JUDY HOLLIDAY

Written by William Peters
From "Redbook" magazine June, 1957

A brilliant woman begins to find in her work the joy she never found in life

     Ever since the opening last November of Judy Holliday's Broadway musical, "Bells Are Ringing," theater critics have been writing of a "new Judy Holliday." For the first time, Judy sings and dances, but does so with the professional aplomb for which she has become famous in straight comedy roles. With the release, a few months later, of her latest motion picture, "Full of Life," movie reviewers had a "new Judy Holliday" of their own to write about--one who played with warmth and conviction the part of a mature, intelligent wife and expectant mother, a role unlike anything she had previously attempted.

     Behind these new facets of her talent, there is still another "new Judy Holliday"--a woman newly content with her career as an actress, one who seems increasingly determined to derive from it a fulfillment she has failed to find elsewhere. It was not always thus.

     "Acting," Judy is reported to have said in 1946, a few months after she had established herself as a Broadway star, "is a very limited form of expression. Those who take it seriously are very limited human beings." In 1951, shortly before she won an Academy Award, she gave this acid advice to women wedded to acting careers: "Better get a divorce. You can't warm your feet on the back of a microphone."

     Today Judy refers to these depreciations of her profession as "nonsense." She explains: "I always hoped to be a playwright or director, never an actress. Knowing absolutely nothing about it, I convinced myself an actor was merely the medium through which others--more intelligent and creative--expressed their ideas. I was contemptuous of acting, and when I found myself not only an actress but a successful one, I was contemptuous of myself. I don't feel that way anymore."

     While Judy Holliday, the actress, was learning respect for her profession, Judy Holliday, the woman, was encountering problems that forced her more and more to look to that profession for a feeling of accomplishment largely lacking in her private life. Strangely, for Judy conforms to a few of the conventions of the actress, the outlines of the story behind this recent transformation are conventional: a less than happy childhood, growing up too fast, overwhelming success at an age when most young people are just beginning to set their goals for the future, an unsuccessful marriage.

     But behind the outlines is a woman with innate theatrical talents, an intuitive sense of what is right for her as an actress, a fine mind, emotional depths and a powerful will to succeed. Also hidden from the public eye is a woman with a devastating faculty for self-criticism, a compelling drive for perfection, strong feelings of inadequacy as a woman and an infinite capacity to torture herself with her shortcomings.

     It is a frustrating irony of Judy's life that, as an actress, she has succeeded almost without trying although, as a woman, she has failed trying desperately. For until recently Judy Holliday would have contentedly forgone success as an actress if she could have been assured of it as a woman. Today she feels as though she might have passed the point of no return. Her acting has, at last, become a vital part of her life.

     To get at the woman behind the celebrity known as Judy Holliday is no easy task, for unlike most actresses, she guards her private life jealously. In a business that concedes no one a right to privacy, Judy has refused to expose herself, her family or her friends to possible emotional distress. For this attitude she is almost universally respected by the very people--writers, columnists, publicity men--whose jobs it makes most difficult. These professional probers are among the first to admire an actress who genuinely wishes to protect her own privacy and that of the people she loves.

     But as difficult as it is for the outsider to see beyond the actress, it is not impossible. The first clue is her own shockingly frank admission: "I can't remember my childhood. It's as if I lost it. I guess I grew up assuming that no one could remember. Friends used to tease me about not remembering people I'd met or places I'd been, but it didn't begin to bother me until recently. Then, when I had my own child and he began to walk and talk and do things, I tried to recall what I was like as a child, and I drew a complete blank. It's like not having a past, and I resent it. It's a gyp."

     Judy is aware of the psychological implications of her block against recalling her childhood in any detail. "I guess it's pretty obvious that I wasn't happy," she says. She politely declines to go any further.

     Judy was born in New York City -- the only child of Abraham and Helen Tuvim, a name which in Hebrew is part of the expression for "holidays." Her father was a professional fund-raiser who wrote popular songs on the side. Her mother taught piano, and musical friends often dropped by for living-room concerts. Social gatherings at the Tuvim house brought together talented, sensitive persons, and Judy responded to this atmosphere with a willingness to dance and recite. She early became an avid reader, taking up everything within reach of her young hands.

     While school chums were swapping volumes in the "Bobbsey Twins" series, Judy was wading through "War and Peace."

     Her parents, after drifting apart for years, finally separated when their daughter was six. From then on she lived with her mother and her maternal grandmother, the latter a tense, excitable woman who had come to the United States from Czarist Russia at the age of 17.

