Get Happy by Gerald Clarke

Author:Gerald Clarke [Clarke, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55633-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2000-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Though he was never in love with her, as Judy had fantasized, Fred Astaire did like working with her. Her showmanship, he said, was uncanny, and he regarded the numbers he did with her in Easter Parade as high spots in his career—exalted praise indeed. Astaire was therefore as elated as Judy was when, even before Easter Parade completed shooting, the studio decided to put them together again. In Garland and Astaire, Metro thought, it had stumbled on a winning combination, another Rooney and Garland—or Rogers and Astaire.

The Barkleys of Broadway, their new picture was to be titled, and it promised to be a frolic. They were to play a married couple this time around, musical-comedy stars who begin feuding when the wife, disdaining the fluff that has made them famous, longs for serious roles that will show she can do more than sing and dance. Not until the end does she realize that, for a performer, there is no ambition higher than spreading joy—“fun set to music,” as her husband calls it. After the writers, those talented hams Betty Comden and Adolph Green, did a run-through of their screenplay in Arthur Freed’s office, an enthusiastic Judy turned to Astaire. “If we can only do as well as they did reading those parts, we’re okay,” she said. With Chuck Walters directing, employing the same velvet touch that had proved so successful in Easter Parade, the weeks ahead did, in fact, look like fun set to music. After two of Judy’s oldest friends, Oscar Levant and Billie Burke, were added to the cast, The Barkleys of Broadway began to assume the genial atmosphere of a house party.

A house party it was not to be, however. As much as Judy had enjoyed her collaboration with Astaire, Easter Parade had worn her out. Emotionally, she was back where she had been a year earlier, during the terrible days of The Pirate—tense, nervous and continually exhausted. In early June she pulled herself out of a sickbed to do just one number in Words and Music, Metro’s ponderous salute to the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Singing a duet of “I Wish I Were in Love Again” with her old pal Mickey—the last time they were to appear together on film—she was so pale and gaunt that not even Dorothy Ponedel’s makeup wizardry could make her anything more than a shadow of the young woman who was romping across the screen in Easter Parade.

Given her poor health and low spirits, it was almost inevitable, then, that when rehearsals for The Barkleys began a week later, Judy was soon calling in sick, a refrain that was repeated with increasing frequency as June gave way to July. By now, Judy believed, she was nothing but a mechanical hoop that Metro was rolling around for its own pleasure, and it was obvious to her, if to no one else, that she would never be able to finish The Barkleys. “The rehearsals began,” she said, “and my migraine headaches got worse.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.