Judy Garland: A Biography Read online

  Ethel had embarked upon her true career as that great phenomenon, the Movie Mother. Hedda Hopper once said:

  They [the youngsters] arrived in Hollywood like a flock of hungry locusts driven by the gale winds of their prompting, ruthless mothers. One look into the eyes of those women told you what was on their minds: “If I can get this kid of mine on the screen, we might just hit it big.” They took little creatures scarcely old enough to stand or speak, and like buck sergeants drilled them to shuffle through a dance step or mumble a song. They robbed them of every phase of childhood to keep the waves in their hair, the pleats in the dress, and pink polish on the nails.

  Most of the major studios were located on the edges of Hollywood. The Gumms took rooms within walking distance of them and for several days Ethel worked long and hard to prepare Baby Frances for her debut. There were pink organdy frocks to be sewn, a handshake and bow to perfect, reluctant baby hair to tease into curls, and an audition number to rehearse. Sound was not yet a problem in films—though it was just over the horizon. Ethel concentrated, therefore, on the child’s ability to put over her personality. She taught her how to use her eyes and her hands; how to look as though she were about to cry—how to quiver her lips and still appear piquant; how to laugh and yet retain her poise. There was the Chaplin walk to be mastered if the role called upon was comedy; the Mary Pickford stance if demure. Feeling sure of their prospects, she left the two older girls with Frank and began the rounds with her youngest child.

  Ethel was not prepared for the long queues of mother and child, the rudeness of casting directors, the hopelessness of ever reaching anyone with executive power. But, from the other mothers, she gleaned a bit of knowledge: if she could meet a top agent and persuade him to represent Baby Frances, the child’s chances would be estimably better. She proceeded to change her tactics. Baby Frances in tow, Ethel then made the rounds of agents’ offices. There were the same endless queues, the same rudeness, the same closed doors.

  Her stamina wavered, and Frank managed to talk her into moving the family to Lancaster, a small town eighty miles north of Los Angeles. It was a harsh, inhospitable community, situated in a barren semidesert, unacquainted with show people and with sunbaked prejudices as hard as the rocky cliffs that surrounded it. There was a small movie theater for sale there, however, and Frank took what money he had left and bought it.

  One can easily imagine Ethel’s state of mind after she realized the full consequence of his move. Refusing to accept the ramifications, terrified at being trapped in a town and a life even more stultifying than Grand Rapids, and frustrated at the nearness yet distance of the Mecca, of the golden gates, of fame and glamour and fortune, she piled the girls into the old car on weekends and drove into Los Angeles, a trip then taking nearly three hours each way.

  Ethel could now see that her chances might be greater if a talent scout caught Baby Frances in action. Her new tactic was to place the child on a stage. Jimmy and Sue had to be included, as Baby Frances could not be expected to sustain an entire act by herself. She signed the girls with the Meglin Kiddies, a booking agency for child acts, and it constituted a large compromise on Ethel’s part.

  Working from Lancaster, as the older girls had to attend school, Ethel made that grueling trip back and forth every weekend, setting out at five in the morning and driving through dust and sandstorms, desert heat, and torrential rain in a tired car with three sleepy and very irritable children. At times she was rewarded with a booking. Then she had to drive the girls to some small theater not always too close to Los Angeles, rehearse them, and accompany them in their performance.

  One weekend while they were playing the Alhambra, just outside Los Angeles, schoolboys who had brought box lunches to the theater, sent the contents whirling toward the three girls with perfect aim. Baby Frances ran from the theater, and it took a half hour to find her and bring her back.

  Ethel took bookings for the girls for any price and for any function—luncheons, benefits, fairs. Money appeared to be no object—once, the girls performed for an entire evening for the lamentable sum of 50 cents—the ultimate hope and purpose being that a talent scout or a cousin or sister of some producer or director would catch the act and see the star potential of Baby Frances.

