JUDY AND THE "BELLS"

Written by Jon Whitcomb
From "Cosmopolitan" magazine February, 1960

Twenty-two years ago Judy Holliday was a shy, frightened telephone operator. Now she's behind a switchboard again---loving every minute of it---in the film version of her hit play, Bells Are Ringing.

For several months this winter, M-G-M's big Sound Stage 15 was turned into a slice of New York's Sutton Place for the picture Bells Are Ringing. Huge cycloramas in color of the Fifty-ninth Street bridge surrounded the terrace of a house very much like one belonging to Aristotle Onassis. Outside the drawing room, library, and dining room sets of the house stood leaning-boards supporting a number of tall, decorative young ladies whose gowns were so sleek and tight they couldn't sit down. In wheeled dressing rooms nearby, members of the cast studied lines, repaired make-up, and waited to be called for scenes. The two busiest trailers were the ones belonging to leading man Dean Martin, whose off-screen interests are golf, the horses and Las Vegas, and star Judy Holliday, who plays a marathon Scrabble game. In the setting of beige paneled walls, white carpeting, white grand piano, and views of New York's East River, a party scene was being set up for Judy's strip-tease at a party featuring "Drop That Name," one of the big song numbers from a musical which ran two years and ten months on Broadway and the road.

Two Talented Sleuths

     The idea for Bells Are Ringing came from Adolph Green's curiosity about his telephone answering service. Says Betty Comden, his collaborator on the story, "One day he and I visited the address. We were amazed to see it occupied a rather small, shabby room right around the corner from the apartment house where Adolph lived. The contrast between this squalor and the glamour of the clients gave us the basis for our story---about a telephone-answerer whose messages got her life tangled up with her customers. (Incidentally, when the musical came out, Adolph's service renamed itself 'The Bells.') We spent a year writing it, off and on, starting with two months in the spring, after which we were interrupted by a screenwriting job in Hollywood. We took it up again that fall, and Bells Are Ringing opened the following year."

     With music by Jule Styne (Gypsy) and with Judy Holliday as the star, the musical was an immediate hit. It was described by one reviewer as "the best original book show in recent history." Another declared, "Bells really bongs the golden gong!" Of its fifteen song hits, including "The Party's Over," "Just In Time," and "Drop That Name," most have been retained for the movie. Two new ones "Do It Yourself," and "My Guiding Star," were written for Dean Martin, who plays the role created on stage by Sydney Chaplin. Of the song, "Long Before I Knew You," which will be missing from the screen, Adolph says, "We have found a movie can stand only a limited number of ballads---in this case two. We are using 'It's Better Than A Dream,' which was added to the musical after it had been running a year. On the screen, a ballad has to justify itself by advancing the story, and can be used only when the plot builds to a climax."

     Green, Comden and Holliday are the celebrated survivors of a five-man group which began performing in Greenwich Village during the late thirties. Called The Revuers, they started out clowning at the Village Vanguard. Their rise was swift both in popularity and altitude, but when they were booked into the Rainbow Room, sixty floors above Fifth Avenue in the RCA Building, their combined salary was still only $250 a week. Adolph says there wasn't much left after the agent's cut.

     From the stratosphere The Revuers descended to Spivy's Roof and the Blue Angel, following this with a booking at the Trocadero in Hollywood. From there they got into the movie Greenwich Village, from which they were all snipped in the editing except for Miss Comden, who barely showed. Then the same studio signed Judy to a seven-year contract, but the career this promised fizzled out after she played a few small parts.

Three Days to Stardom

     Back in New York, Judy got a part in the play Kiss Them For Me and walked off with the Clarence Derwent Award of five hundred dollars for the best supporting actress of the year. Six months went by while Miss Holliday and her mother lived on the award money. Then Jean Arthur fell ill during rehearsals of Born Yesterday, and Judy learned the starring role on three days notice. She made history portraying Billie Dawn, the dizzy blonde, and she has not been idle since.

     The team of Comden and Green meanwhile wrote a string of musicals, including (for the stage) On the Town, Two on the Aisle, and Wonderful Town, and (for the screen) Good News, Band Wagon, and Singing in the Rain.

