Judy Garland: A Biography

by Anne Edwards

  There was an evangelical frenzy in the auditorium. The crowds were screaming hoarsely, “We love you!” and Judy, leaning over the footlights to touch them, seemed incapable of holding anything of herself in reserve.

  “There was an extra bonus at Carnegie Hall last night,” Judith Crist wrote the next day (April 24, 1961) in the New York Herald Tribune.

  Judy Garland sang ... And she sang, let it be reported, as she hasn’t in years—not at the Palace and not at the Met: she sang with all the heart that has been her hallmark, but added to it is a happy self-confidence that gives new quality and depth to her performance. It’s a performance that deserves all the pre-commitment her very name evokes.

  And Shana Alexander, writing for Life, reported:

  Judy Garland is not only the most electrifying entertainer to watch on stage since A1 Jolson, she has moved beyond talent and beyond fame to become the rarest phenomenon in all show-business. Part bluebird, part Phoenix, she is a legend in her own time.

  30Once again Judy was near the top of the roller coaster. She went back to California to shoot a television spectacular with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. And the small, key role in Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg followed. She appeared in the climax of the story in three brief scenes in which she touchingly created the wretched German hausfrau Irene Hoffman. The film was about the second of the Nuremberg Trials and zeroed in on the final cases against four members of the Nazi judiciary. Irene Hoffman, a plump, middle-aged woman, testifies that on account of his innocent friendship with her during her girlhood an elderly Jew was executed and she herself imprisoned. Her heartbreaking court appearance helps to convict one of the judges on trial. It was an electric performance, and once again she was placed in nomination for an Academy Award (this time for Best Supporting Actress) and once again she was the loser. But Hollywood was ecstatic about her film “comeback.”

  “She’s a great technician,” Kramer told the press. “There’s no one in the entertainment world today, actor or singer, who can run the complete range of emotions, from utter pathos to power and dimension, the way she can. . . . She’s like a piano. You touch any key and the pure note of that emotion comes out. She knows how to laugh and to cry on cue. When we made Judgment at Nuremberg, I’d just have to say, ‘Jurty, register hate and fear like a German hausfrau who had been persecuted by the Nazis,’ and the hate and the fear would be there.”

  In the hands of a studio again (this time United Artists), she was requested and expected to appear at both the world premiere of the film in Berlin and the English premiere (before the Duke of Edinburgh) in London a week before Christmas, 1961. Only a few weeks before, she had ended a series of one-nighters that had brought her concert appearances up to forty-eight in that one year, the last concert being performed to a capacity house (13,909 seats) at the Boston Garden. She was coming close to the end of her physical endurance, but somehow she managed to get to Berlin. Directly after the premiere she was flown to Rome, where she was taken to the Excelsior Hotel. Thereupon she collapsed. She was suffering severe pain, and the Italian doctors diagnosed her illness as a serious case of pleurisy. Confined there, she did not reach London and, when able, returned to the States.

  Her “comeback” appearance in Judgment at Nuremberg had proved so successful that Kramer had come up immediately with a second offer, for her to play the lead opposite Burt Lancaster in a film about a state institution for mentally retarded children. Judy was in no condition to appear before the cameras in a taxing, emotional, full-length role. Once again her pill addiction was brutalizing her body and overwork taking its toll. But once she had read the script it was impossible for her to turn down the role of Jean Hansen—music teacher on the staff of the institution. It brought back all the memories of her stay at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and of the little retarded girl who had broken through a wall of silence to speak her name. She told Fields and Begelman (whom she now called Leopold and Loeb!) to accept.

  The film, A Child Is Waiting, went into immediate production and was shot at the Pacific State Hospital in Pomona, California; and except for the lead boy, all the children in the film were patients. Judy gave her all before the cameras and then would entertain and talk with the children in any spare minute she found. She was reliving a time in her life, and it had not been a happy one. By the time principal photography was completed, she was in a severe state of depression, far from well, and totally and irrevocably dependent on pills to survive a day. The roller coaster was beginning another precarious descent. Fear and desperation grasped hold of her. Work seemed to be the only answer. It was one of the few times in her life that there was not a man by her side; and so she retreated into the old routine of calling friends in the middle of the night—including John Kennedy, whom she had once campaigned for and who had been kind to her during one of her previous sieges of depression and illness.

  Stuart Millar and Lawrence Turman (who later did The Graduate) submitted a script (by Mayo Simon) for her to read. At that point it needed a great deal of work—but the character of Jenny Bowman hit a tender and aching void. There was much of herself in the role, and it struck Judy that perhaps through this film she might be able to explain away a lot of her own foibles.

  The script was then called The Lonely Stage (later it became I Could Go On Singing) and dealt with a short, traumatic period in the life of a world-famous singer. It was to be shot in England and released, like her last two films, through United Artists; Dirk Bogarde was signed for the male lead. Judy wasted no time in signing along with him and packing up the children to leave immediately for England.