  Frank, determined to make Ethel take the girls off the road, concentrated his forces on the business and within a year had expanded and bought two neighboring movie houses. Ethel refused to give in. Aware that the older girls were detracting from, not adding to, Baby Frances’ appeal, and deciding the child had gained experience and confidence, Ethel’s compromise to Frank was to leave the older girls at home and take Baby Frances out as a solo.

  Now it was Baby Frances and Ethel, alone, on the road together—sometimes for a one-night spot; more often for a series of one-nighters that would keep them away from Frank and the girls for a week or more.

  In spite of all the waves and manicures and fussy homemade costumes, little Frances Gumm was a chubby, awkward child who was beginning to suffer grievously from an inferiority complex born of comparison with Ethel of the tiny pretty hands and with the thin and pretty children who performed on the same bills with her. She was a quiet, pensive child, who, waiting to rehearse in a theater, would play with modeling clay or talk to her dolls, all of whom she called Peggy. She tried communicating with the other children on the bills, but she was invariably much younger and avoided whenever possible—although she made one friend during those years: Donald O’Connor. She was lonely and sad-eyed, hungry for the companionship of her sisters and the love of her father, confused and hostile toward Ethel whom she felt responsible for these forced separations from the only real contact she had with human love. Ethel was undemonstrative and seemed to consider mothering the same as babying and would have none of it. The “Baby” was a sales tag only. Ethel expected the child to act mature offstage, well behaved, patient, quick to learn, while onstage she was to appear precocious but winningly babyish.

  The youngster began to weave fantasies that Frank would follow them to whatever town she was in and forbid Ethel to take her any farther. In these fantasies, he would buy first-class train tickets and they would travel back to Lancaster, leaving Ethel behind in the strange town.

  But when she was home her sisters were in school, and the other children snubbed her because their mothers felt theater children were unwholesome. Most painful were the fights between Ethel and Frank. As she did in the theaters she performed in, she secluded herself in a room with her modeling clay and her doll—Peggy. At home, another fantasy of the same kind filled her head. Frank would depart Lancaster with her, leaving Ethel behind. Her dream was not that she become a star—but that Frank would become rich and famous and that Ethel and the whole world would have to sit up and take notice of him.

  Ethel would never prepare her for a departure. Early in the morning she would come into Baby Frances’ room, always aclutter, and order her to get dressed. The child sensed her mother’s relief at leaving the scorching, unfriendly heat of Lancaster and the constant reprimands and demands of Frank, but she was always grief-stricken at those leavings and much to Ethel’s anger would cry or sulk for most of the journey. If this behavior kept up when they were on tour, Ethel meted out her own form of punishment. No matter how strange the hotel or the city, Ethel would slowly and silently pack her own suitcase and tell Baby Frances she was leaving because Frances was bad. The terrified child would plead with her to remain, the words falling on deaf ears. Then Ethel would take her suitcase and depart, locking the door after herself and leaving the hysterical child alone. After a time she would stop sobbing and just wait and hope; and, as expected, in due course, Ethel would reappear and the frightened child would beg her forgiveness.

  Early in her maturity the grown Judy was to say: “I was always lonesome. The only time I felt accepted or wanted was when I was onstage performing. I guess the stage was my only friend, the only place where I could feel comfortable. It was the one place where I felt equa
l and safe.”

  Of course, that was when she did not need to dodge any flying objects. And so all her lifetime she would struggle to win her audiences, pushing herself to the last measure of her endurance to hold them in her grasp.

  3It was called Black Tuesday. The date was October 29, 1929. The stock market had crashed. Brokers and investors were hysterical and the nation in utter disbelief. The ranks of unemployed increased at a dizzying speed. President Hoover blindly refused to provide emergency help. The nation seemed unable to cope with all the destitute families, the jobless, the hungry. Families slept in doorways, on park benches, and in subways. A few lucky ones found shelter in municipal lodging houses.

  The depression had settled in. Across the country there were, as the young novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote, “. . . scenes of suffering violence, oppression, hunger, cold, and filth and poverty going on unheeded in a world in which the rich were still rotten with their wealth . . .”

