"Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland" By Gerald Clark Pub.: Random House, NY (2000) Excert: Pages, 164-174

"I do like to be in love," Judy was later to say. "A woman is incomplete when she's not in love." So it was that as she was falling out of love with David Rose, she was falling in love with someone else. But unlike David, whose appeal had eluded most of her friends, her new lover was obviously, demonstrably desirable, as close to perfection as a mere mortal could be: amusing, intelligent, talented and so handsome that it could be said, without quibble or contradiction, that no man was more handsome. "The most beautiful man I ever saw. No question," adjudged Anne Baxter, one of his many lovely costars. His dark good looks, combined with a virile athleticism and a voice as warm and rich as a Brahms symphony, had made Tyrone Power-for that was the name of this paragon-into 20th Century-Fox's biggest star, several rungs above Judy herself on Hollywood?s top ten list. Every time the camera lingered on his deep and ever-so-understanding eyes, millions of hearts pounded like so many libidinous tom-toms.

Imagine, then the commotion Judy's own heart must have made when, at their very first meeting, at a party in Brentwood, Power leaned down from his slim six feet, focused those long-lashed eyes on her and all but knocked her over with praise and attention. Adding force to his words was his transparent sincerity. A week or so earlier-on October 16, 1942, to be exact-he had seen her in her first full-length adult role, as the aspiring vaudevillian of For Me and My Gal, and since then he had been raving about her magical transformation from awkward teenager into interesting woman. Now, here she was, here he was, and out of town for several days was his wife, a chic, glamorous French actress who went only by the name Annabella.

A better recipe for romance could not have been devised. "There was an immediate attraction between them," said Watson Webb, Power's best and chief confidant, "and by the time Annabella got back-and it wasn't that long-Tyrone was already pretty well smitten." By the first week of January 1943, when Power entered the Marine Corps, he and Judy were deeply in love, and Judy, who had largely forsaken the house on Chalon Road for a place of her own in nearby Westood, was ushering a few select friends into her bedroom to show them his photograph. Where was the fun in having one of the most ravishing men in the world mad about you, after all, if you had to keep it all to yourself? "Oh, he's wonderful!" she exclaimed to her friend Anne Shirley. The last thing she saw before she fell asleep at night, Power's smiling face was the stuff her dreams were made on.

What attracted her was obvious: his unsurpassable looks and a charm so exundant that few could withstand it. It was as if a light came on whenever he walked into a room, said one woman; another recalled the aura that seemed to surround him. In such awed tones had the Greeks and Romans spoken of their gods. Few earthly men had Power's natural advantages, and he was able, with no more effort than it took to flash one of his high-voltage smiles, to bed nearly every female who caught his fancy. "We've had them all, haven't we?" bragged one of his friends at the studio, pointing to a wall covered with photos of the Fox women. It was a banquet of beauties, that much-admired wall, and Power, who was only twenty-eight, had had more than his share.

What few knew at the time-some secrets were safe in Hollywoodwas that the sword-wielding, fistfighting, swashbuckling hero of such adventures as The Mark of Zorro and The Black Swan, a man who insisted on doing most of his own stunts and who was to whistle through the harshest and most strenuous training the Marine Corps had to offer, had also had more than his share of men. A bisexual, Power seemed equally excited by both genders, and even he probably could not have said which he found more to his liking.

Murder she was for Power, in any event, touching subterranean emotions that other women had never known of, let alone aroused. He had been an object of flattery for so long that he accepted admiration as his due; what he really wanted was what he did not already possess: someone who would understand him totally and completely, with unreserved, unthinking and unstinting sympathy. He had, to quote from his favorite author, a popular novelist of the time named Mildred Cram, a "longing so intense, so consuming, that it got into his eyes and betrayed him."

It was a youthful, almost adolescent yearning that the practical Annabella, who was six years his senior, who had been married twice before and who had a daughter just three years younger than Judy, could scarcely comprehend. But Judy, barely out of adolescence herself, not only shared that longing but embraced it-her eyes betrayed her, too. She and Power thus came together not merely as man and woman, not only shared that longing but embraced it-her eyes betrayed her, too. She and Power thus came together not Merely as man and woman, but as soul mates, celebrators of everything romantic from the wistful music of Rachmaninov to the elegiac, doom-shrouded verse of A. E. Housman. To that rather distinguished list Power added Cram's little potboiler Forever, a novella that Judy had not previously read, but that she could now quote word for word. Its sentimental message of love surviving death itself was as comforting to her as it was to him, as it was, in fact, to many Americans whose lives were shadowed by war in those grim years. "This is forever," sighs Cram's heroine as she walks with her lover into a pearly eternity; and forever was how long those two besotted stars also thought their own love story would last.

