JUDY HOLLIDAY AND THE RED-BAITERS:
AN UNTOLD STORY
Written by Lee Israel
(From the "Ms." magazine December, 1976)
Judy Holliday's legacy is spare. She was a superstar on Broadway though there were only two hits and they came 10 years apart. Those who saw her as Billie Dawn in Garson Kanin's classic Born Yesterday in 1946 were touched indelibly by the humanity and the poignant hauteur and the comic genius she brought to the role of the junk dealer's mistress. Singing, dancing, and clowning in Bells Are Ringing (1956), she established a rapport that transcended content. People felt that they knew who she was: and they liked who she was.
She starred in fewer than 10 films, made between 1950 and 1960. "Born Yesterday" is the best known. The others -- "Adam's Rib," "The Marrying Kind," "It Should Happen To You," "The Solid Gold Cadillac," "Phffft," "Full of Life," and "Bells Are Ringing" -- are pleasant surprises, but for the most part, smallish, unshattering films. But she brought a dignity and bulkiness to the women she portrayed that was life-enhancing and tutorial.
She came out of a background that was in many ways archetypally Russian-Jewish. Her Grandfather on her mother's side, made epaulettes for the Czar in St. Petersburg. His wife, Rachel, was a fiery socialist. Sensing an imminent pogrom near the turn of the century, they bought the name "Gollomb" and fled to New York. He died soon after the resettlement, and she was left to raise four children alone.
The impoverished and clamorous immigrant experience turned Rachel into a bitter, tense, and brutal woman. Her daughter Helen, who bore the brunt of Rachel's disposition, married late. Because of financial problems, she and her husband, Abraham Tuvim, a fund-raiser for a variety of Jewish and socialist organizations, were compelled to remain in Rachel's home. Judy, their only child, was born in 1923.
Surrounded by verbal adults and endowed with an incredible native intelligence, Judy spoke early, grammatically, and precisely, her first phrase, according to her Aunt Maud, being a beautifully articulated "Lovely Lady."
She was mad about her deep-dimpled gangly father. And they were quite tuned-in to each other. When Judy was four, the family was vacationing in Seagate, a seaside resort in Brooklyn. They were visited by a friend who worked as the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times. He brought along his daughter. Judy's age. A knockout and a charmer. She went into an act, captivating everybody's attention, while Judy looked on mute and glum.
Abe asked her to go for a walk along the beach with him. "You're probably very upset because the other little girl is getting all the attention," he said to his plump, pensive daughter. "But you'll see, everything will turn out all right. You have wonderful qualities. It sometimes takes people a while to see them."
Abe went to Europe on a business trip. When he returned, he realized his marriage was untenable and moved out of the house. Judy was six. Father and daughter maintained some contact. When Judy was old enough, she went to him on Sundays to pick up a support check, an experience she found mortifying. She forgave him for the abandonment, but only after years of adult analysis.
Helen Tuvim was gregarious, malapropistic, distracted, and benign. Given to extremes in moods, she made the first of many suicide attempts after Abe left her, awakening Judy, who smelled gas in the apartment. She pulled her mother's head away from the stove and expended much of her energy thereafter keeping it away.
Judy grew sturdily into an independent, responsible child, though there was always a langour, a heaviness about her. She learned early on to ignore her grandmother and to fend off any and all intrusions upon her own very real sense of self. She read voraciously and, later on, called the need to do so "eye hunger." On an Otis I.Q. test she scored an amazing 172. Her talent was words, language and its possibilities, and, by extension, wit. She wrote plays in school and acted in them.
She had her cap set on attending Yale Drama School, but was a year too young for admission when she graduated high school. Helen was by this time teaching piano to disadvantaged children at the Henry Street Settlement. To supplement their income, Judy went to work that summer at the switchboard of the Mercury Theater, where she several times disconnected Orson Welles. Then a lucky, almost storybook thing happened to her.
