This Day in Film History (Garland Weds Director Vincente Minnelli)

June 15, 1945—With love having bloomed on the set of their first collaboration, the hit musical Meet Me in St. Louis, Judy Garland married director Vincente Minnelli, who had not only guided her towards mature roles but used his camera to make the insecure young star experience something she had never felt since signing with MGM: the sense of her own beauty.

It was the most unlikely of professional and personal partnerships. Minnelli was nearly twice the age of his star and wife, visually rather than orally inclined, painfully shy where she was often explosively funny, and self-disciplined where she was chronically late in showing up on the set.

The age difference between the two—and Minnelli’s genuine thoughtfulness and concern for her—may have reminded Garland of her own beloved father, a vaudevillian and theater owner who had died when she was only 13. But Minnelli resembled Frank Gumm in another important respect: homosexual liaisons that shadowed and complicated his marriage.

At this time, though, the two were as happy as they ever would be. Each had had their entire careers riding on the success of Meet Me in St. Louis, and each had achieved a principal objective: for Garland, an adult role and a performance so incandescent that it enabled MGM to overlook her increasing tardiness in arriving on set; and for Minnelli, his greatest opportunity to that point in a high-profile project. 

Their professional relationship did not start out well during the early days of shooting Meet Me in St. Louis. Already addicted for several years to a studio-compelled pill regimen to clamp down on her weight, Garland continued to annoy studio executives and fellow cast and crew members with tardiness that drove up the costs of filming. Moreover, Minnelli couldn’t communicate how he wanted her to act.

But as time went on, Garland realized what the rest of the crew understood: that Minnelli, a former costumer, set designer and art director who had apprenticed for a year at the studio, had knowledge of virtually every department at MGM, a painter’s eye for color and atmosphere—and more important, a keen sense of how makeup could provide Garland with grown-up sophistication. 

Moreover, this homeliest of men understood how the camera could minimize the flaws and enhance the advantages (notably, highly expressive eyes) of this sensitive young star who had resented studio bosses’ disparagement of her looks.

For his part, as indicated in this YouTube clip of an interview with the director in later years, Minnelli saw a little-noticed asset of Garland’s: a photographic memory that enabled her to absorb direction despite inevitable on-set distractions. Altogether, he believed her potential was so great that she could have been “as great as Duse, or Bernhardt, or Garbo.” 

His sense of her possibilities—and her eager responsiveness—transformed Meet Me in St. Louis from a problematic, plot-free property into a masterpiece of rich visual textures and charm to go with a rich score.

In Hollywood, it has never been unusual for male directors to sleep with female stars. But the growing, open affection between Garland and Minnelli was greeted with astonishment by cast and crew. 

Minnelli’s use of more mascara, eye shadow, lipstick, and a covering base than MGM’s actresses wore would have been enough to spark talk about his sexual preferences. But rumors of his intimate relationships with several men only fanned the gossip.

Besotted with the director who had awakened her sense of her attractiveness, Garland dismissed these rumors as “just his artistic flair!” It would be two more years before, during production of The Pirate, she happened on her husband with another man. 

According to Gerald Clarke’s biography of Garland, Get Happy, her furious description of this encounter quickly spread until it reached the ears of would-be actress Jacqueline Susann, who incorporated the incident into her 1960s bestselling potboiler, Valley of the Dolls. 

(Ironically enough, Garland was set to play a character modeled on Broadway star Ethel Merman in the film version of the roman a clef, until Garland's problems with pills led to her termination early in the project.)

After Meet Me in St. Louis, Garland and Minnelli worked together on two full-length features, The Clock (1945) and The Pirate (1948), and one segment of another, Ziegfeld Follies (1945).  They also had an off-screen production: a daughter, the future singer-actress Liza Minnelli. (Her proud father let her sit in his laps even while he was directing the lavish musicals that became his trademark.)

But four years after their wedding, their marriage was coming under relentless pressure, with the couple unable to cope with the daily stress of studio  suspensions, Garland’s indebtedness, her intensifying pill addiction—and the couple’s growing physical estrangement and mutual resentments (Garland identified Minnelli with the MGM regime, while he, worn down by her constant storms, saw the last straw as her constant lying to her psychiatrists). Though the marriage officially ended in divorce in 1951, it was, for all intents and purposes, over two years earlier.

