The dark fedora tipped to one side; the black tux and black stockings: could that really be Judy Garland singing “Forget your troubles and just get happy!” from the 1950 film musical Summer Stock? No, it was me in the 1970s dressed up in my father’s hat and suit jacket, pretending to tapdance on the tiles of my parents’ hallway and droning out a version of Judy’s syncopated hit to an audience of none.
Even today, 50 years since her death, Garland, the ultimate star of Hollywood’s golden era of musicals, is loved and recognised by children across the world because of her beguiling performance aged 16 as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, released 80 years ago.
Yet that classic Technicolor fantasy is just a small part of Garland’s screen achievements. How, for a start, did she manage to seem so laden with poignant wisdom as she sang Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas in Meet Me in St Louis, and then so vulnerable and spunky in Easter Parade, opposite Fred Astaire? And what about her game-for-life romantic gusto when cast with Gene Kelly in those bright musicals The Pirate, For Me and My Gal, or in Summer Stock, the hokey theatrical tale that once impressed me so much I felt compelled to dress up and dance.
This weekend, just as fans of Freddie Mercury braced themselves last year for Rami Malek’s portrayal in Bohemian Rhapsody, so those who love Garland are waiting, half proud, half full of dread, for the biopic Judy, in which Renée Zellweger plays the lead. It premiered at the Telluride film festival in Colorado on Friday night and will be out in Britain in a month, but some committed fans have been reluctant to even watch the promotional footage. “I can’t bring myself to,” said Emma Brockes, author of a 2007 book about the appeal of musicals, What Would Barbra Do?
“I can’t quite figure out why the possibility of it being bad is so bad, but it is unbearable somehow,” she added. “I don’t want to see something I hold dear pulled apart. It risks killing the mystery somehow, by breaking Judy down to her constituent parts, and I don’t want to see that.”
Another who may well not see it is Garland’s daughter, Liza Minnelli, 73. She is portrayed in the film and announced last summer that she did “not approve nor sanction” the biopic. “I have never met nor spoken to Renée Zellweger … Any reports to the contrary are 100% fiction,” she wrote on Facebook.
The new film, directed by Rupert Goold, chronicles Garland’s difficult five weeks of sold-out London concerts in the winter of 1968, the year before she died at the age of 47 in a Belgravia mews.
If the source of a Hollywood star’s megawatt radiance was ever to be located, it would surely be found in that way they have of communicating a sense of their own specialness (That voice! Those eyes! That smile!). Such performers are commonly described as “one of a kind”, despite the fact the entertainment industry is repeatedly bold enough to let other people play them.
Goold’s biopic follows recent cinematic accounts of the last days in Liverpool of the Hollywood filmstar Gloria Grahame, played by Annette Bening, and of Laurel and Hardy’s tours of Britain at the end of their careers in Stan & Ollie, starring Steve Coogan and John C Reilly. Both films carefully walked a tightrope between sentiment and veneration.
Luckily Zellweger is an Oscar-winning actress and is also capable of great transformations, so it seems probable her Garland will be better than my own childhood efforts. And Brockes has hopes, too.
“Renée has a guilelessness about her that I could see working in this role,” she said. “And, not to make light of Hollywood actresses starving themselves, she also has that head-too-big-for-her-body look that at least physically is totally on point for late-stage Judy.”
The fact the actress sings all the songs on the soundtrack remains a concern for Brockes: “Then again, Zellweger really pulled it off in Chicago. There’s a chance she may be able to fudge around the singing with a lot of wayward vibrato, then fall back on her acting chops.”
A soundtrack album, released as the film opens in the United States on 27 September, features a duet with another fan, Rufus Wainwright, who describes Garland as “a constant force in my life”. He told Rolling Stone last week that “The Wizard of Oz was one of the pyramids of culture that I gazed at as a small child”.
The book best known for summing up this sort of Judy-generated emotion is Susie Boyt’s My Judy Garland Life, reissued this month by Virago with a new preface written by the author in the Cinderella Bar at the London Palladium (“where Judy Garland’s second act as a concert artist truly began in 1951”).
Speaking this weekend, Boyt conveys Garland’s enduring power as a performer. “She sings straight into your central nervous system. Her voice undoes people,” she said. “Her best performances give you the sense that you are entering a good crisis, like hang-gliding or falling in love or having your stitches removed. Time and again she imbued her early material with more wit, ebullience and subtlety than even its creators could have imagined. She could make a silly plot about a girl with a pen-pal who works in a musical instrument shop or a family that almost moves to New York shimmer with bias-cut longing and startling humanity.”
Boyt, a daughter of the painter Lucian Freud, says she watched a preview of the film with the same “tremendous anxiety” she might have felt about a family member. “Those of us who love Judy are naturally protective,” explained Boyt. “My chief fear was the film would dwell on her struggles at the expense of her magnificent achievements, as so many projects about her do. This film does not do that. Renée Zellweger clearly adores Judy Garland. The film’s director says he hopes it will send people back to her spectacular body of work. I hope so too.”
English Heritage once had plans to hang a blue plaque outside the Belgravia mews cottage which Garland shared with her fifth husband, Mickey Deans, and in which she died. But the original building has recently been demolished and so the idea has been dropped, disappointing the British-based Garland fanclub.
Boyt is happier now to see a restored building on the site than the previous deteriorating facade. She describes her reaction in her new preface: “It’s grand and luxurious now, the sort of place the second son of a billionaire might hustle and strut. It tells a lie about how she lived, a lie I wish were true. Is that wrong of me?”
At least as good a parting thought is contained in the words of the British actor James Mason, Garland’s co-star in the 1954 version of A Star is Born. Giving the eulogy at her funeral service in New York, Mason described her as “the most sensitive and sympathetic and funniest and most stimulating woman I have ever met”, a singer who “could wring tears out of hearts of rock”.
SIX OF HER BEST FILMS
Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938)
A teen romantic comedy with Mickey Rooney.
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Judy Garland’s innocent Dorothy Gale never loses her magic.
For Me and My Gal (1942)
A wartime musical with Gene Kelly that still sounds good.
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
A family saga that manages to be moving though nothing bad happens.
A Star Is Born (1954)
An emotional rollercoaster co-starring James Mason as a fading star.
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Garland is highly affecting in a cameo as a German hausfrau giving evidence at the war tribunal.