  But Hollywood had found its voice, and millions of people unable to escape from the bleak reality of their own lives sacrificed food and lodging to see the glamour and opulence of a Hollywood film. For movies, with the double feature now in effect, offered four or five hours’ surcease from despair. The movie moguls poured everything they had into supplying a panacea to a desperate nation. Stars were created, glamourized, lionized: Wallace Beery and Marie Dressier; Joan Crawford; Jean Harlow; Clark Gable; Marlene Dietrich; and such romantic co-stars as Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor. The industry thrived and was the only one abundant in riches.

  By 1934, Ethel had seen the inside of a Hollywood sound stage only once. The girls had performed a bit in a film short called La Fiesta de Santa Barbara * The film was second rate and the girls terrible, but still she was one of the fortunate Movie Mothers. Frank’s business prospered. She never knew want for herself or her family. That fact only added to her great discontent. She detested being so squarely middle-class and was determined that the great fortunes and glamour and stardom that only Hollywood could offer would belong to Frances and herself.

  What Ethel never took into consideration was what Frances wanted. At that time she was an overweight child with a passion for pistachio ice cream cones and hot dogs. Not athletic, she disliked games and felt terribly inadequate when forced to participate. She was, at ten, still playing with dolls and making doll clothes. What she loved most, next to Frank, was animals, particularly dogs, and to Ethel’s chagrin was always dragging in strays, so that there were few times there weren’t two dogs to feed. The dogs became a source of joy and an area of torture for the child. On the move, she was throughout her life always attaching herself to an animal and then having to leave it behind. The guilt and the longing would remain with her until she found another dog to lavish even more devotion on. It was a terrible, vicious circle of overwhelming love and attachment, desertion and guilt.

  Leaving Susie and Jimmy with Frank, Ethel now took Frances, who was ten, and moved into a small hotel, the Hotel Gates. It was the beginning of many long separations between Ethel and Frank. For two years thereafter they would part for long periods and then come together again. It was difficult for Frances to accept or to understand. She longed to be with her father. She wondered if she had anything to do with her parents’ separation.

  After six months at the Hotel Gates, Frank sold the theaters in and around Lancaster and bought another theater in Lomita, a suburb of Los Angeles. He and Ethel reconciled and they rented a house in the Silver Lake district (Frances was in ecstasy about it), which Frank later bought, and the girls were entered in Mrs. Lawlor’s School for Professional Students.

  There Frances met a sandy-haired, fresh-faced kid named Mickey McGuire (born Joe Yule, Jr.), who was later to become Mickey Rooney. Mickey McGuire was a new experience for Frances. In the era just past when child actors had been starred in short subjects, Mickey had headed the cast of over fifty. Draped in a checkered shirt, a derby slapped on his head, a stogie stuck in his mouth, he re-created the then-well-known cartoon-strip character of Mickey McGuire in a series of the same name. The experience gave him tremendous confidence.

  Mickey was just what Frances needed to keep from turning into a morose and totally introspective child, for although she had thought the house in Silver Lake would magically change her life, it had instead made her a closer observer of the violent quarrels between her parents. She overheard accusations made by Ethel to Frank and these had a deep impact on her, for they had something to do with her father’s “immorality,” and he seemed to Frances the loser in these altercations. Mickey was able to make her laugh just as Frank, in his carefree days, had been able to do. They hit it off from the start.

  Jimmy and Sue had lost interest in being performers and had not performed for a while. But Ethel had a terrible fight with Frank, and putting all three girls into the back seat of the same old touring car, she drove without ever stopping to sleep until she reached Denver, where she found engagements for the girls in a theater and in a nightclub. They remained in Denver for a week. During that time, Ethel followed all the write-ups on the Chicago World’s Fair.

  It was called the Century of Progress Exposition, and it was the biggest show of its kind. Twenty million tourists were thronging through its gates. Profits were astronomical. It was a spectacular repudiation of the conditions that existed across the nation with wonders running the gamut from a reconstruction of a Mayan Temple to Miss Sally Rand, stark naked with fans and an outsized bubble. Reading the Variety coverage on the tremendous grosses in the theaters on the Midway, Ethel decided to take the girls there.

