Tanya Gold
Judy Garland: Rainbows and Fog

Tanya Gold | Judy Garland (1922–1969): Rainbows and Fog | 02.29.24

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- Good evening. My name is Tanya Gold. I am a journalist and an obsessive fan of Judy Garland. So here I am speaking to you from the far west of Cornwall about Judy Garland. This talk was inspired by a long article I wrote about Judy for The Spectator five years ago. So I’ll begin with an excerpt from that. “Judy Garland is now a myth, a paradigm, and a warning. ‘Don’t let your daughter on the stage.’ It is the cognitive dissonance that is thrilling and awful like a child that dies. Dorothy kicked off her ruby slippers and turned to Benzedrine. It is a narrative that erases Garland as surely as the drugs ever did. When I think of her, I don’t think of the chaos born at MGM Studios, her Hollywood home, where they drugged her to make her slender and biddable. They called her ‘The Little Hunchback,’ and because she was schooled with Elizabeth Taylor, and Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner, she believed it.

With Garland, I marvel at the music. I will argue that Garland was extraordinary, not because of her lifelong illness and addiction to drugs, but despite it. She was famously less than five feet tall, and when she sang, she looked first anxious, then amazed as if she could not believe that the sound was hers, yet it was. The musical which developed in response to The Great Depression is an art form in which an ordinary person sings and becomes transcendent. An ordinary woman can walk along the street having her ordinary life, and suddenly she’s accompanied by a full orchestra. That is why Judy Garland was the best woman in musicals. She was by herself a musical. I want to start off by saying that there’s nothing Jewish about Judy Garland except her third husband, Sid Luft, one of five husbands, the third of five husbands, a fifth of her husbands.

But the art form she embodied, the film musical in the 20th century, was almost exclusively Jewish. It was normal for American songwriters to have Gentile avatars to bring their music to the world. The best example, of course, is Irving Berlin with Bing Crosby and ‘White Christmas’ in which Berlin invented the dechristianized universal American Christmas and the non-Jewish Bing Crosby sang it for him. You could argue that the musical was American Jewry’s gift to their new country who needed it so badly during The Great Depression, a way of feeling the emotions they were afraid of, but needed. Jews gave them a gift of emotion through musicals, who knew? Judy Garland was the best girl in the film musicals, and she had an incredible, too often forgotten musical legacy.

And this will come up at the end when we talk about the shambles and travesty of a biographical film made about her in 2019, starring Renee Zellweger as Judy Garland. She had another legacy too, as I’ve alluded to, her lifelong drug addiction, which led to her early death in London at the age of only 47 in 1969. When I think of Garland, I don’t really think that she died young. When you read about the details of her drug abuse and her illness, it is rather miraculous that she achieved so much and lived so long. But it’s natural when you love people or when they move them to try and view their lives as a triumph.

Nonetheless, I think Garland’s life was a triumph. Her work certainly was a triumph. It’s difficult to untangle her artistic legacy from the legacy of her drug addiction, but that is what we are here for tonight.” I want to talk about her early life first. Please, can we have the first slide, Jess? Oh, sorry, not the first clip, the first slide, please. It’s a baby. I beg your pardon, that was entirely my mistake. Sorry, let’s keep going on. So Frances Gumm, Judy Garland’s birth name, was born in 1922 to Frank and Ethel. They were vaudevillians, they were born in a trunk. If you want the historical context, she was born on the same day as Mussolini became a fascist dictator of Italy. Ethel was the most important parent in her childhood, though the one that Judy loved least.

Judy loved her father, Frank, a charming and handsome Irishman with an alcohol problem who was most likely gay. This naturally caused great tension within the marriage. And Ethel, who was the significant parent, was the ultimate and most horrifying example of a stage mother I’ve ever encountered. Judy Garland had an explicitly abusive childhood. Ethel longed to be an artist but she had no talent, so she lived through her three daughters and she put them out on the stage. The oldest two of the three Gumm sisters had no talent, and one day when absolutely dying on the stage, their little sister Frances whittled up and sang “Jingle Bells” to rescue them.

Apparently, she was a hit. She was only two and a half. Ethel never had time to be a mother in the conventional sense, and she never had the inclination to either. She just wanted her girls to be famous. She quickly realised that the two older girls would never be a success, and so she separated Frances from the father she adored and drove her around the country looking for gigs. She terrorised her youngest child. She had to dress a certain way, behave a certain way. Aged five, she was already a workhorse. On musical dates, her mother would control her by leaving her alone in hotel rooms, saying she would leave without her. Then she would leave, and after a short period, Ethel would return and Frances would beg her forgiveness for whatever she had done wrong. She was already learning that she was only important and loved by her mother when she was on the stage. It would prove utterly toxic for the rest of her life.

