Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1944)

that have been and for all, the rumors plaguing this girl's life BY LOBELIA 0. PARSONS THE persistent gossip that Judy Garland is dying of some mysterious disease can now be put away along with those moth-eaten old whispers that Shirley Temple was a midget and Mickey Rooney was a grown man made up as a child! Judy is not dying! If she was ill last year, she has thrown off the sickness that caused her friends so much anxiety and has emerged a new girl — happy and healthy. She is now sleeping at night and within the last month she has put on five pounds of much-needed weight. I want to say all this in a hurry because I have never known a rumor to sweep so malignantly over Hollywood in the usual behindhand whispers. At my listening post at the office I admit I had even wondered myself about Judy. I had known her since she was a plump little thing of thirteen actually fighting weight like mad and trying to diet because her studio told her she was too fat. I had watched the round little songbird grow up, marry Dave Rose and then day by day seem to become a mere shadow of her former robust self. “It’s an unhappy love,” said some of the gossipers. “It’s a grave illness that is dooming her to a life of tragic sickness,” said others. When I tried to make an interview appointment with Judy and it was twice postponed, the rumors began to sound true. The only thing to do was to keep on until I got to Judy and found out the truth. The truth of the situation, when she finally came to see me at the house, was almost an anticlimax. She was carrying along an ice bag for a swollen cheek as an antidote for a wisdom tooth that had been pulled the previous day. In spite of the ice bag, she looked marvelous but, nothing daunted, I decided to put the question straight to her. “Are you very ill, Judy?” I asked her. “What does your doctor say?” Even as I put the question to her everyone had been whispering, I was thinking I had never seen her look better. But maybe it was that swollen jaw giving her the look of plumpness. “You too, Louella?” she laughed. “I’m getting so weary of all this talk that I’m wasting away and of people pitying me because I’m so thin. Why, just a few days ago I picked up a newspaper with a picture of me taken at one of the cafes. My eyes were closed and I did look bad — but not half as bad or half as mad as I felt after I read the caption. It said: ‘Judy Garland is a very sick girl and looks it!’ ” I asked: “Judy, was it your unhappy marriage to Dave Rose that caused you to lose all that weight?” “No,” she answered. “Dave and I had no terrific scenes during the time we were married. Of course, there is always an emotional upset when a marriage is finished. “I honestly believe what caused me to lose weight is that I have worked, and worked hard, since I was two years old. As you know, I’ve been on the stage since I was a baby. Perhaps I didn’t build up enough reserve strength, due to making so many pictures during my adolescence. For in the past few years, I’ve been so weary and tired. I couldn’t ever seem to shake a feeling of fatigue and weariness. “And I had terrible trouble sleeping,” she went on. “I had to take something, a sedative, each night and even then I would awaken more exhausted than when I went to bed. “But recently I have been sleeping like a baby. A few nights ago I slept twelve hours around the clock. Right then and there I threw the sleeping pills out the window. I know now that I am on the road to getting (Continued on page 106) (Left) Judy, still the little girl in the early days of her marriage to Dave Rose, now (right) quite the night-clubber, with English Peter Lawford p IB M 29