Judy At Carnegie Hall 9781501355103, 9781501355134, 9781501355127

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Overture—Judy at Carnegie Hall
Side 1: “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You)”
Side 2: “The Man That Got Away”
Side 3: “Stormy Weather”
Side 4: “Over the Rainbow”
Encore: “After You’ve Gone”
Encore II: Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall
Notes
Overture—Judy at Carnegie Hall
Side 1
Side 2
Side 3
Side 4
Encore
Encore II
Bibliography

Citation preview

JUDY AT CARNEGIE HALL Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http:​//www​.bloo​msbur​y.com​/musi​c ands​ounds​tudie​s Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen by Ray Padgett Timeless by Martin Deykers The Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal From Elvis in Memphis by Eric Wolfson Suicide by Andi Coulter Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth by Zach Schonfeld Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 by Colin Fleming Murder Ballads by Santi Elijah Holley Once Upon a Time by Alex Jeffery Tapestry by Loren Glass Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik The Archandroid by Alyssa Favreau Avalon by Simon Morrison Rio by Annie Zaleski Vs. by Clint Brownlee xx by Jane Morgan and many more

Judy at Carnegie Hall

Manuel Betancourt

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Manuel Betancourt, 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Betancourt, Manuel (Writer) author. Title: Judy at Carnegie Hall / Manuel Betancourt. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: 33 1/3; 145 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019044736 | ISBN 9781501355103 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501355110 (epub) | ISBN 9781501355127 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Garland, Judy. Judy at Carnegie Hall. | Garland, Judy–Criticism and interpretation. | Homosexuality and music. Classification: LCC ML420.G253 B47 2020 | DDC 782.42164092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044736 ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-5510-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5512-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-5511-0

Series: 33 31 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Thank you to Matt, my best Judy

vi

Contents

Overture—Judy at Carnegie Hall Side 1 “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You)” Side 2 “The Man That Got Away” Side 3 “Stormy Weather” Side 4 “Over the Rainbow” Encore “After You’ve Gone” Encore II Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall Notes Bibliography

1 15 31 47 63 79 95 109 118

viii

Overture—Judy at Carnegie Hall

The cover image for Judy at Carnegie Hall is a study in reproductions. The artwork, overseen by Capitol Records art director Jim Silke, borrows the design for the poster used to advertise the legendary evening in 1961 when Judy Garland performed at the famed New York City institution. Framed by a wide white margin, a blood orange background bears her name three times in bold capital letters: “JUDY JUDY JUDY.” The first doubles as the album’s title (“AT CARNEGIE HALL” is printed right below it). The second stresses an obvious yet important detail (telling us she was there “IN PERSON”). The third, meanwhile, just offers the sole selling point of such an event: “GARLAND.” It’s her name which dominates this minimalist poster, echoing the chant-like screams that dominated that evening’s proceedings. This poster reproduction, flanked by a wall full of torn-down advertisements, encourages you to think that purchasing and later listening to this recording will transport you back to what the original liner notes describe as “the greatest night in show business history.” The album’s promise is the captured liveness of Judy’s presence. “RECORDED LIVE AND COMPLETE” it reads

J udy at C arnegie Hall

below her full name. The jacket copy for the double album LP went even further. The Carnegie Hall concert may only have boasted 3,165 attendees, but “Now YOU,” it promises, “will join those privileged few and thrill to the very performance which has been captured live and undiluted in this album.” You won’t just be getting Judy singing her standards (“Over the Rainbow,” “The Man That Got Away,” and “The Trolley Song,” the three songs that make up the concert’s “Overture”) but the sheer vibrancy of what it felt like to be in the audience when the “World’s Greatest Entertainer” all but tired herself to death performing twenty-five numbers that were punctuated by the ecstatic cheers from the crowd. While the July 1961 vinyl promised “the complete concert,” contemporary listeners have been able to access an even fuller version of what happened that evening. With Capitol Records’ 2-CD release in 1989 (the album has never been out of print), some of the excised recorded content from that night was restored; the DCC Compact Classics 2000 release, meanwhile, presented the concert’s most uncut version to date. These later versions allow listeners to not only hear Judy sing but also revel in the various anecdotes she regaled her audiences with. Moreover, the track for “Alone Together” has been restored: on the original release the song on the album was rumored to have been a studio cut after the original recording from that night had been flawed (it’s a rare moment in the 1961 vinyl where no applause greets the opening bars of a song and a blip of silence follows its conclusion). If fans back then thought they’d been given access to that fateful night, those of us listening to the album in full can feel truly immersed in the kinetic energy that ran 2

OV E RT U R E — J U DY AT C A R N E G I E HA L L

through the aisles of Carnegie Hall: raucous applause greets almost every number, sometimes with whoops and hollers going on for close to half a minute after Garland has sung her final note. This newer, more complete version makes good on the promise of that first vinyl: you feel like you, too, can witness history from the comfort of your own home, armed only with a good sound system. Maybe even just a pair of headphones. What’s palpable in those extended, music-less moments filled with ecstatic crowd reactions is the pull Garland had over her audience, both that night and every time she took to the stage. Roger Edens, who’d been instrumental in launching Garland’s career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (he arranged and rewrote for her the song that got her cast in her breakout role) and who had done the vocal arrangements for the concert, felt that the Carnegie Hall evening was unlike anything she’d ever done. That concert laid bare the very essence of what made Garland such a magnetic performer, the reason why she was adored by so many. “It’s right down deep inside,” Edens told James Goode, who published a profile of Garland later that same year for the short-lived Show Business Illustrated, “Good, solid, raw talent creates excitement. That was the charm of the Carnegie Hall concert. I had never seen her on [that] stage before. I still don’t believe anything like this could happen. She practically burnt the house down. She said, ‘Let’s do it,’ as though she had never done it before. It’s there and when she touches it, it emerges. It’s alchemy.”1 That very alchemy is precisely what Judy at Carnegie Hall captures. It’s also what makes writing about it so 3

J udy at C arnegie Hall

difficult without sounding hyperbolic. To read the reviews of Garland’s New York City concert is to witness writers grappling with the sheer spectacle they had been a part of. Writing for The New York Times, arts and theater writer Lewis Funke spent just as much of his review describing the audience as he did Judy. “Indeed, what actually was to have been a concert—and was—also turned into something not too remote from a revival meeting,”2 he wrote. Garland’s fans don’t often get discussed in the same tone used to talk about The Beatles’s (or Sinatra’s or Elvis’s fans). But that’s mostly because, unlike the coded fangirl language used to discuss the mobs that assailed those male heartthrobs in concerts and airports alike, there wasn’t an undercurrent of erotic energy within Judy’s crowds. It was all much more familial, though no less overwhelming. No sooner had Garland come out following the show’s “Overture” than the frenzied mob of adoring fans was screaming her name. She could’ve ended the show right then and, Funke quips, they’d still have kept on cheering. Variety begrudgingly agreed. “It’s virtually impossible to remain casual and uninvolved when she’s at work.”3 Famed Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper said she’d never seen anything like it in her life. Garland “took a jam-packed crowd in Carnegie Hall into her arms, and they hugged her back.”4 Reconstructing the legendary night for his readers, Goode evoked an impressionistic portrait of the concert’s proceedings. By the time Garland was singing “Swanee” “the noise and the surge of uncontrolled fans was madness.  .  .  .  You could not tell whether the crowd was clapping, shouting, screaming, laughing, or crying. The 4

OV E RT U R E — J U DY AT C A R N E G I E HA L L

sound suddenly had no character. It was just an expression of total approval and acceptance.”5 More than any performer of her generation, Garland’s star power came from her ability to elicit and bestow empathy in equal measure. Judy’s fans felt they knew her. She spoke to them directly, eliding any presumed or real mediation. She gave herself up and made those who loved her give themselves to her in turn. This became her signature gesture, yet it was already there in the film that would firmly establish her Hollywood career. Broadway Melody of 1938 (which was released in late 1937) may not have been Garland’s feature film debut but it felt like it—1936’s Pigskin Parade, where she played the tomboyish Sairy Dodd, holds that distinction, though that film stands as an anomaly in her career, proof that the people at MGM hadn’t quite figured out what to do with the small girl with the big voice. Broadway Melody, which stars Eleanor Powell and Robert Taylor, and which only features Garland in what’s ostensibly a bit supporting part, serves instead as a better introduction to the young girl from Minnesota. The backstage musical revue offers both a blueprint and imprint of the legend that has shrouded the star since. In the film, and in one of the earliest examples of how her on-screen life mirrored and prefashioned her own, Garland plays a young performer named Betty Clayton who is looking for her big break in show business with the aid of her mother, Alice (Sophie Tucker). In her standout scene she gets a musical number all to herself, the quiet ballad “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It)” where she sings about her fan-like attraction to Clark Gable. 5

J udy at C arnegie Hall

Like the instrumental medley that summed up, primed, and anticipated the 1961 Garland concert that followed, this song is an overture of what’s to come and a record of what was always there. In the film, the song follows a terse scene between Betty and her mother. As Betty readies herself for bed while ogling an autographed Gable picture, her mother snaps it from her. “So you been writing to the actors again?” she angrily asks her daughter. “Well I’ll put a stop to that!” Without hesitation she tears the Gable picture to pieces: “First it was Donald Duck and now it’s Clark Gable you’re crazy about. Now look here young lady, you stop looking at these movie picture actors and you go right to sleep! And mind you, no dreaming about them either!” This scene constitutes one of the earliest representations of fans on screen. With its invocation of a desire to keep one’s silver screen idols close (if only in picture form) and the subsequent shaming it elicits (how childish!), this intimate moment portrays an enduring stereotype of fans as doeeyed fools who can’t contain their devotion. It’s not hard to see how Betty’s own attachment to Gable prefigured the way many young girls (and boys) would come to feel about Garland herself. More tellingly perhaps, the scene presents this moment of fan fascination within a performance. Betty waits until her mother is out of sight to take out a photo album filled with film star headshots, finds Gable’s, and sings “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want To Do It),” a song whose own title contains within itself the level of performativity inherent in fandom. Originally written in 1913 for Al Jolson’s Broadway revue The Honeymoon Express, the swooning ballad got an 6

OV E RT U R E — J U DY AT C A R N E G I E HA L L

added opening verse courtesy of Edens. Its new opening address (“Dear Mister Gable”) turned the song into an open letter to the dashing movie star, placing Garland’s Betty as a lovestruck girl whose unconstrained desire (“my heart beats like a hammer”) is tied to a physical and emotional response (she stutters and she stammers) whenever she sees Gable at the picture show. The song imagines Gable making Betty fall in love with him without doing much other than being in the movies. Nevertheless, Betty is, in her own words, just another fan of Gable. The modifier is important because, despite that singularizing effect, Betty understands that her fandom locates her in a subservient relation to the glittering star she adores. And yet, her choice of star (Gable) and the song’s insistence on his normality work to disrupt this seeming hierarchy. Moreover, the scene functions as a watershed moment for Garland’s career as well as a prescient distillation of what would become her trademark gay appeal in the latter half of the twentieth century, the crowning achievement being her famed night at Carnegie Hall. In praising Gable for being “natural,” just like any other fella, Garland’s Betty sets forth the very argument that has structured much of the gay reading of her own star persona— what film critic Richard Dyer sums up in Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society as her “special relationship to suffering, ordinariness, [and] normality.”6 Betty may be aware that Gable is out of reach but her song brings him down to her level, as if intent on breaking down the boundary between star and fan, between publicly mediated images of actors and privately 7

J udy at C arnegie Hall

sung odes to them. As queer theorist David Caron notes in his essay in the edited collection Gay Shame, Garland’s own “dissolution of the boundary between the private and the public, the personal and the non personal”7 spoke to gay men because it was rooted in an acknowledgment of shame. Of childhood shame, moreover. The Broadway Melody scene exists at the intersection of queerness and fandom because it depicts a childhood scene of shame that Garland herself would continue to enact and perform throughout her career, a career that in its turn engendered many a childhood scene of shame. Betty openly defies her mother’s shaming and channels that decisive moment into one of performance aimed at breaking down the distinction between the larger-than-life Gable she adored on-screen and the “just fan of yours” identity she bestows upon herself. This is precisely what Caron isolates when discussing Garland’s later concerts and her signature moment when she would sing “Over the Rainbow,” a song “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want To Do It)” will forever be tied to as both were released together as a single by MGM in 1939. Whether she was playing big venues and hosting a vaudeville extravaganza as she had done at the London Palladium and later at New York’s Palace Theater, or playing smaller ones at bars and cabarets as she would do in her final years, Garland often opted to present a stripped-down version of that signature Wizard of Oz tune. Tapping into the very lullaby rhythms of the song, Garland would serenade her audience while sitting at the edge of the stage, straddling the very line that marked the 8

OV E RT U R E — J U DY AT C A R N E G I E HA L L

separation between fan and star. That moment created an impression of intimacy between herself and the audience, echoing the blurring that Betty dreams of when she coos to Gable’s picture that she cried all the way home once when she ran into him because he’d looked at her and smiled as if he’d meant it just for her. That moment of individualizing a fan amidst the collective within the framework of a performance is both the motivation of Betty’s song and the appeal Garland effortlessly channeled in her live performances. For actress Tracie Bennet, who played Garland on stage in Peter Quilter’s End of the Rainbow, that was the key to making her performance feel real: “The costumes help, the wigs, the lighting, the whole world of magic. But it’s looking into the audience’s eyes, singing to every single person as if they’re the only one in the room, that really makes you Judy.”8 Broadway Melody of 1938, with its backstage musical trappings, quite literally depends on the promise of live performance. In her very first failed audition (when the show’s director refuses to even see her), Garland’s Betty takes it upon herself to lead a sing-a-long right outside the casting room in hopes of showcasing her talents. She carries music within her, ready to deploy it at any time, especially if it means landing a role. As she gets everyone to join her in a rousing performance of the aptly titled “Everybody Sing,” audiences got a first glimpse of Garland’s infectious energy: she could make a fan out of anyone, so long as they heard her sing. The scene was a clever art-imitates-life moment as it had been a live performance which had nabbed Garland the part of Betty Clayton in the first place. That role was written 9

J udy at C arnegie Hall

into the film after a number of executives saw her perform a version of the “You Made Me Love You” song at a birthday party thrown for Gable. It was upon hearing her rendition that studio head Louis B. Mayer decided to cast her and add the song to the film. Garland’s scene, already a reperformance, is rooted in a filmic adoration that literally imagines a scenario where fan desire distorts the very boundaries between screen and audience. Writing about the ravenous fan base that emerged alongside Garland’s concert era (“the Garland cult” as it was unofficially dubbed), biographer Anne Edwards explains that the singer had tapped into the nation’s rejects (“the men and women who had never been accepted as they were”): Judy’s incredible comeback(s), she writes, “caused them to rise up and at any cost to reach her, to let her know she was not alone, that they would protect her, that they understood, that they accepted her for herself and perceived her need for both a dialogue and an outstretched hand.”9 Gay men were at the forefront of that community of misfits, happy to have found in Garland a performer whose tragedy and resilience (like their own) went hand in hand. Those “boys in the tight trousers,” her “ever-present little bluebirds”10 as Time magazine euphemistically referred to them at the time (William Goldman was not so kind, outright talking about the “flutter of fags”11 that filled up Garland’s closing night at The Palace in 1967), were drawn to Garland precisely because she spoke their language. As queer theorist David M. Halperin notes in his cheekily titled book How to Be Gay, this had little to do with a synchronous identification: Garland “wasn’t a 10

OV E RT U R E — J U DY AT C A R N E G I E HA L L

gay man,” he writes, “but in certain respects she could express gay desire, what gay men want, better than a gay man could. That is, she could actually convey something even gayer than gay identity itself.”12 Which is to say, her voice carried within it an invocation of shame, tragedy, desire, longing, and rejection that felt all too familiar to men (and women) who’d found themselves at the mercy of a society who mocked and discarded them. She not only sang to them but for them. It’s no surprise to find a devoted fan’s comment on TCM’s website calling up that very same song Garland had sung back in the 1930s to express his sorrow and his adoration close to eighty years later. Noting that his prose should be read “to the tune of ‘Dear Mr. Gable,’” “N. Guy” proceeded to offer his very own epistolary message to the late performer: Dear Ms. Garland, I am writing this to you And I’m hoping you can read this from up above Your passing made me sadder Cause your singing made me gladder And I thought I’d write this to tell you so Judy you made me love you I didn’t want to do it I didn’t want to do it Judy you made me love you And I wish you knew it I really want you to see this I know that you’ve ascended to heaven up above And when I get there too I can tell you you’re the one I love Judy, you know you’ve made me love you.13 That even in 2016 a fan would reach all the way back to Judy’s first signature song speaks to her endurance in the cultural imagination but also to the way that tune felt tailor-made to her image. 11

J udy at C arnegie Hall

The yearning she captures in “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want To Do It)” prefigures the longing of Dorothy, the melodrama of Esther, and, of course, the tragedy of Judy herself. The sense that you’re constantly battling inner desires that pull you away from the safety of the ill-fitting identity you’ve been relegated to was at the center of Garland’s persona. It made her relatable to millions around the country but once her MGM star dimmed and her personal demons became headline-grabbing put-downs (famously, “JUDY TAKES OVERDOSE” was set in permanent headline type at the New York Daily News for years leading up to her fateful death), she became a flag-bearer for all the misunderstood misfits who saw the beauty in her steely fragility, who were made to love her by the sheer power of her stage and on-screen presence. This is evident in her scene from Broadway Melody, but perhaps is best encapsulated by Judy at Carnegie Hall. Following a rousing performance of “Stormy Weather” close to the end of the Carnegie concert, Garland sung “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It).” It was part of a three-song medley that hit on key moments from her career. By 1961 it was already a staple of her stage shows. The Clark Gable song, trimmed to a mere two verses and stripped of Edens’ epistolary opening, has echoes of the girlish anthem it once was. But Garland’s matured voice lends it a knowing wistfulness that wasn’t there when she recorded it back in an MGM backlot in 1937. By the time she sings that the very mention of “your name” sends her heart reeling, she’s reframed Betty’s doe-eyed admiration. She’s no longer alone by her 12

OV E RT U R E — J U DY AT C A R N E G I E HA L L

bed daydreaming about a Hollywood stud. She’s surrounded instead by her own throng of ecstatic Bettys who are eager to hear this fan-anthem-turned-bitter-love-song. The dark undertones of loving someone from afar, someone who makes you love them and whose mere name rattles you, are revealed anew in this more sober rendition. Moreover, her emphatic final line (“you made me  .  .  .  love youuuuuu,” the latter word which she stretches and exhausts) feeds right into “For Me and My Gal,” the title song from the 1942 film she starred in with Gene Kelly. Garland encourages those listening to sing along, making them co-conspirators and confidants in her heartbreak, a hallmark of why her live performances felt akin to going to church. It was all preamble for the ecstasy that would follow once the crowd realized they’d soon after be singing along to “The Trolley Song.” Judy at Carnegie Hall is a document of Garland’s gift and of her enduring appeal. There is something electric about listening to that concert in full. It’s not just that the recording technology at the time means imperfections are baked into the album itself. And it’s not just that these captured renditions are Judy’s best. In fact, as great as she sounds, you can tell when her voice cracks and there’s no missing her gasping for air from time to time. No, it’s the fact that the recording takes you there. To that night. It makes you a convert to the Garland cult. After all, her imperfections were always what endeared her to audiences gay and straight alike. A year after the concert, she was asked point-blank whether she could spell out why it was that so many who were there that night kept talking about the way her fans’ adoration felt so tangible. “It sounds rather 13

J udy at C arnegie Hall

difficult, without sounding egotistical,” she explained. “I feel love, yes, and they show me love. You know they demonstrate their love by applause and by saying lovely things to me. And, yes, I can feel it. I can feel it. I hope they feel the love that I have for them.”14 That love went both ways, with laughter and applause mimicking and enriching the plea for love Garland so telegraphed in her performances. To write about Judy at Carnegie Hall requires thinking about what performer and audience got out of that night. Garland’s once son-in-law Peter Allen quipped that all he could hear when he listened to the 1961 album was applause.15 He’s not too far off. The crowd’s presence in the album can feel overwhelming—altogether hyperbolic at times. The following chapters break down what all the clapping was for. They’re an attempt to trace Garland’s relationship with her fans, arguably her most enduring and long-lasting love affair.

