In the spring of 1969 I was a guest at Danny La Rue's nightclub, off Hanover Square. As part of his one-hour floor show, he was burlesquing Rudolf Valentino in The Sheik when a voice called out: "When do I get into the act?" Dan said: "Come up now, dear!" and a tiny, almost skeletal woman tottered on to the stage. Her limbs were twigs; she could not have weighed more than 80 pounds, if that; and probably I was one of the very few there who recognised her as Judy Garland. She was either very drunk or very stoned. She attempted to dance with Dan, then her legs gave way. He picked her up bodily, adlibbed a line about taking her with him to his tent or the Casbah or wherever, and carried her off. End of scene. It was made to seem part of his act, but later, when I went backstage to see him, he was shivering. He said: "She called me up on the stage last week when she was on in the Talk of the Town, and this was her calling in the favour. She's dying, you know. Couldn't you see?"
And die she did, a couple of months later. Her fifth husband, Mickey Deans, a disco manager, broke in through a window of the locked bathroom of their borrowed house in London, and found her dead on the lavatory seat from what was almost certainly an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. Since then, there have been many books about her life, most of them cringe-making attempts to portray her as a forever-young Dorothy, following the Yellow Brick Road on her way to the Emerald City in the land of Oz.
Ruth Leon and Sheridan Morley enjoy a wallow in this same bathos with their subtitle, Beyond the Rainbow. However, if they must invoke The Wizard of Oz, they might at least have done their homework. Binnie Barnes did not play Glinda, the Witch of the North - it was Billie Burke, who specialised in twittering socialites and was the widow of Florenz Ziegfeld. And the authors even misquote the film's most famous line as "We're a long way from Kansas, Toto," instead of "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas any more."
At least, by way of eating their fairy cake and having it, they do not shrink from the brutal reality. They quote the ballet dancer Moira Shearer, who described Garland as "wrecked by drugged, drunken self-indulgence . . . she had immense theatrical talent allied to a marvellous voice, but both were ruined by arrogance and uncontrolled hysteria . . . she was also an inveterate liar, vengeful, jealous of colleagues and especially her daughter Liza, always meanest to those who had made her career possible. Her treatment of her mother was abominable." What the pirouetting Ms Shearer has to do with the price of eggs is unclear - all that she and Judy ever had in common was that the former's shoes were red and the latter's ruby. The authors' principal villains are Judy's mother, Ethel Gumm, and the man the authors unfailingly and jeeringly call "Uncle" Louis - Louis B. Mayer, the despot and yiddisher-papa of MGM. To begin with and at home in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, there were three Gumm siblings, and Frances was the littlest and most talented. Her father - "homosexual, unsuccessful, alcoholic, but charismatic and beloved" - obligingly conformed to the showbiz cliche by dying early on, and Judy Garland (as she soon became) was hired, without a screen test, by Metro. She appeared in a short film, Every Sunday, opposite Deanna Durbin, with whom she was almost of an age. Two child singers were one too many, and Mayer said "Fire the fat one." He could have meant either - both girls were plump with puppy-fat - but Durbin was let go. She went to Universal, where she became a star and saved the studio from financial ruin. After 22 films, and while the going was still good, she retired and now lives - contentedly, it is said - as Mme David in the village of Neauphlele-Chateau a few miles west of Versailles. Judy, the authors tell us, was cruelly exploited by her mother and overworked by L. B. Mayer. She was dosed with Benzedrine and Dexedrine to keep her weight down and her energy up, and given knock-out pills to squeeze eight hours of sleep into two or three. In between filming at Culver City, she went on the road and appeared in stage shows to promote her movies. (Perish the thought, but could it be that she loved every minute of it?)
She appeared in three of the Hardy Family series, all of them set in the fictional "Carvel", a gingham Valhalla of manicured front lawns and white "clabbard" houses, each one a nest of WASPs. Astutely, Louis B.Mayer gave orders that the Hardy films were on no account to be improved, and he became so proud of Judy, his one-time ugly duckling, that he said: "Look what I've made her into, and she used to be a hunchback!"
She was cast opposite the wonderfully resistible Mickey Rooney, who, as Andy Hardy, was as revoltingly all-American as mom and apple pie, and she made four campus musicals with him - each one containing a variation on the line "Hey, kids, why don't we put the show on right here in the barn!" And, of course, she was Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, a piece of cinematic marzipan that died at the box office and did not break even until television exhumed it.
Meanwhile, Judy was growing up. The first of her five marriages was to an English composer, David Rose, of whom the worst that could be said was that he wrote Holiday for Strings.
Then came Vincente Minelli, who really preferred chaps to girls. He directed what proved to be her best film, the delightful Meet Me in St Louis; but after the fiasco of The Pirate she had him fired from Easter Parade. When she met his replacement, Charles Walters - an able journeyman director - her greeting was: "Look, sweetie, I'm no June Allyson, so don't get cute with me. I'm Judy Garland, and you just watch it."
Respect was not her strong suit. When Irving Berlin criticised her phrasing, she told him: "Listen, buster, you write 'em, and I'll sing em, any way I like." It was worthy of Joan Crawford, who told the author of The Great Gatsby: "Write hard, Mr Fitzgerald!" "Make a star," Sam Spiegel said, speaking of Peter O'Toole, "and you make a monster." There is, however, no such easy catchpenny explanation for what happened to Judy Garland. Perhaps at the root of it was the tragedy that she had been robbed of a childhood. Instead, she had stardom: a disease that causes a protective carapace to form, so that it is impossible for an outsider, even a lover, to break through.
A star inhabits a sealed world where the edges of image and reality are blurred. Garland admitted that she had not the ability to love, and, in her case, applause was as addictive as the pills and booze. She became swollen-headed, either turning up late on the set or not at all. When she was fired from Annie Get Your Gun, it was virtually the end of her career at Metro. She made stage appearances, at first with enormous success, breaking attendance records in New York and London. She worked to pay off her debts, and on many occasions stole out of hotels by the service elevators to avoid paying her room rent. In The Far Side of the Rainbow, Mel Torme wrote what is a devastating account of a star self-destructing. Garland's 26-episode television show was a breakthrough to begin with, but she seemed to be infatuated with the need to fail. It all ended in broken promises and betrayals, and in any case - and such is the ethos of American television - the show was all but dumped because its ratings could not compare with those for Bonanza. When she died, she owed four million dollars.
The present book says little that is new or perceptive, but it is handsome and glossy, with more than a hundred photographs, some in colour. Its appearance marks the thirtieth anniversary of Garland's death, so, if not exploitive, it is certainly opportunistic. It has a careless look, as if cobbled together. We read, for example, that "Robert Mulligan and a 16-year-old Stanley Donen were to become triumphant film stars," whereas both were directors, and neither was an actor, never mind a star.
One can almost hear one of the authors saying to the other, as Mickey so frequently said to Judy,"Hey, let's write a book about Garland, and why don't we put the show on right here, in the barn!"
Hugh Leonard is a playwright and critic