Posted by “In every performance…she has the power to stir an audience to the depths of their hearts.” – Hedda Hopper, 1963
June 2, 1934: The first of a two-day weekend engagement for “The Gumm Sisters” at the St. Catherine Hotel, Catalina Island. No other information is known about the engagement.
June 2, 1939: Filming continued on Babes in Arms on the “Exterior Country Road and Path” set, which was most likely some spot on MGM’s Backlot #2. Judy was due on the set at 9 a.m.; lunch: 12:31 – 1:31 p.m.; dismissed: 5:40 p.m.
Check out The Judy Room’s Filmography Page on Babes in Arms here.
Also on June 2nd, Judy made a lovely cover model for “Hebdo” magazine. Photo provided by Kim Lundgreen. Thanks, Kim!
June 2, 1941: Judy and David Rose officially announced their engagement by sending out invitations that read:
June 2, 1941
1231 Stone Canyon Road
Miss Judy Garland requests the pleasure of your company at a tea and cocktail party. Sunday, 15 of June, 1 till 5 o’clock.
Inside the invitation was the printed, official announcement of Judy’s engagement to David Rose.
June 2, 1945: Filming continued on The Harvey Girls on the “Exterior Desert” set which was on location in Chatsworth, Los Angeles. Time called: 10 a.m.; dismissed: 5:56 p.m.
Check out The Judy Room’s Filmography Pages on The Harvey Girls here.
June 2, 1945: Meet Me In St. Louis premiered in November of 1944, but as this newspaper ad out of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, shows it had a long run. Longer than most films of the time.
Check out The Judy Room’s Extensive Spotlight on Meet Me In St. Louis here.
June 2, 1945: Here is another great theatre promotion for Meet Me In St. Louis (released in 1944), created by theatre manager Dave Thomas of the Center Theatre in Salt Lake City, as published in the trade magazine “Motion Picture Herald.”
The caption notes it as “the first trolley car used in Salt Lake City in connection with [the theatre’s showings of] ‘Meet Me In St. Louis’.” The way that’s written it sounds as though perhaps Thomas had more than one trolley car for promotion.
Also from the same magazine, this entry in the “What The Picture Did For Me” series. Thomas di Lorenzo of the New Paltz Theatre in New York noted:
This one is a lollapaloosa [sic] for entertainment and they came from near and far to see it. Some even came twice. Thanks for this one, Leo.
Check out The Judy Room’s Spotlight on Meet Me In St. Louis here.
June 2, 1945: The romantic team of The Clock (Judy and Robert Walker) was featured on the cover of “Picture Show” magazine out of the United Kingdom. Note the title of the film is Under the Clock which was the title of the film when it was first released in the UK.
Scan provided by Kim Lundgreen. Thanks, Kim!
Check out The Judy Room’s Filmography Pages on The Clock here.
June 2, 1946: The Los Angeles Times published this article by Edwin Schallert about Judy’s current state of happiness in her “still very young life.” Fittingly, on the page that continues the article is another article about MGM producer Arthur Freed. Freed was, for those of you who don’t know, one of the earliest champions of Judy at MGM and a driving force in her career, including being the unsung hero behind the bulk of the creative decisions on The Wizard of Oz.
Judy Garland Achieves New Level of Poignancy
More Drama to Mark Roles of Songstress
BY EDWIN SCHALLERT – Times Drama Editor
Even a violent attack of ptomaine incurred from too intimate association with cracked crab which wasn’t all that it should have been doesn’t prevent Judy Garland keeping an appointment with an interviewer. Second day out from the disaster, when she was still feeling wobbly, she was available.
This should do one thing, right off the bat, namely, dispose of those rumors that Judy is a slightly invalided person who has to watch her health on any and all occasions.
How Rumors Start
“Those rumors are really disturbing,” she said. “They seem to crop up all the time.”
“Just after my baby was born” – Judy had a Caesarean delivery – “I wasn’t quite up to snuff for a little while, and one day when I was out in Beverly Hills I felt dizzy. I went into a music score for a few minutes to sit down, asked for a glass of water.”
