Judy Garland

• 1. Introduction

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  Judy Garland was born Frances Ethel Gumm on the 10th of June 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, to a family that lived and breathed performance. Her parents were vaudevillians who ran a movie theater. Her first appearance on any stage came at the age of two, when she stepped out to sing a chorus of "Jingle Bells" at her father's Christmas show. Nobody in that Minnesota audience could have guessed they were watching the start of a four-decade career that would produce one of the most mythologized figures in American entertainment history.

  What made Garland so magnetic? How did a child star raised under the crushing machinery of Hollywood become the woman that Fred Astaire would later call "the greatest entertainer who ever lived"? And how do we square those performances of staggering power with the private suffering that ran alongside them for nearly every year of her adult life? Those are the questions this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. The Making of a Name

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  George Jessel first encountered the Gumm Sisters when they played Chicago's Oriental Theater with him in 1934. The surname Gumm, he noticed, drew laughter from the audience. He encouraged the trio to find something better. According to theater legend, their act was once erroneously billed as "The Glum Sisters" at a Chicago venue, which illustrated the problem vividly.

  Several competing stories attach themselves to the name Garland. One credits Jessel, who may have borrowed it from Carole Lombard's character Lily Garland in the film Twentieth Century, which was then playing at the Oriental. Another traces it to drama critic Robert Garland. Garland's daughter Lorna Luft said her mother chose the name after Jessel announced the trio "looked prettier than a garland of flowers." At a television premiere on the 29th of September 1954, Jessel stated on camera that he had named her, adding that no name could have hidden her talent anyway. A later telling, from when Jessel appeared on Garland's own television show in 1963, held that the word had simply stuck in his mind after he sent actress Judith Anderson a telegram containing it.

  The first name followed soon after. Frances changed it to Judy, drawn from a popular Hoagy Carmichael song. By late 1934 the Gumm Sisters had become the Garland Sisters, and the group broke up by August 1935 when the eldest sister flew to Reno to marry a musician.

• 3. The Studio and Its Costs

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  In September 1935, Louis B. Mayer asked songwriter Burton Lane to go to the Orpheum Theater in downtown Los Angeles and evaluate the Garland Sisters' act. A few days later, the thirteen-year-old Frances Garland and her father were brought to MGM Studios in Culver City for an impromptu audition. She performed "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart" and "Eli, Eli," a Yiddish song written in 1896 that had long circulated through vaudeville. The studio signed her immediately, apparently without a formal screen test.

  MGM did not know what to do with her. At 4 feet 11 inches, she was older than the typical child star but too young for adult roles. Studio chief Mayer called her his "little hunchback." She was dressed in plain or frilly juvenile costumes to reinforce a "girl-next-door" image, asked to wear removable caps on her teeth, and fitted with rubberized discs to reshape her nose. Charles Walters, who directed her in several films, noted that she attended school on the lot alongside Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Elizabeth Taylor, whom he called "real beauties." He believed the comparison had "a very damaging effect on her emotionally for a long time. I think it lasted forever, really."

  Garland and other young performers, including Mickey Rooney, were routinely prescribed amphetamines to sustain the pace of back-to-back productions and barbiturates to help them sleep. Garland later said this pattern created the addiction she struggled with for the rest of her life. The MGM commissary was instructed to serve her only chicken soup and black coffee when she ordered a regular meal. Rooney disputed the studio's culpability, but Garland herself believed MGM had stolen her youth. Despite successful films, awards, and a growing fan base, she required constant reassurance about her talent and appearance throughout her career.

• 4. Over the Rainbow

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  Shooting on The Wizard of Oz commenced on the 13th of October 1938, when Garland was sixteen. The production cost more than two million dollars. Garland was not the studio's first choice for Dorothy Gale. Producers Arthur Freed and Mervyn LeRoy had wanted her from the start, but studio chief Mayer first tried to borrow Shirley Temple from 20th Century Fox and was turned down. Deanna Durbin was then asked but was unavailable.

  For a time Garland wore a blonde wig for the part; Freed and LeRoy decided against it early in filming. Her blue gingham dress was chosen specifically because it blurred her figure, making her appear younger. Historians Jay Scarfone and William Stillman later clarified that despite claims to the contrary, Garland was an anti-smoker at the time and was allowed solid food; her diet was accompanied by swimming, hiking, tennis, and badminton with stunt double Bobbie Koshay.

  The film's estimated promotion costs reached four million dollars, and the revenue lost to discounted children's tickets meant The Wizard of Oz did not return a profit until its 1940s re-release. At the 1939 Academy Awards, Garland received the Academy Juvenile Award, only the fourth person ever to be presented with one. She named "Over the Rainbow" her favorite of all the songs she ever recorded and used an excerpt from it as her entrance music at concerts and television appearances for the rest of her career.

