An extended caption appeared under David Newell-Smith’s photograph on page three of the Observer on 29 December 1968:
“Judy Garland, the singer, was handed a High Court writ yesterday when she arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport from New York. Miss Garland, seen here leaving the airport with her fiancé, Mickey Deans, is due to start a cabaret season at the Talk of the Town restaurant in London tomorrow night.
With the writ is a notice of application in the Vacation Court tomorrow for an injunction to stop her from appearing in the show. It was issued by solicitors acting for two American businessmen, and claims that a contract made in 1967 between an American company and Miss Garland provided for the exclusive use of her services until next June.”
Despite the writ, Garland appeared in a five-week run and her performance of 14 January 1969 was reviewed by Tony Palmer in the Observer of the 19th.
Super-star’s seance
Judy Garland has been coming back ever since she was invented. Now on what seems like her 93rd comeback, she’s appearing for a limited season at London’s Talk of the Town (until 1 February). The late Spencer Tracy said that “Garland audiences don’t just listen, they feel.” They also fear, and in some cases hope, that they are about to witness a nervous breakdown, which is one of the insistent qualities of this 47-year-old disaster-prone star.
She doesn’t really give a concert – she conducts a seance. She evokes pity and sorrow like no other superstar. “Audiences,” she says, “have kept me alive.” They also feed on her agonised and well-publicised past: her teenage stardom, her tantrums, her alcohol-sodden voice with its frequent crack-ups, her innumerable broken contracts and her four busted marriages each to increasingly younger men, her suicide attempts and her aches and pains. The audience knows that life has beaten her up but not destroyed her.
Frances Gumm was born in a trunk in the Princes Theatre at Grand Rapids, Minnesota. “Little leather lungs” started at MGM when she was 13. MGM put her into 12 starring pictures whilst she was still in her teens. She grew fat and was told by a studio executive, “You look like a hunchback. We love you but you’re so fat you look like a monster.” She took psychiatric treatment from the age of 18 and kept alive on pills – sleeping pills, tranquillisers, stimulators, waking pills. Psychologists were her parents and the camera was her lover. By 23, she was already once divorced.
“Call me irresponsible,” she sings, “Call me unreliable/But it’s undeniably true/I’m irrevocably signed with you.” With whom it’s none too clear.
She’s thinner now, almost haggard, her hair flicked back like a boy’s. Her orange sequinned suit makes her jaunty – a pantomime principal boy got lost in the East End. With hand on hip, she struts and totters and stomps and prowls – tigerish and restless, her great brown eyes darting amongst the audience for a friendly face. “I haven’t been taught anything new since silent movies,” she croaks.
She kisses the musical director, Burt Rhodes. He smiles. He indicates the band. They smile. She smiles. We all smile. She pretends to listen to requests from the audience, her ear cocked like a cheeky schoolboy expecting a wallop. “What do you want? OK darling, we’ll come to that.” She wrestles with the microphone lead, wandering round the stage as if in search of a place to put it. She offers the mike to the audience and invites them to join in. One woman actually seized it and sang “Over the Rainbow” herself, whereupon the audience jeered and hooted that the woman continue in the place of Miss Garland.
“I love you all,” she cries. She drinks and toasts herself. Her words become more and more slurred. Her hands appeal, shout, implore: “I’d like to hate myself, but I can’t.” Her husband-to-be is dragged on and kissed while she sings, “For once in my life I have someone who needs me.” The audience heckles and interrupts, between the crème brûlée and the liqueur. She smokes, borrows a handkerchief, looks amazed and embarrassed by the applause. Her little finger goes to her mouth in a well-rehearsed sob of joy.
It is all immaculate and meaningless. The shoddy, tarnished world that created her has emasculated her. In her we see the broken remnant of a gaudy age of show-biz which believed that glamour was a good enough substitute for genius. Her raucous masculinity, for all its fashionable and legendary attraction, has given her away at last.
And then she sings that song – somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly. Birds fly over the rainbow – why then, oh why can’t I? She sits cross-legged, lit by a single spotlight, alone in a great emptiness. No more gimmicks, no more show. Just a small girl who has been put down but who refuses to give in. Her voice cracks a little, sighs a little. No more smiles, no more noise. It’s pathetic and lonely and dignified – and the audience carries on burping and gossiping: “You made me love you: I didn’t want to do it …” she sings.
Judy Garland married Mickey Deans at Chelsea Register Office in London on 15 March 1969. On 22 June 1969, Deans found her dead from an overdose of barbiturates at their home in Belgravia.
