[Dixielandjazz] Judy Garland

[Stephen Barbone]

Don't miss this on PBS tomorrow night. Judy Garland was, IMO, an
extraordinary OKOM singer. The article below has a reference to her
Carnegie Hall Concert, April 1961. That was an unbelievable event and is
available on record. He energy, plus that of the band is simply
breathtaking. See her story (in the USA) on PBS.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

February 24, 2004 - NY Times

Garland's Midnight Blues, Recalled in a TV Portrait PBS Wed Night, Feb
25

By BERNARD WEINRAUB

     LOS ANGELES, Feb. 23 — In the twilight of her life Judy Garland
sometimes sat alone at night speaking into a tape recorder. "Do you
realize how many people have talked about me, written about me, imitated
me?" she says on tape. "Well it's high time to stop. This is the story
of my life, and I, Judy Garland, am going to talk."

The tapes — "I'm all by myself as usual," she says at one point after
turning on the recorder — were to serve as the basis for an
autobiography that Garland, who died in 1969 at 47, began several times
but never completed. Now a PBS documentary, "Judy Garland: By Myself,"
part of the "American Masters" series, is using portions of the tapes to
explore this troubled and extraordinary performer who Tony Bennett calls
"the greatest singer of the century." The two-hour documentary is to be
broadcast on most PBS stations on Wednesday night.

The quality of the tapes was terrible, said Susan Lacy, the executive
producer of "American Masters," so Garland's words were read by Isabel
Keating, who plays her in the Broadway musical "The Boy From Oz."

Portions of the tapes were not meant to be made public, said John
Fricke, an author of several books about Garland and a producer of the
documentary with Ms. Lacy. Garland had expressed embarrassment about
them at one point because, Mr. Fricke said, "they were basically made in
the middle of the night, when she was medicated or unhappy or railing
against her managers or husbands."

The producers tried to respect her wishes, using only tapes about her
career, not those dealing with her troubled personal life, which has
been thoroughly scrutinized in biographies. PBS said that there were
hours of tapes, but that the documentary relied on only about 90
minutes' worth.

Gerald Clarke, author of "Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland" (Random
House, 2000), contributed transcripts of several interviews with people
like the writer and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Mr. Clarke said: "She
was very angry on some occasions — how she had been manipulated, how
money had been stolen from her. A lot of it is absolutely true."

Bits and pieces of the tapes have been circulating for years. On them —
and in the documentary — Garland seems droll and poignant. "Hmm, is it
working?" she asks, turning on the recorder. "Swell. I'm just trying to
get a few thoughts down, talking into this tape machine."

As depicted in "By Myself" Garland was not only plagued by personal
demons and exploitative studio executives and business advisers but was
also a highly ambitious woman: funny, smart and resilient. "Rehearsals!
I was known as a `one-take girl,' " she says. "Nobody ever directed me
much; I just went out there and did what came naturally."

At another point she says: "I would like audiences to know I've been in
love with them all my life, and I've tried to please. I hope I did." And
in a wistful mood, "As I look back upon it, I'm sure that the first four
years of my life were the happiest I ever had."

She was born on June 10, 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minn., a daughter of two
former vaudeville performers. She began appearing as a child in theaters
in and around Grand Rapids, and later in Los Angeles, where she
auditioned for MGM at 13.

Garland became a superstar with "The Wizard of Oz" in 1939 and made an
average of two films a year between then and 1950, including "Meet Me in
St. Louis" (1944), "The Clock" (1945), "The Harvey Girls" (1946),
"Easter Parade" (1948) and "Summer Stock" (1950). But life at the studio
was all-consuming. She was given pills to lose weight, she worked
relentlessly, and she was insecure about her looks amid the studio's
beauties. (Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, called her "little
hunchback.")

The documentary shows her laughing about her schooling at the studio in
a 1962 interview with Jack Paar. "It was a terrible classroom in the
first place, when you think of all of us in one group," she says. "It
was Elizabeth Taylor, Lana Turner, Mickey Rooney and Freddie Bartholomew
and me and Deanna Durbin." Then she asks, "Have you seen us since we've
come out? We're a very peculiar group."

Like so much in Garland's life one of her greatest triumphs was also a
personal disaster. After her MGM career ended, she gave what many
critics consider her most powerful performance, in a musical remake of
"A Star Is Born" (1954), directed by George Cukor for Warner Brothers.

In the documentary she says she had wanted to play Esther Blodgett, who
becomes a star while her husband declines into alcoholism, since 1942,
when she performed the role on radio. "But MGM didn't think such a sad
and tragic story was right for their precious Judy," she says. (The
documentary points out that the story parallels Garland's own: she was
both Esther Blodgett and her husband, Norman Maine.)

The studio drastically cut the film. "It robbed Judy of her Oscar,"
Cukor is quoted as saying. "Neither she nor I could ever look on it
again."

The film also ended Garland's reign as a major movie star. She began
doing concerts. Some were legendary, like her April 23, 1961, appearance
at Carnegie Hall. (NOTE, THIS CONCERT WAS INCREDIBLE) She also signed on
to do a back-breaking weekly series, "The Judy Garland Show," for CBS,
mostly to establish financial security for her three children.

"I've been working my head off," she says in the documentary. "Somebody
had to feed my children, and that's me. And it's my pleasure because in
return they give me laughter, love and comfort."

Although the series, which ran from September 1963 to March 1964, is now
considered classic, it was canceled because the president of CBS, James
Aubrey, was not fond of Garland, and it had failed to make much of a
dent against NBC's top-rated "Bonanza."

Michael Dann, a former CBS executive, says in "By Myself": "She would
say to me: `Mike, why did you cancel me? Why? I loved it so, I felt I
could do it. I didn't let you down.'

"I'd just listen to her because I felt we had let her down, I had let
her down. The cancellation of Judy was the cancellation of a person, not
a company, and it was an awful blow to take at her stage in life."

Garland never fully recovered. She thought that her financial advisers
had cheated her. Her behavior became erratic, and her reliance on pills
accelerated. She died on June 22, 1969, in London of "barbiturate
poisoning."

In his book Mr. Clarke wrote that the coroner found no evidence of
suicide, but that he attributed her death to a mistake, "an incautious
self-overdosage." Her body was flown to New York, where an estimated
22,000 people lined up at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home to pay
tribute to her.

"You're not going to close the book on Judy Garland," Mankiewicz says in
the documentary. "Oh no. I don't think anybody's going to close the book
on her."