Call me what you like, but don’t call me “harmless”.
There’s scarcely a worse epithet! To be “harmless” is to not register at all. A milquetoast! I had a relative who was harmless. A gay man who dispatched himself into the Liffey before his thirtieth birthday. I’ve written about him before. Between poor John and Laird Cregar, a few weeks ago, I dare say this Substack could prove eerily prophetic as to my own demise!
If there’s a theme of Oh, Shut Up!, it’s that of unfinished people. After all, I built my reputation lampooning Glenn Close. My Glenn is a The Onion-esque caricature, who bears no relation to her namesake beyond the title of frequent Academy Award-attendee. Projection! I take solace in the fact that my alter ego is a venerable and wealthy white woman (not someone else’s ten-year-old, like Gary Janetti’s Prince George). The truth is: “Glenn” says things “Mark” couldn’t. Mark’s harmless. He’s not alone! We all have form in making ourselves smaller. Modulating our voices, downplaying our intellect, disguising our softness and our vulnerability. The crude self-preservation that’s comme il faut to survive in 2023. “Intelligence,” pined a teacher in one of the bootstrapping schools I attended “is your ability to adapt.” Today, let’s discuss someone who called upon that wisdom.
Judy Holliday (1921-1965) played Billie Dawn, a character so naïve she thinks “a peninsula is that new medicine”, three times. On stage, on screen, and before a United States Senate Committee. I was having a séance to George Cukor earlier, who oversaw five of her nine film appearances. Chiefly her Oscar’d turn as the junkman’s moll and archetypal dumb blonde in Born Yesterday. “Ah, Judy,” he reminisced fondly.
“Oh, Daddy G– Mr. Cukor,” I volunteered “do tell me about the night she won.”
Mr. Cukor thought carefully, then continued in a soft storytelling voice…
The La Zambra nightclub on West 52nd Street, March 1951.
Two years before the Academy officially adopted concurrent ceremonies in New York and Los Angeles, Cyrano de Bergerac’s José Ferrer had an idea. Not wishing to disappoint ticket-holders who’d flocked to see him and Gloria Swanson, a Best Actress favourite for Sunset Boulevard, on Broadway, he arranged an exclusive after-party in the theatre district. Once the curtain fell, Ferrer and Swanson joined their fellow East Coast nominees in this midtown flamenco bar. Celeste Holm, another hoofer cited for All About Eve, was there; as was Judy Holliday, a bona fide New Yorker (in those days, “New Yorker” was code for “Jewish”) who hated flying. George Cukor, who’d recommended Swanson for Norma Desmond and directed Holliday in two of the evening’s nominated pictures, took his seat among the ladies.
Has there ever been a grander Best Actress year than 1950? Not only Swanson and Holliday, but All About Eve’s Bette Davis and Anne Baxter. Even the fifth nominee, Eleanor Parker, shines in the forgotten Caged: The Felicity Huffman Story. To show what a closed-shop the Academy then was, both José Ferrer and Holliday, widely suspected of harbouring Communist sympathies, were frontrunners. (In contrast to today where gays with “he/they” in their Twitter bios have already decided next year’s winners from a pool of unblemished contenders.) Despite being smeared as a fellow traveller in the infamous Red Channels, Ferrer was named Best Actor shortly after midnight. The next category was a nailbiter.
A quick-thinking reporter plonked a fake Oscar statuette between Swanson and Holliday, and asked them to engage in mock fisticuffs for the camera. Swanson, every inch the star in a veil and furs, and the twenty-nine-year-old Holliday (in navy) were too dignified to entertain his suggestion. Besides, Broderick Crawford had just walked on stage at the Los Angeles Pantages to announce the winner. “One of us is about to be very happy,” Gloria Swanson enthused. The radio crackled.
“And the winner is Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday.”