     "Mother went to her pupils' homes to teach piano," Judy recalls, "and she also taught WPA classes at settlement houses. She was gone most of the day. My grandmother took care of the house and did the cooking. Between the two of them, I usually got what I wanted unless it was something we couldn't afford. I never had a bicycle or a Girl Scout uniform, but I never really minded. Somehow the explanation that we just didn't have the money for them seemed quite sensible to me."

     If this creates the picture of a child mature beyond her years, a child with almost adult understanding, there is evidence that Judy was just that. Although she saw her father regularly after her parents' separation, she seems at an early age to have adopted a protective attitude toward her mother, an attitude still perceptible in the warm, friendly relationship between the two women. In school, which at first was New York's P.S. 125, in Queens, Judy did exceptionally well in everything except arithmetic. She still finds it impossible to budget, and her mother has adopted the habit of slipping some money into her pocket or purse when she goes out. "If it's fifty dollars," Judy says, "I manage to spend it all. If it's five dollars, I manage to get along."

     By the time she was nine, Judy was demonstrating an interest in the theatre by writing the school's Christmas play, a drama in which she also figured as director and actress. Later she picked up a $50 prize for an essay on keeping New York City clean. People who knew her as a child recall that even then she was fascinated with play-acting and charades. Perhaps she found some escape from the unhappiness of her parents' separation in the world of books and acting.

     Judy prefers not to discuss the effect on her of her parents' separation. Her father answers the question of how the separation affected her, with obvious discomfort. "Every child is affected by a separation of her parents. No one knows how much. But Judy was always surrounded with warmth and affection and love. I think it probably affected her less than most." It is impossible not to detect more hope than conviction in this appraisal.

     By the time she reached Julia Richman, a public high school for girls, Judy had established herself as brilliant student. Her IQ was 172; her graduation from high school took place just before her 16th birthday.

     Judy's mental blackout of her youth extends to her high school years. "I do remember that I directed and acted in school plays," she says, "and that I flunked arithmetic and had to make it up in summer school."

     "I'm afraid I was horribly stuffy about social life. I guess I was just a natural snob. I got a kick out of being different, and I was eager to improve myself and everyone around me. As a result, I went out mostly with boys who would take me to Broadway shows instead of parties; symphony concerts and recitals instead of dances. I was more interested in writing poetry than passing love notes and in hearing Bach than dancing to Benny Goodman. I must have been obnoxious."

     Today Judy sees none of the people she knew in her high school days. If in her childhood she missed the security of being surrounded by a close-knit, loving family, in her youth she missed the years in which girls experience the excitement of dating, dances, formal gowns, corsages and the attention of boys of their own age. She missed that period of a girl's life when she worries frantically about being attractive to boys, and when she learns, with one or more boys, that she is.

     Fresh out of high school, Judy plunged into the world of entertainment, beginning with a non-paying stint as switchboard operator at Orson Welles' Mercury Theater. She saw neither Welles nor the stage in her brief sojourn at this job, although she managed more than once to disconnect theatrical personalities in the midst of transatlantic calls and to have her ears blistered by shrieks of anger.

     "I had hoped to go to the Yale School of Drama after high school," Judy says, "but they wouldn't admit students under 17. When I caught a bad cold after a month at the switchboard job, mother took me off to a summer camp in upstate New York." It was at this camp that Judy met Adolph Green, a young man who was putting on one-act plays for the campers. The association resulted that fall in a night-club fivesome called the Revuers, composed of Judy, Green, a college student named Betty Comden and two young men, one of whom played the guitar. Betty Comden and Adolph Green were later to write the musical comedy "Bells Are Ringing" especially for Judy.

     The Revuers opened at a Greenwich Village night spot with material which they wrote themselves and which consisted chiefly of skits and songs burlesquing everything from Hollywood to the Statue of Liberty. Sixteen-year-old Judy became physically ill after virtually every performance during the team's first year; she felt lost, inept, ashamed. Audiences terrified her; the smoke, the din and alcoholic atmosphere of night clubs (they were soon being booked into other, more lavish drinking establishments) depressed her; the thought that she was caught in the exhibitionist world of the performer, fighting nightly for the attention of drunks, horrified her.

     But if her new life seemed abhorrent to her, there were reasons for continuing it. First, there was the money. Between her earnings and what her mother made from piano lessons, the two were getting along comfortably. Second, she came to like the young people with whom she worked. Looking back, Judy has a third explanation. "I thought I was learning about show business. The more painful it was, the more important I thought the experience must be. Hating it, I convinced myself it must be invaluable."

