HOLLYWOOD'S BLOND SURPRISE

Written by Virginia Bird
From "The Saturday Evening Post" December 31, 1955

Is Judy Holliday just a dimwitted dame? As such, she won an Academy Award -- but all the real-life evidence points the other way.

     The rewards that come to a girl for turning in a superior acting job are sometimes mighty peculiar, a case in point being that of Judy Holliday. There are people who meet her in a delicatessen, a hotel lobby, on a street or in her dressing room, and stand there waiting for her to talk like Billie Dawn, the blond dimwit she portrayed in her hit movie and play, Born Yesterday.

     Sometimes they command her, "Come on, say something!" or they look at her and say, "Well?"

     "Well what?" Judy asks.

     "Go on, say it! Say, 'Do me a favor, Harry; drop dead!' like you did in the show."

     Having watched Miss Holliday revolve her hips in a Billie Dawn strut, having listened to her guinea-hen version of Billie Dawn's voice, many of those who saw a performance of Born Yesterday are certain that she must walk and talk that way off the sage too.

     The truth is that Billie Dawn exists off stage only as a myth. The yellow hair piled on her head like a mound of chrysanthemum petals, the huge eyes which look tragically sad while her mouth smiles, are real on and off. But Billie Dawn's real-life other self, Judy Holliday, has a near genius I.Q. rating of 172. She reads books that are so deep that the average citizen might sink without a trace into their pages, and she is a passionate devotee of double crostics. And her voice, unlike Billie Dawn's, is quiet, well-bred, softly musical.

     Nevertheless, she pumped so much conviction into her portrayal of the tousle-headed doxy in Born Yesterday that many playgoers were sure that she had steeped herself in the part for months. Actually, the steeping lasted only three days, and she approached the job by backing into it. In 1938, when Judy Holliday walked backward into the corner of the room which served as a stage for the Village Vanguard, a bistro in New York's Greenwich Village, she was backing toward a night in 1951 when a gilded figurine called an Oscar would be thrust into her hands. At the Vanguard she was a member of a fivesome known as The Revuers. One member of the group says, "We walked on backward because we thought it would be safer. Then, if the crowd hated us, we could leave in a hurry. "

     For that matter, Judy Holliday backed into the Vanguard the first time she ever saw it. Early one September evening she was trapped by a rainstorm, and to avoid being drenched, she ducked down a stairway leading to a cellar. A man opened the door and said, "Come on in."

     "No, thank you," Judy told him primly. "I didn't know whether to trust him or not," she told me not long ago. "But he said, 'Don't be silly. You'll get wet,' and I went in." The only light inside came from candles on the tables. Poets stood around reading from their own works while other poets threw pennies at them. The man who'd invited her in owned the place. His name was Max Gordon. He bought her a soft drink, and she asked, "Why don't you get some entertainment in here? I could find you some."

     Gordon grinned and said, "Go ahead."

     During the preceding summer, Judy's mother had taken her to a summer camp in Pennsylvania, hoping that the outing would help repair the ravages wrought by a strep throat. There she met Adolph Green, one of a band of actors who put on a different play each week. Judy watched the rehearsals and helped out with the props. "Those runaway deer eyes of hers followed our every move," Green remembers now.

     When the stock company disbanded at the end of the season, the friendship between Judy and Adolph continued, and, when Max Gordon said, "Go ahead," she thought of Adolph. She broached the matter to him and he enlisted a couple of talented boys with theatrical background acquired at NYU and at a Broadway drugstore, a pharmacy and lunchroom much favored by show people. Green persuaded a girl named Betty Comden to join them; he talked Judy into becoming one of the members of the group, too, and the five became The Revuers. They composed music for their own songs, and wrote sly, quick skits which burlesqued everything imaginable, including the early 1920's -- a period that was already considered "quaint," although the time was only 1938.

     Max Gordon paid The Revuers five dollars for each performance, but the poets who frequented the Vanguard resented the bright kids who'd pre-empted their place, and tried to get even by heckling. Sometimes the bards in berets got so rambunctious that they had to be removed bodily, but the scuffling made small difference to Judy. She was blind and deaf with fright, and ridden by the notion that if The Revuers gave her a funny line to say, it wouldn't be funny anymore. "I was a frightened, tense, squeaky kid," she told me. "All I wanted was to get the hell out of there. I had no hint of talent; just a great fear and inner sickness." Fortunately, there was a room behind the Vanguard where she could hide in bad moments. Liquor was stored there, it was equipped with a sink, a girl petrified by fright could weep there between waves of nausea and cradle her head on whiskey cases.

     For every protesting poet-customer Gordon lost, The Revuers pulled in four new ones. Old-time Vanguarders came up to Gordon and asked, "What is this, Max? Why don't you get yourself a couple of broads?" But Gordon knew what was packing the crowds in, and he began to pay The Revuers more money. Before long he acquired tablecloths and a second night club uptown, The Blue Angel, with murals on the walls. "Finally, I began to get kind of good," Judy recalls. "But it took me almost a year to get over my shame and fright at appearing before an audience."

     The Revuers learned to sharpen their timing to a razor edge and grab the attention of night-club audiences who only wanted one "schnapper" (joke) after another. If an audience was playing footsie under tables, or falling down drunk, The Revuers were dead unless they could cut through the noise and smoke and reach them. Later, when Judy stepped out upon a real stage for the first time, her early ordeal at the Vanguard made facing an orderly theatre audience as easy as breathing.

     Often during that year at the Vanguard, she wondered why she stood it, but the question was not hard to answer. Her parents ad separated, and Judy and her mother were trying to make a go of it alone. Judy was earning money that was needed at home to eke out sum her mother brought in by giving music lessons.

     Judy Holliday was born Judith Tuvim, the only child of Helen and Abraham Tuvim, a tall solemn man whose business was and is fund raising for Israel. Tuvim means "holiday" in Hebrew, and Judy adopted this translation during her first stay in Hollywood, because people were always misspelling Tuvim, or mispronouncing it. She wearied of being called Twin or Turmine -- even Termite -- and her mail, especially that part of it that was addressed Youkin or Tomb, went astray.

     As only child, Judy was the precocious type who preferred the company of adults to that of other children. Her parents tried to persuade her to go out and play, but she was happier sitting near them and reading. "I've always loved words," she told me. "I ate up all the books I could lay my hands on. If I couldn't get books, I read candy wrappers and labels on cereal and toothpaste boxes. They were words, too, weren't they?"

     When she was a ten-year-old student at P.S. 125 she wrote a Christmas play, Tucker's Christmas. She also directed it and played the lead role, Mother Tucker. When she graduated from New York's Julia Richman High School, the principal suggested she train her sights on the Department of Drama at Yale, but she discovered that she was still a year below the minimum age requirement for admission. She cushioned her disappointment by taking a job as a switchboard operator at Orson Welles' Mercury Theater. It was her hope to spend most of her time watching theatrical wheels go round, but her job never took her backstage at all. The angry flashings of the switchboard terrorized her. "At times the whole board seemed to vibrate with an irritated humming," she told me. "When that happened, I pushed or pulled everything I could reach or I just sat there and howled." Orson Welles was only a disembodied voice that yelled at her when she left him with a telephone conversation dangling in mid-air.

     It was while she was working at the Mercury that the strep throat laid her low and her mother took her to the summer camp where she met Adolph Green. Born in 1938, The Revuers had one meteoric moment in 1941 when they shot up to the Rockefeller Center Rainbow Room from their lowly Village cellar; after leaving the Rainbow Room, they scored critical successes in more intimate night clubs. "We gained a great deal of prestige, but not much money," Judy told me. "We liked to work so much we couldn't hide it, and the club owners paid us accordingly."

     Egged on by one movie producer, who gave them an oral promise of a picture if they would deliver themselves in Hollywood, The Revuers were victimized by their own eagerness. They didn't know that in Hollywood an oral promise is worth no more than the breath consumed in making it, and they borrowed the train fare west, only to find upon arriving, that the picture had been called off.

     They had very little money and they knew nobody from whom they could borrow. Because it was wartime, they could stay in any one hotel for only a limited time. To complicate matters even further, Judy and Betty Comden had picked up flu bugs and were running temperatures. Sick as they were, they trudged miles, knocking on doors and looking for rooms the could rent. Judy was so ill that she sat on the curb and wept. It was then that the episode began to resemble an implausible B-movie. An open convertible passed. The girl behind the wheel waved gaily, slammed on the brakes and asked Judy, "What's with you?" Judy recognized a girl with whom she had worked in a New York night club, and poured out her tale of woe. "Your problem is over," the owner of the convertible said. "I'm leaving for New York tomorrow. You can have my apartment." This safe harbor was over a real-estate office, and Judy described it as being "in a very nonresidential district, from which it took us hours to reach any studio, even the ones on Poverty Row."

     Fortunately, The Revuers landed an engagement at the Trocadero, a night spot on The Strip. They told one another hopefully, "Once the important movie people see us, they'll send a man to put us under contract." Producers did see The Revuers, but departed saying, "You're smart and you're funny -- too damn smart. I understand your stuff, but nobody else does."