     Judy went back to Hollywood for Adam's Rib and remained to star in Born Yesterday, for which she won an Oscar; The Marrying Kind; It Should Happen To You; Phffft!; The Solid Gold Cadillac; and Full of Life. In Bells Are Ringing, three-fifths of The Revuers had their first professional reunion.

     Nothing could be more contemporary than the theme of Bells, with answering services now commonplace in the United States and widespread in many foreign countries. For the film, the latest thing in switchboards was supplied by the phone company, which also sent an expert to instruct Miss Holliday on the intricacies of plugging in.

Bells Gets a Beauty Treatment

     "I just faked it all on the stage," she says, "but with this fancy equipment and the camera breathing down my neck, I have to do everything just like a real operator---and read my lines too. Of course," she went on, "lots of things have to be changed when a stage show is filmed. And should be, I think. For instance, on stage Bells was rather plain to look at. This picture is sure going to be pretty. And I hope it's as funny. You can't explain just why some things we did on stage were funny, the things that weren't down on paper. There's a sort of built-in laugh meter in my head; I know when there ought to be laughs. A case in point was a sight gag in Born Yesterday, a scene where I had to shake a man's hand, only it wasn't there and I shook his shirt cuff. It was a big hit in the play, but in the movie it just didn't come off. They couldn't seem to get the right camera angle. We tried it right hand, left hand---but in the master shot it just got lost in the shuffle."

     Off duty in her portable dressing room, Judy got out her Scrabble board and invited me to sit in on a game. Director Vincente Minnelli came in and explained how he planned to handle a scene being set up on the stage. She told him how she was used to doing it and he said, tactfully, "Well, let's try it both ways."

     After he left the room, Judy sat down and shook up the Scrabble letters in a felt bag. Still thinking about Minnelli's visit, she said, "I'm a perfectionist. I can't do things over too many times to suit me. I've done four pictures with George Cukor, and he's a perfectionist. I'm afraid our producer, Arthur Freed, and Mr. Minnelli are very easy to please. They don't mind okaying things that strike me as only half right...If anybody knows the values in this play, I do. After living in it for three years, I'm the final authority on what lines ought to get laughs and how to get them."

     During the game, other observations followed. Judy on movie acting: "It's tough when Take One is technically okay and Take Two has better acting. Out here they print the first one. That's the one where we all hit the mark on the floor and who cares about the acting."

The Greatest Audience

     On Producer Freed: "Arthur is the world's greatest audience. After he saw the rushes of our song "The Party's Over," the lights went up and there he was, his eyes brimming. I've never seen such emotion on a face; I figured the make-up department had supplied him with glycerin and it was a gag. I accused him of it. But no, they were real tears. Arthur was indignant. 'I do my own crying,' he said."

     Is Judy a Method actress? "I don't have any idea. I think my acting came before my method. Well, we'll see when I get into Laurette, the play about Laurette Taylor I'm going to do in New York this spring. In it I have to go from age sixty to age fifteen and back again in flashbacks; you can see why I'm concerned. How do you do it without any changes in costume or make-up? It'll be just me and a stage. But I'm putting my faith in Josè Quintero. He'll direct it."

     Judy has a reputation for being a worrier. Before starting the film, she worried about losing fourteen pounds. Production began before she achieved this goal, and she reported for work still overweight by the emaciated standards of screen glamour. Early rushes, however, showed her fears were groundless. She looked pleasingly curved but far from plump. This started a studio rumor that she was being photographed with a special thinning technique. I asked the cameraman about this, and he said, "Absolutely not. We are using standard CinemaScope lens for standard projection. Miss Holliday requires only careful lighting and we are giving her that."

     But Judy envied the beanpole ladies decorating the leaning-boards outside her trailer. Watching a lean, statuesque brunette walk past, her wasp-waist gleaming with silver sequins, Judy exclaimed, "Look at that middle! I'd like to shoot her." Then reconsidering, "No, I wouldn't either. I've got nothing against her. I should shoot myself. They can do anything in movies, make a beauty out of anybody, except for one thing: give you a tiny waist." Then, apologetically, "I guess I don't have to tell you I don't look much like the girls around here."

