Excerpt: 'Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland'

By Gerald Clarke
Random House
Nonfiction
424 Pages

April 3, 2000
Web posted at: 11:29 a.m. EDT (1529 GMT)

(CNN) -- Gerald Clarke's "Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland" details the family life and career of this complex actress. While Garland brought joy to so many, her own happiness was elusive.

This excerpt gives background on Garland's parents and how they met.

Chapter 1

Ethel and Frank

He came from a little town in the South, and his smile was as spacious as summer's sun. She came from an even smaller town in the far North, and her eyes, so dark that they were almost black, were as sharp as winter's wind. But for both of them the home of the heart was neither north nor south, nor in any other direction the compass pointed. It was a simple wooden platform, and it could be anywhere, any size, any shape: no stage was ever too mean or insignificant for Frank and Ethel Gumm.

They had grown up to the sound of applause, and they met, in late 1911 or at the beginning of 1912, at the Orpheum Theater - a "picture house," as it was then called - in Superior, Wisconsin, a rowdy, lively port at the western end of Lake Superior. The city, which still retained much of its frontier exuberance, boasted many such places, and the creaky wooden sidewalks of its main street, Tower Avenue, were crowded with people just like them, all eager to break into the big-time world of vaudeville.

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Ethel pounded out the background music for the films that flickered on the Orpheum's screen. Frank sang the songs of the day while the reels were being changed. Far from his home in Tennessee, he rented a room from her parents, John and Eva Milne, and romance blossomed. It died when he suddenly upped and left, then unexpectedly sprang to life again when he returned many months later, in the late summer or fall of 1913. He took a job at the Parlor Theater, she played the piano at the Lyric, which was across Tower Avenue, and they picked up where they had left off.

This time Frank did not bolt, and on December 31, the last day of 1913, they were issued a marriage license by the Douglas County clerk. There was apparently still some reluctance to take the final step, however, and Frank carried that weighty document around in his pocket for more than three weeks. But at 5 o'clock on the afternoon of Thursday, January 22, 1914, their roller-coaster courtship ended at last. Standing before a newly ordained Episcopal priest, they exchanged vows in the parlor of the Milnes' house on Banks Avenue. Ethel wore a gown of ivory silk and carried a bouquet of roses. Her younger sister Mary was her maid of honor, while Alfred Street Jr., who was often seen at the Superior theaters, stood up as best man for Frank.

After the bridal dinner, the little wedding party bundled up against biting winds and temperatures that hovered just a few degrees above zero-winter was a serious affair in that part of the world - and crossed the St. Louis River to the neighboring city of Duluth, Minnesota. There the festivities continued in a box Ethel's father had reserved at Duluth's leading vaudeville house. Topping the bill that night was one of the era's most popular singers, Ernest R. Ball, whose best-known song might have been written for the occasion - "Love Me and the World Is Mine," it was titled. With its sweet lyrics still humming in their ears, the young couple - she was twenty and he was twenty-seven - said their goodbyes and boarded a train for their honeymoon in Minneapolis and Chicago.

The motion picture era was just starting, but one scenario was already a screen standard: boy meets girl, boy and girl part, boy and girl are reunited for a happy ending. And that familiar script, observed the Superior Evening Telegram, was the one that had been followed so faithfully by the happy bride and groom. Their romance, said the paper, had rivaled some of the melodramas shown in the theaters in which they worked: fate, which is the "arch enemy of the god of love," had separated them; but they had found their way back to each other, allowing Cupid to triumph in the end, "as he always does in good moving picture plots." But good moving picture plots never tell everything. So it was with the sentimental scenario the newspaper had sketched for Frank and Ethel, and their story, then and later, was not what it appeared to be.

After leaving Tennessee, sometime between the end of 1910 and the first part of 1911, Frank had traveled through several states before arriving, in the fall of 1911, at the Head of the Lakes, as the Duluth-Superior area was called by its boosters. He was to travel through many more before he returned in 1913. Ethel, by contrast, had never ventured far from the often turbulent waters of Lake Superior, the largest of all the Great Lakes, near which she had been born, had grown up, and now had married.