Fired by MGM in 1950, Garland appeared onscreen only occasionally in the last two decades of her life (though one of those was her Oscar-nominated performance in A Star is Born). In contrast, Minnelli continued to work frequently and well for the studio throughout much of the rest of the 1950s in musicals, comedies and melodramas that demonstrated his great versatility, even lasting at the studio for 26 years--the longest-lasting director of anyone at MGM.

Of all the movies Minnelli made in this period, I think that, oddly enough, his Vincent Van Gogh biopic, Lust for Life, might have best reflected his relationship with Garland. While one artist worked with paint and another with popular song, each was bursting with expressive feeling that few others could match—and, sadly, exhibited an emotional instability that those closest to them, like Minnelli, felt powerless to control in the end.

This Day in Pop Music History (Peter Allen, Flamboyant Singer-Songwriter, Dead From AIDS)

June 18, 1992—Peter Allen, known (if at all) to most pop-music fans for songs other artists covered such as “Don’t Cry Out Loud” and “I Honestly Love You” but to a more rabid cult following as a consummate concert performer in his own right, died at age 48 of AIDS-related throat cancer in a hospital in San Diego.

The death of the Australian-born former protégé of Judy Garland (and first husband of her daughter Liza Minnelli) came less than six months after fans at his last performance in Sydney noticed his uncharacteristic difficulty with high notes—a consequence of his illness—and eight years after the AIDS-related illness of longtime companion Gregory Connell.

The charismatic showman had a contemplative, quieter self reflected in one of his more personal songs, the title cut of his 1979 album I Could Have Been a Sailor, a vision of an idyllic life without compromise in pursuit of dreams: “Oh lover, I can see the waves before you part/Well, I settled for safer harbors of my heart.” In death, he found communion with the waters he loved, as his ashes were scattered at sea.

With the passage of two decades, it can be difficult to describe Allen in all his dimensions. Part of him harked back to Cole Porter, another songwriter whose rueful moods sometimes bubbled up, despite himself, to his bon vivant surface. This was the composer whose work furnished other performers with some of the biggest hits of their careers, including Olivia Newton-John (“I Honestly Love You”), Melissa Manchester (“Don’t Cry Out Loud”) and Rita Coolidge (“I’d Rather Leave While I’m in Love”). (As one of several composers on the tune, he also won an Oscar for Best Song for Christopher Cross's "Arthur's Theme (When You Get Caught Between the Moon and New York City").

And then there was the performer, the between-songs jokester, the wild man pounding the piano with one hand while singing to the audience with each leg on either side of the bench—even the Grand Levitator, moved by sheer energy in his signature song, “I Go to Rio,” to dance around the stage as he shook maracas.

Allen’s concert persona took shape in the New York cabaret Reno Sweeney’s, where he began a few months after its October 1972 opening. He would start his show with songs from his first two LPs, Peter Allen and Tenterfield Saddler, as often as not tinged with nostalgia and melancholy. But he was keenly aware that his audience could use something else, he admitted later to James Gavin in an interview for Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret:

“The same people kept coming back and back…. I could see the audience wanted to have a good time, so I stopped singing so many sad ballads and switched to a lot of uptempo things. We didn’t have a drummer, so I got the audience to clap and do the beat to keep time.  Then I started to get up and dance around to the stomping of their feet. You would look out and see boys holding boys’ hands and girls holding girls’ hands. When you did a ballad, the most unlikely combinations gravitated toward each other.”

Those last couple of sentences hint at the post-Stonewall gay community that helped revive New York's cabaret scene in the early 1970s. After his short-lived marriage to Minnelli, Allen stopped pretending he was heterosexual. Unlike other performers of his time, he didn’t nervously stay in the closet; unlike those of our own era, he didn’t do an elaborately choreographed coming out in a national publication. He simply was out there.

Someone I know who caught one of his shows in the 1980s related this little bit of patter, which, from what I gather, was typical in tone: “I know what you’re all asking yourselves—is he…or isn’t he?” He let the titters build to a crescendo before saying, with a wink: “Well…I guess I’ll let you figure it out for yourselves.”

That didn’t turn out to be too hard. If it wasn’t obvious from his loud, sequined Hawaiian shirts, his double-entendre description of his living arrangements (“I’m bi-coastal”) or the sly title of one of his songs (“Not the Boy Next Door”), it was from the uninhibited stunt he began to use in his 1979 New York one-man show, Up in One: coming onstage toward the end in Carmen Miranda-like drag complete with fruit-topped headdress, belting out “I Go to Rio.”

