Addicted to Judy Garland

AP Photo Before Michael, there was Judy, an icon destroyed by fame. Michael Korda talks to Susie Boyt about her smart new book, My Judy Garland Life—and the toxic relationship between stars and fans.

Fans. Many years ago I had the pleasure of editing a book by Joan Crawford, who, like Norma Desmond, was still a big star, it was just the movies that had gotten smaller.

In an unlikely way, we became friends during the ordeal of rewriting and editing. I have never forgotten a chilling story one of her enablers told me, apparently under the impression it was charming. Once, after one of Joan’s many retirements from the screen, she was leaving Chasen’s after dinner, in Beverly Hills, when a little girl ran over to her, holding out her autograph book, and looking up at her, eyes misty with excitement and admiration, said: “Miss Crawford, you’re my favorite star of all! Would you please sign my autograph book?”

“She could make ordinary people feel glamorous, and glamorous people feel ordinary,” Boyt says of Garland. It’s the mark of a great star, and Garland could do it even at the lowest, saddest points of her life.

Joan looked down at her young fan, fixing those extraordinary big eyes of hers on the girl, and smiled. “Go away, little girl,” she said. “I don’t need you anymore.”

The relationship between stars and their fans is always ambivalent and often highly charged with contradictory and ambivalent emotions, of which the most powerful is need. The real fans do not just admire the star of their choice, they identify with him or her, while the star, unlike Joan Crawford, comes to need the fans’ love, admiration, and constant interest.

My Judy Garland Life. By Susie Boyt. 320 pages. Bloomsbury USA. $25. It’s a mutual addiction, and in a few cases a toxic love affair, which often overshadows or puts an end to the possibility of any real one. After all, what real husband or lover could possibly be as uncritical, loyal, or forgiving as a star’s fans, or demand so little in return?

Some stars, not many, develop an eerie ability to share their own emotions, problems, weaknesses, and fears with their fans—of these, perhaps the most notorious was Judy Garland, whose stage concerts, in the last part of her life, were like a mass group-therapy session, as well as the emotional equivalent of watching some death-defying feat, like Evel Knievel’s attempt to leap across Snake River Canyon on a motorcycle.

The fans saw in Garland (I didn’t know her, so I don’t want to make that assumption of intimacy that fans make when they speak of “Judy,” or “Marlene,” or “Marilyn,” though I did know one of her husbands, Sid Luft, whom author Susie Boyt describes, correctly, as “the least worst man in her life”), a grander and more famous version of themselves, while she saw in them her soul mates.

But given her emotional and physical problems, it was like watching somebody play Russian roulette on stage—would she collapse, would she burst into tears, would she make the high notes, would she be able to continue after the obligatory emotional high point of the evening, when she sang Over the Rainbow, the national anthem of the emotionally challenged and disabled?