14

Side 1 “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You)”

On the night of April 23, 1961, Judy Garland went out to the one place that had always felt like home: the stage. Nearing 9 o’clock, once the orchestra had finished the overture, there was a hushed silence over Carnegie Hall. Those in the audience, which included Spencer Tracy, Julie Andrews, Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda, Rock Hudson, and Leonard Bernstein, were waiting for Judy to arrive. “You stand there in the wings,” Garland shared backstage at the end of the show, “and sometimes you want to yell because the band sounds so good.”1 It was enough to make the ever nerve-wracked performer doubt her own talent. But if she was a bundle of nerves ahead of what would become a career-defining concert, she didn’t show it once she hit the stage. As screenwriter Mayo Simon remembers, the transformation he saw standing in the wings as Garland took a step into the limelight was unlike anything he’d seen before: “It was like watching Mr. Hyde turn into Dr. Jekyll, or seeing black-and-white change into Technicolor.

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

When she walked out onstage, she was not just a wonderful singer; she was a presence!”2 Dressed in modish black toreador pants and a blazingblue-sequined Mandarin jacket, Garland made her triumphant arrival and, without any pleasantries other than a giggle, dove right into the night’s first number: “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You).” Both in substance and in style, the number served as an apt appetizer of things to come. Like many of the songs that make up the concert album, this opening ditty was, by 1961, a well-known standard. The up-tempo number was composed in 1928 and was first performed by the likes of Seger Ellis, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. This is part of what makes listening to Judy at Carnegie Hall such an experiment in nostalgia. As Time magazine put it in its review of that evening, what set Garland apart from so many other girl singers in those days was that, “in addition to lungs, clarity, drive and rhythm,” she had “an incredible amount of nostalgic pizazz, a quality in bad repute largely because it is so unpleasant when it is faked.”3 Just as contemporary listeners feel transported back to that 1961 night, those in attendance were themselves transported back. Back to Judy’s own storied Hollywood history, to that golden decade where she was the most cherished box office star around, with hits that remain classics more than half a century later. But also to a recent musical past of jazz standards and big bandstand numbers that was already on its way out. The two, of course, went hand in hand. Of the twenty-eight songs that make up Judy at Carnegie Hall, only two were written in the 1950s. More than half, 16

“ W H E N YO U ’ R E SM I L I N G”

in fact, date to the 1920s and 1930s, to the Great American Songbook. They capture, thus, the very decades during which Garland first became a star. Born Frances Ethel Gumm in 1922 to Frank and Ethel Gumm, two vaudeville performers, the girl who would later be known as “Judy Garland” found her love for the stage at an early age. On December 26, 1924, during a Christmas show at the movie house her family operated, “Baby,” as she was then called by her parents and two sisters, worked her way up to the stage. In front of a rapt audience bemused by the two-and-ahalf-year-old in front of them, Baby sang her favorite carol, “Jingle Bells.” Those in attendance were smitten, laughing and clapping along. Basking in her reception, Baby decided to give an encore. So she sang the same Christmas carol again. And then again. And again. It was only when her father whisked her away that her impromptu performance was cut short. Garland remembered that moment as the key to her entire career. “I don’t know whether I actually remember that,” she told Cosmopolitan in 1951, “or whether I’ve heard people talk about it so much that it seems as if I remember, but I do know this: I took one look at all those people, laughing and applauding, and I fell hopelessly in love with audiences. After twenty-five years, I still love them, and it has been a serious romance.”4 It was love at first sight. And it crucially depended on a symbiotic dynamic between audience and performer: when you’re smiling, the world smiles with you. The vaudeville would-be child star who surprised audiences with her grown-up sounding voice as part of the Gumm Sisters was but a trial run for the Garland American 17

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

audiences would come to know. By 1934, for example, she was already earning the kind of enviable reviews that told Ethel she had a superstar in the making. Over at the Los Angeles Evening Herald & Express, for example, drama critic W. E. Oliver identified what made the youngest Gumm sister worth paying attention to: “Not your smart, adult-aping prodigy is this girl but a youngster who has the divine instinct to be herself on the stage, along with a talent for singing, a trick of rocking the spectator with rhythms and a capacity for putting emotion into her performance that suggests what Bernhardt must have been at her age.”5 By the time Garland was signed to Metro-GoldwynMayer a few years later, eventually turning heads with her small role in Broadway Melody of 1938, Garland continued to evoke a childish sensibility, one trapped in amber from a quainter time always at the risk of being forgotten. The characters she was called up to play in her first projects were variations on the “nice, old-fashioned girl,” as Andy Hardy’s mother calls her in 1940’s Andy Hardy Meets Debutante. Garland’s image outside of the big screen, manufactured and maintained by the well-oiled publicity machine at MGM, was made to follow suit. “If Humphrey Bogart was seemingly never young, then Judy Garland was never old,”6 writes Anne Helen Petersen. Much of that, she argues, was due to the way MGM groomed her as the studio’s “little girl with a big voice.” Thus, both on- and off-screen, Garland was presented as younger than she was, as if to keep her embalmed in a perpetual state of girlhood. “She is a husky, hearty little girl with a huge appetite, an active body, and an active mind,” read a 1938 Motion Picture profile of the fifteen-year-old (and 18

“ W H E N YO U ’ R E SM I L I N G”

four foot eleven) performer. These fan magazine pieces still operated as arms of the studios’ own marketing departments. Thus, the mention that Judy still went to bed with a teddy bear  and put her dolls to bed every night was part of a concerted effort to build up Garland as a youngster not quite ready to be or be seen as a woman: “She doesn’t want to grow up,” the profile continues. “She wears short skirts, no makeup off the set. Her mother says that she forgets she is a picture actress immediately she leaves the studio. She becomes at once, ‘just a little girl.’”7 Garland’s star persona was designed to create a powerful identification for young girls around the country. When she smiled, they smiled with her. Girlish yearning became the theme of Garland’s neverending youth. It was central to her appeal, tied to a feeling of authenticity that came from—like Gable before her—a sense that she was just like those sitting in theater seats around the country. “That has always been one of the refreshing things about Judy,” wrote Carol Craig in 1941 for Motion Picture: “she has never looked so much like a movie star as like a normal young girl. Even on the screen.”8 That was probably one of the secrets of her success, she added. But Garland’s childlike allure (and the way it was exploited by MGM’s executives to bolster her image and box office returns) spoke also to the way childhood innocence was being leveraged to create a distinctly American sensibility in the new budding art form that was cinema. Those All-American girls Garland went on to portray on the big screen—Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Esther in Meet Me In St. Louis, Betsy Booth in various Andy Hardy pictures—mirrored a country mired in nostalgia. The technology might have been new but 19

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

its stories (pillaged from the stage and the page) looked back and began to construct America’s own visual archive, a hazy (and selective) moving image of its recent past. Garland was but one of the many poster girls for this endeavor. She couldn’t be a glamour girl like Lana Turner or Hedy Lamarr (her costars in Ziegfeld Girl) who could make the boys swoon, but she was made into an Americana figure that would make the country smile even in the face of a slow-to-recover economy and later a far-away war. Garland became a bona fide movie star as Hollywood dominated the American cultural imagination. By 1940, 60 million Americans (more than half of the adult population of the United States) went to movie theaters every week. Whatever made it onto the big screen had the chance to shape culture in ways then still unimaginable. But as the film industry slowly readjusted to recent changes in what it could portray on-screen (a result of the enforcement of the 1934 Motion Picture Production Code which, among other things, encouraged promoting “traditional values”), it came under attack for the almost too aggressively positive image of the United States it was conjuring. Hollywood’s pictures were so obviously selling an image of pro-Americana values they skirted being seen as propagandist missives, so much so that a group of isolationist senators in 1941 felt the need to have hearings investigating so-called “war-mongering” Hollywood films. The only thing the hearings did was make clear just how much the executives living in California liked to see themselves as depicting a positive image of a country many of them had just recently made their home. “I look back and recall picture 20

“ W H E N YO U ’ R E SM I L I N G”

after picture, pictures so strong and powerful that they sold the American way of life not only to America but to the entire world,” Darryl F. Zanuck shared at the hearings. “They sold it so strongly that when dictators took over Italy and Germany, what did Hitler and his flunky Mussolini do? The first thing they did was ban our pictures, throw us out. They wanted no part of the American way of life.”9 The Zanuck testimony was instrumental in reshaping Hollywood’s own self-image, not to mention the way those in Washington saw the products coming out of California soundstages. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which prided itself on offering the most glittering escapist entertainment in the business, may not have been as well equipped as Zanuck’s 20th Century Fox studio to create such Americana projects, but their output in the late 1930s and early 1940s mirrored the need for more patriotic fare. In 1943, for example, the company produced Thousands Cheer, billed as a “love story of an army camp.” Ostensibly a filmed variety showcase with some of MGM’s biggest stars (including Mickey Rooney, Lena Horne and Lucille Ball), the wartime musical comedy also featured a number by twenty-one-year-old Garland. The song she performed? “The Joint Is Really Jumpin’ in Carnegie Hall.” At that same venue in 1961 Garland’s rendition of “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You)” has some added lyrics that articulate the role movies in general and Garland in particular came to play in the 1940s. The song’s built-in optimism played right into the way Garland’s public image as a sunny All-American girl had become fuel for her fans, at home and abroad during the war; she famously recorded a version of “Over the Rainbow” to send 21

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

out to the troops, one of the many ways she mobilized herself as a beacon for country and army alike. That’s what led her public to feel like they had to protect the young performer at all costs. Billy Rose, in an open letter he wrote to the Babes in Arms star in 1950, put into words what many across the country felt about her. Upon hearing of Garland’s sacking from MGM following a much-publicized suicide attempt, Rose wrote that Garland was an engine of happiness for Americans all over the country: “It gets down to this Judy: In an oblique and daffy sort of way, you are as much a national asset as our coal reserves—both of you help warm our insides.”10 Just as she’d done with songs like “Everybody Sing” in Broadway Melody of 1938 (which eggs listeners to use their voice to turn winter to spring) and “Get Happy” in Summer Stock (where she cautions you to chase all your cares away), “When You’re Smiling” was a call to embrace positivity in light of hardship. Only, while those earlier iterations were played straight, by 1961 not even Garland could evade the way such lyrics necessarily highlighted her own troubles and her smiling resilience. Roger Edens, who had continued to collaborate with Garland over the years (including work on 1939’s Babes in Arms and 1948’s Easter Parade), wrote the “patter” section that happens midway through the song in the Carnegie Hall version. Originally conceived for her 1958 performances at the Cocoanut Grove, this section worked as a self-conscious nod at Garland’s troubles. “If you suddenly find out you’ve been deceived,” she sings, slowing down the pace of the song, “Don’t get peeved.” No matter the issue—she lists off her 22

“ W H E N YO U ’ R E SM I L I N G”

weight gain, her tax evasion suit—she instructs herself to put on a smiling face. The winking earnestness at the heart of the song makes it a rousing opening anthem. In contrast to much of the other songs she performed that night, “When You’re Smiling” addresses its audience explicitly. Yet the editorial “you” of the song ultimately feels selfdirected. With a few bars she manages to conflate her own troubles with those of her eager audience. In her memoir My Judy Garland Life, novelist Susie Boyt writes extensively about why it is that so many people like her have found solace in Judy. Garland capitalized on her own struggles, her singing making “a direct assault on the heart.”11 While this was captivating enough on the screen, its undiluted power on the stage was even more awe-inspiring. “Garland’s mature voice affected her concert audiences so deeply,” Boyt writes, that “they unravelled before her. The sympathy she offered was visceral and hard. Her fans felt along the lines of her songs and found both the symptoms of life and their cures.”12 To listen to “When You’re Smiling,” and, indeed, to the entirety of Judy at Carnegie Hall, is to get a glimpse of what her contemporary audiences felt whenever she assaulted their hearts. It was the kind of connection that was unheard of. Well, almost. When Garland, aided by her then-husband Sid Luft, reinvented herself as a concert diva, there was one name that featured prominently in the press at the time. Only one person before had proven to be so adept at charming crowds, reinventing staples for the stage, and inspiring the kind of elated adoration then lavished on Garland. “There is Judy Garland. And there was Al Jolson. And then the mold is broken!” read The Hollywood Reporter in 23

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

its review of the Carnegie Hall concert: “Ask anyone who remembers the days when ‘Jolie’ took over the Winter Garden runway and they will tell you that never since has a singer of songs been able to mesmerize an audience as Judy can.”13 Shana Alexander, writing for LIFE magazine, reached for the same comparison: “Judy Garland is not only the most electrifying entertainer to watch on stage since Al Jolson, she has moved beyond talent and beyond fame to become the rarest phenomenon in all show-business. Part bluebird, part Phoenix, she is a legend in her own time.”14 Even Rose’s letter a decade earlier had presented the similarity as obvious to anyone paying attention. Seeing Garland sing “Get Happy” in Summer Stock, he wrote, “was Al Jolson in lace panties.”15 The comparison didn’t endure partly because Garland’s own mythic persona soon demanded no recognition of equals or progenitors. Mostly, though, it faded away because Jolson’s own legacy dimmed in the decades since he was first pronounced “The World’s Greatest Entertainer.” To see Garland as an heir apparent to Jolson’s own brand of (white) entertainment bears scrutiny, particularly because Judy at Carnegie Hall contains two of Jolson’s signatures tunes: “Swanee” and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” Both songs tap into the nostalgia Garland was so clearly invoking. Their origins, mired in the minstrelsy tradition and awash in the history of blackface entertainment, crucially intersect with the “National Asset” image that so followed Garland. For those in attendance at the 1961 Carnegie Hall concert Al Jolson was an obvious point of reference. Just a few blocks away lay the Winter Garden theater where Jolson had had a 24

“ W H E N YO U ’ R E SM I L I N G”

string of hits in the 1910s and the 1920s, including Sinbad, where he first debuted George Gershwin’s “Swanee.” Even those not familiar with the theatrical box office appeal of Jolson in the early decades of the twentieth century would have likely come across Jolson’s cinematic achievements: his “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” line in the first talkie, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, as well as his two biopics in the 1940s (1946’s The Jolson Story and 1949’s Jolson Sings Again, both of which featured his own vocals) cemented his stature as an entertainer who’d gone from vaudeville to Hollywood. The parallels to Garland’s own journey were not hard to draw, especially as Garland had made a point of doing Jolson tributes in her Palladium shows through the 1950s. But if the Wizard of Oz performer had been able to import her electric screen presence onto the stage, shuttling between the two quite effortlessly, Jolson’s own trajectory from the stage to the screen was hampered by the very thing that made him such an icon of the stage: Jolson was the preeminent practitioner of blackface on Broadway. The New York Times, in its review of Jolson’s 1925 musical Big Boy, tried to grapple with what made the Jewish performer so magnetic on stage. “Doubtless part of Jolson’s hold on the audience that comes to see him, to be entertained by a stage entertainer, is the frankness all around, this breaking-down of all the usual theatre barriers when he steps on the runway.” But that didn’t tell the whole story: “Part of the hold is the complexity of his mood, the shrug or gesture that suggests more than the words have already spoken, the rapid turns in his patter. Part of it is the radiance of his high spirits, enhanced by the blackface that emphasizes threefold the expression in his eyes and 25

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

in his mouth. Part of it, likewise, is the completeness with which he gives himself.”16 Take the reference to blackface out of that quote and you end up with a description not unlike the ones that followed Garland decades later. It was her spirited demeanor and her expressive earnestness which moved crowds who so enjoyed seeing her give herself up completely when up on a stage. The crucial difference, though, speaks to the changing nature of performance that characterized the American stage in the early part of the twentieth century. As Andrew Sarris wrote in his reappraisal of Jolson’s early musical film performances, what made him such a charming larger-than-life performer on stage was ill-suited to the genre he seemed most wellsuited to embody on screen: “His explosive force, once it had broken the sound barrier,” Sarris wrote in 1977, “seemed excessive for the workaday tasks of the movie musical. He was the vibrant vaudevillian, the entertainer by excellence. Beneath the greasepaint and the blackface there seemed to be more greasepaint and blackface.”17 Where his expressive demeanor worked to target those up in the rafters at the Winter Garden, it was less effective when captured by the intimate lens of the camera. To see Garland as an heir apparent to Jolson’s brand of performance necessarily requires seeing how her own renditions of his minstrel-inspired songs as well as the jazz standards she came to perform for her Carnegie Hall audience sidestepped and erased the racial and racist history that Jolson’s greasepaint kept in full focus. “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody” is, as its title suggests, an invocation for the many lullabies sung by mammys all over 26

“ W H E N YO U ’ R E SM I L I N G”

the South to the white children they cared for. In Garland’s rousing rendition, the song is a call to arms as well as a celebration of the very songs (including “Swanee River”) that Jean Schwartz’s song, with lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, so exalts. Writing up Judy at Carnegie Hall for his book-length study on the greatest jazz and pop vocal albums, Will Friedwald aptly describes “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby (With a Dixie Melody)” as “bigger and more all-inclusive than all the individual ‘mammy songs’ that Jolson ever sang because it celebrates the entire genre of mammy songs.” Yet in Garland’s hands, he argues, it becomes a “song about the glories of singing being passed down from Jolson’s generation to hers.” The “Mammy mine” in Garland’s delivery, according to Friedwald, is Jolson himself: “Jolson is the Mammy of us all.”18 Such rhetoric merely reinforces the cultural whitewashing that Jolson’s and Garland’s own takes on these songs staged. To admit that Jolson’s number was drenched in the tradition of minstrelsy only to then abstract and uproot it when discussing Garland’s rendition is precisely what Brian Currid unpacks in one of the few studies of Garland that tries to wrestle with her stature as a wholly American icon, a designation that depended on her aping and reimagining minstrel traditions and songs for a mostly white audience. “Garland’s singing style,” he writes, “as well as many of the songs she sang [in 1954’s A Star is Born], consistently mined musical forms and practices that register in the racial logic of mass culture as ‘black.’”19 He cites not only the fact that as Baby Gumm she’d been known to sing “Stormy Weather” (which was originally written for black diva Ethel Waters), 27

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

and praised for what he terms “a kind of vocal blackface in operation,” but the way the “Born in a Trunk” sequence in the 1954 film hinges on a repurposing and evocation of Jolson’s own “Swanee,” while donning a costume that looks not unlike that of gentlemen of the era. Here was Jolson in lace panties yet again. Which is not to say a younger Judy, like many of her contemporaries, hadn’t donned blackface: one need only look at Babes in Arms and its sequel Babes on Broadway, to find an example of such a thing. Co-starring Mickey Rooney, both films end with elaborate minstrel shows that in the early 1940s were already framed as nostalgic relics from an older time. Then again, nostalgia was a key component of minstrel shows even when they were at their height in nineteenthcentury America. “One of the oddities of the minstrel show,” argues John Strausbaugh in Black Like You, “was the way it balanced its cruel, dehumanizing jokes at the expense of Black people with a fond, often tearjerking nostalgia for the South—a South few of the performers and fewer of their audience members knew anything about.”20 It was that very same nostalgia which pervaded many of the filmed minstrel shows in early Hollywood pictures, Babes in Arms included. They tapped into a “supposedly simpler time, a gaslit era before the two world wars, the Great Depression, the workers’ revolts and all the other turmoil the twentieth century had brought with it.”21 Garland opens the show in Babes in Arms with “My Daddy Was a Minstrel Man” where she reminisces about the minstrel numbers her father used to put on. It’s the only song 28

“ W H E N YO U ’ R E SM I L I N G”

she sings without any blackened makeup. Among the songs Mickey and Judy tackled while made-up with burnt cork in those two films was a minstrel classic: Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.” Otherwise known as “Way Down Swanee River” the song was the inspiration behind Irving Caesar and George Gershwin’s own 1919 tune “Swanee,” which Garland sung toward the end of her 1961 concert. More so than “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You),” “Swanee” encapsulates what makes Judy at Carnegie Hall such a quintessentially American classic. Its nostalgia, mired as it is in blackface entertainment and minstrelsy, works hand in hand with Garland’s effervescent performance to create a document about a country’s backward-looking gaze, forever yearning for a past that existed only in its own imagination. Foster’s choice of using the Swanee river for his song, after all, was driven less by any geographic specificity than by the demands of the melody: the Yazoo and the Pee Dee rivers were both discarded as options before he landed on Suwannee, opting to change its spelling to better match the tune. “Swanee” showcases Garland at her best, which is what makes listening to this ode to long-gone mammys all the more jarring. Throughout the song, performed soon after “Over the Rainbow,” Garland is in full control of her voice, never sacrificing phrasing for the acrobatic tempo shifts the song’s arrangement demand of her. It’s a tour-de-force performance that requires her to easily shuttle between the frantic (“I love the old folks I love / The young folks oh-my​ -hol-​din’-​all-m​y-fam​-ly-i​n-A-l​la-ba​-my”)​ and the swooping (“when I get to that Swaneeeeeeee Shore!”) without missing 29

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

the central longing at the heart of the song: a wish to return to the idyllic South by the Swanee river the singer nostalgically imagines for her listeners. Such was the America Garland so helped us all imagine, one that’s as soothing as it is problematic. From Babes in Arms and Meet Me in St. Louis to the Palladium and Carnegie Hall, Garland packaged nostalgia for an entire generation of Americans who were all too eager to smile alongside her, forgetting not only their own troubles, but the questionable cultural ones this song’s history cannot help but shore up alongside that dreamy river it so exalts.

