Judy Garland and a lifetime of chasing rainbows
by Jake Stigers
By December 1968, Judy Garland’s personal and professional résumé had amassed 30+ movies, hundreds of singles and albums, two Academy Award nominations, one Academy Juvenile Award, two Golden Globes, one Grammy, one Special Tony Award, two canceled studio contracts, four (and about to be five) husbands, three children, a lifetime addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates, multiple stints in rehab, crushing debt, and more highs and lows and crashes and comebacks than one lifetime can reasonably be expected to hold.
End of the Rainbow offers a theatrical take—and is there honestly any way other than theatrical to document Judy Garland’s life?—on the events surrounding what ended up being her final comeback attempt in a series of 1969 concerts at London’s Talk of the Town nightclub.
Once in a lullaby
Born Frances Ethel Gumm in 1922 to parents who had openly not welcomed their unexpected pregnancy, the future Judy Garland got her first enticing taste of performing at age 2 when she sang “Jingle Bells” on the stage of her family’s Minnesota theater. She and her two older siblings soon formed an act they called the Gumm Sisters, and they found a respectable amount of success touring the vaudeville circuit and even appearing in MGM movie shorts.
There’s a delightful theater legend that a Chicago playbill had misspelled their act as The Glum Sisters, which was the impetus for the girls to find a more glamorous stage name. The source of the name Garland has been attributed to everything from the character Lily Garland in Twentieth Century to drama critic Robert Garland to a casual comparison of the girls’ beauty to a garland of flowers. In any case, The Garland Sisters they became. And the future Judy went even farther by adopting a glamorous new first name from a popular Hoagy Carmichael song.
The trio broke up in 1934 when the eldest Garland-née-Gumm sister eloped to Nevada with a musician and the rising-star Judy Garland found herself invited to audition for Louis B. Mayer in California. She belted her way through “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart!” and—as the stories go—was immediately offered an MGM contract without a screen test.
Judy was 13 years old, 4 feet 11 inches tall (which she’d be for the rest of her life) and immediately made to be aware that she was nowhere near as beautiful or glamorous as the other up-and-coming movie stars—like Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor—with whom she shared an MGM classroom. She was the cute girl next door with little in the way of major movie-star potential except for one thing: her voice. The cherubic, pint-sized teen had an impressive set of pipes and a natural aptitude for emotional performance that made her seem wiser and more worldly than her years every time she opened her mouth.
But to Mayer, her looks—specifically her weight—made her a hard sell to a movie-going public (he called her “my little hunchback”), and his studio put her on near-starvation diets of soup and lettuce to slim her down. And once young Judy had earned enough public adoration to make her a bankable star, MGM pumped her full of amphetamines to keep her awake long enough to work her to death and barbiturates to give her short fits of sleep at night.
In the process, they also gave her a lifetime of drug addictions and crippling self-esteem issues.
The dreams that you dare to dream
In 1939, Garland was catapulted from bankable child star to mega-bankable movie star by playing Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz and—more specifically—by singing “Over the Rainbow,” a simple, soaring soliloquy inspired by Dorothy’s Auntie Em telling her to “find yourself a place where you won't get into any trouble.” The song became a breakout hit and a personal anthem of both hope and introspection for Garland that kept finding newer—sometimes profound, oftentimes heartbreaking—shades of meaning as her life and career careened through endless cycles of soaring successes, epic crashes and triumphant comebacks.
The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Arms—both released in 1939—earned Garland an Academy Juvenile Award, which surprisingly ended up being the only Oscar she ever won. But her star skyrocketed from there through iconic pairings with Mickey Rooney; iconic movies like Meet Me in St. Louis; and iconic affairs with other stars both single and married including Johnny Mercer, Tyrone Power and Orson Welles.
But her escalating problems with addiction and, later, mental illness eventually made her so unreliable and expensively absent from filmings that she was fired from three high-profile movies in pretty rapid succession: 1949’s The Barkleys of Broadway (replaced by Ginger Rogers), 1950’s Annie Get Your Gun (replaced by Betty Hutton) and 1951’s Royal Wedding (replaced by Jane Powell). And in 1950, she was unceremoniously kicked out of MGM.
Troubles melt like lemon drops
Over the next two decades, Garland’s life and career raced up one mountain and careened down the next:
She headlined sold-out concerts and tours in London’s Palladium, Manhattan’s Palace Theatre, Las Vegas’s New Frontier Hotel and Carnegie Hall—the last of which produced a two-record album that spent 13 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart and won four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and Best Female Vocal of the Year.
She survived a number of suicide attempts, committed herself to repeated stays in mental hospitals, and developed acute hepatitis that threatened to leave her an invalid who would never sing again.
She made a grand comeback with her 1954 remake of A Star is Born, which earned her an Academy Award nomination. She was thought to be such a shoo-in that even though she was recovering from the birth of her son Joey, television crews set up cameras in her hospital room to televise her acceptance speech the night of the ceremony. They reported packed up and left her alone in her room before the surprise winner—Grace Kelly, for The Country Girl—even got to the stage to accept her trophy.
She signed a contract with Random House to write an autobiography with the working title The Judy Garland Story but was unable to stay focused and on-task to finish it in the nine years until her death.
She launched a successful TV variety show on CBS called The Judy Garland Show that received critical acclaim but was canceled due to poor ratings (it was slotted against NBC’s juggernaut Bonanza) and industry politics. While introducing a young Barbra Streisand to the nation on her show, she candidly told Streisand “Don’t let them do to you what they did to me. … Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a blizzard. An absolute blizzard.”
