Judy Remembered
by Gene Lees
Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing
I HAVE BEEN THINKING about her all morning. Now it's noon, and the sun is warm-and I'm alive, and she's not. I have known few people whose death left such a hole, not only in her profession, but in the lives of those around her. It's surprising to find, after eleven years, how much we all still miss her.
Her real name was Judy Tuvim, and she was Jewish. Tuvim, or tovim, means "good," yom tovim means "holidays," and she became Judy Holliday.
One would think that being introduced to one of your movie-star her oines would be a vivid and imperishable memory. It's incredible to me that I can't remember meeting her. I only remember that I knew her through Gerry Mulligan, the com poser and baritone saxophonist. He and Judy were immersed in a complex love affair for years.
Judy stumbled into stardom when the actress who was to play the part of Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday on Broadway took sick. Legend has it that Judy learned the role in two or three days and then went on and tore the house down. The legend is correct.
But the role that launched her became an albatross to her. She was anything but the girl she portrayed. The producers kept sending her scripts about still another Billie-despite Bells Are Ringing, despite films like The Solid Gold Cadillac and Full of Life. She kept turning them down. She appeared in a musical called Hot Spot, a turkey that lasted as long as it did only because of her performance.
When she was complaining one day about the silly scripts she kept receiving, I said, "Judy, why don't you take one of them, just to be working?" "I did that once," she answered. "It was called Hot Spot, remember?" I offered no further advice.
She didn't particularly like actors or the theater world, and she really wanted to write. Her friends were mostly writers-Joseph Heller was one of them-and music people. She sang very well, as you can hear if you have the original cast album of Bells Are Ringing, but she was far more musical than the public ever knew. Indeed, be fore Judy became known as an ac tress, she worked in a Greenwich Village cabaret with lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green and a little-known pianist named Leonard Bernstein.
Judy wrote marvelous lyrics herself.
She and Mulligan were writing a musical version of Anita Loos's play Happy Birthday. She had not completed the lyrics when she died, and Mulligan asked me to finish them. I studied her work and found it brilliant. I felt strange about tampering with it and so never did. Mulligan's wonderful score is virtually complete-somebody should produce that show.
Judy was in love with words. The late composer Gary McFarland told me once of spending an evening with her, Mulligan, and Paul Desmond.
"Man," he said, "it was like being caught in the middle of an acrostic." One of the puns I remember involved the ferns in her apartment.
Waving her hand toward them, she said, "With fronds like these, who needs anemones?" Judy was not conventionally pretty.
She was stocky and worried about her weight. But she had those crazy dimples and that smile and those eyes illumined from within, and she was beautiful. There was a haunted quality about her, too, a loneliness that I only half understood. Part of it, I think, lay in the fact that she was too intelligent for the world around her. I always had the feeling that she was holding her brain in check, for fear of intimidating people.
Even so, as I once told a mutual friend of ours, "In some ways I was a little afraid of Judy." "You shouldn't have been," he re plied. "Judy was a healer." Around 1960, Mulligan organized a superb, unforgettable orchestra and took it to Chicago. (Some of its records, on the Verve label, can still be found.) At night after work he would get on a plane and fly east to see Judy, who was in the hospital after a mastectomy. He would sit by her bedside during the day, then fly back to Chicago to perform at night. I never understood how he survived it. One of the bitchy New York lady newspaper columnists wrote that Judy had feigned illness to get out of a show she didn't like.
She recovered from that phase of her illness, and she was well for a few years. I remember some funny and happy moments, like riding up Madison Avenue in a taxi late one night with her and Mulligan, singing theme songs from long-gone radio shows, and laughing. Mulligan, by the way, is the only man I ever met who knew all the words to "Wave the flag for Hudson High, boys .... " Mulligan, out of town with his quartet, called me one day. "Judy has been in the hospital for a checkup," he said.
"She's waiting for the results, and she's alone. I can't get back tonight.
Will you go over and spend the evening with her?" She was in bed, wearing a bed jacket-yellow, as I recall. We watched television. There was little I could say to console her, but some how it didn't matter, because some body was there.
A week or two later, when I ran into her and Mulligan in a restaurant, she told me the results of those tests were negative. I asked her how she felt.
"Terrible," she said, and gave that funny little laugh, "but at least I know I'm not going to die." I left for Paris a few days after that and was gone several weeks. About an hour after I got back to New York, I was passing a newsstand. It was June 7, 1965. I looked down at a large stack of New York Posts. A big black head line said, "Judy Holliday Dies." Only one show, Bells Are Ringing, ever displayed Judy's potential in musical theater. No show displayed her writing, although Happy Birthday could still do it. She was admired for comedy, but had she lived, Judy Holliday would without question be one of our major dramatic actresses. You can see that in Full of Life. I have given up watching her movies on television, be cause they sadden me. I always want to talk to her.
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(High Fidelity, Jan. 1977)
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