Part 11

“I don’t think there’s any actress in the world that can produce like she can when she’s going,” said one member of the group that accompanied her to London. “When she’s going, she’s the greatest thing on wheels. When you’re with a dame that’s fantastic like that, and you don’t know if she’s going to get on or off or anything, you’re bound to crack under the strain.”

Many people wondered how Judy Garland got her amazing contract from Jack Warner to make the musical version of _A Star Is Born_. There was a clause in it she didn’t have to work before 11 A.M. If she was ill they wouldn’t expect her to work. It was a fantastic deal. Here’s the story.

When it came time for Jack’s beautiful daughter Barbara to have her coming-out party, he promised to get her anything she wanted. What she wanted was to have Judy Garland sing at the party. Her father told her that was impossible. “But, Daddy, you promised to give me anything I wanted, and I thought you could do anything.” Then she burst into tears and hung up the telephone.

Father went to work. He called Judy. Her answer was: “Why would I do that? No.” He called her again: “What would I have to give you to change your mind?”

Then it was that Sid Luft came on the phone and said: “We want _A Star Is Born_,” naming an astronomical price for Judy and special clauses in the contract. Warner had to buy the story from David O. Selznick at a cost, I believe, of a quarter of a million.

But Judy survived the flop that _A Star Is Born_ proved to be, as she has survived all the incredible excesses of her life. In every performance--at concerts, on television, in her new pictures--she has the power to stir an audience to the depths of their hearts, like an old-fashioned revival meeting. “We have all come through the fire together,” she seems to say, “and none of us is getting any younger, but we’re here together, and I’ll love you if you love me.”

This feeling she gives out to and gets back from an audience may be the one crush of her life that will last. She used to be her own worst critic. Before she went into a number for the screen, her co-workers had to keep telling her: “You’re wonderful, wonderful!” But she never thought she was good. “I was awful” was her own self-judgment whenever she’d finished. But now, as she literally tears her way through her songs, her audiences go crazy listening to her. They crowd around to touch her, and she believes in what she can achieve.

Ethel Barrymore, one of her greatest boosters, told me: “I think she has a tremendous frustration. She’s always felt she wasn’t wanted. She has a complex common among women--she wants to be beautiful. I told her: ‘God is funny that way. He divides these things. When you open your mouth to sing, you can be as beautiful as anyone I’ve ever known.’ But you’ve got to keep telling her.”

Judy suffers from nightmares concerning her mother. She has lost something of herself somewhere along the road. But so long as she has millions of people loving her and fighting for her, she’ll keep the ghosts in the background.

Her performance in Carnegie Hall was one of the most amazing things I ever witnessed. Her fans screamed and applauded after every number. She gave encore after encore, promised: “I’ll stay all night if you want me.” She threw her head back and used the mike like a trumpet.

She repeated the same frenzied performance in the Hollywood Bowl, this time in the rain, and nobody moved. You sat enthralled because she’d cast her magic spell as she did first when she sang “Over the Rainbow.” This was our little Judy, who came home and persuaded the natives that skies really were blue and that dreams really do come true.

_Eight_

One bright morning last spring, a fat young woman with a baby carriage ambled along Hollywood Boulevard. First to catch my eye were the pink Capri pants and her wabbling _derrière_ that was threatening to burst right out of them. Next item I spotted was the cigarette dangling out of her mouth, sprinkling ashes on the baby. I put on speed to catch up with her, though I didn’t know her from Little Orphan Annie.

“I wonder if you know how you look from the rear. You should be ashamed of yourself, and you a mother, too.”

That stopped her dead in her tracks. “And who might you be?”

“Doesn’t matter, but you’re disgusting.” With that, I walked on, feeling I’d done my bit for the cause. I wasn’t exactly running any risk. Though she outweighed me by thirty pounds, I knew she couldn’t leave the baby to come after me.

The cause is glamour, for which I’ve been fighting a losing battle for years. Our town was built on it, but there’s scarcely a trace left now. Morning, noon, and night the girls parade in babushkas; dirty, sloppy sweaters; and skin-tight pants. They may be an incitement to rape, but certainly not to marriage. Unless the era of the tough tomboy ends soon, the institution of matrimony is doomed to disappear forever.