• 5. Comebacks and Concert Halls

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  After fifteen years at MGM, Garland was dismissed from the studio on the 17th of June 1950, following repeated absences from the set of Royal Wedding. A second suicide attempt followed. Bing Crosby, knowing she was depressed and running out of money, invited her onto his radio show on the 11th of October 1950, the first broadcast of the new season. An eyewitness described her standing in the wings, trembling, telling Crosby she could not go out because people would be looking for the scars. Crosby walked onstage and asked the audience to give their love to a friend who had been through a rough time. Garland followed, and the house responded with an ovation.

  She made eight appearances during the 1950-51 season of The Bing Crosby-Chesterfield Show. A four-month European tour to sold-out crowds followed. Her performances at the London Palladium in April 1951 lasted four weeks and produced what the Palladium manager called the loudest ovation he had ever heard. Garland told reporters afterward that she felt reborn. Her engagement at the Palace Theatre in Manhattan in October 1951 exceeded all previous records for the venue. She was awarded a Special Tony Award for her contribution to the revival of vaudeville.

  Her concert at Carnegie Hall on the 23rd of April 1961 is still cited by those present as one of the signal nights in show business. The resulting live album, Judy at Carnegie Hall, charted for 95 weeks on Billboard, including 13 weeks at number one, and was certified gold. It won four Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, making Garland the first woman to receive that award. That same year she became the first female recipient and youngest honoree of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award.

• 6. Voice and Artistry

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  Tony Farrell of the Richmond Times-Dispatch described Garland as the "possessor of a deep, velvety contralto voice that could turn on a dime to belt out the high notes." Critics note that her range was comparatively small, but she could shift between female and male-sounding timbres with little effort. From an early age she had been billed as "the little girl with the leather lungs," a label she admitted she found humiliating; she would have preferred to be known as a pretty or nice little girl. George Jessel recalled that at only twelve years old, her voice already sounded like "a woman with a heart that had been hurt."

  Garland always insisted her talent was innate, telling interviewers: "Nobody ever taught me what to do onstage." Her more jubilant, belted performances drew comparisons to Sophie Tucker, Ethel Merman, and Al Jolson. Opera singer Maria Callas once said Garland possessed "the most superb voice she had ever heard." Aretha Franklin named her "one of the greatest singers there was." Bing Crosby said "no other singer could be compared to her" when she was rested.

  By the time she performed at Carnegie Hall in 1961, observers noted her voice, while still rich with emotion, had begun to carry the weight of years of hard living. The essay accompanying the live record's entry in the National Recording Registry observed that while her voice was still strong, it had gained a bit of heft and wear. Biographer Jonathan Riggs identified a paradoxical combination of fragility and resilience as her vocal signature, marked by pronounced enunciation and a projection of vulnerability through both her singing and her body language. For her part, Garland said that regardless of the condition of her voice, she always felt most safe while performing onstage.

• 7. Politics and Conviction

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  In April 1944, Garland escorted Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis Sr. to a reception held at the home of Ira Gershwin. Davis was the first Black general and highest-ranking Black officer in the U.S. military, and he was in Los Angeles for the premiere of Frank Capra's documentary about Black Americans serving in World War II.

  In September 1947, Garland joined the Committee for the First Amendment, a group of Hollywood figures formed to defend the Hollywood Ten during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Other members included Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Dorothy Dandridge, Katharine Hepburn, and Gene Kelly. On the 26th of October 1947, Garland took part in a radio broadcast called Hollywood Fights Back, urging listeners: "Before every free conscience in America is subpoenaed, please speak up! Say your piece! Write your congressman a letter."

  On the 28th of August 1963, Garland joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom alongside James Garner, Josephine Baker, Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Paul Newman, Rita Moreno, and Sammy Davis Jr. Two weeks earlier she had been photographed in Los Angeles with Eartha Kitt, Marlon Brando, and Charlton Heston as they planned their participation. On the 16th of September 1963, Garland held a press conference with her daughter Liza Minnelli and others to protest the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which had killed four young Black girls the previous day.

• 8. The Final Years

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  By early 1969, Garland's health had deteriorated significantly, yet she completed a five-week run of performances at the Talk of the Town nightclub in London, earning £2,500 per week. Her last concert appearance took place in Copenhagen in March of that year. On the 15th of March 1969, she married her fifth and final husband, nightclub manager Mickey Deans, at Chelsea Register Office in London.

  On the 22nd of June 1969, Deans found Garland dead in the bathroom of her rented house on Cadogan Lane in Belgravia, London. She was 47 years old. Coroner Gavin Thurston determined that the cause of death was an accidental self-overdosage of barbiturates; her blood contained the equivalent of ten 1.5-grain Seconal capsules. Thurston stressed the overdose had been unintentional. Garland's autopsy showed no drug residue in the stomach, indicating the drug had been ingested over a long period rather than in a single dose.

  An estimated 20,000 people lined up at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in Manhattan to pay their respects, and the chapel remained open all night to accommodate them. Her co-star James Mason delivered the eulogy: "Judy's great gift was that she could wring tears out of hearts of rock... She gave so richly and so generously, that there was no currency in which to repay her." Garland's Wizard of Oz co-star Ray Bolger offered a simpler verdict at the same service: "She just plain wore out." In January 2017, at the request of her children, her remains were moved from Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, to Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.