“The next thing that happened I heard over the air that I had fainted in a store in Beverly Hills. The impression was given that my health was being despaired of in various other quarters, that I was in such frightful shape that M.G.M. was thinking of postponing my commitments for pictures – and I don’t know what all. Actually, I haven’t felt much better than now during my whole life.”
Life Moves Swiftly
Events have swirled about Judy in the past year or so. First her home-making following her marriage to Vincente Minnelli, the director; then the birth of little Liza, her daughter, who is just 10 weeks old; next the question of career resumption, which faces her soon. She, who is so well known as a singer, hadn’t sung a note for months until just a week or so.”
“I went to a party at the home of Clifton Webb,” she said. “They asked me to sing. My first impulse was to beg off. It had been so long. When I consented I had a terrible case of the jitters, I don’t mind telling you, but I found my voice was still there, and it gave me a shaft of new courage.”
When Judy first learned that she was to become a mother she was in New York.
“We had taken a flat,” she said, “and we had an invasion of mosquitoes that was like the plague of locusts in ‘The Good Earth.’ They must have sprinkled all of New Jersey with DDT and driven the mosquitoes out for they swarmed in on us.”
“We used those yellow lamps for chasing bugs away, which gave us a jaundiced look.”
“When we retired for the night the mosquitoes looked as if they had been knocked out by it all. However, within an hour or two there they were buzzing about the room again like a fleet of airplanes.”
Show Starts Tears
Everything seemed to happen to Judy. She went to “Carousel” a night or two after that. The heroine of the musical version of “Liliom” was a young lady about to become a mother. Her husband was shown to be a criminal and she suffered from the dread that a stigma would attach to her child because of his record. Besides she was left alone to face the issue by his death.
“Three minutes after the show started,” recounted Judy, “I was bawling my head off. stuck my handkerchief in my mouth, and tried to stop, but the more I did the more I wailed and sobbed.”
“The man next to me tried to reassure me saying, ‘It’s only a play,’ but I let out a veritable whoop at that. It seemed all too real to me.”
“With my eyes red from weeping I me the Darryl Zanucks shortly after that at 21 Cafe and I said to Virginia Zanuck, ‘Oh, I’ve just seen the most wonderful musical comedy,’ and burst out crying again at the recollection.”
Goals Attained
That was Judy running along in high – one of the most vital and sensitive young people in Hollywood, which is probably what makes her songs convey so much.
She declares she’s happier than she has ever been in her life. “I know contentment for the first time in the full sense of that word,” she continued. “I think I’ve always wanted a home – a happy marriage – and motherhood.”
“There have been several different stages to my life, but this I want to be the final one.”
“I don’t want to reshape my career on account of my long absence, because I will always want to sing, but I want the song to be part o the story in the picture. I don’t think that music need always suggest comedy, but that it even more normally associates itself with drama and deep emotion. In the future I hope I will be in pictures of that type.”
“The Pirate,” based on the Alfred Lunt-Lynn Fontanne starring play, will endow Judy’s return with pretentiousness, and she herself likes the idea of doing “Private Lives” as a musical with a singer and dancer as the primary personnel.
June 2, 1947: Filming continued on The Pirate on the “Don Pedro’s Study” set, which was the last day of shooting on this set. Judy had was on the set at 10:05 a.m.; dismissed: 5:40 p.m.
Check out The Judy Room’s Filmography Pages on The Pirate here.
June 2, 1948: The first of several days of filming the “I Wish I Were In Love Again” for Words and Music. The duet, with Mickey Rooney, was the last time Judy and Mickey appeared on screen together. Time called: 10 a.m.; due on set at 1 p.m. The assistant director’s notes state: “[Judy] Was due in makeup at 10 a.m.; but arrived at 11:35 a.m.” Judy arrived on the set at 3:05 p.m.; dismissed at 4:10 p.m. Filming on the number was completed on June 8th which is also the day that these studio photos were made of the number, for use in promoting the film. Also seen are Tom Drake (as Richard Rodgers) and Janet Leigh.