The geniuses who conduct the motion-picture business killed glamour when they decided that what the public wanted was not dream stuff, from which movies used to be made, but realism. They took the girls out of satin, chiffon, velvet, and mink, put them first into gingham and then blue jeans. So what happened? They converted the heroine into the girl next door, and I’ve always advocated that if they want to see the girl next door, go next door. Now they’ve thrown the poor kid out to earn her living on the streets.

The milliners, especially the males, have helped stitch glamour’s shroud. Deep inside whatever they call their souls, they hate women. They made the most ridiculous concoctions for women to wear on their heads. Hats like table doilies, little pot holders, coal scuttles, dishpans, crash helmets, bedpans. Husbands were ignored when they complained: “Where in God’s name did you get that thing? Whoever made it must hate your sex.”

Not until other women laughed at them did the glamour pusses discard their psychotic chapeaux and go bareheaded. By then the designers had ruined their own racket; they’d killed the sale of hats. I can walk six blocks today in any city and see nothing more than hair or a scarf covering anybody else’s hair but mine.

Studio wardrobe departments that employed cutters, seamstresses, and embroidery hands by the dozens are empty, staffed by skeleton crews. The stock rooms were crammed with bolts of magnificent brocades, satins, laces; now most of the shelves are bare. One odd sight you’ll see, though--rows and rows of realistic breasts cunningly contoured from flesh-colored plastic, complete with pink nipples, hanging in pairs, labeled with the name of the underprivileged star they were created for. Some deceivers are made of rubber and inflate to size.

Everything else in Wardrobe was real--furs, fabrics, and feathers. The cost of sheer labor that went into making the clothes drove the accountants cross-eyed. One costume Garbo wore in _Mata Hari_ took eight Guadalajaran needlewomen nine weeks to complete. In my wardrobe I have the most beautiful coat I have seen anywhere, which Travis Banton of Paramount designed. The embroidery alone cost $4000.

The studio designers were brilliant men and would have succeeded as artists, painters, decorators. One or two were addicted to the bottle, but they all blazed with talent. Travis at Paramount, Adrian at Metro, Omar Kiam at Goldwyn, Orry-Kelly, now free-lancing and making more money than ever. He designed the clothes for Marilyn Monroe in _Some Like It Hot_, but she recut them to suit herself, and he refused to do her next picture.

There are only two women associated with the movies now who make sure they look like stars, and they both live in New York. Joan Crawford won’t venture out of her Fifth Avenue apartment to buy an egg unless she is dressed to the teeth. Marlene Dietrich does more--she’s made herself a living legend of spectacular glamour around the world.

For her opening night the first year at the Sahara in Las Vegas I had a front-row seat. She came on in a white dress that was poured over her. She wore layers of sheer soufflé, infinitely finer than chiffon, but only one layer to protect her chest from the evening air. The audience let out a gasp that threatened to blow away the tablecloths. The next night she wore the same gown, but she’d had two little circles of seed pearls sewed strategically on the bodice and forever after swore she had never appeared any more naked than that. But I’d seen both of them.

Every year she outdoes herself. One season she succeeded with a full-length coat of rippling swan’s-down that for sheer beauty surpassed anything in fabulous fashion. Jean Louis designed it, but it was made by my furrier, Mrs. Fuhrman. In her shop one day, where the coat was kept in cold storage, she asked me to try it on. I felt like a maharaja’s mother.

“We had a terrible time getting the swan’s-down,” said Mrs. Fuhrman, as I preened my borrowed feathers. “You know, you have to pull the feathers off the living swans--”

“You what?” I gulped. “I don’t want to see it again.”

Marlene was invented as a fashion plate just as Pygmalion created Galatea. The first time Travis Banton saw her, I thought he’d pass right out at her feet. Soon after she landed here, as Josef von Sternberg’s protégée, she turned up at an afternoon tea party wearing a black satin evening gown complete with train, trimmed with ostrich feathers. Her hips were decidedly lumpy. Except for her beautiful face and perfect legs, which we’d seen in _The Blue Angel_, she could have passed for a German housewife.

