JUDY HOLLIDAY - THE SMARTEST
"DUMB BLONDE" IN SHOWBUSINESS
Written by Frank Rasky
From "New Liberty" magazine April, 1952
Broadway star Judy Holliday copped an Oscar for her acting in film version of Born Yesterday - but with the award came 500 weekly dilemmas for the Cinderella show-girl who achieved success the "dumb" way
With the possible exception of Edgar Bergen and his uneasy liasion with Charlie McCarthy, no stage personality has a greater hidden fear of his own stage creation than Judy Holliday has for that dumb blonde, Billie Dawn. Like Bergen, Judy had moments when she would like to take her alter ego aside and gently throttle it.
Judy Holliday, of course, is the enormously talented, much publicized Cinderella girl of 30, who last year won a Hollywood Academy Oscar, the Golden Grail of showbusiness that now entitles her to demand $200 thousand a film.
Billie Dawn, on the other hand, is the lovable, equally publicized bird-brain whom Judy portrayed for five years on Broadway, on radio, and in celluoid. For the edification of those few isolated souls who have not yet met her, this character has emerged as a genuine, blown-in-the-bottle piece of Americana.
When he first introduced her in his play in 1946, Garson Kanin merely announced in his stage directions: "ENTER BILLIE DAWN. She is breathtakingly beautiful and breathtakingly stupid." Billie turns out to be an ex-Follies chorine and junk tycoon's moll, minked to the teeth. She has the lowdown genteelisms of a floozy ("Wanna wash your hands or somethin', honey?"), the sassy inflections of a Brooklyn hellion ("Do me a favor, will ya, Harry? Drop Dead!"), and the hip-revolving sexiness of a Mae West ("Lemme ask ya. Are you one of these talkers, or would you be interested in a little action?"), who is suddenly exposed to culture ("This country belongs to the people that inhibit it!").
In short, this wondrous ignoramus is a kind of work of art, a modern Shaw's Pygmalion with a heady American accent added.
As the Svengali who evolved this new American institution, Judy Holliday, a shrewd businesswoman, faces a delicate problem. She is in danger of being swallowed up by her alter ego, and can do little about it. At least, when Edgar Bergen wearies of Charlie McCarthy, he can throw the saucy splinterhead into a trunk and play Mortimer Snerd. But Judy's personality is so inextricably confused in the public's affections with that of Billie Dawn that few will allow her to untangle the schizophrenia.
"I've been offered 500 new scripts in the last five years," says Judy morosely, "and just about all the leading characters in them are chippies off the same old block. Even the revivals I'm offered make me out a scatterbrain or a prostitute. Plays like Dulcy, Peg O' My Heart, The Late Christopher Bean and Rain...I begin to feel I've been typed Billie Dawn for life.
"Now, don't get me wrong," she adds hastily. "Billie was a darned good dame. Honest. Brave. Nobody's fool. And I'm duly grateful to her. But this thing can go on forever!" She begins mimicking. "I can see it all now: Billie Dawn meets Tarzan. 'Me Tarzan. You Billie.'"
Judy's admirers have already displayed their emphatic refusal to accept her on any other terms, except as a reincarnation of the dim-witted hoyden. Typical of the some 500 fan letters she gets a week is the one that begins, "We think your voice is the funniest thing we've heard. We don't know if it's your real one, but we don't want to hear any other."
Her professional plight is reflected in the reviews of her most recent stage role, Georgina, which she performed in the revival of Elmer Rice's comedy, Dream Girl, last May at the New York City Center. A sort of female Walter Mitty, the role calls for Judy to imitate a tour de force variety of characterizations, including a mother giving birth to twins, a murderess, a great authoress, and a star actress doing Portia.
Typically, the critic for Billboard magazine complained he didn't like the comedy because, "It is obvious throughout that Judy is deliberately avoiding any mannerism of speech or gesture which would identify her with the Billie Dawn school of thought." On the other hand, the critic for Variety loved the play precisely because, "There's more than a trace of the Born Yesterday doxy left in Miss Holliday's portrayal of the Dream Girl dame who reveries about romance."