30

Side 2 “The Man That Got Away”

“If I’m known at all, it’s for singing tragic sad songs,” Judy Garland told her Carnegie Hall audience four songs into the evening. Once she stopped appearing in feature films and dedicated herself almost exclusively to live engagements for the latter part of her career, her audiences expected those heart-aching and heartbreaking songs; it was what made her such an electric onstage performer. “There’s something about my voice that makes them see all the sadness and humor they’ve experienced,” she said a few years later about those crowds that clamored for such musical self-flagellation. “It makes them know they aren’t too different; they aren’t apart. That’s the only reason I can give for people’s liking to hear me sing because I’m not that fine a singer.”1 Nevertheless, for her 1961 concert Garland wanted to not rely too heavily on those numbers nor on any of the theatrical crutches that her vaudeville stint at the Palace in New York and at the Palladium in London had so depended on. Here, the focus would be on Judy in all her glory. Her only accompaniment would be a thirty-eight-piece orchestra.

J udy at C arnegie Hall

It’s why her repertoire at Carnegie Hall was so varied. As if, finally given full rein over her creative endeavors, she was committed to stretching her singing prowess every which way. Thus, after a moody rendition of “Alone Together”—the kind of tragic sad song her emotional delivery easily made into a teary-eyed affair—Garland announced she would be switching it up. Ever the ham performer, she joked that though she’s known for those tragic love songs, she also loves singing jazz. But “they won’t let me,” she quipped, before promptly pointing out not even she knew who “they” were. No matter, for that evening, and in keeping with the setlist Garland had honed over her tour dates all over the country, Mort Lindsey had assembled a group of nine musicians from her band to accompany her in a short jazz section. Much like “Swanee” and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” the songs Garland tackled during this four-song set existed at the intersection of jazz’s Afro-American roots and its Tin Pan Alley commercialization: all four numbers that made up her eleven minute interlude were jazz tunes that had been written for stage musicals. She sang “Who Cares (As Long as You Care for Me)” (from 1931’s Of Thee I Sing), “Puttin’ On The Ritz” (from the 1930 musical of the same name), “How Long Has This Been Going On?” (originally written for Funny Face, but eventually introduced in the 1928 musical Rosalie), and “Just You, Just Me” (from 1929’s Marianne). These songs played well to Garland’s own brand of showmanship which worked best when matched with songs that gave her a scene to play. In that sense, these jazz songs weren’t quite as obvious a departure as she led her audience to believe. 32

“ T H E M A N T HAT G O T AWAY ”

After Garland ended her rendition of “Just You, Just Me,” a perfect showcase for the musicians accompanying her, she gave her audience the first classic “Judy Garland song” of the evening: A Star is Born’s “The Man That Got Away.” The jazz standards offered a welcome detour but Garland’s haunting take on that Oscar-nominated song was arguably the reason many had paid to see Judy in the first place. “The Man That Got Away” was written by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin for the performer’s first on-screen vehicle since leaving Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer back in 1950. Garland’s then-husband Sid Luft, who was coproducing the film alongside his wife, had improbably assembled an A-list roster for Garland’s return to the big screen. Moss Hart would write the script, George Cukor would direct, and Arlen and Gershwin would compose the bulk of the songs that told the story of rising star Vicki Lester (née Esther Blodgett). Arlen, who’s own “Over the Rainbow” had made Judy a star, was no stranger to writing soaring heartbreaking ballads. By the time he came on board to work on A Star is Born, the “Get Happy” songwriter already had big hits in such sorrowful torch songs as “Stormy Weather” (with lyricist Ted Koehler) and “Come Rain or Come Shine” (with Johnny Mercer), both of which Garland also performed at Carnegie Hall. In Gershwin and his urban wit Arlen found a lyricist with whom he could finally develop a theme he’d been toying with for a while. (He’d originally tried working on it with Mercer but “sometimes a lyric depletes a melody, just as a poor melody can deplete a good lyric,”2 as he put it, and so ended up saving it for later.) Arlen knew Gershwin would know how to not deplete the melody but make it soar. 33

J udy at C arnegie Hall

Which he did, instantly warming up to the song’s eventual title. “The Man That Got Away” immediately alerts you to what kind of song it is: a ballad about a long lost love. Or rather, a lost partner. In that it was a of a piece with the kinds of songs Garland had performed and made famous during her time at MGM. Romantic yearning was a staple of young Judy’s repertoire. In Broadway Melody of 1938 she first pined away for Clark Gable (as out of reach a beloved as a young girl could dream up), but once she was starring in the box office hits that made her a bonafide star, she was often singing about how boys much closer to her were still far from her grasp. It’s a theme that stretched throughout her appearances in the Hardy films and pervaded her on-screen persona. Judy and her songs were always lovelorn. In 1940’s Strike Up the Band, a librarybound Judy sings “Nobody,” a ballad about how Romeo had Juliet and Louis The Sixteenth had Antoinette but Garland’s Mary Holden had, as its title suggests, nobody. In 1941’s Ziegfeld Girl, her Susan Gallagher wows her stage cast and crew with a pared down rendition of “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” a song about how “some fellows look and find the sunshine,” but, she sings, “I always look and find the rain.” That’s nothing compared to the lyrics to Girl Crazy’s “But Not for Me.” The 1943 musical again made Judy into a wholesome Western gal who eventually catches the eye of Mickey Rooney’s Danny Churchill. Yet this late in the film song had her yet again rehash what must have echoed her own thoughts on the matter: “They’re writing songs of love,” she coos, “but not for me.” These songs always located the 34

“ T H E M A N T HAT G O T AWAY ”

young performer as yearning for that boy who’d never look her way. The signature tune from A Star is Born is but a mature rendition of such a theme, one which at the very least imagined Garland actually nabbing a man, if only to have seen him go. “Calling ‘The Man That Got Away’ a torch song,” Will Friedwald writes in his write-up of Judy at Carnegie Hall, “is like calling the San Francisco fire a wienie roast; it’s a great roaring bonfire of a torch song.”3 Torch songs, one of the many generic inventions of Tin Pan Alley, were bluesy romantic ballads built on sensuous melodies, bar-set scenes, and intricate vernacular lyricism. The torch song, with its fiery sensibility, evoked not only hot tunes but lovesick singers who’d been burnt by those who’d left them. These songs, as Larry David Smith notes, “dismissed the tired clichés that dominated contemporary love songs in favor of personal melodramas and intimate detail.”4 They conjured up explosive scenes of heartbreak for the listener to warm up to. In the 1954 film, that bonfire of a song is a literal showstopper: director George Cukor keeps his camera on Garland in medium shot, never breaking to catch the effect her singing is having on the man who’s eavesdropping on this impromptu late-night rehearsal at a deserted bar. The number is one of the most unassuming moments in the film. Elsewhere, Garland sings “Swanee” surrounded by a sprawling ensemble, she dances her way through “Lose That Long Face,” and runs through a number of genres and getups in the “Born in a Trunk” medley. But “The Man That Got Away,” like her Carnegie Hall performance, features Garland alone with just her band. 35

J udy at C arnegie Hall

Without any fancy camerawork or crosscutting editing, Cukor makes clear that what’s so enthralling about Garland’s Esther Blodgett is her voice, which needed little to no adornment. It’s also what made the scene so difficult to film. Wanting to emulate the lack of tidy composition you found when you saw details of famous paintings in art books (“you see a head to one side, bits of other heads cut off here and there”), Cukor decided to shoot the sequence in one long take. As Norman Maine (James Mason) looks on from afar, we see Garland’s Esther ostensibly practicing a new number in the closed down bar. “I wanted the camera to follow her,” Cukor said, “always in front . . . sometimes she would go to the side and almost disappear out of the frame . . . all in one long take, for the whole musical number.”5 Cukor’s direction makes Esther’s number teeter between a stage-bound rehearsal and a screened performance. A Star is Born functioned, as became clear to many a Judy fan watching, like a thinly veiled filmed autobiography. It was less that Esther Blodgett was to Vicki Lester what Ethel Gumm was to Judy Garland than the way a narrative about a vaudeville star finding fame and fortune while wrestling with an ill-suited if loving husband couldn’t help but feel like a running commentary on the star’s own personal life. Even the title for “The Man That Got Away” seemed to play to the many rumors about Garland’s own romantic life, which had long been catnip to gossip columnists covering Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s: it echoed both the story of how Artie Shaw had unceremoniously left Garland standing when he went on to marry Lana Turner in 1940 as 36

“ T H E M A N T HAT G O T AWAY ”

well as later speculations about the star’s relationship with (married) director Joe Mankiewicz. Judy’s romantic affairs had been public knowledge for the better part of her life. Already in 1940 Modern Screen was publishing a piece refuting stories (both planted and leaked) about the eighteen-year-old’s love life: “When I make a new acquaintance or send someone I admire a note or flowers, I am madly in love,” she joked, “Imagine what people, reading about those different men and myself, must think. Boy-crazy Judy, they must say. And I’m not like that!”6 Given to selfreflection, she even wondered aloud why that image was so pervasive: “Maybe it’s because of the songs I sing,” she added. “Yes, it must be. Those songs give the wrong impression. But gee, I’m not that way at all!”7 Her love-starved image would continue for decades to come. By 1963, the fan magazine TV Radio Mirror would sum up the way Judy’s romantic foibles had become a decisive aspect of her star image: “Behind Judy Garland’s Frantic Drive for Success is this Fervent Prayer: Please Somebody . . . Love Me!” The tabloid-ready copy nevertheless captured how love was precisely what the star had been searching for her entire life. Love had proven, if not elusive, then at least unsustainable for the performer. Except, of course, on the stage, where rows with husbands past and present about unpaid bills, gambling debts, prescription pills, miniature trains, homosexual indiscretions, alimony payments, child-rearing, suicide attempts, abortions, and everything else would all just melt away, fueling instead the righteous heartbreak that runs through a song like “The Man That Got Away.” 37

J udy at C arnegie Hall

To hear her sing the words “The man that won you/Has run off and undone you” was to hear a kind of refrain from the star’s own life. By the time Garland made an entire audience swoon alongside her as she sang the Arlen/Gershwin song there had been plenty of men that had gotten away; to hear her slink her way through the A Star is Born song is to hear her tap into every one of them for her audience’s benefit. Not that such subtext was baked into the song on purpose. Gershwin’s early drafts for the then-labeled “Dive number,” for example, show a lyricist all but indifferent to the leading lady’s personal affairs. Compared to the final lyrics, his initial stabs more closely tied Esther’s feelings with the world of the movies both Norman (a famous movie star in the film) and Garland (a famous movie star playing a version of herself) brought to bear on the scene. His discarded cinematic imagery (“The song is played out/ the moon is in a fade-out”8) soon gave way to the stark nature metaphors that litter the song (with bitter nights, glitter-less stars, and cold winds getting stronger). Rather than ground the torch song in the specificity of Esther’s own story, Gershwin’s lyrics slowly turned the tune into a universal wail full of longing and regret. Anchored not in bitterness—at least not in Garland’s deft handling of the emotional complexity of the lyrics—but in a wistful weariness, “The Man That Got Away” became more than a song about a lost love. Indeed, the song’s title, which opts for using “that” rather than the grammatically correct “who,” actually helps objectify its subject: it both exults the man and breaks him down to size, making his leaving more impactful than his being. 38

“ T H E M A N T HAT G O T AWAY ”

Clocking in at little over four and a half minutes, “The Man That Got Away” is, like “Swanee,” one of the most accomplished performances of the night. Having come from a vaudeville and later a Hollywood musical background, Garland was always able to turn the songs she was singing into baroque scenes, as if she’d borrowed a Broadway tune, dropped it in the middle of her concert, and was still able to convey the narrative that encased it with just her phrasing. In that she followed encouraging words Mickey Rooney had given her when they filmed their first Hardy picture: “Good singing is a form of good acting,” he’d told her, “at least it is if you want people to believe what you’re singing.”9 That practical advice from her famed costar guided her entire career. But no matter how much Garland approached these songs as mini-performances, the suggestion that she was merely channeling her own romantic foibles when singing about heartbreak was always there for fans to lap up. Trained for years to blur the lines between her on-screen performances and her off-screen persona, audiences couldn’t help but entertain the lack of mediation that these concerts now afforded them as proof that Judy’s songs were nothing short of confessional offerings, glimpses into her inner life. For Mayo Simon, who wrote the screenplay to Garland’s last film, I Could Go On Singing, the real Judy Garland was the one you saw on the stage; “the private Judy Garland was all chaos and craziness and pettiness, but when she stepped out on the stage there you saw the real Judy.”10 She made her audience into privileged voyeurs who’d been given access to a frail if tenacious woman whose sheer talent kept her upright and alive. 39

J udy at C arnegie Hall

In part due to it functioning as a bracketed unrehearsed staging in A Star is Born, the Arlen/Gershwin tune has always been a number about performing resilience for onlookers. The interiority that the lyrics and Garland’s delivery suggest make you feel like you’ve stumbled onto something you shouldn’t be privy to. In the film that’s what happens: Norman Maine gets a chance to see Esther’s raw star power, with no audience and no vaudevillian bits (what had first caught his eye earlier in the night when he’d drunkenly crashed her onstage performance) to obscure what it is that made her the titular star. Garland may have tried to offer her Carnegie Hall audience more than her “tragic sad songs” but there’s no denying that her setlist leaned heavily in that direction. One need only look at the titles of the songs that made up the bulk of the concert. There was the stripped-down version of “If Love Were All,” a haunting Noel Coward ballad that told its listeners that the more you love a man and the more you trust him, the more you’re bound to lose. There was the slowed-down and bluesy “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” whose title offers an idealized image of romance. And then there was a medley of “Almost Like Being In Love” and “This Can’t Be Love,” which paired the sunny image of the first number (“All the music of life seems to be / Like a bell that is ringing for me”) with the playfully cynical sensibility of the latter: “But this can’t be love,” she sings, “Because I feel so well.” The tragedy Garland so carefully evoked in her singing was always about heartbreak. She had, as she often joked, plenty of experience in the matter. She mined that very experience 40

“ T H E M A N T HAT G O T AWAY ”

in a 1955 article for Coronet titled “How Not to Love a Woman.” The candid self-penned article was characteristic of Garland’s persona following her break with MGM. Whereas she’d grown up having to read stories about her the studio fed to the press, she relished her newfound freedom in being able to speak openly about her private life. By the time she wrote the article in 1955, Garland had already been married three times: to musician David Rose (1941–44), to director Vincente Minnelli (1945–51), and more recently to Sid Luft, who served as her business manager. Those marriages gave her the requisite experience, she argues in the piece, to dole out some advice about what women should look for in men. And, conversely, what men should expect in their women. The essay is a relic of 1950s discourse around gender roles and traditional family values. Garland espouses cringeworthy views on the inferiority of women in the face of men not merely as fact but as the basis of a successful marriage, positions she’d long ago held true and which had no doubt caused her plenty of strife—seeking strong-willed men, after all, had seldom been a winning strategy for the twice-divorced star. It had left her on a road that was, as she sings in “The Man That Got Away,” rougher, lonelier, and tougher. And while her advice column features striking moments of lucid self-awareness, as when Garland writes that “what we’re really scared of is that your love will go dead on us; that you will leave us,”11 it mostly serves as an excuse to remind her female fans of their requisite subservience. She ends her essay with a “beautiful passage from Ruth”: “Whither thou goest, there will I go; and where thou lodgest, 41

J udy at C arnegie Hall

I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.” She says she weeps whenever she reads that Bible verse because it’s such a perfect encapsulation of “woman as a follower.” It’s a reminder that the man must be the one who leads. “If you are not, nothing else really matters,”12 she cautions her (presumably inadvertent male) readers. Garland’s candid revelations serve as helpful subtext that runs through her lovelorn ballads, many of which imagined women as helpless participants of romantic storylines who were offered agency only at the moment when they narrativized their own heartbreak in song. To read “How Not to Love a Woman,” especially in the context of the romantic ballads that so characterized Garland’s repertoire during her concert years, and at Carnegie Hall in particular, is to see her frail femininity both as pose and as truth. Those tormented women she embodies whenever she sings a lovesick song—“My lips just ache to have you take / The kiss that’s waiting for you,” she beseeches in the heartbreaking “Do It Again,” for example—were quite openly figuring love affairs in the most Romantic, with a capital R, sensibility possible. The overflow of emotion she so harnesses, letting her belts stretch out in “Stormy Weather” or containing them in the near-whispered “If Love Were All,” is of a piece with the kind of Romantic poetry Garland adored. She often cited Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To A Skylark” as a favorite, a poem that opens with an image of the eponymous bird pouring its “full heart / In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”13 The eighteenth-century poet argues that Man could never quite attain the sublimity of Nature’s own art, which was pure and unalloyed by the very things 42