Travis, a Yale man, took her in hand, taught her everything he knew about art, clothes, and good taste. She slimmed down, was made over into the most strikingly dressed clothes horse on the screen. She had some keen competition to contend with at Paramount. Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Kay Francis, Evelyn Brent, and, later, Mae West fought for Travis’ most stunning designs.

For one picture Mae insisted upon having only French clothes. She had posed for a nude statue and sent it to Paris to have the clothes fitted on it. They were beautiful clothes that arrived back, but when they were tried on Mae, they didn’t meet by ten inches. Everything had to be remade at the studio.

There aren’t any Marquis of Queensberry rules when an actress wants to win, but Marlene walked off with the honors. She was Travis’ favorite. Nothing was too good for her. As top star at Paramount, she allowed herself the luxury of a raging temper unless she got her own way, but she took care not to rage at Travis.

At Christmas time she showered him with presents by way of thanks. He invited my son Bill and me to help trim his tree one Christmas. I saw him unwrap twenty-two separate packages from Marlene, covering the whole gamut of giving, from sapphire-and-diamond cuff links with studs to match, to Chinese jade figures and a kitchenload of copper pots and pans.

She is a complex woman. A different side showed when she wanted a hat, made almost entirely of black bird-of-paradise feathers, which she was going to wear at the race track. Trouble was that federal agents had just swooped down on the Wardrobe Department and confiscated its entire stock of egret and paradise feathers--$3500 worth. The law said that importing, buying, or possessing them was forbidden, though these particular items had been carried on the inventory for years.

So Marlene’s precious hat had to be made of substitute plumage by a staff of expert milliners--one of them even came out from New York for the occasion. Marlene took one look at the result, tried the fine feathers disdainfully on for size, then in silence ripped them to shreds. The milliners worked for days before they came up with a hat she’d wear.

The same perfectionism blazed again when Ouida and Basil Rathbone announced a costume ball they were giving at the old Victor Hugo Restaurant in Beverly Hills. This was going to be the diamond-studded social event of the season. Our hosts counted the invitations they’d sent out, then thoughtfully had the restaurant install extra plumbing and built two complete extra powder rooms, ladies’ and gents’.

Marlene, as ever, was intent on outdoing everybody. She decided to come as Leda and the Swan. Paramount’s sewing ladies labored for weeks on the costume. The studios in those days took care that wherever a star appeared, she lived up to the glittering image of a star that they--and the public--carried in their minds. If she showed up at a private gathering looking less than immaculate, she’d be hauled on the carpet next morning by a head executive and advised to mend her manners.

On the evening of the Rathbones’ party Marlene made up at home and went to the studio at 8 P.M. to be poured into her Leda gown. She regarded herself in the mirrors, then cried: “It won’t do. I can’t possibly wear a swan whose eyes match mine.” So the sewing girls fell to, and the embroidered blue eyes were picked out and green ones substituted. Marlene sent out for champagne and sandwiches for them all to have an impromptu celebration in Wardrobe. She arrived at the Rathbones’ shivaree five hours late and was the sensation of the evening.

I’d intended to go in a borrowed brocade that had a coronation look, with a jeweled crown to match, toting a baby lamb with gilded hoofs on a leash. But the lamb submitted to his pedicure for nothing. I was working on a picture with Louise Fazenda until midnight. When I got home, I was too tired to look at the lamb or do anything but flop into bed.

Under the swan’s-down and sequins, Marlene remains at heart what she was in the beginning: a _Hausfrau_ with a mothering instinct a mile wide. She has mothered every man in her life. They’ve loved her for that, and much more. Mike Todd enjoyed a special place under her warm, protective wing. A great friendship started when he went to see her in Las Vegas to ask her to appear as a “cameo” star along with Frank Sinatra, Red Skelton, and George Raft in the San Francisco honky-tonk sequence in _Around the World in Eighty Days_.

She agreed and instantly took on the full-time job of mothering Mike. She saw to it that he ate regularly, and the proper food. She helped him with advice. She bought him his first matched set of expensive luggage when she saw the ratty collection of cheap suitcases in which he’d been living. “You are a very great man, Mike,” she told him; “you must look and act like one.” He bought her nothing in return. Every dollar he could scrape up had to go into completing his picture. He hadn’t then met Elizabeth Taylor.