  She stopped en route in New York, checking in at the Stanhope Hotel into an eleventh-floor suite. There she was confronted by Luft (who was at the same hotel in a sixth-floor suite), who demanded that she leave his children Lorna and Joey with him. They had a violent argument and Luft claimed that then two “hired goons” burst through the door of his suite and held him in a tight grip while Judy went off with the children. Terrified, she later claimed she feared that Luft would somehow snatch the children from her, for he had threatened to do so and to bring court charges against her to declare her an unfit mother. Luft, in a statement to the press, said that he would fly to London soon to see his children. “They won’t be there long,” he added, but he did not elaborate.

  That September she had filed suit for divorce once again—this the fourth time in Las Vegas, Nevada—charging Luft with extreme mental cruelty. He then had filed a divorce complaint at Santa Monica, California, shortly thereafter obtaining a restraining order prohibiting her from proceeding with her divorce action. Directly after this New York confrontation with Judy, he filed charges in Las Vegas against Judy alleging that she had concealed $2 million in “community property” earned since their business severance.

  He also charged that she “is presently suffering from mental illness as a result, in part, of her use of barbiturates to the degree that, in the absence of prolonged rest and hospitalization, she is unable to care for her minor children.”

  The “community property” assets that he charged were concealed were identified as royalties or percentages from the films Gay Purr-ee and A Child Is Waiting, her Columbia record albums, and contractual future payments and percentages on The Lonely Stage (not yet called I Could Go on Singing). And he asked for custody of the children.

  What he was suing for was 50 percent of Judy’s income since she had left his management, claiming it as marital community property.

  Judy was not due in London for several days, but she was frightened Luft might take the children away from her. Pale and distraught and suffering from an attack of laryngitis, she huddled them together and with three burly hired private detectives as guards, bundled them off to Idlewild Airport (now Kennedy). The decision to leave sooner than planned was so precipitate that Liza was wearing slacks and sandals and had slips, dresses, and sweaters draped over her arm and told reporters that she hadn’t had time to get her clothes for t
he trip. Liza now had a career on her own mind. She had been studying dancing at the New York High School of Performing Arts and had given a moving portrayal of Anne Frank in a school production. On a high school guidance card Liza wrote that she wanted to be a dancer and film actress.

  Once in London, Judy feared Luft might follow and spirit the two youngest away. She declared to the London press that she and Luft had been estranged for two years and that the marriage was over. Almost immediately she moved to have Lorna and Joey made wards of the British court—so that Luft would have a legal battle on his hands and face a possible jail sentence if he did try to take the children from her illegally.

  Her worst fears were realized. Just before filming began on I Could Go On Singing, Luft arrived in London. They had been estranged for two years, and in that time she had zoomed right back up to the top of the ladder and reconquered both stage and screen. She had earned over $1 million (though not the $2 million Luft had claimed) and for the first time in decades was finally out of debt, even being able to put aside a small amount of money for the future. She believed very deeply in her upcoming film and she loved London and the English. But she was physically once again at breaking point. Fields and Begelman had given up playing constant and private nursemaid to her, and she truly did not know how to fend for herself. Not being able to publicly face her addiction, she was never able to secure her own pills. And she had a mammoth, taxing, important role to perform.

  Luft, in Las Vegas, had filed a countersuit for divorce against her; and the marriage was never to be repaired.

  31At the start of shooting on I Could Go On Singing, I the crew, according to co-star Dirk Bogarde, called Judy “Miss Garland.” By the end, they referred to her as “It.” He claims the crew hated her. “They had had a wallop of her. She would keep them waiting hours and hours. But when she delivered, no one delivered like her. She lived with an intensive I, I, I. There seemed to be no other life but hers. And she simply could not take stress.”

  Judy, badly off center because of the pills and her health and the emotional roller coaster her daily confrontations with Luft kept her on, was indeed almost impossible to work with. Yet in the film Judy gives a performance equal in stature and intensity to her performance in A Star Is Born; and had the story allowed, it could have been a truly great film. All of the scenes between Judy and Bogarde were written with her cooperation, and often by Bogarde and herself—and came as close to expressing the truth about Judy, in terms of the character she portrayed, as any she had done before. The part was that of Jenny Bowman, an aging but great performer who has sacrificed her personal life for her career. Then, during an engagement at the Palladium in London, she makes a last grasp for both her son and her lover, whom she had long ago let go. Bogarde, her lover and father of their illegitimate son, tries to stop the boy from disrupting his life to follow Jenny.

  “I know how much fun she can be to be with,” he tells him, “how good and wise—and life would be more exciting. You’d go to places you’ve never seen before. You’d fly; you’d catch boats; and you’d laugh a lot. I loved her—I still do love her. But mark this: Jenny gives more love than anyone but takes more love than anyone can possibly give.”

  The lines in the script were very close to the truth, and Judy was aware of it. All the neuroses the pills had induced had made her a monster. The more someone gave, the more she demanded. By giving, the person had proved she could trust him; there weren’t too many people she could trust, and her needs were overwhelming.