The film is a very fictionalized biopic of the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, with Rooney starring as Hart and Judy providing a guest appearance as herself.
Meanwhile, The PIrate had opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York and was doing good business, prior to its general release on June 10, 1948.
Check out The Judy Room’s Filmography Page on Words and Music here.
Check out The Judy Room’s Filmography Pages on The Pirate here.
June 2, 1950: More rehearsals for Judy and company for Royal Wedding. On this day Judy was especially late. She was due in the rehearsal hall at 11 a.m. but did not arrive until 2:15 p.m. Rehearsals ended at 5 p.m.
Erksine Johnson’s latest column, printed on this day, and other days during this week, reported that Judy was in San Francisco “under the care of specialists” and that when she returned to MGM there were three musicals waiting for her return including Show Boat. None of this is true. Judy was already back at MGM after a rest in Carmel, California, which is nowhere near San Francisco. Judy had been mentioned for the role of “Julie” in Show Boat but by this point, she was out of the running.
Check out The Judy Room’s Filmography Pages on Royal Wedding here.
June 2, 1955: This two-page spread was featured in the UK “Picturegoer” magazine, naming Judy as the year’s best actress for her work in A Star Is Born.
Scans provided by Kim Lundgreen. Thanks, Kim!
Check out The Judy Room’s Extensive Spotlight on A Star Is Born here.
June 2, 1957: Here is a nice, uncredited review of Judy’s latest album for Capitol Records, “Alone.”
Check out The Judy Garland Online Discography’s “Alone” pages here.
June 2, 1959: Judy’s opening night at the Chicago Opera House (June 1) was a hit in spite of the shortcomings as reviewed by William Leonard for the Chicago Tribune. Of course, even in the stellar review, Leonard can’t help but note that Judy was “pudgy.”
Check out The Judy Room’s “Judy Garland – The Concert Years” here.
The society page of the paper featured images of some of the “who’s who” of Chicago attending the opening night (above).
Judy Garland Cheered at Opening Here
BY WILLIAM LEONARD
THE INDESTRUCTIBLE Judy Garland went into another new phase Monday night at the Civic Opera house, where a near capacity audience turned out to cheer the pudgy songstress who has been a child vaudeville star, a child movie star, an adult movie star, a has-been, a reborn vaudeville star – and, now, a legend.
At 37, Judy Garland has been everywhere, seen everything, and conquered everybody. It has been eight long years since she smashed the customers out of their seats with her comeback at the Palace in New York after her Hollywood career apparently had been finished forever. But some of that same thrill of live, three dimensional communicative discovery still lingers in her singing from a stage to listeners who remember her as a bright eyed kid star in films of the 30s.
At the Opera house this week, the staging is gaudy and more lavish than when she introduced her variety revue to Chicagoans last September at Orchestra Hall. There are more singers, more dancers, more costumes, more assistants, more jokes – and less of Judy Garland.
Her first appearance, in three songs about happy love, is brief. Her second, in a couple of soft shoe numbers with the veteran John W. Bubbles, is even briefer. Not until after the intermission does she take to loitering in view of the audience for any great length of time.
“The Letter,” a lengthy tone poem by Gordon Jenkins, who conducts an overly loud orchestra in the pit, is her vaguely sentimental salute to men, women, and their happy association. “Born in a Trunk” is a fancy staging of a medley in which Judy sings her way from a kiddie walk on thru a “tab” show to a Manhattan night club and whatever lies beyond that.
Miss Garland reprises with Alan King, the review’s able comic, their tramp number, “We’re a Couple of Swells,” and repeats all the old standards, not getting around to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” until after 11 p.m.
There are no standing ovations this time, as there were at Orchestra Hall last fall. This time, Judy is here as a veteran of vaudeville – a virtually vanished form of show business which she cases to breathe again with nostalgia and excitement combined.
