I saw him work her over in one picture, where she stood on a truck and sang. He watched from the floor, with a wild gleam in his eye, while in take after take he drove her toward the perfection he demanded. She was close to hysteria; I was ready to scream myself. But the order was repeated time and time again: “Cut. Let’s try it again, Judy.”
“Come on, Judy! Move! Get the lead out.” By now, she was determined to keep her name in the billing, but I doubt if she would have pretended to anyone that she enjoyed being an actress. She was jealous of Mickey, forever running to Ida to complain: “He got the break, I didn’t.” For all the friendship of the two young people, she wanted to best him in everything they did together.
The two of them sat together in the darkened theater. On one side of them was Irene Dunne; on the other, Sonja Henie; behind them, Cary Grant. When the house lights came on, Judy was crying through the applause. “I know what you’re thinking,” Mickey said. “We’re two kids from vaudeville, and we didn’t mean a damn thing for so long, and now it’s happened to both of us.”
Years later, after Judy had fallen into a bottomless pit and climbed out again, the Friars Club gave a banquet at the Biltmore Bowl and proclaimed her “Miss Show Business.” She had just had the British eating out of her hand at the London Palladium, played the Palace in New York for nineteen sensational weeks; toured the United States and finished her triumph at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles. Mickey’s career was running downhill. Somebody remembered to send him an invitation to the Biltmore Bowl, but it was to sit way over in a corner.
“Everybody was slapping each other on the back,” he reported without bitterness, “and I said to myself: ‘Poor Judy, how many of these people really care about you?’”
I said: “You two were like ham and eggs. You helped her more than anybody.”
“Yeah, but the people who gave the party forgot that. That was the only thing that hurt. Because I felt so close. I haven’t seen her much lately. It’s all a kind of whirl.”
Adolescence can give a rough ride to any girl—and her mother, if she’s around to share her daughter’s fears and confidences and dry her tears. Judy’s thinned-out body was not given time to readjust. The public idolized her. The exhibitors couldn’t get enough Garland-Rooney musicals. She had to go on churning them out one after another. They’d been sent to New York for the Capitol Theatre opening of Babes on Broadway. They went back again and broke every house record.
“We’d been doing six, seven shows a day and having about forty minutes between shows,” Mickey recalled. “This one afternoon we’d just gone off stage to come back and take a bow together, and she collapsed in the wings. I didn’t know what to do. I filled up with tears. I felt as though something serious had happened. I came out on stage and just felt lost without her. She wasn’t dieting at this time. She was just going too fast.” And with the wrong companions.
That was Louis B. Mayer’s doing. His suspicious brain came up with the idea that Ida had too much influence over Judy. She might be tempted to think of what was good for the girl before she thought of the studio, so he flatly told Ida: “You’ve got too much work to do to look after the Garland.” By order, the old intimacy was ended.