***
What's the secret of Judy's universal appeal as she wiggles and whinnies in the role of Billie Dawn? I asked Dr. Helen Hall Jennings, author of Leadership And Isolation, and psychologist at Columbia University.
"In a Puritan society like ours," says Dr. Jennings, "Billie Dawn serves a therapeutic purpose as well as apparent entertainment. She makes sex both winning and acceptable on its own terms, rather than a process to be dressed up in a masquerade costume.
"Billie appeals to men because she brings out the elements of wonderment and honesty into her relationships with men in a full-blown way. She uses the kind of warm, confidential and forthright responsiveness men would like to show themselves when introduced to a member of the opposite sex.
"Billie appeals to women for two reasons. Since women in our society are expected not to initiate a direct declaration of affection for a man, it is releasing at least to see it expressed without hesitation via Billie. And not only does she even up the score by expressing what she feels when ordinarily such priority rights go to men only - she outdares men in wholehearted fearlessness in the realm of love and sex."
While the critics wrangle over how much of Billie Dawn there is in Judy's performances onstage, many other people are sure she must be nothing but a dumb hussy offstage. Not long ago, an old friend of Judy's family sat in front of two dowagers who were viewing Born Yesterday at a movie house.
"Whoever she is," he heard one of the shocked biddies mutter, "she must be a bad girl. No good girl would know how to walk that way."
The family friend turned about to stare at them icily. "She is not bad," he exclaimed, with seething indignation. "Her mother is a piano teacher!"
Actually, Judy Holliday is the complete antithesis of Billie Dawn. She is as much the addlepated blonde in real life as Charlie Chaplin is an addlepated tramp.
In the first place, she is not even blond. Her hair is colored a light, brassy brown, and worn in an unswept, shortcropped fashion, as though she were a mad pixie. It is very fetching, too, so much so that New York hair stylists have introduced a "Judy Holliday mop" hairdo.
Though she is so naturally pretty that she wears no lipstick on the street, Judy is by no means beautiful. "Columbia Pictures have to spend a lot of cash to make me look like a glamor puss," she told me, as she fitted on a pair of long, artificial eyebrows before a performance. That's why I'm going to wait before I go into television. I look like a dim-witted high school girl. Besides, I have bad ankles and a prizefighter's jaw."
The fact is that she presents an extraordinarily striking appearance. She has a round face with high cheekbones, squarish cast, which she believes goes back to her family's Polish origin. Her eyes are brown and sensitive, with none of Billie's glassy vacuity. Her voice is soft and modulated, completely devoid of Billie's tinny, Brooklyn squeaks.
In fact, except for a slight New Yorkerish twang, her voice might be called musical. She uses it as a skilled musican might a harp. In a serious conversation, she speaks reflectively and intelligently, considering every word for its subtle nuances, and gazes directly at the listener. Her voice then is warm and clear. But when she is in a clowning mood, her voice begins its wide range of mimicry, hoarse and rasping, or tittery and squealing, or full of scorn and anguish.
"She can turn her voice off and on like a tap," says a friend of hers at Columbia Pictures, mixing her metaphors slightly. "She just gushes talent."
Also unlike Billie, whose concept of complete happiness in life is two mink coats, she only owns one fur jacket - an old baumarten - and, thumbing her nose at Hollywood Academy conventions, she drapes her 5 foot 7 inch figure in rumpled sacks, simple blouses and scuffed shoes. "People have a hard time making me dress up to look like a classy gal," she sighs happily.
However, she tends to be quite hippy, and that does not make her happy. Only by dint of a Spartan diet (of raw carrots, hard-boiled eggs and plain meat) has she been able to lop 10 pounds off her buxom weight of 148 pounds.
"I keep dreaming I can smell veal scallopini cooking on a fire somewhere," she says, puffing hard on a Regent cigaret. "I'm always hungry. Sometimes, after a meal. I feel like Lauritz Melchior - my middle heralds me a block away."
But though she has a well rounded embonpoint, she doesn't normally trundle her shanks in the sexually alarming manner of a street wanton.
"I learned that walk by watching the girls at the Copacabana Night Club," she says. "It's the strut of any girl who's been trained to show off her body and what she's got on it. It's a movement below the hips and absolute rigidity above the hips. Very sexy."
