THE THING ABOUT PAM is a new series on Hulu and NBC that is based on the true story of criminal sociopath Pam Hupp. Pam not only kills her best friend Betsy Faria but makes enough insinuations to the authorities against Betsy’s husband Russ to help them get him wrongfully convicted. If Pam’s one kind of a mess, law enforcement in Troy, Missouri, where the crime takes place, constitute another…
Yet the show belongs to Renee Zellweger who plays Pam. I have never yet seen Renee Zellweger in any production where she doesn’t totally nail whatever role she plays, like the starstruck role of “Roxie Hart” in CHICAGO and her Academy Award-winning performance as “Judy Garland” in JUDY. I never saw any role as phenomenal as her “Judy” – until Ms. Zellweger played this one.
The character of Pam Hupp comes across like a schlemiel with a bit of a brain. The lady manages to make some money flipping houses which is no easy feat. However, she’s also fat, sloppy, runs around with a perpetual large soda drink in her hand, talks with a weird affect, seems harmless and behaves like a dipshit. She can also be controlling, which is obvious when it happens, but isn’t as apparent as it might be if she didn’t walk and talk like she’s one half-step up from a clueless doofus.
The truth of this woman’s character is a whole other matter. Underneath her bluster she’s a violent sociopath. Believe only what someone shows on the outside at your peril…
That’s all I’ll say about the plot. It’s far too good to add spoilers. The series is just so well done that I’ve already watched the first two episodes twice and am about to watch ’em again! If you like true crime, not to mention phenomenal acting, give this show a try.
I saw the movie JUDY, about Judy Garland toward the end of her too-short life, yesterday, and oh my God.
Take a look at the photo of Judy as a teenager, above. Is this child beautiful, or what? Anybody who would say this child was “ugly” should have had their head examined, but nobody back in the days when MGM Studios all but owned this kid, contractually, bothered to ship Louis B. Mayer off to the funny farm, where he belonged, even though HE made comments like that to her all the time.
The new movie shows Mayer, in flashbacks, mind-raping Judy to bring her under his control and to crush the girl’s spirit. It also shows one of his henchwomen, or maybe she’s Judy’s mother – that wasn’t made too clear – forcing the child to take pills to lose weight, pills to stay up and keep working ridiculous hours, or pills to go to sleep. There are lots of movies about stars with drug problems, but this one differs because this star never had any initial say in whether she took them or not. The adults got Judy hooked, putting her on all kinds of prescription crap when there was no medical reason to do so, and the bastards should have done time in Alcatraz for it.
By the late 1960s, when the movie starts, Judy, played by Renee Zellweger, is an adult, and she’s broke. She’s impaired beyond all recognition from all the mindless drugging that was forced upon her when she was a teen, and try as she might, the poor woman can’t quite get everything together. Her ex realizes their two children are infinitely better off staying with him under the unfortunate circumstances, so she takes a singing engagement in London to try and earn enough money to fight him and get tehm back. It doesn’t go as planned…
The audience at the theater where I saw this movie were gobsmacked by it. At the end, almost everyone remained in their seats, silently watching the credits. A few people got up to leave or get to the restrooms, then stopped dead in the aisles, also watching the credits, waiting for…I don’t know what, but we were just waiting. For the situation to get better, perhaps. For the happy ending Miss Garland deserved and didn’t get. Or maybe for a time machine to bring us back to 1939 and arrange for a fat boulder to get dropped on Louis B. Mayer’s sadistic head for creating such a mess out of such a beautiful and talented child in the first place.
Renee Zellweger: BRAVA! What a performance! I’ve never seen anything quite like it! Shout out to Darci Shaw as Young Judy and Richard Cordery for his portrayal of Louis B. Mayer, too, whose performances set up the rest of the story. The entire cast was superb, and I wholeheartedly recommend this extraordinary movie.
Trailers are in circulation for two terrific-looking movies that are coming soon, but not soon enough! One is JUDY, about the troubled last year in the life of the actress and phenomenal singer, Judy Garland. The other is HARRIET, which tells the true story of Underground Railroad heroine Harriet Tubman.
From the looks of this trailer, Renee Zellweger is doing an amazing turn as Judy Garland. As my friend Marilyn Dicks said:
“Nobody’s Garland … but she looks good …!”
