GARLAND, Judy

(b. 10 June 1922 in Grand Rapids, Minnesota; d. 22 June 1969 in London, England), teenage star and singing sensation during Hollywood's Golden Age who began the 1960s thrilling audiences at London's Palladium and New York City's Carnegie Hall and ended the decade the victim of a drug overdose.

Garland, born Frances Ethel Gumm, was the youngest of the three singing Gumm Sisters and debuted at the age of two and a half years on the vaudeville stage owned by her father, Frank Avent Gumm, and accompanied on the piano by her mother, Ethel Marian Milne Gumm. Allegations of sexual misconduct involving Garland's father and a minor forced the family to flee Grand Rapids in 1926 for southern California. Ethel nurtured her daughters' careers in Los Angeles, while Frank managed the Valley Theater in Lancaster. In 1931 the Gumm Sisters appeared at the Ebell Theater in the show Stars of Tomorrow, and the nine-yearold Garland stole the show. Her rich, commanding voice and stage savvy impressed the comedian George Jessel at Chicago's Oriental Theater in 1934, where he first introduced the act as the Garland Sisters. Garland chose her first name after the title of a popular Hoagy Carmichael song.

The sisters were signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) to appear briefly in a star-studded Technicolor short film, La Fiesta de Santa Barbara (1935). Roger Edens, a studio musician, persuaded the studio chief Louis B. Mayer to sign Garland to a seven-year contract on 27 September 1935. The starting salary was $100 a week. The excitement of this event was shattered by the news of the sudden death of Garland's doting father. The fourteen-year-old Garland dazzled audiences opposite the musical hopeful Deanna Durbin in the MGM short film Every Sunday (1936) but was disappointing in a supporting role in Twentieth Century–Fox's Pigskin Parade (1936), her first feature. A bit part in which she sang Edens's tune "Dear Mr. Gable" was a showstopper in MGM's Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937) and led to a recording contract at Decca Records. In 1937 Garland graduated from Bancroft Junior High School and enrolled in University High School in Los Angeles.

MGM had difficulty casting the plump, plain-looking teenager. Thoroughbreds Don't Cry (1937), Everybody Sing (1938), Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), and Listen, Darling (1938) were unremarkable movies. Garland, however, caught the break of her career when Fox would not release the child star Shirley Temple to appear as Dorothy in MGM's long-awaited Wizard of Oz (1939), and Garland was cast instead. The result was a consummate classic that catapulted Garland and her wistfully hopeful rendition of "Over the Rainbow" into box-office heaven. Garland received a special miniature Oscar in 1940 for her role in the film.

Garland's remaining decade at MGM enlarged her star power while covering her descent into drugs and depression. She was taking amphetamines to help regulate her weight and energize her through a grueling schedule and barbiturates to help her sleep. She teamed with Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms (1939), Strike Up the Band (1940), Babes on Broadway (1941), and Girl Crazy (1943), all fan favorites. By the time she was twenty-one she had married (on 28 July 1941) and divorced composer-arranger David Rose, had an abortion, begun using barbiturates and amphetamines, and started seeing a psychiatrist. The studio kept Garland's troubles private. For Me and My Gal (1942) introduced Garland's friend Gene Kelly to movie audiences, and the moneymaker Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) introduced Garland to her second husband, the film's director, Vincente Minnelli. They married on 15 June 1945. Their daughter Liza, who became a singer and a star on stage and screen, was born 12 March 1946.

MGM reluctantly tolerated Garland's chronic absences from work, because films like The Harvey Girls (1946) and Easter Parade (1948) made the studio millions. By 1950 the cash-strapped studio suspended Garland when her behavior pushed Annie Get Your Gun well over budget. A well-publicized suicide attempt followed. Her triumph at the London Palladium in April 1951 launched a series of successful comebacks. Garland divorced Minnelli in March 1951 and married her business manager, Sid Luft, on 8 June 1952. They had two children. Garland was nominated for an Academy Award for her bravura performance in A Star Is Born (1954), whose plot paralleled her stormy life. Her failure to win an Oscar only increased the devotion of her adoring fans.

The 1960s opened hopefully for the thirty-eight-yearold star. She had recovered from health problems that had virtually turned her into a recluse. Knockout performances at the Palladium in London in the fall of 1960 and at New York City's Carnegie Hall in April 1961 followed. The double album, Judy at Carnegie Hall, sold two million copies and won her five Grammys, including one for album of the year. An Oscar-nominated dramatic role as a supporting actress in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) led to leads in A Child Is Waiting (1963) and her final film, I Could Go On Singing (1963). The Judy Garland Show, airing in twenty-six episodes from 29 September 1963 to 30 March 1964 opposite the western hit Bonanza, was a critical success and had good ratings but was not renewed for a second season. Guest appearances by Gene Kelly, Lena Horne, Mickey Rooney, Jane Powell, Peter Lawford, Donald O'Connor, and others fondly recalled Garland's days in Hollywood. Her work on the show with the singers Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Nat ("King") Cole, Peggy Lee, Vic Damone, and Ethel Merman showed that she was without peer as a vocalist. Most memorable were her one-woman shows, where she would sing "Born in a Trunk," "The Man That Got Away," "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby," "The Trolley Song," the inevitable "Over the Rainbow," and her personal favorite, "Get Happy."

