Judy Garland on Judy Garland (2 page)

I am indebted to my exceptional and thorough editor Yuval Taylor, who felt this title warranted a place amongst the fine titles already in the Musicians in Their Own Words series. I also wish to express my thanks to Amelia Estrich, Mary Kravenas, and rest of the staff at Chicago Review Press for their encouragement and support throughout the production.

A number of individuals provided support at various stages throughout the project. Thanks to Rebekah Ankrom, Daniel Berghaus, Frank Bonito, Walter Briski Jr., Scott Brogan, Jeff Burger, Gerald Clarke, Steve Cox, Tom Early, Rick Ewigleben, Kyle Hall, Dean Hanvey, Sam Harris, Sam Irvin, Richard Tyler Jordan, Sara Jordan, Garry Kief and Stiletto Entertainment, Jeremy Kinser, Frank Labrador, Patrick Lillis (my Avedon angel), Steven Lippman, Chris May, Jeff Marquis, John Meyer, Jon Perdue, the Punchy Players, Michael Riedel, Tom Santopietro, Hillary Banks Self, Michael Siewert, Anthony Slide, Buzz Stephens, Chris Tassin, Donna Trammell, and Scott Zone. An extra special thanks to Laura Adam and Alex Williams for their assistance in transcribing several important radio and television interviews.

I am grateful to Gary Horrocks and the International Judy Garland Club (est. 1963,
www.judygarlandclub.org
) for images supplied and quotes shared from
Judy GarlandâA Celebration
and
Rainbow Review.
I also wish to acknowledge the late Coyne Steven Sanders, author of
Rainbow's End: The Judy Garland Show,
whom I had the privilege of meeting in Chicago just weeks before his untimely death. Steve was genuinely interested
in the concept of this book and was a source of encouragement to me during its inception.

My appreciation also goes out to the following libraries and organizations, and especially the librarians and representatives who offered such valuable assistance: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences / Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles Public Library, West Hollywood Public Library, Butler Library at Columbia University, University of North Texas Library, Southern Methodist University Library, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (specifically the Collections of Scott Schechter, Amanda Gee, and Charlotte Stevenson), the Richard Avedon Foundation, and the New-York Historical Society / Patricia D. Klingenstein Library. Additionally, I extend thanks to the various online communities of Judy fans, namely the Judy Garland Database, the Judy Garland Experience, the Judy Garland Message Board, and the Judy Room.

For their encouragement of my passion for exploration, research, and writing, I acknowledge my family. First, thanks to my parents and sister for putting up with me during those formative years filled with collecting and conventions. And to those I have the honor and privilege of coming home to at the end of each day: Jaime Rodriguez, my patient and reassuring partner, spent many late-night hours typing and reading aloud to me for this project, while daughters Camryn and Kaylee continually serve as an inspiring, captive audience. Because of them, there really is no place like home.

PREFACE

“A book for which publishers have been angling for years has been signed and sealed,” proclaimed Random House in a press release dated January 4, 1960. “We expect that
The Judy Garland Story
will be our ACT ONE for 1960,” added publisher Bennett Cerf.
*
What promised to be the book deal of the decade was personally negotiated by Cerf during a visit to Judy Garland's room at Manhattan's Doctors Hospital, where she spent seven weeks near the end of 1959.

“Those great, hypnotic brown eyes of hers were not there.” recalled Judy's ghostwriter Freddie Finklehoffe, a longtime friend and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scenarist. “Just little dark spots, sunken in the fat and bloat of her face. Those famous legs, the ankles of a gazelle, were fat and heavy and she had trouble getting into her shoesâ¦. [The doctors] announced the verdict. Sid [Luft] told me. âHepatitis and very bad.' That's what he told Judy. But he was lying to her as he lied to me. She had cirrhosis of the liverâand very bad.” With physicians prescribing retirement and saying she'd forever be a “semi-invalid,” the thirty-seven-year-old's career seemed at its end.

It has been said that husband Sid Luft pitched Judy's autobiography to Bennett Cerf as soon as he realized his wife would not be fit to return to performing and touring anytime soon, and maybe never. Upon signing the book deal with Random House, Judy was reportedly paid an advance in the amount of $35,000. Cerf later recalled an advance of $20,000 to be
split with Finklehoffe. Either way, Judy never saw a dime. Some say it was later that same day that Sid bet and lost the entire sum at the horse races.

“There have been a lot of stories written about me â¦ some of them fantastically distorted,” Judy announced in a press statement given from her hospital bed. “This book is going to set the record straight.” Still terribly ill, she was discharged on January 5, 1960, and returned to Los Angeles to begin what promised to be a lengthy recuperation period. Recalling the incident a year later, Judy said: “You want to know something funny? I didn't care. All I cared about was that my children needed me. Suddenly the pressure was off. I just laid there, watched TV, read novels, and thought, no more pills ever, now I'm free. I'll find a way to be happy.”
*

Judy may have lost the ability to sing, but it was during this time that she found another voice. Working closely with Finklehoffe, she recorded a number of stories and reminiscences on audiotape. Random House execs expected a quick turnaround, but on September 26, 1960, Cerf stated in a letter published in the
Garland Gazette,
a fan club journal, that he'd “not yet seen one line of manuscript of the Judy Garland autobiography.”