But Ethel was successful as we all knew. She got her into Hollywood. When Judy was 12, she had an audition at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the richest and most important studio in Hollywood, run by the fearsome Polish Jewish refugee, Louis B. Mayer. He signed her instantly, he saw her talent. But he didn’t know what to do with Frances Gumm. She wasn’t conventionally pretty. She had a snubbed nose, and two wide eyes, and thinning brown hair she always complained. She was the girl next door, but she had an incredible voice. While the front office wondered what to do with her, she went to fame school with such glorious creatures as Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Elizabeth Taylor. Poor Frances Gumm, that can’t have done anything for her self-esteem.

With her mother Ethel’s willing assistance, Mayer was brutal to Frances. It is impossible to read the history of Judy Garland without believing that this man who brought so much joy to so many millions of people, actually hated women and was a heartless psychopath. If you’re an admirer of Mayer, I beg you not to read a Judy Garland biography. And Judy bullied by her mother, separated from the father she adored, so she could work at MGM full-time, even though she was a child, was easily bullied. As I wrote, Mayer called her a “hunchback” and “fat.” Garland was a normal sized girl with a healthy appetite. At MGM, horribly, she was put on a diet of chicken soup, coffee, and I will talk a bit more about this later, uppers and downers. Mayer underpaid her for years, other stars got far more.

Mickey Rooney, later her co-star, got 10 times her salary. Garland never got her due in Hollywood. And she knew it, she wasn’t stupid. Mayer told her she should be grateful to be made a star, that she was nothing without him, and that if she didn’t do exactly as he told her, there were a million girls ready to take her place. I don’t think so. It wasn’t true and he knew it. Garland, she named herself after a theatre critic and a song she liked when told that Gumm rhymed with dumb and that had no place on a billboard was singular. No woman ever gave more on stage or screen. She gave everything, and that’s the Garland dichotomy and the Garland enchantment. Even as she created incredible joy and her performances at The Palladium in London and The Palace in New York City are famous even now, she could keep none of it for herself.

The joy was always fleeting. People hung onto it, but it always left. I’ve been a Garland fan for 40 years ever since my grandmother showed me “Easter Parade.” And I’ve always grappled with the idea that my admiration for her is somehow rooted in her sickness. I’ve come to the conclusion that this isn’t true, that she was a great artist despite her illness, not because of it, but you can only wish that she had a happier life. The worst thing Mayer and Ethel did to Judy was to get her addicted to drugs. The famous Jacqueline Susann novel, “Valley of the Dolls,” which is about drug abuse in Hollywood, could have been written for Judy Garland. She was offered a part in it, she said yes, then she said no. She may have been a helpless addict, but she retained some self-respect and her professionalism almost always.

As a child, she had to work so hard at the studio, learning deportment, dancing, singing, those musical numbers take so much more effort than a mere straight drama. There was not enough time for her to sleep. People didn’t know about the danger of prescription drugs then. Or perhaps they did, but they simply didn’t care. By the age of 14, she was addicted to uppers, downers, and sleeping pills. She would sleep in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hospital alongside Mickey Rooney, the boy next door and the girl next door, living glorious, gilded lives. It’s the greatest lie Hollywood ever told. She would work, be given a pill to go to sleep, and then be given a pill to wake up. After all, MGM had invested a lot of money in her. She was meat. Her break in the film that made her famous was, of course, “The Wizard of Oz.”

She was 17 and the runner-up in the casting competition to Shirley Temple. And of course, Mayer, ever keen to control her, told her so. Even playing Dorothy, she was second best. The famous song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was, of course, written by a pair of American Jews, Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg. I have always believed that “Over the Rainbow,” which Garland sang so perfectly for these Eastern European Jews was America. America was the land over the rainbow, America was secure. Garland invested the song with her typical yearning, and it became an anthem to everyone’s idea of home, of safety. It is a universal classic. Jess, please, could we have a look at it now?

[Clip plays]

♪ Somewhere over the rainbow ♪ ♪ Way up high ♪ ♪ There’s a land that I heard of ♪ ♪ Once in a lullaby ♪ ♪ Somewhere over the rainbow ♪ ♪ Skies are blue ♪ ♪ And the dreams that you dare to dream ♪ ♪ Really do come true ♪

• Although “Over the Rainbow” was written by a pair of Jewish American songwriters, its message is universal. You can hear it in the line Garland says before she sings the song, “Somewhere, somehow, I want to find a place without any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. It’s not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It’s far, far away. Behind the moon, beyond the rainbow.” Garland was a star at last after the Wizard of Oz and Ethel was satisfied for now. But she was treated no better by the studio. In fact, she was treated worse. My instinct is that Mayer liked to bully people who could be easily bullied, and Garland was the perfect victim. It became a game to her.