“They expected scenes from me!” Gloria recalled “wild sarcastic tantrums. They wanted Norma Desmond.” Swanson congratulated a flabbergasted Holliday, but privately wished she kept her triumph until next year. Cukor’s Adam’s Rib (1949), a glorified screen test which Holliday stole from under Hepburn and Tracy hadn’t played in Los Angeles until early ‘50 and was also eligible; attesting to Judy’s being a classic ‘star is born’ win on cumulative effect. Indeed, the Golden Globes were so enamoured by Cukor’s new muse that they nominated Holliday as both a dramatic and comedic actress for Born Yesterday (she won the latter) as well as including her in their Supporting roster for Rib. Swanson and Bette Davis (or, alternatively, Davis and Anne Baxter) splitting the vote is the rival ‘she won by default’ theory, popularised by Ryan Murphy.
But both are misnomers. And, as Depressica Lange claimed in Feud, “ungracious and dismissive of Miss Judy Holliday’s winsome performance”. To my mind, it’s one of history’s great wins and a rare occasion Oscar got it right. People think being funny is easy. Judy Holliday understood, like few others, the adage that comedy is tragedy plus time. (“She was a master of comedy!” Cukor interrupted “her subtlety and her understatement. Marvellous and infinitely touching.”) Garson Kanin had written Born Yesterday as a vehicle for Jean Arthur, though Columbia’s Harry Cohn, despairing of “that fat Jewish broad” Holliday who’d replaced Arthur at three days’ notice in New York, wanted Rita Hayworth for the movie. That is, until he saw rushes of Adam’s Rib. Cohn signed Judy on the spot. There was a proviso that she slim down, of course – “I’ve worked with fat asses before” – but it was a favourable contract that allowed her to make one film a year in addition to her stage work. And in Born Yesterday, Judy achieved what would’ve eluded those other actresses. Her character’s Pygmalion-esque metamorphosis felt authentic; not sudden and artificial.
But much as the movie-going public conflated Gloria Swanson with Norma Desmond, Judy Holliday might as well have been Billie Dawn. A stock character! In real life, Gloria Swanson was a pragmatic woman who moved east after the advance of talkies and, cushioned by an enormous fortune, happily trod the boards and toiled on radio. Holliday, too, was no floozy. She had a genius-level IQ. (“An extremely intelligent intellectual person,” Cukor remembers, “very well-educated, very high-brow.”) She could play everything: from sophisticates to slapstick. And her take-offs were legendary! Later in the decade, Marilyn Monroe got wind of Judy’s spot-on impersonation and, over tea at Judy’s apartment, coached her on getting the Marilyn Look just right. Marilyn and Judy were as alike as chalk and cheese, but Hollywood cast them in the same bimbo mould that stretched back to Harlow in the 30s and made every studio have their own Monroe copy (Mansfield, Novak, van Doren) by the 50s. Playthings for men! The difference was: Judy’s were undereducated and well-meaning. Marilyn and her clones’ were highly sexed.
Further strikes against Judy were her Jewishness, her weight and, crucially, her politics. Vicious reporters created a split personality. Classic “othering”. In essence, it boiled down to “New York” and “Los Angeles”. “Judith Tuvim” from Queens versus “Judy Holliday, the Movie Star”. (“Holiday” was a literal translation of her Hebrew surname; she added another ‘L’ to differentiate her from Billie Holiday.) Her hunger for bagels and pastrami in contrast to the studio’s dietetic regime of poached eggs and cottage cheese. (There were weeks where she imbibed nothing but black coffee to fit into Jean Louis’s costumes.) Her capacity to wax lyrical on Proust as opposed to the airheads she played. “All I have to do is remember to be dumb when I’m out, and smart when I’m home.” Gosh, it would give anyone a complex!
True, she was a socialist – but one mustn’t hold that against her. Like the late Glenda Jackson, Holliday was a proper union man who was more concerned with housing and feeding people than the trivial issues on which our left squanders their chances of electoral success. Just as it was soul-crushing to obscure her brainpower, her religion, and her appetite, it was deeply unsettling to become Hedda Hopper’s punching bag for the crime of having a social conscience. While Judy didn’t initially regard her appearance, alongside José Ferrer and Garson Kanin, in Red Channels as a career-ending threat, we cannot underestimate the dread of the McCarthy era. Baiting so severe that Harry Cohn refused to let Judy’s co-star in It Should Happen to You Jack Lemmon change his name to “Lennon”. “Too close to ‘Lenin’,” Cohn said, and that would never do.