Where their spirits led, their bodies eagerly followed. After sharing a bed with an older, rather reserved spouse, each found the other to be an exciting and uninhibited sexual partner. Few other women had aroused Power as much as Judy did. Aware, for her part, that he was bisexual, Judy nonetheless convinced herself that she could transform him into a man who loved only women-and only one woman at that. Power gave her good reason, indeed, to believe that she might succeed where so many others had failed, and in the months after their meeting, it was his turn, for perhaps the first time, to fall under the spell of that old black magic called love.

There was just one cloud, small at first, then larger and increasingly ominous, intruding into their sun-drenched paradise: they were both married. Judy's marriage had crumbled, in her eyes, if not in the law's, before she had met Power. But Power's remained firmly intact, and as they were soon seen strolling arm in arm into the Fox commissary, alarms once more started howling in Culver City. Little Judy, screamed the men in the Thalberg Building, was endangering her career again.

Metro had been wrong when it told Judy that marriage might wreck her career. Audiences liked "the now-come-of-age Judy Garland," as the studio had taken to calling her, as much as they had liked the younger version. For Me and My Gal, her biggest hit by far, drew long lines around the country, overturning a house record of eighteen years at Manhattan's huge Astor Theater. "Box-office honey," the editor of "Film Daily" called the picture. But if the studio had been wrong about her marriage to David, it was not necessarily wrong about her romance with Power, which was cause for concern. It was one thing for Judy to have publicly held hands with a man who was already rushing toward the divorce court, as David had been. It was quite another thing to break up the seemingly tranquil marriage of a popular star like Power. "To be involved with a married man was serious, something you really weren't supposed to do," said Anne Shirley. And you absolutely were not supposed to be involved with a man who was about to go off to war and risk his life for his country. Small wonder that Mayer himself summoned her to his office to warn her of quicksand ahead.

Threats and warnings had not stopped her from marrying David, however, and this time around the studio's naysayers showed uncharacteristic finesse; they were, indeed, almost diabolically subtle. Rather than trying to bludgeon her into submission, they aimed, by means of psychological warfare, to surreptitiously lead her to the conclusion they wanted her to draw: that Power was not her Prince Charming after all. Their primary weapon in this gamy plot was her studio publicist, Betty Asher, who had previously used her persuasive arts on Lana Turner, helping to hold Turner together during her noisy breakup with Artie Shaw. Like many of those who worked in Howard Stickling's wideranging publicity department, Asher was not actually a publicist, someone who represented a star to the press; she was instead a kind of lady-in-waiting, a hand-holder and a fixer, someone who did whatever it took to keep her client happy and productive. The "vice-president in charge of Mickey Rooney" was how Rooney described his own publicist, Les Peterson, and Judy could have said the same about Asher.

But Mickey was shrewd enough to realize that the affable Peterson was not a real friend, that he held, along with all his other titles, that of company spy: he reported every move Mickey made to his bosses in the Thalberg Building. Not for several years was Judy to realize that Asher was doing the same thing. "She gave a report to the studio office every week on the people I saw, what I ate, what time I came in at night and what time I got up in the morning," Judy was later to say. "I can remember crying for days after I found out what she was doing to me." But by then the damage had been done.

The daughter of a producer at Universal, Asher was as much a child of the motion-picture industry as Judy was. She had grown up in Beverly Hills, she had attended UCLA for three years and, until she was in her late teens, she had led the cushioned, protected life of Hollywood's j junior elite. All that ended abruptly with her father's death. With no money and no one to help her-her alcoholic mother could scarcely take care of herself-she was obliged to live by her wits alone, which advised her to be hard, unscrupulous and loyal to no one. Even as she was telling Turner, who looked upon her as a close friend, how much better off she was without Artie Shaw, Asher was ringing Shaw's door bell and inviting herself inside. "The next thing I knew," said Shaw, "we were in bed together." It thus should have surprised no one that at Metro Asher's lover was Eddie Mannix, one of Mayer's chief subalterns and a man well placed to give a girl, especially an attractive, curly haired blonde. a helpful boost up the corporate ladder.

Though Asher was just five years older, to Judy she seemed light years ahead in experience and worldly wisdom. Her seeming sophistication, in fact, was probably one of the reasons she appealed to Judy, who doubtless hoped that some of that polish would rub off on her. With surprising speed Asher became not only her helper, but also her friend, mentor and emotional crutch. Judy depended on her more than anyone else, and there were times when no one, not even her old friend Roger Edens, could talk to her as soothingly and as effectively. Whenever Judy suffered an attack of nerves during filming, Asher would suddenly appear on the set, as mysteriously as a genie, to calm her down. On orders from Mayer himself-"Mr. Mayer wants them left alone," Judy's directors were told-no one was allowed to interrupt their conversations, and shooting could not resume until Asher had left.

