Judy Garland: A Biography Read online

  Judy Garland

  Anne Edwards

  Judy Garland

  A Biography

  TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING

  Lanham • New York • Boulder • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Copyright © 1974, 1975 by Anne Edwards

  First Taylor Trade edition 2013

  Excerpts from After the Fall by Arthur Miller, copyright © 1964 by Arthur Miller, reprinted by permission of Viking Press, Inc. and Secker & Warburg.

  Excerpts from Billy Rose’s syndicated column, Sept. 1, 1950, copyright © 1950 by Billy Rose and Bell-McClure Syndicate, reprinted by permission of Bell-McClure Syndicate.

  Excerpts from The Child Stars by Norman J. Zierold, copyright © 1965 by Norman J. Zierold, reprinted by permission of Coward McCann and Macdonald.

  Excerpts from I.E. An Autobiography by Mickey Rooney, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, copyright © 1965 by Mickey Rooney, reprinted by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

  Excerpts from ‘Judy’ by Hoagy Carmichael and Sammy Lerner, copyright © 1934 by Southern Music Publishing Co. Inc. and Samuel M. Lerner Publications. Used by permission.

  Excerpts from Judy Garland, Her Last Tragic Months, by Mickey Deans, published by Look magazine, copyright © 1969 by Mickey Deans, reprinted by permission of Mickey Deans.

  Excerpts from Liza by Stephen K. Oberbeck, published by Good Housekeeping magazine, copyright © 1970 by Stephen K. Oberbeck, reprinted by permission of Stephen K. Oberbeck.

  Excerpts from Liza, Gasping for Breath, reprinted by permission from Time, the Weekly News Magazine, copyright Time, Inc.

  Excerpts from Marilyn, text by Norman Mailer, published by Grosset and Dunlap, Inc. and Hodder & Staughton. Copyright © 1973 by Alskog Inc. and Norman Mailer, reprinted by permission of Norman Mailer.

  Excerpts from The Other Side of the Rainbow by Mel Tormé, copyright © 1970 by Mel Tormé, reprinted by permission of William Morrow and Co. and W. H. Allen.

  Excerpts from The Plot against Judy Garland, published by Ladies’ Home Journal, copyright © 1967 Downe Publishing, Inc., reprinted by permission of Ladies’ Home Journal.

  Excerpts from Hollywood Rajah by Bosley Crowther, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, copyright © 1959 by Bosley Crowther, reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  ISBN: 978-1-58979-787-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-58979-788-8 (electronic)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  FOR JUDY

  AND FOR STEVE

  IN GOOD CONSCIENCE

  AND WITH LOVE

  Part One

  Somewhere . . . somehow ... I want to find a place without any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. It’s not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It’s far, far away—behind the moon, beyond the rainbow . . . somewhere over the rainbow . . .

  —Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz

  1If Judy Garland’s mother had walked for eighteen minutes she would have completely covered the east, west, north, and south of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where her husband had purchased a small movie house. It was no wonder that a young woman who had dreamed of playing the Palace in New York would not only despair, but would—in order to survive the ordeal of being forced to live in a small, drab town—weave golden dreams of her own.

  All of those dreams took her far away from the town’s muddied streets, from its lineup of Model T Fords and lumber wagons, from the terror of its winter storms, and from the vulnerability of the small, unprotected white frame house in which she; her husband, Frank; and their two daughters, Virginia (Jimmy) and Sue (Susie) lived. The ugliness did not make her despair; the hopelessness did.

  Born Ethel Marion Milne, in Superior, Wisconsin, one of a very large family, she was always petite and feminine, and her mother, Evelyn, favored her, giving her every advantage, transferring her own ambitions to her daughter. By the time Ethel was twelve she played the piano and sang badly, but the fantasy her mother had helped create refused to be crushed inside her small-framed body, and she grew to be a pretty woman with dreams of stardom.

  While playing the piano in a local movie theater, she met a good-looking, fun-loving Irishman who hailed from Tennessee and was a tenor. His name was Frank Avent Gumm. They married on January 22, 1914, in Superior, Wisconsin. He was twenty-seven and she was twenty. They formed a vaudeville act, billing themselves as Jack and Virginia Lee, Sweet Southern Singers, and made the vaudeville circuit in their home territory, meeting with very little success. By the time their first two children had reached school age, Frank had scraped together all he could salvage or borrow and bought the little theater in Grand Rapids, where his mother lived.

  Ethel begged Frank to sell the movie house and go back on the road. He refused. Bolstered by her own aggressiveness and her new awareness of the freer role women in cities now had, she threatened to leave on her own.

  It was the fall of 1921. Warren Gamaliel Harding had that year taken over the Presidency, succeeding a tired, partially invalided Wilson. Perhaps not a hick, but certainly humble, Warren Harding was redeemed in Ethel’s eyes only by his imperious wife, Florence, who had already gained the name of The Duchess. It was Florence who drove her husband on to success against all obstacles. A devotee of astrology and necromancy, she believed her husband’s star destined for the highest ascendancy. Ethel, though identifying with the President’s lady, felt it was her star, not Frank’s, that would bring her into the aureole light. She planned to leave, then discovered she was pregnant.

