AN APPRECIATION OF JUDY HOLLIDAY

(No writing credit listed)
From "Newsweek" magazine June 21, 1965

Bright Girl

     In her own opinion, her face was "lopsided," her jaw "like a prizefighter's" and her basic expression one of "dimwittedness." She had never wanted to be an actress, so that when overnight stardom came, she thought it a "fluke" and went for years in a state of disbelief, which turned to awkward pleasure when the continuing acclaim finally convinced her. Then in 1960, at the top of her career, she learned she had cancer; although she made a few more appearances there were no more successes. That was why, when Judy Holliday died last week at 42, the public had to make a slight effort of remembrance before it could grasp what it had lost: an original in an age of replicas, a performer who transfigured almost all the commonplace material she was generally burdened with.

     Judy Holliday's entire life was a texture of ironies and contradictions. Though she thought herself plain and battled a tendency to be overweight, she had a piquant, baby-faced beauty. Though she was extremely intelligent (she was said to have an IQ of 172), she became famous as the quintessence of dumb blondeness. A comedienne of great subtlety and magnificent unpredictability, she was seized at the start by type-casters who confined her to roles which she once described as the kind where "you see them walk on stage and you laugh." Only in her last years, when she was collaboring on songs with jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, did she come near a fulfillment of her girlhood ambition to be a writer.

     That girlhood had something of the prodigy in it. The only child of New York parents, she started ballet lessons at 4 and was graduated from high school before she was 16. She then tried to enter the Yale School of Drama, to study playwriting and directing, but was turned down because of her age. After a stint as a highly ineffectual switchboard operator for Orson Welles' Mercury Theater, she teamed up, in 1939, with two young unknowns named Adolph Green and Betty Comden in a group called "The Revuers" whose satirical skits were an instantaneous hit at the Village Vanguard in Manhattan.

Conquest

Some bit parts in Hollywood followed, and then Miss Holliday (her family name was Tuvim, Hebrew for holy days) made her Broadway debut in a short-lived comedy called "Kiss Them For Me" for which she won the Clarence Derwent Prize of $500 as the best supporting actress of 1945. Then, at the end of the year, producer Max Gordon signed her to replace the ailing Jean Arthur in a Garson Kanin comedy called "Born Yesterday," which was about to open in Philadelphia. Miss Holliday learned the long part in three days, opened to rave notices and conquered Broadway a few weeks later.

From the moment she walked on stage as Billie Dawn, the velvet-hipped, gum-chewing, crazy-as-a-fox mistress of a junk tycoon, she was irretrievably typed. And when she began to speak, in a voice that miraculously fused the innocence of extreme girlishness with the sound of an out-of-tune kazoo, an army of scriptwriters was committed to try to duplicate the flavor of such lines as "This country belongs to the people that inhibit it." and "Do me a favor, will ya, Harry? Drop dead."

Oscar

The show ran for almost four years and was sold to the movies for $1 million. After Columbia characteristically spent two years testing dozens of actresses for Billie Dawn, the role was reluctantly handed back to Judy and, naturally, she won the Academy Award. From then on she made film comedies in which writer Abe Burrows said, "she won both the laughs and the guy." She returned to Broadway in 1956 for Comden and Green's "Bells Are Ringing," her first musical.

As usual she was far better than the show, which ran for more than two years. After that there were only two occasions left. She attempted her first straight role as Laurette Taylor in a play based on the life of the great actress, but the drama was a hapless one and Miss Holliday, in the first stages of her fatal illness, was booed by a Philadelphia audience for mumbling her lines. In 1963 she appeared in the ill-fated "Hot Spot," an inept musical about the Peace Corps. It was a melancholy reminder, intensified now by her death, of how little the American theater had to offer one of its most gifted performers.