Campy? Undoubtedly. But also expressive of an irrepressible joie de vivre. His studio albums, even when buffed to a high sheen by the likes of ace producer David Foster, came nowhere near capturing this bonhomie. For that, you had to turn to his live work. If you weren’t lucky, you made do with recordings such as It Is Time for Peter Allen; if you were lucky, you caught him hoofing it up, for all he was worth, with the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall.

His unstoppable energy served Allen well in the late Eighties, when he began to battle some of the stiffest challenges of his career and life. After critics mauled his musical Legs Diamond, he simply incorporated a number of the songs into a retooled version of his act and went on the road.

Those fans who knew how to read between the lines of his sometimes autobiographical lyrics, however, might have felt a chill when they saw the title of what turned out to be his last album: Making Every Moment Count. Less than two years later, Allen was dead, with Minnelli (who remained his friend despite the breakup of his marriage) at his bedside constantly until the end.

More than a decade after Allen’s death, fellow Australian Hugh Jackman starred on Broadway in a jukebox musical based on the singer’s life and work, The Boy From Oz. I never got around to seeing this show, but I don’t think it would have lessened any bit of my regret over what would have been a vast catalogue of sterling songs but for Allen’s untimely, wasteful death.

(Photo shows Peter Allen performing at the opening of the Sydney Entertainment Centre, May 1, 1983)

This Day in Pop Music History (Judy Garland, in a Conquering Carnegie Comeback)

April 23, 1961—In its long, legendary history, Carnegie Hall has served as a platform for countless musicians who left their mark on the New York venue. 

But it’s almost impossible to think of one who had fallen so low before an appearance as Judy Garland, nor one who rose again so high on the strength of a single exultant performance as the former Wizard of Oz star.

Offstage, Garland was such a mess that if she came to visit, you’d better say goodbye to the contents of your medicine cabinet. But put her in front of thousands of cheering fans with a microphone in hand, and she ruled.

It was practically a physical change that those closest to her witnessed. 

That night at Carnegie, for instance, journalist Shana Alexander, who had been holding the star’s lit cigarette backstage as the audience excitement built before the 8:30 pm scheduled start time, was astonished to see that as Garland let go of the curtain and headed onstage, she “actually got bigger.”

Hype, you say. But Garland was so over the top herself that even when you describe exactly the way she was, in what you view as realistic terms, it comes out as hype anyway.

Sports bring comeback stories aplenty—in fact, baseball even has a “Comeback Player of the Year.” But in the entertainment industry, with only one notable exception that I can think of—John Travolta, who has noted wryly that he’s had four or five so far in his career—they’re harder to mount. 

Though sports had its share of triumph over physical adversity (Ben Hogan’s car crash, Tony Conigliaro’s beaning in the head), most “comebacks” happen after a subpar, injury-plagued season. Heal a bone and the body does wonders again.

Entertainment comebacks are different. Entertainers might not be overcoming simply a medical condition, or even the inevitable self-doubt in the wake of this kind of setback, but also the attitudes of those who make the deals in Hollywood. 

Make no mistake: For all their professed progressivism, when it comes to a performer who can interfere with a payday, Hollywood moguls can be as intolerant as the worst bigot.

The only entertainment comeback I can think of comparable to Garland’s was the one staged by her good friend and old MGM colleague, Frank Sinatra, with From Here to Eternity (recounted in this prior post of mine). But Sinatra only had to do it once, and by 1961 he was bigger than ever.

Not so with Garland. Oh, nobody doubted her ability to invest the Great American Songbook with the same drama that Ol’ Blue Eyes did. 

But the lift provided by her comeback vehicle after her suicide attempt and public firing by MGM, A Star Is Born (1954), proved ephemeral.

Five years later, after looking at her 4-ft.-11-in., 180-lb. frame in a hospital bed, drained of fluids, with a liver compromised by years of alcohol and pills, a doctor not only bluntly warned Garland she would be a semi-invalid for the rest of her life, but that under no circumstances could she even walk again.

Maybe Garland misheard him—maybe she thought he said she could never work again. Whatever. She was going to prove him wrong.

More than a few people thought she couldn’t do it. And more than a few people, tired of her chronic tardiness and unreliability, thought her such a high-maintenance pain in the neck that they weren’t even inclined to wish her well.

