Monday, June 12 | 5 Movies
With her bleached-blonde hairdo, large eyes and unforgettable squawking voice, Judy Holliday became a star by playing dim-witted Billie Dawn onstage and in the film version of Born Yesterday (1950), but the real Judy Holliday was no dumb blonde. She had a genius IQ of 172, was an accomplished singer, musician, avid reader and an amateur inventor. As director George Cukor, who made five films with her, said, “Judy Holliday was an extremely intelligent, intellectual person. Very well-educated, very highbrow. And, then, of course, she was a master of comedy and of subtlety and understatement. I found her marvelous, and, in retrospect, infinitely touching.”
Judith Tuvim (the Hebrew word for holiday) was nearly born in a theater. Her mother, musician Helen Gollumb Tuvim, went into labor after watching Fanny Brice perform and had to hurry to a Manhattan hospital, where her only child was delivered on June 21,1921. Her father, Abe Tuvim, served eight years as the President of the American Federation of Musicians, and Holliday grew up surrounded by the arts. Her parents separated when she was a child and she was raised by her mother and extended family, becoming “one of those precocious, obnoxious children who read ‘War and Peace,’ Schnitzler and Molière while my friends were going in for ‘The Bobbsey Twins.’”
The acting bug bit Holliday early in her childhood, and she wrote and acted in school plays. Despite her excellent grades, she was rejected by the Yale Drama School, and instead worked for Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre group - as an unpaid switchboard operator. In 1938, she appeared as an extra in the Mercury’s unreleased experimental film, Too Much Johnson, and later that year met future composer and playwright Adolph Green while entertaining at a mountain resort. In 1939, they formed a comedy troupe with Betty Comden (who would later work with Green on many hit musicals), called the Revuers, whose members occasionally included Green’s roommate, Leonard Bernstein, on piano. The Revuers were soon gaining an audience at The Village Vanguard in New York, but Holliday later said of this period that she “hated the whole idea of being an actress. I used to throw up before every performance and cry afterward.”
With success came the move to bigger and better clubs, like the Rainbow Room and The Blue Angel in New York and an engagement at the Trocadero in Los Angeles. There, the Revuers appeared on radio and tried to secure Hollywood contracts, but the studios only wanted Holliday, who refused to sign without her friends. 20th Century-Fox contracted them to film some bits for Greenwich Village (1944), but their scenes were cut, although Holliday can be seen in the background in some shots. Adopting the stage name “Judy Holliday,” she made two more films for Fox, but those amounted to one line in Something for the Boys (1944) and a small part in Cukor’s drama, Winged Victory (1944), in which she played a pilot’s wife, but complained that “the way they made me up I looked like his mother.” None of these films did anything for Holliday’s career and she asked to be let out of her contract.
As the Revuers had recently disbanded, Holliday returned to New York, making her Broadway debut playing a prostitute in “Kiss Them for Me” at the Belasco Theatre. She won the Clarence Derwent Award (and $500) as Best New Female Talent for her portrayal, but she called it “the most moronic part I ever played.” Having spent years dealing with rowdy patrons in nightclubs, Holliday found the difference in theater audience behavior bewildering. “My God, they were all quiet and paying attention. It was like lifting a feather after struggling with the 500-pound dumbbell.” Her next performance would attract the undivided attention of one of the world’s biggest comedians.
Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon’s play, “Born Yesterday,” was to have starred Jean Arthur as ignorant former chorus girl Billie Dawn, whose newly-rich boyfriend hires a writer to teach her to act more refined. Arthur fell ill and left the production just before it previewed in Philadelphia, and Holliday, crediting “coffee and Benzedrine,” learned the part in only three days. The play, which costarred Paul Douglas and Gary Merrill, ran on Broadway at the Lyceum and Henry Miller theaters for nearly three years, from February 1946 to December 1949. Jack Benny was said to have studied Holliday’s performance in a near-trance, carefully watching her every move. He was so focused on her technique that he had to see the play again so he could enjoy it. Holliday claimed the inspiration for her performance came from her dog, Lifey. “In repose, my face looks as though I had gone through a terrible ordeal in the last five minutes. I have to disguise that expression and get a glassy-eyed look. That’s something I learned from my dog.” While still in New York, Holliday appeared on several early television programs like “She Loves Me Not” and would return to television throughout the rest of her career as a musical performer or guest on shows like “What’s My Line?”