She was slowly becoming aware that she was addicted to drugs, even though she was a child and it would make her ill. Her instincts were correct, but the studio didn’t care. They gave her no space and no succour to investigate what was happening to her and how she was changing. They didn’t allow her to grow up. Mayer used to call all the child stars of MGM his children. If so, he was a terrible father. He treated her like a cash cow, and she was rushed into a series of idiotic boy and girl next door adventures, the “Andy Hardy” series with Mickey Rooney, her childhood friend, who somehow, despite the destruction of his own career, at one point in the ‘60s, he could only get work as a Mickey Rooney impersonator, managed at least to physically survive stardom at MGM.

She made some weak films in her years at MGM and a couple of cold-eyed masterpieces. Namely “Meet Me in St. Louis,” directed by her second husband, Vincente Minnelli, and “Easter Parade,” in which as ever, she played the ugly, unfortunate woman who miraculously by virtue of her talent, is raised to the level of goddess. The classic film musical archetype. This was always the Garland film, the girl next door raised up. Mayer was dazzled by her ordinary appearance and character and her extraordinary gift. How could they live together in one person? While it made for a few great movies, it also destroyed her emotionally. The plot of “Easter Parade” is literally that a dancer, Fred Astaire, makes a bet that he can’t turn an ugly, plain chorus girl into a great star. And that chorus girl was Judy Garland. I’d like us to look at a clip from “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Could we do that now, please, Jess? Second clip. No, sorry. Sorry, Jess, the other one, the second one, please. Sorry, guys. We’ll get there in a minute, no rush.

• [Jess] So Tanya, that is showing that that’s the second clip on the slideshow. So is it this one instead?

• Yes, it is, apologies everyone. Sorry, Jess.

• [Jess] No, it’s not a problem at all. Don’t worry.

[Clip plays]

• This is “Meet Me in St. Louis.” ♪ Have yourself a merry little Christmas ♪ ♪ Let your heart be light ♪ ♪ Next year, all our troubles will be out of sight ♪ ♪ Have yourself a merry little Christmas ♪ ♪ Make the yuletide gay ♪ ♪ Next year, all our troubles will be miles away ♪

• And that’s her playing Esther in “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Looking that clip now and knowing what I know about Garland, the thing I find most extraordinary about it is how closed in she is. How tightened, how tightly directed. It’s perfectly short and beautifully sung, but there’s a tension to it. It doesn’t feel like the real her. This probably feels like a good time to mention that she married and divorced two men at this time, including Vincente, who directed this film. The father with her of Liza Minnelli, a woman who almost in “Cabaret” matched her mother’s incalculable gift.

Painful though it is, I want to tell you about another way in which Ethel and Mayer conspired to destroy Judy Garland’s life. She was pregnant when she was 19, but it didn’t fit in with the studio schedule. She had a film to make, costume fittings, musical direction to take, so they made her have an abortion. And I suspect that for her, though she was only 19, that was the beginning of the end. And now here, just a few years later with “Meet Me in St. Louis,” she was hopelessly addicted to drugs and she would be for the rest of her life. For the rest of her life, she would be in and out of psychiatric hospitals and hospitals. She would also for the rest of her life, almost the rest of her life, live under an incredible amount of debt, due to the fact that her mother abused Garland’s money with bad investments, though kept the percentage that she was given for making these investments.

Her father, her beloved father, was now dead. She began to unravel at MGM. She was fired from “Annie Get Your Gun” where she appeared at the specific request of Irving Berlin by a lowly studio messenger. By now, she was suicidal due to the drugs and the studio would leak it to the newspapers, to Louella Parsons, the columnist for the Hearst papers. “Stupid, ungrateful Judy, after all we’ve done for you.” There was no contrition and there was no condolence. When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fired her after 27 films in 13 years, she was only 32. She was again suicidal, but she had the first of her incredible career renaissances, the first as a live performer. People say that her live shows were the greatest anyone have ever seen because she gave so much. Her renaissance began, of all places, in London, a town for the rest of her life, which she loved due to the gratitude.

She would say that London saved her, that London brought her back after she had fled America in shame and despair. She made some great films after her career at MGM. Not many of them, but a few. It’s not surprising because she was so unwell and the best of them by far is “A Star is Born.” “A Star is Born” is about the love affair between Esther, there’s another Esther on top of the Esther in “Meet Me in St. Louis.” A lowly studio hack, the Garland type again, and a great dramatic star called Norman Maine, who was played by the British actor, James Mason.

But there’s a problem in that garden of paradise. Mason is an alcoholic, and Esther who rises to stardom as he collapses, must watch. Of course, Judy was both Esther and Norman Maine. I don’t know why she didn’t play Norman Maine, though as a female. Perhaps she couldn’t have faced it, but she identified absolutely with Maine’s character. Even though filming, I mean, sorry, though filming again made her ill. It was the pressure of carrying a whole film when so gravely ill.