You get a very pungent sense of this in James Kaplan’s terrific 50th-anniversary retrospective of the Carnegie Hall concert in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair. Among the friends and fans who function as a kind of Greek chorus in this tragedy that was magically delayed, one quote especially stands out, by actress-singer Polly Bergen:

“She’d been gone, and her career was over. Nobody really understands. Her career was over. Nobody wanted to see her. Nobody wanted to put up with her. Nobody cared. I’m talking about nobody in the Business. And let’s face it, the Business is what creates the business. So if people in the Business didn’t care, nothing was going to happen.”

But two thought they could reverse that impression: Bergen’s husband of the time, aspiring agent Freddie Fields, and his partner, David Begelman (yes, the future head thief of Columbia Pictures). 

In January 1961, they outlined their plan to revive her career. One element of this was re-establishing her as a marquee live performer—and a key component of this was her date at Carnegie Hall.

That sold out within hours after a small ad was placed in The New York Times. 

Yes, there was an element—similar to those watching Charlie Sheen’s current bizarre tour—wondering if they might be watching a self-immolation onstage. 

Yes, there was, for those pre-Stonewall days, a gay coterie out to pay homage to a performer already turning into one of their idols. 

Yes, there were even those in show business—not the suits described by Bergen, but the performer’s own acting and music colleagues—who cherished their troubled but talented, funny, endlessly warm-hearted friend.

And there were those who cut across all these groups and more, who wanted to see a once-in-a-lifetime performer who could make them marvel, laugh and cry at every turn because, in giving voice to every joy and sorrow of her heart, they heard an echo of their own.

You can cite the usual results of the concert that night—an album (Judy at Carnegie Hall) earning five Grammy Awards, placing number one on the Billboard charts for 13 weeks—but it’s all pallid and bloodless. It was a night in which not merely a career but a life hang in the balance.

The minutes dragged by after the 8:30 start time, leading some to fret a backstage breakdown. Far from it, though: Garland was milking the excitement for all it was worth, until it could barely be restrained. 

From the moment she hit the stage, singing “When You’re Smiling,” everyone realized that she was in as good physical shape as she’d been in for the last two years—and that not only the pipes remained intact, but that her ability to put over a song might even have been enhanced by the years of heartache.

I’m not going to get into the years after the show—you know the sad story already. What I do want to do is leave you with a sense of what it felt like to be among the three thousand strong in Carnegie Hall that one magical evening of 20-plus songs.

(In a sense, words will have to do. Fields was only able to persuade Garland's record company to audiotape the proceedings that night because they thought they'd never be able to get her into a studio with any regularity. But, except for a few precious seconds caught surreptitiously by a fan that night, contained in this YouTube excerpt, no visual record remains of that evening.)

Garland had true believers in the audience that night, but she made even more, including Mike Nichols. Still a comic partner of Elaine May, not yet a film and stage director, Nichols was unprepared for what he saw, according to what he told Kaplan for the Vanity Fair piece:

“Everybody loved Judy Garland, and I liked her, but I wasn’t obsessed with her. Then she comes out and she’s like on fire from the first moment. You just thought, Holy shit! What is this? I don’t remember what she sang when. I just remember that our jaws dropped, because she seemed to be singing these songs for the first time, which of course was her gift anyway. We kept clutching each other and gasping and cheering and yelling and carrying on.”

Song Lyric of the Day (Together in the Holidays, “If the Fates Allow”)

“Through the years
We all will be together,
If the Fates allow,
Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow,
And have yourself a merry little Christmas now.”—“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” music by Ralph Blane, lyrics by Hugh Martin (1944)

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is the climax of Meet Me in St. Louis, the Vincente Minnelli musical which opened on this date in 1944. The lyrics, sung by Judy Garland to a tearful Margaret O’Brien, were reworked by Martin at the strong urging of the older star, who said people would think she was a monster for singing such sad words (“Faithful friends who were dear to us/Will be near to us no more”) to a little girl.

Martin lightened up the song even further for Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album, A Jolly Christmas. Nevertheless, an ineffable melancholy continues to cling to it, no matter which version is sung.

Several years ago, one of my uncles—who, sadly, passed away in October—told me how much “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” meant to his generation, and particularly to his family, who had their youngest son serving in the South Pacific in World War II. One line particularly struck home, he recalled: “If only in my dreams.”

The Blane-Martin song came from the same era and, I think, from the same pressures. The lyrics constantly employ equipoise: “here” versus “miles away,” “olden days” versus “now,” “happy” versus “troubles.”