Take a look at the trailer here:
Harriet Tubman is played by the actress Cynthia Erivo, and she’s also awesome in the role. I never knew, before reading up on this movie, that Harriet Tubman had epilepsy in addition to being the woman who led so many slaves to freedom. Where did her courage come from? She certainly had it in abundance. Here’s the HARRIET trailer:
A fabulous line that I recall from another Judy Garland movie, ME AND MY SHADOWS, based on her daughter Lorna Luft’s book, said that no matter what when on in her mother’s life, “Mama never considered her life to be a tragedy.” That’s what people often said it was, but her daughter set the public straight about it. Something tells me, even though there’s nobody left alive who knew Harriet Tubman personally, that she didn’t consider her life to be a tragedy, either. Both of these ladies always tried to rise above their circumstances. Both women found themselves in dire circumstances caused entirely by the sick decisions and inexcusable actions of other people. When you consider that one was addicted to pills as a child by a corrupt Hollywood studio system, and the other was born into slavery, for each to have had the courage to try and triumph over stuff like that can only mean something in the souls of these two ladies never, for a moment, stopped shining bright.
JUDY will be opening in theaters in September, HARRIET in November, and all I can say is that I wish they would be available a whole lot sooner. Like, today!
Andrea McArdle, as Judy Garland, sings “Dear Mr. Gable” to Clark Gable at his birthday party.
Here’s a treat! It’s the television movie RAINBOW, which recounts the early life of Judy Garland. It’s upbeat for the most part with all the fabulous songs, but it becomes increasingly terrifying, on an emotional level, as we see the stranglehold MGM Studios starts to have over Judy.
The movie stars Andrea McArdle of Broadway ANNIE fame as the young Judy, and she does an amazing job. I wish there had been a soundtrack recording of these songs when the movie first came out in the 1970s. “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” never sounded better to me, before or since, as it does when Andrea belts it out. Brava!
Be sure to check out Martin Balsam as “Louis B. Mayer” in a performance that is downright chilling to the bone. I have a feeling his portrayal was 100% right on target.
I won’t say too much more because I don’t like to put “spoilers” out there. Take a look. Locating this movie, which is one of my all-time favorites, on YouTube and getting to see it again has made my day! Here it is. Click on the movie title at the top of the frame to watch it directly on YouTube, and let it also make yours:
Glory recaptured: Judy Garland at the Palladium, 1951.
Unintentional heroes are often the very best kind.
This week I have been reading a terrific, though heartbreaking and infuriating, biography: Judy Garland by Anne Edwards.
It’s heartbreaking because the child, Judy, born Frances Gumm in 1921, had no say in anything that went on in her life from the day she was born. Her mother was more of a ruthless stage mother than Rose Hovick ever was, putting her three kids on the vaudeville stage because she herself wanted to be a star but lacked the talent, echoing the plot of Gypsy to an eerie degree. Judy’s “big break” came when she was signed to an MGM contract at age 13, but it wasn’t a break at all: once she signed the contract, the studio, for all intents and purposes, practically owned the child.
Here is the infuriating part. Louis B. Mayer called the child with the great big voice but a propensity toward weight gain “my little hunchback.” Hunchback??!!! What kind of a term is that for a grown man to levy at a 13-year-old? She reportedly had a slightly sway back as a child, but come on! Furthermore, that child was beautiful. No one could ever have called her otherwise except, perhaps, within the confines of a movie studio where a certain type of beauty – that which could be most flatteringly photographed – was the norm. Had she been in school rather than signed to a studio, she’d have easily been regarded as a homecoming princess, not a hunchback. Since she easily put on the pounds, Mayer went and decreed that the studio commissary serve the girl nothing but chicken soup. How can a teenager survive on nothing all day long but soup? The man was worse than a dictator with these insane edicts. Yes, she had to be photographed a certain way on film, but still, nothing but liquid soup all day long for a teen? That’s less fare than a prisoner might have received while held in a Siberian gulag!
Later on, once she was doing beautifully in movies, Louis B. Mayer went further, authorizing amphetamines to keep Judy up for 36 hours at a time – 36! – to shoot movies, then allowing her to be handed sleeping pills to crash and get some shut-eye when she was no longer needed on the set. These were forced on the girl.
Uppers so that she could work for 36 hours straight.
Downers so she could sleep.
The beautiful girl became addicted, and it was that studio’s fault.
Still later, when her problems with pill addiction and became severe and she required treatments and hospitalizations, plural, what did Mayer say? That she was “a spoiled, bad girl having a temper tantrum!” This is complete insanity as a statement on his part. Judy developed that addiction problem only because Mayer himself created it!
In 1951, freed at last from her studio contract, the suggestion was put forth that she play The Palace Theater in New York City, the old temple of the very best of vaudeville acts from 1913-1933 – but by then it was being used as a movie house. Judy was hired to appear at England’s most famous vaudeville theater, The Palladium, in London instead.
I was further steaming when I read that before her opening performance, Judy was terrified, unable to sleep, and sick to her stomach. This beautiful girl, this astonishing singer, who had starred in so many pictures for MGM, had been so beaten down by her own studio, and for so long, that she didn’t think she could handle the live performance!
