What Price Hol­ly­wood: The Sto­ry of A Star is Born

Choose one film to rep­re­sent the essence of gold­en-age Hol­ly­wood, and George Cukor’s A Star is Born could well be a con­tender. There’s the glam­our of starpacked, flood­lit pre­mieres. There’s the sheer punch of Judy Garland’s own ped­al-to-the-floor per­for­mance, as the band singer who’s tak­en up by booze-addled mat­inée idol James Mason, and hits the heights while try­ing to save him from self-destruction.

Add to that daz­zling pro­duc­tion num­bers, the time­less craft of the Great Amer­i­can Song­book, and bril­liant­ly writ­ten melo­dra­ma too, where ego­tism and frailty col­lide in the high-stakes are­na of screen star­dom. How­ev­er much there is to admire in Bradley Coop­er and Lady Gaga’s tilt at sim­i­lar mate­r­i­al, this is on an alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent plateau of accom­plish­ment. It gains even more pow­er, how­ev­er, when you know what was going on with Gar­land behind the scenes.

By 1953, when A Star is Born start­ed com­ing togeth­er, Garland’s chem­i­cal depen­den­cies had long been an open secret in Hol­ly­wood. Signed up by MGM in 1935 when she was just 13, she was even­tu­al­ly put to work as a girl-next-door type oppo­site Mick­ey Rooney in a whole string of ​“back­yard musi­cals”, whose gru­elling pro­duc­tion sched­ules saw the juve­nile leads giv­en amphet­a­mines to pep them up, and bar­bi­tu­rates to knock them out at night.

MGM boss Louis B May­er was also intent on keep­ing Garland’s weight down, hence there were more diet pills and the stu­dio can­teen were under instruc­tions to restrict her to chick­en soup only, with the chick­en bits and mat­zo balls removed. The whole régime had an ulti­mate­ly dis­as­trous per­son­al impact on Gar­land, lead­ing to ongo­ing addic­tion issues, gnaw­ing inse­cu­ri­ty and volatile behaviour.

Read any of the Gar­land biogra­phies, and the same pic­ture emerges. She was everybody’s meal tick­et, and if she couldn’t func­tion with­out the pills, then the best thing any­one could do was to try and con­trol the sup­ply. She was the bread­win­ner for her fam­i­ly, since her moth­er and sec­ond hus­band squan­dered much of her MGM earn­ings in a wel­ter of poor invest­ment deci­sions. Her first hus­band, band­leader David Rose, was look­ing for a career leg-up, and sided with MGM to force her into hav­ing an ille­gal abor­tion at age 19.

There’s even a the­o­ry that the stu­dio set up her sec­ond mar­riage with direc­tor Vin­cente Min­nel­li, which cer­tain­ly brought pro­fes­sion­al div­i­dends (includ­ing movies like The Clock and The Pirate), but floun­dered per­son­al­ly after the birth of daugh­ter Liza. Gar­land even­tu­al­ly attempt­ed sui­cide by slash­ing her throat after she report­ed­ly found him in bed with the handyman.

Seem­ing­ly a bet­ter match was hub­by num­ber three, for­mer test pilot and all-round wheel­er-deal­er Sid Luft, who found a plan B for her when MGM can­celled her con­tract in 1950, and he set up a series of record-break­ing live shows in Lon­don, New York and LA, which revived her for­tunes and made her bank­able again. Every­thing though, depend­ed on Judy pop­ping those pills and get­ting through two shows a day, week after week. In essence then, the func­tion­ing addict was also sav­iour and provider.

Which is how we get to A Star is Born. Luft and Gar­land launched their own inde­pen­dent pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, Transcona Enter­pris­es, to pro­vide the cre­ative impe­tus, while Warn­er Broth­ers sup­plied fund­ing and stu­dio exper­tise. The cou­ple sought out Cukor, then tried and failed to per­suade Cary Grant to co-star, but one of their smartest moves was hir­ing esteemed Broad­way play­wright and screen­writer Moss Hart to reshape the orig­i­nal 1937 film ver­sion, whose rights had just become available.

There, Janet Gaynor was an actress mak­ing it big while her lover, estab­lished star Fred­er­ic March, hit the skids, but Hart rejigged the back­ground to bring in a musi­cal angle for Gar­land. He also knew the degree to which her own per­son­al issues made her a unique fit for the sto­ry, since the cen­tral char­ac­ters Vic­ki Lester and Nor­man Maine are basi­cal­ly por­traits of the con­flict rag­ing with­in Gar­land her­self – both self-destruc­tive addict and the empow­er­ing sav­iour. None of the oth­er screen ver­sions have quite this same dynam­ic, which is why the 1954 incar­na­tion has a spe­cial electricity.

Gar­land is entire­ly believ­able as the mid-rank­ing work­ing pro­fes­sion­al we meet at the start of the movie, a band singer at a gala event, who has the where­with­al to stop James Mason’s drunk­en star mak­ing an even big­ger fool of him­self. When he sobers up and finds her again, hear­ing her deliv­er The Man That Got Away in a late-night club con­vinces him she’s ready for star­dom. He knows she knows it too, and talks him into quit­ting the band for a tilt at the big time.