  Although she was never able to really communicate with her sisters, there was one good thing about their presence on this journey—Frances did not experience the loneliness and fear at night that she did when it was just Ethel and herself. Never was she able to cast off the terror at night that she would be deserted, left alone. Many years later she was to say: "I’m afraid at night. I didn’t know how to use the telephone when I was a scared little girl. But now, at the age of forty-one, I do know how to use the phone and I make all those nocturnal calls to wake up all my friends about three in the morning. I resent the fact that they’re sleeping and they’re not around here . . . It’s almost like everybody were Mama, and everybody went away and I’m left alone."

  Their first booking was at a theater on the Midway. The place was run by gangsters, and acts were seldom paid—and were threatened if they attempted to do something about this. Ethel allowed the girls to work without pay because Frank had given her a sizable amount of money before she had left Los Angeles. And she kept her silence because she felt so sure someone would have to see them at such a major entertainment spectacle as the Chicago World’s Fair. After three months, however, her money ran out. She was forced to go to the management and ask for their wages. The act was thereupon given immediate notice.

  Refusing to wire Frank for help even though they were out of money, she went begging for work for the girls at every nightclub and theater. Finally, they were given a spot on the bill of the Oriental Theatre, where George Jessel was headlined. It was Frances whom the Oriental wanted, having heard her sing “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” But Ethel had not prepared a solo act and so the sisters were included, with the proviso that the youngest carry the act.

  The night they opened at the Oriental their names went up in lights. All of them ran out to look at this wonder. The last on the bill before ADDITIONAL ATTRACTIONS, their name was misspelled as THE GLUM SISTERS. Ethel was beside herself, haranguing cast and crew to change the name on the marquee. Jessel suggested they change their own, for any review could too easily rhyme Gumm with “dumb,” “crumb,” and “bum.” Robert Garland, a newspaper critic, was backstage, and so Jessel suggested they use the name Garland. Ethel, possibly feeling this would set her apart from Frank forever, agreed.

  Sue and Jimmy did not want to give up their Christian names, but Frances had an idea that if she changed hers, she would get away from e
ver being called Baby again. At that time one of her favorite songs was “Julty” written by Hoagy Carmichael. The lyric began, “If her voice can bring ev’ry hope of the Spring / That’s Judy, my Judy,” and ended, “If she seems a saint and you find that she ain’t / That’s Judy / Sure as you’re born.”

  Reluctant to see her Baby entirely disappear, Ethel fought for the name Babe, but Jessel and the management won the battle. Jessel was master of ceremonies and he introduced the act as “The Garland Sisters—featuring little Miss Judy Garland with the big voice.”

  The act earned enough money at the Oriental to pay for a return to Los Angeles. They arrived at three in the morning. It had been nearly four months since the newly christened Judy Garland had seen her father. Frank, hearing the car pull into the driveway, had run out to greet them. Judy broke away from her sisters and ran into his arms.

  “I cried out of happiness,” Judy said of that reunion—“and that was a first, too. It’s hard to explain, but all the times I had to leave him, I pretended he wasn’t there; because if I’d thought about him being there, I’d have been too full of longing.”

  Footnote

  * La Fiesta de Santa Barbara was a two-reel short subject Musical Revue Series, released February 7, 1935, but filmed much earlier, and there remains the possibility that MGM therefore had film footage of Judy previous to her contract. The short, filmed in color, was about a boating party, with glimpses of such stars as Gary Cooper, Harpo Marx, Maria Gambarelli, Warner Baxter, Leo Car-rillo, Adrienne Ames, Robert Taylor, Mary Carlisle, Edmund Lowe, Toby Wing, Buster Keaton, Ida Lupino, Irvin S. Cobb, and Ted Healy.

  4Even though she had been well received at the Chicago Oriental, the year that followed brought her one studio rebuff after another. Ethel was still in there trying, making the rounds of the studio front offices with her. It was agreed that she had a big talent to match her big voice, but her appearance and her age blocked any further interest.