     Her gloom was well-founded, considering the raving beauties M-G-M rounded up to embellish the party scene in Bells. Two brunettes for which the studio has big plans for are Valerie Allen and Nancy Walters, respectively playing the roles of Olga and The Actress. Miss Walters, who has an M-G-M contract, is a luminous, blue-eyed siren with an ethereal Garbolike quality. In the film she is seen as an exaggerated Bankhead-type stage star. Miss Allen does a role as Dean Martin's racetrack-minded girl friend, using a Brooklyn accent which she perfected, she says, after many years of kidding with it. Her Ziegfeld chassis and pixie face have inspired Arthur Freed to search for a comedy in which to show her off.

     Vincente Minnelli directs his pictures calmly, seldomly raising his voice. With the living room set full of people, he moved through the crowd, suggesting placement and attitudes, returning often to the camera boom for a look through the finder. The scene required phone-girl Judy to be ill-at-ease in this elegant throng, peering at the dresses, peeking through elbows and around butlers and maids serving drinks and canapès. Brilliant and conspicuous in her corny red dress with its cap sleeves and floating panels, she realizes that she is overdressed, and furtively begins to strip, tearing off her sleeves and bits of her skirt until she is down to a plain red sheath. Then the "Drop That Name" number begins, sung by the whole company---with Judy's lyrics showing that her grasp of celebrities is as sketchy as her wardrobe.

Judy's Inner Glow

     Actually, Miss Holliday has little to fear from the competition of willowy females. Her charm is based on the inner glow that comes from an endearing personality and an acute, infallible comic sense. Her brown eyes and round, childlike face make her seem much younger than some of her contemporaries in show business. She was born thirty-six years ago to Helen Gollomb and Abraham Tuvim, a journalist. Her real name is Judith Tuvim. (Translated loosely from Hebrew, Tuvim means 'Holy Days.') She went to school at P.S. 125, where intelligence tests rated her as a gifted child with an I.Q. of 172, and went on to Julia Richman High School. Although a telephone switchboard was to play a big part in her life later, she never mastered the one she had to operate during an early job with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. Rather hastily, she left for a mountain resort to join a troupe of young players who called themselves Six and Company. At the end of the summer, the troupe broke up and three of its members, Adolph Green, Betty Comden, and Judy Holliday went into business as The Revuers, writing their own material for songs, dances, and satirical sketches.

     In 1948, Judy married David Oppenheim, by whom she has a seven-year-old son, Jonathan. The Oppenheims were subsequently divorced. During the filming of Bells, Judy, her mother, and Jonathan occupied a rented house in Beverly Hills, but she considers her permanent residence to be an apartment in the extraordinary building on New York's Central Park West called The Dakota, so named because back in the 1800's the land it stood on was an empty plain. Judy lives happily in this thick-walled relic with its stone battlements and high ceilings, a fortification which also houses Madge Evans, Sidney Kingsley and other theatrical folk.

     In a projection room, Arthur Freed showed me a ten-minute bit of completed film. It was the sequence where Judy, having promised to wake Dean Martin by phone, goes to his apartment to find out why his line is dead. After she tries to pick the lock on his door, a gust of wind blows it open. Entering the place, she finds Dean asleep on the sofa and the phone unplugged. He wakes up and catches her crawling on her hands and knees past the sofa in an effort to plug in the phone. Suffering from hangover, he says, "I don't suppose you have a cup of coffee on you?" and she says yes, as a matter of fact, she does, and produces one steaming hot from her bag. In her pink summer dress, Judy is breath-takingly young and attractive, even streamlined. I said as much to Mr. Freed. "Tell her that, will you?" he asked. "That's the one thing she wants to hear."

"...But Did You Laugh?"

     When we returned to Stage 15, Judy was just finishing a scene. As she walked back to her trailer, I told her I had just seen her in a piece of the movie and that she looked breath-takingly young and attractive, even streamlined.

     She broke into a dazzling Holliday smile, all brown eyes, dimples, and white teeth. But only for a moment.

     Looking at me intently, she said, "Yes, but did you laugh?"