“ T H E M A N T HAT G O T AWAY ”

that trouble mankind: death and suffering. One can see why Garland was so drawn to a poem which, at a later instance and offering an apt précis of the singer’s sensibility, notes that “our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”14 Shelley’s sensibility is all over Garland’s oft-forgotten poetry. Written in the 1930s, her poems teem with overly dramatic scenes of romance and glamour befitting a teenage girl who pined away for boys who were always much more interested in, say, Lana Turner, than in Judy herself. Echoing but also hoping to course-correct those MGM songs she performed on the studio lot, one poem, titled “The Wish,” centers on a speaker who wishes her pen were tipped with a magic wand so she could tell a boy about her love for him. She wishes she could write to him about what she feels like when she sees his face. But more importantly, she wishes her throat were blessed by the nightingale. Already Garland was aware of the power of song to capture an overflow of loving feeling. Only, just as soon she was admitting that such a desire could be put into song, she was also suggesting it could only ever be self-destructive. As she wishes she could sing of her heart’s great love her imagery moves toward the melodramatic. She imagines herself singing until her breast burst with such passion that she’d “Sing, then fall dead to lay / at your feet.”15 The image Garland returned to time and time again was that of a woman whose larger-than-life love risks destroying her altogether: there’s a celebration of emotional vulnerability here that teeters on the edge of being masochistic. This scene of a passion so full-throated that it actually kills you reads like the outlandish musings of a lovestruck teenager. But 43

J udy at C arnegie Hall

anyone listening to Judy at Carnegie Hall can hear that very same tenor in Garland’s rendition of a song as sorrowful as “The Man That Got Away.” This roaring bonfire of a torch song creates a scenario where man acts and woman reacts. “We aren’t really made for leadership,” Garland writes in “How Not To Love a Woman”; “It’s a pose.”16 If woman has power at all, it’s through her wily femininity, which she can only deploy in the realm of emotion. “The Man That Got Away” is a perfect example of this kind of narrative, where a woman wronged finds strength through her very lack. The Gershwin/Arlen song opens on a cold and bitter night. Garland, much like she had in A Star is Born, opts for a conversational tone at the start, as if she were ambling around a darkened room musing to herself about what just happened. The strings and winds that score those first few lines make the scene feel quite romantic. But once she sings that all those dreams she’d dreamed have gone astray, Mort Lindsay’s percussion section crashes right into that final word, aurally replicating the disarray Garland is evoking only to mellow down once more, returning us to another soft-spoken verse. For such a fiery torch song, Garland spends much of it in a quiet register, slowly building up to the ailing wails that make up its climax. It’s her initial softness which makes the song all the more heartbreaking. As she sings about how she doesn’t know what happened and how no new love will ever be quite the same, you get the sense that she’s just as likely to be remembering the good times as she is the bum times she’s currently experiencing. There’s not so much rancor as 44

“ T H E M A N T HAT G O T AWAY ”

disappointment. The song is an affirmation of her pain, of her loss. “The Man That Got Away,” despite its title and in keeping with the torch song tradition, gives its female singer agency only insofar as she’s able to articulate her sorrows, which demand to be broadcast in all their intensity. And therein lies the way Garland marries melodrama with Romanticism; there’s an archly performative aspect to her rendition that feels grounded in the sublime. The song imagines a world where the saddest thing in the world is a one-man woman looking for the titular man that got away. As she sings those final lines—the song’s title twice over—she leaves her belts behind and softens her voice into a mere whimper. It’s as if she were losing her voice, falling dead and laying her final note at the foot of the stage. And, like an opera diva who’s sung her final aria before dying, she’s greeted with thunderous applause and raucous whistling. The premise of every torch song is that the men may have gone away but the audience remains. It is for them that the song exists and for them that the singer belts out her tragedy. For Garland this was especially true. The men who never went away from her were those fans who loved her, and who loved her precisely because she was so wounded. Where others saw weakness or vulnerability, many saw strength and resilience. The retrograde gender politics at play in a song like “The Man That Got Away,” in an advice column like “How Not To Love a Woman,” or in a poem like “The Wish,” need not be denied. But hidden within them is the power of female performance. Garland showed that one could triumph over 45

J udy at C arnegie Hall

adversity—over heartbreak even—not by shying away from the pain that such moments but by embracing them. “Why do I make everyone so uncomfortable,” she once asked John Meyer, who wrote an explosive memoir about his affair with the star in the late 1960s. “Because Judes,” Meyer told her, “no one knows whether you’re going to sing ‘Over the Rainbow’ or open your veins.” In between giggles, Garland shot back a line that sums up not only what made her a one-of-a-kind performer but also what made so many in the audience that night at Carnegie Hall fall in love with her in the first place: “Sometimes I do both . . . at the same time.”17

46

Side 3 “Stormy Weather”

Like much of Judy Garland’s life, the concert and recording at Carnegie Hall is shrouded in myth and lore. One oft-repeated tale revolves around the reason for the recording itself. After a decade of concerts that began in London with her famed 1951 Palladium show and albums like 1955’s Miss Show Business, Garland’s career as a recording artist was waning by 1961. As the tale goes, Garland was becoming such a liability by then (she’d spent much of the previous two years not only battling her drug addiction but recovering from a bout of acute hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver) that Capitol Records figured the easiest way to get the one last album Garland’s deal required was to do a live concert recording. So enshrined is that story that it continues to be repeated decades later. Nancy Olson Livingston, the widow of Alan Livingston, then-president of Capitol Records, told Vanity Fair in 2011 that Garland’s “emotional whipsaws” had posed a personal challenge to her husband: “You could not get her into a studio,” she shared at the time. “So that, even though

J udy at C arnegie Hall

it was daring to do it live, it was the only way to” record Garland.1 The story is appealing because it makes the night at Carnegie Hall all the more triumphant. It ups the stakes of the evening, making it a truly make-it-or-break moment for the legendary comeback kid. Despite doubts and apprehension, the Wizard of Oz star, as we know, delivered a smash hit. Released in July 1961, Judy at Carnegie Hall ended up charting for seventy-three weeks on the Billboard charts, including thirteen weeks at number one, and won four Grammys, including Album of the Year, the first ever for a female artist. It became the fastest-selling two-disc album in history. Alas, the lurid history behind why Capitol Records decided to produce Judy at Carnegie Hall is all needless distortion of actual facts. Whatever apprehensions about Garland’s mental and physical health audiences, critics, and the label might have had ahead of that famed night were immaterial given how many tour dates she’d already successfully mounted in the lead-up to Carnegie Hall. New York City audiences may have felt like they were getting a once-in-a-lifetime performance— and they likely did—but Garland had already serenaded fans at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, the City Auditorium in Houston, the Constitution Hall in D.C., and seven other venues in the United States alone before her triumphant return to the Big Apple. Moreover, Garland was surprisingly prolific in the months leading up to her Carnegie gig. The year 1960 was, as noted Garland music historian Lawrence Schulman has 48

“ST O R M Y W E AT H E R”

established, “Garland’s most productive year in terms of the number of recordings she did”2; by the end of the year she had recorded all of thirty-three sides in between sessions at Colpix and Capitol in Los Angeles (for what became her 1960 album Judy: That’s Entertainment!) and EMI in London. Thus, her label had plenty of material to release had it wanted to dispense with her once-prized star. Much of the material she recorded were songs she performed at Carnegie Hall and which have, in time, been released on their own: 1962’s The Garland Touch included six tracks from her London sessions while the posthumous 1972’s Judy in London contains more than a dozen of the tracks she ended up singing at Carnegie Hall, including “You Go To My Head” and “Chicago,” which were new to her repertoire and had been recorded in London in 1960. Garland purists had to wait until 1991 when The Best Of The Capitol Masters: The London Sessions was released on CD, bringing together the work she’d finished ahead of her return to the United States for her tour; it was the first chance to hear what those preCarnegie Hall versions sounded like. Those sessions alone don’t tell the whole story either. There was, in fact, apprehension about recording and releasing a live concert—a double album at that, and thus in itself a risky venture. Livingston admitted he had to be nudged to greenlight the project by Garland’s then-manager Freddie Fields. “Alan, you’re crazy. You’ve got to do this!” Fields told him; “I probably would have done it anyway, but Freddie pushed me into it,” he concluded.3 Nevertheless, the need to amplify Garland’s issues at the time and the requisite desire to make her triumphant return 49

J udy at C arnegie Hall

even more unlikely speak to the way no conversation about Judy’s successes can be devoid of talk about her personal demons. Even in 1961, just as reviewers found themselves reaching for ever more hyperbolic expressions to describe Garland’s achievement, they couldn’t do so without bringing up the star’s own private life. “It is possible to arrive at a Judy Garland concert, if one is not a believer, in a state of considerable nausea,” wrote Time back in 1961. “The listener knows more than he cares to know about Judy’s perpetual troubles—with studios, husbands, nightclub owners, food and the British press.”4 And despite the needless condescension that follows (“Worst of all, there will be the Garland believers who clap wildly and weep like new widows at anything Judy does onstage”5), the frankness of what went into attending a concert for a performer who was, by 1961, as well-known for her mental breakdowns, her weight struggles, and her romantic foibles as for her talent, reminds us that there was, not then and not now, a way of thinking about Judy without wading into her private life. In a profile for LIFE magazine, published shortly after Garland’s Carnegie Hall concert, Shana Alexander recounted the highs and lows that had characterized the decade following Garland’s departure from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: “She was obviously often ill; she couldn’t pay her bills; there were rumors that she was a hopeless alcoholic, a drug addict; she didn’t show up for work, she collapsed on stage, she lost her voice, she lost her figure, she fought with everybody. But it was during these same years of violent ups and downs that the public image of Garland as the bluebird really began to take wing. The struggles of the woman, no longer hidden by 50

“ST O R M Y W E AT H E R”

the smokescreen of studio publicity, were the making of a legend.”6 There was no way to see Judy Garland up on any stage without thinking about the tabloid-ready stories one had read so much about. Moreover, it wasn’t so much that one couldn’t disentangle the explosive performance from those lurid details that so colored it; it was that one shouldn’t want to. It’s what fueled her greatness. The raw emotional power that Garland brought to bear publicly on the stage was irrevocably tied to the pain and turmoil she experienced in private. “Stormy Weather,” which the likes of Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, and Billie Holliday had made a classic, read all too differently when in Garland’s hands. Lines like “Can’t go on / Everything I had is gone” can’t help but summon up the vast fortunes her husbands did away with, leaving her, at times, with nothing, not even the drive to keep going. She may be singing about an everlasting storm, with rain all around her, but her sinuous belts place her at the eye of such a storm, a ballast on a ship that won’t budge but that can’t very well yet go on. “Stormy Weather” may be the greatest example of Garland’s ability to conjure up an ironclad vulnerability. There’s power in her voice but her pronounced enunciation (in her wording, there is no sunnnnn up in the sky) and her later use of her vibrato (ni-i-i-ight comes arou-u-u-und, in Judy’s phrasing) further reveal the song for the inner monologue that it is. The self-doubt and self-pity that run through the lyrics are what slowly move Garland to a breaking point. By the time she’s singing that everything she had is gone, there’s a brokenness 51

J udy at C arnegie Hall

to her delivery, as if it were dawning on her just how lonely and sad the scenario she’s inhabiting truly is. The vulnerability Garland projected while performing was constantly read as giving audiences access to her inner life. Songs like “Stormy Weather” had their own backstories (both lyrically and historically) but she performed them— and audiences received them—as if they were inimitably her own. This is why Judy at Carnegie Hall all but functions as a jukebox musical biography of Garland, with her own past hits (“Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” the very tune she’d first sang for Roger Edens on her first audition) leading right into a song like “Stormy Weather” that yanked her crowd back to the present tense of her life, away from the glittering world of MGM and onto the darkened, rainy days of late. “There was a hurt in her voice and an immediacy to her performance that gave the impression that it was her pain,” writes Michael Bronski. “She became her songs, and made the songs themselves more powerful and commanding.”7 Here lay the promise of any great Garland performance: it would give the singer a chance to truly express herself and her audience a chance to access her unmediated interiority. For actress and singer Polly Bergen, who was once married to Garland’s agent Freddie Fields and admits to never having much liked Garland to begin with, to see her perform was to witness a rawness that felt all too palpable: “There’s no way to describe her capacity for opening herself, as what I would call an ‘acting singer.’ It’s really all about your life experience that you use in a song. But she just went so deep and so open, and of course her life experience was so horrific. It was devastating to watch her. The exhilaration of the high times, 52

“ST O R M Y W E AT H E R”

and the devastation of the low times, was just mind-blowing. If anyone else did what she did, you would call it extreme overacting. But when she did it, it was true and honest and real. Because her life was overacting.”8 It’s easy to undersell Garland’s “overacting.” But to see any of the televised specials she recorded, or any of the performances she filmed as part of her short-lived CBS variety show (1963–64) is to see firsthand why so many of her Carnegie Hall reviewers felt the need to remark on her physicality while on stage. Hedda Hopper, who’d long followed Garland’s career in her role as Hollywood’s preeminent gossip columnist, wrote that Garland had taken a jam-packed crowd in her arms as she “clowned, talked, danced a bit and used the mike as though it were a trumpet.”9 Lewis Funke at the New York Times was a lot more colorful, writing that while she’d mostly let her voice convey her emotions with a minimum of gesture or movement, she had, at others, “skipped a bit, sort of dancing lightly with the rhythm, always making her audience feel—as one listener remarked—‘as if she’s singing just to you.’”10 An expressive performer, Garland was the kind of singer who used the entirety of her body when delivering a performance. It’s what made her sweat through her costume—“so unlady-like!” she jokes at one point in the Carnegie Hall recording. All those movements and gestures, though not legible in the record as its stands, hover at the edges of any listen of Judy at Carnegie Hall. They were crucial aspects of her performance, much more intentional than one would be tempted to believe. As much as Garland had perfected her vocal range, she’d also worked at tightening her onstage 53

J udy at C arnegie Hall

performance. This she owed to Kay Thompson, whom she’d met back in 1939 when a sixteen-year-old Judy guested on Thompson’s Tune-Up Time radio show. She may be better known now as the creator of the iconic Plaza Hotel dwelling Eloise (a character whispered to have been inspired by Garland’s own daughter and Thompson’s goddaughter, Liza Minnelli) or as the stylish Maggie Prescott in Funny Face, but Thompson was, before all that, a mentor and a friend to young Judy. As MGM’s top vocal arranger, vocal coach, and choral director from 1943 to 1947, she came to work closely with Garland on films like Ziegfeld Follies and The Pirate. The two women formed a bond that would continue even after they both left the studio lots. More than merely train and mold Garland’s singing voice, Thompson was instrumental in getting the performer to tackle more ornate orchestrations and nurturing a kinetic energy that went beyond focusing on her vocal chords. “Thompson made her more conscious of her movements,” notes Gerald Clarke in Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, “convincing her that singing involves not just the voice but the entire body, that gestures and movements—the raising of an arm, the opening or closing or a hand, the expression on the face—are as important as tone, phrasing and volume.”11 To see footage of Judy performing is to see that her body language did as much heavy lifting as her vocal acrobatics. Her manic hand movements, her penchant for holding herself by her elbows, her need to continually brush her hair off her face (even when there wasn’t any there to begin with), as well as her signature limp wrists by her side made her own physicality look a lot like needless overacting. 54

“ST O R M Y W E AT H E R”

There are moments in Judy at Carnegie Hall when that overacting sensibility is on full display, when what’s captured on tape hints at the physicality and expressiveness that was central to Garland’s onstage performances. There are the unexplained bumps of the mics one hears every now and then, consequences no doubt of Garland’s forceful gestures. But it’s there in more subdued moments. A song like Rodgers and Hart’s “This Can’t Be Love” (sung in a medley alongside Lerner and Loewe’s “Almost Like Being In Love”), after all, benefits from Garland’s overtly winking delivery, while “Stormy Weather” stops the audiences in their tracks by Garland’s sheer stoic emotionality. But Garland’s over-dramatization of her songs can also, at times, overwhelm the performance. The most obvious example of this—and a moment that surely gave pause to those in the audience that night—was her rendition of “You Go To My Head.” The 1938 song, which had first been recorded by Duke Ellington, Teddy Wilson, and Billie Holliday, among others, was given a tropical makeover for Garland’s Carnegie take on it. After a few ballads (including the quietly devastating “Do It Again,” the kind of song where you can hear the hushed silence that took over Carnegie Hall that evening whenever Judy tackled these softer tunes), “You Go To My Head” kicked up the tempo. With a mock-mambo style (“what she would sing if she were a guest on I Love Lucy, dueting with Desi at the Tropicana,”12 writes Will Friedwald), the song is playful. Its mambo drums keep the rhythm in high gear turning the song into a bouncy joy ride until it suddenly feels like a train in danger of being derailed. There’s a forceful physicality you 55

J udy at C arnegie Hall

can feel just by following the song’s ever-quickening tempo, which Garland is soon in danger of losing altogether. “You go to my head with, and I’ve forgotten the goddarned words,” she sings mid-song, attempting to find her way back to the lyrics all the while sticking to the melody. Unwilling to get off the song’s near-derailed train, Garland offered what has to be the most unquotable moment of the evening: “Where’s a honey-zig-a-zip-afound, are you intoxicate my soul with your eyes?” The lyric flub, which catches her off guard, doesn’t totally throw her off, but it may well be the only moment where Garland’s facade breaks, where her vulnerability risks upending what’s otherwise a sunny rendition of the J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie song. Later, when attempting Noel Coward’s “If Love Were All,” she admits she doesn’t quite know the words and so will be looking at them on a piece of paper, lest she’d bumble her way once more. Moments like those are what make Judy at Carnegie Hall truly feel special. There was no second take, which made Garland’s high-wire act all the more impressive even with its occasional missteps. For, while you may initially cringe at the word salad the performer conjures up as she struggles to remember the lyrics of “You Go To My Head,” repeated listens of the same song make the fumbling all the more endearing. You even catch her second-guessing the lyrics when she reaches the same refrain later in the song and sigh with relief when she nails it. That sense of protectiveness was there in the audience that night. Later, when Garland falters as she hits the final sustained high note in “Come Rain or Come Shine” all you hear is the 56

“ST O R M Y W E AT H E R”

applause that drowns out whatever disappointment Garland or the crowd may have felt. “Her audiences,” as Vito Russo wrote years later, “was never sure whether she’d fall into the abyss or soar like a phoenix. One wanted to hold her and protect her because she was a lost lamb in a jungle, and yet be held by her because she was a tower of strength, someone who had experienced hell but continued to sing about bluebirds and happiness.”13 Both of those impulses, anchored as they are by the act of an embrace, put Garland’s body front and center. Much of what compelled audiences to want to wrap their arms around her was her small frame (she was only four foot eleven), yet what encouraged one to imagine the satisfaction of being wrapped in her own embrace was her own larger-than-life stature. That dichotomy existed in Garland’s own body, which had long been the focal point for critics and fans alike. When Garland was first signed up at MGM, Louis B. Mayer had a presumably loving nickname for her: she was his “Little Hunchback.” The young girl’s scoliosis, which was responsible for the physical traits that led Mayer to gift her such a cruel nickname, as well as the studio’s insistence she lose weight (her other nickname around the lot was “The Fat One”) made Garland’s body a problem to be solved from the very beginning of her on-screen career. For critics like Richard Dyer, Garland’s physicality—both her discomfort in her own body as well as her near-manic way of deploying it in performance—was a sign of her authenticity. For others, like Adrienne L. McLean, to watch the filmed Garland body is to see quite plainly a woman battling out a number of conflicting demands: be talented 57