Her parents were Canadian. Her father, John Milne (Milne was pronounced with one syllable and rhymed with "kiln"), was the son of Scottish immigrants. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1865, he was a railroadman, as his father had been, and he had crossed the border in 1888 to take a job with the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic Railway, whose trains ran along the south shore of Lake Superior. Ethel's mother, Eva Fitzpatrick Milne, most likely had also been born in Ontario, in the town of Cornwall in 1864. But her family - her father was a shoemaker - apparently moved to Massena, New York, across the St. Lawrence River, when she was a child. It was most likely in Marquette, Michigan, a busy lake port like Superior, that John and Eva met. It was there that they married in 1890, and it was also there that Ethel, the first of their eight children, was born on November 17, 1893.

John Milne remained with the South Shore line for many years, advancing from fireman to engineer, from a job that had him shoveling coal into the locomotive boiler to one that had him actually driving the train. The Milnes lived in several towns in Marquette County, but it Michigamme, where they lived from 1903 or 1904 until the late summer of 1910, that Ethel knew best. With no more than six hundred inhabitants, Michigamme provided few obvious amenities. Sanitation meant backyard outhouses - even the school relied on such uncouth facilities - and winters were so bitter that money was made by hacking ice, sometimes as much as two-and-a-half feet thick, from Lake Michigamme and shipping it to cities that lacked such natural refrigeration.

Yet if life in Michigamme could be harsh and forbidding, it also could be remarkably congenial. Amusements were all homemade. People in Michigamme did not pay to be entertained; they made their own fun. Most nights during the winter there was a dance, a basketball game, or a meeting of one club or another. When the snow melted in the spring, doors burst open and the residents rushed outside, like prisoners released from jail. On Independence Day the South Shore Line lowered its fares, and people from all over the county converged on Michigamme, which was famous for the enthusiasm with which it celebrated the nation's birthday.

Energetic and outgoing, the Milnes had a prominent role in the life of the town, particularly its musical life. Both John and Eva sang and played instruments--he, the violin; she, the piano - and in the early years of their marriage, they occasionally toured those northern precincts with their own medicine show, drawing the curious with their music, then coaxing them to buy an evil-tasting laxative that was derived from the bark of the cascara tree.

Some parents impart to their children a love of reading or of sports, and their offspring become writers or athletes. John and Eva taught a love of music, and their sons and daughters became singers and pianists. Performing was like breathing, and almost as soon as they began walking and talking the Milne children were singing, dancing or practicing on a keyboard. There was probably not a waking hour when a chord was not sounded or a note was not struck in their house on Railroad Street. They may have lived in the backwoods, far from opera, symphony or vaudeville, but no family anywhere was more eager to please an audience than the Milnes of Michigamme.

The first to follow in their parents' footsteps were Ethel and her younger brother Jack. Teaming up to play, sing and dance at school parties, they left such a vivid impression that they rated a special mention in the town's centennial book, which was written more than sixty years after they had gone. Ethel was not the most gifted of the musical Milnes - Jack, Mary and Norma vied for that honor - but she was the most versatile. She could sing, play the piano, dance, even write songs: indeed, when it came to music, she could do almost anything passably well.

In an age of faith and piety, John Milne was a proud and vocal agnostic. He went so far as to name his third son after Robert Ingersoll, the late Nineteenth Century thinker who toured the country lecturing against orthodox religion. Just as Ingersoll delighted in making "it hot for the dear old stupid theologians," as he once phrased it, so John, who was perhaps too fond of the bottle, seemed to enjoy making it hot for his dear old Episcopalian wife. Possessed of an equally strong will, Eva matched him insult for insult. Their bickering never stopped, and despite all the music, there was not much harmony in the Milne house.

Ethel had inherited her parents' strength and obstinacy, as well as their love of music. Tirelessly energetic, unconquerable in spirit, she relentlessly pursued what she wanted, keeping to the chase no matter how long it took. None of the other children had anything like her force, and her relationship with her parents, Eva most particularly, was never easy. She and her mother argued and fought, yet were closer, paradoxically, than more compatible pairings, constitutionally incapable, it seemed, of being apart for very long. If he did not know it then, Frank soon was to discover that he was not just marrying one of the Milne daughters, he was marrying the entire clan.