Garland hadn’t been well since she was a child, but even in “A Star is Born,” she offers what I think is the greatest performance by a woman in film musical with the song, “The Man That Got Away.” I’ll add a caveat to this. I believe Garland has only one rival for the prize of best performance of, I know you know what I’m going to say, of a woman in film musical, and that is her daughter, Liza Minnelli in “Cabaret” with “Maybe This Time.” But perhaps we can fight about that in the comments. Please, could we look at “The Man That’s Got Away,” Jess? I think it’s the second one.

[Clip plays]

♪ The night is bitter ♪ ♪ The stars have lost their glitter ♪ ♪ The winds grow colder ♪ ♪ And suddenly, you’re older ♪ ♪ And all because of the man that got away ♪ ♪ No more his eager call ♪ ♪ The writing’s on the wall ♪ ♪ The dreams you dreamed have all gone astray ♪

• I wanted to play all of it, but it’s four and a half minutes long. I urge you to go and see it after I go offline. It is absolutely extraordinary. Because there it is, the yearning and the withholding. The pulsating in just one tiny woman. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for this film, but she didn’t win it. There was yet more humiliation. For the broadcast, they decided she was in hospital and they decided to mic her up and put lights on her so if she won, her response could be seen in the Academy. She didn’t win, but the response of her losing was beamed straight into the Academy.

Things happened to Judy Garland that should never have happened to anyone. The gossip columnist, Louella Parsons said, “I don’t think that Hollywood was responsible for what happened to Judy Garland, but it could only have happened in Hollywood,” which I think is as close to an admission of the truth as Louella Parsons was capable of. So her disappointment was beamed across the world. Garland never got her due from Hollywood. And she could no longer make films, she made only a few more. She was uninsurable, she was terrified, and above all, she was drugged. I don’t mean to keep saying she was drugged, she was drugged, she was drugged, but she had been on these drugs since she was 12 years old.

She was effectively an insane person at this time, that is what uppers and downers do to you. And yet she was still capable of this, and that is why I call her story a triumph. She would only make five more films after “A Star is Born” and one of them was “Judgement at Nuremberg.” “Judgement at Nuremberg” is about the Nuremberg trials obviously, the minor second tier Nuremberg trials, the ones of the judges who enforce the Nazi laws.

It was directed by Stanley Kramer. It came out in 1961 and Kramer had the amazing idea of getting Judy Garland to play Irene Hoffman Wallner, an ethnic German serving woman who had an affair, no, I beg your pardon, that’s completely wrong, who had a friendship with a Jewish man. He was executed and she was imprisoned, and she was offered up and a witness in the trial of the judge who convicted them both at Nuremberg. I would argue that her performance in “Judgement at Nuremberg” shows us clearly that she was not only the greatest female singer in musicals, but an amazing dramatic actress. Please, can we have a look at it, Jess?

[Clip plays]

• Remember it was brought out at the tribunal that Mr. Feldenstein had bought you things, candy and cigarettes.

• [Irene] Yes.

• Remember that sometimes he bought you flowers?

• Yes, he bought me many things. That was because he was kind. He was the kindest man I ever knew.

• You know the witness, Mrs. Elsa Lindnow?

• Yes, I know her.

• [Hans] Was she a cleaning woman at the apartment you lived in?

• Yes.

• Did Mr. Feldenstein come to see you at your apartment?

• Yes.

• [Hans] How many times?

• I don’t remember.

• Several times?

• Yes.

• [Hans] Many times?

• Many times.

• Did you kiss him?

• Yes, I kissed him.

• Was there more than one kiss?

• Yes. But it was not in the way you are trying to make it sound. He was like a father to me. He was more than a father.

• More than a father? Did you sit on his lap?

• Objection! Counsel is persecuting the witness in the pretext of gaining testimony.

• Objection overruled.

• The defence is being permitted to reenact what was a travesty of justice in the first place.

• Colonel Lawson. The tribunal makes the rulings in this case, not the prosecution, you may proceed.

• Did you sit on his lap?

• Yes, but there was nothing wrong or ugly about it.

• Did you sit on his lap?

• Yes.

• You sat on his lap. What else did you do?

• There was nothing that you are trying to say, there was nothing like that.

• What else did you do, Mrs. Wallner?

• What are you trying to do? Are you trying to… Why do you not let me speak the truth?

• That’s what we want! [Clip ends]

• I can never watch a Garland scene in a meaningful piece of art, I do not include the “Andy Hardy” movies in that, without being completely mesmerised by her. If you are interested, the man persecuting her was Maximilian Schnell as the prosecutor. And of course, I beg your pardon, the defence, and the kindly judge is Spencer Tracy. These were Garland’s dying years. She toured a lot, she had to, she had no money. These were the years when she would stay at friends’ houses or flee hotels in the middle of the night because she couldn’t pay the bill. Sometimes her three children, Liza, her child by Minnelli, was joined by two children, Lorna and Joey, by her third husband, Sid Luft.