They fall in love, of course, but even­tu­al­ly the studio’s patience with him runs out – just as it had with Gar­land, whom MGM cast then fired from three movies in a row pri­or to her con­tract ter­mi­na­tion. The killer dra­mat­ic moment comes when she breaks down in front of the stu­dio boss, dis­traught that her love isn’t enough to get Mason out of his tail-spin, and wor­ried that she’s going to start hat­ing him instead. It’s a moment which seems to go beyond act­ing, as Gar­land lays bare her own fears that there’s no way out of her own pri­vate hell.

The shoot was long and com­pli­cat­ed and expen­sive. Giv­en the pres­sure Gar­land was under and Sid Luft’s pro­duc­tion inex­pe­ri­ence, Warn­er broth­ers insist­ed on junk­ing the first month’s footage so it could be redone in the new widescreen, Cin­e­maS­cope for­mat designed to lure audi­ences away from TV.

Cukor’s exact­ing demands also took time, and that was before the real­i­sa­tion that a gen­uine show-stop­ping num­ber was required to sell Garland’s Vic­ki Lester as a peer­less per­former – where­upon they went back and assem­bled the lengthy Born in a Trunk med­ley (with­out Cukor, by this time on his next project), which tells Garland’s own life sto­ry of pluck and deter­mi­na­tion in song. It’s the ulti­mate affir­ma­tion of Garland’s sheer will to keep on plug­ging away, and it wowed the pre­mière audi­ence of massed Hol­ly­wood stars when the film’s full 181-minute ver­sion played to tumul­tuous acclaim.

The film opened in New York and LA, and was doing what Vari­ety termed ​“bof­fo­la box-office”. Judy was back. Every­one loved her. This was her moment. Until dis­as­ter struck. Two hun­dred prints had already gone out nation­wide, but the the­atre own­ers clam­oured for a short­er ver­sion they could screen four times a day rather than three. Warn­ers caved in, and the mar­ket­ing depart­ment – not Cukor – made the cuts, send­ing instruc­tions to the dis­tri­b­u­tion hubs about the scenes they had to scis­sor out from the actu­al prints.

“A Star is Shorn” reck­oned the New York Times crit­ic Bosley Crowther, and poor word of mouth sub­se­quent­ly killed the com­mer­cial prospects for the trun­cat­ed 154-minute edit. It was lat­er nom­i­nat­ed for six Acad­e­my Awards and won pre­cise­ly none, Gar­land los­ing out to Grace Kel­ly in The Coun­try Girl – a shock­ing deci­sion facil­i­tat­ed in part by Warn­ers’ lack of cam­paign support.

Gar­land wasn’t at the awards cer­e­mo­ny, hav­ing just giv­en birth to her son Joey, but she did endure the ignominy of hav­ing a TV crew ready to relay her reac­tion in the event of her win­ning– who then swore at her for all their wast­ed effort when she was left emp­ty­hand­ed. In the moment, her new baby was a kind of con­so­la­tion, but the val­i­da­tion she expe­ri­enced from the pre­mière ver­sion marked a per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al peak.

Luft got her out on the road again (and again), there were more records, more films, more TV shows, yet all the while the drug use con­tin­ued, often in increased amounts need­ed to sus­tain the effect. Her weight went up, but even­tu­al­ly came down and stayed down, result­ing in the rav­aged, ema­ci­at­ed fig­ure of her final decade. Her body even­tu­al­ly gave out, slumped in a bath­room in her Bel­gravia home in 1969. She was 47, but her bird-like frame made her look con­sid­er­ably older.

There hasn’t yet been a com­plete­ly hap­py end­ing for A Star is Born either. Cukor died at the age of 83 in Jan­u­ary 1983, hav­ing refused for decades to watch the cut-down release. The very next day, he was due to see the restored ver­sion, which is cur­rent­ly what’s avail­able on var­i­ous for­mats. A com­plete sound­track of the 181-minute pre­mier ver­sion was traced, but no one at Warn­ers both­ered to keep an uncut neg­a­tive of that print, and the trims which were removed from the release prints had van­ished, an exten­sive search notwith­stand­ing. Hence the restored cut has a series of scenes with com­plete audio, but with black-and-white pro­duc­tion stills fill­ing the remain­ing gaps. It’s not ide­al, but remains prefer­able to the short­er cut which removes so much of the roman­tic build-up in the first half, and essen­tial­ly hob­bles the view­ing experience.

One lives in hope that the miss­ing footage will turn up some­where in the future, yet A Star is Born, even in its incom­plete state, still rep­re­sents Gar­land at her zenith. Here she’s no girl­ish inno­cent chas­ing rain­bows, but a mature world­ly woman who knows the harsh truths behind the torch songs she belts out, and who realis­es that while love can bring hope and con­so­la­tion in the tough­est times, love may not, even­tu­al­ly, be enough.

Of all her screen per­for­mances, it’s arguably the clos­est to the intractable dilem­mas of her own long-suf­fer­ing tra­vails. As her own favourite per­for­mance, she knew how it stood for every­thing she’d been through. Remem­ber her this way.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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