In the late summer of 1938, she was hanging around in Greenwich Village. Rain began to fall and she ducked into a nightclub called The Village Gate. Owner Max Gordon, taken with her wistful beauty and obvious intelligence, mentioned to her that he was looking for new talent for his fledgling club.
Judy immediately thought of Adolph Green, a plump, disheveled musical genius from the Bronx, whom she had met the year before at a summer resort. Adolph had been there with a small repertory company for which Judy had volunteered to do some work. In an uncharacteristic burst of aggressiveness, she suggested to Gordon that she and Adolph might put something together, perhaps some mini-musical reviews with emphasis on social commentary.
Judy and Adolph brought in three other talented acquaintances: Betty Comden, the bright, demure daughter of a lawyer and a schoolteacher; Alvin Hammer, a monologist for a local radio station, and John Frank, who had been performing with a group that sang folk songs from the Ukraine. They called themselves The Revuers. Their audition was successful.
They were highly original, among the first to perform in the tradition of the European cabaret. Writing their own material, they did songs and sketches about the Popular Front, hitting Fascism, Franco, Hearst, and the political witch-hunters of the day ("Never Say Dies").
Playing the naive, the overwhelmed, with her immense fawnlike eyes and her brown hair piled up, Judy's talent for comedy was quickly perceived. This despite the fact that she was terrified of the audience and threw up regularly before performances.
The Revuers soon became the darlings of the New York intelligentsia. People like S.J. Perelman, Lillian Hellman, William Shawn, Heywood Hale Broun, Jr., and E.J. Kahn came to see them. Their notices were glowing. They played other village spots and signed a radio contract.
New Yorker writer E.J. Kahn, one of the host of people who fell a little in love with Judy then, remembered her being less concerned with "image" than either Betty or Adolph. "I don't think she cared about that," he said. "She had some fundamental understanding that she was a person of quality and that whatever happened, she would be herself."
To Helen's vast chagrin, Judy, barely 18, moved out of their apartment during her stint with The Revuers and lived for a time with a woman she met while vacationing in Woodstock. The woman was Judy's first lover. They lived in a chaotic apartment with big windows through which a flock of intrusive pigeons regularly flew. The relationship was a good one in spite of Judy's constant preoccupation with Helen's well-being and the ubiquity of her relatives who, like the pigeons, dropped in often and unannounced.
The sexual part of their relationship ended when Judy discovered that her attraction to men was stronger, and the pain was assuaged by her move to California. They remained close and loyal friends.
The Revuers left for Hollywood to appear in a movie based on the radio's "Duffy's Tavern." The movie was never made and they accepted instead a booking at the Trocadero. It was an ideal showcase. Within weeks, there were offers from every major studio. The interest, however, was only in Judy. She refused out of loyalty, but the phone kept ringing and the money offers increased. The group implored her to accept. She finally signed a seven-year contract with Fox, but only with the proviso that the studio use them all in her first picture. It was called "Greenwich Village." And it was the pits. While her friends returned to New York, Judy stayed on to work out her contract. She changed her name at that point. Tuvim, in Hebrew, refers to a "holiday."
She hated Hollywood, learned to deplore the sun, and was misused horribly by Fox, who had it in mind that she might eventually replace Betty Grable and Alice Faye. The studio jettisoned that scenario after two movies: "Something For the Boys" and "Winged Victory," both made in 1944. In the latter, she played one of a group of women who sat around and moped while their fly-boys flew. She was called "Brooklyn" and was compelled to speak lines like: "If he's more than fifteen minutes away from Prospect Park, he's miserable." In between movies, she sat and stared at the La Brea Tar Pits.
An episode that involved Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of Fox, did not further her career. One day she decided to talk to him about the roles she was getting. Zanuck, a short man with a mustache who smoked long compensatory cigars and swung a sawed-off polo mallet habitually, led her from his front office into his bed-ridden, zebra-lined inner chamber where he proceeded to exercise his notorious satyriasis. He extolled her eyes and grabbed impatiently at her breasts. Judy reached down into her dress, pulled out the studio-provided falsies, and flung them at him. "If you want them that badly, take 'em," she yelled. "They're yours anyway!"