But for anyone undergoing a transition—including watching my uncle’s generation pass from the scene—the song hinges, like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” on one line: “If the Fates allow.” As she sang, Garland—for all her youth and considerable show-business savvy—sensed that the song depended on contingency and transience. Among the many songs she sang throughout her career, this would rank among the half-dozen with which she is most associated.

In its nostalgia for a gentler time and its tentative, fragile optimism, Meet Me in St. Louis and its most heart-tugging song are more than just holiday evergreens; they’re prime, poignant pieces of Americana. More than a few people know what it’s like to “muddle through somehow” amid the noise of a seemingly cheerful holiday.

This Day in Film History (Garland’s “A Star is Born” Premieres)

September 29, 1954—In Los Angeles’s Pantages Theater, the world’s first televised film premiere was held for A Star Is Born, a drama with music featuring a now-classic torch song, “The Man That Got Away.”

But for Judy Garland, making a comeback on the silver screen after too many pills, a suicide attempt and termination by long-time employer MGM, what “got away” was an Oscar for her magnificent, gutsy, career-defining performance.

By general agreement, the film is the best of the four basic treatments of the same story stretching from 1932 to 1976. 

But for nearly 30 years after its release, most people did not realize just how classic it was, because Warner Brothers deleted nearly 30 minutes from the running time after the premiere to boost the number of showings per day and its box-office receipts.

The minutes cut were not just any minutes, either. Maybe if director George Cukor were around, he’d either have been able to plead his case or, at least, snip out the least essential portions from the original 181 minutes. 

But, like Orson Welles during the cutting of The Magnificent Ambersons, he was far away on location with another project. He could do nothing but howl as the studio took a meat cleaver to a film as much a landmark to him (his first musical and color film) as it was to Garland.

Notice that I wrote it was as much a landmark to Cukor as to Garland, not that it was as important. Give the lady credit: Even while still a 20-year-old studio ingénue, not a worn-out veteran dismissed as a shaky has-been by many in the industry, Frances Gumm/Judy Garland sensed an affinity with Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester.

On December 28, 1942, she played the role for a 60-minute straight-drama version on the Lux Radio Theater. Shortly thereafter, she began advocating to MGM the idea of a movie musical based on the story.

The studio, understandably eyeing musicals as an escapist genre, pooh-poohed the idea—and, even given the talents enlisted for the project a decade later (not just Garland and Cukor, but also costar James Mason, screenwriter Moss Hart, lyricist Ira Gershwin and composer Harold Arlen), they were right to wonder if they’d see any money from this.

Making something artistic—even truthful—was another matter entirely.

The cut footage in the ’54 version testifies to the filmmakers’ complicated, uncompromising version. As good as the numbers are, I wasn’t as upset by the loss of "Here's What I'm Here For" and "Lose That Long Face" as by the straight dramatic portion.

Some of the latter lost scenes neatly foreshadow how much Vicki Lester and alcoholic star-in-decline Norman Maine (played by Mason) will risk. More important, they make viewers realize why they’re so devoted to each other.

I’m going to play devil’s advocate just for a second: Warner Brothers was right in claiming the scenes didn’t really advance the plot. 

And God knows that modern filmmakers could learn a thing or two from notably unsentimental studio production heads about the virtue of economy.

But overall, Cukor was right: less really was less in this case. Cukor subscribed, at least here, to Frank Capra’s contention that every film needs one scene that doesn’t advance the plot but makes you care about the characters. 

The missing scenes from A Star Is Born do precisely that.

In one crucial sequence, Maine convinces Esther to quit the jazz band and come to Hollywood for a screen test he’ll arrange. 

But the actor has been whisked away to shoot on location, and Esther has to battle unemployment and unsympathetic film personnel to find him.

Instead of becoming an overnight sensation, we now see, Vicki has had to pay her dues. And, despite the generosity he’s displayed, we see enough hints of Norman’s unreliability to know that there will be significant trouble in this relationship.

One can see why Norman loves Vicki, all right—in the three-minute sequence (still in the butchered version of the film) where she belts out “The Man That Got Away,” she invests the intimate setting of a smoky after-hours nightclub with enough passion to fill an arena. She may be young, but she has heart.

But why Vicki would be interested in him is another matter. 

His downward trajectory has already been well established in the opening sequence, when the drunken actor misbehaves at a charity event and is only saved from worse embarrassment by Vicki’s adept improvisation of getting him into her act. Getting together with him, then, is already stupid, and might well be crazy.

