April 23, 1961—In its long, legendary history, Carnegie Hall has served as a platform for countless musicians who left their mark on the New York venue. But it’s almost impossible to think of one who had fallen so low before an appearance as Judy Garland, nor one who rose again so high on the strength of a single exultant performance as the former Wizard of Oz star.
Offstage, Garland was such a mess that if she came to visit, you’d better say goodbye to the contents of your medicine cabinet. But put her in front of thousands of cheering fans with a microphone in hand, and she ruled.
It was practically a physical change that those closest to her witnessed. That night at Carnegie, for instance, journalist Shana Alexander, who had been holding the star’s lit cigarette backstage as the audience excitement built before the 8:30 pm scheduled start time, was astonished to see that as Garland let go of the curtain and headed onstage, she “actually got bigger.”
Hype, you say. But Garland was so over the top herself that even when you describe exactly the way she was, in what you view as realistic terms, it comes out as hype anyway.
Sports bring comeback stories aplenty—in fact, baseball even has a “Comeback Player of the Year.” But in the entertainment industry, with only one notable exception that I can think of—John Travolta, who has noted wryly that he’s had four or five so far in his career—they’re harder to mount. Though sports had its share of triumph over physical adversity (Ben Hogan’s car crash, Tony Conigliaro’s beaning in the head), most “comebacks” happen after a subpar, injury-plagued season. Heal a bone and the body does wonders again.
Entertainment comebacks are different. Entertainers might not be overcoming simply a medical condition, or even the inevitable self-doubt in the wake of this kind of setback, but also the attitudes of those who make the deals in Hollywood. Make no mistake: For all their professed progressivism, when it comes to a performer who can interfere with a payday, Hollywood moguls can be as intolerant as the worst bigot.
The only entertainment comeback I can think of comparable to Garland’s was the one staged by her good friend and old MGM colleague, Frank Sinatra, with From Here to Eternity (recounted in this prior post of mine). But Sinatra only had to do it once, and by 1961 he was bigger than ever.
Not so with Garland. Oh, nobody doubted her ability to invest the Great American Songbook with the same drama that Ol’ Blue Eyes did. But the lift provided by her comeback vehicle after her suicide attempt and public firing by MGM, A Star Is Born (1954), proved ephemeral.
Five years later, after looking at her 4-ft.-11-in., 180-lb. frame in a hospital bed, drained of fluids, with a liver compromised by years of alcohol and pills, a doctor not only bluntly warned Garland she would be a semi-invalid for the rest of her life, but that under no circumstances could she even walk again.
Maybe Garland misheard him—maybe she thought he said she could never work again. Whatever. She was going to prove him wrong.
More than a few people thought she couldn’t do it. And more than a few people, tired of her chronic tardiness and unreliability, thought her such a high-maintenance pain in the neck that they weren’t even inclined to wish her well.
You get a very pungent sense of this in James Kaplan’s terrific 50th-anniversary retrospective of the Carnegie Hall concert in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair. Among the friends and fans who function as a kind of Greek chorus in this tragedy that was magically delayed, one quote especially stands out, by actress-singer Polly Bergen:
“She’d been gone, and her career was over. Nobody really understands. Her career was over. Nobody wanted to see her. Nobody wanted to put up with her. Nobody cared. I’m talking about nobody in the Business. And let’s face it, the Business is what creates the business. So if people in the Business didn’t care, nothing was going to happen.”
But two thought they could reverse that impression: Bergen’s husband of the time, aspiring agent Freddie Fields, and his partner, David Begelman (yes, the future head thief of Columbia Pictures). In January 1961, they outlined their plan to revive her career. One element of this was re-establishing her as a marquee live performer—and a key component of this was her date at Carnegie Hall.
That sold out within hours after a small ad was placed in The New York Times. Yes, there was an element—similar to those watching Charlie Sheen’s current bizarre tour—wondering if they might be watching a self-immolation onstage. Yes, there was, for those pre-Stonewall days, a gay coterie out to pay homage to a performer already turning into one of their idols. Yes, there were even those in show business—not the suits described by Bergen, but the performer’s own acting and music colleagues—who cherished their troubled but talented, funny, endlessly warm-hearted friend.
And there were those who cut across all these groups and more, who wanted to see a once-in-a-lifetime performer who could make them marvel, laugh and cry at every turn because, in giving voice to every joy and sorrow of her heart, they heard an echo of their own.
You can cite the usual results of the concert that night—an album (Judy at Carnegie Hall) earning five Grammy Awards, placing number one on the Billboard charts for 13 weeks—but it’s all pallid and bloodless. It was a night in which not merely a career but a life hang in the balance.
The minutes dragged by after the 8:30 start time, leading some to fret a backstage breakdown. Far from it, though: Garland was milking the excitement for all it was worth, until it could barely be restrained. From the moment she hit the stage, singing “When You’re Smiling,” everyone realized that she was in as good physical shape as she’d been in for the last two years—and that not only the pipes remained intact, but that her ability to put over a song might even have been enhanced by the years of heartache.
I’m not going to get into the years after the show—you know the sad story already. What I do want to do is leave you with a sense of what it felt like to be among the three thousand strong in Carnegie Hall that one magical evening of 20-plus songs.
(In a sense, words will have to do. Fields was only able to persuade Garland's record company to audiotape the proceedings that night because they thought they'd never be able to get her into a studio with any regularity. But, except for a few precious seconds caught surreptitiously by a fan that night, contained in this YouTube excerpt, no visual record remains of that evening.)
Garland had true believers in the audience that night, but she made even more, including Mike Nichols. Still a comic partner of Elaine May, not yet a film and stage director, Nichols was unprepared for what he saw, according to what he told Kaplan for the Vanity Fair piece:
“Everybody loved Judy Garland, and I liked her, but I wasn’t obsessed with her. Then she comes out and she’s like on fire from the first moment. You just thought, Holy shit! What is this? I don’t remember what she sang when. I just remember that our jaws dropped, because she seemed to be singing these songs for the first time, which of course was her gift anyway. We kept clutching each other and gasping and cheering and yelling and carrying on.”
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