J udy at C arnegie Hall

but beautiful, be graceful but limber, be perfect but effortless. Looking at her dancing numbers and taking seriously the way audiences have long felt they see Garland straining for perfection on screen, McLean traces just how MGM—with costumes and corsets, diet pills and nicknames, strenuous choreography and strict shooting techniques—worked against what Garland’s own barrel-shaped body, anatomically perfect for singing, was designed to do. This carried through even after Garland left the screen. Expressions used to discuss Garland’s physicality during her concert years, like “iron-willed vulnerability,” McLean notes, speak to the way “a significant component of Garland’s star image and artistry as a performer developed out of the very ‘coping, adaptive strategies’ she developed for succeeding in spite of what she was constantly told were her failures as a movie-star body.”14 Her awkward gracelessness emphasized emotion and vulnerability over any appearance of prim effortlessness. Once, during an episode of The Judy Garland Show, she told Lena Horne that she loved working with her because “you open your mouth and sing louder than any other girl singer besides me in the world.” That prompted Horne to agree, noting that she’d often been told she needed to work on “singing pretty” but that “unless you just open your mouth wide and get a big breath,” she told Judy, “you can’t last as long to some of these arrangements we sing to.”15 After spending years needing to force her body to adhere to unattainable standards working at MGM, Garland felt more at home on the stage. There, in loose-fitting clothing that allowed her to move freely without worrying about her lines or her form, she made full use of her expressive body 58

“ST O R M Y W E AT H E R”

and face. At Carnegie Hall specifically, where she did away with the choreographed numbers from her earlier shows, audiences got to see Garland as unself-conscious as she’d ever be. Garland’s overacting as well as her manic mannerisms have survived in the many ways her concert presence is constantly revived by impersonators. Her movies may remain classics but her image in the cultural imaginary is most often drawn up from her post-1950 stage-bound self. Jim Bailey, who was already impersonating Judy (as well as Barbra Streisand and Peggy Lee) in the late sixties, set the standard for such endeavors when he performed on The Ed Sullivan Show barely a year after Garland had passed. Sporting Judy’s signature short hair, a bold red lip, and a sequined jacket, Bailey looked nothing like a drag version of Judy. Instead, he looked like a replica of his beloved icon, matching her fluttery blinking as well as her vocal vibrato as he sang “The Man That Got Away.” The Philadelphia-born female impersonator was so successful that by 1973 he got himself his very own Jim Bailey Live at Carnegie Hall album, a record that was equal parts Barbra, Judy, and himself, but which nevertheless owed its title and concept to Garland’s concert at the New York City venue. It’s in Bailey’s wake that more recent tribute acts like Peter Mac and David de Alba have kept Garland’s memory alive, playing to crowds who hope to see a glimmer of the Judy they love in these loving impersonations. As if to counteract such well-known images, actresses who have played Garland on stage and on screen have had to fight back against the notion that to embody her is to merely mimic her. “If Judy Garland were just her mannerisms, a 59

J udy at C arnegie Hall

thousand drag queens would be stars,” Jesse Green wrote when discussing Peter Quilter’s 2012 play End of the Rainbow, which starred Tracie Bennett as a tormented Judy in her last few months in London. “But the centrifugal limbs, semaphore poses, and vibrato so broad it seems to have swallowed another vibrato are necessary, not sufficient, conditions.”16 Bennet, like Isabel Keating (on Broadway’s The Boy from Oz) and Judy Davis (in ABC’s miniseries Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows) before her—and, more recently, Renée Zellwegger (in the big-screen biopic Judy)—understood that Garland’s physicality was no mere affectation but a symptom of her inner turmoil. Those flapping hands, those restless legs, the insistent toe-tapping, the constantly batted-eyelids were signs of someone in great distress. At times exacerbated by alcohol and drug abuse (or their respective withdrawal symptoms), Garland’s gestures telegraphed a sense of unease in a woman who never felt comfortable in her own body and who blinkered out SOS signs in overdramatic gesticulations that were so intimately tied to her own personal experience they read as vaudevillian tics and Hollywood parlor tricks when they were the only ways she’d ever learned how to project her own emotions. “If there’s ever been a more dramatic woman,” Quilter shared ahead of his play’s Broadway premiere, “I’d like to meet her.”17 Such drama, which always hovered at the edges of any Judy Garland performance, took center stage on the night of her Carnegie Hall concert. After coming back from a short intermission with “That’s Entertainment!”, a song that had since become synonymous with MGM, Garland regaled her audience with an anecdote from her recent time in London 60

“ST O R M Y W E AT H E R”

that centered on her relationship with the press and their relationship with her body. “If you know anything about the English press,” she said, “they’re rather odd.” She knew this firsthand. While attending a press conference full of “very important, very rude questions,” she noticed a young girl who was kind of cute. Throughout the event, she felt flattered by the young girl’s compliments: “She kept saying, ‘You look marvelous!’ ‘I’ve never seen you look as well!’ ‘You look so relaxed!’” By the time she left and the young reporter asked Judy for a lift to her own hotel, Garland was all too happy to oblige. Little did Garland know that she’d be met the next day with a column penned by the same girl titled, “Judy Garland Arrives in London. And She’s Not Chubby. And She’s Not Plump. She’s Fat!” Despite the lighthearted tone of her delivery (she quotes the article as saying that when Garland laughs, all of her chins “joggle happily”), you can hear Garland’s all-too familiar pain about being under the press’ microscope and having her body yet again scrutinized even as her own emotional and mental well-being was at an all-time high. Among a sea of devoted admirers, she could vent about the other necessary relationship a star of her stature was required to maintain. She knew she couldn’t fend off the press’s cruel remarks but she could at least redeploy them in a familiar stage as an improvised bit of banter and get the last laugh. The stage was the place where she put herself out there and didn’t need to worry about such careless jabs at her body, at her mannerisms, at her personal drama. She could be truly herself—at times playful, at others melancholy—knowing her audience would coddle her and make her feel at home. 61

J udy at C arnegie Hall

“The papers have often given me bad publicity,” she once complained. “Some writers said I was through but, by God, the audiences came and bolstered me. What they were saying was, ‘We don’t give a damn what the papers say, we love you.’ That’s why I could never cheat on a performance, or coast through. My emotions are involved.”18 Those same emotions are what led many to want to police her body. While working on her CBS variety show, The Judy Garland Show, executives worried that their ratings-floundering gamble was suffering mostly because of Judy’s body language. Audiences, they told her, felt too uncomfortable when watching her, particularly given the way she touched and kissed and held onto her guest stars. “It’s pure affection,” she told them, “I’m a woman who wants to reach out and take 40 million people in her arms.”19 The 2001 miniseries Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows offers a fictionalized version of that same meeting where Judy Davis’ Judy ends her meeting with the stonefaced CBS executives by getting John F. Kennedy himself on the line (the two had been close friends). Unlike the networkrun audience numbers offered to her that claimed the American people felt ill at ease with her on the small screen, “Jack” says he truly enjoyed seeing her show the other night. He then asks her, as he was prone to do whenever the two got on the phone, to serenade him. She sings to him eight bars of “Over the Rainbow,” the song that had so defined her career and which, then as it had at Carnegie Hall in 1961, captured Judy’s ability to connect with audiences—to embrace them— with just the power of her voice.

62

Side 4 “Over the Rainbow”

That Judy Garland died on June 22, 1969, a few days before the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, immediately tied and consigned her to an imagined gay past. The altercations between the New York City Police Department and the patrons of the gay bar along Christopher Street began on June 28, just one day after Garland’s funeral in the Upper East Side. In the fifty years since, Garland’s death and the violent protests that mark for many the beginning of the modern gay rights movement have all but coalesced. Their contiguity has been rewritten as causality. No sooner had Judy died than the very population who hid behind euphemisms borrowed from her most famous film (“friends of Dorothy”) rallied against the oppressive forces that in turn created the system that required such euphemisms in the first place. As RuPaul himself put it in a 2019 episode of his Emmywinning reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, the LGBTQ community had “used their grief over Judy’s death to rise up and fight back.”1

J udy at C arnegie Hall

Long a champion of LGBTQ rights and comfortable in his role as mentor to a rising generation of drag queens (and queer members of the community), RuPaul was merely echoing a narrative decades in the making. The earliest example came courtesy of The Village Voice. In line with the flagrantly homophobic coverage the New York City weekly had offered about the late June riots that happened mere blocks away from the Voice’s offices, a July 10 story titled “Too Much My Dear” snidely connected the lavish Garland funeral with the angered response against a late-night police raid of Stonewall: “The combination of a full moon and Judy Garland’s funeral was too much for them, Dick Neuweiler said the other day, assessing the cause of the Great Faggot Rebellion.”2 Writer Walter Troy Spencer helpfully let someone else’s words flippantly connect the grief many in the gay community felt about Judy’s loss with the anger members of that same community lashed at the NYPD in the days that followed. It kept the Voice contributor from having to factually make the connection himself. Just as people have clung to that image of tear-streaked theater queens raising hell for not being able to mourn in peace, historians and those actually involved in the four-day riots have pushed back on that all-too tidy conflation of arguably disparate members of the same community. Sylvia Rivera, one of the preeminent LGBTQ advocates of that era, has called it a “myth,”3 while historian David Carter, author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, has stressed the inadequacy of seeing the riots as being in any way caused by the funeral of a beloved 64

“OV E R T H E R A I N B OW ”

entertainer.4 Without needing to see a sense of causality, though, there’s no denying that the loss of Garland and the rising fight for LGBTQ civil rights in the United States together cleave twentieth-century gay history in two. There was a before and there was an after. And it was clear which one the Wizard of Oz star belonged to. By the time she was buried after close to 20,000 people had peered into her glass coffin at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, Garland was already a bona fide gay icon. The “Garland cult,” as it came to be pejoratively called, was increasingly being discussed within mainstream outlets in Judy’s later years. In The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, William Goldman casually mentions the “flutter of fags” that had gathered for the closing night of Garland’s residency at The Palace in 1967. And while he’s quick to note that “probably no more than a quarter of the house are obvious homosexuals” he does include an overheard exchange that puts into relief just how disdained Judy’s gay fans were to her straight audience: “It’s like Auschwitz,” one man, there with his wife, tells another, “some of them died along the way but a lot got here anyhow.” Goldman leaves the guy’s next line (a punchline of sorts) intact: “Tonight, no one goes to the bathroom.”5 In the decades since, Garland’s ties to the LGBTQ community have broadened and grown much more muddled: the revelation that her own father was a homosexual (an open secret that followed Frank Gumm from town to town, all but forcing the very move the family made from the Midwest to California); the salacious details about her own marriages to not one but two gay men (director Vincente Minnelli 65

J udy at C arnegie Hall

and actor Mark Herron); as well as the rumored same-sex relationships she’s said to have had with women throughout her life (Gerald Clarke suggests as much in Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland) have made her connection to gay men and women all the more explicit than it was while she was alive and packing concert venues. Yet the all-out embrace of Garland as a gay icon many in 2019 will take for granted was, as Goldman exemplifies, framed in hushed, mocking tones in the late 1960s. In its review of that same 1967 Palace show, Time magazine went even further than Goldman’s snide commentary. Talking about how a “disproportionate part of her nightly claque” were homosexuals, the magazine came up with a kinder if no less distracting euphemism for them. “The boys in the tight trousers,” the reviewer writes, “roll their eyes, tear at their hair and practically levitate from their seats, particularly when Judy sings” the lyrics to her iconic Wizard of Oz song “Over the Rainbow.”6 Despite how much of a cliché it may seem to connect Garland’s gay fans and Dorothy’s wistful ballad, these contemporaneous assertions are one of the earliest examples of when such a connection had gone mainstream. The 1939 film, which had only grown in esteem over the years since it first lost money for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in its initial run and later became a television staple, would remain at the forefront of any discussion of Garland for as long as she lived—and beyond. “‘Rainbow’ has always been my song,” Garland reminisced years later. “I get emotional—one way or the other—about every song I sing. But maybe I get more emotional about ‘Rainbow.’ I never shed any phony tears 66

“OV E R T H E R A I N B OW ”

about it. Everybody has songs that make them cry. That’s my sad song.”7 It was, not coincidentally, the song’s very sadness which almost left it at the cutting room floor. The song’s genesis has, at this point, the sheen of a wellworn tale. Harold Arlen, who wrote the music for The Wizard of Oz (Yip Hamburg provided the lyrics), couldn’t quite figure out what to make of the screen ballad that was to follow Aunt Em’s directive to Dorothy to get out of her way and find some place “where you won’t get into any trouble.” After struggling with writing up the kind of ballad that would normally have been a romantic serenade, Arlen all but gave up. It was only after his wife Anya was driving the two to Grauman’s Chinese Theater to clear his mind that the tune came down to him as if from the sky. He stopped the car, jotted down the theme and immediately called up Hamburg: “I ran to meet him at home,” the lyricist remembered years later, “He approached the piano with the usual blue-eyestoward-heaven ritual and played the first eight bars. . . . My heart fell. He played with such symphonic sweep and bravura that my first reaction was: ‘Oh, no, not for little Dorothy! That’s for Nelson Eddy!’”8 Eddy, then a contract player at MGM, was best known as Jeanette McDonald’s leading man in films such as Naughty Marietta (1935) and The Girl of the Golden West (1938). He was a trained opera singer whose sweeping renditions of romantic ballads were all the rage in the 1930s—which is to say that the tune Arlen had created was too mournful for the sunny young girl that would skip down the yellow brick road with a Cowardly Lion, a Tin Man, and a Scarecrow. Thankfully, Hamburg was won over in the end. 67

J udy at C arnegie Hall

But even after Garland recorded it and shot the sequence in the MGM lot, there was always hesitation about its place in the filmed adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s beloved property. The song was included in the first rough cut, but during the run of the final it was decided that the song was too cloying and sentimental and should be removed; and it was. Only after the initial sneak preview was it spliced back into the print—and then only because it was felt the picture at that point was slow and needed a change of pace and it was too late to shoot a new musical sequence. What some of the MGM executives making those early decisions failed to understand (much too worried were they about letting an MGM leading lady sing amidst bales of hay and pig sties) was that “Over the Rainbow” was the key to The Wizard of Oz. Not only does it set the tone for the picture but it puts yearning—for something better, for a place where you can be and feel yourself at home—squarely at the heart of the film. The melancholy of the song works in the movie as a palate cleanser of a ballad before the whirlwind journey to Oz transports Dorothy and viewers alike into a candycolored world scored by flowery toe-tapping sequences. In concerts like that at Carnegie Hall, when Garland had been performing the song then for over two decades, the Nelson Eddy-ness of the Arlen tune comes to the forefront, creating a more mournful version of her once childhood song. Indeed, “Over the Rainbow” isn’t just a signature tune in Judy at Carnegie Hall. It is its climax and its recurrent theme. It may sound like Goldman was exaggerating when he describes the final moments of Garland’s 1967 Palace 68

“OV E R T H E R A I N B OW ”

performance as being scored by “the band [going] wearily on with ‘Over the Rainbow,’ over and over, ‘Over the Rainbow,’ over again.”9 But the Carnegie Hall concert recording is no different. A full listen of the album lets you hear Arlen’s melody a total of six times. Its dreamy twinkling instrumentation makes its first appearance in the show’s “Overture” (alongside “The Trolley Song” and “The Man That Got Away,” arguably Garland’s golden troika). It then makes a return an hour and a half into the album when Garland sings her tear-streaked version of the song. Two decades after she’d first performed it, in pigtails and a checkered dress, Garland sat at the edge of the stage (by then a signature move when singing Dorothy’s tune) and delivered an “Over the Rainbow” that was as wistful as it was knowing. The sadness that so upset Hamburg about a song meant for a young girl no longer feels ill-fitting. Instead, Garland’s delivery suggests that there may well be something tragic about the childlike yearning she’s singing about, wondering as she does, why she cannot find some solace like those happy little bluebirds who fly over the rainbow. And rather than shy away from such tragedy, she crashes right into it, stretching and near-breaking in that final line that leaves its key question—why, oh why, can’t she?—hanging, a rhetorical demand the song won’t and can’t let her answer. Camille Paglia has compared her rendition to Tosca’s aria “Vissi d’arte” (“I lived for art”), “an operatic lament, a dirge for artistic opportunities squandered and for personal happiness permanently deferred.”10 As if to comfort singer and audiences alike, the band swoops in soon after the applause 69

J udy at C arnegie Hall

that greets that emotional climax to offer an instrumental reprise meant to signal the end of the concert, something Mort Lindsay and his band do after each of the next three songs Garland performed that night, making Arlen’s tune a constant presence during the last half hour of the show. The yearning which anchors “Over the Rainbow,” and which Garland’s Carnegie Hall performance captures as her voice breaks getting through it, is right there in its opening bars. It’s in that octave leap embedded in “some-where,” which Leo Fiest, the representative of the music publisher for the film, objected to at the time on the grounds that it would be too difficult for the average singer to tackle. This difficulty is also what constitutes the very sadness that queer academic Daniel Contreras has discussed as being central to the song’s connection with gay men for the better part of the twentieth century (and beyond). The leap is akin to the journey Dorothy takes from barren, sepia-toned Kansas to the technicolor urbane world of Oz. But that utopian vision of a world where everyone’s differences only make them stronger, where one’s individuality is prized, is eventually shown to be a dream. Dorothy may not yet know she’s to come back to Kansas, eventually realizing that (improbably) there’s no place like home, but “Over the Rainbow” telegraphs both that longing for something else and its eventual evanescence, capturing the sense “not just that this utopia does not exist, but that perhaps any utopia comes with a price—the giving up completely of the conditions that created the longing for a utopia in the first place.”11 This, of course, was what long has been seen as Dorothy’s, and by extension Garland’s, appeal within the gay community. 70

“OV E R T H E R A I N B OW ”

Garland’s girl from Kansas was a blueprint for a journey elsewhere, to a place where what set you apart was an asset, not a hindrance. But such an image was always tinged with Garland’s own off-screen persona, which was both sadder and more tragic than the shot of Dorothy returning to her drab home in Kansas. Intent on offering its readers a logical explanation for the seemingly odd sense of identification gay men had with Garland, Time magazine’s 1967 piece on The Palace performance quoted two Manhattan psychiatrists who advanced arguments that have since become unquestioned truths about why a “flutter of fags” would so idolize the Oz star: “Judy was beaten up by life, embattled, and ultimately had to become more masculine,” Time quotes Dr. Lawrence Hatterer as saying. “She has the power that homosexuals would like to have, and they attempt to attain it by idolizing her.”12 Despite its coded condescension, Dr. Hatterer’s attention to Garland’s presumed androgyny (seen in onscreen in numbers like Summer Stock’s “Get Happy” and Easter Parade’s “A Couple of Swells”) did do a lot to create in the performer an aura of gender in-betweenness that no doubt set her apart from her contemporaries. Goldman was equally glib if accurate in his assessments while trying to answer his own rhetorical question (why would they bleed for her?): “the lady has suffered. Homosexuals tend to identify with suffering. They are a persecuted group and they understand suffering. And so does Garland. She’s been through the fire and lived—all the drinking and divorcing, all the pills and all the men, all the poundage come and gone—brothers and sisters, she 71