In the mid-forties Judy returned to New York and appeared in a Broadway play called Kiss Them For Me, playing what one raving reviewer called "a dumb but sweet little tart." She called it "the most moronic part I ever played," but she stole the show and won the prestigious Clarence Derwent Award: $500. She used the award money to support herself and Helen through six subsequent months of unemployment.
When Jean Arthur pulled out of Garson Kanin's stage comedy, Born Yesterday, only days before the scheduled Philadelphia opening, an astonished Judy, whose work had been admired by Kanin and by Broadway producer Max Gordon, was beckoned to step into the starring role of Billie Dawn. The scene that ensued when Judy arrived in Philadelphia became the stuff of show-business legend: unknown actress, three days to learn a formidable part, scalding black coffee, tears of exhaustion, mercifully little time for reasonable terror.
After the curtain, the audience in Philadelphia was beside itself. When they finally stopped applauding, they continued to sit in the theater as though to savor the experience. As the put-upon mistress of a tyrannical capitalist, Judy created one of the most memorable and hilarious characterizations in the history of theater comedy. The pantomimic gin-rummy scene in which she organized and reorganized her cards in the frenetic tempo of a Chaplin assembly line, her chorine walk unlike the walk of any chorine, the voice like helium escaping from a balloon imploring her junk-dealer/lover to do her a "favor" and "drop dead," were pure Holliday einfall. And she became a Broadway star.
It was during the long run of Born Yesterday, in 1948, that Judy married David Oppenheim, a husky, handsome, classical clarinetist from Detroit. She had known David distantly for years; indeed, he had kept a picture of her with him during his service in the Army and referred to her as "my girl" when Judy was nothing of the kind. They remet when he approached her, the year before their marriage, requesting her signature on a civil rights petition. They were married in Helen's apartment and moved to a rambling, floor-through apartment in Greenwich Village.
Their marriage was warm and bounteous for several years, filled with friends and laughs and a mutual passion for music. Judy was in awe of David's estimable musicianship, though one suspects that David took Judy's talent less seriously. Her eventual ascendance to "movie star" did nothing to strengthen the bond in spite of her sensitivity to the problems her celebrity posed. At one point, David played a piece in concert that had been written for him by Benny Goodman. When the performance was over, a crowd gathered around Judy to tell her how much they had enjoyed the concert. "Please don't tell me," she implored. "Tell the artist -- Mr. Oppenheim."
That elevation to movie star did not come without a struggle. Born Yesterday was purchased by Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures for a record-breaking one million dollars. In spite of the fact that Judy had created the role and received fantastic encomiums, Cohn was dead set against using her in the movie version. He admired her stage work, but he could not imagine that movie audiences, accustomed to another "look" in women, would accept Judy's Slavic, somewhat embattled appearance.
In active pursuit of the part, she agreed to a cabal hatched by George Cukor, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Garson Kanin, all of whom admired her work and were about to involve themselves in a movie called "Adam's Rib." She took a leave of abscence from Born Yesterday and agreed to a secondary role in that movie. She played a harried wife of a philandering husband who shoots him when she finds him with another woman and is defended by lawyer Hepburn who demands equal justice, vis-a-vis crimes of passion, for women. Her work in the film was intended as a kind of screen test for Cohn's edification.
She got the part in "Born Yesterday" and a lucrative picture deal with Columbia. To Cohn's dismay, she agreed to make only one picture a year. David's work was in New York, and she had no desire either to move to the Coast or to be separated from him for long periods of time.