Even if she has mastered this enticing wiggle for professional reasons, Judy could not be classified a boisterous hussy. She is, in fact, exceedingly shy. While I was interviewing her in her pink dressing room backstage, she wanted to change from her street clothes into her blue dressing-gown.
"Keep firing questions," she instructed, "But turn your back to me while I change." She paused, and added with a laugh, "And no peeking in the mirror."
This sense of prim modesty is carried over into her professional life. When she was first confronted by a close-up in Hollywood, she was terrified by the intrusion of the camera. "Each time the camera came close to me," she recalls, "I'd lower my eyelids as a protection. It was as though you were undressing, and some stranger has just burst into your room unannounced. Your natural impulse is to throw your arms up to conceal your body. Me, I dropped my eyelids."
***
Of course, the worst possible libel against the flesh-and-blood Judy is the assumption that she is as dumb as the stage trollop she imitates. "Judy," says a close friend, "is as dumb as a fox is dumb. Like Einstein is dumb. She wasn't born yesterday."
While she may not be an Einstein there's no doubt that Judy is a bonafide intellectual. It's already part of stage folklore that when she was a 10-year-old attending Public School 125 in Sunnyside, Long Island, she scored a rather frightening 172 on the Otis Intelligence Test. This is well above the gifted child bracket and safely into what psychologists mark off as "genius" territory.
Now that she is a grownup Wunderkind, Judy is reluctant to display too blatently the marks of her high I.Q. That is to say, she seems fully aware that she has a purposeful, adroit mind, but when it suits her purposes, she carefully masks her intellect behind a baby-faced stare. For example, while talking to her, I reminded her that Henry James, the philospher, had once divided people into the tender-minded and the tough-minded.
"Into what category do you fit?" I suddenly asked, hoping to get her to reveal her own impression of herself.
A startled look flashes across her features. "Why, I guess I never have considered what sort of person I really am," she said thoughtfully. Then a slight trace of the dimpled, Billie Dawn grin lit her face. "Just say my mind's a blend of the tough and tender," she said evasively.
The whim of iron hidden behind her pose of the helpless butterfly was suggested, too, when she turned to say, "It's stuffy in here. Will you help me open the window?"
Together, we hoisted the window up, and I was surprised at her strength. But no sooner was it raised, when it slammed right down again.
She looked at me with distraught helplessness. "Can you hold the window up yourself," she asked, "while I get a wooden coathanger to serve as a prop?"
"I'll try," I replied manfully.
"Gee!" she said. The smile of awed wonder she radiated was enough to flatter the ego of any masculine visitor, and sufficiently designed to make him her slave forever.
This is not to imply that Judy is a coquette. When she wants to, she can be extremely blunt, and in a most literate fashion. Speaking of a famous Hollywood producer, she flared up, "He's a tough cookie with a Napoleonic complex. Probably the most hated man in Hollywood - and believe me, that's a hard title to win in the movie colony. When an actor gets a job doing a picture for him, friends don't offer the actor their compliments. They offer their solace."
Indeed, it can be said safely that Judy, who is the most unactressy kind of movie star, shares no great love of Hollywood in general. (She once turned down offers from Bob Hope and Edgar Bergen to appear on their West Coast radio shows.) Nor is she afraid to express her Hollywood phobia in candid terms.
"The social life in Hollywood is deadly," she confides. "Go to a party and you always meet the same people there, talking about the same thing - pictures. The urgent topic of conversation is: Are you on your way up or down, on the inside or outside? You're weighed the second you enter a room. You can almost see their minds busily working: What's she wearing? What did her last picture gross? Who did she come with.
"If you don't happen to conform, you're hounded. There are always the interviews with the movie fan magazines. And always they seem to begin this way: 'I was confronted by a sparkling pair of brown eyes, and I just knew it had to be Judy Holliday.' "
She paused, then smiled. "I really mustn't say anything about the fans. I'm liable to be bombed or something. They're aggressive children. I love them all. But their lives are bounded on the one side by unrealistic movies they see, and on the other side by their imitation of the imitative stars in the movies."
***
In light of her snorting disdain for Hollywood stereotypes, it's ironical that Judy's own career is shot through with cliches of the kind that would delight the producer of a Technicolor musical.
