© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
The following is excerpted from Gene Lees’ essay The Last Days of Junior’s in his Meet Me at Jim and Andy: Jazz Musicians and Their World [New York: Oxford, 1988].
It falls under the broad category of significant women in Gerry Mulligan’s life, a category that includedhis relationship with Gale Madden, a marriage to Arlyne Brown, relationships with Judy and Sandy Dennis followed by his marriage to Franca Rota in 1974.
Each of these women played a key role in Gerry’s life, but Judy’s might have been a pivotal one for the reasons explained in Gene’s narrative.
“And Judy Holliday was there through it all. She was Gerry's lady, and Ed Sherman wasn't the only one to wonder why they didn't marry. But she was a friend to so many of us—Bob Brookmeyer, Alec Wilder, Willis Conover, myself. Everyone had heard the story: how, when Jean Arthur had purportedly fallen ill just before the out-of-town opening of Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday, the young Judy Holliday had memorized the script overnight and gone on and done the part flawlessly without rehearsal. It was the stuff of mythology.
Willis Conover offered me a deck of cards one day. "Shuffle them," he said. I did. He said, "Cut them." I did. "Now," he said, "leaving the deck face down, touch the backs of the cards and by feel separate them into the red and black suits." I did it — and separated them perfectly. I was astounded. Was this some sort of example of ESP, or a trick? It was a trick, Willis assured me, one he had learned from an inebriated professional magician in the army. The magician, sobering up later, made Willis pledge never to reveal its technique, and Willis had never done so. "Do you want to know how smart Judy is?" Willis said. "When I tried it on her, she'd gone only about ten cards down into the deck when she said, 'Oh, I see how it's done.'"
One thing that gives New York its edge is its intellectual density. Photos taken from Bedloe's Island or, my favorite view, the Staten Island ferry show that astonishing crowd of great edifices seemingly standing on the water itself, defying nature. Why don't they sink? They do not sink of course because they are footed in bedrock. When you live in that city, you know that within blocks of you there are dozens, maybe scores or more, of people who do the same work you do, have as much talent as you do, and are probably awake working while you are wasting time in sleep or conversation or making love. You are not actually wasting time, to be sure. The very people you are talking to are teaching you. I by now lived on West 86th Street near Central Park West. Five blocks down, at the corner of CPW and West 81st, in a building called the Beresford that overlooked both Central Park and the Museum of Natural History, lived Sheldon Harnick; in the same building were Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, and Lee Falk, who wrote the comic strip The Phantom, one of those I'd grown up on. Farther down CPW, Harold Arlen lived.
A group of us, all friends, lived within walking distance of each other, among them Willis Conover at the corner of West 83rd and CPW, Mulligan on West 71st near CPW, and on West 72nd at CPW, in the Dakota, Judy Holliday, Boris Karloff also lived there. It is a strange and gorgeous old monstrosity, styled after a French chateau, though no chateau was ever built in such exaggerated proportions, so American in their excess. Jack Finney used it as the setting of his fantasy novel Time and Again, and Rosemary's Baby was filmed in it.
Willis was in Washington half the time, playing his records on his Music USA program for the Voice of America, sending Duke Ellington and Woody Herman and Gerry Mulligan and Oscar Peterson and Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie to peoples far beyond the waters, and almost single-handedly turning jazz into a world language. Most of the great jazz players from other countries, particularly those in the Soviet orbit, will tell you that they were inspired to learn this music by Willis Conover. When Willis would arrive in Warsaw, cheering mobs would surround him, but we could walk down CPW to Judy's apartment or Gerry's and nobody knew him, because his program was not heard in America — just in Sri Lanka and the USSR and Algeria and, for all I know, Tibet.
Mulligan too was away much of the time, with his quartet or the Gerry Mulligan Concert Band with Zoot and Brookmeyer and Clark Terry and Don Rader and Mel Lewis and Bill Crow. I stayed home and wrote. Judy stayed home, too, and alas did not do much in those years, although such was her musicality that she was learning to play the flute.
I have no memory of meeting her for the first time, although it was almost certainly in one of those four musicians' bars, and probably Jim and Andy's. But I remember the last time I saw her vividly. It was in Birdland, at the bottom of the stairs, in front of the cloak room.
[Above photo by bassist Bill Crow.]
I think every man who knew her loved her in some suspended and unadmitted way. I think this was true of Willis Conover and Bob Brookmeyer, and I know it was true of Alec Wilder.
I think every man who knew her loved her in some suspended and unadmitted way. I think this was true of Willis Conover and Bob Brookmeyer, and I know it was true of Alec Wilder.
Long before I knew her, I had read of her purported brilliance and dismissed it as the invention of press agents. For once they were not exaggerating. Her mind was incredibly quick, and relished puns, as Paul Desmond's did. The huge living room of her apartment in the Dakota overlooked West 72nd. In it there were masses of ferns, of which she said one day, "With fronds like these, who needs anemones?" To be in the company of Judy and Mulligan and Desmond (who loved Tom Swifties and may have invented them) was, Gary McFarland said, "like being caught in the middle of an acrostic."
She was, Alec Wilder said simply, "a healer." Alas she could heal everyone but herself. There was such a goodness about her. Once I called her apartment, looking for Mulligan. She said he was on the road for a couple of weeks, and then she said, "What's wrong?"
"Nothing," I said.
"Yes there is."
"Just down, just a little depressed."
With that little soft chuckle you know if you have seen her movies, she said, "You sound like you need a little body warmth. Why don't you come on over?" I spent the evening there and had dinner with her. I think that was the night she told me the story of going to Columbia Pictures.
