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“How strange when an illusion dies. It’s as if you’ve lost a child.”
-Judy Garland
LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS
Movies are undeniably different now from what they were during the Golden Age of Hollywood. There is, of course, more freedom to discuss certain once-taboo issues, but it’s also that there are more ‘films’ being made than there were back when cinema was only half a century old. It used to be that films were made only for the enjoyment of the audience and the pockets of the studios; there used to be more ‘movies.’ The filmmakers would inject art into these movies- some of the greatest works of cinematic art are from that era that passed decades ago- but, usually, the audience didn’t know it, and went to the theater for the sole purpose of escapism. Not only are the movies today more socially conscious, sometimes jarringly so, but the audience is relatively more demanding and pompous, and more educated on the ins-and-outs of the industry. Sure, there are a lot of ‘movies’ being made in today’s Hollywood, most of them released in the summer, but they don’t make the happy stories they used to make anymore, and they probably never will again, because the audience has changed after that thing known as the hippie era, and so have the filmmakers, who are now artists instead of artisans.
There wasn’t much acting going on during the Golden Age, at least not the kind of acting we see today on the screen. There were stars, and most of them bounced on the same note throughout their careers, and did it well. Greta Garbo was always the hazy enigma; Bette Davis was the Independent Woman; Cary Grant was The Gentleman; and Clark Gable was tough male sexuality. They were impeccable actors but, looking back at their movies, few of us would ever gasp and marvel at their performances, and it’s because we’ve learned to respond to Marlon Brando and The Method. These stars weren’t playing people; they were playing stars playing dream people. They had phenomenal, overwhelming star quality. Judy Garland was perhaps the most real dream person of all because, no matter how hard she might have tried, she could never stop being human on screen.
And it’s not that she got the better roles, or the more realistic ones. She was typecast like everyone else, and her aura wasn’t even as intoxicating or enjoyable as those of Grant or Bogart or Hayworth. One could conclude that the personable, real quality in her performances stemmed from the terrible aspects in her life. Born Frances Gumm, she became a star even before becoming an adult. She was given all sorts of pills by MGM at an early age, and soon, she was hooked, and was addicted till the day she died. She went from husband to husband, housing enormous, unreasonable insecurities. But even in her personal sorrow, she always played characters with hope, and we always bought it.
David Shipman’s biography of the icon is painful reading. This spunky girl you remember from Meet Me in St. Louis is asking her husband to go down on her and masturbating her hairdresser. The very name of the biography, Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend, sounds like a tabloid headline. Even in her later films, Judy Garland was innocent, infantile, fragile- you just can’t, don’t, and don’t want to imagine her thinking about sex, let alone doing it. She was a bisexual, and it’s initially unimaginable, what with the existing sexual stereotypes that have sunk into our subconscious and the idea that the clean, sober ‘50s were entirely heterosexual.
Judy Garland becomes ours when she’s performing; she’s our friend and our daughter. There’s always been something brittle to her performances. The Wizard of Oz finds her injured and lost and, one of her last truly notable films, A Star is Born, has her beaten up again and again by life. By 1950, she had already gained a reputation for being difficult and was attempting suicide often, and she was only twenty-eight. Summer Stock, her final film for MGM, had, like her first film Every Sunday, the typical MGM plot revolving around show business sentiments, and was nothing but a favor to her after all the success she had brought MGM in earlier years. She’s obviously chubbier than usual in the film, but her star power never falters, and she gets up and does one of her greatest numbers, “Get Happy.”
Judy Garland was never her own woman. She always needed someone to take care of her, in her movies and in her life, and it’s just as refreshing to see an actor who is so vulnerable as it is to see an actor playing a slick, powerful character. (Just watch James Dean; Rebel Without a Cause works because it’s so great to see a guy who can cry and who needs to be protected and who doesn’t know where he’s going or what he’s doing.) Judy Garland’s career went into decline after MGM fired her. Despite it being a controlling studio that pushed her around and made her work like a dog even when she was terribly sick, perhaps she needed to be told what to do. Or perhaps she had been bossed around for so long, she didn’t know how to do things for herself. This child-woman needed a nurturing environment, and MGM passed as one. It was all she ever knew, and it was her home. When they let her go, she was as good as homeless.
It is generally acknowledged that her greatest performance is as Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester in A Star is Born, which she made with Warner Bros. in 1954 as her comeback. (I do not agree that it is her greatest film, or her greatest performance, but I do think it is quite a remarkable piece of acting and certainly a wonderful film.) Judy was only thirty-two, but she looked as if she were in her forties, and looked several years older than she did in Summer Stock, which had been made only four years earlier. A Star is Born was made right at a turning point for Hollywood movies. TV was the new thing, and Cinemascope, the widescreen format we all know and love today, was created to lure audiences back into theaters. Many scenes of the film that had been shot already had to be redone in the new format. The film is full of parallels to Judy’s own turbulent life. Though A Star is Born was a remake of the 1937 Janet Gaynor-Fredric March movie, it introduced something new to the world- the drama-musical. The glossy, epic framing of Cinemascope was filled with real, wall-to-wall conflict.
