Judy Garland: Radio Actor

In addition to her legendary career as a movie star, Judy Garland also spent a lot of time acting on the radio in the 40s and 50s. This part of her career often gets overlooked for a couple reasons. First, the size of her accomplishments on film (with classics like THE WIZARD OF OZ, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, and A STAR IS BORN) and onstage (she was one of the most popular performers of her era, culminating in her iconic 1961 live album JUDY AT CARNEGIE HALL) simply dwarfs everything else she ever did. The other reason is because of the disappearance of the medium itself. Dramatic radio, a massively popular medium in the 30s and 40s, went into quick decline with the rise of television in the 50s. Everyone knows that the invention of TV hurt the movie business, but it laid waste to radio—particularly dramatic radio.

I’ve compiled the following annotated list of Judy’s dramatic performances on radio. Please note, this list does not include the hundreds of appearances she made on shows where she appeared as herself to do an interview or sing a song or two. This is a list of her work as a radio actor.

 

1940

10-28: Strike Up the Band - Lux Radio Theatre. With Mickey Rooney. An adaptation of their film of the same name. Judy did more work for Lux Radio Theatre than any other show, and happily most of these have survived.

1941

1-26: Love’s New Sweet Song – Silver Theater CBS. This full episode might be lost, though a brief clip of Judy singing has survived. According to author Scott Schechter, Judy cowrote the story for this show and cowrote the song she sings.

10-12: Eternally Yours -Part I – Silver Theater CBS. This one might also be lost. I can’t find much information about it. The program usually specialized in original dramatic works, but occasionally did movie adaptations, and I wonder if this wasn’t a production of the 1939 Loretta Young movie. Part one of two.

10-19: Eternally Yours -Part II – Silver Theater CBS. Part two of two.

11-9: Babes in Arms - Screen Guild Theater. With Mickey Rooney. An adaptation of their 1939 film.

11-17: Merton of the Movies - Lux Radio Theatre. With Mickey Rooney. An adaptation of the play of the same name. I think this might be the only time Judy and Mickey acted in a radio show that was not an adaptation of one of their films. 

1942

10-12: Morning Glory - Lux Radio Theatre. With John Payne.

12-28: A Star is Born - Lux Radio Theatre. With Walter Pidgeon. This is an adaptation of the 1937 David O. Selznik drama. It was Judy’s first attempt at the character of Esther Blodgett and inspired her to eventually tackle the role on film (as a musical) later on. 

1943

3-22: For Me and My Gal – Screen Guild Players, CBS. With Gene Kelly and Dick Powell. An adaptation of Judy and Gene’s 1942 film.

12-12: Ringside Table – Silver Theater, CBS. With Alan Ladd. This one also appears to be lost.

1946

1-28: The Clock - Lux Radio Theatre. With John Hodiak. An adaptation of Judy’s 1945 film.

9-14: Holiday – Hollywood Star Time. Not sure if this one has survived. An adaptation of the 1938 Katharine Hepburn film.  

11-21: Drive In – Suspense. This one is readily available and is a real treat. Judy does radio noir! Suspense was just about the best show of its kind and Judy’s episode—where she plays a carhop who makes the mistake of accepting a lift home from the wrong man—is a real nailbiter. It’ll make you wish she did more of this kind of thing.

12-2: Meet Me In St. Louis - Lux Radio Theatre. With Margaret O’Brien. An adaptation of Judy and Margaret’s 1944 film.

1950

11-5: Alice Adams – The Theater Guild on the Air, NBC. With Thomas Mitchell. An adaptation of the 1935 Katharine Hepburn film.  

12-25: The Wizard of Oz - Lux Radio Theatre. Do I even have to say? An adaptation of Judy’s 1939 film.

1951

2-15: Cinderella – The Hallmark Playhouse. Judy as the title character.

1953

2-16: Lady in the Dark - Lux Radio Theatre. With John Lund. An adaptation of the 1944 film. Pretty dated and sexist, but if you’ve seen BABYGIRL you’ll see some funny parallels with this story. This was, I believe, Judy's last dramatic role on radio. 

This is list is only complete in the sense that it has all the performances I know of, but, of course, I'd always love to discover more. Let me know of any I missed!

What If: Judy Garland and the Fifties Musical

I like to play little what if? games sometimes with classic films and filmmakers, asking myself what would have happened if X Y or Z had occurred. It's fun (at least I think it's fun) to contemplate the different ways film history might have changed. I was thinking about one of these what ifs last night, and I thought I'd share it. (Maybe I'll make this a semi-regular feature on the blog. We'll see.)

