Trivia / Meet Me in St. Louis

• Billing Displacement: Margaret O'Brien is billed second, despite Lucille Bremer (Rose) and Tom Drake (John) having more prominent roles. This is because she was at the height of her child star popularity - coming off Jane Eyre and Journey For Margaret.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: How many people actually know that "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" was written for this film?
• Creator Backlash: Composer Hugh Martin didn't enjoy his time working on the film, due to clashes with producers and disliking the "one-upmanship" of the MGM hierarchy.
• Creator's Favorite Episode:
  • Judy Garland regarded this film as one of her favourites.
  • Arthur Freed named this as his favorite of the many musical films he produced for MGM.
    Meet Me in St. Louis is my personal favourite. I got along wonderfully with Judy, but the only time we were ever on the outs was when we did this film. She didn't want to do the picture. Even her mother came to me about it. We bumped into some trouble with some opinions – Eddie Mannix, the studio manager, thought the Halloween sequence was wrong, but it was left in. There was a song that Rodgers and Hammerstein had written, called Boys and Girls Like You and Me, that Judy did wonderfully, but it slowed up the picture and it was cut out. After the preview of the completed film, Judy came over to me and said, "Arthur, remind me not to tell you what kind of pictures to make." [It] was the biggest grosser Metro had up to that time, except for Gone with the Wind.
• Cut Song: "Boys and Girls Like You and Me", which was supposed to take place after "The Trolley Song". It was originally written for Oklahoma! but was cut there too. Here's the audio.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Judy Garland was 21 playing a 17-year-old (She almost didn't do the film because of that).
  • Rose is meant to be somewhere between eighteen and twenty. Lucille Bremer was twenty-six.
  • Mildly for Henry H Daniels Jr, who was twenty-two as a nineteen-year-old.
• Deleted Scene:
  • A scene after "The Trolley Song" was filmed where Esther and John walk through the fairgrounds under construction - set to the Rodgers and Hammerstein song "Girls And Boys Like You And Me". This is why John says near the end "I liked it better when it was just a swamp, and it was you and me."
  • A scene of Esther dressing up her mother was removed, and only stills survive.
• Enforced Method Acting: In order to get Margaret O'Brien to cry when it was required, her mother would whisper something in her ear before the take. Vincente Minnelli later found out it was saying someone was going to kill her pet dog. Margaret however denied the story years later, claiming "my mother never would have allowed that."
• Fatal Method Acting: A near miss. A lighting man who was annoyed that his daughter had been passed over for the role of Tootie intentionally dropped a heavy spotlight near where Margaret O'Brien was standing. It narrowly missed her, and the man was later admitted to a mental hospital for his actions.
• Hostility on the Set:
  • Mildly. Mary Astor gave Judy Garland a talking to after she was repeatedly late to set and kept everyone waiting for hours. She later admitted she had no idea that Judy was being overworked:
    "She was recording at night and playing in the picture in the day, and people got annoyed when she was late on the set, and when she got jittery and weepy with fatigue."
  • Garland reportedly disliked Lucille Bremer. Garland felt that Bremer's acting abilities were subpar and tried to have her removed from the film. However, Garland was unsuccessful, as Bremer had many allies in the upper management at MGM who considered her a bright and up-and-coming talent, and was bringing exactly the level of subtlety to the part that Vincente Minnelli wanted (Bremer was also romantically involved with producer Arthur Freed at the time). Additionally, Garland's many missed days of filming and late arrivals weakened her position when it came to the situation involving Bremer.
• I Am Not Spock: Lucille Bremer and Henry H Daniels Jr never had any notable roles after this, so they are remembered entirely for playing Rose and Lon Jr respectively.
• Missing Trailer Scene: Tom Drake's name card in the trailer shows a clip from the scene where he and Esther walk around the under-construction fair.
• Never Work with Children or Animals: According to Mary Astor, Margaret O'Brien was quite mischievous on set:
  Margaret O'Brien was at her most appealing (I might say 'appalling') age. And she could cry at the drop of a cue. Real tears, an endless flow, with apparently no emotional drain whatsoever. She was a quiet, almost too-well-behaved child, when her mother was on the set. When Mother was absent, it was another story and she was a pain in the neck.
• Non-Singing Voice: Producer Arthur Freed dubbed the singing voice for Leon Ames in the song "You and I," which was written by Nacio Herb Brown and Freed, who had begun his career as a lyricist. Mary Astor's voice was dubbed by Denny Markas.
• One-Take Wonder:
  • Judy Garland recorded "The Trolley Song" in one take.
  • Margaret O'Brien likewise did the tearful smashing of the snow people in one take.
• Orphaned Reference: John says to Esther of the fair "I liked it better when it was a swamp and it was just you and me" - which references the cut scene of them walking around the under-construction fair after "The Trolley Song".
• Romance on the Set:
  • Judy Garland met Vincente Minnelli on the film and they later married. They were already living together when the film entered post-production.
  • Prior to the Garland/Minnelli courtship, Judy had tried to woo co-star Tom Drake, but his reported homosexuality naturally meant their pairing was unsuccessful. Unfortunately, Garland took this as rejection and shut him out emotionally afterwards, thus ending their earlier friendship. This made Drake very unhappy.
• Stillborn Franchise: The success of the film had encouraged MGM to create further movies involving the Smith family and was to be based on further tales of Sally Benson's family. MGM wanted to make sort of a deluxe color group of serials in the spirit of the popular Andy Hardy series. A proposed sequel titled Meet Me in Manhattan was in the works in which the Smith family actually moved to New York. (This happened in real life to Sally Benson's family.) However, the project never got out of planning stages and the film was never made.
• Those Two Actors: Leon Ames and Mary Astor starred together in Any Number Can Play and the 1949 version of Little Women - which also starred Margaret O'Brien.
• Troubled Production:
  • Judy Garland proved to be very difficult on set. Initially she didn't care for the role, and would often read the lines in a self-depricating way as if she were poking fun at the material. She also tried to skip many of the rehearsals for the dance numbers. She was frequently late to the set and delayed filming. Vincente Minnelli was eventually able to coax a good performance out of her, and she grew to love the role. She later called Esther one of her favourite characters to play.
  • Besides the delays Judy caused, numerous other cast members came down sick and caused additional postponements and problems. Mary Astor had to take a month off to recover from pneumonia, Joan Carroll was out of commission with strep throat for a while, and elderly Harry Davenport had numerous ailments afflicting him. It was jokingly referred to on the lot as “the sickest movie in town.”
  • The film also was put on a 13-day hiatus after Margaret O’Brien’s mother pulled a power-play move by unexpectedly taking her daughter to New York, in order to demand more money from the suits on the East Coast.
• Wag the Director: The first lines of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" went Have yourself a merry little Christmas/it may be your last. Judy Garland found it too depressing and refused to sing it to little Margaret O'Brien.
• Write What You Know: Sally Benson based the stories on her own experiences as a little girl in St Louis. She was called "Tootie" as a little girl, her maiden name was Smith, and she sometimes published under the pseudonym "Esther Evarts".

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