Here’s where the unintentional heroism of the British people comes in. They had, unbeknownst to Judy, loved her all through the darkest days of World War II. She’d gotten into their hearts with The Wizard of Oz by singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which happened to coincide with the beginning of the war – and their darkest national hour. She was in their hearts yet.
American newspapers had published scandalous stories about Judy; the British papers didn’t. They were thrilled she had arrived in England to entertain them.
They wished her luck.
She had gained weight after leaving the studio that starved her and knew it. She made a joke about it during her performance.
What did the British audience do? They replied with, “More to love! More to love!” Perhaps the walls constructed by Louis B. Mayer and his studio around what could have been the pretty girl’s self-esteem may not have ever been entirely erased, but that night, at least, at last, they started tumbling down.
This will go without saying, I’m sure, but they gave her several standing ovations that night, and during subsequent performances, too. Bravo, London! You didn’t just love her performance. You restored her dignity and, I believe, most likely even prolonged her life, as a result. This is the best story of an audience giving back that I’ve ever heard.
Here she is singing “Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” from that engagement. It includes the lines that so well applied to Judy herself:
“Weep no more my lady,
Sing your song again for me!”
I say again, since it’s worth repeating here: BRAVO, London!
Take a look at this glorious YouTube find of the evening! It’s Ethel Merman and Judy Garland singing a medley on THE JUDY GARLAND SHOW. Talk about a performance that’s equal to Cole Porter’s lyrics as being “delightful, delicious, delectable, delirious, dilemma, de-limit, deluxe and de-lovely” – WOW!
Every Broadway-lovin’ little girl’s dream is to come down the Warbucks mansion staircase in ANNIE dressed for Christmas in a red and white dress. What fun it was today, during the onstage tour of ANNIE, to get a chance to pose there myself!
And what a great experience it was to stand on the world-famous Palace stage. For anyone who may not know, since it’s been so many decades since Vaudeville was an art form, “playing the Palace” was every vaudevillian’s dream. It was the premiere vaudeville theater in the world. You didn’t “play the Palace” unless you were one of the best performers in the business: show business.
Here’s what it looked like back in 1920, during the height of vaudeville:
English: Palace Theatre, Broadway, New York, circa 1920. The theatre is the tall building on the right side of the photo. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Some of the stars that had the honor of playing the Palace were: Will Rogers, Blossom Seeley, Bert Williams, Marie Dressler, The Marx Brothers, Ed Wyn, Ethel Barrymore, Eva Tanguay, Kate Smith, Eddie Cantor and Ethel Waters. Much later, in the 1960’s, Judy Garland played there, too, in a historic performance. I adore history. What a phenomenal feeling it was to stand where all of those sparkling legends once stood!
The performers would look out from the stage into this beautiful sight:
When vaudeville died out as an art form, the Palace was reopened as a movie theater, and later, as a Broadway theater. It’s the third-largest theater on Broadway in terms of the size of the house – which means the number of audience seats that it can accommodate – but it doesn’t have a very large stage. When the theater was constructed for vaudeville, the architect wasn’t thinking about sets for lavish Broadway productions. Vaudeville acts were smaller and less complicated than a show like ANNIE which involves an orphanage, a Hooverville, a mansion, the streets of New York City, and the White House. As a result, some of the props for the show are stored on pulleys up in the air above the stage, in the wings. Others put on prop shelves backstage. Here’s a shot of one of them, lit with blue lights so that the actors can see the props in the dark backstage area:
Here is a shot of backstage scenery and props – the mansion staircase, the front silhouette of the orphanage, and part of the New York City skyline, not to mention a few stray balloons – stored all the way to the ceiling, which, by the way, is several stories high in the Palace, which provides for a lot of room:
It was my friend and fellow “Broadway Baby” Jen who won the tickets for today’s show and the onstage tour. Here we are on the stairs inside the orphanage set:
The Palace is, and has always been, quite a magical place! Here’s what the exterior looks like today:
Publicity still released by MGM of Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Louis B. Mayer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When my grandfather served in the Marine Corps with Hollywood star Tyrone Power back in World War II, they made a surprising discovery: the two men were related.
Grandpop Quinn was the most direct, “no bull” kind of guy you ever saw. He was always the first person to call a story “nonsense,” and his favorite line was, “That’s nonsense – talk sense!”
I can hear him now, using that line on Tyrone Power when first he heard they had a relative in common named Quinn, possibly a John Quinn, if I’m recalling the story I was told as a child correctly. Grandpop must have said something along the lines of its being nonsense, or at least, highly improbable, since Tyrone had to send home to someone for a copy of his family tree in order to prove it to Grandpop that they were related. Such was the force of the personality of Grandpop that a movie star would have had to get the documentation for him in order to prove it. Ha, I’m that way myself about documentation, so I get where Grandpop was coming from.
I’d give anything myself for a copy of that family tree.