     Judy, however, began to receive offers, but the offers didn't include the other Revuers. She had worked hard to become one of the group and she wasn't going to give it up on what she regarded as a slim chance of becoming an actress. If The Revuers were cast in a picture as team, she believed, that even the blindest producer could see their virtue.

     "So there we were," Judy says, "all of us are living together, the phone is ringing and I'm mumbling into it, and lying and saying 'No,' and having a bad time because the others are listening." It is a safe Hollywood rule not to utter cries of joy at the first offer; if you control your enthusiasm for money when it is first mentioned, the price that studios are willing to pay you goes up. Accordingly, every time Judy answered the phone and said "No," she was offered more. Word got out that she must be "hot" (if not, why is she so hard to get?) and before long she was offered $400 a week to become part of Twentieth Century-Fox's talent stockpile. "If you put all of us in a picture, I'll take it," she said, and grudgingly the Fox management said "O.K."

     "It was a lot of money to pay someone who wasn't a sex object and wasn't beautiful," Judy told me seriously. Aptly, the picture in which The Revuers appeared was titled Greenwich Village. They did three nmbers, but all three were swept into an ash can. Only one flash of Betty Comden remained as she said, "Check your hat, sir?" to Don Ameche. Judy didn't appear in the film at all.

     Betty and Adolph returned to New York, to embark upon a career which was to lead them on to fame and fortune. Since then they have carpentered the lyrics and books for such plays as On The Town and Two on the Aisle, as well as the lyrics for the songs in Mary Martin's stage and TV presentation of Peter Pan. Judy remained in California to work out a year's contract with Fox. "I didn't do a stitch of work for months and months," she said. "I was the most miserable, homesick, sullen, non-actress you ever met."

     At last, as a result of one of those changes in policy which lick through a studio like a brush fire, Fox decided to use her in a film. This posed quite a problem, for she was classified as a musical-comedy actress. Betty Grable or Alice Faye starred in the studio's musicals; both of these ladies were having babies in 1944, and no musicals were being made. It was decided to test Judy for a dramatic role. Director George Cukor called Judy into his office and asked her to read a scene from his projected movie, Winged Victory. She was nervous and she wore too much makeup, but she did it well.

     "Go home," Cukor told her, "wash your face and report for work tomorrow."

     Having washed her face, she found herself in a small but artistically satisfying role in Cukor's film. Then in due course, Betty Grable and Alice Faye had their babies and once more the studio buzzed with talk of musical pictures. Judy was asked, "How would you like to have a comedy role in a musical production?"

     She was no veteran of the cinema wars, but she knew enough to be wary, so she said, "Let's see the part." She was handed a single sheet of paper. On it was written one line: "I once knew a girl who got carborundum on her teeth and it turned her into a radio receiving set."

     "You mean you need a comedienne to say that?" Judy inquired.

     "It has to be read fast," she was told. So Judy read the line so fast she has never met anyone who remembers it.

     Many times during the next few months she held imaginary conversations with Darryl Zanuck. In them she refused to renew her contract, in spite of Zanuck's anguished pleadings, and from time to time she haughtily mentioned such matters as "...certain interests in the East who are after me." Suddenly, she was dropped from the payroll. The next day she was on an eastbound train. No one ever made a faster getaway. "I simply could not wait," she said.

     Back in New York she had luncheon with Adolph Green, after luncheon she waited in his office while he chatted with a producer friend of his, Herman Shumlin. When Shumlin saw Judy, he went into a bit which might have been borrowed from a cornball movie. "You're just the girl I'm hunting for my new play," he told her.

     "No, I'm not, but thank you just the same," Judy said. She explains her refusal now by saying, "I didn't think I'd proved I had any acting talent."

     Green brushed aside her protests and she found herself in a fast-moving comedy, Kiss Them For Me, based on the novel Shore Leave, by Frederic Wakeman. As a result, the Derwent Prize of $500 went to Judy, together with a scroll that proclaimed her "the best supporting actress of 1945."

     It was then that a second Max Gordon entered her life. This one was a producer with a string of more than fifty shows to his credit. When I went to see him about Judy, he talked to me in an office papered in "To my darling Max" photographs.

     "Judy is not the Broadway type in any sense of the phrase," he told me. "The first time I saw her, she dropped in for an interview, but I had nothing for her. Later we were rehearsing Born Yesterday. It was due to open in Philadelphia but its star, Jean Arthur was ill. I remember the job Judy did in Kiss Them For Me, and I put in a call for her."

