From the current WINTER 2025 Issue

The brilliant, beautiful and all too brief career of the wonderful JUDY HOLLIDAY

HOLLIDAY'S SPIRIT

By Walter Scannell

There is an old saying that into every life a little rain must fall. Luckily, Judy Holliday had enough sense to come in out of a downpour. In fact, on one occasion, doing so was one of the best things that ever happened to her.

The native New Yorker was born Judith Tuvim in 1921. It was written that her mother was enjoying comedienne Fanny Brice at the Ziegfeld Follies when her contractions started coming closer together; she left the theater and made it to a maternity hospital just in time. (Appropriately, Judy later introduced the world to a popular song called “Just in Time.”)

Judy’s parents divorced when she was six and her grandmother and uncle (author Joseph Gollumb) helped raise the child. They could see she was extremely bright — when she was ten, she scored an unusually high 172 on the Otis IQ test — but also quite serious and determined about what she wanted.

What she wanted was to be an actress; in fact, right after graduating from high school, she took a job with Orson Welles and John Houseman’s Mercury Theater — working the switchboard. (She did appear as an extra in Welles’ 1938 silent film, Too Much Johnson; Welles later told director Peter Bogdanovich that Judy’s work offered humor and “richness.”) She also performed anywhere she could, including Camp Onota, a Massachusetts summer resort that hosted a variety of entertainments, including the occasional Gilbert and Sullivan operetta produced on the cheap.

It was at Camp Onata that Judy met Adolph Green, a small, ordinary-looking musical prodigy who had started writing songs with his college classmate Betty Comden. Green and Comden put on a show at a New York cabaret and coaxed the untrained Judy to join them and two other friends. The five called themselves the Revuers, specializing in topical humor and social satire. Green and Comden were composers who also sang and did some simple dancing, but Judy quickly became the star performer.

It was after joining the Revuers that Judy ducked out of the rain and into the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village, where poets were reading to an unfriendly audience. She told the owner that she and her friends could put on a better show; when they were given the chance, seats started filling up every Sunday night. The Revuers went on to perform at Café Society, the Blue Angel, and Radio City Music Hall; just as important, columnists started paying attention to their act.

The Revuers tried Hollywood, hoping to get spots in musicals; however, when it was clear the studios were interested only in Judy, Comden and Green convinced her that none of them would get anywhere if they stuck together. So it was that 20th Century Fox hired Judy, while Comden and Green went home to lick their wounds and hone their skills.

The studio — as they did with countless discoveries — immediately set about changing her. She was ordered her to lose weight and dye her brown hair blonde, and her name was changed from Tuvim (“good” in Hebrew or “good days” in Yiddish) to Holiday. Judy added a second ‘l’ to avoid confusion with jazz singer Billie Holiday, although that didn’t make her own career path any clearer; as an uncredited Rosie the Riveter-type in 1944’s Something for the Boys, she fought to say her only line without wearing goggles over her face.

After appearing unnoticed in the movie version of Moss Hart’s wartime play Winged Victory, Judy was released from her Fox contract and moved back to New York. By then Green, Comden, and their friend Leonard Bernstein (not yet a symphonic conductor) had written a hit musical called On the Town.

Using the clout that comes with success, Green arranged for Judy to appear on Broadway (alongside a young Richard Widmark) in the 1945 comedy Kiss Them For Me, the story of three war heroes who are assigned to take part in a public relations campaign. Critics were struck by her offbeat comic ability; instead of the precision of someone like Rosalind Russell, Judy delivered amusing lines as if the words were her own instead of a writer’s and she had to think about them first.

Judy’s performance won her the Clarence Derwent Award for Most Promising Female Actress. The $500 that came with it helped Judy and her mother stay in their New York apartment. Even so, she wasn’t exactly a star. Not yet.

That would change in 1946 with Born Yesterday.

Garson Kanin had written the play as a vehicle for his friend Jean Arthur; however, when the veteran actress backed out, he was forced to recast the role of Billie Dawn, engaged to the boorish, corrupt Harry Brock, who hires a tutor to “smarten her up” and “smooth out the rough edges.” Along the way, she learns how to think for herself and brings Harry’s empire crashing down around him.