Meanwhile I’ve been reading a really wonderful, though shocking and sad, history of Hollywood called THE FIXERS: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling, and the MGM Publicity Machine by the fabulous author E.J. Fleming. This is one of the best Hollywood books I’ve ever seen because it deals with not what the public was told was happening with the stars’ personal lives but with their actual stories. It talks of hit-and-run accidents that the studio paid to cover up, including one involving Clark Gable. It goes in depth into the murder of Paul Bern by his disturbed common-law ex, which was made to look like a suicide so that the story wouldn’t (somehow) imperil the career of his then-wife, Jean Harlow. There are all manner of bizarre situations described in this well-researched, impossible to put down book: “lavender” marriages to cover up homosexuality, “white” (unconsummated) marriages for the same reason, abortions, payoffs, corrupt D.A.’s in the studios pockets, mobsters, gamblers, Joan Crawford and Jeanette MacDonald’s past history of prostitution, and all manner of strangeness, wild living and corruption. If you don’t mind having your jaw involuntarily drop to the floor every other paragraph, it’s a fabulous read.
But then I came to the story about Tyrone Power’s affair with Judy Garland – and MGM’s ridiculous plot, actual, honest-to-goodness plot, that stopped it.
Tyrone Power. My relative, though I have yet to figure out the particulars of how we’re related. And Judy Garland. One of the most beloved entertainers of all time. Suddenly, it’s not just Hollywood history any more. It’s personal.
I have never been so mad in my life from reading anything as I became today, reading about this thwarted affair. MGM had assigned Judy a “publicist,” Betty Asher, whose actual job, believe this or not, was to spy on the young actress. She was still a teenager when this viper was assigned to her, just eighteen years old. Judy thought this horrific Betty Asher was her “best friend.” She didn’t realize that she was reporting every move she made back to the Powers That Be, Eddie Mannix and Louis B. Mayer at MGM.
Right there, I was getting steamed on Judy Garland’s behalf as I read it. While I do get it that the studio had an investment in Judy’s career, still – employing a spy? What kind of people would need to do this to a teen? Then Tyrone Power entered the picture, and oh my God. He loved her. She loved him. She became pregnant with his baby. The studio didn’t like any of this. He had a wife. It would hurt Judy’s “image” if she married him and had the baby. So Asher deliberately prevented Power, who was trying to call Judy, from reaching her on the phone – then lied and said Power was reading her love letters to his service buddies “as entertainment.” It devastated Judy completely. It also worked. But none of it was true! It was all a lie, perpetrated by this Asher character to break up the duo’s relationship. Poor Judy was led, by Asher, who was lying like a rug, to believe the “best” thing she could “ever” do under the circumstances was to abort his baby….
I cannot even begin to formulate the words to explain exactly what I think about Betty Asher, though my blunt grandfather could have come up with quite a few, and easily. Are there even words in our language, or anybody’s, to describe someone as base as this? Oh, the usual ones pop up – like “Judas,” or “treacherous,” or “scheming,” or “untrustworthy,” or “false friend” – but can any term like those do any justice to this? To Asher lying to deliberately destroy not only this affair but the life of the couple’s child – and to further cripple the already damaged self-esteem of a child-woman like Judy Garland, too, into the bargain? How could anybody do that for the sake of an “image” or a studio? What image or studio is worth manufacturing lies like that to force the hand of a beautiful young girl like Judy Garland – without realizing she was helping to destroy her? In the long run, I don’t think any less of Judy Garland for having had an affair with a married man that produced a baby, but I’m heartsick for her over the actions of Betty Asher as directed by Eddie Mannix and Louis B. Mayer. Yes, MGM produced spectacular movies, but the place was run by a dictatorial nut job who ordered, encouraged and allowed all of this insanity, lying, spying, drugging and destroying a young star, her lover and child. Oh, if only Grandpop were here! Better yet, if only Grandpop had been at MGM. I could just see him roaring at those people, nice and loud, “That’s nonsense – talk sense!”
Before Judy ultimately was made wise to Asher’s nefarious actions against her, she thought she was her friend to the point she had Asher in her bridal party – as her maid of honor, yet – when she wed Vincente Minelli. Let’s just say the world doesn’t need to know what kind of little margin notes I wrote in my copy of the book when I read that part, but they’re quite vivid, and almost in technicolor, too.
Screenshot of Tyrone Power from the trailer for the film Alexander’s Ragtime Band (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Here’s a Liza Minelli song by the Broadway songwriting team Kander and Ebb that I heard for the first time on Friday night. They wrote it for a television special called “Liza with a Z” that I saw when I was about ten years old. I remember other parts of this special, though not this song. After hearing it just once on Friday, I have not been able to stop singing it since. Enjoy!
Splendiferous Everything 