This what if concerns Judy Garland. Before I get to the question itself, let's set it up. In the mid-1930s, while she was barely a teenager, Judy did her apprenticeship at MGM. She was most successful playing the female sidekick to Mickey Rooney. By the time she made THE WIZARD OF OZ in 1939, however, the studio was already wondering if Judy could start carrying movies by herself. Although OZ wasn't an immediate hit (it did good box office but cost a lot to make and didn't turn a profit until it was rereleased a few years later), it did establish that Judy was worthy of the spotlight. The studio kept her paired with Rooney for a few more years to squeeze out as many "Mickey and Judy" dollars as possible, but it also began easing Garland into her own star vehicles like FOR ME AND MY GAL (1942) and PRESENTING LILY MARS (1943). When she struck box office gold with MEET ME IN ST LOUIS in 1944, Judy Garland was officially a star in her own right. For the next six years she enjoyed hits like THE HARVEY GIRLS (1946), EASTER PARADE (1948) and SUMMER STOCK (1950). 

As her star rose, however, Judy began to be a problem on set. She had crippling stage fright which, when combined with deepening drug abuse, made her steadily more difficult to work with. In practical terms that meant that some days it was impossible to get her in front of a camera, costing the studio thousands of dollars for every minute the crew stood around waiting. Finally, after she completed SUMMER STOCK in 1950, MGM did the previously unthinkable and fired Judy.

Now, this is where we might do a what if? What if Judy had somehow pulled herself together and didn't get fired from MGM in 1950? It's interesting to consider, though I think the answer isn't as simple as 'we would have gotten more great Judy MGM musicals.' Yes, we would have gotten her in ANNIE GET YOUR GUN, which she'd already begun shooting when she was fired. (She was replaced by Betty Hutton.) Yes, she probably would have starred in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN with Gene Kelly, which is what he wanted. That would have been interesting.

But by 1950, Judy was burned out doing the whole 'happy and I know it' song and dance routine at MGM. What happened to her when she got fired was that she was forced to go and become Judy Garland the singer, to tour and record fulltime, rather than being Judy Garland the singing movie star. And this is the key, because it was only at this point in her career that Judy really became the auteur of her own career. While she had been one of the greatest and most iconic of movie stars, she'd also been a cog in the machine, a commodity for the studio to shape and distribute as it saw fit.  On her own, however, she shaped her art to her own will. She became a legendary live performer with historic runs in London and New York, culminating in her smash hit album JUDY AT CARNEGIE HALL in 1961. What's notable is that her studio albums and live recordings have more of an edge to them than her previous work for MGM. Their pathos is deeper, their wit is sharper.

In the sixties, she returned to movies, making a handful of films, but it's notable that she mostly made dramas like JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG and A CHILD IS WAITING. Her only film role in the 1950s was her triumphant performance in George Cukor's A STAR IS BORN (1954).

And it's A STAR IS BORN that leads us to our big what if. Although the film was heralded as a masterpiece and a great comeback for Judy, it failed to make money. I won't get into the details of why this happened (it has a lot to do with Warner Brothers, the studio that released it), but it will suffice to say that Judy took a lot of blame that she didn't deserve. But what if the film had been a success? What if Judy could have set up her shingle at Warner Brothers and made two or three (of more) musicals for them?

Because one thing that is fascinating about A STAR IS BORN is that it's more of a Judy Garland joint that any other film she made. She and her husband Sid Luft were the primary movers and shakers on the production. The entire film was geared toward being a showcase for the talents of Judy Garland: belting out up-tempo tunes, crooning slow torch songs, and displaying her acting chops. (She lost Best Actress to Grace Kelly that year, and I'd say that time has offered a different verdict except that even at the time it was obvious that Garland should have won.) More tellingly, the movie was dark. This wasn't a musical comedy like all those smiley pictures she made for MGM. This story ends with a suicide. This is a musical drama.

What if Judy had been able to make more musical dramas in the 50s? Her drinking buddy Humphrey Bogart took on darker and darker roles in the 50s, deepening the meaning of his onscreen persona. What if Garland had been allowed to do that with the musical? Listen to her song "Me and My Shadow" off her 1957 studio album masterpiece ALONE, and ask yourself what kind of film that song would have fit into. I want to see that film. I bet it would have been great. 

MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944)

I've just completed my semi-annual viewing of Vincente Minnelli's MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS. I've lost count how many times I've seen this film over the years, but it's become something of a Christmas tradition for me, a film I can return to again and again with the same level of joy, admiration, and, frankly, wonder.

Here are ten reflections about this great film.

1. It was Judy Garland's biggest hit. Of course, today Judy is best known and most beloved for THE WIZARD OF OZ, but at the time of its release OZ was an under-performer. (While it did well at the box office, OZ cost a lot to make and distribute, and it didn't actually turn a profit until it was rereleased in the late forties.). MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, however, was a massive hit right out of the gate. It established that Judy Garland--freed from her childhood costar Mickey Rooney--was a box office powerhouse.

2. This was peak Judy Garland, Movie Star. As an icon, there's no greater Garland movie than OZ. As an actor, there's no greater Garland movie than A STAR IS BORN. But if you want Peak Judy, if you want Judy the Star, then there's no greater Garland film than MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS. She's never looked more beautiful in a film--in every Technicolor frame Minnelli is telling us "Here is a movie star". She's also never been funnier in a film. Perhaps because of the pathos surrounding her tragic life, it's easy to forget that Judy was one of the funniest performers of her era. As the whip-smart boy-crazy Esther Smith in MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, she's hilarious. And, of course, the music by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, overseen by Judy's trusted friend and arranger Roger Edens, is some of her best, letting her do yearning in "The Boy Next Door" and melancholy in "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". The joyous "Trolley Song" sequence might be the most exuberant four minutes Judy Garland ever on film.

3. It was MGM's biggest hit to date. The studio had part ownership of GONE WITH THE WIND, but that film was first and foremost the work of independent producer David O. Selznik. It was in no real sense of the phrase an MGM production. MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, on the other hand, might well be considered the ultimate MGM production.

4. Its Christmas scenes are an outlier. Like a lot of people, I usually watch MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS at Christmastime, and the film has become something of a holiday classic due to the incredibly potent Winter section of the film that culminates in Judy singing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" to Margaret O'Brien. The song would become a standard, forever linking the film to the holiday. The film itself, however, is told in sections, and the Winter section is simply one among four.

5. Somehow it's a perfect Christmas movie anyway. The thing about Christmas is, it's super fake. Fake trees in the living room, fake Santas at the mall, fake nativity scenes in the front yard. And the thing about MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS is, it is a dreamscape, a sentimental vision. Many Christmas songs are steeped in nostalgia for a distant past, a past where treetops glisten and children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow. MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS is just such a vision of the past, a past where everyone is funny and happy and breaks into song when the spirit moves. A past where a child's greatest concern is that she might have to miss the St. Louis World's Fair if her family moves to New York. The whole thing is as fake, and wonderful, as a great Christmas tune.

6. It's a war film. What's not in the film is any mention of what was happening in 1944 when the production was underway. America was in World War II, and the war was going poorly for the Allies. The film, then, is escapist -- quite literally a way to escape the world and its worries. Yet its most famous scene, Judy's rendition of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" takes on added poignancy when one considers its context. The song is, more than anything else, a prayer that "from now on, all our troubles will be far away." When she comes to the verse "Through the years, we all will be together, if the fates allow" you can practically hear the moviegoers of 1944 wiping away tears. Today, the film remains a joyful celebration of life, but its key emotional scenes retain their bittersweet quality, even if the audience has forgotten their context.

7. The Halloween sequence is one of the strangest things MGM ever put onscreen. There's a stretch of, I don't know, twenty minutes or so, where the film gives over its plot to the Halloween machinations of the youngest daughters of the Smith family, Agnes and Tootie (Joan Carroll and Margaret O'Brien). I'm always shocked that these scenes were allowed to stay in the movie. Because they are weird, really weird. The sequence takes place entirely at night, with the girls donning costumes ("She's a horrible ghost and I'm a terrible drunken ghost") and telling ghoulish tall tales about the neighbors (one neighbor is said to have a "box of dead cats" that he "burns in his furnace at midnight" when he's not "beating his wife with a red hot poker"). The girls assemble with local kids in the streets and burn old furniture and throw baking flour in the face of the reputed wife-beater and cat-murderer (the jolly way the guy takes the face full of flour leads us to suspect that he's been the object of Halloween pranks for a long time). After this strange sequence, the film gets even darker when Tootie turns up bloodied and crying and says that Esther's would-be boyfriend John Truett (Tom Drake) attacked her ("He tried to kill me!"). After a scene where Esther storms over and beats the crap out of John Truett (Judy is wonderfully ferocious), we learn that Tootie simply fell down. She's just a little fibber, and the whole thing is laughed off. What is bizarre, though, is that for something like five minutes of this movie the audience thinks that the romantic lead, the titular boy of Judy's ballad "The Boy Next Door" is something like a murderous child molester.