     Success came rapidly for the Revuers, and after a year Judy began to enjoy what she was doing. The collaboration on songs and skits gave her an opportunity to exercise her writing talents, and as she found audiences responding to her, she began to realize that she had acting ability. After five years of increasingly successful billings in ever plusher surroundings, four members of the team succumbed to the Hollywood dream. With a vague promise of a part in a picture, they entrained for the film capital. The promise faded into the smog of Los Angeles.

     With Mrs. Tuvim along as a combination chaperon and mother-to-all, the four remaining Revuers found a small apartment, acquired an ancient limousine and set about looking for work. They found it in a $1,000-a-week booking at the Trocadero. Although the rest of the team failed to entice movie offers, Judy rapidly became the goal of a long line of studio executives with uncapped fountain pens and long legal documents. Demonstrating a loyalty which has since become legendary among her friends, she refused to sign without her teammates.

     Eventually, when 20th Century-Fox offered a spot for the team in a forthcoming picture on condition that Judy sign a year's contract at $400 a week, she signed. The result was a picture in which the Revuers' musical numbers wound up on that fabled cutting room floor. Discouraged, the team broke up. Betty Comden and Adolph Green returned to New York to collaborate first as a night-club act, later as a Broadway writing team. Judy stayed in Hollywood with her mother to attempt the climb to stardom. A year later, after only two small parts, Fox dropped her option, and Judy and her mother caught the first train east.

     Judy Holliday returned to New York with an enviable sun tan, a fair-sized bankroll, and a strong skepticism of her talent for acting. In less than a year, she won the Clarence Derwent Award as best supporting actress of 1945 for her role in "Kiss Them For Me" and opened on Broadway early in 1946 in the immediately successful Garson Kanin play, "Born Yesterday." Overnight, Judy Holliday was an important star.

     The story of how she was cast as the hilarious, hip-swiveling Billie Dawn, an ex-follies chorine turned human rights advocate, reveals something of the ability of Judy Holliday to cling to her self-imposed perfectionist standards even under the most unrelenting pressure. Jean Arthur had opened in the role in New Haven and Boston. Moving to Philadelphia to complete its pre-Broadway run, the star fell ill. Producer Max Gordon, desperate for a replacement, took the train to New York and, remembering Judy's part in "Kiss Them For Me," called her.

     In Philadelphia, Judy was given three days to learn the part and go on as Billie Dawn. For three days, she lived on coffee and Dexadrine. Each time she came off stage on opening night, she burst into tears of nervous exhaustion. But any sounds she may have made were drowned by an audience response almost unseemly for staid Philadelphia first-nighters. In 72 hours she had created a character so delectably real that for years some of Billie Dawn's choicer lines ("This country belongs to the people that inhibit it.") returned to haunt her. Even today strangers still ask her to repeat the famous line from the play: "Do me a favor, will ya, Harry? Drop dead."

     Judy Holliday played Billie Dawn on Broadway for almost four years without missing a performance. On January 4, 1948, a year before she left the show, she became Mrs. David Oppenheim. She had met the young concert clarinetist while she was with the Revuers through a common friend, Leonard Bernstein, the noted composer-conductor. Oppenheim went into the infantry, and during the next five years she saw him only once again. After "Born Yesterday" had been playing on Broadway for nearly two years, Oppenheim appeared backstage.

     "I had always wanted to see him again," Judy says, "and I guess the feeling was mutual. He admitted he'd been showing my picture to Army buddies with the comment 'This is my girl,' and I decided to keep him honest. We went together for a year and then were married."

     For five years, the Oppenheims made their home in a three-story walk-up in Greenwich Village. With the arrival, in 1952, of their only child, Jonathan, they began looking for a place where taking Jonathan to the park did not require the talents of an alpinist. In 1953, they moved to an old-fashioned, high-ceilinged apartment in a massive building on West 72nd Street, the apartment where Judy today lives alone with her son.

     Neither Judy nor her husband, now a record company executive, will discuss the reasons for their divorce. Friends and relatives are stanch in their refusal to speculate on it. But some possibly contributing factors to the failure of the marriage are clear.

     Having played a leading role in a hit Broadway play six nights and two afternoons a week for the first year of her marriage, Judy left "Born Yesterday" to take a featured part in the movie, "Adam's Rib." After that -- and after Columbia Pictures had tested half the women in Hollywood for the role -- Judy was finally screen tested for the part she had made famous on Broadway [for] the motion picture version of "Born Yesterday." Insisting on a contract for only one picture a year, she signed with Columbia for her first starring effort and walked away with an Academy Award.