Despite the accolades she received for “Born Yesterday,” Columbia Pictures’ studio chief Harry Cohn didn’t want to cast Holliday in the film version, preferring an established movie star like Gloria Grahame, Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth. Holliday worried that “in 30 years I’d be taking my grandchildren to the Museum of Modern Art, and would see Rita Hayworth or Lucille Ball in my role. It would be pretty hard to take.” Her friends Kanin and Gordon enlisted Katharine Hepburn and George Cukor to help by casting Holliday and enlarging her part in their upcoming film comedy, Adam’s Rib (1949), in which Holliday stole every scene as a ditzy woman who shoots her cheating husband. The role earned Holliday her first Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture, and Cohn relented.
Born Yesterday was a smash hit and earned Holliday a Golden Globe for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and an Academy Award for Best Actress, beating out Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Anne Baxter and Bette Davis in All About Eve (1950). Awards notwithstanding, Holliday didn’t care about fame, refused to play the publicity game, go to Hollywood parties or even live in California when not making pictures, instead staying with her husband and son at her Greenwich Village apartment and farm near Monroe, New York, which was full of music, antiques and many books. She didn’t even attend the Academy Awards, preferring to remain in New York. Holliday also worried that the studios would typecast her as a dumb blonde, which wasn’t helped by her reprising Born Yesterday on radio, and using the Billie Dawn voice on other programs with stars like Jimmy Durante, Jack Haley and Tallulah Bankhead. She told Life magazine that she had grown tired of people on the street asking her to talk like Billie Dawn.
Holliday was appearing on Broadway in “Dream Girl,” with Don De Fore, when her name was included in “Red Channels,” a conservative publication which listed supposed members of the Communist Party in the entertainment business. In 1952, she was subpoenaed by Sen. Pat McCarran’s Internal Security Subcommittee, and her lawyers advised her to play dumb while under oath so the committee wouldn’t take her “seriously as a political figure.” Two weeks before her appearance, the accusations caused her newest film, written by Kanin and Gordon and again directed by Cukor, The Marrying Kind (1952), to be picketed by right-wing activists when it was released in New York City.
Holliday came out of the hearing without the career destruction that happened to many accused of being a communist sympathizer, but the experience had been deeply frightening for her. She wrote to her friend, Haywood Hale Broun, that she knew he might be ashamed of her “because I played Billie Dawn [in front of the committee]. Well, I’ll tell you something. You think you’re going to be brave and noble. Then you walk in there and there are the microphones, and all those senators looking at you — Woodie, it scares the shit out of you. But I’m not ashamed of myself because I didn’t name names. That much I preserved.” Variety might have felt that she’d won over the committee, but the controversy kept her off the screen for more than a year afterward. Garson Kanin later said, "Of all of those who were harassed in the ugly days of ‘Red Channels’ and blacklisting, no one was more steadfast or less craven than Judy. Her behavior under pressure was a poem of grace."
While under contract to Columbia, Holliday was teamed with newcomer Jack Lemmon in two of his earliest films, It Should Happen to You (1954), in which she played a woman who buys a billboard to promote herself (a precursor to Los Angeles’ legendary Angelyne) and a woman who divorces her husband in Pffft (1954). Decades later, Lemmon would call Holliday “divine, terrific and one of the brightest actors I’ve ever known […] And she was great fun to work with.” The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956) gave Holliday the chance to play a woman who goes from tiny shareholder of a company to Director of Shareholder Relations, uncovering corruption in the process. The film reunited Holliday with her “Born Yesterday” stage co-star Paul Douglas and earned her another Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. Holliday took a rare drama-comedy role in a surprisingly modern approach to the subject of pregnancy in Full of Life (1956), as a woman struggling with her changing life and body, while her Italian-American husband (Richard Conte) battled with his deeply religious father.
Holliday returned to the stage several times during her film career, winning a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for the 1956 production of “Bells Are Ringing,” costarring Sydney Chaplin and future “Barney Miller” television star, Hal Linden. The play was written especially for her by her former Revuers partners, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. In it, she portrayed an answering service operator who gets involved in her clients’ lives and falls in love with one of them. Bells Are Ringing would be adapted for film in 1960, directed by Vincente Minnelli and costarring Dean Martin, for which she was again nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. It would be her final film role, although she continued to appear on television and, finally, onstage in the 1963 production of “Hot Spot.” Holliday, a heavy smoker, had previously had a throat tumor removed, but contracted breast cancer, which metastasized throughout her body. Judy Holliday died in New York City on June 7, 1965. She was only 43 years old.