It was after the success of Born Yesterday on Broadway. For once the girl in the play got the part in the movie. She went on to make Adam's Rib, Full of Life, The Solid Gold Cadillac, Pfft, Bells Are Ringing with Dean Martin (and Mulligan in that minor role), and more, each characterization a perfect etching.
She was a pretty woman. She was rather sturdy of build, small-busted and a little thick-waisted; and she worried about her weight. She had those remarkable dimples in her cheeks when she smiled, and, as you can see in her films, she could light up a theatre or a living room. She had a closed, tight-jawed way of speaking, and like many New York City natives she was almost unable to say the letter r: it came out halfway to being w. It was a distinctive voice, and although I dislike the word (and she would have loathed it), it can only be described as cute.
I also dislike the word "vulnerable" as it is used to describe actors or characters in stories, and in any case, though it fits her, it is inadequate. She had a talent for melancholy, there was a darkness in her, she was a hurt person, for, as she once said to Willis Conover, "I spent my childhood pulling my mother's head out of a gas oven." Her ancestry was Russian Jewish, and her true surname was Tuvim, from which she derived Holliday.
She was very musical, and she sang well in an ingenuous and unaffected way, as you can hear from her few albums, including the stage and film versions of Bells Are Ringing. In April of 1961, Mulligan took her into the recording studio with what was essentially his Concert Band and recorded her, using charts by himself, Ralph Burns, Bill Finegan, and Brookmeyer, and recorded her for MGM Records. Four of the songs were pieces she'd written with Gerry, showing her considerable ability as a lyricist. But MGM never released the album.
She was a sort of distaff Jack Lemmon. She was a brilliant actress who had established her reputation in comedy. But she had not yet made the transition to the character roles for which she was, like Lemmon, so well equipped, and The System wanted to keep her in the kind of parts that had established her, the likable dizzy blonde.
Her last Broadway show was a musical called Hot Spot. It was a piece of trash, and it achieved an early and just demise. I hated it, and so did she.
Script after script kept coming to her, and the character she was requested to portray was almost always a variant on Billie Dawn, her role in Born Yesterday, She turned them down, one after another. She was restless, not working, and after a year or so I said, "Why don't you take something, just to be busy?"
"I did that," she said. "It was called Hot Spot — remember?"
I offered no further career advice.
But the lack of good parts kept grinding on her. And time was passing. She was forty-one now, no longer the ingenue, yet she had not yet gone through that professional metamorphosis into the great character roles she deserved and would have ennobled. One night I was in Jim and Andy's with her. I don't know where Gerry was; possibly he was working a gig and had asked me to pick her up and bring her there. Or possibly he'd left for one and asked me to take her home. Whatever the reason, he wasn't there. We were sitting at the bar, talking quietly, when a girl in her twenties who obviously was not a regular of the place — none of the habitues would have done this, and they all knew her anyway — said, gushingly, "Aren't you Judy Holliday?"
"Yes I am," she said, a little apprehensively.
"Wow!" the girl said. "Oh wow! You know, you're my mother's favorite actress!"
"Oh God," Judy said, "that's all I needed," and put her head down on her crossed arms on the bar. I couldn't tell if she was crying, but I put my arm across her shoulder. She was wearing a mink coat. I still remember the feel of the mink under my hand.
Her medical problem returned. She went in for tests. I got a call one evening from Mulligan. He was on the road somewhere — Chicago, Pittsburgh, I don't remember. He said that Judy was home alone and waiting for the results of the tests. He couldn't be there. Would I go over and keep her company for the evening? I called her, then went over to the Dakota. We watched television. She was sitting in bed, wearing a pink bed jacket, quilted as I recall. We talked about the tests, and after that said little. There was little to say. She just needed some body warmth. She'd given it to me one dark night. I went home around midnight.
It must have been a week or two later that I ran into her and Gerry at the bottom of the stairs at Birdland. They were leaving as I was arriving. I gave her a hug; she was wearing that mink coat. "How're you feeling, m'darlin'?" I said.
"Rotten," she said with that unforgettable chuckle, "but at least I know I'm not going to die!"
I had to go to Paris on a job. When I got back to New York, it was in the midst of one of its taxi strikes, and I had no way to get my luggage home from the East Side terminal. I stored the bags in a locker and took a subway to Jim and Andy's, where, I figured, I'd find one of the guys with a car. I came up out of the subway on Sixth Avenue and looked down at a pile of New York Posts. The headline read; Judy Holliday Dies.
I called Gerry immediately. He sounded like death on the phone. I was asked to come to the funeral. I sat up all night and listened to records, watched the hour of the service approach and then pass. Bob Brookmeyer told me later he had done the same thing. Her death just shattered us.
Willis Conover told me he was worried about Gerry, who had been under almost unendurable strain in these last weeks. Willis arranged that in secret compact either he or I or Joseph Heller, the novelist, would be with Gerry almost around the clock, Willis was with Gerry in Charlie's, talking to Gene Williams, when the juke box played her recording of The Party's Over.
Gerry put his head on his arms on the bar, as Judy had done that night in Jim and Andy's with me.
Dear Judy. Her death left a great emptiness in our lives, though no one's of course as much as Gerry's. He was drained, wasted, depleted afterwards. Perhaps her sudden absence was the reason we spent so much time together in that period. We went to the theatre a number of times. One of the shows we saw, I remember, was Stephen Sondheim's Company, whose score we enormously admired. I went back and saw it several more times. …
One of the shows we saw at that time was A Thousand Clowns. I vividly remember running west on West 48th Street to get there by curtain time: one of us had been late getting to Jim and Andy's. The show starred Jason Robards and Sandy Dennis. Gerry would spend the next several years of his life with Sandy, this gifted actress and delightful lady. …”