Sometimes they would join her, but they couldn’t look after her. And Garland was not a woman who could look after her children, of course. She couldn’t even look after herself. So sometimes she had her children, sometimes she didn’t. She toured a lot, she had lovers. She had two further husbands, much younger, loose nightclub types who she treated, I think, a little bit like lampposts in which she hung onto them so she could stand up. But these were the years of running around, of fleeing, even so, you have seen so much evidence of her great gifts tonight. She died aged 47 in the bathroom of her house in Knightsbridge. It’s on Cadogan Lane. I’ve walked past it, the house is completely remade.

I find it somehow comforting that she lived in London because she always said London was so much better to her than Hollywood was. Hollywood used and rejected her when she came to London after she was fired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. London adored her, it worshipped her, it took her into its heart. I suppose it was just what they needed after the war. There are a few more things I’d like to talk about now I’ve basically finished my imperfect narrative of Garland’s life. And this is based on a piece of original research I did for The Spectator before the travesty of a film, “Judy,” the biography of Judy Garland starring Renee Zellweger, came out in 2019. I will read from my article in The Spectator, it probably makes it a lot clearer. “A new film, ‘Judy,’ in 2019, retells the myth of Garland’s last nightclub performances in London. Garland, Renee Zellweger, is in London in the winter of 1968 to ‘69 to play "The Talk of the Town.”

She’s broke, she’s ill, she’s four times divorced, and separated from her children. In public, she’s communal property, heckled or swamped. She will die of an accidental overdose at 47 the following June. All this is sweetly enough played by Zellweger, whose Garland is absolutely a victim, bears no gift to Zellweger’s performance, she’s only a moderate singer. It is just the sickness, absolutely appalling, shocking, so exploitative. It’s an old story and one for which the hunger is insatiable. A gifted woman will pay for her talent with her life.“ But I wrote, "There is a real problem with 'Judy.’ The filmmakers inexplicably, inexplicably decided not to use Garland’s voice.” If you’ve seen the biopic film of Elvis that came out last year, they wouldn’t dare. Of course, they used Elvis’s voice because otherwise, what the hell are you looking at or why the hell are you paying attention?

So they decided not to use Garland’s voice, Zellweger sings instead. “In ‘Judy,’ we are enjoined to be spell bound by a woman whose voice is barely adequate and whose expertise is not even in musical theatre. What is left of Judy Garland when you remove her voice? Sickness, and so ‘Judy’ is yet more exploitation, a platform for a woman’s lesser gifts.” And I’m sure that you’ll be as shocked to learn as I was that Renee Zellweger won an Oscar for playing Judy Garland, even though Judy Garland was denied the adult Oscar all her life. I recall that she won a Juvenile Oscar, but she always wanted the great prize, and she deserved it, and she never got it. I fancy Zellweger has the good sense and the good taste to be ashamed, but she should have stood up for Judy’s voice and not attempted to sing for her. It made her look ridiculous.

At this time, I met Lorna Smith, who was the founder of the International Judy Garland Club, and I was lucky enough to be able to interview her before she died. Lorna Smith was a civil servant from Exeter, and she was also a Garland fanatic who when Judy was in London to play “The Talk of the Town,” went to act as Judy’s dresser because they didn’t have a lady for her, it was all quite budgety. Again, Bernard Delfont doesn’t come out of this, the promoter doesn’t come out of this very well after. So she asked her fan club to look after her and what makes more sense than that? I always thought that the biopic shouldn’t be about Judy singing but not using her voice, and staggering around all over the place, and being terrible to her children, I always thought they should have told the story of her bizarre late years’ friendship, or maybe not so bizarre as I’ll go on to explain.

Her late years’ friendship with this woman, Lorna Smith, but they didn’t have the imagination, it would’ve been a wonderful film. I learned of Smith’s existence from Gary Horrocks, the Garland historian and obsessive, do look him up online, he knows more about Judy Garland than anyone else alive. He’s the editor of the International Judy Garland Journal. You can glimpse Smith at the edges of photographs holding Garland’s makeup case and extinguishing her cigarettes in the car on the way to the nightclub. At Garland’s fifth wedding in March 1969, I spoke to Smith. She was then 93, if she was still alive, she’d be 97. There was something incredibly doughty to about her. There was something incredibly sort of sensible about her. And I wondered if she was the anti-Garland and that was what attracted them to each other.

