THE EXPLOITATION OF JUDY GARLAND - PART TWO

According to Paul Donnelly’s remarkable 2007 biography, Garland was a lost child from an early age. When her beloved father Frank Gumm, a flagrant homosexual, died in 1935, the 13-year-old Garland lost her best friend and was left to the mercy of her despicable mother. “My father’s death was the most terrible thing that happened to me in my life,” she repeated over the years. The traumatic period created an unhealthy desire in the girl to seek out older men for love and marriage, many of whom turned out to be homosexual.

“I was always lonesome,” Garland later recalled. “The only time I felt accepted or wanted was when I was on stage performing. I guess the stage was my only friend; the only place where I could feel comfortable. It was the only place where I felt equal and safe.”

She certainly didn’t feel safe in the MGM offices of Louis B Mayer. “In our house the word of Louis B Mayer became the law,” Garland said later. He took to groping her in his offi ce, telling her as he put a hand on her left breast that she “sang from the heart”.

“I often thought I was lucky I didn’t sing from another part of my anatomy,” she once quipped. Blackmailed into a hectic work schedule by the constant fear that their contracts would be torn up, Garland, along with other young stars, were given adrenaline shots, followed by downers like Seconal.

Mayer even sent people to spy on her to see if she was sticking to her daily diet of chicken soup, black coffee and 80 cigarettes to curb her appetite. Cheating would result in a reprimand and a trip to a doctor to be given diet pills, which gave her insomnia.

When songwriter Arthur Freed approached Mayer with The Wizard Of Oz, the mogul immediately saw the potential of the book as a major musical. Although Garland was Freed’s fi rst choice for the role, Mayer preferred Shirley Temple, under contract to rival studio 20th Century Fox. When Fox refused to loan Temple to MGM, Garland won the part. While it was the break she (and Ethel) were waiting for, it was also to initiate the long slow decline that ended with Garland’s death at the age of 47 in 1969.

The child was forced to lose weight and was put on a special diet. Mayer’s spies followed her day and night to make sure she kept to it. Whenever she was caught in a soda fountain eaing one of her favourite sundaes she would be severely reprimanded. Even so, her breasts were bound with tape and she was made to wear a special corset to flatten out her curves and make her appear younger.

Worse still, much of the rest of the adult cast of The Wizard Of Oz resented the attention given to the teenager and were afraid she would upstage them in the movie. Instead of giving the insecure girl the support she desperately needed, she was shunned by the four male leads Bert Lahr (The Cowardly Lion), Ray Bolger (Scarecrow), Jack Haley (Tin Man) and Frank Morgan (Wizard of Oz). Ironically her one lifeline and adult friend on the set was Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West.

Although it seems incredible now, the song that was to make her famous, Somewhere Over The Rainbow, was nearly dropped from the film for being “too sentimental”. One can only imagine how Garland’s career might have progressed if the song had been removed.

Garland received a special juvenile Oscar at the 1940 Academy Awards for her performance in The Wizard Of Oz and her subsequent fi lm, Babes In Arms. It made her one of MGM’s most bankable stars and the most exploited.

Thanks to a deal struck by Mayer with her agent, a former bootlegger and pimp called Frank Orsatti, Garland was earning $500 a week. Her friend at MGM, Mickey Rooney, was on $5,000 a week. It was, as she remarked later, the beginning of the end.

At 17, Garland was a mess; her life was totally controlled by Mayer and Ethel. Even her love life, such as it was, was carefully monitored. Having lost her virginity at 15, Garland was in constant need of male companionship, especially after the death of her father. She had been linked with child stars Freddie Bartholomew, Jackie Cooper and Frankie Darro. Rooney was her best friend but when she began a putative romance with Tyrone Power, Mayer stepped in and scotched it.

Garland could not escape Mayer’s clutches even through a legitimate marriage. In May 1941 she got engaged to band leader David Rose. Despite planning a big wedding, the couple eloped to Las Vegas and married during the early hours of the morning on July 28, 1941, when Garland was 19, with just her mother Ethel and her stepfather Will Gilmore present.

When Garland discovered that she was pregnant in November 1942, Rose and MGM persuaded her to have an abortion in order to maintain her good-girl image. Her “inhumane actions” haunted for the rest of her life...

HARRASSMENT IN CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD

Nearly two decades ago, while researching a book about Judy Garland, biographer Gerald Clarke stumbled on an old gossip column noting that his subject was working on a memoir for Random House.

This piqued Clarke’s curiosity, he later told Entertainment Weekly. No memoir had ever appeared. Clarke sent his research assistant to Columbia University’s library, where the publisher stores its archives, to see if there were any letters about the project. There were 30.

“Oh, by the way,” the researcher said, “there’s also an autobiography.”

It was incomplete, just 68 pages. But Clarke was startled by what he discovered in those pages — that Garland, one of the world’s most famous actresses, was groped and harassed repeatedly by Louis B. Mayer, the famed producer and co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios.

With the world fixated and disgusted by sexual harassment allegations by actresses and actors against and some of the biggest names in Hollywood — Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Dustin Hoffman — it is worth remembering that this intolerable behavior has been tolerated in showbiz as long as there have been bright lights.

The historical victims include Marilyn Monroe, Beverly Aadland, Joan Collins, and even Shirley Temple — all of whom described being molested and other abuses in their own memoirs.