8. About that boy. God, I hate John Truett. What a dullard. What a boring, boring, boring man. Esther Smith is gonna be in for a long haul married to this blank slate.

9. Judy almost didn't do the film. At first, the star actually turned down MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (the first project she ever turned down at MGM, in fact). She wanted to make her mark as a mature leading lady, and she thought the part of Esther was too close in nature to the kind of thing she'd been doing with Mickey Rooney. Plus, she suspected that little Margaret O'Brien, as the hilariously demonic little Tootie, would steal the movie. Judy was partly right. O'Brien was indeed a sensation in the film and even won a special Oscar for the part. But director Vincente Minelli took care of his star, so that the film became a showy debut for Margret O'Brien AND the perfect showcase for Judy Garland.

10. Minnelli and Garland fell in love during the making of the film. The marriage of the great star and her great director has always been an object of fascination. Minnelli was gay, but then again so was Garland's beloved late father, and while it may be Freudian shorthand to suggest that Judy fell in love with Vincente because she was looking for a father figure, it's also almost certainly true. What better father figure could there be than the kind and soft spoken director who guided her to her biggest (and most glamorous) hit? What exactly Minnelli saw in Garland has always been more of a mystery, though, because Minnelli was as much a closed book as Garland was an open one. What we know for sure is that for the next few years, the couple was in the business of being a couple. They worked together on THE CLOCK, ZIEGFIELD FOLLIES, TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY, and THE PIRATE. None of these projects could duplicate their success on MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, though the THE CLOCK is a moving romance with an excellent performance by Judy, while the uneven THE PIRATE has become something of a cult classic. Aside from Liza Minnelli, though, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS remains the pair's greatest accomplishment. It is beautiful and buoyant, a hymn to human emotion. 

Why The Oscars Are Worse Than Useless

Above: Joanne Woodward admires her Oscar while husband Paul Newman regards his "Noscar" during his decades-long Oscar losing streak

MOONLIGHT might actually be my favorite movie from last year, which would make it the rare winner of the Oscar for Best Picture that lines up with my own taste. Having said that, and looking past the instantly legendary screw-up last night wherein Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were given the wrong envelope before taking the stage to hand out the award--I can't help but expressing my disgust at the whole Oscar thing.

Here's why the Oscars are worse than useless: Giving out competitive awards for art reduces art to a horse race. "The Oscars" is just the world's biggest reality game show, turning every film except one into a "loser." MOONLIGHT won, so LA LA LAND lost, but why in the name of all that is holy are these two films in a competition with each other in the first place? Was LA LA LAND the better film for the few minutes that its creators were on stage thanking their families and coworkers? Did it suddenly stop being the best picture released in 2016? Did MOONLIGHT suddenly become the best? No, because one director's love letter to the Hollywood musical and the other director's poignant exploration of race and sexuality were not trying to do the same thing. They are separate works of art, and though some people have tried to make them into proxies for larger cultural arguments the truth remains that the films themselves are self-contained works, both years in the making, and neither attempting to capture the current zeitgeist.

If MOONLIGHT won because Academy voters wanted to send some vague message about inclusiveness, then it really only proves the point that the Oscars are bullshit. MOONLIGHT is a great work of art. It didn't need a shiny gold man to be a great work of art. 

At this point, the most notable thing about the Oscars is how wrong they are. We could add up all the great films that didn't win the Oscar for Best Picture and we'd have almost all of the greatest movies ever made. Cary Grant never won a competitive Oscar, and neither did Judy Garland. Since they might be cinema's two greatest performers, does this make sense? After years of not winning, John Wayne and Paul Newman finally did win Oscars, but does anyone really regard TRUE GRIT and THE COLOR OF MONEY as their greatest performances? Do many people consider SCENT OF A WOMAN to even be a passably good movie, much less Pacino's best performance? Is TRAINING DAY really the keeper from all the leading performances that Denzel Washington has given?