Judy gave her a dream of instability and stardust and Lorna picked up her clothes and was a normal person who could look after her. It’s the sympathy of the different. Smith wrote a book about it, “Judy, with Love.” It is precise, very respectful, and very formal, much more respectful than most of the Garland biographies and certainly more respectful than press agents at MGM who leaked the details of Judy’s illness when she was still a very, very young woman. Smith didn’t write about the terrible symptoms of Garland’s addiction. She used, as always, the gentle euphemism of nervous breakdown and tensions. I could tell that she really cared about Judy Garland. She was patient and protective of Garland’s privacy. Most people weren’t.

By this point, she was barely eating. She had an eating disorder and she was also sleepless for much of her life by this point. And her stage clothes were held together by safety pins. She was frightened to be alone. Like Elvis Presley, she couldn’t sit in a room or lie down in a room without having the radio or the television on. That’s how frightened she was to be alone. Lorna Smith told me that when Judy Garland arrived in London to play “The Talk of the Town,” she telephoned her to ask if there was anything I could do to help. Perfectly normal behaviour in the 1960s. Judy Garland replied, “Oh yes, Lorna, can you possibly help me to unpack tomorrow?”

Smith arrived at the Ritz Hotel, which Garland, by the way, hated it. Hated, she thought it was, I think it reminded her of Vincente Minnelli. So Smith arrived at the hotel and was absolutely shocked by how unwell Garland had become, bless her heart. Garland asked her to prepare for opening night. “I haven’t got a lady with me and they’re not providing anybody at the theatre.” Maybe I was a bit rude about Bernard Delfont, the promoter. It’s possible no one wanted to work for her, she could be very, very difficult. She used to ring people in the middle of the night, all life long. The psychologist who was interviewed by one biographer said she was constantly looking for her mother in the darkness, but her mother never came. So Smith said, “I’ll certainly come and help you, but I’m not much good at that sort of thing.” She worked at the Inland Revenue. I love this story. “I’ll probably get everything upside down,” Smith said. Judy replied, “Oh well, we’ll make a team.”

So that was another reason Judy wasn’t frightened by Lorna. Lorna was not so confident either. That’s why she needed musical theatre. Every night, Smith went to the hotel after work. “I just helped her get in and out of things and find the clothes she wanted to wear,” she told me when I interviewed her. “I accompanied her in the car. I stood in the wings while she was on stage and went upstairs to the dressing room afterwards. I thought I’d rather go there and help her and worry about her than worry without knowing why I was worrying.” I’m certain that Smith knew that Garland was a dead woman walking. Sometimes her emphasis on Garland’s wellbeing, not her art, disturbed Garland awful. After all, she, at least part of her, knew she was a genius. Smith says, “She said to me one night, ‘You never say anything about the performance.’ Lorna, "I said, ‘Well, I don’t really see or hear very well from the wings.’” I find this very funny. Garland said, “Well, I wish you’d say something. The silence is so demoralising.”

Classic addict, showbiz behaviour. All of it isn’t enough. She had to have everyone adoring her. “You should know me well enough by now, love, to know I’m no good at fancy speeches,” Smith told her. “Anyway, what would you rather have? Someone who makes fancy speeches or someone who hangs up your wet pants?” Garland apparently took the pants and dropped them on the floor. “Someone who makes fancy speeches,” she said. Boom, perfect timing. Oh, I can’t remember if I told you that when looking at the last clip, one take. She did it in one take. Garland and Smith became friends when Garland was in England for six months in 1960. She had loved England, as I said, since her performance at the London Palladium in 1951 salvaged her career. “I came full of fear,” she said of London, “I left full of hope.” “I just loved Judy,” Smith said, “I went to her hoping the very first time she came here. I’d never been in an audience before with that atmosphere, a sort of palpitation before she even walked out.”

And she had this all her life, the connection with the audience was extraordinary. “Welcome to London, Judy. Good old Judy, we love you, Judy.” “One great, deep throated roar,” is how Lorna Smith described it. That was Judy’s reception. “The Talk of the Town” run was called retrospectively a failure because that is the narrative people like to impose on Judy Garland. She was always falling down, she was a failure. The idea that her life was a failure is, to me, completely ridiculous. The truth is it was a dud gig for any singer. The audience were eating and smoking, which was bad for Garland’s morale and for her voice. She was actually, and only Garland-ologists know this but now I’m telling you, asked to stay on for another week, but she was too unwell. Excuse me. She was always late for her spot because Smith says, “The management asked if Judy could make up and dress in the Ritz hotel room.”

And that, according to Lorna, was absolutely disastrous because she was getting slower and slower, she was a very ill woman, but she would panic if you tried to hurry her, she didn’t have a watch. It was unbelievable,“ Smith told me, "that there wasn’t even a clock in the Ritz hotel suite. She was getting slower, and slower, and slower.” She was never, and Smith was defending Garland, you know, 40 years after her death, she was never knowingly or intentionally late. Some nights, Garland was heckled and pelted with bread rolls. Public property, as I said. “This lunatic,” Smith said, “went up on stage and started shouting at her and grabbed hold of her arm, it was disgusting. The management did nothing. Rather, she was defended by that lady who was tortured by the Gestapo during the war. She went up and told them what she thought of them, good for her, and wished they could be tortured by the Gestapo as far as I’m concerned.”