  Frances Ethel Gumm, the future Judy Garland, was born on June 10, 1922, about the same time as Benito Mussolini marched on Rome and took up the reins of dictatorship. Not even Ethel in her greatest moments of fantasy could have imagined that her third baby would someday come to represent to a nation fighting the Fascism of Hitler and Mussolini the ideal American girl.

  Ethel and Frank Gumm had actually hoped for a boy so strongly that the evening edition of the Grand Rapids Independent carried an announcement of the birth of Francis Gumm, Jr., born to Mr. Francis Gumm, owner and manager of the New Grand Theatre, and Mrs. Gumm. This was corrected on the child’s birth certificate, but Frank could not help showing his disappointment.

  Soon, however, this third daughter became his favorite, and he called her “Baby.” She was a snub-nosed, homely baby, who seldom cried and seemed almost unable to contain her great joy at being alive.

  Had Ethel not been longing for a glamour that Grand Rapids could not rise to, it is entirely possible that “Baby” Gumm would have grown up in that small town and married a local boy. That would not have been an unhappy choice in Frank Gumm’s opinion. But Ethel’s fantasies drew her on, and eventually “Baby” with her.

  As Ethel looked around her, she saw all the young people deserting Grand Rapids for the big cities. Throughout the country
a feeling of optimism and prosperity prevailed, and the American Woman appeared to be liberated. At least she could smoke, wiggle the Charleston on a tabletop and travel unchaperoned.

  Ethel followed the lives of the famous in magazines and in the tabloid press. She was an avid admirer of the Fitzgeralds, though she never read a line F. Scott wrote. She found Hemingway romantic but she was not sure what sort of books he had written. Hollywood and the films were the only glamorous world she could identify with.

  Sitting in her husband’s movie-house matinee after matinee while her mother-in-law minded her brood, Ethel studied Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton as intently as if she were cramming for a university degree. Her determination was to be admired, and her own realization that she did not have the beauty or genius to make it on her own, to be respected. Her predatory eye had already roved away from Frank. He was good, and hardworking—the least creditable traits Ethel could imagine, especially when out in Hollywood one Rodolfo Alfonzo Raffaeli Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla, better known as Rudolph Valentino, had captured the American housewife with an image of dash and daring. Frank Gumm could not be expected to carry any woman off to great adventure. It was, therefore, up to Ethel herself.

  Gathering all the ammunition she could, which seemed to be the asset of three daughters, each of whom might grow to be the beauty or great talent she was not, Ethel began her first steps on what was to be her great adventure. She convinced Frank that what his movie house needed was a “live act” every Saturday afternoon. Using all the knowledge she had picked up from the film comedies she had been studying, she proceeded to work out an act for Susie and Jimmy, then eight and five respectively (Baby remaining in the care of Grandmother Gumm). Child stars were all the rage in Hollywood. Ethel set her hopes high, but after only a few performances of “The Gumm Sisters” those hopes began to slip. Even at the New Grand Theatre in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, the girls could not be called a smash act. But their mother persevered.

  It was on a Saturday night during the Christmas season of 1924 that Baby made her debut. She was two and a half years old and seated on her grandmother’s lap watching her sisters perform as her mother accompanied them. She began to cry, wanting to be with her sisters, who were onstage. Her grandmother, hoping to quiet her, carried her to the stage and set her down on the edge. Ethel was furious. “Get off. Get off!” she called from the pit, where she was playing the piano. Susie and Jimmy froze, not knowing what to do. The audience began to laugh and applaud. Baby laughed and applauded, edging toward her sisters, slipping and tumbling, rising to her feet with Chaplinesque genius, mimicking all the gestures she had watched her mother instruct her sisters to employ in their act. The audience called out for her to sing. Frank Gumm started out onto the stage to carry her off; but before he reached her, she began a chorus of “Jingle Bells,” the only song she knew.

  Something happened in that movie house that blizzardy winter day, and both Ethel and Frank were aware of it. The laughter that was always quick to surface in their youngest daughter rose in her voice, and it transmitted itself to the audience.

  Nothing could hold Ethel back now. She was convinced her star had just ascended on the stage of the New Grand Theatre. It was impossible for Frank to stop her. She immediately put Baby into the act and sought engagements in nearby towns. The older girls sang at first as a duet, with Baby coming onstage for a specialty; one of her numbers was a turn as a belly dancer, dressed in a colorful Egyptian costume that Ethel had made.

  Ethel’s dream flourished, and Hollywood was its ultimate setting. She whittled away at Frank’s good nature, and it was not long before house and theater were both up for sale. No sooner had both been sold than the Gumm family piled whatever was left of their possessions, took to the road, and working their act in every town they could grab for a booking, headed West.

