Judy Garland
Judy Garland (born Frances Ethel Gumm; June 10, 1922 – June 22, 1969) was an American actress and singer. She attained international stardom and critical acclaim: as an actress in both musical and dramatic roles; as a recording artist; and on the concert stage. Renowned for her versatility, she received a Golden Globe Award, a Special Tony Award and was one of twelve in history to receive an Academy Juvenile Award.[1][2][3] Garland won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for her 1961 live recording, Judy at Carnegie Hall; she was the first woman to win that award.[4]
Judy Garland
- Actress
- singer
- dancer
- vaudevillian
1924–1969
Throughout her career she recorded and introduced numerous songs including "Over the Rainbow", which became her signature song, the Christmas classic "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and Saint Patrick's Day anthem "It's a Great Day for the Irish".
Garland began performing as a child, with her two older sisters, in a vaudeville group "The Gumm Sisters," and was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a teenager. She appeared in more than two dozen films for MGM, including The Wizard of Oz (1939), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Harvey Girls (1946), Easter Parade (1948), and Summer Stock (1950). Garland was a frequent on-screen partner of both Mickey Rooney and Gene Kelly and regularly collaborated with director Vincente Minnelli, her second husband. In 1950, after 15 years with MGM, she was released from her contract with the studio amid a series of personal struggles that prevented her from fulfilling the terms of her contract.
Although her film career became intermittent thereafter, two of Garland's most critically acclaimed roles came later in her career: she received Academy Award nominations for her performances in the musical drama A Star Is Born (1954) and the courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). She also made concert appearances that attracted record-breaking audience sizes, released eight studio albums and hosted her own Emmy-nominated television series, The Judy Garland Show (1963–1964). At age 39, Garland became the youngest (and first female) recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in the film industry.
Garland struggled in her personal life from an early age. The pressures of early stardom affected her physical and mental health from the time she was a teenager; her self-image was influenced by constant criticism from film executives who believed that she was physically unattractive and who manipulated her onscreen physical appearance.[5] She had financial troubles, often owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. Throughout her adulthood, she struggled with substance use disorder involving both drugs and alcohol; she died from an accidental barbiturate overdose in 1969, at age 47.
In 1997, Garland was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Several of her recordings have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 1999 the American Film Institute ranked her as the eighth-greatest female screen legend of classic Hollywood cinema.[6]
Political views[edit]
Garland was a life-long and active Democrat. During her lifetime, she was a member of the Hollywood Democratic committee and a financial and moral supporter of various causes, including the Civil Rights Movement. She donated money to the campaigns of Democratic presidential candidates Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson II, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace.[121][122][123][124]
In April 1944, Garland escorted Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis Sr. to a reception honoring the general at the home of Ira Gershwin. Davis, the first Black general and highest-ranking Black officer in the U.S. military, 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 formed by Hollywood celebrities in support of the Hollywood Ten during the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives led by J. Parnell Thomas. HUAC was formed to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees and organizations suspected of having communist ties. The Committee for the First Amendment sought to protect the civil liberties of those accused.[125]
Other members included Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Dorothy Dandridge, John Garfield, Katharine Hepburn, Lena Horne, John Huston, Gene Kelly and Billy Wilder. Garland took part in recording an all-star radio broadcast on October 26, 1947, Hollywood Fights Back, during which she exhorted listeners to action: "Before every free conscience in America is subpoenaed, please speak up! Say your piece! Write your congressman a letter – air mail special. Let the Congress know what you think of its Un-American Committee."[125]
Garland was a friend of President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline Kennedy and she often vacationed in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. The house she stayed in during her vacations in Hyannis Port is known today as The Judy Garland House because of her association with the property.[126] Garland would call Kennedy weekly, often ending her phone calls by singing the first few lines of "Over the Rainbow".[126]
On August 28, 1963, Garland and other celebrities such as Josephine Baker, Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Paul Newman, Rita Moreno and Sammy Davis, Jr. took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a demonstration organized to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. She had been photographed by the press in Los Angeles earlier in the month alongside Eartha Kitt, Marlon Brando and Charlton Heston as they planned their participation in the march on the nation's capital.