J udy at C arnegie Hall

knows.”13 Garland’s particular brand of raw vulnerability, the kind that made her renditions of songs like “Stormy Weather” and “The Man That Got Away” feel so electric, as if she were letting audiences see her tearing herself open for them to gawk and gasp and commiserate, felt also like an invitation to redraw her resilience as aspirational. That twinned ability to be broken and whole, to be both phoenix and bluebird (as Shana Alexander had indeed described her in the pages of LIFE shortly after her Carnegie Hall concert) was what made Garland a perfect avatar for gay men who struggled with finding ways of being in a world that so broke them, that so discarded them, and yet who wished to weather whatever storm came their way if that meant finding a somewhere (anywhere) over the rainbow where they’d find fellow sissies and freaks with whom to make a home. In the twenty-first century, these kinds of musings on diva worship may strike one as dated or old-fashioned. They reek of a vision of gay identity that’s mired in tragedy. Surely there’s no need to find in such a broken diva an avatar for our own contemporary struggles. It’s both degrading and unseemly, which is why it’s just as likely to be used as a way to police gay men’s femininity from within and outside the community. “What the hell is it with you people?” the character of Mickey Deans (Garland’s fifth and final husband) asks in Peter Quilter’s End of the Rainbow, addressing her gay piano player (a fictional character created for the stage play): “The more she falls apart, the more you adore her. . . . If she was found half-dead in the gutter, you’d all cum in your pants.”14 In a post-“It Gets Better” world, the anthemic power of Garland’s yearning ballad feels like a vestige of a time long gone. 72

“OV E R T H E R A I N B OW ”

But even by 1969 there was already a datedness to connecting Garland with the struggle of being gay. That’s best encapsulated by a landmark gay play whose very title is an ode to the A Star is Born actress: Boys in the Band. Mart Crowley’s play opened Off-Broadway on April 14, 1968, and ran for over 1,000 performances. The unlikely hit broke new ground by focusing on a group of gay men gathered in an Upper East Side apartment in New York City. The birthday celebration that brings the tight-knit group together soon devolves into a bickering, drink-fueled comedic and melodramatic tour de force that’s equal parts hilarious and devastating. Crowley’s quippy quotable lines and his keen exploration of the ills that afflicted a very specific segment of the gay male population of New York City immediately became a time capsule of a pre-Stonewall sensibility. Its title is a bit of dialogue from A Star is Born that rewrites the very boys the 1954 Garland vehicle was referring to. In the film James Mason’s Norman Maine has helped Garland’s Esther Blodgett nab an audition at a film studio. She’s been done up by a makeup and hairstyling team who have styled her to look almost nothing like herself. She resembles precisely that which she’s supposed to become: a Hollywood starlet. Yet Maine, who first fell for Esther’s raw talent in a dingy latenight bar, is committed to doing away with those needless layers that hide who she is. After having her blot out her overdone makeup and hair, he can see she’s still nervous, unsure whether her unvarnished self will be enough to dazzle. She can’t bear the screen test that’s to come. “Look, forget the camera,” he advises her: “It’s the Downbeat Club 73

J udy at C arnegie Hall

at three in the morning and you’re singing for yourself and for the boys in the band—mainly for yourself.” This image is supposed to be reassuring. He’s intent on having her recreate the very moment he first saw her true potential, the moment when she sang “The Man That Got Away” to no one but herself and the “boys in the band” accompanying her, their difference being almost immaterial. In Crawley’s title, though, the playwright has made those band members—simultaneously Esther’s co-conspirators and audience members—Garland’s most vocal fans. In the play itself, these boys use Garland as campy shorthand, the connection between gayness and the Summer Stock star being so obvious it’s the premise, not the punchline to their in-jokes. When Michael, whose apartment is hosting his friend’s birthday party, sees that his boyfriend Donald is much too serious, he tries to liven up his mood: “You’re funstarved, baby, and I’m eating for two!” he tells him before launching into a Judy routine: MICHAEL: Forget your troubles, c’mon get happy! You better chase all your blues away. Shout, “Hallelujah!” c’mon get happy. (MICHAEL does a few Garland poses. Sees DONALD isn’t buying it.)—what’s more boring than a queen doing a Judy Garland imitation? Donald’s retort—“A queen doing a Bette Davis imitation”15— places Garland squarely within the realm of what selfdescribed “queens” love and traffic in. Crawley’s play, which opened a year before the Stonewall riots and played a full year thereafter, had the unfortunate effect of, as academic Steve Cohan put it in a 2016 essay, “having been and 74

“OV E R T H E R A I N B OW ”

remaining ‘always already dated’ because of the camp in its characterizations, humor, and outlooks on homosexuality and on the private worlds of gay male culture in sixties Manhattan.”16 Similarly, the gay reception of Garland seems stuck in an endless loop of repudiation and redemption, her dated cachet always in need of being relitigated. By the time Richard Dyer devoted an entire chapter of his seminal 1986 book, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, to Garland and her gay male fans, it was clear that there was something always already dated about such a connection. Opening his chapter on Judy, Dyer remembers a June 1973 article in the Birmingham Gay Liberation Front (GLF) newsletter. It was all about the Wizard of Oz star but one that curiously made no reference to gayness at all. There was no need to, Dyer notes; it was an open shared secret that gay men loved that recently departed diva. Yet that didn’t stop some from criticizing its inclusion in such a forward-thinking publication: “A few were objecting on the grounds that Garland belonged to the unliberated days of gay existence before GLF,”17 Dyer writes. Such criticism has continued to structure Garland’s place in the gay cultural imagination: love of Garland always already locates you in a long ago past in need of being rebuked. It’s as much a failure of your imagination (how much more cliché can you get?) as a rather more insidious abdication of the progress that’s been made since (how much better must it get?). No sooner had a decade gone by since her death than Vito Russo, who’d later earn fame for his revisionist queer history of Hollywood as the author of The Celluloid Closet, was bemoaning the way Garland had become a hushed 75

J udy at C arnegie Hall

embarrassment within the community. “Despite the legend that gay men have a special affinity for the music and career of Judy Garland,” he wrote in Gay News in 1980, “I find that most of my gay male friends shudder at the mention of her name.” To so love Judy as he did—he had pictures of her all over his London flat—was “a relic of dark ages when fey young men wrung their hands and stood in the aisles crying ‘We love you, Judy!’ across the footlights, tossing roses onto the stage of the London Palladium.”18 The complaint has remained almost unchanged ever since. Tracking, as the title of his 1997 book describes, the rise and fall of gay culture, Daniel Harris notes that the answer to the proverbial question “Why did gay men like Judy Garland so much?” lies less in Judy herself than in “her audience, the hordes of other gay men who gathered in her name to hear her poignant renditions of old torch songs that reduced sniffling queens to floods of self-pitying tears.”19 That very quote allowed Michael Joseph Gross in The Atlantic three years later to yet again announce that “the specter of these ‘sniffling queens’ wallowing in the campy show of Garland’s melodramatic, drug-dazed last years has relegated her to a marginal place in gay culture today.”20 His eloquent deconstruction of how the Garland cult has been (or should be, the line between description and prescription being almost indistinguishable within his piece) relegated to the dustbin of gay history stresses why Garland’s message of being true to yourself rings hollow (allegedly) in an era where gay men are worried less about being outcast and more about being dead. “Judy Garland began losing her power over gay 76

“OV E R T H E R A I N B OW ”

men,” he muses, “because we got that message and started becoming more integrated characters than the screaming queens of yore. We no longer need a surrogate to embody the conflicts that so many of us experience, because we now have more and better resources for sorting them out for ourselves.”21 As Contreras more succinctly put it in 2005, Garland’s diva worship made the most sense in a pre-Stonewall sensibility “when the kind of pathos that Judy represented through her life and music seemed the most apt description of life in the closet.”22 Gay men may have once needed her but they should (or don’t) no longer. As Meghan (age 31), a participant in a 2014 UBC study on Garland’s fandom put it when addressing the star’s gay iconicity, “I believe this is accurate but speaks more to the past than current day.” She further elaborated: “I understand the importance of Judy in the older gay community (which includes many other female icons) and it should not be forgotten or dismissed, but I don’t feel it reflects the current fabric of her fans.”23 That “past” is ever receding yet always much more recent than such assertions would have you believe. That gay men today still gravitate to Judy Garland the way those tight-trousered blue birds who attended her 1961 concert remains as undeniable as the fact that such a connection continues to be coded as dated or retrograde. This anxiety that the enduring Garland cult still arouses shifts the question from why gay men find the “Over the Rainbow” singer so enchanting to why such a connection is so destabilizing to modern ideals of the gay community. Part of it, as David M. Halperin so eloquently explains in his book 77

J udy at C arnegie Hall

How to Be Gay, is that to continue to attach Garland to gay male culture betrays “the official post-Stonewall creed that gay men are no different from anybody else, that sexual objectchoice has nothing to do with gender style, that gay sexuality has no relation to femininity, and that homosexuality is a sexual orientation, not a culture or subculture.”24 One need only look at the language often used to describe Garland’s gay fans—“fey young men,” “sniffling” and “screaming” queens— to see an anxiety rooted in visibility amidst a rhetoric that privileges one’s ability to blend in, to be normal. Coded in the recurrent and therefore increasingly inaccurate reminders that Garland’s contemporary allure is all but nonexistent is the assumption that those “boys in the band”—Crowley’s but also Garland’s writ-large—need to grow up and grow out of identifying with such wounded femininity (there’s a whiff that, honestly, they should just man up already). Yet such an imperative undermines the very lessons the queer community has learned from Garland. There’s resilience and strength in her vulnerability, and while the specter of the closet has receded since the night on June 1969 when a group of black and brown trans women stood up to the New York Police Department during a raid of the Stonewall Inn, there’s little to suggest that queer people in 2019 know no suffering. Or, more to the point, that glorifying strong-willed women who refused to buckle under the weight of a system that so easily discarded them is somehow a step backward for a community that remains under siege and is still very much far from a place where troubles melt like lemon drops.

78

Encore “After You’ve Gone”

Over a thousand photos of Judy Garland adorn a wall. They span her entire life and include both the first and the last ever photos taken of her. There are glamour shots from her time at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, photos from her weddings, candid takes with her kids, rare photos from her time as one of the Gumm Sisters, behind-the-scenes images from her film shoots, even a snap from her performance at Carnegie Hall. They’re not arranged in any order. Instead, they’re organized almost haphazardly, overlapping to create a mosaic look at Garland’s life. On an opposing wall lies the title of Corey Michael Smithson’s 2004 exhibit: “The Unified Theory of Judy Garland.” Below, the then Massachusetts College of Art student offered a few words that helped put his shrine of sorts into context. “Even gods are mortal,” it begins. The aphoristic sentences grow longer and longer (“The imprint we leave upon the public consciousness is a form of afterlife”) creating a poem that doubles as an artist’s statement. Smithson is fascinated, as he writes in his website where photos of the exhibit now reside, with the way a seemingly fixed

J udy at C arnegie Hall

persona—“Judy Garland,” say—consists of and depends on a myriad of oft-conflicting and ever-changing identities. “There is not one Frances Ethel Gumm Rose Minnelli Luft Herrons Deans,” he writes, “but rather, a collective of Judy Garland that we can assign certain traits or parameters.”1 No pop culture object better captures the necessarily fractured “Garland” image than Judy at Carnegie Hall. To listen to the 1961 concert album in full (and there really is no other way to do it if one wants to get the full effect of that night’s recording) is to see various Judys coming in and out of focus. With a song order dreamed up by Garland herself (it dawned on her one day while taking a shower), the album ebbs and flows in very deliberate ways. Thus, an opener like “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You)” that captured the sunniness of a young Judy at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer yet which explicitly gestured to her more grown-up issues, is followed by a buoyant medley of “Almost Like Being in Love” and “This Can’t Be Love” that coyly let us see Garland (or, rather, Mrs. Luft) in full lovestruck mode. Similarly, the choice to break up her staples with a jazz interlude and later with a piano-only section not only varied the night’s proceedings but allowed the performer to slip into other personas (“Judy does jazz!” “Judy, the torch singer”) that toyed with her evermalleable showmanship, a reminder that to think of “Judy Garland” was to hold, as Smithson’s installation points out, a number of complementary and even conflicting images in your head at any given moment. Throughout that 1961 night, Garland got to show as many facets of her talent and her personality as she could muster. 80

“A F T E R YO U ’ V E G O N E”

She was the melancholy figure she portrays in “If Love Were All,” the hammy performer who prefaced “San Francisco” with a playful nod to the song’s Hollywood roots, the worldweary singer who made you hear “The Man That Got Away” anew, and even the coy master of ceremonies who introduced “Puttin’ on the Ritz” with talk of a striptease (“We don’t do it, we just talk about it!” she joked, referring to the sax solo that opens the famous number). Her ability to switch back and forth between these personas was revelatory: after an audience member presumably suggests she actually perform a striptease, she quips back, “Aw, heck. No, not in Carnegie Hall! It wouldn’t look right!” Judy knew how to work a crowd. And so, after earning belly laughs from that repartee (nimbly bracketing the blue humor she had introduced into the proceedings), she went back to playing maestro to her band, asking about counts but not before letting her ribald rapport go: “Now moan!” she instructs before we hear the slinking notes of the classic Irving Berlin song. Smithson’s photo collage works as reminder that to try to pin down “Judy Garland” to any one thing—mother, singer, daughter, wife, star, torch singer, leading lady, etc.—was to miss what made her so alluring. More fascinating than the photography exhibit itself is Smithson’s explanation for why he was compelled to center his MFA thesis on what those closest to him still referred to as “some dead movie star.” It wasn’t (just) that Garland was a natural talent or that her mythic persona spoke so clearly to his interest in the way memory, history, and identity so neatly overlap. There was also the fact of her ghost. “Ever since an inexplicable (I hesitate to use the word ‘supernatural’) experience in 81

J udy at C arnegie Hall

Hoboken, NJ, 1993, I’ve felt haunted by her,” he writes. “It’s hard to explain, and I know that it sounds ridiculous, but my entire conception of human spirituality has come about because of my relationship with Judy and the fragments of her ‘ghost.’”2 That is no mere turn of phrase. As he explains in his essay “Me and Frances Gumm,” Smithson encountered Garland’s ghost while visiting a friend. He felt a burst of energy overtake him and then a memory coursed through his body, one that was not his own. “It was like watching the glare from a cosmic collision,” he remembers, “an event that had happened long ago, its light taking ages to reach my eyes. I could no longer see the storefront, my drunken friend, the costume racks, the walls. All I could see was a frenzied crowd, a sea of reaching hands, bright footlights, and a woman’s face leaning down. Sweat and makeup. Tears on her eyelashes.”3 He knows exactly what date it was. The very date the Judy record he had tried playing just minutes before and which miraculously began playing on a broken record player right then and there had immortalized: April 23, 1961. Garland ghost stories are not hard to find. Judy is said to haunt her old stomping grounds at The Palace Theater in New York City; her house in Brentwood is listed in Haunted Places: The National Directory; while a little girl looking just like a young Ethel Gumm reportedly lets herself be seen at the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Even a play titled Judy at Stonewall made Garland a literal ghost, haunting the Village bar the night of the famed riots. But Smithson’s tale, which puts her Carnegie Hall evening as both conduit and flashpoint, speaks to the potency of 82

“A F T E R YO U ’ V E G O N E”

such an evening. When Smithson later went to visit the New York City venue, he hoped to rekindle the moment he’d witnessed, a hand outstretched and fleetingly caressed by Judy in the final moments of her 1961 concert. The gesture may feel futile (if not outright laughable) but Garland’s fans have long wanted to break through and touch the Wizard of Oz performer, be it across screens or time. Susie Boyt, whose memoir My Judy Garland Life doubles as an extended fan letter Judy will never get to read, writes that there are flashes of understanding between her and the star, “almost supernatural shocks of intense recognition, which assail me when I hear her sing or speak, or watch her dance.”4 Garland’s recordings make her presence so palpable that they almost feel like tangible ghostly remnants, as if she were reaching out to us. Or, as if she were merely keeping the promise she sang about in one of the many encores she performed that very night in 1961, the much-requested “After You’ve Gone.” Having nixed the opening verses that explicitly framed the 1918 tune around a breakup—like in many of other Garland staples, this song told a story about a man getting away—Garland’s late in the night rendition uncoupled the song from its purely romantic setting. Singing it as she did to her clamoring fans, who’d rattled off any number of requests (“We don’t have an arrangement for ‘Liza,’” she explained when many demanded for the Gershwin tune) and who’d drowned her out when she mentioned “After You’ve Gone,” Garland turned her audience into the “you” she was speaking to. Yet, just as with her opener (“When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You)”), the lyrics from that 1918 83

J udy at C arnegie Hall

song soon quickly circled back around to describe the effect her own singing (and later her own departure) would have on her fans: “You’ll feel blue,” she sings, “you’ll feel sad / You’ll miss the dearest pal you’ve ever had.” The song’s many predictions slowly turn into flat-out curses (rendered endearing by Garland’s own wounded delivery) and they end with a promise she seems to have kept: “I’m gonna haunt you so, I’m gonna taunt you so.” Such haunting was made possible by the very industries that made Garland a star. Her rise to fame from such a young age meant that she became one of the first Hollywood celebrities to have her entire life be so recorded. Smithson’s project is only possible because there is so much Garland ephemera that traces her journey from “Baby Gumm” to “Judy Garland,” from Sairy Dodd in 1936’s Pigskin Parade to Jenny Bowman in 1963’s I Could Go On Singing, from the Gumm Sisters to Mickey and Judy, from radio broadcasts to concert venues, from Grand Rapids to London, and everything in between. The moment she set foot at MGM, Garland’s life was painstakingly archived. Before the ease of technology allowed any of us to chronicle our daily routines in photos, videos, tweets, and emails, Garland found her every move tracked in screen tests and filmed productions, in printed interviews and promotional stills, in studio notes and fan profiles, in signed contracts and audio singles. As every one of her biographers can attest, there is a wealth of information available on and about Garland precisely because she grew up alongside technological advances that made such archival impulses possible. 84

“A F T E R YO U ’ V E G O N E”

If audiences felt like they knew Garland it was because her image and her voice were endlessly reproducible, courtesy of industries that promised to retain in real life what would be gone in death. The photograph, the film strip, and the audio tape all capture ghostly remains (it’s no surprise their emergence coincided at the turn of the century with increased attention to the possibility of speaking with departed spirits). And while Garland’s moving pictures embalmed various iterations of that image (Dorothy in awe at Oz, Esther beaming on the trolley), it was her voice which set her apart. Writing about Garland’s place in the twenty-first century in the very first web-zine iteration of Garlands for Judy (a long-running zine started by the late Scott Schechter in 1995), Lawrence Schulman notes that one of the reasons her star shines so bright still is because of her incongruity with our contemporary fast-paced life. “We are stopped in our tracks when listening to her,” he writes, “and this stopping of time is out of sync with the 21st century. And that is why today we pay attention—surely more than at the time of her death—to Garland. Our fast pace stops as Garland’s oldworld intensity invades us, and we realize that her soaring voice can stop time itself.”5 Not just stop time but transcend it. To listen to any Garland record is to be transported back—to the shores of the Swanee river, to a rubble-strewn San Francisco, to any number of fast-fading pasts that continue to haunt us in the present. “There is one thing about Judy Garland,” wrote Adela Rogers St. Johns as early as 1945 for Photoplay, “maybe because she has music all the way through her: she is literally 85