In an effort to appease the publisher, Finklehoffe delivered sixty-five pages of rough draft, but the project with Random House soon fizzled as Judy made a full recovery, abandoned the book, and returned to work. According to Cerf, Finklehoffe “vanished into thin air. I hoarded those pages, and every once in a while, Judy would say, âI'm really going to finish that, you know.' She felt very guilty about it. She's a good girl. She doesn't mean to do unforgivable things, but she is absolutely discombobulated between liquor and pills.” Random House eventually reclaimed its advance when it sold Judy's story to
McCall's
and Finklehoffe's pages came together to create a two-part feature for the magazine in 1964. “We got back our money and a little bit more,” Cerf said. “But there's no book.”

It was an angry, bitter, and obviously overmedicated Judy who revisited the idea of an autobiography during the spring of 1964, following the cancellation of her CBS television series. “I'm going to talk,” she demanded. “And somebody's going to print this. Even if I have to put up the money myself, I'll print it in a little book â¦ maybe somebody will
read it â¦ and maybe somebody will
learn
a little of the truth of this so-called legend! That's what I'm supposed to be, a legend. Judy Garland. Alright, then read about her. Read the
truth,
though!”

Again, during the summer of 1966, Judy took time to record more of her memories and thoughts to tape. “I think that I have every right to write a book,” she said. “I think I'm interesting. I have perspective about me.” The earliest recordings made during this period were thoughtful and honest, but quickly took on a more jaded and resentful tone. “I'd like to expose a lot of people who deserve it [â¦] and I'd also like a few questions answered â¦ questions that I'm sure I'll find my own answers to by talking about things that I've buried within myself too longâ¦.
Why? Why
did the agents do this?
Why
did M-G-M behave the way they did?
Why
have the newspapers printed such idiotic and messy stories?
Why
was I not allowed to talk?
Why
was I overworked?
Why
was I â¦ I think I know
why.
I just don't think anybody's ever taken the time to listen.”

At times Judy was clearly in a narcotized state and even became enraged. She took to screaming and shouting into the recorder, saying, “I'm
not
something you wind up and put on the stage that sings Carnegie Hall album and you put her in the closet [â¦] I'm gonna write a book, and I'm gonna talk, because I can do something besides sing, you know. I don't always have to sing a song. There is something besides âThe Man That Got Away' or âOver the Rainbow' or âThe Trolley Song.' There's a
woman.
There are three children. There's me! There's a lot of
life
going here. I wanted to believe and I tried my
damndest
to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and I
couldn't. SO WHAT!”

Judy phoned Cerf again in 1966, but her pleas for another book deal were not met with any sort of monetary advance from the publisher as she hoped. “I've always loved Judy Garland,” Cerf said the following year. “She is an irresistible little womanâbut one of the most tragic in the world. I'm sure that one day she's going to do herself in.”
*

That would be Judy's last effort to tell her own story. Discouraged, but easily distracted, she put the elusive book project back on the shelf. “When you have lived the life I've lived,” she explained in 1967, “when you've loved and suffered, and been madly happy and desperately sadâ
well, that's when you realize you'll never be able to set it all down. Maybe you'd rather die first.”
*

For all the chaotic tirades, there were moments of passion and tenderness, too, with Judy seeming genuinely determined and eager to tell her story. “I can guarantee you,” she said in her final tapes, “even if I have to form a new publishing company and write this book, it's going to be one hell of a greatâeverlastingly greatâbook with humor, tears, fun, emotion, and love.” She even toyed with ideas for a book title. She wittily told daughter Liza Minnelli her story would be titled
Ho-Hum: My Life,
and revealed to others that it might be called simply
Judy,
or
So Far So Good,
or
And Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Judy Garland.

“How's your autobiography coming?” Judy was asked in 1968. “It's been quite a packed-in life,” she answered. “It will take years.”
â
Fueled by episodes of despair, stalled in moments of hope, Judy's efforts to compose an autobiography were inadequate and never resulted in much more than a few tapes of recorded rants and reminiscences. She abandoned her work repeatedly, and even Finklehoffe's sixty-five-page manuscript for Random House never amounted to much more than a disarranged transcription of the tapes the two made in 1960. With all such ventures incomplete, stalled, or suspended by the time of her death in 1969, it seemed as though Judy's telling of her life story would never come to fruitionâuntil now.

Judy Garland on Judy Garland
is the closest we will likely come to experiencing and exploring the legend's abandoned autobiography. Collecting and presenting many of Judy's most important interviews and encounters that took place between 1935 and 1969, this work opens with her first radio appearance under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and concludes with her last known interview, one taped for Radio Denmark just months before her death. Selections appear in chronological order and are arranged by decade. Most fall into one of two categories: The M-G-M Years (those published under the influence of the studio publicity machine in the 1930s and 1940s), and the Concert Years (from the 1950s and 1960s, with Judy on her own, telling
her
version of events, and
attempting to set the record straight). Given that it was Judy's most vocal period, the 1960s section occupies nearly half of this book's pages.

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