     When Judy arrived in Philadelphia she was met by the play's author and director, Garson Kanin, accompanied by his stage manager and his assistant. They installed her in a hotel room with the script and told her, "When you've finished it, come into the next room." She read it, went in to them and began to explain why she couldn't take the part without devoting a lot of time to studying it. Kanin studied his wrist watch patiently. When five minutes were up, he said, "O.K., everybody; let's go."

     For three nights and three days Judy memorized her role almost continuously. She lived on cup after scalding cup of coffee. She was also subject to fits of weeping; she was all right while studying or while on stage during rehearsals, but with each exit she burst into tears.

     I talked with one veteran Philadelphia first-nighter who remembers her opening in Born Yesterday in January, 1945. "I've never heard such laughter rocking a theater," he said, "and I'll never forget the look on her face when the applause washed over her and she knew that she was in a hit." During the show's run of almost 4 years, Jack Benny saw Born Yesterday twice. After the second time he told Judy's father, "I think I know timing. It's my business, and if I didn't know it I'd be a bum, but you tell Judy there are still a lot of things I could learn about it from her."

     With Judy ready, willing and able to step into the Billie Dawn role in any film version of Born Yesterday, you might suppose Columbia Pictures, which had bought the play, would look no further for a star. Anyone who thinks this doesn't know Hollywood. With her mother, Judy moved to California to wait for Columbia to do the logical thing and cast her in the role she had brought to perfection. But Harry Cohn, Columbia's president, announced he was "looking for a name." It broke Judy's heart when Louella Parsons announced, "Rita Hayworth is all set to do Born Yesterday."

     "And I was heartbroken for this reason," Judy said: "I thought Rita could do it."

     Months went by -- months in which almost every actress was discussed for the part except Garbo. At the end of the year, Cohn announced that he wanted an unknown for the role. If Judy was upset before, she was in a ferment now. If she wasn't an unknown and she wasn't a name, what was she? She was still in a low frame of mind when Garson Kanin, George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn suggested that she appear in Adam's Rib, a film story Kanin had written as a co-starring vehicle for Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

     This part of the Holliday story I got from Katharine Hepburn in her New York home. She made me strong hot tea, handed me a cup and told me, "Gar wrote the part of the canny but thickheaded Hausfrau in Adam's Rib for Judy, hoping she would do it. But at first she thought the part was too small. She had been a big, big star in Born Yesterday."

     Hepburn is reluctant to take credit for persuading Judy to take the Adam's Rib role, but I heard elsewhere that she, Tracy and Kanin had sold Judy on the notion. During the shooting of the picture rumors of the phenomenal nature of Judy's work began to "leak" out. The source of the leak became apparent when Miss Hepburn allowed herself to be interviewed by the press. "This Holliday girl is stealing the picture," she announced. "She is running away with my scenes." Harry Cohn, Columbia's president, hadn't thought Judy photogenic enough for Born Yesterday, but presently he asked if he could see some of the shots Cukor was making of her. Many of the scenes in Adam's Rib were filmed with stark newsreel reality, but there were also shots that glamorized Judy. Katharine Hepburn saw to it that Cohn was only shown this glamourous footage.

     Finally Cohn decided to test Judy for Born Yesterday, and pretty soon he announced the quest for a star was over. Columbia was aware of the bargaining lever they had in Judy's passionate desire to play Billie Dawn on the screen, and before committing themselves they offered her a contract to do 3 pictures a year. She refused. She could see her coveted role flitting away from her, but she set her jaw, said, "Only one a year," and in January of 1950 Columbia signed.

     "After all, my family and roots were back in New York," Judy told me. "I was bargaining for time away from Hollywood, and Columbia was bargaining for money. I got what I wanted and they got what they wanted. They knew I was so anxious to do Born Yesterday that I'd have done it for a dollar. They gave me the next best thing."

     Her work in Born Yesterday set up a merry tinkling in box-office tills and brought its star the motion-picture industry's highest award as an actress. When I asked if the pictures she's made since then have been financially successful, Judy replied, "I don't check on them to make sure. Anyhow, you hear about it quickly enough if one of your pictures goes in the red. They bring the news to you on the set during the first day's shooting on your next picture. Someone says, 'Well kid, your last one lost a sock of money. Let's hope this one is hot enough to be booked someplace except a few tunnels and bowling alleys.'"

