The Gay Metropolis (37 page)

“I believe in doing what I can, crying when I must, laughing when I choose.” That was the most apt Noel Coward lyric she ever sang. When she chose to, this one-hundred-pound, five-foot-tall dynamo could charm anyone. Dirk Bogarde thought she was “without doubt … the funniest woman I have ever met.” She could also display a brutal self-regard: “I have a voice that hurts people when they think they want to be hurt. That's all,” she told Bogarde. After Peter Lawford had introduced her to his brother-in-law Jack Kennedy, she campaigned for the future president among American troops in Germany in i960; afterward, the president took her calls in the White House whenever she needed cheering up. To cheer
him
up, at the end of every conversation, JFK always asked her to sing the last eight bars of “Over the Rainbow.” Her daughter Lisa Minnelli listened with astonishment whenever that happened.

Kennedy and Garland had both lived like figures from the sixties long before the decade began. “All my life I've done everything to excess”: that was her motto, and her method. It was also one reason why so many gay men identified with her. “There was a vulnerability there that anyone could appreciate,” said Minnelli. “If you were going through any kind of pain, you had company when you watched my mother.”

Garland loved men—and women—of all persuasions. She had five husbands, three children, and frequent lesbian affairs; she also got a special kick out of seducing gay and bisexual men. One of those was Tyrone
Power, with whom she had a torrid affair during World War II. Her androgynous looks made her look like the “girl and boy next door,” Margo Jefferson observed. “She is at bottom a sort of early-twentieth-century kid,” said the critic Harold Clurman. “But the marks of the big city wounds are on her.”

Like many of her most devoted fans, Garland was a beguiling outlaw, someone who broke all the rules but still managed to make almost everyone love her. She was born Frances Ethel Gumm on June 10,1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Gumm made her debut two and a half years later singing a chorus of “Jingle Bells” on the stage of New Grand Theatre in her hometown. From that moment on, her fierce stage mother was certain that she would be a star. Twelve years later, daughter's talent and mother's determination merged to land her a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. For the next seventeen years, she “worked, slept, ate, appeared in public, dated, married and divorced” at Louis B. Mayer's command, according to her biographer Anne Edwards. But she always denied a persistent rumor that she had been a victim of Mayer's weakness for very young girls before she reached her fifteenth birthday.

In 1939 she tapped her ruby slippers together and planted herself inside the hearts of millions of Americans of all ages. “I sort of grew up with Judy Garland,” said Walter Clemons, who saw
The Wizard of Oz
when he was ten. “Judy Garland was a very big deal for my generation.” Garland thought, “The American people put their arms around me when I was a child performer, and they've kept them there—even when I was in trouble.” It was during the making of
Oz
that her lifelong addiction to uppers and downers began; the studio had provided her with them. “I don't seem to either get up or go to sleep without them anymore,” she explained to Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West), who had inquired about the source of the seventeen-year-old girl's limitless energy. For the rest of her life, her prodigious ingestion of these insidious pills fueled the psychodrama in which she was the permanent star.

Garland made a halfhearted attempt at suicide in 1947, slitting her wrist with a broken tumbler, but her mother was able to stem the bleeding with a Band-Aid. Even so, the actress was bundled off to her first sanitarium. Two years later she was given shock treatments to cure her addiction. Their effects wore off quickly. Then there was another suicide attempt, and she was fired from the movie set of
Annie Get Your Gun.
In 1950 and 1952, she tried to cut her throat; in 1957, it was her wrist again. Each time a new incident was reported by the tabloids, fanatical gay fans wore Band-Aids on their own wrists in solidarity. At the end of 1959, her
drinking and drug taking forced her into Doctor's Hospital in Manhattan with a bloated liver four times its normal size. She was also fifty pounds overweight—150 percent of her usual self. Seven weeks later, she had lost thirty pounds, but she left the hospital in a wheelchair and was told that she would always be a semi-invalid. As usual, her doctors had underestimated her.

“I think she beat on life,” said Arthur Laurents. “Like most of those divas, she was both sides of the coin. They cling to you and they suck the blood out of you. She was a tough customer.”