She found the demands of movie work arduous. "See how fat I am now?" she told an interviewer in 1951. "That's because I love to cook and then I love to eat what I've cooked. But when I was doing 'Born Yesterday,' I had to diet for months. And I had to show up at the studio every morning two hours before they started shooting. From seven to eight they worked on my hair. From eight to nine they worked on my face. And they bleached me every other day....I couldn't do that as a steady thing. You think I'm nuts! I like living too much for that."
Judy's Hollywood career was nonetheless burgeoning by 1952. She won the Oscar for her role in "Born Yesterday." Her second picture was "The Marrying Kind," a gemlike story about a blue-collar couple on the verge of divorce. It features the first domestic argument in which the wife (Judy) slams out of the apartment door -- not to take the conventional, careening suicidal drive in the rain, as if female egress had to imply nervous breakdown -- but merely to think things through.
"The Marrying Kind" had just been released, the Oscar was on Helen's mantel, and Judy was pregnant with her son Jonathan when she was subpoenaed to appear before a Senate subcommittee investigating "subversive" influences in the performing arts. It was the depths of the McCarthy era, and Judy was terrified.
Even before the subpoena was issued, the shit had begun to hit the fan. The Catholic War Veterans picketed the opening of "The Marrying Kind," their signs proclaiming: JUDY HOLLIDAY IS THE DARLING OF THE DAILY WORKER and WHILE OUR BOYS ARE DYING IN KOREA, JUDY HOLLIDAY IS INSTEAD DEFAMING CONGRESS.
She was not an orthodox political animal. Unlike many of her friends, she had never joined the Communist Party in the 1930's. She had, however, voted Progressive, signed peace petitions willy-nilly, and permitted her name to be used for sundry libertarian and civil rights causes. Because of her family background and her obvious sensibilities, she had become, during the 1940's, a kind of emblematic New York liberal. She was automatically called upon to help when a cause needed a name. In the context of the 1950's, when guilt was historic and by association, when refusal to name names was inculpatory, she had plenty to be frightened of.
Columbia Pictures and Harry Cohn, who by this time had genuine regard for Judy as well as a real need, hired the distinguished lawyer, Simon H. Rifkin, to defend her. They also paid Kenneth Bierly, an ex-FBI man, a substantial amount of money "to clear up the confusion about Judy Holliday." Bierly was a member of several organizations that did the kind of incriminating "research" that had gotten Judy into trouble in the first place.
Judy was swamped with advice, some of which she actively solicited, some of which was volunteered. A famous playwright and television personality telephoned her repeatedly, in the days before she left for Washington, D.C. "Tell them everything," he said. "You're an artist and your only obligation is to your talent."
She telephoned an old acquaintance, Robert L. Green, who was to become fashion director of Playboy magazine. "What you don't want to appear is intelligent," he cautioned. "Think of who you are publicly to those Congressmen and their wives. You represent a mistress, an absolutely darling piece of fluff. I would dress in dark clothes, a little sexy, but not trashy. They'll think you're Billie Dawn. And how can they take you seriously a political figure? Try to wear the softest gloves of unborn leather. There is nothing more comforting."
The transcript of Judy's three-hour ordeal, of March 26, 1952, is an amalgam of attitudes as complex as the woman herself. To the extent that she used language more primitive than her own, deprecated her considerable intelligence, and answered the inquisitors' specific questions with vague, labyrinthine evasions, she Billie Dawned them with a vengeance.
At one point, for instance, she was asked whether or not she had participated, in 1946, in a strike action against the docking of a ship out of Franco's Spain. She apparently had her picture taken with the strikers and left. She was being questioned by Senator Arthur Watkins and counsel Richard Arens:
HOLLIDAY: What was it for, strikers?
ARENS: I do not want to be in the position of testifying. I want to be in a position of
interrogating you.
HOLLIDAY: I thought maybe I could remember.
ARENS: Do you have a recollection of about where you were in this picket line in New York City
in which you did have your photograph taken?
HOLLIDAY: You mean Manhattan?