Asher's friendship with Judy was not confined to Culver City; during the time Judy was seeing Power, the two women went so far as to share quarters in Westwood. Almost inseparable, they were seen everywhere together, whispering and giggling like schoolgirls. A relationship so intense, so unusual and so conspicuous did not go unnoticed, particularly on a gossipy studio lot, and many at Metro suspected that Power was not Judy's only lover in those days.

They may well have been right. Judy was not a lesbian. Nor was she a bisexual, equally attracted to both sexes. She was indeed drawn to men as iron is drawn to a magnet. Yet, despite that, she nevertheless enjoyed an occasional frolic with another woman, as did many other women in the permissive movie colony. That Judy and Asher both sometimes had sex with other women is indisputable; that they also had sex with each other is probable, if ultimately unprovable. They were as close as lovers, in any event, and Asher, to whom Judy told all and to whom she listened most intently, had been ideally cast to play the role of the double agent who would harden her heart against her beautiful Ty.

And some sympathy must also be extended to Judy, who could not get him to say yes, and who could not get him to say no. Handicapped by a constitutional compulsion to please, Power was all but paralyzed at such crucial moments. "It was hard for Tyrone to face big issues," acknowledged a regretful Watson Webb. Judy, who had fallen in love with his melting smile, did not see, or did not want to see, that his need to ingratiate himself was the obverse of his spectacular charm, that the two were bound together, one and indivisible. All Judy knew was that he refused to do what she wanted. Furious, she made what must have been a wrenching sacrifice, declining to see him when he came home from camp on weekend passes.

Perhaps never before had Judy been burdened by so much anxiety as she was in those early weeks of 1943. As if Power's refusal to commit himself were not anguish enough, she was once again enduring the daily abuse of her old nemesis, Busby Berkeley, who had started work on Girl Crazy. His frantic pace, even more frenzied than usual, was pitilessly hard on his two stars, Judy and Mickey. Judy was, moreover, almost undone by the six-shooters popping around her during rehearsals for his elaborate rodeo scene, "just a wreck," as one observer recalled, until Mickey put a comforting arm around her shoulder. "Honey, don't worry," he said. "It's all right."

But it was not all right. Fear and tension on the set, combined with a queasy concern about her affair with Power, had frayed her nerves beyond the breaking point, and Berkeley's dismissal, three weeks into filming, came too late to prevent Judy's collapse. Her weight dropped alarmingly, from a normal 110 pounds to ninety-four, and on January 29 she was confined to her bed for five days, warned by her doctor, sturdy old Marc Rabwin that even after she returned to work, she should not do strenuous dance scenes for another six to eight weeks.

It was probably then, during those five days of convalescence, that Judy agreed to see Power again. Gazing into the warm and compassionate eyes that stared from his photograph near her bed, how could she have refused? Their romance resumed where it had left off, and Power, still in the grip of that old black magic, at last decided, on March 31, to grant her request and confront his wife. Over dinner at Perino's, a restaurant often favored by the stars, he gave Annabella the bad news: "I've got to tell you-I'm in love with somebody else." But Annabella, canny Frenchwoman that she was, already knew, in fact had known for months-not because of anything Power had done, but because of what he had not done. After reporting in October that he had met Judy, he never again mentioned her name. But from that moment Annabella had noticed his lack of ardor in the bedroom. It was obvious, she said, that Judy was the reason. Yet having gone so far as to bring their affair into the open, Power could not bring himself to take the next step: he was still unable or unwilling to ask Annabella for a divorce.

A few days after that tell-all dinner, Power was on a crowded troop train, headed east to Quantico, Virginia, the Marine Corps officers' training school near Washington, D.C. As his train clattered slowly across the country, over the mountains and across the prairies, farther and farther away from Judy, he clutched her memory ever more tightly, and in a letter to Webb he made it clear how completely she had displaced Annabella in his affections. "I'm just the luckiest, happiest man alive today," he wrote from Indianapolis. "God-sometimes I don't think I can stand it. I do love her so." A chance to show how much he loved her came perhaps sooner than he anticipated: not long after he had settled into his new barracks, he received some startling news-she was pregnant, Judy announced. She was carrying his baby, and if he did not marry her, she would be compelled to have an abortion.

