HAPPY HOLLIDAY

(No writing credit listed)
From "TV Guide" magazine February 26, 1955

Oscar-winning Judy is enjoying return to song-n-dance roles

     Judy Holliday, a girl of simple tastes, likes to wear slacks, eat, gabble with her friends and read Marcel Proust. She's essentially easy-going and even-dispositioned. But two things make her boil.

     One: she begins to simmer whenever someone corners her at a party and confides, "I love you in the movies. You slay me with that voice!" Two: she burns whenever someone else burbles, "I love you on TV. How did you learn to sing and dance so fast?"

     The facts are that the offscreen Judy Holliday doesn't have that voice at all. (She invented it for her role in "Born Yesterday" on the Broadway stage, used it to snag an Oscar in the Hollywood version of the play.) Furthermore---and this may come as a surprise to those who have seen her in four Max Liebman "spectaculars"---she actually learned to sing and dance before she learned to act.

     "I began my career as a song-n-dance girl at the age of four", says Judy, a tall (5-foot, 7-inch) trim (120-pound) intermittent blonde with a friendly, matter-of-fact personality, "when my mother dragged me to a ballet school and threw me in."

     Approximately 15 years later, a stage-struck, high-school-graduate Judy went to work for orotund Orson Welles---as a switchboard operator. When not pulling plugs, she and another young hopeful, Adolph Green, worked on a series of musical comedy skits they had devised with Betty Comden. The skits were sophisticated little burlesques and Holliday and Green were convinced they were terrific. For a long time they were alone in this conviction.

     One bleak day in 1938, Judy and Green dropped into a Greenwich Village hide-away called The Village Vanguard, confronted the proprietor, Max Gordon, and persuaded him to use their skits as a floor show. That marked the birth of "The Revuers," starring Holliday, Green and Comden.

     The Revuers kidded celebrities, burlesqued musical extravaganzas, offered a documentary on a man who invented a shoehorn, composed wry lyrics on the news. Judy sang, danced, played witches, princesses, chorines and maiden aunts and sometimes sold cigarettes.

     The Revuers were a hit. So when Gordon moved uptown to the Blue Angel night club, he brought the act with him, raising Judy's weekly salary from nothing to $25 a week. After appearances in posh spots, the group took off for Hollywood with a "verbal" film contract---which to quote a Goldwynism, wasn't worth the paper it was written on. Stranded, the trio resumed its night club chores.

     Eventually, Judy was offered a seven-year contract by 20th Century Fox. After joining her in one ill-fated film sequence, Comden and Green returned to New York, to become concocters of stage---and ultimately screen---musicals, like "On the Town."

     Judy stayed behind. "In seven years," she recalls, "I got two parts. The rest of the time I lay around in the sun, gradually becoming an orange."

     After seven years, Holliday left Hollywood. Back in New York, she appeared in "Kiss Them for Me," which won her a $500 award for the best supporting actress of the year. She lived on that money for six months in a furnished room. Then she got the break that made her famous.

     Three days before a new Garson Kanin comedy, "Born Yesterday," was to open in Philadelphia, its star, Jean Arthur, became ill. The producers decided to take a chance on Judy.

     She played Billie Dawn, a not-so-dumb blonde with a voice like that of a Brooklyn girl talking and eating celery at the same time. She learned the role in three days (her IQ: 172) and opened to raves.

     "Born Yesterday" ran three years on Broadway. Then Columbia Pictures bought the rights and, reluctantly, as a last resort, signed Judy to play Billie Dawn. She promptly won an Academy Award.

     Judy, who had made a few TV appearances earlier, scored last February in a Billie Dawn-type role on Goodyear Playhouse. Restored to a comedy song-and-dance trio (sometime partners Steve Allen, Dick Shawn) by the astute Max Liebman this season, she kayoed critics and viewers alike.

     However, although she has signed to appear in more Liebman "spectaculars," Judy isn't interested in TV as a full-time career. She would rather devote her time to her husband, musician David Oppenheim, their two-year-old son, Jonathan Louis, and their huge high-ceilinged apartment in New York.

     She plans more movie work for Columbia, but says Hollywood depresses her.

     "I like to eat," she wails. "Out there they don't let a girl eat."

Judy Holliday Resource Center Note: There are inaccuracies in this article, as with most articles, but one particular inaccuracy in this article I feel needs to be pointed out. References to a 7-year contract with 20th Century Fox are misleading. In late 1943, she signed a 7-year contract, which is really a 1-year guaranteed contract with six additional 1-year options that the studio may or may not choose to pick-up. In Judy's case, she was guaranteed 40 weeks pay under the original term, but Fox opted not to pick-up any of the options, thereby releasing her. I have purchased an unsigned office copy of this contract and have transcribed the text so it is easier to read. Click here to read the contract. I don't know how she can be quoted as saying she got 2 parts in seven years. She appeared in 3 films for Fox during the year of 1944 and left Hollywood immediately after being dropped by the studio in December of that same year.