"Pretty Miss Milne," was how the Superior newspaper had described Ethel. But that was the flattery accorded all young women on the day of their wedding. Neither pretty nor ugly, she belonged to the great majority, the plain. Her face was unremarkable except for her eyes, which were not only unusually dark, but also slightly crossed. She was short, no more than five feet tall, and somewhat stout, like all the other Milne women. At twenty she already had a matronly figure. All in all, her marital prospects had appeared so dim that Maude Ayres, a soprano who also worked at the Orpheum, was amazed when she announced her marriage to Frank, who was considered something of a catch.

Ethel was lucky to get him, was Ayres opinion, and who would have disputed her? Everyone who knew Frank in those days said that he was good-looking - some thought him handsome. A little above average in height, about five feet nine inches tall, he had dark hair, blue eyes and a round, open, pleasant face. What most people recalled, however, was not his looks, but his captivating manner. He could bring more cheer to a gloomy afternoon than the best Tennessee bourbon. Decades after he had left the South, people there still could picture, as vividly as if he were standing there before them, the young man with the songs and the smiles. "Always happy, laughing," was how one woman remembered him, adding that "when Frank dropped around, the music began." One fact can be stated at the beginning: no one ever disliked Frank Gumm.

His Tennessee roots ran strong and deep. Both the Gumms and the Baughs, his mother's family, had lived there since the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, when it was still pioneer country. That was when John and Mary Baugh were born, and they were already middle-agedÑMary was in her early forties and John was over fiftyÑwhen Frank's mother Clemmie was born in 1857. Clemmie was the last of the Baughs' six children, and the fact that Mary Baugh was past the ordinary time for child-bearing may have contributed to her daughter's lifelong infirmity: Clemmie was an invalid from infancy.

By contrast, John and Martha GumÑsome, even some in the same family, spelled the name with one "m"Ñwere young when Frank's father William Techumseh Gumm, the first of their seven children, was born in 1854. Will married Clemmie in 1877, but instead of taking her away to a home of their own, as most husbands do, he moved into the Baughs' large and handsome house in Murfreesboro, on East Main Street, the address of most of the town's gentlefolk. Built in the Federal style, with thick brick walls, a fourteen-foot-wide central hall, and ceilings twelve feet high, the house had enough room for Clemmie and her new husband, as well as for the three boarders Mary Baugh was forced to take in after John Baugh died in 1870.

During the years to come, it was also to be home to the five Gumm children. Invalid though she was, Clemmie gave birth once every three years. Mary, the only girl, came first in 1880; then Robert in 1883; Frank in 1886 (March 20, to be exact); William in 1889; and finally Allie in 1892. Although money was scarce, life on East Main Street seems to have been pleasant enough. The five children were apparently close, and one relative remembered a parlor that reverberated with song. Like the Milnes, the Gumms were devoted to music.

Situated in the geographic heart of Tennessee, astride a vital rail line, Murfreesboro had been a strategic, much contested prize during the Civil War. Though it had never regained the wealth it had enjoyed before the cyclone of war whirled through, it was, when Frank was growing up, a pleasant place to live nonetheless. With a population of only five thousand, half of which was black, it was small enough to retain the friendliness of a villageÑpigs and cows wandered freely through the streetsÑyet large enough to offer such urban pleasures as a theater.

Many traced their ancestry back to Virginia, and they liked to think that they also retained the refined manners of the Old Dominion. Conversation was the common currency, and by universal custom, houses were built close to the street so that residents, sitting on their porches, could gossip with passersby. Everyone knew who was up, who was down, and whose husband was sneaking off for some illicit pleasure in Mink Slide, the red light district. People were allowed few secrets in Murfreesboro.

Money was admired but not venerated, and the Gumms remained people of respectable standing even as their financial situation descended from bad to desperate. Two years after Mary Baugh's death in 1892, her big house was sold, and Will and Clemmie had to move their brood into a cramped brick cottage nearby, one of three or four dwellings Clemmie had been left by her mother. Worse followed. Clemmie herself died in October 1895, when she was only thirty-eight. Then, three months later, fire partially destroyed the overcrowded brick cottage. With no home, no money and no prospects, Will asked the Rutherford County Chancery Court to give him permission to use most of his children's slim inheritance to buy another house, a larger and more comfortable one four blocks away on Maney's Avenue.