"I'd fit into the June Allyson role," says Judy amusedly. "I was good to my mother, I dreamed the proper girlish dreams, and, by God the star did get sick, and I became the overnight celebrity. It's so pat, it's embarassing."
The only touch lacking in her life story to disturb a future Samuel Goldwyn is the regrettable absence of her birth backstage in a theatrical trunk. She was born, with only a small measure of histrionics, by the name of Judith Tuvim, June 21, 1921, in New York Lying-in Hospital, on Manhattan's upper East Side. Her mother, Helen Tuvim, a piano teacher, rushed to the hospital directly from a Broadway theater, where she had been watching Fanny Brice perform. Her father, Abraham Tuvim, a professional fund raiser for Jewish organizations, paced worriedly out in the corridor like thousands of expectant papas. (Judy's stage name was later arrived at on the basis of a free translation of the family name, Tuvim, which is part of the Hebraic term, yom tuv, meaning "holiday".)
As a toddler of four, Judy, a plump, exhibitionistic girl, was taken by her mother to ballet school, and a year later, by her father, to witness her first stage entertainment. It was to a vaudeville show at the Palace Theatre.
"I was so entranced by the ladies onstage," recalls Judy. "By their fans, and flowers, and the long dresses they wore. I thought it was the most beautiful grouping of colors I'd ever seen. From then on I wanted to be an actress and wear lovely colored costumes. It was only later, long after, I learned that there was much more to acting than wearing fans and flowers and long violet dresses."
When her family moved to Long Island, N.Y., Judy went to the movies Saturday afternoons. But she was more of a stage addict than a movie fan.
"My first play was Alice in Wonderland," she says. "I can still remember envying the little girl with the long blond hair. But I really fell in love with Laurette Taylor, when I saw her in a revival of Outward Bound. She was the greatest actress of them all. I saw her again, much later, as the faded Southern belle of a mother in Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie. I never knew her, and she never met me. Yet when she died, it was as though I'd suffered a personal tragedy."
At public school, she remembers herself as "one of those precocious, obnoxious children who read Tolstoy's War and Peace, Shaw, Barrie and Schnitzler, while my chums were going in for The Bobbsey Twins." At Julia Richman High School, she wrote plays and acted in them. (She still writes plays in her spare time, and hopes, in a dilettantish sort of way, to have one of them produced.) In 1933, she displayed her literary talents further, by winning $50 and a plaque for composing a paean to New York entitled, How To Keep The Streets And Parks And Playgrounds Of Our City Clean And Wholesome.
She was, though, less successful with shorthand writing. "I'd sit in class and watch all the silly little girls squiggling like mad. I got all confused. There was too much arithmetic. When it comes to arithmetic, I'm a moron."
On graduation, Judy tried to enroll in the playwriting courses at Yale Drama School. When this bid failed, she got a job, without pay, as switchboard operator at Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre.
"I'd hoped to learn playwriting and directing from Orson," she says. "But the nearest I got to the footlights atmosphere was when Orson popped his head into the switchboard cubbyhole - once - to say hello! I knew nothing about operating a switchboard. I'd plug all the loose plugs into the empty holes and pray like mad the right parties would somehow get connected."
All she got from this experience was a sore throat, so she went to a nearby mountain resort to recover. There she caught the attention of a borscht-circuit entertainer, Adolph Green, who was fascinated by what he remembers as "this strange, gazelle-like creature with a long neck, dimples and soft brown eyes." That Summer, she became stage manager for his company, called The Group of Six, helping them perform Chekov's one-act plays.
***
Back in New York in the Fall, Judy was caught in the rain one day in Greenwich Village, and ducked down a flight of stairs into what she assumed was a cellar. It was a fledgling night club called, hopefully, the Village Vanguard. The joint served bacon and eggs and soft drinks, and featured as entertainment local poets reading their works aloud.
"What you need is young talent," she began pleading with the proprietor, Max Gordon. "Talent like The Group of Six."
"Sold," said Gordon promptly. "If you'll take five dollars apiece."
Sadly, except for Green, The Group scoffed at performing for such a niggardly sum. Undaunted, Green rounded up a bright student at New York University he knew named Betty Comden, and a young man named Alvin Hammer, rumored to have some tenuous connection with Summer stock.
