About book Get Happy: The Life Of Judy Garland (2000)
LADY GAGA - RICHARD NIXON - FINALLY THE TRUTHThere are a couple of very nasty anecdotes in this judy garland bio which I would have suppressed, because now they're in my brain whenever I hear her extraordinary voice. But of course biography isn't hagiography, and if you go round censoring the lurid aspects of your subject you're now engaged in PR which is a whole other thing. I dunno. Do we really need to know that Marlon Brando and J Edgar Hoover were lovers? Or that Richard Nixon sired a love child in 1960 who later briefly married Britney Spears? You see how tricky this stuff is. What with 24 hour celebwatch channels and Heat magazine and Walmart selling kits on how to liposuct your own baby it's not easy to keep an even keel. Judy garland was born not only without an even keel but without a keel of any sort. She wrote the book on how not to be famous. Your Britneys and Lindsays are following bravely in her rubyslippered footsteps but she had to do it all without the help of the 74 different varieties of space dust you can now score on any downtown street corner and the obligatory leaked home movie sextape. But if there were camcorders and internets in the 40s, you just know Judy would have had her threesome with the very young Richard Nixon and J Edgar right up there for all to goggle at. And plus she did have large amounts of talent. Judy married 14 guys, some three times, and each one stole all her money. Like Bob Dylan and John Lennon she had an unnatural ability to look like different people from one year to the next. That part may be due to the drugs and the extreme dieting regimes of course - same with John Lennon and Bob Dylan. I don't know about Marlon Brando. And Richard Nixon always looked the same, from the age of 19 right up to when he died and as far as I know he still does. (Not so Britney! (I loved her "raunchy biochemist" look.))note change of face shape from round to hatchetHAPPY LITTLE RAINDROPSJudy Garland crashed and burned several times as we know and after being gurneyed off to some sanatorium she always came back with a different career. From child star to grown up star, to impossible diva, to concert hall sensation, to character actress. Had she lived she may have joined the Black Panthers or have invented Tippex or become the leader of the Central African Republic. She was exhausting. She had one of the 20th century's great voices, unmistakeable after one note, and she sang a lot of the great songs although much of what went down on record is a little too ringadingding for me. (That hi-octane 40s swing style did nobody any favours, it's like a smile painted on a corpse). She was the epitome of the great star who you thought was really just like an ordinary person lost in a whirl of Hollywood mania - like yeah, of course she was! so ordinary! - but she could really sell that ridiculous idea. She even sells it to me. It's like she had a special heat that melted cynicism. So I wanted to find out about her life, and now I'm slightly sorry I did. This also happened with Dusty Springfield. Books can be dangerous, they're not something passive, they jump into your head and ramify your mind.
*prepare for stereotypically gay comments and response to this book*Pretty much everyone knows that Garland's life was a true American Tragedy. This book altered that opinion in me only by making it clear that the story is more complex than that. Was it ALL "everyone else's" fault? (MGM, her parents, her lovers/husbands, etc.) or is she partially to blame? Some of her "diva-like" behaviors in her later career (trashing dressing rooms, being completely impossible to work with, etc.) were nobody's fault but hers. Or were they? Were these just natural reactions to the way she was treated earlier? It's a complex story.Clarke is an incredibly gifted writer...I will definitely be reading his Capote biography. He has the rare gifted of crafting a non-fiction work that is impossible to put down, but at the same time doesn't appear to take huge liberties with the truth. (I can usually detect that...Nigel Cawthorne comes to mind).A quote that stuck out to me, which I think sums up what my response to Judy's voice has always been, even before I had the words to describe it. This quote is also handy to describe my reaction to excellent performances of any kind, and thereby my choice of profession. Clarke is describing Judy's enormous triumph at the Palace, not long after her enormous triumph at Carnegie Hall:"Judy's conquest was so complete that critics and commentators, hard to account for it, eventually gave up, likening it to a miracle - and miracles can only be described, not explained. 'Where lay the magic?' inquired a bewildered Clifton Fadiman, who saw her not at the opening, but many weeks later, at a point when many shows have lost that first-night fervor. 'Why did we grow silent,' Fadiman went on, 'self-forgetting, our faces list as with so many candles, our eyes glittering with unregarded tears? Why did we call her back again and again and again, not as if she had been giving a good performance, but as if she had been offering salvation?'"Such is great performance...a miracle each and every time. A miracle which "can only be described, not explained." And the best part? You don't need a music degree to recognize it when it happens. You just have to be there.
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I enjoyed this book, it seemed a bit long and slow moving in places, but her life was tough and had lots to cover in it. It was very well written I think and didn't concentrate to much on parts that were needed to make it longer. I liked how the pictures were done in the book in that they were inserted every now and then, not like most with a photo album section in the middle, but I wanted more of them. I think that Judy had a very hard life and it was sad for the circumstances and decisions that she made in her life that lead to it's end. Oddly, enough I see some similarities between her life and my mom's for some reason, or it could just be that she looks like my mom in some of the pictures. Overall, this is a book that I would recommend to someone who wanted to read about Judy Garland's life.
—Emily
An interesting biography on the great Garland. I found that Clarke was easily able to engage us in her life story. He is sympathetic towards her while also taking a step back in order to look at her critically. However, there were a few times that I felt uneasy about some of his 'facts' that I believe he actually couldn't support. He describes the sexual orientation of stars that have never been fully authenticated as the truth. He also talks about affairs, personal experiences of people etc as though it was a definite. A lot of these stories were rumours and were not confirmed in the 1930s, let alone nearly 80 years later.
—Varsha Lalla
Took me about a week to read through not because of length or lack of interest, but so many things referenced had me looking up video clips or Googling to look at people's pictures, find out more information, etc. Garland had such a eventful life filled with extreme highs and lows, it is hard to encapsulate it in one book, I think. So there are lacking details on some of Judy's relationships, particularly with her children, but exhaustive details on other relationships. While some may feel Clarke only focused on tawdry details or had dubious sources, he did write and organize this book in a very readable and entertaining way. In a previous book by Anne Edwards I was brought to tears while reading of Judy's final days, but Clarke handled those rather quickly and dispassionately. Overall not a perfect book but very interesting.
—Sarah
