“When you have lived the life I’ve lived,” Judy Garland once noted, “when you’ve loved and suffered, and been madly happy and desperately sad—well, that’s when you realize you’ll never be able to set it all down. Maybe you’d rather die first.”
This brutally honest admission of her own strengths and limitations was typical of Garland, the enthralling performer whose legendary concerts and roles in films like The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, and A Star Is Born cemented her as an icon of the 20th century.
Garland never did set her own life story down on paper. But since her death in 1969, countless books have been written in lieu of the memoir she repeatedly tried to write. According to her daughter Lorna Luft, author of the understandably defensive, harrowing, humorous, and empathetic Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir, her family has found many of these books to be exploitative and cruel.
The definitive Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, by Gerald Clarke, is probably the best of the bunch: laudatory, filled with fun, gossipy tidbits, but with a warts-and-all approach that feels demeaning, even if it is the truth. Garland supplied plenty of scintillating copy, including five marriages and alleged affairs with Joe Mankiewicz, Tyrone Power, Johnny Mercer, Yul Brynner, Orson Welles, and Frank Sinatra. Then there was her crippling addiction to pills, which eventually cost her everything—including her life.
But what Lorna’s book and her father Sid Luft’s memoir, Judy and I: My Life With Judy Garland, reveal is the magnetic pull of the woman behind the tragic star: a tiny, high-strung dynamo who was funny as hell, throbbingly emotional, devilishly manipulative, overwhelmingly loving, and a masterful storyteller. “An affectionate hug from Judy and you knew you were accepted by this rare creature,” Sid Luft writes. “You felt as though you’d never been appreciated before.”
Though her life was a cautionary tale even as she lived it, Garland never lost her sense of humor or her sense of destiny. “Oh, come on,” Judy laughingly said to a reporter who asked if she would live her life all over again. “Don’t for heaven’s sake give me that old sob stuff routine. Of course I’d do it all over again. With all the same mistakes.”
Baby Gumm
Frances Ethel Gumm was born June 10, 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Her father, Frank, was a charming, gregarious Southerner who had run off to join the vaudeville circuit. Her mother, Ethel, was tiny, strong-willed, and relentless—“the real wicked witch of the west,” according to her youngest daughter.
The Gumms were old hats at vaudeville, performing as a double act while Frank managed a theater in Grand Rapids. Their older daughters, Mary Jane and Jimmie, were already seasoned performers. But the future Judy Garland quickly became the pampered star of the family, responding only to “baby.” She was her father’s pride and joy.
“Once my grandfather got a look at her big dark eyes, he forgot that he’d been wanting a boy and fell hopelessly in love with Baby,” Lorna writes. “Mama would have that effect on people for the rest of her life. The truth is, whatever Mama might say about it years later, everybody loved her.”
She would soon establish herself as the undisputed star in the family business as well. According to Garland, at two years old she was already begging her parents to let her join her sisters onstage. One night she couldn’t wait any longer and ran onto the stage, running in circles with a dinner bell, singing “Jingle Bells.”
“Everybody started applauding,” Garland recalled, per Judy and I. “I liked it and I stayed there singing one chorus after the other. My mother was howling with laughter as she kept playing [the piano]. My father was in the wings saying, ‘Come on, Baby, you get off.’”