No Garland for Judy
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing NO GARLAND FOR JUDY BY PEARL K. BELL Six years after Judy Garland's death in the summer of 1969, at the age of 47, her monumentally appalling life has publishers falling over...
...Indeed, her infantile melancholy, feeding on itself, was a large part of her appeal to those sobbing crowds at the Palace...
...He ordered her to end a brief love affair with Tyrone Power at 17, to abort a pregnancy by her first husband, David Rose, when she was 19, to marry the slick director Vincente Minnelli at 21 "for the good of the studio...
...was dead...
...Yet whatever the size of the potential audience, if Miss Edwards' book is in any way representative, Judy's story does not attract the kind of mind that is ready to ask serious questions about pop stars and popular culture in America...
...Later Luft sold the agreement-his ex-wife being so much chattel-to a couple of crooks as security for a loan he never intended to repay...
...Her fifth and last husband, Mickey Deans, anticipated the ghould rush in 1972 with a tear-jerker about their three-month marriage...
...But they didn't or perhaps by then she couldn't, what with swallowing 40 Dexedrines a day for ersatz energy, and huge amounts of barbiturates for some hours of unquiet sleep...
...After A Star Is Born, the yellow brick road went steadily downhill, through yet another acrimonious divorce, two more predatory husbands, disastrous concerts where the audience jeered her off the stage...
...One should remember, at the risk of seeming pompous and "elitist," that "Over the Rainbow" is not an art song but a musical entertainment...
...In their pursuit of the millions and the masses, they exacted an unconscionable human price from the robots like Judy Garland, who smiled and danced and destroyed themselves at the czars' command...
...Miss Edwards often thinks and writes crudely about all this, yet she manages in her pedestrian way to hit most of the easy chords on the psychological piano...
...An outsize American Piaf, this tearfully heroic waif made all the old songs sound like a triumphant hallelujah of survival...
...All of these wary publishers apparently think so, or else they would not be staking their great expectations on the public's appetite for more and more "authentic" gossip and Garlandiana...
...Miss Edwards tells the gruesome story with due regard not only for its vicious record of exploitation but also for Judy Garland's suicidal compliance in her ruin...
...From the age of two and a half (!), Baby Frances Gumm, as she was born, was forced by her stone-hearted mother Ethel to stagger through exhausting, mean-paying tours of one-night stands, in the giddy hope that a Hollywood talent scout might catch the act and whisk them off to fame and glory in the movies...
...Men like L. B. Mayer alone determined what Hollywood would offer (while insisting they were giving the audience what it wanted), thus imposing their own small-minded, reliably profitable taste on the public, which then rendered it "popular...
...The intellectual celebrants of public taste as the keystone of cultural democracy (vide Herbert Gans' Popular Culture and High Culture) overlook an important fact: A commercial tyranny of tastelessness, not the mass audience of Judy Garland's heyday, nurtured pop culture...
...This maternal solicitude finally paid off when Judy was 12...
...And as if to prove this new success was no sentimental fluke, she went on, in 1954, to do her most brilliant and resourceful acting in A Star Is Born...
...Judy Garland was locked within the barren insipidities of popular culture because she was never encouraged to know or reach for anything more challenging or satisfying...
...Most of the film is bright, clever and sticky with Hollywood self-love...
...For more than a decade, Mayer exerted a satanic power over Judy Garland...
...The song is certainly sweet and, in its way, moving, but is there anything a singer, no matter how gifted, can do with the treacly words and melody even the 20th time around...
...As a musical director who worked with her told Miss Edwards, "she relied upon the same arrangements, always sang in the same key and seldom introduced new material...
...It was practically impossible for Judy to learn anything new...
...Nonetheless, the chilling facts of Judy Garland's overexposed, inhumanly hard-working, and brutally manipulated career, as Miss Edwards presents them, have a harrowing authority of their own...
...A small-time hustler with big ideas, he persuaded Judy to embark on a new career as a concert singer, and in legendary evenings at the Palladium and the Palace during the early '50s, she reduced packed houses to a weeping, adoring frenzy...