That was Odette Hallowes, an agent in France and the most highly decorated woman in the Second World War, and the first woman to win the George Cross. And when Judy Garland was pelted with bread rolls at “The Talk of the Town,” Hallowes went up to them and made sure they didn’t do it again. Smith told me that she last saw Garland six days before she died. She visited her at the mews house in Knightsbridge and brought her pearls as a birthday gift. Garland kept nothing, she was always moving house. She was always getting divorced towards the end of her life. And she would leave the houses without taking what she needed. And she was too chaotic to find it. Towards the end of her life, she was desperately looking for a picture of her beloved father, Frank, and she couldn’t find it and it was devastating to her. So she had no pearls despite being one of the greatest stars in the MGM firmament.

And so, Lorna Smith brought some to her from the fan club. “She loved pearls and I realised she hadn’t got anything like that with her when she came back here. I rang the doorbell and she came down in her dressing gown. I went up with her and we sat chummily on the side of the bed and we chatted on that afternoon.” I want to finish with what I believe is the most perceptive review of any performance by Judy Garland. It was a journalist I had never previously heard of. His name is Clinton Fadiman, and I’d like to read out his review in Holiday Magazine, which I’m not sure is going anymore. She had been playing at The Palace in New York. “As with all true clowns, she seemed to be neither male nor female, young nor old, pretty nor plain. She had no glamour, only magic. She was gaiety itself, yearning itself, fun itself. She wasn’t being judged or enjoyed, not even watched or heard.

She was only being felt as one feels the quiet run of one’s own blood, the shiver of the spine, houseman’s prickle of the skin. And when looking about 18 inches high, sitting hunched over the stage with only a tiny spotlight pinpointing her elf face, she breathed the last phrases of "Over the Rainbow” and cried out it’s universal unanswerable query. ‘Why can’t I?’ It was as though the bewildered hearts of all the people in the world had moved quietly together and become one shaking in Judy’s throat, and they’re breaking.“

So those are my thoughts on Judy Garland. I’m a little bit discombobulated about not being able to see anybody, but I see that there are some questions, so I will try and answer them for you.

Q&A and Comments

Arlene Goldberg, "I read that Judy Garland’s mother put her on speed when she was 10 years old.” My belief is it was 12 because she wasn’t at MGM until she was 12. And I’m so envious of you, Arlene, because you say that you saw Judy Garland in a live concert and it was heartbreaking to see her.

Q: “Were there any other child actresses or actors put on drugs, or was Garland unique in that respect?“ A: That’s a question from Stuart Seidel. My guess is that, my informed guess, is that what was available to Garland was available to anyone. Garland had a predisposition to drug addiction due to her very fractured relationship with her parents. I feel certain that many other child stars were offered them, but just because you’re given them, it doesn’t mean you’re going to develop a lifelong addiction to them. And also, she was such a workhorse so young, they realised she had such an incredible gift, they wanted to capitalise on it. I believe she made, I think it was, the figure I had, she made $160 million for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and she left almost penniless. So I’m sure that’s true and that they were given drugs, but they were lucky enough not to become addicted to them as Judy was, because her workload was so much higher and her predisposition was open to it.

Donald Zinsky, this isn’t really a question, but you’ve said you never knew that Louis B. Mayer was such tyrant. Yes, I mean, it’s absolutely heartbreaking, isn’t it? I mean, he wasn’t the most creative, but he was the greatest mogul in the history of Hollywood. The films produced in the Silver Age between 1930 and 1950 at MGM, I believe are some of the greatest films ever made. And to learn that behind that is a cold, controlling, psychopathic man is a very sad thing to hear. I mean, the rumours are even worse. There are rumours that he abused very young women who worked for him physically. But I don’t really want to go into that now, but that does remind me of two other stories about Louis Mayer I wanted to tell.

The first is that when Billy Wilder, we like to call him Schmall Wilder, you know, Polish Billy Wilder, you know, the greatest, for me, director in modern Hollywood with "Sunset Boulevard” and also “Some Like It Hot.” When he made “Sunset Boulevard,” which is called the greatest film Hollywood ever made about its own decline, Louis B. Mayer watched it, and then he came out, and he went up to Billy Wilder, and said, “You bastard.” And he was furious because Wilder had told the truth about the abuse. His Norma Desmond is not a great star adored by everyone and happy in her life, she’s completely mad and isolated. And the other story I want to tell about Louis B. Mayer was his funeral. And it may be apocryphal, but it’s great story, which is someone said, you know, “Why were there so many people at Louis B. Mayer’s funeral?” And the answer, of course, came back, “They’re just checking he’s dead.”