Quick divorces were not easy to obtain in 1943. Even if Annabella had agreed to one, it would have been hard, perhaps impossible, for Power to have procured it in time to marry Judy before her condition became a scandal. Judy must have been aware of that, and there is reason to suspect that she invented the pregnancy to pressure him into breaking with Annabella completely and irrevocably. But even as she was prodding him to say good-bye to Annabella, she herself, curiously enough, had neglected to file for divorce from David. Real or false, her pregnancy nonetheless pushed Power into a corner that he could not smile his way out of, and he finally asked Annabella for his freedom. His request was so tentative and polite, however, that Annabella had no trouble answering with a firm and authoritative no. Writing to Webb, Power himself confessed to a feeling of terrible depression. "I just can't see ahead at all," he said. "Everything seems so futile, and pointless."

The story of Judy and Tyrone now moved swiftly toward its climax. At the end of May, Annabella traveled to Washington to, talk to her husband face-to-face. Apparently assuming that her visit signaled a change of mind-a oui to divorce instead of a non-Power urged Judy, who had just finished Girl Crazy, to hurry east for a victory celebration in New York. As frightened of airplanes as she was of guns, Judy nonetheless jumped aboard a plane, making the long and punishing transcontinental flight-nineteen hours, with three stops for fuel in a dawdling DC-3.

She rushed only to wait, her happiness and her entire future resting, so she thought, on one favorable word from Annabella. If Power had shown some of the resolve of his swashbuckling screen characters-the dashing Zorro, for instance-he might yet have persuaded Annabella to make that word yes. Without a script, the actor who played those dashing roles could not stand up to so determined a woman, and even at that late date, with Judy poised nervously by a telephone in Manhattan, Power was all but tongue-tied. Whenever he brought up the subject of Judy, Annabella simply let the conversation die. No she had said, and no she continued to say-tant pis! Her spirits sinking with every hour, Judy lingered in New York until all hope had passed; then, feeling defeated, and probably deceived as well, she returned to Los Angeles. Power had let her down, and they both knew it. Their love affair Was over, and a relationship that had begun with soaring hearts and flights of verse thus ended in resentment, recrimination and an undignified muddle.

Some romances, like Judy and David's, are doomed, and obviously so, from the start. Others, like Judy and Tyrone's, bear the stamp of smiling fortune, and fall only because the lovers lack the endurance and grit to see their problems through to a conclusion. If Tyrone was shy the grit, Judy was short the endurance. Though she turned twenty-one on June 10, a few days after she came back from New York, emotionally she remained an adolescent, an impatient child who demanded too much, too soon, and, as a result, wound up with nothing. If she had waited for her man until the end of the war, as millions of other women were loyally doing, the icy barriers that blocked her way in the spring of 1943 probably would have melted to little puddles. Until the fighting stopped, Power could have been no more than a distant, absentee husband in any case, his address a remote island in the Pacific. Waiting would have cost her nothing.

Judy might have shown more patience if she had been able to ignore the poison her best friend, that artful Iago, Betty Asher, was pouring into her ear. The most damaging story Asher passed on to her, the one that killed any possibility of reconciliation, was that Power was entertaining his Marine buddies with her love letters. Such tawdry behavior was so alien to Power's character that Asher's story was almost certainly a brazen falsehood. Astonishingly, Judy believed it, however, and she was, of course, grievously wounded at being made sport of Retaliating, as she often did, with humor, she nicknamed poor Tyrone "Tyroney the Phony," refusing thenceforth to acknowledge his cards or messages.

Just a few months earlier they had identified with the young lovers in Mildred Cram's Forever, whose devotion was so strong that it survived death itself "We'll find each other. Somewhere. Somehow," the hero assures the heroine, and so, on the last page, they do. But that was a happy ending Judy and Tyrone were not destined to see, and when they talked about each other afterward, they could not hide a note of regret, which echoed through their words like the faint sound of a lonely cello, for what might have been-for the "land of lost content," as Housman so aptly named it. "It really was different between Tyrone and me," Judy was to say. "It was no small affair."

It was no small affair for Power either, and months after their breakup he confessed that she still occupied his dreams. When her latest movie, Meet Me in St. Louis, reached his island outpost in February 1945, he was reminded, more sharply than he probably liked, of all that he had given up. Her first color picture since The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis caught, in a way that black-and-white had never been able to do, the full vibrancy of her personality and the warmth and fire in her brandy-brown eyes. What delicious agony, then, it must have been for Tyrone to sit watching her for nearly two hours in a makeshift outdoor theater, surrounded by dozens of other men-far, far from Hollywood and even further from the good times they had shared. "My God," he wrote Webb, his words drenched with longing, "but she never looked more beautiful."