ARENS: Yes.
HOLLIDAY: No.
ARENS: What can you tell us about the incident you were in. Were you in a bathing suit or what?
HOLLIDAY: It was cold.
ARENS: With whom did you have your photograph taken?
HOLLIDAY: With striking people.
ARENS: Did you make an inquiry with respect to who was striking or why they were striking?
HOLLIDAY: I must have at the time undoubtedly. Maybe I didn't. But they undoubtedly told me
before I went, because you just don't go anywhere....
WATKINS: Did any of your friends ask you to have that picture taken?
HOLLIDAY: Somebody asked me.
WATKINS: You do remember somebody asked you.
HOLLIDAY: They must have, because I wouldn't wander off over to strikers and ask to have
my picture taken.
Judy's fear sprang partly from her detestation of her interrogators and what they stood for. But she remained cool. There were no heroics, no fulminations. She called herself "irresponsible and slightly -- more than slightly -- stupid." She swore that her political knowledge was nonexistent, that she read newspapers only for the auction notices and theater news, and that she avoided political discussions at parties. With that posture, she only betrayed herself.
When she scored, she scored obliquely. She registered aversion to all kinds of censorship, maintaining that she would not even have denied the Catholic War Veterans the right to picket her movie. With mulish constancy, she upheld the free-marketing of all ideas: "It's better than their stewing around subterraneanly."
She was asked repeatedly to name names or to affirm the committee's naming of names. Her denials and equivocations made Richard Nixon look like a straight shooter. Was she certain that Betty Comden and Adolph Green did not have "Communist-front records"? "I am as sure of that," she said, "as I can be of anybody who isn't me." "Do you know the Communist-front record of Thomas Mann?" "No," she said, "How could I?" "And Mr. Albert Einstein as well," Watkins added, "do you know the Communist-front record that he has?" Judy replied with an antic, irrefutable logic: "Then I am sure they got into it the way I did, because I'm sure none of them are Communists. I mean, if you are a Communist, why go to a Communist front?" Why not be a Communist? Whatever you are, be it!"
Though she was promised that her testimony would remain secret, the transcript was released several months later. The newspapers played it for comedic values, highlighting Judy's response to Senator Watkins's avuncular question, "You watch it now, do you not?"
"Ho, do I watch it now....I don't say yes to anything now except cancer, polio and cerebral palsy."
There were repercussions. She was listed in the Manhattan phone directory, and several callers expressed the wish that her baby be born deformed. A weekly television show for which she had been signed was canceled. She remained on the television blacklist for years. Because Harry Cohn went to bat for her, she was permitted -- unlike Larry Parks -- to keep making movies. Her career, though somewhat hampered, continued.
"I guess you saw the papers," she said to Heywood Hale Broun. "Maybe you're ashamed of me because I played Billie Dawn. But I'll tell you something. It scares the shit out of you when you walk into that hearing room with all those lights and all those microphones and all those Senators looking at you. I'm not proud of the defense, but I'm not ashamed either. I didn't name one single name. That much I preserved."
One of Judy's many concerns during her encounter with the Senate philistines was that somehow Helen -- a kind of Perle Mesta to New York's aging Debs Socialists -- would be drawn in and hectored.
Helen Tuvim remained a primary concern to her daughter, though there were formidable pressures placed upon Judy to somehow pull back, to establish a sensible priority system that would have relegated her mother to second-class citizenship vis-a-vis David, Jonathan (after whose birth Helen had another breakdown), and her own career. Judy was never able to do that. Instead, she juggled, attempting to include Helen in her life, to maintain a watch over her, and to try to make her feel as useful as possible.
