Monday, June 22, 2009

This Day in Film History (Judy Garland, Incomparable Entertainer, Dies)


July 22, 1969—Her death in London through an accidental overdose of sleeping pills only meant that the life of Judy Garland had come to an end. Her legend, though, burns as brightly as ever.

MGM started Garland on her untimely end more than a quarter century before by putting her on a regimen of diet pills, inadvertently hastening the departure of their brightest female musical-comedy star.

Garland’s ensuing pill addiction and mental instability made her famously unreliable and, at times, nightmarish to bear around even for those who craved her friendship and love. Several years ago, on Larry King’s show, Elaine Stritch related how hosts had to be careful in inviting the singer over to a party--if she went to the bathroom, she might wipe out the medicine cabinet single-handedly.

The singer was probably correct, however, when she noted that the only person she ever hurt by her mistakes was herself—or, as she put it far more memorably in an interview with Barbara Walters two years before her death, “The only mistake I ever made, the only harm I ever did, was sing ‘Over the Rainbow.’”

Most Garland photos I’ve seen on the Web capture her in her twenties and even teens, at her most fresh-faced and innocent. But the one accompanying this post shows her (in a duet, of course, with the young Barbra Streisand) in an episode of her short-lived variety series—President Kennedy’s favorite show. More important, she was successfully waging (no doubt helped by a rekindled love affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer) a struggle to endure and prevail over misfortune and depression.

An estimated 20,000 mourners streamed through the Frank Campbell funeral home at 81st Street in New York to view the star in her glass-enclosed coffin. Millions more, alone or in small groups, wept while watching on TV or discussing it among themselves—including a small group at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.

How many of these men knew that Garland had given her heart to three gay men—her father and two of her ex-husbands, Vincente Minnelli and Mark Herron? No matter—in their view, her heartache somehow echoed their own. When police came to raid Stonewall, as they had done countless times before, the gin-and-grief-sodden habitués rioted, sparking the gay rights movement in the United States.

Her influence was, in this instance, incendiary, but not, I would argue, more than her talent. If I have to tell you about that, you’re probably a lost cause—though I suppose that, if you want to learn the full extent of it, renting out a DVD of her can’t hurt. Everybody knows about the full litany of her physical and mental problems.

But a good reason for writing this blog, I figure, is to inform (or remind) people of often-forgotten aspects of a life. Here are some items you might want to look at sometime showing a different side of Garland:

* All in Good Time, by veteran deejay Jonathan Schwartz, in which the son of Great American Songbook composer Arthur Schwartz offers up the briefest but most indelible of cameo appearances in his memoir by Garland, who visited the young boy upstairs in his room to sing him a lullaby: “Over the Rainbow”—“just for me,” Schwartz writes.


* Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, an acclaimed 2001 TV movie featuring a touching Tammy Blanchard as the young Garland and Judy Davis, in an all-stops-out performance, as the older, pill-popping, eternal-comeback entertainment powerhouse.


* American Masters: Judy Garland—By Myself, a PBS documentary featuring recorded commentary on her life, made for a projected memoir that never came to pass, by none other than Garland herself.


A YouTube snippet which demonstrates one of the oft-forgotten aspects of Garland’s career—her tremendous sense of humor. (In this case, she relates how a moth flew into her moth during an outdoor performance of “Over the Rainbow.”)

No comments: