AN INTIMATE TALK
WITH JUDY HOLLIDAY
Written by Betty Randolph
From "TV and Movie Screen" magazine May, 1955
The first time she took her act into a night club, a good many years ago, Judy Holliday used to go out back and be violently ill before every performance. “I didn’t love acting then,” she says moodily, “I hated it.”
”Then why did you stick at it?”
”Necessity. I had to. It was the only way I had of earning money while I was trying to save enough to go back to school and study writing and directing.”
But this we point out is contrary to all the laws and rules of success. Nobody, the copybooks tell us, can possibly be successful at something she doesn’t enjoy doing, and Judy didn’t need to be reminded that she’s not only successful, she’s phenomenal.
Judy opened her eyes wide in the dumb-blonde stare that’s practically her trade mark. “Oh,” she said, “I didn’t say I like acting now. I love it. And I’m glad I had to stick at it, I’m glad I had no choice. Because if you have to do something every day of your life you’d be a moron if you didn’t get pretty good at it. And when you get good at something, you begin to like it. When you begin to like it, you really pitch in and work and before you know it, you’ve got it licked.”
If it sounds a little confused, it isn’t when you hear Judy explaining it. Because Judy Holliday is probably one of the least confused people you’ll ever meet. She’s smart enough to have finished high school with honors when she was just fifteen. She’s smart enough to draw a curtain over her personal life and keep it there, without offending anyone or seeming temperamental. She’s smart enough to have read “Born Yesterday” once over lightly and know that it was going to be a smash hit and that if she landed the role of the dumb blonde, she‘d be made. Judy’s also a realist from the ground up. She appreciates praise but can see through flattery and she doesn’t like it. She’s also not sure she’s going to like the role that Columbia Pictures has selected for her next---that of an old lady in “Solid Gold Cadillac,” the part created on the stage by Josephine Hull. But she’s willing to go along with the team that’s produced such smash hits as “Phffft,” “The Marrying Kind,” “It Should Happen To You” and “Adam’s Rib.”
Miss Holliday insists that the credit for her incredible success in movies is due to her good luck in having been able to get George Cukor to direct and Garson Kanin to write all but the last, which was written by George Axelrod. She's also smart enough to limit herself to one picture a year so that the public won't get fed up with her, and she's limiting her TV appearances to three a year.
Her approach to her career is still as sensible, business-like and realistic as it was back in those night club days. And maybe part of it is still the result of necessity---of realizing that, luckily, she can make more money doing this than she could anything else. Because asked whether, if she had her life to live over again, she'd still go for acting, Judy says frankly, "I don't know how to answer that question." A pause while she thought some more, and, "No, honestly, I don't know. As a matter fact," she said, "it seems to me I never had much choice about what I was going to do. Things just happened and there I was."
Getting the coveted lead in "Born Yesterday" happened like something out of Charles Dickens' "Christmas Carol." It's the sort of sentimental, God's-in-his-heaven, all's-right-with-the-world story that press agents try to dream up to humanize their big stars. But Judy didn't dream this one up; it happened. Sitting in their big apartment on West Seventy-Second Street now, Judy can talk about it matter-of-factly, and even with a touch of humor. It probably wasn't very humorous at the time, though.
The time was Christmas Eve, 1951 [JHRC Note: This date is obviously incorrect. It was the Christmas of 1945]. Judy had been out of work for a whole year and during that year, she and her mother lived on five hundred dollars. By the time Christmas Eve came around, they had just two dollars left. Judy suggested that her mother go to a nearby delicatessen and get some food, enough to tide them over until Judy could maybe get a loan from a friend or her agent. Her mother, Mrs. Helen Tuvim, went dutifully out in search of food---and came back with a Christmas tree!
"I know that maybe it was foolish," Mrs. Tuvim reflects on it now, sitting beside Judy and reaching over to tousle her daughter's short blonde hair. "But all her life, Judy has had a Christmas tree on Christmas day. I couldn't bear to think of her not having one. So I bought a little fifty-cent tree and spent another dollar on decorations. I'm glad I did," she defends the sentimental moment now. "It gave us a lift just when we needed a lift. It reminded us of all the good times we'd ever had and we knew, suddenly, that somehow we'd have them again someday."
And what about dinner? "Oh," Judy laughed, "we sponged dinner off my uncle on Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner off another relative, didn't we, Mom?" she asked the older woman affectionately. "I'm glad she bought the tree instead of sandwiches. We'd both been feeling pretty blue, but by the time we finished trimming the tree, we felt great."
Meanwhile, Judy had been calling her agent frantically asking for a part in anything. She'd read about "Born Yesterday" in Variety, the show business newspaper, and asked her agent if there was any chance of landing the part of Jean Arthur's stand-in. But Jean Arthur already had a stand-in. Jean Arthur left the play in Boston, a couple of days after Christmas, and they sent out hurry calls for a replacement because they found her stand-in wasn't adequate. Judy got to Boston the next day, tried out for the part, and got it.
Judy and her mother had seen the last of those dark days of want and worry. The New Year broke over them in a blaze of glory, with Judy acclaimed a star the night "Born Yesterday" opened on Broadway. Judy had once more proved the sound truth of two pretty well-known bits of homely philosophy. The first is that it's all right to have the whole world against you, if necessary, as long as you have one person rooting for you, believing in you absolutely even when the going gets rough. The second is that there's no such thing as an idle dream if you're determined to work hard to make your dreams come true.
Judy had one advantage over the rest of us, perhaps, in that all of her life she has simply assumed that hard work was not a virtue but a necessity. "Of course I work hard," says Judy of that. "Why shouldn't I? Who am I to think I should get things the easy way?"
And when Judy went out of the room for a few minutes to answer the telephone, Mrs. Tuvim said of this, "When Judy was a little girl it used to be almost sad, the way she worried, the way she took on responsibility."
At one point in their hard struggle to make ends meet, Mrs. Tuvim, who made a living giving piano lessons, decided to take in a boarder, as well. The boarder was a relative of Mrs. Tuvim's, and she had a daughter about a year younger than Judy. One night, Mrs. Tuvim happened to come into the bathroom to wash her daughter's back. She was shocked to see black-and-blue marks all over Judy's arms. "For heaven's sake," she demanded, "what's happened to you? Did you fall?"
"No," said Judy, "Rebecca pinches me all the time."
"But why didn't you tell me? I'd have told her mother and---"
"That's what I was afraid you might do," Judy said worriedly. "And please don't. Because then they might move away and I know we need the money."
Judy was just nine years old at the time. That sense of responsibility toward all who are dependent upon her, helps her to explain her calm acceptance of setbacks and discouragement and, now, of her phenomenal success. It helped her to handle night club audiences and she credits her night club work for the amazing sense of timing that makes her a great actress and a superb comedienne.
"I found out they weren't there to be entertained, they were there to compete with me. At first, I tried talking and singing as loud as I could to overcome the uproar and drown out the catcalls and the rude remarks. Then I had a better idea. As their voices went up, mine went down. They found they had to strain to hear me. And since they'd paid for entertainment, it made them furious to find they couldn't hear what was going on. They stopped competing and started listening.
As a result of those years of night club work, says Judy, she found playing to an audience in "Born Yesterday" comparatively easy. "It was like being trained to lift three pounds and suddenly finding you only had to lift three pounds." She no longer had to outwit an audience to get their attention. There they were, quiet as mice, responsive, receptive. That's when the critics went back to their typewriters to rave about Judy Holliday's amazing sense of timing, her ability to catch your attention by underplaying a part. That's when she began being grateful for the fact she'd no choice about those night club engagements, that, sick or well, she'd had to face those rowdy or hostile audiences and make them like her.