I watched Marlene play the honky-tonk scene, which wasn’t suited to her--she could have written a much better script herself. Then Mike drove me over to Metro, the only place where Todd-AO equipment had been installed, to see José Greco, David Niven, Cantinflas, and Cesar Romero in the flamenco and bullfight sequences. I sat stunned. “If the rest is as good as this,” I told Mike, “you’ve got one of the greatest spectacles ever made.” Joe Schenck, who’d sat with us, agreed. “If you need money to finish it,” he promised, “all you have to do is come to me.”

Mike gave Marlene and me his word that we could see the first rough cut of the complete picture. He kept his promises with most people, certainly with us. We had a six o’clock date to attend the screening with him before the three of us ate a quick dinner at Chasen’s and he flew to New York. He was late, as usual, but at six-thirty he was there to call: “Roll ’em.”

When the screening ended, Marlene and I sat in total silence. Mike couldn’t stand it. “Why don’t you say something? What’s the matter? I’ve never known you two broads at a loss for words.”

“Shall I tell him?” I asked Marlene.

“Go ahead.”

I gave it to him on the chin. “Who cut this picture? A butcher? Where are those wonderful scenes I saw in the gypsy tavern and the bull ring? Why have they been cut to bits?”

“She’s right,” murmured Marlene. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“The cutter said they ran too long,” Mike explained.

“Well, fire him. Get the negative put back together and start all over again. Pay him off and find yourself an artist, not the man who did this.”

“I don’t know if I can do it. I gave him a year’s contract. It’d cost a fortune.”

“If you don’t, it will cost you a great picture.”

“Who could I get?” he begged.

“You’ve got one friend in this town who wants to see you succeed, not fail,” I said, “and that’s Sam Goldwyn. He has saved his own pictures in the cutting room many a time. Go to Sam and let him find you the finest cutter in the business. It’s the only way you can save it. You haven’t got a picture unless you do.”

Mike sat there churning with anger. This was his first picture. We made a sad threesome in the restaurant, with Mike complaining about how hard he’d worked already and us not listening to him. “You’re going on a plane and you’ll get no food there,” Marlene interrupted. “I’ll order dinner for you. Hedda and I will eat later.”

He accepted that idea, then grumbled that he didn’t feel like going to New York anyway and he’d cancel his reservation. “You must go. You’ve got money questions to settle there,” said Marlene, the mother again.

After he’d left, she telephoned the airport: “Mr. Michael Todd will be a few minutes late for his flight, number ten, TWA, for New York. Would you please hold the plane for him? It’s very important.” Then she asked me: “Are you hungry?” We hadn’t eaten a mouthful with him.

He went to New York. On his return he saw Sam Goldwyn, who came through with the right cutter. The first real preview, loaded down with Hollywood and New York big shots, was a sensation. But by then Mike had met and been dazzled by Liz, who arrived late at that screening nursing a highball, and sipped her way through the performance. Marlene saw very little of him after that, and Liz got all the glory.

On the afternoon of March 22, 1958, I was in Havana, Cuba, bowing before Madame Fulgencio Batista, wife of the reigning dictator, who was guest of honor at a fashion show being staged to celebrate the opening of a new Conrad Hilton hotel. In my outstretched hand I held a hat for presentation to her. A newspaperman in the crowd couldn’t wait until I’d finished. He hurried forward and whispered in my ear: “Mike Todd’s dead--his plane crashed.”

I quickly dipped my head to Madame. “Will you excuse me? I’ve had some very sad news.”

When I flew back to New York next day, Marlene telephoned me at the Waldorf Towers, broken up by the news of Mike. We talked for ninety minutes. She wept for him, and so did I.

Over cocktails in Havana I’d met an ex-subject of my movie-making days. Ernest Hemingway had cursed like a troop of cavalry in 1942 when my cameraman trailed him around Sun Valley and ruined a day’s quail hunting for him. I wanted to bag him and the Gary Coopers on film for my series of two-reelers called _Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood_. In Cuba I got very chummy with Ernest and his lovely wife, Mary. “We should have met twenty-five years ago,” he said gallantly.