The answer to all these questions is no, yet the Oscar myth creates a counter-narrative in which competing marketing campaigns decide which work of art had more merit, all for the benefit of a flashy television event, the real purpose of which, like the Super Bowl, is to sell soap and beer during the commercial breaks. The awards themselves have a longer history, with their roots stretching back to a promotional scheme cooked up by Louis B. Mayer, a scheme that first morphed into a status symbol (industry bragging rights in a one-industry town) before becoming modern television's biggest waste of time.

Like I said, though, the awards show is worse than useless, it's reductive. It diminishes, for the sake of money, artists and works of art. The movie business is already volatile enough mix of art and commerce (of "movie" and "business"). How about we just skip the show next year and go to the movies? 

THE CLOCK (1945)

I think Judy Garland might well have been the greatest performer in the history of motion pictures. We all know she was a great singer, but she was also a superb dancer (Gene Kelly rated her as his most gifted partner) and one of the great underrated comic actors of classic cinema. She was also, not incidentally, a fine dramatic actor. She didn't do many non-musicals, unfortunately, but her work on pictures like A CHILD IS WAITING (1963) and JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG (1961) nicely demonstrates that as an actor she could draw on the same depth of feeling that made her a great singer. The best example of this is probably found in George Cukor's 1954 musical drama masterpiece A STAR IS BORN, which called on every skill that Judy Garland had, to glorious results.

But Garland's most underrated dramatic role was the one she gave in Vincente Minnelli's fascinating 1945 war drama THE CLOCK. Judy plays Alice Mayberry a young secretary in New York who meets solider Joe Allen (Robert Walker) who is on a 48-hour leave before he'll be shipped off to war. The two walk around the city together, flirting and fighting and falling in love, until they decide to get married in a rush. In the end, Alice sees Joe off at the station as he returns to war and she returns to her life.

With this kind of material, one would expect the romance to be lush and light and thick with sentiment. Yet the script by Robert Nathan and Joseph Schrank, from the story by Paul and Pauline Gallico, grounds things in a kind of reality. Alice holds Joe at arms length, afraid of being "picked up" by a solider, and thus being thought of as "that kind of girl." (The film hints that this is a constant danger of single young women in the city.) Their whirlwind romance is marked by uncertainty about the future, and their rush to get married is hampered at every turn by a bored bureaucracy that regards their love affair as just another pile of paperwork. This lack of sentiment is a Minnelli specialty. Even in something as heartwarming as MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, the mood is complicated by dark humor and sudden flashes of anger and violence. In THE CLOCK, the romance between Alice and Joe is placed in a decidedly unromantic context. This juxtaposition has the effect of making the romance all the more moving.

Garland and Walker are excellent. Judy gets to play a street smart young woman, a nice change of pace from all the doe-eyed innocents she had to play for MGM. She's eminently believable in the role, perhaps because Judy herself was far from a doe-eyed innocent in 1945, despite her public image. She was, in many ways, a shrewd working girl, closer in spirit to Alice Mayberry than to OZ's Dorothy Gale. Walker compliments her nicely because there's an edge to his performance. Walker was going through a painful divorce during the making of the film (his wife Jennifer Jones had already left him for producer David O. Selznick), and he gives Joe an unsettled quality. He's not just a nice kid from Indiana. There's something slightly dangerous about him. Watching him here, you can see why his most famous role would be as a psycho in Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN.

The most fascinating element of THE CLOCK is the unsettled quality of the romance between Alice and Joe. You can believe that they fell in love and you can believe that they got married in a fever, but you can also believe that the marriage might not work out in the end. There's a lot unresolved at the end, and not just because Joe is shipping off to war. There's the fact that Alice and Joe seem to want different things. She seems very happy working in the city and doesn't seem in a rush to have kids, while he wants to go back to where he came from. The ending is sweet but restrained, with the newlywed couple telling each other, "See you soon." Then Joe boards his train and Alice turns and walks into the crowd at Penn Station, merging and disappearing in the crush of people.

In its quiet way, THE CLOCK is one of the best romances of the wartime period. It's not epic like CASABLANCA, but it's also more nuanced and, in some ways, more mature. It's about two small people whose love affair is insignificant to the outside world. They marry out of love and fear and a sense that time might run out on them. It's the kind of movie where you can be happy for the crazy kids while not being altogether sure that they're going to make it as a couple. If you can appreciate the fragile beauty of their love affair then THE CLOCK takes takes on real resonance as an artifact of World War II.