One hundred years have passed since the birth of the versatile actress, popular for her role as Dorothy and condemned to a life of addictions due to Hollywood cruelty
Like Marilyn Monroe, she died in the bathroom of an overdose of barbiturates. Judy Garland walked the yellow brick road for the last time, but she didn't return to Kansas or be carried away by a whirlwind, like in 'The Wizard of Oz'. She was just 47 years old, but before half a century, the Hollywood goldfinch had already lived a few lifetimes.
Judy Garland, whose birth marks 100 years, was destined to be an all-out star, endowed with great acting talent and a prodigious voice. She was just a little girl when her mother took her all over America, blasting her voice in cabarets and nightclubs, parading around on a sort of tour performing dance numbers with her older sisters in a vaudeville group they called 'The Gumm. Sisters'.
When Louis B. Mayer, the head honcho of Metro, heard her sing, she signed him to a long-term contract with MGM. It was 1935, and Judy Garland was 13 years old. She debuted in a short and her future was promising, but the start of her career was marked by indetermination. They didn't know what to do with me because they loved you either at five or eighteen, with nothing in between. Well, I was in the middle," admitted Judy Garland. It saw the light of day in the youth comedies of the time, especially with 'Thoroughbreds Don't Cry' and the Andy Hardy series (which in Spain was translated as 'Andrés Harvey Falls in Love'), sharing the spotlight with another of the most prolific Hollywood child actor Mickey Rooney, with whom she co-starred in nine films. "We were not just a team, we were magical," said the actor about the couple they formed, both child actors, teen idols, and, as tradition dictates, fallen stars.
Then came 'The Wizard of Oz' and her career took off. The captive-bred goldfinch took flight, but never very far from the cage in which he had grown up. Judy Garland was 16, but Dorothy must have looked twelve. At that time, she was already addicted to pills, which Metro Goldwyn Mayer gave her so as not to suffer from the demanding shooting: amphetamines during the day to stay awake, and barbiturates at night to rest. They forced her to use tight corsets and gauze to hide her chest; her doppelganger and her personal trainer, Barbara Bobbie Koshay, were spying on her on the studio's orders.
Dressed in blue and her coveted red slippers, Garland suffered the whipping of Louis B. Mayer, who accentuated her insecurity by calling her "my little hunchback" during the filming of the film, one of the great achievements of the technicolor of the history of cinema. For the film, the actress won a special Oscar, but also countless problems. Her tendency to gain weight subjected her to constant surveillance by producers and managers of MGM, who imposed a strict diet based on lettuce and soups that reinforced her anxiety and increased her addiction to tobacco, reaching the point of consuming eighty cigarettes a day.
'The Wizard of Oz' exalted Judy Garland, but she drew a legacy of shadows in her future. The actress, for whose centenary Notorious Ediciones dedicates the book 'The Universe of Judy Garland' to her, never fully recovered from torturous filming in which another executive called her a "pig with pigtails" and the Munchkins, those dwarfs who populated the fictional world of the film, they went too far with her.
What had been a productive relationship ended sourly? After the success of the film, distrust was established in MGM, which fired Garland from several projects for not showing up for filming, which in turn caused the actress anxiety attacks and suicide attempts. During their forties, she participated in musicals such as 'The Ziegfeld Girls', 'For Me and My Gal', 'My Date in San Luis' or 'The Pirate', but her ups and downs ended up breaking a rope that I had been tense for years.
Always under the media spotlight, without the protection of a mother complicit in those excesses that sealed a fragile personality with low self-esteem, Garland grew up comparing herself to other stars and, like many of them, suffered the cruelty of an industry that she only cared about. You matter when you're on the ridge. Her traumatic childhood did not improve over time, and she also led the singer to endless disorders, with anorexia and psychological problems that she only tried to replace with alcohol.
Five Marriages and endless lovers of Judy Garland
He took refuge on Broadway and at work, coming to give more than a thousand concerts in his entire life, including his legendary performance at Carnegie Hall. Also in love, accumulating five marriages, one for each decade since 1941. One of them was with the father of modern musicals, Vincente Minelli, with whom he had a daughter, the also actress and singer Liza Minelli, and the last one was with Mickey Deans, a dealer who ended up breaking the fragile Judy Garland. In between, she sought affection in the ephemeral nature of sporadic relationships, which she found in the arms of lurking conquerors such as Artie Shaw, Frank Sinatra, Tyrone Power, Orson Welles, or Yul Brynner.
In 1949 she came across for the first time someone who was not looking for anything. Fred Astaire, another of the great musical film stars with whom he had never worked, coincided by chance in 'Easter Parade', directed by Charles Walters, after the original protagonist, Gene Kelly, suffered an accident. "She was just wonderful. He danced beautifully and learned beautifully. She was very skilled in everything she did. She really was in pretty good shape. We were ready to do another movie together, but she got sick and that was it," recalled the actor, who never worked with Garland again.
Addicted to Drugs and Alcohol by Judy Garland
Unable to sleep, Judy Garland became addicted to morphine, which added to her dependence on cocaine and alcohol and led to her removal from the film "Comes Back To Me," in which she was replaced by Ginger Rogers. After fifteen years, MGM released her from a prolific contract that includes more than twenty of her titles.
After years in cinematographic ostracism, George Cukor, who had already saved her from the bad decision of her blonde wig in 'The Wizard of Oz', rescued her from her again. At his command, Judy Garland returned to the cinema in one of her best roles, in 'A Star Is Born (1954), where in addition to showing her privileged voice and her ability to dance, she demonstrated her talent for drama, since the leading man, a declining actor and alcoholic, resembled her more than James Mason.
She was absent again for nearly a decade until she returned triumphantly with a heartbreaking supporting role in 'Winners or Losers?' (1961), in which she was accompanied by Montgomery Clift, another downcast star.
For both, she received an Oscar nomination, but not the award. In the end, in the showcases of the eighth best female star in the history of cinema, according to the American Film Institute, only one statuette shines, the Academy Award for Youth that she won in 1940.
Like 'Over the Rainbow', Judy Garland continued to sing her entire life the "sad song" until the end of her days in Chelsea, where she died in 1969.