J udy at C arnegie Hall

like a haunting melody.”6 In the many recordings she made in the decades following her break with MGM (she released twelve albums between 1955 and 1967) that “haunting melody” was front and center. The promise of a “live” Judy Garland is what’s central to Judy at Carnegie Hall. In that promised “liveness,” listeners could and can imagine themselves present at that famed 1961 night. And while that liveness is crucial to making some of Garland’s renditions feel all the more revelatory—her soulful and aching performance of “You’re Nearer”; her stillyouthful take on the classic “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”; her winking framing of Jeannette McDonald’s “San Francisco”—it’s her meandering anecdotes and playful stage banter that allow one’s imagination to soar and make you feel like you’re getting a look at a Judy that may well jolt you through time and space, making you feel like you’re grazing her hand at the end of her concert. Those impromptu moments when she bantered with her band, when she claimed to have a “frog in her throat,” when she almost ran out of breath telling the audience that they were “divine,” or when she went long on something or other that happened to her while in Paris, anchor the concert recording on the permanence of her fleeting performance. Moreover, they suggest the presence of an authentic and unguarded version of Garland, tangible because of her ephemerality. When she sounds much too surprised that the audience isn’t yet tired—“I know; I’ll sing ’em all, and we’ll stay all night!” she half-jokes—she gestures to the promise of the record. For perpetuity, you can make Garland sing those endless standards forever and ever. Moreover, you can pretend like 86

“A F T E R YO U ’ V E G O N E”

you were there, having perhaps an even more intimate encounter with her than if you’d been there in person. For those in attendance—and for those who own now the full concert recording—the dazzling virtuosity on display in her vocal performances was juxtaposed with the near-spastic openness of her onstage repartee. That banter is as integral part of Judy at Carnegie Hall as the singer’s greatest belts. Part stand-up routine and part gossip parlor—without the discipline required to nail the former yet with the requisite candor of the latter—Garland’s breathy and halting anecdotes are a tour de force unto themselves. Here she is following her performance of “Come Rain or Come Shine,” after telling her audience that she’d be doing a number of songs accompanied only by the piano: I’ve got, I must say, one more thing about—in Paris again. I, I got to, I got to the intermission, and I changed my dress and got into my pants and my slacks. And the zipper in the back wouldn’t stay zipped. And so, just before I went on, I put a great big safety pin—you know, so my act wouldn’t get too gay in the in the middle of . . . and I strolled over to the piano at this point, and sat down and the pin came undone and into my derriere! I’ve never sung so high and so fast! Where her singing showed her in full control, these meandering tidbits were much more freewheeling. Her syntax, especially when set down in print, betrays a nervousness that’s hard to shake off when you hear it in the record. She stutters and stammers (much like Betty claims she does in Broadway Melody of 1938 whenever she thinks 87

J udy at C arnegie Hall

of Clark Gable), finding it hard to stay on course. Her sentences stretch out and sometimes just end abruptly as a sudden thought derails them. But those hesitations and those moments where she all but trails off are endearing. They are proof of Garland’s own fallibility. When she’s singing, it sometimes feels like she’s coming up with the lyrics on the spot. She has a way of keying into a song’s truth by making it seem like a spontaneous pouring forth of emotion. One need only look at these other moments of unconstrained improvisation to see what a truly unfiltered and unscripted Garland actually sounds like. Many of the anecdotes Garland chose to tell at Carnegie Hall that night spoke precisely to people’s misconceptions of her, allowing her audience not just to see how others saw her but how she struggled with those manufactured projections of her own persona. Her bit about the rude young lady at a London press conference—the one who complimented her on her figure, asked for a ride, and later wrote a headline about how fat Garland was—captured not just how wounded Garland felt about her weight continuing to be a lurid topic of tabloid conversation but how other people’s expectations could still needle her. Similarly, when she goes on about meeting a friend at Paris (a “darling, marvelous woman . . . so chic that you can’t stand it!”) who introduced her to a hairdresser who gave her an equally chic makeover, the story is, on its surface, a comic set-piece about Garland sweating her way through her slowly melting Parisian up-do. But the imperative the Parisian hairdresser directs at Garland—“You must look nothing like Judy Garland!”—as well as the fact that it was the effort she 88

“A F T E R YO U ’ V E G O N E”

exerts while performing that broke apart such an ill-conceived illusion (she claimed she looked like “an overweight Balenciaga model or something”) reveal it as yet another failed attempt at trying to remake a Judy that never was. Perhaps as another way to offset the “sad, tragic songs” that so dominated the evening, Garland aimed for lighthearted conversation in between numbers, earning plenty of laughs at her own expense. Taken together, though, these handful of stories—not to mention their clipped, buoyant delivery— position Garland as someone well aware of how hard it is to seem, let alone be, put together. No matter how sprightly and healthy she looked she was reduced to being “fat”; any attempt to tame her hair was a disaster in the making; sometimes even well-tailored pants were a safety pin away from coming undone. Garland was a master at channeling her unruliness into sublime performances that could range from the restrained to the thunderous. Her phrasing and cadence were unmistakable, but the feeling that what she was singing was in any way authentic came from audiences and critics identifying something right beneath the surface, the suggestion that this was a voice that was always on the verge of breaking (as it does, in fact, a handful of times in Judy at Carnegie Hall). To hear her speaking voice, devoid of the cloying dialogue of an MGM vehicle or the melodramatic flair of her post-MGM screen work, is to hear a private Judy that so seldom was allowed to surface, even if, as is the case in the Carnegie Hall recording, she’s still very much putting on a show. If the spoken portions of Judy at Carnegie Hall feel so precious it is because any kind of glimpse into Garland’s 89

J udy at C arnegie Hall

personal life remained in high demand up until the moment she died, and greater still thereafter. Despite the tabloid headlines, the gossip columns, and the many hushed rumors that followed her in life (like the story of when she found her then-husband Vincente Minnelli in their bed with another man, a juicy tidbit Jacqueline Susan borrowed for her 1966 novel, The Valley of the Dolls), Garland was a very guarded individual, especially when it came to the press. It’s what set her number-one fan, Wayne Martin, apart from everyone else who wanted to lay claim to that title. Over the decades following Garland’s career, attending her many concerts and appearances, Martin eventually ingratiated himself with the star he so adored, often being able to get her on the phone, in conversations he controversially recorded (and which now circulate freely on the internet). That kind of access in life was unheard of; in death, it’s become a cottage industry. Indeed, Martin’s recorded conversations are not the only ephemera that survived Garland and allowed fans to get a peek behind the curtain. In the sixties, and as a way to score a hefty advance of $35,000 that was to help tide over some of her financial strains, Garland was working on a memoir, one which would finally put to rest the many rumors and myths about her. To do so, she set out to record herself, hoping her divagations could be harnessed into the kind of autobiography that would quell fans’ desires to read about every bit of her backstage drama and finally get to hear her side of the story. The book, alas, despite a 1960 contract with Random House, never came to fruition. But the tapes—like the many studio recordings she finished in her lifetime that never got released while she 90

“A F T E R YO U ’ V E G O N E”

lived—soon became an obsession for her most fervent admirers. When they surfaced in the early 2000s (as a bootleg disc-set called Judy Garland Speaks! that you can still purchase today on Amazon for close to $100), they finally shattered whatever prim image had survived many decades of Garland lore. Here was a truly unvarnished look at Garland: “Am I emotional?” she asks in one of the many tapes she recorded for the project. “Yeah, I’m a woman! I’m emotional! I’m not something you wind up and put on the stage, that sings the Carnegie Hall album and you put her in a closet and you forget to invite her to the party that’s given to her.” The rancor that had simmered under the surface in her later years and which made all her comebacks equally rewarding and frustrating (why couldn’t Judy catch a break?) came out in full force in long-winded and slurred monologues that finally showed the raw pain that so underscored Judy, legend and woman alike. It’s no surprise that this more public availability of the tapes coincided with newfound interest in Judy’s inner life. Judy Davis’s performance in Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (based on Lorna Luft’s memoir about life with her mother), Peter Quilter’s End of the Rainbow play (focused on the performer’s last few months in London), as well as Gerald Clarke’s Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland biography (which made extensive use of the tapes) all attempted to find a way to break past the legend that surrounded Garland and get at the private interiority that always felt out of reach when mediated through music recordings or filmed performances. “I’ve sung, I’ve entertained,” she bemoans at one point in Judy Garland Speaks!, “I’ve pleased your children, I’ve 91

J udy at C arnegie Hall

pleased your wives, I’ve pleased you—YOU SONS OF BITCHES!” Just as in “After You’ve Gone” the “you” here is diffuse, generalized to the point where it could mean any number of people who at one point or another deserted and thus betrayed her. To hear such rage is to conjure up a Judy Garland who was at once a shadow of her former self but also the ever-present haunting image of the Judy one always saw. Such tirades sound not unlike a more R-rated version of dialogue she doctored for herself on the set of I Could Go On Singing, the 1963 film that ended up being her last. In it, Jenny Bowman, a successful singer playing the Palladium visits the son she left behind, forcing her to come to terms with the decision she once made to pursue a career over a family. “I can’t be spread so thin,” Jenny tells her former lover David (Dirk Bogarde), trying to convince him that she’s ready to give it all up. “I’m just one person. I don’t want to be rolled out like a pastry so everybody can get a nice big bite of me. I’m just me. I belong to myself. I can do whatever I damn well please with myself and nobody can ask any questions.” She’s both wistful and self-assured, even as David reminds her that’s not completely true. “Well I’m not gonna do it anymore,” she insists. “And that’s final! It’s just not worth all the deaths that I have to die.” Her character may have been exaggerating but to listen to her records is to know, as Boyt puts it, that “matters of life and death hang in the balance when Judy Garland sings. Everything is celebration or mourning.”7 If her ghostly presence has survived into the twenty-first century it is because there is no shortage of people who keep 92

“A F T E R YO U ’ V E G O N E”

wishing to commune with her, eager to mourn and celebrate her in equal measure. Not for nothing did Adam Feldman, profiling Rufus Wainwright ahead of the Canadian singersongwriter’s 2006 recreation of the Carnegie Hall concert, note that Wainwright’s undertaking was “a kind of gay séance, transforming Carnegie Hall into a haunted house full of songs that moan with the memories of the fans who once loved them.”8

93

94

Encore II Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall

The cover image for Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall is a study in reproductions. The artwork for the 2006 live album borrows the design for the poster used to advertise the legendary evening in 1961 when Judy Garland performed at the famed New York City institution. The image that was used to promote Rufus Wainwright’s two-night residency recreating said event at the same venue made no attempt to disguise the fact that this was to be more than just a homage. Only here, the minimalist orange poster that once bore Judy’s features and her name emblazoned in bold white capital letters has been replaced by the Canadian singersongwriter’s: “RUFUS RUFUS RUFUS.” There’s a winking playfulness to this flagrant copy-catting. Much like in Garland’s original poster, the last two names offer factual information: “IN PERSON,” it reads below the second name; “WAINWRIGHT” under the third. But right below that first use of Rufus’ name is not, as had been the case in Judy’s promotional poster, the venue of the concert (which doubled as the album’s title: “at Carnegie Hall”).

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

Instead it reads “WORLD’S GREATEST ENTERTAINER,” a moniker often bestowed on Garland, particularly when discussing her 1961 performance. Wainwright has co-opted it in a bit of campy self-aggrandizing very much setting the tone for how to approach his live album ode to the Wizard of Oz star. Much as he expects those picking up his record to be familiar with Garland’s original concert and double album, his cover depends on a very specific shared knowledge of the legendary star and, of course, of the self-serious mocking tone that pervades Wainwright’s persona and this ambitious project. Further deviating from the 1961 album artwork, Wainwright’s cover places this copy of that iconic poster not against a backdrop of torn advertisements but against a marquee on its side (“RUFUS WAINWRIGHT, SOLD OUT” the latter two words blotted out by the poster) and a photograph of the then-thirty-three year-old crooner. Shot from the neck up, a shirtless Rufus (his hair perfectly tousled) looks to his right. His pose, as you look closer, the very same one his minimalist sketch in the poster, is striking. There’s a dreamy weariness to his expression, a sadness, perhaps, that his closed lips and droopy eyes are telegraphing. Yet, as with all things Rufus, there’s also something rather put-on about the pose, its exacting ease betraying the way it reads as a performative stance. There’s a way of reading his nearblank expression as not only weariness but wariness, his slightly raised eyebrows connoting both exhaustion and apprehension. He has, after all, as Rolling Stone put it in their very first profile of the performer back in 1999, a very direct gaze, “as if he is looking at a camera right before the shutter 96

RU F U S D O E S J U DY AT C A R N E G I E HA L L

closes.”1 To deny the camera of such a gaze only further stresses how conscious he is of being in front of one. The son of American songwriter Loudon Wainwright and Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle, Wainwright had, by the time he embarked on the insurmountable task of reliving Garland’s glorious night at Carnegie Hall in 2006, amassed a devoted cult following. Despite initial buzz and support that suggested he may well become a mainstream hit (he was signed in 1996 by then-budding media conglomerate Dreamworks, which bankrolled his first record for close to one million dollars), Wainwright’s tastes soon proved too outré. An accomplished songwriter in his own right, his ornate sensibility never quite set him out to break out the way his record company (or honestly, Rufus himself) would have liked. His albums, after all, were full of baroque pop standards that teetered on the edge of operatic Sondheimean monologues. Their elaborate orchestrations and deliciously languid vocal arrangements made you feel like you were sitting in on the late-night cabaret performances Wainwright perfected in Montreal and New York City in his youth, the kind that easily shuttled between literate melodramatic riffs on life (and death) and ecstatic swoon-worthy odes to young love (and lust). Wainwright, who cites Nina Simone, Serge Gainsbourg, Fleetwood Mac, Wagner, and Prince among his many disparate inspirations, creates the kind of music that feels out of time. Or, out of this time at least. “If the songs on Rufus Wainwright remind you of old pop standards,” wrote Neva Chonin in Rolling Stone while reviewing his 1998 self-titled debut album, “it’s because they’re so damn classy.”2 This is 97

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

why the Carnegie Hall endeavor seemed to be right up his alley; Wainwright has always seemed more at home when diving into a kind of old-fashioned entertainment where his dexterous piano-playing, his glittering sense of humor, and his penchant for theatrics feel of a piece with the material. Talking about his third album, Want One, he described his music as “Pre-Raphaelite in a certain way, in that it reinvents an older era and romanticizes it, puts it in a gilded frame. But also I’m pretty much drenched in fairy tales,” he added, “and, recently, when I was making the album, a lot of those old stories and legends became very central to my recovery.”3 The first song in that album, “Oh What A World,” borrowed from one of the most enduring fairy tale stories in Wainwright’s life: The Wizard of Oz. Its title is the line the Wicked Witch of the West utters as she’s melting. That film, as well as Garland’s “Over the Rainbow,” were staples in the singer’s childhood. His decision to eventually take on Judy at Carnegie Hall was a return and an ode to those childhood memories. Wainwright’s choice to take on such a herculean undertaking was not made lightly. He’d first dreamed it up in 2004 when he had taken part in drag cabaret duo Kiki & Herb’s Carnegie Hall farewell concert. That’s when he first shared with Kiki & Herb’s producer, Jared Geller, his idea for the Garland tribute. While The Wizard of Oz had been a treasured memory, Judy at Carnegie Hall had become a totemic cultural object for him in the wake of 9/11. He listened to the reissued double CD obsessively during a time when many New Yorkers like himself were living in the wake of unspeakable tragedy. “The only thing that made me feel positive about living in the U.S. was that record,” he 98

RU F U S D O E S J U DY AT C A R N E G I E HA L L

shared recently. “It was the one thing I could turn on and bliss out on the fact that America was great.”4 Much of that came from Garland’s own sunniness: “She had this capacity to lighten the world through the innocence of her sound.”5 It was Garland’s joy which Wainwright wanted to capture, borrowing the very lines from “Get Happy” the singer had inserted into her own opening number, asking her audience to forget their troubles, and have themselves a little fun. Seen on its own, or even as a piece of Wainwright’s music career, Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall is a fascinating curio, a vanity project that was but a high scale model of the kind of Judy impersonations a young Rufus trotted out as a kid in his living room. It was “part showbiz stunt, part postmodern happening, part fanboy dream come true,”6 as the New York Times once described that 2006 concert. But seen in the context of the legacy of Garland’s legendary concert and double live album, the 2006 recreation (which Wainwright then went on to perform in London, Paris, Los Angeles, and back in New York a decade later) Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall is a prime example of the conflicting if overlapping ways Garland has been reclaimed in the twenty-first century. Wainwright’s Grammy-nominated album straddles the line between serious tribute and playful mockery, distilling and hoping to instill further the legacy of that evening as a keystone of gay male culture. In this it was quite a different endeavor from the fiftieth anniversary concert staged at Carnegie Hall by the New York Pops (under Steve Reineke). Featuring Heather Headley, Karen Olivo, and Ashley Brown as well as Garland’s daughter, Lorna Luft, the event stayed true to 99

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

the 1961 setlist but reinvented its orchestrations (the Pops orchestra boasted a seventy-piece assemblage, compared to Mort Lindsay’s 38). It was a loving tribute that treated that famed evening with hushed reverence. Wainwright’s was a much more interesting if tricky proposition, the kind where he could joke, right before singing “Rock-ABye-Baby With A Dixie Melody,” that he loved performing the song because he felt he channeled not just Judy but “the great Al Jolson . . . and just the whole hundred years of . . . questionable behavior,” earning laughs and belated if awkward applause as he implicitly called out the minstrelsy history that’s so often ignored when singing such Jolson/ Garland standards. Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall, as its title suggests, is no mere recreation. It’s not “Rufus at Carnegie Hall.” But it’s also no mere impersonation. It’s not “Rufus as Judy at Carnegie Hall.” You can see how he rebukes both interpretations right off the bat: Wainwright’s very first words following the “Almost Like Being in Love”/“This Can’t Be Love” medley are “I’m going to speak now, because in the album, Judy speaks.” There’s a suggestion here that there is indeed a template the singer is following (Judy’s setlist order remains intact), but one which is not an ironclad script. Where Garland’s opening words were about how excited she was, which keyed her up to tell an anecdote about visiting Paris and encountering a hairdresser who made her up to look “nothing like Judy Garland,” Rufus’s was about his childhood role-playing as Dorothy “when he was feeling swell.” Shuttling between recreation and impersonation, with a winking sensibility throughout, allowed Wainwright 100

RU F U S D O E S J U DY AT C A R N E G I E HA L L

to never collapse entirely under Judy’s shadow nor wholly subsume her for his own purposes. This posture was also, as if there had been any doubt about it, a brilliant embodiment of Garland’s gay appeal. Dressed in an extravagant Viktor & Rolf suit, Wainwright was unabashedly campy all through the night making sure to steer clear of a self-serious tone that would otherwise deflate the buoyant and celebratory feel he was aiming for. “It’s a communal experience; I’m drawing upon a collective unconscious,” Wainwright explained ahead of his big night. “In this day and age I think it is important for us, as gay men, to respect that part of history, and not put it in a place of shame.”7 He knew that by the time he sung “The Trolley Song” he’d be experiencing the gayest moment of his life, made all the gayer, no doubt, by the fact that many in attendance would be gleefully cheering him on, remembering perhaps many a living room recreation of the Meet Me in St. Louis tune. The playful nature of the night, amidst an audience that was very much in on the joke, allowed Wainwright to at times inhabit and at others merely gesture to the Garland that took the stage back in 1961. Thus, to echo Judy flubbing her lines in “You Go To My Head” or her intro to “A Foggy Day” (“You like ‘A Foggy Day’? I like ‘A Foggy Day,’” he mimics in a highstrung, sped-up piece of performative Judy-ness) wasn’t a way to mock the performer. His shade-throwing was closer to the kind of ribbing that has been central to drag shows that have long tread the fine line between faithful mimicry and loving caricature, making the distinction all but immaterial. Even without attempting to impersonate—some songs, in fact, had been tailored to his lower register by musical 101