Opening night acoustics were unhappy. Downstairs patrons were complaining about the inaudibility of anything Mr. Jenkins’ extremely enthusiastic orchestra; those in the upper reaches, a reporter’s survey showed, were hearing everything satisfactorily.
June 2, 1961: “Life Magazine” featured an extensive article about Judy by Shana Alexander. Judy was originally going to be on the cover, which would have made it her third “Life cover,” but she was bumped at the last minute in favor of Fidel Castro. Read the magazine here.
Check out The Judy Room’s “Judy Garland – The Concert Years” here.
June 2, 1963: This two-page article by columnist Hedda Hopper, titled “Judy Garland’s Big Problems Began With Her Big Success,” was published in some Sunday papers around the U.S. The article was most likely written because Judy was again big news due to the announcement that she had entered into a contract with CBS-TV for a weekly series, titled “The Judy Garland Show.” Taping of the show began later in the month.
Check out The Judy Room’s “Judy Garland – The Concert Years” here.
June 2, 1965: “Variety” noted that Judy had supposedly bought a number of songs, to get into the publishing business, according to her attorney Herb Schwab, who was drawing up articles for incorporation. She was also forming a talent management firm, to include the first-signed Allen Brothers. All this – including just-purchased Louisiana oil wells – were to come under the aegis of “Judy Garland Enterprises.” Sadly, except for managing the Allen Brothers’ career for a short time, none of the other transactions are known to have actually occurred.
Photo: Judy at her Brentwood home in 1965.
Check out The Judy Room’s “Judy Garland – The Concert Years” here.
June 2, 1974: That’s Entertainment! had opened in New York on May 24th. Here is a review of the film, which turned out to be one of the biggest hits of 1974 and almost single-handedly created the nostalgia market that we know today. It certainly had an effect on young fans by introducing them to Judy’s films (this was the era before home video), as well as those of Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney, Jane Powell, Debbie Reynolds, Esther Williams, and so many more!
Check out The Judy Room’s That’s Entertainment! Section for details about all three films in the series.
Error with date 1962 ? Judy Garland show was1963. Suspect typo?
Yep – it’s a typo. Thanks for catching that. 🙂
Another great entry (bless you for your hard work!).
Two comments: That GORGEOUS photo of Judy from 1934 clearly indicates that she was fitted with portable caps BEFORE signing with MGM. Her natural teeth were NOT that straight. Is it possible this pic was taken in very late ’35 AFTER she signed with Metro?
Words and Music: I find it odd that countless reviewers/fans write that Judy looked “too thin” in her duet sequence with Rooney. I have always felt she looked slim, but not unhealthily so. She is MUCH thinner in “Ziegfeld Follies” and “The Harvey Girls.” As for the Johnny one Note encore, yes, Judy is suddenly bigger around the waist, but above the waist she still looks slim and beautiful. Odd, in that when she gained weight she showed it her face as well, but she doesn’t here.
Thank you for the kind words! That photo was taken in the summer of 1934, long before MGM got a hold of her. I don’t know if Ethel had caps for her or not. I suppose it’s possible.
I have to say that I think she looks too thin in “Words and Music” (excepting “Johnny One Note”) but I also think she’s too thin in most of “Easter Parade” as well. She looked much better in “In The Good Old Summertime.” That’s such a gem of a film! 🙂
Her weight fluctuates in “Easter Parade.” In the number “When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves For Alabam” I think she looks a bit heavy in that blue dress. I also feel she looks painfully thin in most of “The Pirate”, “Harvey Girls” and “Follies.” Again, to me, she appears heavier in the “Words and Music” Rooney duet, but apparently, I’m in the minority. I think one issue in “Words” is her “nervous energy.” Plus, the stupid dialogue. We’re supposed to buy this IS Judy Garland, but that’s NOT Mickey Rooney. I agree about “Summertime.” She looks beautiful and sings beautifully. One of my Christmas favorites.