What redeemed Garland was her gigantic talent—a huge voice out of a compact body—and the ability to make every note sound effortless, just when everyone was certain the game was over. “She ate up music like a vacuum cleaner,” said the songwriter and producer Saul Chaplin. The director Stanley Kramer believed that with every performance, she declared, “Here is my heart, break it.”

Laurents found Garland much more exciting to watch than Barbra Streisand “because with Streisand you know nothing will go wrong. She may be in the flesh, but you're seeing film—and literally, too: everybody is looking back over their shoulders at the TelePrompters. Judy Garland was always naked: ‘Here I am. Throw me your slings and arrows or give me your hearts!'”

To Judy Barnett, a singer-songwriter who came of age just as Garland's career was ending, “the range of her talent was extraordinary—she could act, she could dance, she could sing. The gay community was just one facet of a much broader audience. After all, this woman was a star from the time she was fourteen until she died.”

By the winter of 1961, the wheelchair had long since been thrown away and Garland had begun her umpteenth comeback—a fourteen-city tour that opened in Dallas. Stanley Kramer was considering casting her in a small part in
Judgment at Nuremberg,
so he traveled to Texas to see her perform. There he discovered that her legendary connection to her audience remained entirely intact. “I saw staid citizens acting like bobby-soxers at an Elvis Presley show,” said Kramer. “There's nobody in the entertainment world today, actor or singer, who can run the complete range of emotions, from utter pathos to power … the way she can.” Garland's cameo was a triumph. “I could never cheat on a performance, or coast through,” Garland explained, because “my emotions are involved.” In April 1961, she performed at Constitution Hall in Washington, and the president invited her for a quick visit to the White House.

The tour reached its climax in Manhattan on April 23. She arrived at
her Carnegie Hall dressing room at 5:00
P.M
. For the next three and a half hours, she suffered from a paralyzing stage fright, insisting that she could not possibly perform that evening. One reason for her nervousness was the addition of a new number, the song “San Francisco,” which she had never sung in public before. By 8:30, Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards, Henry Fonda, Rock Hudson, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Tony Perkins, Hedda Hopper, Richard Burton, Carol Channing, Spencer Tracy, Arthur Schwartz, Myrna Loy, Mike Nichols, Harold Arlen, Rex Reed, and 3,149 other fans were all waiting inside the auditorium, wondering whether she would ever appear at all. Outside, scalpers were offering tickets for an astonishing $500 apiece.

Garland finally opened the show with “When You're Smiling (the Whole World Smiles with You),” another one of her ironic trademarks. Then she proceeded to give a performance that many witnesses still describe as the most electrifying night in the history of show business.

Rex Reed had just arrived in New York City. He was only an “office boy in some publicity office,” but he still managed to wangle a ticket. Seeing Judy Garland was “the thing I wanted to do all my life.” He had a great seat: right next to Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. “I think it was probably the greatest experience I've ever had in the theater,” said Reed. “I had never seen that much love given to a performer.” Jackson and Wallach didn't know Reed, but they grabbed him anyway: “They were holding on to each other, and Tony Perkins was right in front of me; and Bernstein. … It wasn't just the cult who supported her. This was … really an audience of hard-nosed professional critics.”

A lilting “San Francisco” came out as if it had always been part of her repertoire. But after forty minutes she was drenched. “I don't know why it is that I can't perspire,” she complained from the stage. “I just sweat. It's so unladylike.” But after the intermission she was changed, blow-dried, and ready to go all over again. “Well, you know, I'm like [the prizefighter] Rocky Graziano,” she explained backstage.

A joyous “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” brought her another ovation. Then she performed her trademark, which was also her covenant. This time “Over the Rainbow” was sung with an eerie combination of mother and child. She followed with an effortless “Swanee” and a glittering “After You've Gone.”

It was past 10:30, and Garland had already sung twenty-seven songs. “You really want more?” she asked. “Aren't you tired?”

“NOOOOOOOO!” the audience roared back, and she finally ended with “Chicago.”

