Judy Garland was confident that there would be something beyond the rainbow, as the song that made her famous said, but she found a reality full of setbacks.
More than eighty years later, Over the Rainbow is the most covered song in history. It is part of the soundtrack of humanity. Its melody and lyrics sound tragic as well as optimistic and can accompany sad moments or happy moments. His simple and immediate metaphor, fantasizing about what lies beyond the rainbow (a scientific atmospheric phenomenon that seems magical, as undeniable as it is unattainable), connects with any human being; That is why Over the Rainbow has spent decades occupying a space halfway between the mythological and the visceral in pop culture.
And, furthermore, Over the Rainbow condenses the existence of its interpreter. Judy Garland sang it for the first time at age 17 in The Wizard of Oz and, despite not being her composer, she would see her life marked by that song. No one has ever written about Garland without resorting to some verse from Over the Rainbow: as Dorothy wondered ("If bluebirds can fly over the rainbow, why can't I?"), Garland herself once exclaimed: "If I'm a legend, why am I so alone?" Judy, a film about her later years starring Renée Zellweger and hitting theaters today, sets out to answer that question.
As Feud has done with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Judy can be expected to expose the cruelty of the Hollywood establishment with the advantage of 21st-century information, sensibility, and justice. But in the 1930s, when a teenage Frances Ethel Gumm emerged from a cocoon to mutate into Judy Garland, society was completely lacking in all three of those things. For decades, the divas of classic Hollywood have been idolized and ridiculed as flamboyant creatures consumed by their arrogance, tyrannical to everyone around them, and obsessed with fame that only disgusted them. That first generation of stars paid with their lives (some literally) to lead the squadron that opened fire in an unprecedented war: they neither knew of another way of life nor did they understand that, after 30, the world would treat them as Dantesque relics. Like Davis or Crawford, Judy Garland died without fully understanding why Hollywood (and, by extension, her public) had abandoned her.
Because capricious, despot, and egotistical divas are not born, they are made. Ever since she signed an exclusive seven-year contract with Metro-Golwdyn-Meyer (at that time actors were defined, without the slightest irony and with great pride, as "property" by the studios), Judy Garland has been molded like "the girl next door". Turned into Mickey Rooney's a morality clause in her contract prevented her from dating or going to parties. From the age of 13 Garland suffered a diet imposed by the Metro based on soup, lettuce, 80 cigarettes a day to suppress her appetite, amphetamines to work, and barbiturates to sleep. At the age of 14, an executive defined her (with her in front of her) as "a little pig with pigtails"; while she was studying how to polish her image, the studio's president, Louis B. Meyer, affectionately called her "my little hunchback"; and at the age of 15, the producer of The Broadway Melody in 1938 scolded her that she looked like a dancing monster.
That is why when she sang Over the Rainbow at the age of 16, she connected, as her biographer Susie Boyt would define it, with the central nervous system of all the spectators. Because her bitter, visceral voice sounded more like Edith Piaf than the technical and lyrical perfection of the actresses of the day, Hollywood made sure that Frances Ethel Gumm was never aware of Judy Garland's supernatural talent. She needed her insecurity and dependent. That's how they turned Judy Garland into a Hollywood cliché: the unhappy star who, between movies, was only looking for love, acceptance, and adulation.
At 19, she married David Rose, at 20 she had an abortion, and at 21 they divorced. Two years later she married Vicente Minelli, her director at Cita en Saint Louis, with whom she had a daughter (Liza). In 1947, at the age of 25, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where she attempted suicide by slitting her wrists. Sick with an addiction to sleeping pills, alcohol, and morphine (addiction, let's not forget, study-induced during her teens) and subjected to electroshock treatments to overcome her depression, Garland stumbled careers by arriving late or never arriving at work. filming and was eventually fired by Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer while recovering from her second suicide attempt (she slit her throat). "The only thing she saw in front of me was more confusion," the actress would explain years later. "I wanted to turn off the lights in my past and in my future as well. I wanted to hurt myself and everyone who had hurt me." Jobless and broke, Judy Garland turned to concert tours and radio specials: he had not turned 30 and was already an old glory.
Reinvigorated by her success as a folk variety artist, Garland returned to film with A Star Is Born. Everyone was convinced that she would win the Oscar, to the point that the hospital room where she was convalescing after giving birth to her third child (with her third husband, producer Sid Luft) was packed with photographers and journalists. Her loss to a much tamer and much younger Grace Kelly considered a historic Oscar injustice, was smacked in the face by an industry that considered her "a difficult actress" whose hysterical attitude had delayed or canceled dozens of shoots. Garland would only shoot three more movies after A Star Is Born.
When in 1959 she, at the age of 35, fell ill with hepatitis, the doctors gave her five more years to live. Judy Garland received this news as "a huge relief." "I stopped feeling pressure for the first time in my entire life," she would confess. On April 23, 1961, Garland starred in what would be defined as "the greatest night in the history of show business": her concert at Carnegie Hall was released on record, stayed at number one for 13 weeks, and won the Grammy for best album of the year Director Stanley Kramer described Garland's presence on that set as "a woman who seemed to say, 'Here is my heart. Break it."
But these triumphs, as brilliant as they were sporadic, were never enough. Judy Garland lived the last years of her (which are portrayed by the biopic of her with Renée Zellweger) condemned to ostracism like the rest of the actresses of her generation. She moved to London, because there the public applauded her more fervently and, after one of her last concerts, an admirer visited her in her dressing room and watched as Garland listened to the recording of the performance that she had just finished. When the applause broke out on the gramophone, she began to cry repeating herself in front of the mirror: "You are a star, you are a star" and kissing her reflection. This a tragic, melodramatic, and grotesque picture that fits with the stereotyped existence of Garland during the last years of her life: She spent her free time singing in gay bars in England for 100 pounds a night. In 47 years, Judy Garland gave time to be a woman, an actress, a star, and an icon. And each time she transformed into her next role of hers, she was forced to leave the previous ones behind.
On June 27, 1969, Judy Garland died from an accidental overdose of barbiturates. As with all myths, various theories surrounded her death (including suicide), but Ray Bolger, who played the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, summed up that "Judy just wore herself out." Pop culture, an expert in turning coincidences into a historical canon, directly related his death to the birth of Gay Pride (June 28): when the policemen entered Stonewall to carry out one of their routine violent and vexatious raids, the clients of the bar refused to turn the other cheek and stood up to oppressive authority because, on that very night, they were in mourning and just wanted to be allowed to listen to Judy Garland in peace. Longing to leave her Kansas town and enter a sequined technicolor world, Dorothy accepted her friends from Oz for who they were. The phrase "Are you a friend of Dorothy's?" It was for decades a covert method to ask another man if he was gay and that rainbow would become the symbol of the fight for equality. Garland herself joked that she imagined her funeral as "a great parade of fags singing Over The Rainbow", a fantasy reminiscent of Lola Flores asking the fags to walk first behind her coffin and which shows that the closest thing we have in Spain is the divas of Hollywood is the folkloric ones.