In A Star is Born, Judy Garland plays a singer who is discovered by drunkard movie star Norman Maine. She becomes a movie sensation, and the two get married. As she gets increasingly famous, Maine loses popularity and fame due to the alcoholism. The film is exhausting to watch, actually, because Garland is so convincing in her tormented scenes. She is extremely fragile, as usual. In Shipman’s biography, it is said that the “Lose That Long Face” sequence was thought to be dispensable by director George Cukor. I think it may be the most crucial of all the scenes. Vicki Lester is at work on a musical and belts out lyrics like “don’t give in to a frown/turn that frown upside down.” Immediately after shooting the scene, she goes into her dressing room, and weeps to a friend at her studio about her husband’s alcoholism. She cries, “You don't know what it's like to watch somebody you love just crumble away bit by bit, day by day, in front of your eyes, and stand there helpless” (that’s basically how the audience feels at that moment for Judy Garland the Person.) She goes back to resume shooting, her makeup running from crying. Seconds before the cameras start rolling, she wipes away the tears, and it’s utterly eerie how she transforms herself from miserable to jubilant. One minute, she’s bawling, and the next minute, she’s singing “Lose That Long Face” again. Like Judy Garland herself, Vicki never allows herself to put on a bad show.
“The Man That Got Away” is, I think, the greatest song Judy Garland ever sang. The scene in which she performs it is, for me, the most moving thing she ever did in film. There is an undeniable difference between listening to Judy sing and watching Judy sing. The song is overwhelmingly powerful when it is experienced with both eyes and ears because her whole body is in the song and you can see her muscles moving and how completely she gives herself to the music and the lyrics, even if she was just lip-syncing while shooting. (The pan-and-scan version of A Star is Born is absolutely despicable, but the difference between widescreen and the 1.33:1 aspect ratio is perfectly illustrated. The “Man That Got Away” number is more personal in pan-and-scan because we lose the feeling that the film is an epic, and we don’t get to see the relationship between her and the musicians.)
Judy Garland’s two great gifts, entertainment-wise, were her ability to be flesh and blood on screen, and her voice. Her singing changed over the years just like her acting; her voice naturally became increasingly deep, with an intense vibrato. She was always riveting when delivering a song. In her earlier days, her elocution was flawless. Her voice was perfectly reserved. Later, she became a powerhouse.
Her repertoire was filled with Harold Arlen by the time she famously graced the stage of Carnegie Hall in 1961. The great composer wrote some of the most beautiful songs of his time. Listening to the Grammy Award-winning album of the concert, which put her back on the charts and into the spotlight, is an exciting experience. She’s lively, often humorous, and splendid vocally. During the concert, one of her final great achievements, her voice was anything but flawless, though. She is at her best on the Arlen songs: she’s desperate and determined on “Come Rain or Come Shine” and passionately lonely on “The Man That Got Away.” Nowhere is the change of her voice more heartbreaking than on her signature song, “Over the Rainbow.” She’s tearful and moving, even when her voice cracks on the first line. She sang the song with such naiveté and innocent longing in The Wizard of Oz; here, her yearning for that place beyond the clouds is achingly real. Her passionate delivery is tainted with experience. Comparing the recordings of “Over the Rainbow” from the movie in 1939 and the concert in 1961, her obvious sadness in the latter is chilling. However, the joyous and catchy “Trolley Song” doesn’t work as well without the youthful Judy of Meet Me in St. Louis.
Throughout her life, Judy Garland never seemed able to separate reality from illusion. Her world was movies, MGM movies, and as the Golden Age of Hollywood disappeared with the end of the studio system and the era of the musical, and the increasing honesty in films by the ‘60s, reality leaked into her performances. In every one of her scenes in two of her final films, Judgment at Nuremberg and A Child is Waiting, she looks just about ready to crumble. Movies are reality plus illusion- the audience doesn’t know where the illusion ends and the reality begins. Similarly, Judy Garland never knew where Frances Gumm ended and where Judy Garland began. In the Golden Age, the studios covered up their employees’ personal lives, but today, the private lives of the stars are front-page news. Illusion has blended with reality. It’s not just the movies that have changed; the audience’s awareness of what goes on behind-the-scenes has increased.
One may deeply regret reading a Judy Garland biography, because it’s difficult now to separate the movies the actors make and the lives the actors live. It’s painfully paradoxical that she should be singing “Get Happy” and “When You’re Smiling (The Whole Word Smiles With You)” at such low points in her life. Now that detailed biographies can be found on any old-Hollywood star, we now know where the illusion ends and the reality begins. One would never guess that Judy Garland’s life was filled with such tragedies by simply watching a great trifle like Easter Parade. So, if Judy Garland’s later films are like watching the death of a child, her earlier films are like watching its idealized life. But the image of Judy Garland as the great entertainer who could do everything, as the hopeful little girl Dorothy who was looking for her way back home, is everlasting. Her charm was in the way she hesitated and stuttered before speaking, the way she was constantly afraid yet strangely strong, the way she could own every song she sang. Her films and recordings are chronicles of her own disintegration and the inevitable death of the happy-go-lucky mentality in Hollywood movies, but more than anything, they capture the magic of an entertainer who was more than a talent… more like a supernova.
By Andrew Chan [SEPT. 8, 2000]
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