The Revuers, as they called themselves, were too impoverished to buy songs and sketches, so they wrote their own in mass collaboration. Their skits were parodies of the kind still in vogue in Manhattan night clubs. One satirized the schmalzy, Student Prince-Merry Widow sort of operetta. Another poked fun at the Joan Crawford Fan Club. Still another was notable for its offbeat lyrics beginning, "If I were I and you were you, what a wonderful world this would be."
After six months, the Vanguard acquired a liquor license, and raised the Revuers' salary to $250 a week. Their name got bruited about town, and for five years they displayed their skits at smart supper clubs like the Blue Angel, the Rainbow Room, and even Radio City Music Hall, and the New York World Fair. Ultimately, they wound up at the Trocadero in Hollywood, at one thousand dollars a week, where they hoped their shenanigans would bring movie scouts flocking.
The scouts flocked, all right, but their contracts were directed at Judy alone, not at the rest of the troupe. To Judy this was unthinkable. For weeks they played an episode trite in hundreds of musical films, but rarely performed in real life: the young ingenue nobly refusing fame and fortune rather than desert her friends, and the friends insistant that she accept.
It might still be an undecided impasse, if Twentieth Century Fox hadn't agreed to to put the entire group in a Don Ameche musical, Greenwich Village, providing Judy would sign a long-term contract. A month later, the Revuers dispiritedly found their scene had wound up on the cutting room floor, and Judy was under a binding solo contract for seven years beginning at $400 a week.
There followed a Hollywood tradition as ritualistic as the passion dance of the trumpeter swans. After panting so hard to woo her signature on the dotted line, Fox virtually neglected to use her. Judy spent most of her days tanning herself idly on the roof of her apartment overlooking the La Brea tarpits. "All that sunshine!" she says, shuddering.
She only played one bit part of importance. "That was Ruth, the Brooklyn pilot's wife in Winged Victory," she says, wincing at the memory. "But the way they made me up, I looked like his mother!"
***
Following this bleak experience, Judy crept back to New York in December of 1944, her option dropped. While Adolph Green and Betty Comden went on to sell their Broadway stage hits, On the Town and Billion Dollar Baby, she scuttled about looking for a job. Her ego sunk to a new low - until one noon somebody introduced her at Sardi's Restaurant to Herman Shumlin, the producer, who cast her as the blonde who solaces war-weary veterans in Kiss Them For Me. The show closed after 110 performances, but it won her the Clarence Derwent Award for the "best non-featured performance of the season." This netted her a little publicity, a large scroll and $500 in cash.
Six months later, Judy unemployed, was living in an apartment with her mother, aimlessly reading Actor's Cues. Then a fantastic stroke of luck occurred. Just before Born Yesterday was to open in Philadelphia, Jean Arthur, the star, came down with strep throat. Max Gordon, the producer, feverishly remembered Judy. He rushed her to Philadelphia without a tryout, attired her in Jean Arthur's discarded seven thousand dollars worth of Mainbocher clothes, and hustled her into rehearsals. Judy, who has a photographic memory, managed to fit into the role by dint of no sleep for 72 hours and a diet of benzedrine and coffee.
"In those days," recalls Garson Kanin, the author and director, "Judy changed from a bright young girl to an exhausted old woman of 60."
"I originated the character out of sheer necessity and a bit of intuition," says Judy. "They tell me I went on. But all I remember is walking in a London fog."
Everybody else remembers what happend clearly. "They had to put out the lights to clear the theater," wrote one Philadelphia critic. "Utter strangers beamed at each other across the aisles."
At the end of the performance, Judy's mother went to her daughter's dressing room to relieve her tension with a good cry. When she found the room crowded with well-wishers, she was so pent up that she said, "Oh, you weren't so hot!" Later, both daughter and mother went off together and had a good, private cry of their own.
Late in the four-year run of Born Yesterday at the Mansfield Theatre, Judy got released from the cast to go to Hollywood, to play a role in Adam's Rib with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Her talent as a comedienne was obviously sterling, but Harry Cohn, who had bought the movie rights for Born Yesterday for one million dollars in 1946, stubbornly maintained the mystic Hollywood tradition that the originators of roles should not duplicate their parts in a screen version. Instead, he began a talent search for Billie Dawn - fully as frantic as the Gone With The Wind's hunt for Scarlett O'Hara.