On September 16, 1963, Garland – along with daughter Liza Minnelli, Carolyn Jones, June Allyson and Allyson's daughter Pam Powell – held a press conference to protest the recent bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that resulted in the death of four young African American girls. They expressed their shock and outrage at the attack and requested funds for the families of the victims. Pam Powell and Liza Minnelli both announced their intention to attend the funeral of the victims during the press conference.[127][128]
Death[edit]
Garland was found dead by her husband Mickey Deans in the bathroom of her rented house in Cadogan Lane, Belgravia, London on June 22, 1969 at the age of 47. At the inquest, Coroner Gavin Thurston stated that the cause of death was "an incautious self-overdosage" of barbiturates; her blood contained the equivalent of ten 1.5-grain (97 mg) Seconal capsules.[147] Thurston stressed that the overdose had been unintentional and no evidence suggested that she had intended to kill herself. Garland's autopsy showed no inflammation of her stomach lining and no drug residue in her stomach, which indicated that the drug had been ingested over a long period of time, rather than in a single dose. Her death certificate stated that her death was "accidental".[148] Supporting the accidental cause, Garland's physician noted that a prescription of 25 barbiturate pills was found by her bedside half-empty and another bottle of 100 barbiturate pills was still unopened.[149]
A British specialist who had attended Garland's autopsy stated that she had nevertheless been living on borrowed time owing to cirrhosis, although a second autopsy conducted later reported no evidence of alcoholism or cirrhosis.[150][151] Her Wizard of Oz co-star Ray Bolger commented at her funeral, "She just plain wore out."[152]
After Garland's body had been embalmed and clothed in the same gray, silk gown she wore at her wedding to Deans, Deans traveled with her remains to New York City on June 26, 1969, where an estimated 20,000 people lined up to pay their respects at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in Manhattan, which remained open all night long to accommodate the overflowing crowd. On June 27, 1969, James Mason gave a eulogy at the funeral, an Episcopal service led by the Rev. Peter Delaney of St Marylebone Parish Church, London, who had officiated at her marriage to Deans, three months earlier.[153] "Judy's great gift", Mason said in his eulogy, "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."[154] The public and press were barred. She was interred in a crypt in the community mausoleum at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, a town 24 miles (39 km) north of midtown Manhattan.[155]
Upon Garland's death, despite having earned millions during her career, her estate came to US$40,000 (equivalent to $250,000 in 2023). Years of criminal mismanagement of her financial affairs by her representatives and staff, along with her generosity toward her family and various causes, resulted in her poor financial situation at the end of her life. In her last will, signed and sealed in early 1961, Garland made many generous bequests that could not be fulfilled because her estate had been in debt for many years. Her daughter, Liza Minnelli, worked to pay off her mother's debts with the help of family friend Frank Sinatra.[156] In 1978, a selection of Garland's personal items was auctioned off by her ex-husband Sidney Luft with the support of their daughter Lorna Luft and their son Joey. Almost 500 items, ranging from copper cookware to musical arrangements, were offered for sale. The auction raised US$250,000 (equivalent to $920,000 in 2023) for her heirs.[157]
At the request of her children, Garland's remains were disinterred from Ferncliff Cemetery in January 2017 and re-interred 2,800 miles (4,500 km) across the country at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.[158]
Selected studio albums
Public image and reputation[edit]
Garland was nearly as famous for her personal struggles in everyday life as she was for her entertainment career.[165] She has been closely associated with her carefully cultivated girl next door image.[174] Early in her career during the 1930s, Garland's public image had earned her the title "America's favorite kid sister",[168] as well as the title "Little Miss Showbusiness".[183][184]
In a review for the Star Tribune, Graydon Royce wrote that Garland's public image remained that of "a Midwestern girl who couldn't believe where she was", despite having been a well-established celebrity for over 20 years.[176] Royce believes that fans and audiences insisted on preserving their memory of Garland as Dorothy no matter how much she matured, calling her "a captive not of her own desire to stay young, but a captive of the public's desire to preserve her that way".[176] Thus, the studio continued to cast Garland in roles that were significantly younger than her actual age.[176]
According to Malony, Garland was one of Hollywood's hardest-working performers during the 1940s, which Malony claims she used as a coping mechanism after her first marriage imploded.[174] However, studio employees recall that Garland had a tendency to be quite intense, headstrong and volatile;[168] Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend author David Shipman claims that several individuals were frustrated by Garland's "narcissism" and "growing instability", while millions of fans found her public demeanor and psychological state to be "fragile",[183][174] appearing neurotic in interviews.[176]
MGM reports that Garland was consistently tardy and demonstrated erratic behavior, which resulted in several delays and disruptions to filming schedules until she was finally dismissed from the studio, which had deemed her unreliable and difficult to manage.[174] Farrell called Garland "A grab bag of contradictions" which "has always been a feast for the American imagination", describing her public persona as "awkward yet direct, bashful yet brash".[161] Describing the singer as "Tender and endearing yet savage and turbulent", Paglia wrote that Garland "cut a path of destruction through many lives. And out of that chaos, she made art of still-searing intensity."[165] Calling her "a creature of extremes, greedy, sensual and demanding, gluttonous for pleasure and pain",[168] Paglia also compared Garland to entertainer Frank Sinatra due to their shared "emblematic personality ... into whom the mass audience projected its hopes and disappointments", while observing that she lacked Sinatra's survival skills.[165]
Despite her success as a performer, Garland suffered from low self-esteem, particularly with regard to her weight, which she constantly dieted to maintain at the behest of the studio and Mayer;[168][174][182] critics and historians believe this was a result of having been told that she was an "ugly duckling" by studio executives.[166] Entertainment Weekly columnist Gene Lyons observed that both audiences and fellow members of the entertainment industry "tended either to love her or to hate her".[183]
At one point, Stevie Phillips, who had worked as an agent for Garland for four years, described her client as "a demented, demanding, supremely talented drug-addict".[174] Royce argues that Garland maintained "astonishing strength and courage", even during difficult times.[176] English actor Dirk Bogarde once called Garland "the funniest woman I have ever met".[173] Ruhlmann wrote that the singer's personal life "contrasted so starkly with the exuberance and innocence of her film roles".[167]
Despite her personal struggles, Garland disagreed with the public's opinion that she was a tragic figure.[176][181] Her younger daughter Lorna agreed that Garland "hated" being referred to as a tragic figure, explaining, "We all have tragedies in our lives, but that does not make us tragic. She was funny and she was warm and she was wonderfully gifted. She had great highs and great moments in her career. She also had great moments in her personal life. Yes, we lost her at 47 years old. That was tragic. But she was not a tragic figure."[181] Ruhlmann argues that Garland actually used the public's opinion of her tragic image to her advantage towards the end of her career.[167]