Holliday agreed to take the role because she needed the money and Kanin was desperate. The Philadelphia try-out was less than a week away, but she learned the part over three days and nights, getting very little sleep along the way.

Her ordeal was worth it. The play was a hit (running for nearly 1,900 performances), Kanin won a Pulitzer Prize, and Judy played Billie for what she regarded as the best three years of her life.

As with most hot Broadway properties, it wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling, and Columbia paid $750,000 for the movie rights of Born Yesterday. Accounts differ as to whether Holliday wanted no part of the movie or studio head Harry Cohn (whom Kanin insisted was the model for Harry Brock) wanted no part of Holliday; regardless, there was talk of the Billie Dawn role going to Rita Hayworth, Gloria Grahame, Lana Turner… even Jean Arthur.

Kanin and wife Ruth Gordon made an indirect pitch for Holliday by writing a part for her in their screenplay for Adam’s Rib, a 1949 comedy starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy as married lawyers who must face in each other in court when Holliday’s character is accused of shooting her adulterous husband. Hepburn even had director George Cukor expand the newcomer’s role and give her more close-ups.

That did it. Cohn handed her the Billie Dawn part she had already made her own, and signed her to a seven-picture deal. Cukor stuck around to direct the Born Yesterday movie, with Broderick Crawford playing Harry Brock and William Holden as Billie’s “tutor,” reporter Paul Verrall.

No slight to either gentleman, but Holliday was the star of this particular show, earning an Oscar nomination for striking the perfect balance between the sometimes absurd comedy (watching her painstakingly arrange her hand during a game of gin rummy is priceless) and Billie’s very human discovery that the world is much bigger than she had previously imagined. Still, she was up against the likes of Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson (for her impressive return to movies in Sunset Boulevard), which made it an even bigger surprise when she walked away with the Best Actress award.

Columbia decided to bank on Judy’s name and put her in decent (if relatively low-budget) films for the length of her contract. The first, The Marrying Kind, was another Kanin-Gordon-Cukor affair, the story of a couple recounting their marriage as they file for divorce.

It was a mixture of drama and comedy and one suspects Columbia’s purpose in making it was to transform co-star Aldo Ray into a matinee idol. At least Cukor was able to bring out new sides of Judy’s acting talent.

Holliday had always taken an interest in social causes, even after her success on Broadway and her marriage to musician David Oppenheim. She wasn’t the first or the last star to discover that some people couldn’t abide an outspoken performer.

Just as her career seemed to be on firm footing, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (the upper chamber’s version of the House Un-American Activities Committee) called her to explain her efforts on behalf of groups with supposed Communist ties. Now, a lot of actors responded in different ways to meeting with HUAC and its satellites — from cowardice to open defiance — but none of them took the approach that Judy used.

When called to Washington, this very bright (and now pregnant) actress caught the Committee off-guard by basically appearing as Billie Dawn. Judy denounced Communism and authoritarianism but told the panel that she had hired someone to investigate her before she met with the Committee, because “I had gotten into a lot of trouble.” (When Committee staff director Richard Arens asked if anyone had tried to prosecute her, she answered yes, only to follow up by saying “Prosecute? I thought you said ‘Persecute’!”)

The Committee found nothing for which they could charge Judy, but the stress of being suspected took its toll. “I’m not ashamed of myself,” she told a friend afterward, “because I didn’t name names. That much I preserved.”

After their son was born in the fall of 1952, Holliday and Oppenheim moved into Manhattan’s fashionable Dakota apartment building. By 1954, she was back in Hollywood and reunited with Kanin and Cukor for It Should Happen to You. Originally, Kanin had Danny Kaye in mind to star, but wife Ruth Gordon suggested he rewrite it for a woman.

For this satire on fame and media, Holliday plays an unemployed model who uses her savings to place her name on billboards around New York City; in the process, she becomes famous as the “average American girl” but finds that fame is a double-edged sword that threatens to come between her and her boyfriend (Jack Lemmon, making his movie debut).

The film just floated through theaters, but Holliday and Lemmon made such a likable screen couple that they were teamed again that year in Phffft!, a comedy about a divorced couple who keep bumping into each other while trying to move on with their lives. Like a lot of actresses, Holliday found herself becoming something of a type, playing somewhat ditzy women who speak their minds quite sensibly and, in the words of one writer, tricks others into treating her lightly. As a result, even her most middling films were able to showcase her interest in social satire.

