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Judy's Jobs
from Hollywood, January 1942
by Edward Martin
It was her startling voice that led Judy Garland to choose her career. The career she chose was the law. "This voice," she confides, "was designed for intimidating witnesses. It's low, loud and flat, just the thing to scare the wits out of a nervous citizen who doesn't remember what he was doing on the night of January 16th."
Although she is consistently chosen by theater owners as one of the biggest box-office personalities, Judy isn't sure yet that she won't continue her studies and qualify for the bar.
"Maybe that Portia business is for me after all," she speculates, with a quizzical lift of the eyebrow. "It's not too late to finish my studies and hang out the shingle. Abraham Lincoln was years and years older than I am before he ever stepped into a courtroom.
"I'm going to college anyway this winter, and I may as well bone up on Blackstone as anything else. If the Garland pipes get any worse, I can fall back on straight yelling. 'I object, Your Honor,' is easier on the vocal cords than three choruses of 'I Got Rhythm'."
One career at a time is Judy's idea of an empty life. Her basic occupation at the moment is being the wife of Dave Rose, the brilliant young orchestra leader whose place in his profession is as conspicuous as Judy's niche in the movies.
Their home this season is the Wesley Ruggles mansion in Beverly Hills. A little later, as soon as Judy finds time to dream it up and get it on paper, there will be a specially built homestead "where we can grow old together gracefully in comfortable surroundings." Does this sound a little premature?
To occupy Judy's daylight hours there is the little matter of working fifty weeks a year for dear old M-G-M, where she ranks in personal and professional popularity right up with Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable and Leo the Lion.
These two jobs are hardly enough to engage the full time and energies of such an up-and-coming young bride as Judy, however. To absorb her excess enthusiasm she has taken up four other occupations, each of which would seem an arduous assignment to a normal industrious adult.
First of these extra-curricular activities is radio. It's normal for most of the first-rank movie stars to make occasional appearances before the microphones. Judy does the usual stint, mostly for charity and defense projects.
But Mrs. Rose is not content to be somebody else's parrot on the air waves. Whenever feasible she writes her own material, and a very capable job she does of it. Sometimes she works solo on her scripts, sometimes in collaboration with True Boardman, the former movie matinee idol who has become one of the better practitioners of radio writing.
Next there is literature. Judy's favorite character in real life is her mother, Mrs. William Gilmore. Before many seasons pass Mrs. Gilmore is destined to find herself immortalized in a novel by Judy Garland.
The budding authoress is attending fiction classes, scribbling practice pages at a furious rate and learning to be a writer by the empirical, or trial-and-error, method. Several publishers have offered to accept her first book sight unseen. Judy will have none of this. When her first novel is ready she will submit it under an assumed name, thus making sure that it will be considered strictly on its merits.
The third of Judy's overtime undertakings is the study of piano. Her teacher, conveniently, is that same David Rose who is her husband. But when piano lessons start, matrimony is no excuse for faulty fingering.
"As a teacher, David is a tyrant," Judy confesses, a little proudly. "During dinner he can be just a dream-boy, one of the most likable lads you'd want to know. But when we step over to the piano for a workout he's as tough as one of the Warner Brothers' prison guards. It's wonderful."
And to drain off the ultimate creative urge, Judy writes music and lyrics. Her lyrics are not the casual kind of "June, moon" stuff that most tyros attempt, but complex word patterns remindful of Rodgers and Hart and Ira Gershwin. David has set a few of them to music and Freddy Martin, the big orchestral popularizer, has undertaken to give them their first radio hearing. The title of some of the earliest efforts are "This Is the Night", "One Love" and "Love's New Sweet Song".
Every schoolchild has heard the fable about the ambitious baby that tried to run before it could walk. Musically, that's Judy Garland. Although she's still on Lesson Twelve in the art of playing the piano, she has already plotted out a piano concerto called "Ode to an English Gentleman". She'll finish it if it kills her. At this date the betting is about even that it will. Delius is her favorite composer and the Ode admittedly owes something of its mood to Delius. But the perspiration was supplied by J. Garland. Whip-cracking by D. Rose.
The tempo on the Garland-Rose establishment is just about the fastest in Hollywood. The last dull moment was two weeks ago Thursday. If the household engineering isn't as smooth as at the Ritz it's because Judy had only two weeks' practice, the two weeks immediately preceding her marriage. With a girl friend she rented a beach house and insisted on doing all the housework, cooking and cleaning, just to get her hand in.
At the end of this practice period came the wedding ceremony, one day's honeymoon, and an immediate return to the movie treadmill. Judy's current chore is just about the most exacting she has undertaken. Her co-star is that other little dynamo, Mickey Rooney, and the story is a breathless chronicle of surging youth called Babes on Broadway, which features, among other super-charged performers, bouncing Virginia Weidler, Anne Rooney, Richard Quine and Ray MacDonald.
All Judy has to do is carry the love interest, introduce a new rube dance called The Lowdown Hoedown, act in a playlet called The Convict's Return, impersonate Blanche Ring and Sarah Bernhardt and sing her head off ("low, loud and flat").
Aside from these and her other after-hour activities, the girl is practically unemployed. Anybody need a good law partner?
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