The missing minutes supply her motivation. At first glance, they would seem to be the polar opposite of the “Man That Got Away” sequence—an extended montage in several locations, rather than one, continuous take in a single tightly controlled frame, as with the song. But I would argue that they combine to create a common metaphor.

With the small jazz combo backing her in the song, Vicki feels comfortable enough to cut loose, to let her emotions out and take chance. It’s an absolute necessity in the entertainment world, we’re about to discover.

Beneath the love story of A Star Is Born is a savage dissection of Hollywood—a community, we’ll soon find out, that does not, unlike its boast at the opening charitable event, “look after its own.” 

It’s capricious in evaluating raw young talent, then unforgiving of veterans' mistakes. To preserve your career, your ego, even your sanity in this environment, you need a cocoon.

Vicki finds it—briefly—in a creative way among the supportive jazzmen that night, but she needs it in her personal life. That’s what Norman tries to provide, and that’s why, when his world shatters, viewer sympathy is on his side.

Twenty-nine years later, film historian-detective Ronald Haver tracked down all but five of the missing minutes. With a largely complete audio track but only some footage, he used stills to flesh out the story.

We now have at least a bit of a sense what the audience in the Pantages saw in Garland’s performance: not only that this magical voice remained intact from her MGM days, but that she was an actress of power and depth.

In the scene where she asks the sympathetic studio boss played by Charles Bickford why Norman is so intent on destroying himself, her delivery is informed by her own experiences. She is really channeling why she felt so intent on wrecking her life.

Warner Brothers ended up damaging only themselves by deleting the footage from the film.

True, the movie ended up more than doubling its initial $2.5 million budget, but the studio might have been able to recoup more—and preserve intact a classic, in the bargain—if they hadn’t trimmed these scenes that showcased Garland’s acting talent.

Instead, the Academy Award for Best Actress that year went to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl. Kelly would go on to deliver better, more luminous performances (e.g., Rear Window) in her short career. But that ended up being Garland’s last best chance at the Oscar. 

Groucho Marx spoke for many when he sent her a telegram saying it was “the greatest robbery since Brink’s.”

This Day in Film History (Judy & Mickey Put on a Show at “Wizard of Oz” NYC Premiere)

August 17, 1939—For a day, Hollywood’s moviemaking factory turned into a movie promotional factory. With its musical extravaganza of the season, The Wizard of Oz, having already exceeded its $2 million budget by 50%, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—the studio that trumpeted in its motto that it had “more stars than there are in Heaven”—decided to use two of its younger ones to pump up sales.

The Wizard of Oz already had its “unofficial premiere” at the Strand Theatre in Oconomowoc, Wisc., on August 12, and its “world” premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood three days later. Now, MGM had flown Mickey Rooney, the star of its popular “Andy Hardy” series, and Judy Garland, the 17-year-old ingénue with the amazing voice, playing Dorothy on film, to plug The Wizard of Oz in the Big Apple.

I hadn’t realized just how huge an event this premiere was till I read Horatia Harrod’s piece in Britain’s Daily Telegraph nearly two weeks ago. I’ve always thought that the line I stood on for Star Wars when it came out was the most interminable I ever encountered, but that pales next to the details that Harrod unearthed about the one at Loew’s Capitol Theatre in New York for The Wizard of Oz:

* Lines were already forming at 5:30 a.m. outside the theater.

* On the sidewalk outside the 5,230-seat theater, 15,000 people were waiting for the box office to open at 8:30 am.

* Sixty cops exercised crowd control outside MGM’s flagship theater throughout the day.

* By the last performance that evening, 37,000 people had witnessed the movie in that one spot.

MGM wasn’t taking any chances with a movie that, during production, looked snake-bitten (Margaret Hamilton had been sidelined for six weeks because of severe burns from an onset accident, and Buddy Ebsen suffered such a severe reaction to his Tin Man makeup that he’d been forced to withdraw from the role). The double-teaming of Garland and Rooney highlighted two of the studio’s most winning (though not to directors) stars.

With Babes in Arms, the third (out of eight) collaboration between Garland and Rooney, set for release in several weeks, you could almost see the wheels spin in studio honcho Louis B. Mayer’s head: Why not, in effect, beat the publicity drum for two flicks?

A great idea—on the surface. Problem was, the studio was about to demonstrate that the title of a prior Garland-Rooney film, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, was mistaken.