David and Judy always maintained a room for her in their Greenwich Village apartment and later in their more luxurious digs in New York's famous Dakota, though Helen had her own place a couple of blocks away. When Judy lost her temper -- which she frequently did -- Helen fled childishly to spend nights at friends' houses, lamenting invariably, "Judy's cranky tonight." The object of the flight was to worry and punish Judy, and it worked. Judy would panic and fetch, always fearing the worst. "It was the most intense mother-daughter relationship I ever saw," a friend recalled. "Helen remained totally dependent on Judy, and Judy, in some strange way, was not without her dependence upon Helen."
The dissolution of her marriage to David Oppenheim was a severe blow to Judy, as was David's remarriage soon after the divorce in 1957. Violinist Ruth Buffington, a devoted friend of Judy's, recalled her complex and subtle response to David's new marriage. Ruth had been to the Festival Casals in Puerto Rico, where Judy knew she had met David and his second wife, Ellen. When she returned to New York, she telephoned Judy, whose voice was unusually remote. "A couple of days later," Ruth said, "I went over to the apartment to see her, although she had not encouraged the visit. She didn't want to see me solely because I had been down there. She knew I had to have seen them; and that was pain to her. Finally she said, "You saw them?' I said, 'Yes.' And she turned white. Then it was over and we never referred to it again. Judy was that complicated and intense and related to everything that went on."
During this period, Judy was reunited professionally with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, two ex-Revuers who had built supersuccessful careers as musical comedy lyricists and writers. By 1957, their credits from Broadway to Hollywood included: On the Town, Two on the Aisle, Wonderful Town, "Good News," "Singin' in the Rain," and "Band Wagon." Bells Are Ringing was written with Judy in mind.
The three ex-Revuers had taken widely disparate social paths in the years since their disbanding. Betty and Adolph were into Beautiful People and the Right Parties. Judy, on the other hand, had absolutely no interest in parties or social gamesmanship. She was maladroit at small talk and declined the dozens of invitations she received each week. Once, in California, she agreed to attend a party of Adolph's at which the honored guest was to be Peter Sellars. Judy arrived late. She was greeted at the door by a melancholy Adolph Green who informed her, "Peter Sellars couldn't come." Judy handed him her coat and replied, "Eee-eye-eee-eye-O!"
Judy triumphed in Bells and evoked in Broadway audiences a feeling of warmth and relatedness almost without parallel. She had less luck with the men in her life. Judy first met her Bells Are Ringing co-star, Sydney Chaplin, during a poker party at Gene Kelly's house when she was in Hollywood filming "Solid Gold Cadillac". The son of Charlie Chaplin, he was at the time a heavy-drinking, B-movie actor, but a witty man, an asset at any party, and a good friend to Betty and Adolph. With their help and Judy's encouragement -- despite some terrible first auditions -- he was chosen for the lead in Bells.
According to Maureen Stapleton, "He was very nice and attractive, but he'd already left a wake of broken bones behind him. It wasn't like an unknown quantity for Judy...I mean, guys like that, you can be friendly and nice, but you don't put your arm in a buzz saw if it's got 'buzz saw' written on it."
There ensued a heavy love affair that lasted a year. Sydney, in all fairness, had sent out certain small-craft warnings, such as, "I'm not in love with you," but there was no way that Judy could accept the immutability of that pronouncement.
The year with Sydney was a euphoric one, and they were together constantly. "She was unbelievable to him," a friend, Ruth DuBonnet, remembered. "She used to go to the theater early to do his makeup, and remove his makeup for him after the show. He was just like a spoiled child. She was adorable and giggly and utterly mad about him."
Chaplin walked out on her in Paris, where they had gone on summer vacation, following a visit to Sydney's father in Switzerland. What happened, she never talked about. But the wake of it was something awful, one of the lowest periods of her life.
She took to her bed. She missed performances of Bells. She drank almost a fifth of vodka neat and fast one night and fell down in a heap. From her friends, she demanded inordiante allegiance, chastening Heywood Broun for lunching with Sydney, cutting off Betty and Adolph because they took his side and continued to socialize with him. One night, when Adolph came over to the Dakota in an attempt to make peace, she slammed into her bedroom and whimpered, "From lovers you expect betrayal, but not from friends."