     Back in New York after the two pictures, Judy Holliday set about being a wife and preparing to be a mother. The complete loss of anonymity which comes with movie stardom, the months spent in Hollywood each year and the obvious problems created by being the more celebrated partner in a marriage did not make her job any easier. But here, at last, was a role which Judy had chosen for herself. There is evidence to suggest that she may have approached it as she approached her stage and screen roles, with a lack of confidence in her ability combined with a powerful determination to perform it to perfection.

     In some areas, at least, she succeeded. Her relationship with her son is warm and intelligent, mixing love and gentle discipline in healthy proportions. Her home is tastefully decorated. She is an excellent cook. Still, something was apparently lacking. For a period of two years (in what some have called a typically theatrical gesture), she gave up acting completely. At about the same time she began a psychoanalysis which was to last four years. Both of these measures were explicitly designed to help save her faltering marriage. They did not.

     Meanwhile, Judy's attitude toward being an actress underwent a change. "George Cukor, a brilliant Hollywood director and a very dear friend, is most responsible for making me see the light," she says. "He directed my first pictures and he showed me that my so-called desires to write and direct were unreal and that acting -- really good acting -- could be both creative and satisfying. He knocked a lot of nonsense out of me, and I'm grateful to him for it."

     Judy Holliday's psychoanalysis, if it did not save her marriage, did help her professionally. "It gave me a far greater understanding of the motivations which underlie action," she says, "and it made me look at myself in a much more realistic way." With the exception of her roles in the current "Full of Life" and a much earlier picture, "Winged Victory," all of her parts have been comic ones. (Her other pictures have been "Something for the Boys"; "It [Should] Happen To You"; "Phffft"; and "The Solid Gold Cadillac.") Judy believes there are valid psychological reasons for the satisfactions she derives from comedy. "Why does a person want to make others laugh?" she asks. "Perhaps to create an atmosphere of happiness, to make like him. Most comedians probably feel it's the only way they can be accepted."

     People who know Judy well say that at intimate gatherings she can be as funny spontaneously as she is in a well-rehearsed role. The same friends also describe her as a creature of moods; if the mood is serious or depressed, she simply can't be funny. Betty Comden, who along with Adolph Green is still one of her closest friends, says that Judy is not only a perfectionist, but highly self-critical. "It isn't unusual to find her crying between acts because she feels she hasn't done well. Then, in a matter of minutes, she'll pull herself together and go out and do much better."

     These perfectionist tendencies are vouched for by almost anyone who knows Judy. They result, almost always, in a highly nervous state at the beginning of every new project. Despite this, Judy has a reputation among people who have worked with her on the stage of relaxing everyone in the cast.

     When Judy accepted the lead in her current play, Herbert Greene, a conductor and voice coach, was given the job of turning piping soprano Billie Dawn into a strong singing voice capable of reaching the back row of New York's large Shubert Theater.

     Herbert Greene and Judy Holliday became close friends in a short time. Greene has admiration for her both as an actress and as a woman, but he can be bluntly critical as well. "She understands deeply the nature of her talent," he says, "but she is also violently and destructively self-critical, to the point of unreality. Her strongest feelings are negative; she's driven by unfounded fears and feelings of guilt; she has nasty periods of depression, and she doubts her femininity and appeal to men. At the same time, she has enormous insight into other people, intense loyalty and great generosity."

     As for Judy's view of herself, she admits to wavering between vigorous self-criticism and deep depression, on the one hand, and a recurrent thankfulness for the good things she does have within her grasp, on the other. Among the latter is her son, Jonathan, a bright four-year-old whose adjustment to his parents' separation seems excellent. He sees his father often. Judy has, too, the intense loyalty and devotion of her close friends. If these were not enough, there is also her new sense of the importance of her acting career.

     The self-doubts and strivings for perfection that have made her the fine actress she is are probably the very characteristics that have made Judy Holliday most unhappy in her private life. It is difficult to live with a person who seldom relaxes a rigid self-discipline and drive toward perfection, who cannot derive any permanent satisfaction from past successes. Unfortunately for Judy Holliday, one's human role is never subject to the same polishing which the fine actress applies to the parts she plays on the stage. Events -- and people -- seldom wait for a person to play his part in life to perfection.

Main | New & News | Biography | Chronology | Multimedia | Articles | FBI Files | F.A.Q. | Quotes Film | Theatre | Music | Radio | Television | Awards | Trivia | Books | TV Schedule | Links | E-Mail