Word: garlanding
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...Judy Garland--again? Is there really anyone left who still gives two hoots in Oz about her sad life and squalid death? You had better believe it. Thirty-one years after America's first lady of victimhood popped her last pill, the publication of Gerald Clarke's Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland (Random House; 510 pages; $29.95) is being greeted by enough hoopla to elect a Senator, including a monthlong Turner Classic Movies marathon and the reissue on 24-karat-gold audiophile CDs of Garland's 1961 Carnegie Hall concert, which is to the Cult of Dorothy what...
...aren't we all tired of pitying Judy? Not just yet. Thanks to candid interviews with hitherto-silent sources, plus a peek at a previously unpublished memoir by Garland herself, the author of Capote has miraculously contrived to tell the old, old story--the uppers and downers, the stage mother from hell, the lascivious studio execs and malevolent managers, the boyfriends (and girlfriends) and gay husbands (and father)--with a freshness and factual clarity that scarcely seem possible. This is the Garland bio to read if you're reading only...
...fearful ups and downs of Judy Garland's life are ideally suited to the horror-show style of biography Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed "pathography." But though Clarke is frank, you never feel he is piling up sordid details just for fun. He suffers with her every time she repeats the cycle of "a brilliant start, several years of spectacular success--and then disaster" that marked her career from beginning...
...only thing missing from Get Happy is a serious discussion of Garland's musicianship. "I never heard anybody sing...just the way you do," an amazed James Mason tells her in A Star Is Born. Truer words were never scripted. Dumpy and unglamorous, she acted the way Frank Sinatra did, as an intuitive extension of the complex persona she had first painstakingly built up with her voice alone. When Hollywood finally slammed its doors in her drug-raddled face, she moved into concert halls and sang her way back to superstardom. An ideal biography would have had something memorable...
Please allow my son to court Linda Garland, a student of African-American descent. We recognize that hand-holding may become a possibility. We'll cross that bridge when we come...