Judy, who cannot be jockeyed easily, badgered everyone in Hollywood to help her. "I made a bore out of myself," she recalls. "I beat everybody about the ears to talk to Harry Cohn.
"Kate Hepburn, who hates squabbles of any kind, became my special pleader. I asked Spencer Tracy, Garson Kanin, Ruth Gordon, Max Gordon, Julie and Phil Epstein, the writers. Everybody.
"I got a message finally. If I could do the test Father's Day, okay. It was very hot. The fathers came in wearing presents from their kids. They wanted to go fishing. They all hated me.
"So I did the test - the gin-playing scene. Then I heard Gloria Grahame had the part. Then Lucille Ball. Then Rita Hayworth. I told my agent, Abe Lastfogel, of the William Morris agency, about it. He said, 'The man doesn't want you for the part. He just doesn't want you. Forget about it.' "
Finally, after 28 months, 38 actresses and 10 official pronunciamentos, Columbia relented and gave her the part. Judy, after much dickering on her own part, agreed to sign a seven-year-contract - but only on the proviso that she do one picture a year, so that she could continue acting for the stage on Broadway. Cohn has already acquired the Anita Loos comedy of some seasons back, Happy Birthday, for her next picture. But when it was suggested that she might also play the movie version of another dumb blonde, Lorelei Lee, in another Anita Loos Broadway success, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Judy protested vehemently.
"It may sound old-fashioned," says Judy briskly, "but I've seen Carol Channing play the part magnificently on Broadway. And the role, I feel, is made for her. I once fought for the privilege of doing the movie counterpart of an original stage role I created. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, I still haven't changed my mind about that principle."
Judy dislikes talking about her acting ability. "It's so egocentric," she says. "You know, like the actor who met a friend and just talked and talked and talked. Then he said, 'We've talked enough about me. Now let's talk about you. What did you think of my last performance?' "
However, she does unbend sufficiently to say she'd like to play the role of Ophelia some day; also to explain what she considers the difference between tragic and comic acting. "For tragedy," she says, knitting her brows while she considers her words, "you need great intensity and the ability to project feelings with great emotion. But for comedy, you need a more detailed kind of technique.
"First of all, you need to know what a joke is. Actually, a lot of people don't understand jokes. They don't know how to tell a joke, or develop a joke, or appreciate the oncoming of the point of the joke. A comedienne also has to know when to walk away from a line, or come up on it. And she must do all of this within the character; without letting the audience become aware of her tricks. For example, in Born Yesterday I played down the obvious laughs. I walked away from them. That made the audience feel superior, as though they had caught on to a very subtle joke, and so they laughed all the harder. In short, a good comedienne has to be good at playing tricks. She's a trickster."
Her fellow actors admire Judy's timing and facility with comic details, but they are a trifle wistful about her flair for stealing scenes. This trick is based on her knack for breaking a speech in the middle, which works wonderfully for her, but is likely to leave others onstage with nothing to do and feeling a little foolish.
"Honest," says Judy defensively. "I don't try to steal scenes. I just get wrapped up in the character. My instinct is to turn my back to the audience. Really it is."
"Yes," one actor who has played with her agrees, "that's true." Then he sighed and added, "But there's something so magnetic about her back."
***
Away from the stage, Judy tries to keep her mind off acting entirely. She is married to David Oppenheim, a six foot, rugged, former clarinetist, who is now recording director for the Masterwork Division of Columbia Records.
"Leonard Bernstein, the composer, introduced me to Judy some 11 years ago," recalls Oppenheim. "She was playing at Cafe Society Downtown. I guess it wasn't love at first sight. But we looked at each other and sort of made a note of it. I called her up once, but got no response."
"You called me up at two in the morning and said, 'Don't you want to take a walk?' " says Judy. "No wonder I didn't respond."
"When I was in the Army in Germany," Oppenheim continued. "Judy was in Kiss Them For Me, and I saw her picture in Life. I told everyone she was my girl friend."
