Addicted to Judy Garland

Garland didn’t just sing for them, she offered herself up as a kind of human sacrifice to her fans; her last concerts were unbearable, more like blood sport than theater, a kind of marathon of angst. Of course Garland was also able to project all the vulnerability and longing for affection of a puppy in an animal shelter—it was her trademark, and her stock in trade, after all—a psychic pleading: “Love me, take me home with you, help me, please, I promise to be good,” yet at the same time, she was a still a star, had been one since childhood, and so she also had the imperious ego, the relentless demands, the selfishness, the acute narcissism, and the brutal ability to cut people off— which are all hard-wired into any star’s persona.

Doubly so, in her case, since she had spent a good part of her childhood and youth as one of MGM’s brightest stars, at once spoiled and dominated by Louis B. Mayer and his satraps in a studio which, at one and the same time, was a dream world, a gulag, a magic kingdom (of which she was not just a princess, but the princess), a sweat shop, and a Dickensian rookery in which L.B. played the role of Fagin, and his child stars his brood of loyal pickpockets.

Nobody could emerge from a childhood at MGM unscathed. It is enough to know that at the fake New England clapboard schoolhouse at the studio—a concession to the child labor laws where the MGM kids were educated, since their shooting schedules didn’t mesh with the hours of normal kids—Judy Garland’s schoolmates were the young Lana Turner and Mickey Rooney.

There is, of course, no need to write another biography of Garland—Gerold Frank’s Judy tells us as much as we need or ought to know—but the Garland fan waters have been stirred mightily in the U.K. by Susie Boyt’s My Judy Garland Life, which is in some ways the ultimate fan’s book, since Susie (I can call her by first name because I had the pleasure of talking to her for this piece) not only tells us about Garland’s life, but about her own.

Garland has become for her a kind of ghostly support group, inspiration, and role model, all wrapped up in one. It is difficult to know what to think about this. Once, when Vivien Leigh was going through a very public period of rage, anger, and emotional fragility, her own usually buoyant personality apparently merging with that of Blanche DuBois, over Laurence Olivier’s leaving her for Joan Plowright, a woman, trying to be kind, said, “I know exactly how you feel, dear.” To which Vivien (I did know Vivien, very well, and was very fond of her, so it’s OK for me to use her first name) replied crisply, “Oh, no, you don’t.”

Susie’s belief that she understands Garland might have elicited just such a reply from Garland if she were still alive—it’s faintly hubristic to think we understand the dead, because they’re not in a position to argue back.

But of course Susie’s book exists on two planes, the first her slightly eerie fascination with (and identification with) Garland, the second her own life, which is marked at once by a certain fragility of the spirit, and a defiant, determined effort to overcome all that and have a good time. The result is that one reads her book rather in the spirit of watching somebody gamely trying to swim a longer distance than she thinks she can manage, or that onlookers on shore suppose she can.

What comes through is courage in the face of emotional adversity and a deep need to find somebody who has faced the same kind of thing and overcame it, i.e., Judy Garland. Strange to say, instead of being (as one feared) weepy, her book is smart, often funny, occasionally very touching, and great fun to read in a way that a new biography of Garland would not be—it’s a survivor’s notebook, and Susie, who is a very accomplished novelist, has written it with a rare honesty that one can’t help admiring.

She is also very frank about her immersion in Garlandia, and what it means to identify with a celebrity. Speaking to her, I found she has a curious combination of solid common sense, very English that, and misty-eyed star worship that is very appealing.