Mayer schemed to turn the tables on Universal. Nobody was going to laugh at him for keeping the wrong girl. “I’ll take this fat one, Garland, and make her a bigger star than Durbin,” he boasted to his associates. How to start was the puzzle. He began by insisting that she be coached in acting and dancing, though she’s never had a formal singing lesson in her life. She still doesn’t know what key she sings in. She’ll say, “Play some chords and I’ll pick one.” He had orders sent down to the commissary: “No matter what she orders, give her nothing but chicken soup and cottage cheese.”
Her one dear friend in approximately her own age group was Mickey Rooney. They were nuts about each other. They went to school together, along with Metro’s Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew, and other child stars whom Mickey rapidly eclipsed. Mickey, who remains today one of the greatest underrated talents in entertainment, was brash, cocksure, and growing up fast. He was doing calisthenics in the schoolyard one day under an instructor’s eye when Frank Whitbeck, the studio advertising director, passed by.
“Hi, Uncle Frank,” yelled Mickey. “Ain’t this the damndest thing for a grown man to be doing?”
The crush Judy had on Mickey would have burned up a girl twice her age. An explosive mixture of emotion and ambition churns inside her. “I have to have a crush on somebody,” she once cried to Ida, “but they don’t last.” Mickey had a shield of toughness, which she lacked, and a heart as big as Ireland, but he mostly regarded her as a kid, too young for him.
She’d played minor roles, two of them with Mickey as star, when The Wizard of Oz came along. Producer Mervyn LeRoy, typically, was all set to have Shirley Temple as Dorothy, but Twentieth Century-Fox wouldn’t release her. So he reluctantly settled for Judy—and she had it made.
The top executive offices at Culver City are located in the Thalberg Building, otherwise known as the “Iron Lung” by reason of its much-envied air-conditioning system. Before it was built, Metro tried to buy a little piece of corner property, on which stands a long-established undertaker’s parlor. He refused to sell, so today his establishment stands like a sore thumb next to the handsome structure named for Irving Thalberg. The undertaker occasionally peers into the “Iron Lung” and says: “Well, I’ll get you all, sooner or later.” He’s had most of the old-timers already.
From the executive offices you could look across the street at four big twenty-four-sheet billboards standing side by side. On them were displayed posters that shouted the claims of the studio’s newest hits, listing names of the stars, featured players, producer, director and, if they were lucky, the writers.
Since actors are vain, Mayer and his aides, like soft-spoken Benny Thau and burly Eddie Mannix, could sweet-talk them into accepting bigger billing in lieu of more money in many a contract. With Oz, Judy’s billing grew like a mushroom. It jumped above the picture’s title, making her technically a star. The size of the lettering that was used to spell out her name expanded year by year. Now she’s reached the peak, where one name, Judy—like Garbo and Gable—does all the selling needed to pull in an audience.
Then Metro smelled gold in billing Mickey and Judy together for Babes on Broadway, and some of her cruelest years opened up for her. Compared with Mickey’s greased-lightning ability to do everything and anything and get it right instantly, Judy was a slow study. Dance rehearsals were a torture. She was driven frantic, dancing, singing, improvising, putting a picture together. The director, Busby Berkeley, was a taskmaster who extracted the last ounce of her energy.
“I used to feel,” she told me later, “as if he had a big black bull whip, and he was lashing me with it. Sometimes I used to think I couldn’t live through the day. Other times I’d have my driver take me round and round the block because I hated to go through the gates.”