Let me see if there are any other questions. “What a voice,” well, I can only only agree with that. Oh, my main research sources. Well, the films, of course. I don’t have the name of the, because my phone is upstairs, I don’t have the name of the biographies to hand, I’m afraid. I don’t have a brilliant short term memory anymore. I’m sorry, it’s gone, there’s a wonderful biography with a picture of her on the front of her looking like a lost little girl. But as her daughters, Lorna Luft and Liza Minelli said, when, I mean, it even feels a little bit exploitative when talking about Garland to read about her life, because as her daughters said when this travesty of a film with Renee Zellweger came out, they said, “We do not endorse this film. If you want to understand our mother, watch her movies.” So just go and watch her movies. I think that would make her happier than anything.

I’m just wondering, if there are any questions, please ask me. Oh, there are more, great. Ray. Yes, she was friendly with Dirk Bogarde, her co-star in “I Could Go On Singing,” which was her last major film, which was about, it was a very exposing film, it was basically a film about Judy Garland. And she was close to him, but you’ve got to understand that drug addicts are impossible. She had terrible mood swings. She would be, on the one moment, she would be terribly needy and desiring of affection, and then she would become incredibly angry and incredibly frightening. And it’s a doughty friend who can sustain a friendship with that, but they were close. The crew on the film didn’t have so much time for her. I read that they started off by calling her Miss Garland and ended up by calling her it. You know, to admire a woman for her gifts and her strength is not the same thing as thinking that she behaved perfectly all the time. I’m sure she was perfectly capable of being a complete monster.

Q: “Did Judy have a relationship with her sisters?” A: Again, drug addicts’ relationships with their family sort of tend to be disjointed because although the love is there and the feeling is there, you become completely self-obsessed. By all accounts, they were delighted not to be put on the stage by their mother, Ethel, anymore. They were delighted that it was just Judy going off in the car with Ethel to the round of auditions. And as far as I’m aware, they both married happily. And they had useful lives and they did stay in touch with their sister. They loved their sister, but they couldn’t save her. No one could.

I don’t like “I Could Go On Singing” nearly as much as I like “A Star is Born.” Maybe it’s because it’s just too raw and truthful for me. I think when anyone adores or worships someone who makes culture, you always have to ask yourself why. And you’re not here really to listen to why I identify so much with Judy Garland and why I feel Judy Garland has something to say to me, but I would rather see her in George Cukor’s incredible lighting, snogging James Mason, giving the greatest performance, as I said, of a musical number by a woman in film than her later towards the end of her life, you know, looking terrible and exploiting her own life for money. I like to think that if she had been in her right mind, Garland was always a professional. Don’t think I don’t have to finish yet. Liza Minelli used to sing with her on stage and she would say, “Offstage, she was my mother, onstage, she was a ruthless professional and a rival.” And I like to think that if Garland had been in her right mind, she wouldn’t have made “I Could Go On Singing,” so it isn’t my favourite of her films.

Just looking forward, I think that’s nearly it. Oh, I’m glad that Madeline is happy that my take on Garland is positive. Yes, I mean, you see this all the time. You see it with Amy Winehouse, and of course, with Marilyn Monroe, you know, the great mirror of Garland. And Monroe adored Garland and followed her around, and said, “Help me.” And Garland said, “You must be joking,” I’m paraphrasing, “I can’t help you, I can’t even help myself.” You know, to look, as I said at the beginning, to look at the sickness as if that is the thing that made them interesting when actually, the singularity and the power of their art. I mean, I don’t doubt that the intensity of Garland’s singing was a result of her personality type that also led to this illness. But I remember her first and foremost, always of a very, very, very great artist. I don’t know why there isn’t a blue plaque outside her home in Belgravia, but I will start a campaign on it. And my husband says I’m a gay man in a woman’s body. And maybe I’m giving plenty of evidence.

So her children, I believe they’re fine. I mean, you know about Liza Minelli, whose performance in “Cabaret,” I don’t think she’s ever really been brilliant in anything apart from “Cabaret.” And you could also argue that “Cabaret” is a better film than Garland ever made. Yeah, it’s certainly a more knowing film. So you know about Minelli, Lorna Luft is a singer, she preserves her mother’s legacy. I think they are all fine. You know, their mother loved them and they knew that she loved them. And their father, you know, gambler, easy come, easy go, grifter, you know, he loved them too. And, you know, I think she would be delighted about that because sick as she was, she left a legacy which was extraordinary cinema and three children, none of whom followed her down the sad trails in her life.

So I feel I’ve just gone on and on way too long, and sorry if I babbled, and please all go off and watch Judy Garland movies, as I said. You know, and the American musical is a Jewish invention, but no one sang it better than Judy Garland. Thank you, good night.