Judy's myopia vis-a-vis Sydney was especially ironic because her sight was so acute at longer distances. She never liked Humphrey Bogart because of the way he treated Lauren Bacall when he was drinking. Once in Hollywood, when Frank Sinatra came to visit her set, she walked off because of his punky strut and the sycophancy he engendered was so obnoxious to her. Even with David, there had been anger; now there was only depression and acting out.
One way Judy escaped from that depression was by playing word games with friends long into the night at her apartment. Her particular obsession was Scrabble, and she was an unbeatable player. She did Double Crostics, as well, with mind boggling skill.
Her word-related synapses were staggering. A friend remembers entering Judy's living room one afternoon and finding her kneeling over one of her houseplants. "With fronds like this," Judy said, "who needs anemones."
She talked throughout her life about applying her verbal facility to a disciplined and substantial medium. She made enormous contributions to many of the properties in which she appeared, suggesting changes to writers or rewriting scenes herself. But it was more the contribution of an intelligent player than the declaration of a writer.
She began to write songs between takes on the movie set of "Bells Are Ringing." Her collaborator was jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, with whom she was living at the time and with whom she had a lot in common: same quirky, verbal minds; same humor; same intolerance for bullshit; same langorousness; same frustrations. Though they were both accomplished in their respective fields, each of them wanted to fan out creatively. Alone, Gerry was known to take a year to write a piece of music. Alone, Judy would never have written a lyric. Together, they knocked songs out and were particularly pleased when Dinah Shore sang one of their numbers, "Christmas Blues," on her television show.
Young performers like Barbara Harris and Alan Arkin were singing Judy's praises even during her lifetime (Barbara Harris was immediately pegged "a young Judy Holliday"). Her geist -- the wayward intelligence, the total lack of rusa, the poignant awkward grace -- would finally come into vogue.
When Judy looked back upon her movie career, in the late fifties, she felt unsatisfied. She perceived her work as respectable but insignificant. She wanted to depart totally from the two-dimensional muffins she had portrayed. So in 1960, she jumped at the opportunity to star in Laurette, a biographical play based on the life of Laurette Taylor.
She was terrified. The play was epical and depicted the actress from childhood to old age. The character was Irish-Catholic with a background and a set of demons entirely different from Judy's.
During the rehearsal period, she kept a tortured, truncated diary, one of whose entries reads: "I'm trying to eliminate every vestige of my own personality, style, approach and get into somebody else's skin. Sometimes I feel I've accomplished it. But when I don't, I'm nobody at all, having left myself at home."
Judy was finally coming to grips with her character when her voice, during a performance in New Haven, was reduced to inaudibility. She was booed by the audience and it devastated her. "I couldn't make a sound," she told a reporter subsequently. "It was like a nightmare." In the course of a followup medical examination, a lump was discovered on Judy's breast. She was taken to New York Hospital. where the cancer was diagnosed. She was in surgery for two hours and her breast was removed. Judy was 37.
The press was told that she had a benign throat tumor. Women didn't publicize mastectomies in 1960. The word "cancer" was never spoken to Helen, though she ultimately came to know. Abe Tuvim, Judy's father, had died two years before of the disease, and when Helen found out about Judy, she responded bitterly: "She got that from him, too." Jonathan was eight years old -- bright, beautiful and angry at his father. Judy was compelled to keep her anxieties hidden from all but Gerry.
Ruth Buffington recalls, "that's when her relationship with Gerry was probably at its most intense. She had a great need of him then and he did his best to fulfill it. Gerry kept everybody sane during that period."