"Everyone but me," protests Judy, demurely.
They met again in 1946, and were married January 4, 1948.
There is no doubt that they are happily married. Judy says she admires him for his abilities as "a latent director." And some months ago, on The Big Show radio program, she gave Tallulah Bankhead her considered opinion of women who are married to their careers.
"Better get a divorce," said Judy unequivocally. "You can't warm your feet on the back of a microphone."
Though she stole the limelight every time she appeared on Tallulah's show, both are on admiring terms. "We make such good foils for each other," says Judy. "I understand she broke her coccyx when she was a small girl. Maybe that's why she's such a wonderful eccentric."
The Oppenheims live unpretentiously in an apartment on the third floor of an ancient red brick building on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. The rooms are furnished with odd items Judy and her husband have picked up at auctions and junk stores. Their bar is a massive, early American cobbler's bench, their coffee table a farmer's wheat winnowing tray which they've put legs on and scraped and waxed themselves. Recently, they have been engaged in painting a 1790 farmhouse which they have acquired near Monroe, N.Y., about 50 miles from Manhattan. It contains newly installed plumbing, but no telephone, and they have been lugging all sorts of early-vintage furniture there in their modest automobile.
Judy prides herself on doing her own cooking. When she shops in the Italian open air market-place on Bleaker Street in Greenwich Village, she goes about disguised as a housewife, wearing a coat and hood to hide her identity. Her husband dotes on Chinese food, which she cooks for supper at 5:30 p.m. before going off to the theater. Both of them like exotic drinks, like Sumatra Snifter, Java Grop and "martinis made with gin over which a very old cork of a Vermouth bottle has been placed." In her leisure, she does double-crostic puzzles from the Saturday Review, and divides her time reading Proust and going on detective story binges, during which she may read several whodunits in a night.
***
Except for two possible obstacles, Judy has a brilliant future ahead of her. For one thing, she is worried about the repercussions on her career as a result of claims of the Un-American Activities Committee that she has belonged to several liberal organizations, and hence is a radical. Judy has signed a notarized statement that she "is not, and never has been a member of the Communist Party." But despite this signature (which would leave her open to charges of perjury if not true) a few American Legion headline-grabbers have been vilifying her by means of distributing malicious pamphlets.
"I can't understand why these people are trying to persecute me," she says. "I've always been a-political. A political nobody. If anything, the vilification of these bigots has awakened me into an awareness now of the need to fight these fascist-minded persons wherever they appear in our democracy. Just like Billie Dawn. It's hard enough, trying to be good, earn a living, and be creative, without fearing these smearers of reputations."
She is also worried that it may take a few years before people will recognize her as an actress, instead of typing her as "that dumb blonde". But that's one worry thay may soon be dissolved for in her latest, and recently completed, film, The Marrying Kind, Judy has her first solo starring role.
"And this picture isn't a comedy," emphasizes Judy. "Not at all. It's a quiet love story about two people who've been married for seven years. I've even got a little daughter in it, played by cute, seven-year-old Susan Hallaran."
The Marrying Kind brought together the same success-combination which put Born Yesterday on celluoid - Director George Cukor and man-and-wife writing team, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon. It also brought Judy a new leading man: the newly-christened John Harrison, a gravel-voiced, burly fellow, who was credited as Aldo Da Re in Saturday's Hero.
With the movie finished, a somewhat slimmer Judy has been loafing around enjoying the company of her husband and reading scripts for a possible Broadway play. Between-times, discussions are still going on between Judy and NBC concerning a radio drama series, A Girl Named Gert. But the discussions have reached a Korean-like impasse, over which floats the specter of Billie Dawn. For NBC - with Judy's dumb blonde creation in mind - want to make the drama's heroine a reflection of Billie Dawn; Judy of course, wants it to be a role that makes her something better than a loveable moron. All hands at NBC are looking on, waiting to see which party wins in the verbal tug-of-war.
But no matter how horrified Judy may be at being typed, her parents have no such qualms.
"Whenever I phone my folks and learn they're not home," Judy says laughing impishly, "I know immediately where they are. They're at the movies - seeing me in Born Yesterday for the twenty-fifth time as that cursed wench Billie Dawn!"
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