She was cast as the desperately aging, shamelessly man-hungry Helen Lawson in the 1967 movie Valley of the Dolls, but her alcoholism and unreliability—compounded by her cruel treatment by director Mark Robson, who saw her only as a source of scandal-inspired publicity—got her fired soon after production began.
She found herself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that she could never resurface from thanks to failed investments in movie projects, unscrupulous managers, gambling husbands, skyrocketing interest on back taxes and her own failures at managing her money. She even had to sell her Brentwood home at a loss to help dig herself out of it.
Happy little bluebirds fly
Garland’s lifetime quest for approval, love and stability also led to five marriages and four divorces with musician David Rose (she was 19; he was 31), director Vincente Minnelli (with whom she had daughter Liza), tour manager and producer Sidney Luft (with whom she had daughter Lorna and son Joey), actor Mark Herron (they both accused each other of domestic abuse and the marriage ended within six months), and disco manager and opportunist Mickey Deans (whom she married a month after her Talk of the Town concerts).
When all the world is a hopeless jumble …
So Garland approached her five-week concert engagement at London’s Talk of the Town—which inspired the narrative of End of the Rainbow—as a triumphant return to the adoring audiences of her 1951 Palladium concerts, as a yet-again comeback that proved she still had it … and as a source of desperately needed income to finally extricate herself from her crippling debt and start a new life with her children.
The concerts were—as End of the Rainbow playwright Peter Quilter describes it—an “emotional car crash.” She staggered and slurred—often in the sequined orange brocade suit she kept from Valley of the Dolls—through her performances. The sold-out audiences often threw food at her to show their anger over her on-stage messiness and infuriating lateness.
And the reviewers did not hold back. The Guardian said the shows seemed “like her 93rd comeback” and stated that “she evokes pity and sorrow like no other superstar. … In her we see the broken remnant of a gaudy age of showbiz which believed that glamour was a good enough substitute for genius.” Time called the performances more “seance” than “concert” and wrote a year later in her obituary that they “turned out to be the biggest flop of her life” and that she looked like a “walking casualty.”
And the raindrops tumble all around …
End of the Rainbow—though now based on the Talk of the Town concerts—didn’t start out about Judy Garland at all. Playwright Peter Quilter had written a 2001 play called Last Song of the Nightingale about a past-her-prime diva inspired by an alcoholic cruise-ship performer he had known. It starred Tracie Bennett, who said her character felt like a roman à clef for Garland in her Talk of the Town performances. Quilter reworked the play, and End of the Rainbow premiered at the Sydney Opera House in 2005. It won Caroline O’Connor three Best Actress awards for her portrayal of Garland. Bennett took over the role in 2010 when it came home to London, where the show won four Olivier Awards, including Best Actress and Best New Play. Bennett also received a Tony nomination when she brought the show to Broadway in 2012.
End of the Rainbow also inspired the 2019 movie Judy, which won Renée Zellweger a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Garland. While End of the Rainbow underscores Garland’s emotional and professional claustrophobia at this point in her life by confining the off-stage narrative to her Ritz Hotel suite, Judy builds Garland’s journey to catastrophe in slow claps with flashbacks to cruel adults, exhausting schedules, and a calculated, inevitable addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates.
When all the clouds darken up the skyway …
Garland made her final concert appearance on March 25, 1969—ten days after marrying fifth husband Mickey Deans—in Copenhagen, and she performed there with the same display of disorientation, collapse and horror she’d exhibited in London.
Three months later, on June 22, 1969, Deans discovered Garland dead in the bathroom of their run-down London rental. The death was ruled an accidental overdose of barbiturates. She was just 12 days past her 47th birthday.
There's a rainbow highway to be found …
Garland’s funeral was on June 27 in New York City, and an estimated 20,000 people showed up to pay their respects. That night, New York’s Stonewall Inn—a gay bar run by the mafia—was raided by police. Raids of gay bars were commonplace, and patrons always meekly and with shame let themselves be arrested and humiliated in the next day’s papers.
But this time the patrons fought back, throwing bricks and bottles, trapping the police in the bar, and effectively starting the march toward equality for LGBTQ+ people across the country.
Garland—in her personal story arc from fabulous screen ingénue to fierce survivor—had been an icon to gay men, who often used “friend of Dorothy” in reference to her Wizard of Oz character as code to clandistinely identify themselves to each other in public. Whether her funeral was an impetus for the Stonewall rising or just coincidentally on the same day is still passionately debated among historians and devotees, but it is nevertheless tied to the uprising in the minds and hearts of gay people to this day.
There’s a place behind the sun …
Of Garland’s endurance and resilience in the public’s—and not just gay people’s—hearts and minds, Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann once declared “I think Judy will always come back. She kids about making a lot of comebacks, but I think Judy has a kind of a thing where she has to get to the bottom of the rope and things have to get very, very rough for her. Then with an amazing inner strength that only comes of a certain genius, she comes back bigger than ever.”
There’s a place beyond the rain …
Of the profound endurance of the song “Over the Rainbow,” Judy star Renée Zellweger told Vanity Fair that people “have nostalgic feelings from childhood attached to that song, but in Judy’s life, it’s something different. She weathered so many insurmountable challenges in her life, and it’s about her maintaining hope. In spite of all her difficulties, she still carried on.”
Jake Stigers regularly writes about the arts for theaters in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City and often makes his own triumphant comebacks on their stages.
