I walked out on that party when those girls laughed at me.
"But they made me so mad, I made up my mind that in spite of what they said, I'd be somebody in pictures."
And Judy is.
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