In 1956, Holliday had the task of replacing the much older Josephine Hull (best known as one of the sweetly homicidal Brewster sisters in Arsenic and Old Lace) for the movie version of The Solid Gold Cadillac. The play tells the story of a woman who owns a small amount of stock in an international company and takes such an interest in her investment that she earns the admiration of the company’s CEO (Paul Douglas, Holliday’s after co-star in the stage version of Born Yesterday) and the enmity of the Board of Directors, who decide to get her out of their hair by giving her a job. The film version was amusing, thanks largely to Douglas’ comedic bluster, but it turned out to be just another trifle for Judy.

Her sixth film for Columbia, 1956’s Full of Life, was a charming, realistic comedy-drama about a pregnant woman who reconciles her pig-headed husband (Richard Conte) and her pig-headed father-in-law just before the baby arrives. Holliday was fine as a woman navigating the emotional highs and lows that come with pregnancy, but it just wasn’t the kind of movie audiences went to see.

At this point, Judy still owed Columbia one more picture, but she asked to be released from her contract — not to freelance, as most stars did, but to get over the strain of work and a troubled marriage. She and David were divorced in 1957, and Judy continued to live in New York with her mother and young son. Eventually, she took up with jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, recorded an album with him, and even helped him write four of the songs: “Loving You,” “Summer’s Over,” “What’s the Rush,” and “It Must Be Christmas.”

Luckily, some very familiar friends were waiting to ride to her rescue; Comden and Green wanted Holliday to star in their new stage musical (co-written with the great Jule Styne), Bells Are Ringing. The play centers around a kind-hearted answering service operator who (contrary to company policy) gets directly involved in the lives of her clients; in the process, she gets mixed up with gamblers, an unemployed actor and a lazy composer — and gets to sing “Just in Time,” “Long Before I Knew You” and “The Party’s Over.”

Given her past life as a switchboard operator, she must have felt as though the role had been written for her. Audiences certainly thought so; the play ended up running for nearly three years while Judy and co-star Sydney Chaplin (as composer Jeff Moss) won Tony awards.

As with Born Yesterday, Holliday finished the stage production of Bells and went out west (this time to MGM) for the film version. The movie had a fine cast, with Dean Martin taking over the role of Jeff, Jean Stapleton (re-creating the role she played in the stage version), Fred Clark, Eddie Foy Jr. and a young Frank Gorshin (playing a Brando-ish actor). If the box-office returns were a disappointment, it might have been an indication that the popularity of screen musicals was fading. Perhaps more people would have gone to see it had they had known that it was to be Holliday’s last movie.

There’s an especially sad irony that Judy’s final film saw her singing a song called “The Party’s Over.” By the 1960s. Judy had moved to a small house in Washingtonville, in upstate New York, where she was known as a crossword puzzle fanatic and a fierce Scrabble player. She returned to the stage in 1960 to star in a new play (based on the life of actress Laurette Taylor) but illness forced her to drop out before the show could reach Broadway.

Soon thereafter, Holliday discovered she had breast cancer, at a time when treatment options for this disease were far more limited. She underwent a mastectomy and made it back to the stage in 1963 for Hot Spot, a political satire with music involving a Peace Corps volunteer who decides to get aid for a small African nation by claiming that the Russians plan to invade it. The show ended after five weeks; during the run, Judy concealed from the audience the off-and-on suffering she endured.

A year later, Holliday’s cancer returned. “It was a primitive world,” her son Jonathan Oppenheim recalled later. “I don’t think they ever told her precisely what was wrong with her the second time she was sick.” Carl Reiner had written a screenplay for Judy (which ultimately became The Thrill of It All) about a housewife-turned-television-star, but her declining health forced her to turn it down.

Judy Holliday died in New York City on June 7, 1965, just two weeks before her 44th birthday. It was a life that ended far too soon and we can regret not only the missed opportunities, but also the fact that there are precious few people alive today who ever saw her perform on stage. Still, watching her films — even the lesser ones — one can see the actress who managed to combine a keen sense of humor with an even keener sense of humanity.

Tune in to Those Were the Days on January 11 to hear Judy Holliday as a guest on The Big Show.

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