Days after Judy’s success at the Academy Awards, the Columbia boss watched as another of his progressive stars was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Larry Parks, a former member of the Communist Party renowned for playing Al Jolson, gave a mealy-mouthed confession before HUAC; and was left to fade into the obscurity of the blacklist. Harry Cohn wasn’t going to have such a fate befall his new golden goose.
Judy Holliday never belonged to the party, but had performed in wartime benefits with her Greenwich Village troupe, the Revuers, for left-wing causes. Librettists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, whose own careers were skyrocketing after On the Town and Singin’ in the Rain, rounded out the satirical comedy group – and Leonard Bernstein moved in the same circles. Indeed, the notoriously sexually confused maestro might well have taken Holliday as his own bride. It was he who introduced her to her husband, David Oppenheim. At the time I am speaking of, Judy was expecting her first child with the clarinettist – and due to the invective hurled at her in the Hearst press, regularly received crank calls. “I hope you die in childbirth,” they jeered, “I hope your baby is born dead”. “While our boys are dying in Korea,” veterans protested outside showings of her films, “Judy Holliday is the darling of the Daily Worker.” Columnist Robert Ruark demonised her as a “pinko who played footsie-footsie with organized Commie fronts”.
With Judy’s next picture, The Marrying Kind, in the can, Harry Cohn feared the losses he might incur if she went by way of Larry Parks. The surliest of all the moguls, Cohn couldn’t understand why those suspected of being Reds wouldn’t endure the necessary evil of naming names. Save their skins, and let him profit. He hired a distinguished lawyer, Simon H. Rifkind, to advise Holliday and also paid an ex-FBI consultant, Kenneth Bierly, hush money to “clear up any confusion about her”. Nonetheless, Judy was subpoenaed to appear before the McCarran Committee – officially, the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security; the upper house’s answer to HUAC – in March 1952.
Judy knew what to do. She had to make herself “harmless”. She pulled Billie Dawn around her like a shield. Meanwhile, the senators grilled someone who they plainly regarded as an uppity Jewess and their inferior in every way. Holliday could have given dozens of names. She didn’t reveal a single one. The ordeal was exhaustingly humiliating, but she retained her integrity. José Ferrer (and famously Elia Kazan) wouldn’t handle the pressure of outwitting Ivy League-educated men who believed the movie folk were guilty of crimes they hadn’t committed. To me, it attests to her skills as an actress. The politicians belittled the accomplished star as “Mrs. David Oppenheim” in their private hearing and vindictively stressed the “Jew” in “Judy”. But our heroine prevailed. She was capable of stagecraft better than anything Gar Kanin invented. She feigned not knowing the difference between “prosecute” and “persecute”; and willingly played up the idea that she was a gullible stooge led astray.
In that inimitable voice, equated to a Jewish seagull by Lenny Bruce, she grinned: “I don’t say ‘yes’ to anything now except cancer, polio, and cerebral palsy!”. Nonetheless, Judy was unofficially blacklisted from television and radio for three years, but through Harry Cohn’s intercession, could still make films. Thus, Columbia’s profits were ensured. Plagued by ill health, she died of breast cancer thirteen years later, leaving behind a twelve-year-old son and an uneven, unfinished body of work.
“It’s so sad about her,” Cukor concluded “she had so many possibilities. And she’s not thought of a great deal anymore. I hear everybody talking about this one and that one, but she, poor darling, is dead. Not forgotten, but not remembered as much as she should be.”
“Like all great clowns, Judy Holliday could move you. She made you laugh, she was a supreme technician, and then suddenly you were touched. She could interpret a text with the subtlest detail, her pauses would give you every comma –she’d even give the author a semicolon if he’d written one. And vocally she was fascinating, she had a way of hitting the note like a bull’s-eye, and the slightest distortion in the recording meant that you lost something. If you lost any of the highs you lost a moment of comedy, and if you lost any of the lows you lost a moment of emotion. A true artist.”
I urge all of you to watch Born Yesterday and see why Judy’s win is much, much more than a footnote in Academy lore.
Mark, please don’t “dispatch yourself.” After all, what would I read if you did?? Think of me! Think of my morning coffee! Have mercy!