After the operation, she was loath to put herself in a performing situation until she came to terms with her body. Instead, she put more and more aggressiveness into the music that she and Gerry were creating. Judy even found a property to adapt for the musical stage: a play by Anita Loos called Happy Birthday, written originally for Helen Hayes in the forties. Judy went to Anita Loos, negotiated for the rights, and asked her to move in with her and Gerry and Helen and Jonathan for the summer. They had rented a cottage in Westhampton, Long Island. "I was dumbfounded when she came to me," Anita Loos recalled. "But I did move in for about seven weeks and she came up with the most wonderful lyrics anyone had put to my play. And a lot of real pros tried."
It was a peaceful and productive summer. Gerry was forced out of his esoteric jazz bag by Judy's insistence on melody and produced, according to esteemed lyricist Alec Wilder, some extraordinarily limpid and untypically relaxed melodies. Judy, who said that she was never again going to perform, would sing one of her own adventurous, wistful-wacky songs, look up from the piano, and laugh, "Oh, I can't let anybody else sing that one."
Judy's financial condition was fearsome. Her illness was costly. Her rent was high. And having refused child-support from David, she was solely responsible for Jonathan and Helen.
The most worrisome problem was the Internal Revenue Service. As a result of some bad financial advice, Judy owed a whopping $99,000 in back taxes. The government started collection proceedings by taking the country house that she and David had rebuilt in the early stages of their marriage. They took the furnishings as well, most of them early American antiques that Judy bought for a song at auction and sanded and finished lovingly over the years.
Though there was some Broadway interest in Happy Birthday, negotiations bogged down and Judy was compelled to return to performing. In 1963, the producers of a musical about the Peace Corps called Hot Spot made her an offer she couldn't refuse. She was not happy with the property from the beginning, but the advance money assuaged her doubts. There was no benevolence involved. Judy's name made capitalizing the $400,000 production a cinch.
Judy never came to believe in the show, she was still feeling like a cripple, and the costume changes were agony for her. Additionally, she went into the show 25 pounds overweight, thinking the weight would come off by diet and massage, as it had come off in the past. But the steroid she was taking made reducing doubly difficult.
The show limped into New York; it was a disaster, though Judy's performance on opening night was sensational and she received her usual Valentines from critics and audience.
In April of 1963, two years before she died, she talked about Hot Spot and other things to Jerry Tallmer of the New York Post:
"I don't mind failure. That's part of what I'm in. But a very sudden and terrible thing happened to me in 1960, and I don't like to read about it. It'll just make me feel bad all over again. Can we do that? Not talk about it."
"Maybe if we could make it honest?..." Tallmer began.
"The minute you make it honest it's like a soap opera and it's a capitalization on...on...I just don't want to. The one thing I can tell you is -- it's trite to say, but it's absolutely true -- that adversity strengthens. I could go into a tizzy much easier before than now, though it's too bad you have to learn it the hard way. But then it wouldn't be adversity if you didn't have to learn it the hard way."
Judy's illness recurred, though none of her friends is quite sure when she realized she was terminally ill. Her doctor, knowing Judy's tendency toward depression, came up hubristically with another disease whose symptoms were similar to cancer, and told her it was a treatable disease. The treatments made her body and her face puff up and she commented mordantly, "The least I could get is thin."
Judy saw to it that Jonathan was reunited with David. She continued to do a little writing with Gerry. There had been someone else in his life for a while and Judy explained to her aggrieved mother that she knew and that it was unimportant. He stayed with Judy through some of the worst nights, warming her head with his hands. She asked to be taken to the hospital when she thought Jonathan should no longer see her.
The day Judy died, at 42, actress Barbara Bel Geddes was riding back to her hotel after a Philadelphia theater performance. She had heard perfunctorily about a show business death of someone named Judy and turned to her husband at one point to ask, "How old was Judy Garland?" He replied, "It wasn't Judy Garland who died. It was Judy Holliday." Barbara Bel Geddes burst into tears. "Why are you crying?" he asked. "You didn't even know know Judy Holliday." Barbara Bel Geddes answered, "Everyone expects Judy Garland to die. I somehow didn't expect it of Judy Holliday."
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