  Months of continuous travel followed. They lived in rented rooms or slept in the car, and Ethel saw to it that all their bookings brought them closer to Hollywood. Frank drove, handled the business end, and appeared in the act as opener and interlocutor, while Ethel prodded and plotted—her small, pretty, plump hands moving across broken keyboards in her own arrangements; prompting the girls from the pit; and taking a turn as a chanteuse before the end of the act. There were one-night stands and split weeks. Work was scarce and bookings hard to come by. The country might have been experiencing a boom, but vaudeville was already beginning its decline, with vaudeville theaters quickly being transformed into movie houses.

  Often they performed before a movie was shown. The audiences were impatient and not always approving. And there was the Gerry Society to contend with, for laws had recently been passed that forced children to attend school. If the Gerry Society caught them, the girls were made to attend a school for a minimum of a week. They minded much less than Ethel, who dreaded the delay in attaining her goal.

  The two older girls were very close confidantes. Baby was too young to be a participant in most of their adventures or conversations; and as Ethel was always busy working on the act, she grew extremely attached to her father. She had more in common with that laughing Irishman than the others anyway. They had a similar sense of humor. She loved his stories and his singsong voice and was already resentful of the way her mother could say things to him that would bring a sadness to his face. Sitting on his lap or curled up next to him in the front seat of the old car, she was content and happy. And when she was onstage she always wanted to be sure he would be in the audience and where and would direct her glance to that spot.

  Prohibition was in, but Frank Gumm always managed to obtain some Irish whiskey. There would be shrill reprimands from Ethel then. Every cent was to get them to Hollywood; at bootleg prices, Frank’s whiskey could cost them precious time. The longer the delays, the more difficult Ethel was to live with. Yet Frank was unable to conquer his need at times to blur the edges.

  The Gumm Sisters did not play the big cities. They played the cow towns and farm towns and small factory towns. In those places the discontent was a visible, buzzing thing; farmers were hard up, and there was serious unemployment. What Frank saw on the road disturbed him, made him feel uneasy. He wanted to get his girls to safety, to put a picket fence around them and a great many blossoming rosebushes. Unfortunately, the times he felt this the strongest were the times he drank the most.

  Frank opened the act singing spirituals and sometimes closed it with a song—“I Will Come Back.” (Years later this was to become Judy Garland’s closing song on her weekly television show.) He was an Irish tenor with a lovely full-bodied voice. Baby would applaud him frantically from the wings. But when Ethel chose to sing a song—“I’ve Been Saving for a Rainy Day”—Baby would cry. There was something sad and touching about Ethel when she sang—not because her performance was moving but because it was so terrible and Ethel so untalented, and because the audiences were always hostile to her. Even the small child sensed this hostility and remembered it all her life. A sea of angry people and her mother a sinking ship. It was a haunting image. She wanted the angry buzz to stop, the faces to smile; but she was powerless. At times they even threw food at Ethel. Once a piece of cheese missed its mark and hit Jimmy in the stomach. Jimmy didn’t cry, but Baby did.

  After three long, torturous months, the five Gumms arrived in Los Angeles. It had seemed a much longer journey. But for Baby Gumm it had brought her close to the two great loves of her life—her father and a live audience.

  2Today, except for the signs, it is difficult to know when you enter or leave Hollywood. But when the Gumm family came to the end of their journey and turned onto Hollywood Boulevard, it was bizarre and marvelous. They had traveled all day, part of it through the searing heat of the desert. Frank was exhausted and the three children half asleep, and they had not arranged for rooms; but the brilliant neons were blinding. Ethel wanted first to see the brand-new Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and Ethel always got her way. Holding Baby Frances in her arms, Ethel woke
her. Grauman’s—the grand and glorious movie cathedral—was the future Judy Garland’s first glimpse of Hollywood.

  The finishing touches were just being put upon a replica of a Polynesian village in the forecourt of the theater. Sid Grauman, veteran showman, had invited a number of the most distinguished stars to put the imprints of their hands and feet in the wet cement of the forecourt, thus preserving in cement the prints of the immortals. Grauman was also the man who invented the “premiere”—the initial public showing of a “super-special” film. Tickets sold for $5; they were purchased by the public to see the stars, and by the stars to be seen by their fans.

  The night of a premiere, Hollywood was a carnival. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick describing the scene in the New York Times Magazine in the late twenties wrote:

  The elite of the movies crossed a high bridge erected across the street in front of the Theatre. This “bridge of stars” was a temporary gangway ablaze with clusters of huge incandescent flowers and raked by Kleig lights like a battery of suns. The stars were announced by megaphones; in ermines, sables and similar equivalents of the imperial purple, like royalty on a balcony, they bowed to the plaudits of the populace.

  The throng was so dense that the pedestrian could not fight his way within a block of the place. The parade took place under an awning a block long, lighted like an operating table, between solid walls of gaping people.

  Imagine Ethel’s excitement at viewing such a scene. Or at having Frank buy a guide to the stars’ homes and driving past the giant English manors and Spanish castles with their lineup of foreign cars in the driveways; the stucco sculpture in the forecourts; the swimming pools—some with swans; houses guarded by mastiffs and Russian wolfhounds; and rooftops flying huge American flags. Ethel was mesmerized and at the same time convinced that Baby Frances would transport the Gumms into a world such as she now saw.