Judy Garland

Actress

  • Born: June 10, 1922
  • Birthplace: Grand Rapids, Minnesota
  • Died: June 22, 1969
  • Place of death: London, England

American singer-actor

An entertainer with a magnificent voice that attracted a worldwide audience, Garland appeared in concert, on television, and in film, most notably The Wizard of Oz. She is best remembered for her powerful singing and her dramatic flair.

Areas of achievement Music, theater and entertainment, film, television

Early Life

Judy Garland’s father and mother, Frank and Ethel Gumm, had worked in vaudeville but, after having two daughters, settled down and leased the motion picture theater in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. In the era of silent films, organists provided music to accompany the action. For this reason, when sound became available for films, theaters continued to provide entertainment for audiences in the intermission between films. The Gumms entertained their audiences with Ethel’s piano playing and their daughters’ singing.

Judy, born two weeks overdue, was named Frances Gumm. Though her parents would have preferred a son, Judy’s childhood was reasonably happy, and she was pampered. When she was two and a half, Judy made her stage debut at her father’s theater, and soon the parents had created an act for the three Gumm sisters. In 1926, they moved to California, leasing a theater in Lancaster, north of Los Angeles on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

Ethel had great ambition for her children and devoted much attention to her daughters’ careers. She gave them dance and music lessons. In 1927, she enrolled them in a dance school in Los Angeles that had been a springboard for many stars. Judy liked the school, but her older sisters soon dropped out.

The Gumm sisters, now named the Garland sisters, still performed as an act together, and word began to spread (even in the press) about the child with the incredible voice. Ethel took Judy for auditions, and Judy sang for Joseph Mankiewicz, for Ida Koverman, who worked for Louis B. Mayer (the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM), and eventually for Mayer himself, who signed her without a screen test in September, 1935, when she was thirteen years old.

Life’s Work

MGM needed to produce fifty-two films each year to fill the theaters it controlled (the Loew’s theater chain). Some three thousand people worked to produce these films, and the company operated much like an efficient factory. Developing stars was an important task, for stars would attract audiences to the films. MGM became, therefore, one of the most extraordinary finishing schools in the world. As it did for all of its young stars, the company provided for Garland’s education, even building a small classroom near the set when she was working on a film. She had a voice coach, was given dance lessons, diction lessons, drama lessons, makeup lessons, and deportment lessons, and had a physical therapist and specialists to help her lose weight.

Garland was short and plump, with scoliosis (a slight curvature of the spine, which ran in her mother’s family). Her teeth were crooked and her nose was a problem. (She had to wear removable caps on her teeth and rubber discs in her nose on screen.) She also had constantly to fight excessive weight. Garland was humiliated by all these judgments and by comparison with her peers. She soon came to believe that she was not physically attractive nor sexually desirable to men and that she was inferior to the other teenagers there (who included Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Hedy Lamarr). Ethel Gumm would remind Garland that she was signed for her voice. Garland’s voice coach, Roger Edens, developed her skills as a singer, and her mother, now devoting herself entirely to Garland’s career, came to the studio every day to rehearse and accompany her.

Garland’s first two small roles were in Every Sunday (1936) and Pigskin Parade (1936). Her first major film role was in Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937), and for this motion picture the studio began giving Garland benzedrine and phenobarbital to help her lose weight and to sleep at nights. These were new wonder drugs for the film colony in California, and no one was aware of their addictive potential. For Garland, using them for Broadway Melody began her lifelong dependence on drugs.

Broadway Melody was released in the fall of 1937, and the reviews of Garland’s performance were enthusiastic. After making several more films, usually with Garland cast as the girl who never gets the man she loves, MGM decided to build a film vehicle especially for Garland, The Wizard of Oz (1939). Work on The Wizard of Oz began in mid-1939, the film was released in August, and in the spring of 1940, Garland received a special Oscar for best juvenile performance. Later that year, Mayer gave her an eighteenth birthday party at his house and raised her salary from $750 to $3,000 a week.

In this early period, Garland appeared in several films with the young Mickey Rooney, and the pairing was so popular that a part for Garland was written into the Andy Hardy films, in which the title character was played by Rooney. Babes in Arms (1939), starring the two of them, cost $600,000 to make and grossed more than $2 million in the United States alone.

Garland married David Rose, the leader of an orchestra, in July, 1941, but they separated in 1943 and divorced in 1944. She married the film director Vincente Minnelli in 1945, and a daughter, Liza Minnelli, a renowned singer and entertainer in her own right, was born to the couple in 1946. Minnelli directed several successful films starring Garland, including Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Clock (1945), Ziegfeld Follies of 1946 (1946), and The Pirate (1948). This marriage ended in 1950, and the divorce became final in 1952.

Garland married Sidney Luft in June, 1952, already pregnant with Lorna, who was born in November, 1952. (A son, Joey, was born in 1955.) Sidney devoted himself to Garland, abandoning his career to manage hers. They separated in 1958 and began a seven-year period of fights, reconciliations, and separations. There were two brief marriages with younger men, Mark Herron and Mickey Deans; the latter marriage ended with Garland’s death in 1969.

In 1942, Garland appeared in her first film with dancer Gene Kelly,For Me and My Gal (1942), which introduced Kelly to the screen. In this film, and in later films with Fred Astaire, Garland’s talent as a dancer was showcased. In perhaps the best of these, Easter Parade (1948), with music by Irving Berlin, Garland ably complemented Astaire.