"I suppose," she'll tell you now, "that if I could have quit, I would have, because in those days I never wanted to be an actress, the acting was something to do while I waited for a chance to study writing and directing. But I guess I was just meant to be an actress. Because," with a shrug, and with that Holliday smile that lights up her whole face and lifts the rather pensive seriousness of it for a minute, "here I am."
Where Judy Holliday is, of course, is right on top of the heap in all three media---TV, stage and movies. With her mother and young son, Jonathan Louis, she lives in a huge apartment that, she sighs, it will take her the rest of her life to furnish. But it's right near the park, which is just fine for Jonathan. When she goes to California to make a movie, Jonathan, a nurse and her mother go with her. She thinks the California climate is just wonderful for Jonathan, but for all other purposes, she'll take New York. Judy is currently reading at least four scripts a week in the hope of finding another play, but this time she'd rather do a musical so that she can break away a little from the dumb blonde roles.
An idea of the sheer skill which Judy has acquired can be gathered from the fact that during the making of her latest movie, "Phffft," Judy had a bad virus infection and was under pretty heavy sedation most of the time. In fact, after a scene was shot, Judy would totter off to bed and stay there, limp and ill, until time for the next one.
"It was the strangest sensation," she recalls, "seeing the rushes of those scenes. I couldn't even remember having done them and yet most of them were just fine. I'd made them when I was half-drugged, but I guess I just instinctively did the right thing."
It's a sort of instinctive "taking an extra beat" and Judy thinks you can learn it but that it can't be taught. She got the knack of it when she was trying to find an opening for a song or a joke when she was standing before those microphones on night club floors. And she recommends night club work to any young person who has hopes of doing comedy or, for that matter, any form of entertaining. "If you can handle a night club audience successfully," she'll tell you a trifle bitterly, "you can handle anything."
And, like her "Phffft" co-star, Jack Lemmon, Judy firmly believes that a performer who can handle comedy well can handle any role---including heavy drama.
No one, including Judy, knows quite how good a writer-director might have been lost to the world when she never got to the Yale College of Drama, but no one will argue the point that the theatrical world got a skilled, capable actress whose full range of dramatic ability probably hasn't even been tapped yet.
Off-stage, Judy doesn't go in for glamour. When I saw her for this interview, her short blonde hair was tousled and she was wearing a white brocaded dressing gown. She wore no make-up at all, not even lipstick. Judy doesn't like to give interviews simply because she doesn't honestly think she has anything particularly interesting to say about herself or anyone else---"Except my son," she interrupted herself to say here. "I could talk about him all day. He one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me."
In private life, Judy is Mrs. David Oppenheim, although it's no secret that her marriage hasn't been any too happy. Judy, like many actresses before her, is finding out that success exacts a pretty big price from everyone, in one way or another. After the early years of struggle, hard work and denial come the lush years---if you're lucky. And with the lush years come the inevitable invasions of privacy, career conflicts, long separations from those you love.
I can report that Judy has the same sort of "toy whistle" voice when she's talking to you curdled up on the sofa in her pleasant, sunny apartment that you've heard coming from your TV or movie screen. And she does the same sort of double-take before you get your answer. When you've phrased a question badly, you get the same deceptively dead-pan stare from those wide brown eyes. Then the voice, famous for its flatness, says with a childlike naivete, "I don't even know what you're talking about."
These things, which automatically combine all the ingredients of comedy, are things Judy Holliday was born with. It never occurred to her that by combining them with a fine mind, an intense seriousness of expression, and grueling hard work, she would turn them into a gold mine. She's just a little suspicious of success and some of the people success might bring into her life. She still leans over backwards to be sure people aren't going to take advantage of her or get her to say something which might sound silly in print.
And maybe, in the final analysis, that too, is the very essence of comedy; a deadly serious approach to everything, a determination to peer behind every sentence to be sure she knows what's lurking there before giving an answer. She plays it straight while the audience roars and thinks it's way ahead of her. But nobody's ahead of Judy Holliday these days.
But nobody. END
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