     Judy's usual screen portrait is that of a wide-eyed, helpless doll "just trying to get along," and succeeding remarkably well. In her next film, It [Should] Happen To You, she played a dim-brained dame who was obsessed with a yearning to be famous. So she blew all of her savings in one large gesture, leased a billboard high above New York's Columbus Circle and had her name painted on it. The subsequent goings-on were wacky. "One writer said that I started as a moron in Kiss Them For Me," Judy told me, "and I worked up to be an imbecile in Adam's Rib. What I want to know is: where does a girl go from being an imbecile? Maybe, if I'm lucky, I can be an idiot or a cretin?"

     Eventually, a growing cult began to complain that the world would be robbed of a great actress if Columbia continued to type Judy as a female Mortimer Snerd. Then the studio made a movie called [Phffft!], and Columbia's publicity department spread the news that Judy Holliday had escaped from the Billie Dawn character that had entrapped her. In [Phffft!] she played Nina Tracy, a literate Park Avenue society girl who wrote clever TV scripts.

     "It was Billie's life or mine," Judy says grimly. "Billie had to go."

     But her film roles keep backsliding into what critics had called "shrewd featherhead" and "sensible screwball" roles. In her next picture, The Solid Gold Cadillac, she plays blond Laura Partridge, who attends stockholders' meetings of the powerful International Products Corporation and asks embarrassing questions -- she owns ten shares. To shut her up, the corporation offers her a job. This brings her into contact with the retiring president of the firm, Paul Douglas, who is going to Washington as a dollar-a-year man. To a dedicated Holliday fan, there is no need to say more about the plot. Scenes for this picture were shot in Washington, which was also part of the background for Born Yesterday. Cameras were set up outside the Pentagon, and in the Senate subway. One of the subway employees almost lost his heavy dignity when Judy asked Douglas, "What is this -- a Government-subsidized Tunnel of Love?"

     Judy's husband is David Oppenheim, a serious musician, who earns his bread by selecting the repertoire and artists for Columbia Masterworks Recordings. He also plays clarinet with the Budapest String Quartet. The Oppenheim-Holliday romance flourished during the run of Born Yesterday.

     "We'd known each other for a long time," Judy told me, "but we liked each other in spite of that. Then David went away, and I heard that he was carrying a picture of me he'd cut from a magazine, and that he was telling people, 'That's my girl.' When he came back, I made an honest man out of him. I really was his girl."

     Judy lives in New York with her three-year-old son, Jonathan, in a high-ceilinged apartment in a Victorian building, all carved oak, polished brass and checkerboard-marble floor. When I'd passed the scrutiny of the watchman at the gate, an elevator creaked me upward in heavy dignity. Judy stood in the doorway to greet me. "All we need is a moat," she said, "but living here is one of the reasons I like New York."

     Another reason why she prefers Gotham is that Hollywood means dieting to her. Her weight leaps up and down, twenty-five pounds at a leap -- lower when she is working; higher when she's at leisure. "I hurry past restaurants the way reformed dipsos rush past saloons," she said.

     There are those who think that in spite of the addlepated character she has made famous, she is sex personified, but time was when she was told to look sexy for portrait photographs and only succeeded in looking [next sentence missing from my copy]. "I looked sick instead of sexy. Then they said, 'half open your lips and wet them.' I still looked like a moron. One day one of the men said, 'Boy did I have a great dinner the other night!' He mentioned an Italian restaurant. I asked, "What did you have?" and he told me. Suddenly there I was with a yearning look on my face, and he said, 'Hold it! That's what I want!' After that, when they wanted me to look sexy, the just showed me a menu."

     "New York is better than Hollywood for most New Yorkers," she went on. "But only if you don't happen to be a baby. Having Jonathan changed my attitude about California. Out there you don't have to bundle a child up and take it down an elevator and out to a city park to play outside. Your own backyard is your park. You put your baby in it."

     Jonathan was playing with his toys in the living room when Judy got down on her knees and crawled to him. Together they disappeared under a large table, making "Bee-ah , bee-ah" and "Boop-boop" noises. When she came back, she said, "We were trucks. Did you hear him say "Mamma truck?"

     I shook my head.

     "Well, he said it," she assured me.

     She has no plans for Jonathan; she thinks that parental plans and ambitions can be a drag on a child. There are a few things she hopes Jonathan doesn't do, but if he does them anyhow, she'll keep quiet. "Even if he wants to be an actor," she said. "That's a terrible life. Men actors are not a happy breed. They're worse than actresses and, goodness knows, actresses aren't happy."

     However, she is working on a way to handle the Billie Dawn myth. "It could be very simple," she said, "and I'm not the only one who's thought of it. All I have to do is to remember to be dumb when I'm out, and smart when I'm home."

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