Judith Crist saw tears running down Leonard Bernstein's face, and a usually impassive Henry Fonda was shouting “Bravo!” Garland said, “I love you very much! Good night! God bless!” But nobody wanted to leave.

“It was absolute pandemonium,” Crist reported. “The entire audience ran to the footlights with their hands in the air, screaming ‘Judy! Judy!' And she touched all the hands she could. Then Rock Hudson lifted [Garland's children] Lorna and little Joey on the stage, and she hugged them and leaned down to kiss Liza, who was in the front row, and the audience screamed for more. … The children were touching people's hands and it was like a sea.” Rex Reed thought, “It was the greatest triumph in anyone's life.” It was also the elegy for an era.

SEVEN YEARS
later, America had become a different country altogether. John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had all been murdered, and the kind of music that Judy Garland was famous for had been pushed off center stage by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, the Supremes—and scores of other artists embraced by a new generation of music lovers.

In 1968, a dazzling twenty-year-old New Yorker named Laura Nyro proved just how much the world had changed when she released
Eli and the Thirteenth Confession,
a brilliant concept album of “bright gospel rock,” in which all the songs fit together to tell a story. None of them sounded anything like any pop record of the past. Nyro's fans included gay men, lesbians, and (in 1968) a much larger group of the young and the hip. Her compositions celebrated everything that was different and original about the new decade. And they explicitly enumerated the joys of cocaine and bisexuality—the guilty pleasures that performers from Garland's generation had only been able to enjoy in secret.

By the end of 1968, Garland had entered her final decline. At a Christmas party at Arthur, Garland started a long conversation with the night manager, Mickey Deans, who was already an acquaintance. On an impulse, Garland and Deans told the gossip columnist Earl Wilson that evening that they were getting married. Three months later, the wedding actually occurred at the Chelsea registry office in London. Three months after that, in London, on June 21,1969, Garland took yet another overdose of barbiturates. But this time she never woke up. She was forty-seven. She was also $4 million in debt.

“The greatest shock about her death was that there was no shock,” Vincent Canby wrote in the
Times.
Her body was flown back to New York City. Liza Minnelli remembered that her mother had told her to get Gene
Hibbs, a famous makeup man, to do her face for her funeral, but Hibbs was unavailable, so Minnelli got Charles Schram instead, the man who had done her mother's face for
The Wizard of Oz.
Frank Sinatra wanted to pay for the funeral but Minnelli declined his offer. When she viewed the coffin, she was sure she could hear her mother's voice. “Don't I look just beautiful?” Garland seemed to ask. “Goddamn you do!” Minnelli answered back out loud. For a day and a night, more than twenty thousand fans waited in the fierce summer heat to pay their last respects to Garland in a white, glass-covered coffin in the Frank Campbell funeral chapel on the East Side. Manhattan had seen nothing like it since 1926, when Valentino's death sparked riots, and his lying-in-state attracted a crowd eleven blocks long.

Minnelli requested that no one wear black to the funeral. James Mason began his eulogy at one o'clock on Friday, June 27, and it was broadcast into the street by loudspeakers for the thousands who were lined up outside 1076 Madison Avenue. When Mason was finished, the mourners sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the same song that Garland had insisted on singing on her CBS television program as a tribute to John Kennedy after his murder.
^*

NO ONE WILL
ever know for sure which was the most important reason for what happened next: the freshness in their minds of Judy Garland's funeral, or the example of all the previous rebellions of the sixties—the civil rights revolution, the sexual revolution and the psychedelic revolution, each of which had punctured gaping holes in crumbling traditions of passivity, puritanism and bigotry. All that is certain is that twelve hours after Garland's funeral, a handful of New York City policemen began a routine raid of a gay Greenwich Village nightspot, and the drag queens, teenagers, lesbians, hippies—even the gay men in suits—behaved as no homosexual patrons had ever behaved before. Deputy Police Inspector Seymour Pine, who led the raiding party, would never forget it. “I had been in combat situations,” he said, but “there was never any time that I felt more scared than then. … You have no idea how close we came to killing somebody.”