It was only one of several trips Will made to the court, which officially pronounced him insolvent. His children's sole support was the tiny income that Clemmie's properties brought in. No mention is made of an illness or a handicap that would explain Will's inability to hold a jobÑhe testified only that he could not find oneÑand it seems likely that he had been dependent on his wife's family from the day they were married. Whatever the reason for his fecklessness, it caused hardship for his children. He did not have money to educate them beyond public school, and after using up most of their legacy to give them more space in the new house, he was forced to crowd them together again to make room for a paying boarder, a young doctor from Mississippi.

For Frank, rescue came, as if by divine intervention, from the richest man in town, George M. Darrow. Darrow and his wife Tempe lived in the town's finest house, Oak Manor, a graceful Italianate villa in which they entertained with lavish seven-course dinners. Tempe, whose family owned plantations in Alabama and Mississippi, had always been rich; it was her money that had bought Oak Manor and that paid for all those fancy dinners. But George had grown up poor in Nebraska, and he liked helping young people who were in the position he himself had been in.

Armed with Tempe's money and his own determination, Darrow, whose nickname was "the Boss," always got what he went after. When he could not find American workmen who could restore Oak Manor the way he wanted, he imported craftsmen from Europe. When he could not find a church of his own Episcopal faith in Murfreesboro, he proceeded to establish one. Its modest frame building on South Spring Street looked downright puny by comparison with the stately structures of the long-dominant Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians, but St. Paul's had something the others could envy: it had Frank Gumm, whose voice had so captured the Boss's ear that he had recruited him to sing in his choir. Darrow's church could not match the numbers of its bigger rivals; but with Frank singing solo, his boy's soprano as pure and sweet as childhood itself, it surpassed them all in its musical devotions.

Just two years younger than Will Gumm, Darrow became Frank's godfather, a role he fulfilled, as he did all others, with unrestrained vigor. In June 1899, three months after Frank's thirteenth birthday, Darrow plucked him out of poor Will's beleaguered household and sent him off to an Episcopalian boys' school, the junior adjunct of the University of the South, or Sewanee, as it was usually called. Frank's voice had been his deliverance, and Darrow had procured him a scholarship to sing in the Sewanee choir. "I am sure neither you, or any of those interested will ever have cause to regret helping this bright boy along," Darrow wrote the school's head, Lawton Wiggins. "He knows that he is taken for his services in the choir, and that he must be ever anxious to render service to his benefactors." On the morning of June 13, a few days before the start of the summer term, godfather and godson journeyed by train to Sewanee, which was about sixty miles southeast of Murfreesboro. Darrow personally presented his young charge to his new benefactors, thus beginning what Frank was later to call "six of the happiest, the most beautiful years of my life."

Not much known outside the South in those years, Sewanee inspired the fanatical devotion of all those associated with it. Set high on the Cumberland Plateau, about 1,800 feet above sea level, it was often referred to simply as "the Mountain," an academic aerie that had little to do with the troubles of the world below. It was "in the middle of woods, on top of a bastion of mountains crenelated with blue coves," wrote Frank's friend and schoolmate, William Alexander Percy, in his richly-brocaded autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee. "It is so beautiful that people who have once been there always, one way or another, come back. For such as can detect apple green in an evening sky, it is Arcadia...."

Along with a rigorous dose of the classics, Sewanee taught manners and style, how a gentleman behaves. Small and friendly, it was, as Percy noted, "a place to be hopelessly sentimental about and to unfit one for anything except the good life." It suited Frank exactly, and he suited it exactly, doing what Darrow had promised he would doÑhe filled the chapel with glorious song, a voice that eventually matured into a brilliant tenor. Writing of the Easter services of 1900, the student newspaper, the Purple, said that such beautiful music had never before been heard at Sewanee, and it singled out Frank's solo for its purity of tone.

"Hurrah! Hurrah! Sewanee boys are we," went the words to the college song. "Away with melancholy and let care and trouble flee, while we are at Sewanee...." But at the end of 1904, his second year in college, Frank's carefree youth ended abruptly. With two years left to go before graduation, he ended his academic career and returned to Murfreesboro, probably to help support his impoverished family. Will Gumm died in 1906, and for the next four years Frank worked as a stenographer and court reporter by day and at night performed at a theater owned by an uncle, Walter D. Fox.

In 1909 he left those familiar surroundings for the town of Tullahoma, a resort and health spa about forty miles to the southeast. His Uncle Walter, who was the state secretary of a fraternal organization called the Knights of Pythias, was building a home there for the widows and orphans of deceased Knights. Ovoca he named it, and he took Frank along as his secretary. Joining Frank in Tullahoma were his sister Mary, who was still unmarried at twenty-nine, and his sixteen-year-old brother Allie. All three lived in a small frame house on East Lincoln Street, half a block from St. Barnabas' Episcopal Church. In this new setting Frank's voice once again opened doors. He sang in the church choir, he joined a quartet that was much in demand for parties and weddings, and before long he was associating, as one prominent Tullahomian said, "with our best people." Universally admired, he seemed to have as bright a future as any young man in Tennessee. But by the end of 1910, or possibly the first part of 1911, he was goneÑgone from Tullahoma, gone from Tennessee, gone from the South itself.

In those days most American towns had at least one theater that offered live entertainment. In all probability Frank traveled from stage to stage, along a third-string vaudeville circuit. By September 1911, the date of his next documented appearance, he knew the business well enough, in any event, to buy his own small theaters. In the most unlikely of spots, the logging town of Cloquet, Minnesota, he became a show business entrepreneur, purchasing both the Bijou and the Diamond. "Mr. Gumm impresses one as a very capable young man in his line of endeavor and most desirous of pleasing the theatre-going public of Cloquet," said the Cloquet Pine Knot. Yet within weeks after he had taken them over, this very capable young man inexplicably handed over his Cloquet theaters to his older brother Bob and moved twenty miles to the eastÑto Superior, the Orpheum Theater and Ethel Milne.

Frank and Ethel first approached the altar in 1912, not long after they had met. Ethel was so convinced of the certainty of their marriage that she boldlyÑand rashlyÑinvited Frank's singing partner, Maude Ayres, to a between-shows wedding supper on the Orpheum stage. Ethel had an enviable knack for making a little seem like a lot, and she transformed a card table into a festive board, covering it with a crisp white tablecloth on which she placed fried chicken, salad, rolls, glasses of champagne, even a wedding cake. With no other company than the rows of empty seats staring at them from the darkness below, the three of them toasted their friendship and peered happily into the future. But Ethel had celebrated too soon. Before they could make their vows official, Frank had skidded off, leaving Superior as abruptly as he had left Tullahoma and Cloquet.

By his own count, Frank was in twenty-eight states during the months that followed, once again, it seems likely, traveling the vaudeville circuit and performing in out-of-the-way towns like Cloquet and in theaters like the Bijou and the Diamond. Eventually he landed in Portland, Oregon, where, for a year or more, he managed the Crystal on Killingsworth Avenue. But Portland, which was then a bustling, rambunctious port city much like Superior, did not keep him either. By the autumn of 1913 he was back in Superior itself, singing at the Parlor on Tower Avenue and resuming his romance with Ethel, whose determination to marry him apparently had never wavered during the many months he had been away.

Since leaving Tennessee, Frank had moved around the country at a dizzying pace, like a bullet that had missed it mark and ricocheted aimlessly from place to place. At times his behaviorÑhis sudden departure from Cloquet, for example, which was followed by an equally hasty exit from Superior--seemed like that of a madman. But Frank was not crazy, and actions that appeared to be irrational were in fact eminently sane. For Frank had a secret that explained everything: he was basically homosexual, and his advances to young men and teenage boys sometimes made him unwelcome in the towns in which he took up residence. Cloquet was one of them. He had been forced to leave. "He was accused of being a pervert and he had to skip town and get out fast," said Ayres.

When the news reached Superior, he found it expedient to leave there as well. "Everybody in Superior was talking about it," said Ayres. "I was shocked because I had had no idea that there was anything like that going on." What Ethel thought no one can know, but when he returned at last in the fall of 1913, she was ready to say yes to his proposal. Their marriage, on that cold afternoon in January, was indeed a victory for the god of love, just as the Superior newspaper had said it was. What the paper did not sayÑwhat it did not knowÑwas just how impressive little Cupid's triumph had been.

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Judy Garland Database: Brief Biography

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