...Only 28, she had already made several suicide attempts, been in and out of mental hospitals, and was flat broke because her mother and stepfather had squandered her earnings on one South Sea bubble after another...
...Still, in one extraordinary scene, trying to cheer up her drunk, despondent husband, James Mason, she carries off an improvised comic song-and-dance turn with such virtuoso wit and satirical panache, it is beyond fathoming why all those Hollywood wizards didn't set her to do more of the same...
...His word in her professional and private life was absolute: Nembutal to knock her out for a few hours of sleep, then pep pills "so we could work another 72 hours in a row...
...At one of her last concerts, she performed "Over the Rainbow," by her reckoning, for the 12,380th time...
...Never provided in her youth with the room or the means to grow, Judy was permanently imprisoned in the helpless anger, the frustrated impotence and the irresponsibility of childhood...
...Writers & Writing NO GARLAND FOR JUDY BY PEARL K. BELL Six years after Judy Garland's death in the summer of 1969, at the age of 47, her monumentally appalling life has publishers falling over each other in hot pursuit of the biographical jackpot just over the rainbow...
...In June, Gerold Frank, that tireless tape recorder of ill-fated stars, will outdo Miss Edwards, at least in sheer bulk, with a 700-page "official" biography, Judy, while in the same month a pair of California social workers will offer up their findings in Young Judy...
...He frightened and starved her into shape and submission, and paid her only $150 a week, even after her movies had begun to make millions...
...Hollywood, notoriously inhospitable to failure, wrote Judy off as a has-been, and she fled to New York...
...It was of course a great theatrical creation, struck with a fierce and anguished light by the driving will she tapped for every performance...
...By 1950, when M-G-M summarily threw her out because she was no longer a box-office bonanza, Judy's health was irreparably damaged by drug addiction, insomnia and malnutrition...
...with a picture biography in the lucrative manner of Mailer's Marilyn, sans Mailer...
...As the indefatigable press allowed no one who could read to forget, she now let herself get fat...
...At no point, however, does she bother to explore a more subtly damaging incapacity that emerges from her account...
...On the strength of her big, bold singing voice and her winning kid-sister air, the plump and insecure adolescent was signed to an M-G-M contract by Louis B. Mayer...
...Just as uncontrollably, she strode with her usual romantic in-caution into the arms of yet another opportunistic, unstable husband, Sid Luft...
...Whenever Baby Frances showed any signs of rebellion against the seedy hotels and strange cities, Ethel would pretend to abandon the terrified child because she was "bad," leaving her alone to scream in the locked room until the hysteria had passed...
...Is the Garland cult still so large and voyeuristically curious about its idol's tragic mess of a life as to justify this sudden biographical overkill...
...Though Judy had astonishing show-must-goon fortitude, though she had a powerful voice of great natural promise, and sang her familiar repertory with admirable feeling and clarity, she never grew as a singer, never tried to do more with her talent than pursue the popular entertainer's single-minded concern for "putting a song across...
...Mayer, an authentic American monster, combined the sleazier qualities of a star-spangled moralist and a dirty old man sniffing after pubescent girls, and he ruled his actors with draconian severity, When he died in 1958, Vice President Richard Nixon smarmed, "I was among those fortunate enough to be a close, personal friend to him," but Samuel Goldwyn, cutting through the piety, said the only reason so many people came to Mayer's funeral "was because they wanted to make sure the S.O.B...
...That's not entertainment, it's tragedy...
...Even after they were divorced, she continued to rely on Luft for business help, and a year before her death, hopelessly ravaged in mind and body, she was conned by him into signing an outrageous financial agreement: Among other indignities, it made her estate liable if she died without giving notice...
...In September the glut comes to an end (but who can be sure...
...This March, Anne Edwards, a British novelist, published Judy Garland (Simon & Schuster, 349 pp., $9.95...
...This final assault of the sharks is macabre next to the last photographs in Miss Edwards' book of a cadaverously exhausted Judy, with huge hallucinating eyes in a wizened mask that reeks of death...
Vol. 58 • April 1975 • No. 8