Garland hoped that the television series would provide her with financial security. She had made more than $8 million in thirty years in show business, but she had entrusted it to business managers who had placed her $1 million in debt. Throughout the 1960s headlines chronicled Garland's cyclical dramas of despair and redemption. Australians jeered her off a Melbourne stage in May 1964 after she arrived an hour late. Days later she was reported to be near death, suffering from pleurisy and chronic hepatitis. In July of that year she was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in London after cutting her wrists. Three hours after her release "against doctors' orders," she followed the Beatles onto the stage of the Palladium at a charity show, where she "brought down the house" by softly singing "Over the Rainbow" before belting out "Swanee." She had the audience "on its feet, cheering, stamping, shouting and crying." Her 8 November 1964 appearance with her daughter Liza at the Palladium was a triumph for both singers.

Garland's divorce proceedings against Luft, finalized on 20 May 1965, were protracted, public, and acrimonious. In a July 1965 concert ten thousand fans packed the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York City, an assembly that the New York Times described as "one of the most unusual cults in show business." Even though Garland's voice was "just a memory" and was often off pitch, her fans were unbridled in their devotion. Garland might forget the lyrics, but her fans knew the old, familiar songs better than she did. When her once vivid voice displayed signs of weakness, the vulnerability made the performance all the more endearing.

On 14 November 1965 Garland married her traveling companion, Mark Herron, in Las Vegas. They divorced on 11 April 1967, when Garland told a judge she had been beaten repeatedly in Herron's drunken brawls. She was to have appeared in the 1967 potboiler Valley of the Dolls but was fired when she failed to appear on the set. Garland was in court again in April 1968 charging that her twenty-nine-year-old boyfriend, Thomas Green, had pawned two of her diamond rings while she was hospitalized. Charges were dismissed. Two months later she had to be hospitalized again after falling off a stage at the Garden State Arts Center in suburban New Jersey. In November she was hospitalized with blood poisoning. For much of this time Garland was virtually homeless, living with friends or admirers and trying to find club work at $5,000 a night while fending off creditors.

On 9 January 1969 Garland married for a fifth and final time. Mickey Deans, a discotheque manager, was with her that June in their London flat when Garland succumbed to what police and a coroner later ruled was an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. She was forty-seven years old and $4 million in debt. More than twenty thousand people waited hours to view the body when it was flown back to New York City. On Madison Avenue crowds surged through barricades for a last glimpse of what little remained of their idol. Several hundred more had to be escorted away by police when the casket was placed in a crypt at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Obituary writers carefully chronicled the enormous talent and painful vulnerability of Garland's life but could hardly have anticipated the widening affection of her many fans in the years after her death.

Materials on Garland's career are in the Performing Arts Research Center at the New York City Public Library. Biographies include Al DiOrio, Jr., Little Girl Lost: The Life and Hard Times of Judy Garland (1974); Anne Edwards, Judy Garland: A Biography (1975); Christopher Finch, Rainbow: The Stormy Life of Judy Garland (1975); Gerold Frank, Judy (1975); Lorna Smith, Judy, with Love: The Story of Miss Show Business (1975); Thomas J. Watson and Bill Chapman, Judy: Portrait of an American Legend (1986); John Fricke, Judy Garland, World's Greatest Entertainer (1992); David Shipman, Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (1993); Sheridan Morley and Ruth Leon, Judy Garland: Beyond the Rainbow (1999); Lorna Luft, Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (1999); and Gerald Clarke, Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland (2000). Joe Morella and Edward Z. Epstein, Judy: The Films and Career of Judy Garland (1969), and James Juneau, Judy Garland (1974), are two filmographies of Garland's screen work. Emily R. Coleman, The Complete Judy Garland: The Ultimate Guide to Her Career in Films, Records, Concerts, Radio and Television, 1935–1969 (1990), and Scott Schechter, Judy Garland: The Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Legend (2002), summarize Garland's career in show business. Mickey Deans and Ann Pinchot, Weep No More, My Lady (1972), self-indulgently summarizes Garland's brief marriage to her fifth husband. Vincente Minnelli frankly recounts his troubled marriage to Garland in I Remember It Well (1974). Garland's relationship to her daughter Liza Minnelli is the subject of James Spada, Judy and Liza (1983). Garland's childhood and early career is chronicled in David Dahl and Barry Kehoe, Young Judy (1975). Aljean Harmetz remembers Garland's classic work in The Making of the Wizard of Oz (1977). Coyne Steve Sanders analyzes Garland on 1960s television with Rainbow's End: The Judy Garland Show (1990). Mel Torme's troubled telling of his work on that show appears in The Other Side of the Rainbow: With Judy Garland on the Dawn Patrol (1970). Edward R. Pardella has produced The Judy Garland Collector's Guide (1999) for Garland fans. Articles include life and career profiles in Current Biography (1941) and (1952); James Robert Parish and Ronald L. Bowers, "Judy Garland," in The MGM Stock Company: The Golden Era (1973); Ernest A. McKay, "Judy Garland," Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 8 (1988); Wade Jennings, "The Star as Cultural Icon," in J. P. Telotte, ed., The Cultural Film Experience: Beyond All Reason (1991); and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "On Kiri Te Kanawa, Judy Garland, and the Cultural Industry," in James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger, eds., Modernity and Mass Culture (1991). An obituary is in the New York Times (23 June 1969).

Bruce J. Evensen