Judy Garland

The Full Biography

Judy Garland. Singer. Actress. The Grand Rapids girl who became Dorothy, then spent the rest of a short life paying for the gift and for the pills the studio put in her hand.

This is her story.

The image most people still carry is a child in gingham, a dog in a basket, a road the color of a promise. The year was 1939. The picture was The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy Gale is a civic object. “Over the Rainbow” is a national hymn that happens to have been sung by a sixteen-year-old under contract. What the still cannot show is Frances Ethel Gumm of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a vaudeville daughter the studio put on amphetamines and barbiturates to control her weight and her sleep, and a woman who would die in Chelsea at forty-seven of the same class of pills.

She was born on June 10, 1922, in Grand Rapids. Her parents, Frank and Ethel Gumm, worked the small-time circuit. The Gumm Sisters — Mary Jane, Dorothy Virginia, and Frances — were a family act before the youngest had a choice in the matter. Ethel was the engine. The child had the throat. They moved toward California the way vaudeville families did, chasing a week that might become a season. George Jessel, on a bill with them, suggested the name Garland. Judy came from a Hoagy Carmichael song. Frances Ethel Gumm left the program. Judy Garland took the call.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed her as a teenager, in 1935, after Louis B. Mayer heard what the throat could do. The door was not Oz. The door was the lot: shorts, a loan-out to Fox for Pigskin Parade (1936), Andy Hardy pictures with Mickey Rooney, a studio that treated a gifted girl as inventory with a bedtime. Then Victor Fleming — and a small army of other hands — put her in Kansas and in Oz. The juvenile Academy Award in 1940 made the inventory official. The song did the rest. For the rest of the century, people who had never been to Minnesota would thank her for a place that does not exist.

The MGM years that followed are the cathedral people hum without naming. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), for Vincente Minnelli, gave her “The Trolley Song” and a family that photographs as warmth. The Harvey Girls. Easter Parade (1948), with Fred Astaire, after Gene Kelly broke an ankle. Summer Stock (1950). She could act a joke and then break a room with a ballad in the same reel. Before Oz was a civic object she had already been the lot’s girl: Broadway Melody of 1938, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937), Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), then the Rooney musicals that paid the studio’s rent — Babes in Arms (1939), Strike Up the Band (1940), Babes on Broadway (1941). For Me and My Gal (1942) gave her Gene Kelly in his first picture. Girl Crazy (1943). The Clock (1945), a leave-train romance Minnelli directed, proved she could hold a film that was not a downbeat. The Pirate (1948) and In the Good Old Summertime (1949) kept the catalog humming while the body was already on the studio’s clock. The studio, meanwhile, kept the pharmacological schedule that is not gossip and is not new. Amphetamines to thin her and to keep the shooting day alive. Barbiturates to put her down when the day was over. That was house practice on that lot, for that girl, in those years. It is in the file. It is in her body. It is in the coroner’s report twenty years on.

MGM let her go the way a studio lets go of a problem it created. She was still in her twenties. A Star Is Born (1954), for George Cukor at Warner Bros., is the performance that should have been the adult Oscar. She plays Esther Blodgett / Vicki Lester as if she had been taking notes on her own life and decided to tell the truth in someone else’s plot. The Academy gave Best Actress to Grace Kelly, for The Country Girl. Garland was in the hospital that night. The loss is not a footnote. It is the night the town chose a different kind of suffering.

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.Judy Garland

That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers the rainbow. The turn is not Oz. The turn is the walk off the lot, and then Carnegie Hall. On April 23, 1961, she stood on that stage in New York and gave a concert the live album turned into a monument. Judy at Carnegie Hall won Album of the Year. Five Grammys. The girl the studio had timed with pills proved, to a full house, that the voice was not a trick of the process shot. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) brought a supporting Oscar nomination and a reminder that she could act without a downbeat. She had become, at last, a concert artist who also made pictures, instead of a contract player who was allowed to sing. The Palace Theatre in New York, in 1951 and 1952, was the first proof that a fired MGM girl could sell a live room without a process shot. She played the London Palladium. She played the Copacabana. A Child Is Waiting (1963), for John Cassavetes, put her opposite Burt Lancaster in a picture about children the public preferred not to see. I Could Go On Singing (1963), shot in England, is the last theatrical film: a concert singer who cannot keep a private life, Ronald Neame directing, a role that is not a disguise. The concert years — Los Angeles, New York, the European halls — are the second employment. They paid the bills the studio no longer paid. They also kept the pharmacological schedule in motion, because a midnight show still required a morning after. Sidney Luft, whom she married in 1952, managed those years and produced A Star Is Born; Lorna was born in 1952, Joey in 1955. The television specials of the mid-fifties — Ford, General Electric, a living room the size of the country — kept the throat in American houses after the lot had closed. Judgment at Nuremberg is the dramatic reminder. Carnegie Hall is the monument. The Palace is the proof she could sell a week without a process shot.