By the time she was twenty-two, Garland had been in nineteen films. From 1943 through 1945, she was voted one of the five most popular screen actresses in the United States. Garland’s drug and emotional problems, however, began to interfere with her work. She was usually late to work, if she arrived at all, and was temperamental. MGM paid a psychiatrist to be with her on the set in 1947. MGM suspended her frequently and fired her from three films (including Annie Get Your Gun). In September of 1950, MGM canceled her contract, almost fifteen years to the day after they signed her.

It was four years before she appeared in another film. The first was A Star Is Born (1954), made by an independent company and released by Warner Bros., which critics hailed as a triumphant comeback for Garland at the age of thirty-two. The film has an eighteen-minute sequence, “Born in a Trunk,” which traces the success story of a vaudeville star, and features “The Man That Got Away,” which became one of Garland’s trademark songs. In Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Garland played a small but key dramatic role and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. A Child Is Waiting (1963), which featured another fine dramatic performance, was followed by Garland’s last film, I Could Go on Singing (1963), a film about a concert singer tormented by personal problems.

Garland had little ability to handle her financial affairs. Despite advice from her mother and financial experts, she was continually in debt. After her divorce from Minnelli and her firing from MGM, she and Minnelli owed $60,000 in back taxes and thousands more to friends. In 1966, her assets were listed as $12,000 and her liabilities to 120 creditors as $122,000.

The result was that Garland had to work to pay her bills. With the film studios reluctant to hire her, Garland moved to the nightclub and cabaret circuit and appeared in concerts and on television shows. Her first concert was in 1943 in Philadelphia, and she toured for the USO. In 1951, she had successful runs at the London Palladium, the leading theater in London, England, and at the Palace in New York City. Her finest performance was at Carnegie Hall in 1961, a concert that was recorded and released as an album. Her drug addiction and increasing psychological disturbance, however, led her to cancel performances and walk out on contracts, so that often she could not even cover the expenses of her current tour. Though some of her concerts were outstanding, during others she collapsed on stage or was booed.

Garland first appeared on television in 1955 in The Ford Star Jubilee, a spectacular sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. CBS began a one-hour musical-variety series, The Judy Garland Show, in 1963. The show had to compete against NBC’s very popular Bonanza, but it ran for twenty-six shows before it was canceled.

Garland was addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates and also abused alcohol. She had frequent stays in hospital and rehabilitation facilities, often to dry out after a physical or psychological collapse, and eventually she developed kidney and liver problems. She suffered from depression, and she made frequent attempts at suicide. On June 22, 1969, her husband found her in their bathroom, dead from an overdose at the age of forty-seven. Some people believe that the overdose was accidental; others, that her death was suicide.

Significance

Despite her emotional disease, Garland is remembered for her film performances (as a child in The Wizard of Oz and as an adult in A Star Is Born) and for her concert performances. Her singing was magnificent, and her later film work showed that she was also capable of fine dramatic performances. She was successful in films, in concerts, and on television. She blended her personal problems into her performances, so that a few of her films seemed autobiographical, and her admiring audiences longed for her next comeback. If Garland could recover, maybe they could too. Her recording of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” made late in her life, in the middle of which she breaks down crying, became a classic as soon as it was released, perhaps because it expressed what everyone feels at times. In 2019, Judy, a biopic depicting the later years of Garland's life when she performed sold-out shows at a nightclub in London, was released.

Bibliography

Clarke, Gerald. Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland. New York: Random House, 2000. Illuminating, exhaustively researched biography that provides a compassionate view of Garland, who was harshly treated by her employers, family, and lovers.

DiOrio, Al. Little Girl Lost. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974. This biography of Garland is similar to several others but also has a complete listing of every record, television show, and film she made, noting the songs she sang on each occasion.

Frank, Gerold. Judy. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. This biography provides a thorough examination of Garland’s life, giving details of her many illnesses and psychological problems. It does not attempt to evaluate her career in film and entertainment.

Fricke, John. Judy Garland: A Portrait in Art and Anecdote. Boston: Bullfinch Press, 2003. Fricke provides a chronology of Garland’s performances on radio, television, film and the stage from the 1920’s through the 1960’s through the use of photographs, vignettes, and excerpts from interviews.

Meyer, John. Heartbreaker. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983. Meyer, a songwriter, was in a relationship with Garland from October 18, 1968, to January 31, 1969, at which point he lost her to her soon-to-be fifth husband, Mickey Deans. Meyer gives a detailed account of his life with Garland, complete with re-created conversations.

Morella, Joe, and Edward Z. Epstein. Judy: The Films and Career of Judy Garland. New York: Citadel Press, 1969. This is a scrapbook detailing Garland’s career, with a listing of the films in which she appeared, photographs of her in different roles, extracts from reviews of her work, and comments by friends and colleagues.

Spada, James. Judy and Liza. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983. This biography focuses on the relationship between Garland and her daughter, Liza Minnelli. The quality of the relationship between mother and daughter is documented from Judy’s pregnancy to Liza’s adolescence and the growing emergence of Liza as a star in her own right. The book ends with the development of Liza’s career after the death of her mother.

Torme, Mel. The Other Side of the Rainbow: With Judy Garland on the Dawn Patrol. New York: William Morrow, 1970. This is a personal account of Torme’s experiences with Garland. He first met her in 1943, and he worked with her in 1963 and 1964 as a writer of special musical material and adviser for the CBS television program The Judy Garland Show.

1901-1940: August 17, 1939: The Wizard of Oz Premieres.

1941-1970: 1944-1957: Kelly Forges New Directions in Cinematic Dance.

1971-2000: January 5, 1975: The Wiz Brings African American Talent to Broadway.