“Everyone knows about the Hollywood casting couches,” Clarke said in an interview with ABC News, “but nobody thought that Judy had been subjected to any sexual pressure from the higher-ups at MGM.”

It started around the time Garland was playing Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.” She was 16.

“Having sex with the female help was regarded as a perk of power, and few women escaped the demands of Mayer and his underlings,” Clarke wrote in “Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland,”painting a stomach-turning portrait of the abuse:

…Between the ages of sixteen and twenty, Judy herself was to be approached for sex — and approached again and again. “Don’t think they all didn’t try,” she said. Top on the list was Mayer himself. Whenever he complimented her on her voice — she sang from the heart, he said — Mayer would invariably place his hand on her left breast to show just where her heart was. “I often thought I was lucky,” observed Judy, “that I didn’t sing with another part of my anatomy.” That scenario, a compliment followed by a grope, was repeated many times until, grown up at last, Judy put a stop to it. “Mr. Mayer, don’t you ever, ever do that again,” she finally had the courage to say. “I just will not stand for it.”

If Mayer was the most persistent, he was not the most vile, Clarke writes:

Another executive — Judy did not identify him — summoned her to his office, as he had summoned so many other, more glamorous Metro stars. Eschewing any pretense of small talk, he demanded that she, too, have sex with him. “Yes or no, right now — that was his style,” Judy recalled. When she refused … he began screaming. “Listen you — before you go, I want to tell you something. I’ll ruin you and I can do it. I’ll break you if it’s the last thing I do.”

In addition to being threatened and harassed, Garland was hounded to lose weight and made to feel ugly. She abused drugs and alcohol and died in 1969 of an apparent accidental overdose of barbiturates. She was 47 years old.

There is an ironic and disturbing coda to Clarke’s discovery of the abuse Garland endured.

In 2009, about a decade after the biography was published, the Hollywood trade journals were abuzz after the book was optioned for a movie — that Garland would come alive again on-screen, played by Anne Hathaway.

“It’s a very sensitive project,” Hathaway told the BBC in 2010, “and there have been so many stories told about her life that we’re really trying to get it right.”

The movie has not yet made it into production, and it seems even more unlikely now.

The producer is Harvey Weinstein...

SOURCE

NEW DOCUMENTARY ON TCM

NEW YORK – Turner Classic Movies, that bastion of old films, is making its most dramatic foray yet into original programming.

TCM will broadcast a seven-part documentary series, "Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood," beginning Monday. The series, narrated by Christopher Plummer, will run for seven weeks and cover Hollywood's history from 1890-1970.

For the movie-obsessed TCM, the series is an ambitious anomaly. The cable channel is also sponsoring a touring exhibit of Hollywood memorabilia that will travel through Atlanta, New York, Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

"We haven't done anything this big before," says Robert Osborne, host and face of the 16-year-old, commercial-free Turner Classic. "I think it's very appropriate because we are all about movies."

The project was the brainchild of executive producer Bill Haber, who turned to documentary filmmaker Jon Wilkman to write and direct it. He spent 2 1/2 years on the film, which he says is about "how Hollywood became Hollywood."

"There have been other histories, which are sort of highlights, scenes from the great films," says Wilkman. "The underlying theme of this series is essentially Hollywood power: Who had it, how did they get it, what did they do with it, and how did they lose it."

While the series covers the history of the movie business through evolving technology, artistic progress and commercial drive, the dominant feeling one gets is that the engine of Hollywood was its ambitious moguls: Men, mostly immigrants, who built an empire of celluloid.



At the end of the second episode, "The Birth of Hollywood," Plummer intones: "In hardly more than 20 years, the American motion picture business had evolved from a cheap novelty to the country's fifth largest industry, after agriculture, transportation, oil and steel. And it seemed to happen in less than the flicker of a frame of film."

It's very much a rags-to-riches story, from the invention of moving images to the industry's early foothold in New York and Fort Greene, N.J., and finally to its California home. Especially vibrant are the early moguls: Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle, Samuel Goldwyn, William Fox and others.

Where possible, Wilkman turns to descendants of those founders, interviewing producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., the son of Samuel Goldwyn; Daniel Selznick, the son of David O. Selznick; actor Bob Balaban, whose father, Elmer Balaban, was an early movie theater owner; and, who Wilkman calls his "great find," Carla Laemmle, the 101-year-old actress and daughter to Carl Laemmle.

"We wanted as direct a connection to the people, the main characters, the environment that we're looking at," says Wilkman, who compares the founders of Hollywood to the characters of a Dickens novel. "In some cases, the American dream as we know it is a creation of these immigrant moviemakers."

In examining how the movie business was forged, "Moguls & Movie Stars" reflects many of the issues of today's Hollywood, where questions brought on by the Internet and technology — digital distribution, 3-D filmmaking — are causing many to reconsider basic questions of moviemaking.



"In many ways, today we are back in 1890," says Wilkman. "This whole world of the movies is being rethought and rebuilt: How are movies made? Who makes them? How are they distributed? What's the subject matter?"

Osborne is quick to caution that the series doesn't represent a change in programming philosophy for Turner Classic.

"I don't think we're a channel that should do a lot of original programming just for its own sake because I think people come to us because they really want to see movies," says Osborne, who adds "Moguls & Movie Stars" is a worthy exception.

Aring along with the series will be panel discussions with Osborne, Wilkman and others. Films discussed in the series will also be broadcast after each episode. The conversation — as it always does at Turner Classic — will lead back to the movies...