  “You see,” Bobby Cole has stated, “anybody that becomes a friend of Judy is working all the time—working keeping this one away from her; don’t let So-and-So do this. ‘Delores, [Cole’s wife],’ she’d say, ‘you’ve got to get Sid away from here.’ And [the producers] would say, ‘Delores, you’ve got to make sure she’s at the Saint Regis at four o’clock.’ ‘Delores, we’re counting on you,’ and before you know it Delores is working her ass off. Delores is counting Dexedrines. No matter how it drove you crazy, there was something—Judy was like the eternal victim. . .

  The most powerful scene in the film occurs after she is told by her son that he will not join her. Due to appear at the Palladium, she gets outrageously drunk, trips, hurts her ankle, and is taken to the hospital. Her lover (Bogarde), who is a doctor, is called.

  “No more coffee,” she screams at him. “I couldn’t take any more coffee. You’d have to feed me through the veins. I’m full to the brim with it. I’m full to the brim with the whole damned world.”

  Bogarde calms her and moves in very close, and the camera seems to be on top of them.

  “Have you come to take me home?” she asks pitifully (for Jenny really has no home).

  “No, I’ve come to take you to the theater.”

  “Oh, no, you haven’t. I’m not going back there again—not going back there ever, ever, ever again.”

  “They are waiting.”

  “I don’t care if they’re fasting. Give them their money back and tell them to come back next fall.”

  “Jenny, it’s a sellout.”

  “I’m always a sellout.”

  “You promised.”

  “The hell with them. I can’t be spread so thin. I’m just one person. I don’t want to be rolled out like pastry so that everyone has a nice big bite of me. I’m just me. I belong to me. I can do whatever I damn well please and no one can ask any questions.”

  “You know the last is not true.”

  “... and that’s final! It’s just not worth all the deaths that I have to die.”

  “You have a show to do,” he reminds hei. “You’re going to do it and I’m going to see that you do.”

  “You think you can make me sing? You can get me there, but can you make me sing? I sing for myself. I sing what I want to, whenever I want to—just for me. I sing for my own pleasure. I’ll do whatever I damn well want. You understand that?”

  “I understand that. Just hang on to that.”

  She sobers almost instantly, and her voice becomes desperate. “I’ve hung on to every bit of rubbish in life there is and thrown away the good bits. Can you tell me why I do that?” she asks.

  And before the scene ends she tells him, “There’s an old saying: When you go onstage, you don’t feel any pain; and when the lights hit you, you don’t feel anything . . . It’s a stinking lie.”

  I Could Go On Singing was the only film for which Judy had worked on the screenplay. From that point of view it satisfied some of her desire to write. But it was an emotionally draining experience. She was at one time analyzing herself and then having to demonstrate her. findings before a full film crew, exposing every weakness, every source of inadequacy she had. She was aware throughout of the delays she caused. At one point in the shooting she purportedly fell and hit her head in her hotel bathroom and was hospitalized in London Clinic while filming was held up a week.

  She was also aware of the growing hostility of the crew, of the lack of patience on the part of Bogarde and the executives; she could not seem to help herself. She was particularly fond of Bogarde and feared losing his friendship. Before she completed the film, she warned him, “One day you’ll have your back to me. You won’t walk away facing me. No one does.” Bogarde said afterward, “Judy is a schizo; Judy is a mess; Judy is a genius.”

  The film was not a successful one. It is difficult to understand why, for with all its failures, it was (and remains) an exciting film portrayal and a beautifully mounted picture. Judy looked ravaged—time and trauma had eroded her. It was a real, moving, and revealing look at one of America’s living legends. It was being filmed at the same time the Marilyn Monroe-Arthur Miller film, The Misfits, was in general release. Judy was beginning to see some parallel in Marilyn’s and her lives. She was aware that Marilyn was almost as desperately addicted to pills as she was. “Why don’t they stop her?” she was heard to comment angrily. And The Misfits disturbed her. “It’s like seeing someone naked and exposed,” she said. She felt that Mi
ller’s screenplay was drawn from his wife’s (Marilyn’s) own character. Her objection was not that Marilyn should expose herself, but that someone else was doing the exposing. Perhaps it had some bearing on her working so closely with the script of I Could Go On Singing.

  “You’ll see her in close-up,” Judith Crist said in the New York Herald Tribune,

  ... in beautiful, glowing technicolor and striking staging in a vibrant, vital performance that gets to the essence of her mystique as a superb entertainer. Miss Garland is—as always—real, the voice throbbing, the eyes aglow, the delicate features yielding to the demands of the years, the legs still long and lovely. Certainly the role of a top-rank singer beset by the loneliness and emotional hungers of her personal life is not an alien one to her.

  It was her thirty-sixth—and last—film and stands alone as the only one that reveals the true essence of the mature Judy Garland. Shown as an aging woman in it, nonetheless she exposed her own high-strung vitality, her tensely gay personality. She had that elusive, indefinable attribute known as star quality; and at no other time, except in A Star Is Born, did she so dazzle one with it.

  London critic Philip Oakes, in his review of I Could Go On Singing, summed it up:

  She is a star; the genuine outsize article. . . . She is an actress of power and subtlety; a singer whose way with a song is nothing short of marvelous.. . . She is a great artist. She is Judy. She is the best there is.