Minnelli directed her and married her; Liza May was born in 1946 and inherited the throat and the lights. Luft managed her through the concert years and the television years; Lorna and Joey are the other two names in that chapter. Friends from the MGM schoolhouse describe a professional who hit her marks and then could not sleep. Friends from the concert years describe a woman who could wreck a room at 11 and need someone to get her to the next city at midnight. She tried, she said, to bring the audience’s own drama — tears and laughter they already knew — back to them. She did not have to invent the drama. She had been living it on a shooting schedule since she was a child.

The later years

Television gave her a last American house. The Judy Garland Show ran on CBS in 1963 and 1964: twenty-six episodes, guests who understood they were on a serious variety hour — Barbra Streisand, Lena Horne, her own daughter Liza — a ratings fight with Bonanza she could not win. The show is better than its cancellation. Watch a few and the concert artist is still there, thinner, funnier, willing to let a guest take a chorus. Hollywood had fewer rooms for her by then. Fox hired her for Valley of the Dolls in 1967 and fired her before the picture could use the life as a stunt. She returned to the Palace that same year and sold the live room again. Australia in 1964 had been a harder tour: cancelled dates, a press that wanted a wreck, a voice that still had nights. London had a stage and a hotel. She played the Talk of the Town. She lived, in stretches, in a city that would give her a last address.

She married Mickey Deans, a discotheque manager, at the Chelsea Register Office on March 15, 1969. She was forty-six. The marriage was three months old when the Chelsea morning came. Friends from those last London weeks describe a woman who could still wreck a room at 11 and need someone to get her home at midnight. The pills had been in the file since the MGM schoolhouse. Husbands had come and gone. The voice, on a good night, had not gone. That is the cruelty of the last chapter. The instrument still worked. The schedule that had been invented to serve it had become the plot.

On June 22, 1969, she was found in the bathroom of a rented house at 4 Cadogan Lane. Gavin Thurston, the Westminster coroner, recorded accidental death from an incautious overdose of barbiturates. She was forty-seven. The life had been a war with the same pills the studio had introduced as a production tool. A war can end by accident. The finding is the finding. The childhood that delivered her to Mayer, and the schedule that delivered her to the medicine cabinet, are the plot that ends in that bathroom. Liza, already a star, and Lorna and Joey, still young, were the next generation of the same business. They had to bury a mother the world still called Dorothy. The funeral in New York was a civic object. Twenty-two thousand people filed past the glass at the Frank E. Campbell chapel on Madison Avenue. James Mason, who had played the husband in A Star Is Born, spoke. The concert records kept playing as if the downbeat had not stopped. Grand Rapids is the first room. The MGM lot is the door. Cadogan Lane is the last address. Oz, Cukor’s picture, and the April night in 1961 are the weather, and they have not thinned. Liza, Lorna, and Joey had to become the keepers of a throat the world still wanted to hear. The pills stayed in the coroner’s language. The songs stayed in the national mouth. That is the last split, and it has not closed. Hollywood Forever is the civic grave now, a daughter’s decision in 2017. The Carnegie album is still the live monument. Gingham is still the still. The coroner still said accident. The children still had to be the next generation of the same business.

After she was gone

The rainbow did not dim. It got cleaner, which is what death does to a difficult woman the public prefers as a child. Liza became a cathedral of her own. Lorna kept singing the family catalog with a candor the columns did not always want. Joey stayed closer to the private ledger. The body, after years at Ferncliff, was moved in 2017 to Hollywood Forever, a daughter’s decision about where the civic object should lie. Judy at Carnegie Hall still sounds like a woman taking a city back. Oz still plays at Thanksgiving, and a certain kind of viewer still believes Kansas might be enough if the song is.

She came out of Grand Rapids, took a name a comic offered, sang a song a studio almost cut, wore gingham until the world could not see anything else, walked off the lot, made A Star Is Born, filled Carnegie Hall, hosted a television hour the network did not keep, and died in Chelsea of the medicine that had been in the file since she was a girl. The still on the fence will last. It should. The life behind it was shorter, harder, and more expensive than the still can say.

If you only remember Dorothy, you have the photograph. If you remember the Gumm Sisters, the studio cabinet, Cukor’s picture, the April night in 1961, and a coroner who said accident, you have her.

Portrait: Eric Carpenter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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