Maybe the most famous exchange from Babes in Arms came when Rooney’s singer-musician character had a brainstorm: “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!”

“We can use my Dad’s barn!” Judy says, matching him every step of the way.

On the set was a bit different.

Rooney wasn’t the problem. The man, then as now, was a force of nature.

But Garland needed special handling—precisely what she wasn’t getting. Keeping up with Rooney during the Babes in Arms shooting had severely taxed her physical resources. Only starting the second year of her career, she was already receiving strong hints from the studio brass that she try diet pills to maintain weight consistency throughout production.

Garland did as she was told, as she now did when MGM wanted her and Rooney to introduce each screening—and perform energetic song-and-dance routines—before each one. The Lowe’s audiences ate it up.

Garland’s run was extended for a third week. It proved too much for the star, who at one point collapsed from exhaustion.

Think this taught MGM a lesson? Think again.

If you want graphic visual evidence of how the studio ran its most valuable female musical-comedy star into the ground, then rent the DVD of Annie Get Your Gun, made a decade later. Betty Hutton was handed the role of Annie Oakley when Garland’s diet-pills-and-amphetamines regimen led to a physical collapse and her withdrawal from the Irving Berlin musical.

Special features of the DVD include Garland’s three outtakes (she’d recorded the vocals in their entirety for the soundtrack already). They’re painful to watch. Time and again, the star attempted another take, but she looked utterly wan, spent and bewildered.

By 1950, five studio doctors were plying her with pills. But Garland’s body could no longer take the stress.

Her refusal to film Royal Wedding led the studio to suspend her for unreliability. The next day, she attempted suicide. Within 24 hours, with the exquisite tact it had shown throughout her tenure at the studio, MGM cited her suicide attempt as a violation of the “morals clause” in her contract and severed the relationship permanently.

Garland would complete only three more films before her death, from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, in 1969.

Babes in Arms, on a budget of $600,000, made its money back and then some, grossing $2 million domestically. The Wizard of Oz did so, too—a decade later. As with It’s a Wonderful Life, it took TV to make the film a permanent part of the American cultural experience.

Like other youngsters in the Sixties and Seventies, I sat transfixed in front of my family’s color TV set for the annual showing of The Wizard of Oz. Much of the time, I peeked through my fingers whenever the Wicked Witch of the West terrified poor Dorothy and Toto. (In real life, Margaret Hamilton was a former kindergarten teacher who adored kids and pets.)

I haven’t seen the film all the way through in at least 35 years. I suspect if I were to do so now, my dominant emotion would not be horror at the Wicked Witch but a sweet-sad feeling of nostalgia over Dorothy’s lost Kansas.

From the first, audiences welcomed “Over the Rainbow” rapturously, along with the line that, in effect, echoes it: “There’s no place like home.”

Years after Judy and Mickey put on their show, the original fans of the movie (and their children, such as myself) grew up to learn that “home” is not only a point in space but a point in time, when the people we have loved were not just here but physically and emotionally whole—and, for that reason, the concept exists now only as a gulp in the throat.

This Day in Film History (Judy Garland, Incomparable Entertainer, Dies)

July 22, 1969—Her death in London through an accidental overdose of sleeping pills only meant that the life of Judy Garland had come to an end. Her legend, though, burns as brightly as ever.

MGM started Garland on her untimely end more than a quarter century before by putting her on a regimen of diet pills, inadvertently hastening the departure of their brightest female musical-comedy star.

Garland’s ensuing pill addiction and mental instability made her famously unreliable and, at times, nightmarish to bear around even for those who craved her friendship and love. Several years ago, on Larry King’s show, Elaine Stritch related how hosts had to be careful in inviting the singer over to a party--if she went to the bathroom, she might wipe out the medicine cabinet single-handedly.

The singer was probably correct, however, when she noted that the only person she ever hurt by her mistakes was herself—or, as she put it far more memorably in an interview with Barbara Walters two years before her death, “The only mistake I ever made, the only harm I ever did, was sing ‘Over the Rainbow.’”

Most Garland photos I’ve seen on the Web capture her in her twenties and even teens, at her most fresh-faced and innocent. But the one accompanying this post shows her (in a duet, of course, with the young Barbra Streisand) in an episode of her short-lived variety series—President Kennedy’s favorite show. More important, she was successfully waging (no doubt helped by a rekindled love affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer) a struggle to endure and prevail over misfortune and depression.