“Yes, I think we might have made some sweet music then.”

“It’s not too late now,” the old flirt replied.

“It is for me,” I said.

He sighed. “I was boasting a bit. I guess for me, too.”

The following winter in New York I saw Mary at a Broadway opening. “Where’s your ever-loving?” I asked.

“Out with Marlene Dietrich. He preferred dining with her to coming to see this play.”

“Can’t blame him. But how come I never get that much attention from your husband?”

“Because you don’t do as much for him as Marlene,” said Mary.

* * * * *

Where Marlene was a challenge and an inspiration to Travis Banton, Garbo was a challenge, exclamation point, to Gilbert Adrian at Metro. Marlene loves seductive glamour in clothes, and she finished up knowing as much as her master. The Swede hated dressing up, enjoyed wearing only her drab woolen skirt, turtle-neck sweater, flat-heeled shoes, and men’s socks on her big feet.

Travis delighted in high fashion. Adrian came up with more fantastic designs, though when femininity was in order, his clothes dripped with it for Greer Garson, Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald. He sized up Garbo like a bone surgeon, with his keen, kind, hazel eyes. She moved like a man, and she had a man’s square shoulders. Her arms were muscular; her bosom--let’s just say meager. Yet on the screen there was a commanding presence and luminous beauty.

She had an acting secret that only a few of us who watched her closely caught on to. In every clinch, a split second before the leading man put his arms around her, she would reach out and embrace him. It was one of the subconscious things that marked the difference between a European and an American woman--and Americans were always awed by Garbo. Her pictures are still earning lots more praise and money overseas than at home.

Her face hinted at sadness. She suffered her first bitter taste of that not long after she was brought over from Stockholm by Metro, to land in the middle of a New York heat wave, when she spent most of her days sitting in a hotel bathtub full of cold water. It wasn’t Garbo that the studio wanted but Maurice Stiller, the Swedish director who had discovered her and refused to travel without her. But Stiller was subsequently fired by Irving Thalberg, and it was Garbo who was given the build-up. Stiller returned to Stockholm, a defeated, ailing giant of a man, and she was heartbroken.

She stored up bitterness against MGM. In her early days Pete Smith, head of publicity, had her pose for cheesecake shots wearing track shorts, to be photographed with another Scandinavian, Paavo Nurmi, the record-breaking runner, on the athletic fields of the University of Southern California. When she had made her name a household word and insisted on working in complete privacy on the set behind tall screens, Louis B. Mayer brought six important New York stockholders to see her. She sent them packing. “When Lillian Gish was queen of the lot, all I was allowed to do was show my knees. Now let these visitors bend their rusty knees to me, but they shall not watch,” she said.

Once Arthur Brisbane, Hearst’s top editor, came on the set to watch. When she saw him she walked out of the scene. “If he wants to see me, he can see me in the theater.” She went to her dressing room and wouldn’t come back until he’d gone.

Adrian accentuated Garbo’s assets and concealed her liabilities. For her he devised the high-necked, long-sleeved evening gown that swept the world of fashion in the thirties. For _As You Desire Me_, in which I played her sister, he invented the pillbox hat with strings tied under her chin, which became part of every smart woman’s wardrobe. He had her dripping in lace and melting costume lines for _Anna Karenina_, sent the dress industry off on an oriental kick with her exotic outfits for _The Painted Veil_. Her costumes in _Grand Hotel_ could be worn today and still be high fashion.

He achieved much the same kind of fashion influence for Crawford. Her padded halfback’s shoulders in _Chained_ and a dozen other movies convinced half the women of America that this was exactly how they wanted to appear. His _Letty Lynton_ dress, with wide sleeves and sweetheart neck, was a garment-center classic. “If Crawford has an apron,” we used to say, “it has to be by Adrian.”

His new clothes for any top star were guarded like the gold of Fort Knox. Until the premiere costumes were kept under lock and key so manufacturers’ spies couldn’t run off with his designs and pirate them. A new Garbo or Crawford or Norma Shearer picture carried the fashion wallop of a Paris opening today.