An estimated 20,000 mourners streamed through the Frank Campbell funeral home at 81st Street in New York to view the star in her glass-enclosed coffin. Millions more, alone or in small groups, wept while watching on TV or discussing it among themselves—including a small group at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.

How many of these men knew that Garland had given her heart to three gay men—her father and two of her ex-husbands, Vincente Minnelli and Mark Herron? No matter—in their view, her heartache somehow echoed their own. When police came to raid Stonewall, as they had done countless times before, the gin-and-grief-sodden habitués rioted, sparking the gay rights movement in the United States.

Her influence was, in this instance, incendiary, but not, I would argue, more than her talent. If I have to tell you about that, you’re probably a lost cause—though I suppose that, if you want to learn the full extent of it, renting out a DVD of her can’t hurt. Everybody knows about the full litany of her physical and mental problems.

But a good reason for writing this blog, I figure, is to inform (or remind) people of often-forgotten aspects of a life. Here are some items you might want to look at sometime showing a different side of Garland:

* All in Good Time, by veteran deejay Jonathan Schwartz, in which the son of Great American Songbook composer Arthur Schwartz offers up the briefest but most indelible of cameo appearances in his memoir by Garland, who visited the young boy upstairs in his room to sing him a lullaby: “Over the Rainbow”—“just for me,” Schwartz writes.

* Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, an acclaimed 2001 TV movie featuring a touching Tammy Blanchard as the young Garland and Judy Davis, in an all-stops-out performance, as the older, pill-popping, eternal-comeback entertainment powerhouse.

* American Masters: Judy Garland—By Myself, a PBS documentary featuring recorded commentary on her life, made for a projected memoir that never came to pass, by none other than Garland herself.

A YouTube snippet which demonstrates one of the oft-forgotten aspects of Garland’s career—her tremendous sense of humor. (In this case, she relates how a moth flew into her moth during an outdoor performance of “Over the Rainbow.”)

This Day in Music History (Birth of Great American Songbook Fixture Harold Arlen)

February 15, 1905 – Twin sons were born to Buffalo cantor Samuel Arluck and wife Celia. The larger of the two boys died the next day, while the smaller, four-pound twin lived and was given the name Hyman, that of his dead brother. 

At age 19, having taken up jazz instead of the Hebraic melodies and Italian operas his father favored, the cantor’s son adopted a new name for his first copyrighted melody: Harold Arlen.

Who would have thought that a hackneyed story like the Al Jolson film The Jazz Singer could echo real life? 

Yet, no matter what elements of environment, genetics, and ambition could have produced his alchemy of talent, the fact remains that Harold Arlen composed for stage and screen, in a career spanning five decades, more than 400 melodies, many of which have entered the Great American Songbook: “Get Happy,” “Stormy Weather,” “Let’s Fall in Love,” “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” (a particular favorite of one of my friends!), “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and “My Shining Hour.”

To my mind, there are three career-defining Judy Garland musical sequences on screen: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” from Meet Me in St. Louis; “Over the Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz; and “The Man That Got Away,” from A Star is Born. Arlen was at least partly responsible for the last two. 

Though composed with two different lyricists as collaborators (E.Y. “Yip” Harburg and Ira Gershwin), both songs featured strong undercurrents of yearning and loss—qualities not only innate to Garland but also to Arlen, a decent man trapped in a long, tormented, sometimes dangerous marriage.

Perhaps the most unusual lyricist that Arlen—or, perhaps, any composer—had was Truman Capote. I first became aware of their partnership while attending a 1993 Berkshire Theatre Festival performance of Sweet and Hot, a revue of Arlen songs.

One song in the revue was “A Sleepin' Bee,” from the Broadway musical House of Flowers. It’s doubtful that Arlen’s long and fruitful collaboration with the good-natured Southerner Johnny Mercer could have prepared him for writing with Truman Capote, a man who asked, when the idea of a collaboration was broached, “Who’s Harold Arlen?” (What rock was Truman sleeping under when The Wizard of Oz came out?)

At the best of times, Capote was—what’s the best phrase?—high maintenance. But I could only imagine what it must have been like for Arlen to begin composing songs with a guy stuck in Rome, frantically rewriting Beat the Devil for John Huston, and forced to send lyrics by mail.

A particularly fine profile of Arlen was written by a theater critic for The New Yorker, John Lahr. If the last name sounds familiar, it should—he’s the son of Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, lending his indelible presence to the songwriter’s tunes of glory.