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

director Stephen Oremus—Wainwright’s own outlandish diva demands made him able to play the part of Judy better than if he’d tried to channel her mannerisms. At various times during the album, for example, you can hear him stopping the band (“I just want to do it a little faster, just a touch,” he says at the start of “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”), an invective that always came laced with self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing commentary (“I’m a songwriter,” he explains when asking the band to restart “Just You, Just Me” after following his much too slow count). These moments, and the overall campy tone of the evening is what Kirk Lane, Wainwright’s biographer, singled out as demeaning the night’s artistic accomplishment: “Rather than remain ‘in character’ while performing the set,” he writes, “Rufus in effect stepped aside and made so many knowing comments relating to gay pride and the inherent ‘gayness’ of his endeavour that he was in danger of turning what could have been a career-defining ‘performance art meets showbusiness’ happening into a rainbow flag-waving self-indulgent love-in.”8 Wainwright’s decision to not play the evening straight, in all senses of the word, is what makes it hard to assess its success. Despite Rufus’ cocky pronouncements on the subject—“I would never say I was better than her, because I don’t want to die. But I’ve had a chance to listen to the recording of my performance, and while I think her belts are bigger than mine, when I got to those belts, they are a little more thought out.”9—there’s no comparing Judy’s voice with his own. While hers is as pliable as water—at times icy, at others flowing, sometimes misty, some others boiling over— his is more like molasses. There’s a languor to his instrument 102

RU F U S D O E S J U DY AT C A R N E G I E HA L L

that, while perfectly suited for his renditions of “Do it Again” and “You’re Nearer” (two ballads that feel right in his wheelhouse), his quavering, drawn out intonation is not as well-matched to up-tempo numbers like “San Francisco” or “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Whereas Judy could ride those melodies with the ease of a running brook, Wainwright feels rushed as he careens into the song’s most upbeat moments. Nevertheless, Wainwright’s desire to stay as faithful as possible to the concert’s original orchestrations was what made the evening so special. It’s also what somewhat hindered the singer from fully paying tribute to Garland. Where the Wizard of Oz star had lived with the songs she performed at Carnegie Hall for years, knowing them intimately inside and out, able to calibrate her voice to suit their demands (here a winking turn of phrase, there an unexpected pause for breath), Wainwright, at times, feels shackled by the very conceit of his show. Not that there wasn’t a way to both echo and remold the Carnegie repertoire: Wainwright’s sister, Martha, managed the feat with her take on “Stormy Weather,” unquestionably the highlight of the evening. Never quite imitating Garland nor needing to overhaul Mort Lindsay’s orchestration for it, Martha was able to make an imprint on the song by the sheer originality of her voice. Her quivering diction and full-bodied belts tore through the famed torch song with abandon, showing up her brother on his own turf. Still, there are gleeful highs in the record (not to mention worthy cameos by Luft and Wainwright’s mother), but they mostly remind listeners just how effortlessly Garland made it all look (and sound). “Still,” as the New York Times noted in 103

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

their review of the night, “Wainwright’s courage to stand as a surrogate for every Garland fan who ever gazed into the mirror and fantasized about stepping into her ruby slippers spoke for itself.”10 Those were big glittering shoes to fill. But more to the point, the mere bravery of attempting such a high-wire act was as much about Wainwright honoring Judy as a gay icon as it was about placing Wainwright’s own queer persona alongside hers. Therein lies the cultural work Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall was doing. He wasn’t merely queering Garland but showing how such an agenda was nothing short of redundant. This is nowhere clearer than in the one song he added to his own double album and which hadn’t been performed by Garland in the original 1961 concert: “Get Happy.” The Summer Stock number is best remembered for the actress’ instantly iconic look: wearing a black fedora, a black dinner jacket, a pair of stockings, and some diamond earrings, the “Get Happy” Garland is almost unrecognizable from the plump Garland who sang and danced her way through the rest of the 1950 film with Gene Kelly. The number was filmed months after production had wrapped when producers insisted they needed another powerhouse moment only to find out their star had lost the extra pounds they had been hounding her about all through their shoot. Garland’s sultry androgynous look and the sprightly Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler song made the number a classic, one curiously absent from the Carnegie Hall proceedings. But that wasn’t enough to dissuade Wainwright from including it as a bonus track in the US and UK digital releases of his album. 104

RU F U S D O E S J U DY AT C A R N E G I E HA L L

In fact, the Summer Stock song became a staple of Wainwright’s Release the Stars world tour. At the end of the concerts he performed in 2007 and the start of 2008, the singer-songwriter would come out for an encore in a bathrobe. As he changed into a pair of heels and put on a bit of red lipstick, a pair of diamond earrings and later a black fedora, he’d reveal himself wearing a replica of Judy’s “Get Happy” outfit before launching into a cover version of that 1930 song. Followed by his own cheeky song, “Gay Messiah,” those concert encores let Wainwright go even further than Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall had. In full Judy drag, Wainwright finally let himself literally step into her high-heeled shoes. Moreover, he happily traipsed around the stage emulating her own choreography, arguably doing Judy in a way he hadn’t allowed himself while at Carnegie Hall. His decision to don such apparel and to then wear it while performing a song about the gay messiah that’s to be baptized in cum (it’s not him, he assures us; he’s merely Rufus the Baptist in this scenario, the one who will give it to them looking down, as he sings at the end of the song) further ties Garland to a gay historiography that depends on and emerges from her. She’s nowhere to be found in the lyrics—which mention instead Studio 54 and Fire Island’s shore—but in embodying her while singing “Gay Messiah,” he explicitly ties her into the gay legacy that the song’s titular figure will be indebted to. Wainwright’s playful cover of “Get Happy” is most akin to the kinds of performances that make up the longrunning “Night of a 1000 Judys” show in New York City. Originally conceived by Justin Sayre, writer of The gAyBC’s: 105

J udy at C arnegie Hall 

A Brief Journey Through Queer Culture and chairman of the International Order of Sodomites, the annual benefit event began in 2012 as an offshoot of Sayre’s own monthly variety show “The Meeting*.” Gathering performers from Broadway as well as the downtown scene, the New York City event puts on the tribute to Garland in hopes of keeping her gay torch-bearing alive. The performances in “Night of a 1000 Judys” adhere to no single rubric: there is neither blind reverence nor an uncritical irreverence. They run the gamut from uncanny singing impersonations (Molly Pope’s rendition of “Chicago”) and soulful covers (Natalie Douglas singing “Stormy Weather”) to electric reinventions (Kim David Smith turning “The Trolley Song” into a lurid cabaret number) and parodic skits (a live reading of the Sayrepenned play “Toto’s Tale”). Much like Wainwright’s “Get Happy” drag encores and his Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall concert, these various celebrations of Garland locate the singer’s queer legacy not in some pre-Stonewall time capsule but in the present moment. Even as Wainwright’s album will likely remain a mere footnote to the “greatest night in show business history,” the Canadian singer’s ambitiousness brought the 1961 evening into the twenty-first century. He reminded critics and audiences of the overtly political statement that being an openly gay performer embracing such a legendary evening carried. There was hubris in the endeavor, but also a sincere yearning for vulnerability, an embrace of a winking sentimentality that characterizes a particular brand of twenty-first-century gay male culture. “I want to offer some kind of emotional safe place where people can feel free to 106

RU F U S D O E S J U DY AT C A R N E G I E HA L L

be unhappy and sensitive and imperfect,”11 Wainwright had suggested ahead of his concert. The Carnegie Hall stage was the greatest example of how Garland made a career out of wearing her heart not just on her sleeve but in her voice. The rawness of her performances let her audiences, both then and now, embrace their pain and own it in turn. That ability to tap into her emotions was what first drew a young Rufus to Garland. Even before he’d dreamed up the very premise of Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall, Wainwright had already signaled just how powerfully Garland had affected him. “Judy spoke to the gay toddler side of me,” he told a journalist, with a requisite eye roll while discussing his exuberant Want albums. “She also showed me to not be afraid of singing my heart out, and opening up, and really slaughtering a song. In fact, I do consider myself to be the male Judy Garland.”12 Wainwright’s youthful boasting aside, he’d isolated precisely what makes Garland in general and Garland at Carnegie Hall in particular such an enthralling performer. She had a voice that hurt and comforted people in equal measure. And you can hear that in the recordings at Carnegie Hall, where the line between agony and ecstasy was blurred for performer and audience alike. As her Judgment in Nuremberg director, Stanley Kramer, put it, with every performance Judy declared, “Here is my heart, break it.”13 In Judy at Carnegie Hall you hear it shatter amidst chants and cheers from people who had come to parcel its pieces among themselves.

107

108

Notes

Overture—Judy at Carnegie Hall 1 James Goode, “Judy,” in Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters, ed. Randy L. Schmidt (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), 265. 2 Lewis Funke, “Judy Garland in Concert; Attracts Cheering Fans to Carnegie Hall,” New York Times, April 24, 1961, 36. 3 “‘Judy at Carnegie’ Capacity $20,100; Star’s Surcharged Gotham Comeback,” Variety, April 26, 1961, 200. 4 Hedda Hopper, “Clean New Comedy Broadway Success,” The Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1961, 52. 5 Goode, “Judy,” 258. 6 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: Routledge, 2014), 138. 7 David Caron, “Shame on Me or the Naked Truth about Me and Marlene Dietrich,” in Gay Shame, eds. David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 124. 8 Jesse Green, “Does Judy Garland Still Matter?” New York Magazine, March 29, 2012, http:​//nym​ag.co​m/mov​ies/f​eatur​es/ ju​dy-ga​rland​-2012​-4/.

N otes

9 Anne Edwards, Judy Garland: A Biography (Plymouth, United Kingdom: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2013), 153. 10 “Séance at the Palace,” Time, August 18, 1967, 40. 11 William Goldman, The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway (Maple Shade, NJ: Limelight Editions, 2006), 4. 12 David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012), 123. 13 “Judy Garland, Fan Comments,” Turner Classic Movies Database, accessed March 17, 2019, http:​//www​.tcm.​com/t​cmdb/​perso​ n/686​89%7C​90673​/Judy​-Garl​and/f​an-co​mment​s.htm​l. 14 William B. Williams, “Judy Garland,” Make Believe Ballroom (New York, NY: WNEW, April 23, 1962). 15 Vito Russo, “Poor Judy,” Gay News, December 11, 1980– January 7, 1981, 15.

Side 1 1 Shana Alexander, “Judy’s New Rainbow,” LIFE, June 2, 1961, 111. 2 Gerald Clarke, Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland (New York: Dell Publishing, 2000), 356. 3 “Over & Over the Rainbow,” Time, May 5, 1961, 54. 4 Judy Garland, “My Story by Judy Garland as Told to Michael Drury,” Cosmopolitan, January 1951, 35. 5 Clarke, Get Happy, 49. 6 Anne Helen Petersen, Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema (New York: PLUME, 2014), 157. 110

N O T E S

7 Gladys Hall, “Punch and Judy,” in Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters, ed. Randy L. Schmidt (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), 20–21. 8 Carol Craig, “Old Enough to Know What She Wants,” in Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters, ed. Randy L. Schmidt (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), 109. 9 Mark Harris, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (New York: Penguin Group, 2014), 98. 10 Billy Rose, “Pitching Horseshoes,” New York Daily News, September 1, 1950, 4. 11 Susie Boyt, My Judy Garland Life: A Memoir (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009), 7. 12 Boyt, My Judy Garland Life, 8. 13 Radie Harris, “Broadway Ballyhoo,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 27, 1961, 4. 14 Alexander, “Judy’s New Rainbow,” 111. 15 Edwards, Judy Garland, 140. 16 “Authors vs. Actors,” New York Times, September 6, 1925, X1. 17 Andrew Sarris, “The Cultural Guilt of Musical Movies,” Film Comment, September/October 1977, 41. 18 Will Friedwald, The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017), 161. 19 Brian Currid, “Judy Garland’s American Drag,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 46, no. 1 (2001): 129. 20 John Strausbaugh, Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture (London: Penguin Press, 2006), 118. 21 Strausbaugh, Black Like You, 219.

111

N otes

Side 2 1 Randy L. Schmidt, “Preface,” in Judy Garland on Judy Garland, xxiv. 2 Edward Jablonski, Harold Arlen: Rhythm, Rainbows & Blues (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 236. 3 Friedwald, The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums, 158. 4 Larry David Smith, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, and the Torch Song Tradition (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004), xvi. 5 Philip Furia, Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 220. 6 James Carson, “‘I’m Not Boy Crazy!’ Asserts Judy Garland, Debunking The Hollywood Match-Makers’ Gossip,” in Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters, ed. Randy L. Schmidt (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), 51. 7 Carson, “I’m Not Boy Crazy!” 50. 8 Furia, Ira Gershwin, 217. 9 Garland, “My Story by Judy Garland as Told to Michael Drury,” 114. 10 Boyt, My Judy Garland Life, 154. 11 Judy Garland, “How Not to Love a Woman,” Coronet, February 1955, 41. 12 Garland, “How Not to Love a Woman,” 43. 13 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To a Skylark,” Shelley: Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1956) 182. 14 Shelley, “To a Skylark,” 185. 15 Edwards, Judy Garland, 310. 16 Garland, “How Not to Love a Woman,” 42. 17 John Meyer, Heartbreaker (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 240. 112

N O T E S

Side 3 1 James Kaplan, “Over the Rainbow, and Then Some!” Vanity Fair, May 2011, https​://ww​w.van​ityfa​ir.co​m/hol​lywoo​d/201​1/ 05/​judy-​garla​nd-20​1105.​ 2 Lawrence Schulman. “Judy Garland: The London Studio Recordings, 1957-1964,” ARSC Journal 43, no. 1 (2012): 119. 3 John Fricke, Judy Garland: A Portrait in Art & Anecdote (Singapore: Bulfinch Press, 2003), 238. 4 “Over & Over the Rainbow,” Time, May 5, 1961, 54. 5 “Over & Over the Rainbow,” 54. 6 Alexander, “Judy’s New Rainbow,” 112. 7 Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984), 103–4. 8 Kaplan, “Over the Rainbow, and Then Some!” 9 Fricke, Judy Garland, 239. 10 Lewis Funke, “Judy Garland in Concert; Attracts Cheering Fans to Carnegie Hall,” New York Times, April 24, 1961, 36. 11 Clarke, Get Happy, 212. 12 Friedwald, The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums, 157. 13 Vito Russo, “Poor Judy,” Gay News, December 11, 1980– January 7, 1981. 14 Adrienne L. McLean, “Feeling and the Filmed Body: Judy Garland and the Kinesics of Suffering,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2002): 12. 15 The Judy Garland Show, “Episode #1.3,” CBS, October 13, 1963, directed by Bill Hobin. 16 Jesse Green, “Does Judy Garland Still Matter?” New York Magazine, March 29, 2012, http:​//nym​ag.co​m/mov​ies/f​eatur​es/ ju​dy-ga​rland​-2012​-4/. 113

N otes

17 Green, “Does Judy Garland Still Matter?” 18 David Shipman, Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (New York: Hyperion, 1992), 408. 19 Clarke, Get Happy, 373.

Side 4 1 RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars, “RuPaul’s Best Judy’s Race,” VH1, February 1, 2019, directed by Nick Murray. 2 Walter Troy Spencer, “Too Much My Dear,” The Village Voice, July 10, 1969, 36. 3 Sylvia Rivera, “Sylvia Rivera’s Talk at LGMNY, June 2001 Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, New York City,” CENTRO Journal, XIX, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 118. 4 David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 260. 5 Goldman, The Season, 4. 6 “Séance at the Palace,” Time, August 18, 1967, 40. 7 Clarke, Get Happy, 108. 8 Jablonski, Harold Arlen, 131. 9 Goldman, The Season, 3. 10 Camille Paglia, “Judy Garland as a Force of Nature,” New York Times, June 14, 1998, http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/19​98/06​/14/ a​rts/j​udy-g​arlan​d-as-​a-for​ce-of​-natu​re.ht​ml?. 11 Daniel Contreras, Unrequited Love and Gay Latino Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 88. 12 “Séance at the Palace,” 40.

114

N O T E S

13 Goldman, The Season, 7. 14 Green, “Does Judy Garland Still Matter?” 15 Mart Crawley, The Boys in the Band: A Play in Two Acts (New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1968), 9–10. 16 Steve Cohan, “Let’s Hear a Round of Applause for the Camps in the Band,” in The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics, ed. Matt Bell (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 39. 17 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: Routledge, 2004), 141. 18 Russo, “Poor Judy,” 14. 19 Daniel Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (New York: Hyperion, 1997), 18. 20 Michael Joseph Gross, “The Queen Is Dead,” The Atlantic, August, 2000, https​://ww​w.the​atlan​tic.c​om/ma​gazin​e/arc​hive/​ 2000/​08/th​e-que​en-is​-dead​/3783​02/. 21 Gross, “The Queen Is Dead.” 22 Contreras, Unrequited Love and Gay Latino Culture, 86. 23 Hillary Hulsey, “Just Another Fan of Your: Renegotiating Judy Garland’s Star Status and Contemporary Fandom” (MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 2014), 45. 24 Halperin, How to Be Gay, 56–57.

Encore 1 Corey Michael Smithson, “The Unified Theory of Judy Garland,” Corey Michael Smithson, accessed April 19, 2019, http:​//www​.core​ymich​aelsm​ithso​n.com​/Page​s/Pag​es_Sh​ows/ U​nifie​dTheo​ry.ht​ml. 115

N otes

2 Smithson, “The Unified Theory of Judy Garland.” 3 Corey Michael Smithson, “Me and Frances Gumm,” Relished Vices: A Self-Portrait in Essays (Smashwords, 2016), Kindle. 4 Boyt, My Judy Garland Life, 2. 5 Lawrence Schulman, “Judy Garland in the 21st Century,” Garlands for Judy, June 2012, 10, http:​//www​.thej​udyro​om.co​ m/gar​lands​forju​dy/Ga​rland​s%20f​or%20​Judy.​pdf. 6 Adela Rogers St Johns, “Love Song for Judy,” in Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters, ed. Randy L. Schmidt (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), 146. 7 Boyt, My Judy Garland Life, 7. 8 Adam Feldman, “Judy Blooms,” Time Out, June 8, 2006, http:​//www​.time​out.c​om/ne​wyork​/thin​gs-to​-do/j​udy-b​looms​.

Encore II 1 Mim Udovitch, “The Importance of Being Rufus,” Rolling Stone, June 10, 1999, 57. 2 Neva Chonin, “Rufus Wainwright: Rufus Wainwright,” Rolling Stone, June 11, 1998, 122. 3 Kitty Empire, “Nowt as Queer as Folk,” The Guardian, October 12, 2003, https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/mu​sic/2​003/o​ct/12​/ popa​ndroc​k.ruf​uswai​nwrig​ht. 4 Michael Martin, “Rufus Wainwright on Music, Gay History, and Informing the Next Generation,” Out, May 17, 2016, https​://ww​w.out​.com/​hit-l​ist/2​016/5​/17/r​ufus-​wainw​right​musi​c-gay​-hist​ory-a​nd-in​formi​ng-ne​xt-ge​nerat​ion. 5 Guy Trebay, “At Carnegie Hall, a Judy Is Born,” New York Times, June 4, 2006, I12. 116

N O T E S

6 Michael Schulman, “The Wild Child Grows Up,” New York Times, June 5, 2016, L1. 7 Adam Feldman, “Judy Blooms,” Time Out, June 8, 2006, https​://ww​w.tim​eout.​com/n​ewyor​k/thi​ngs-t​o-do/​judy-​bloom​s. 8 Kirk Lane, There Will Be Rainbows: A Biography of Rufus Wainwright (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010), Kindle. 9 Ion Barrett, “Entertainer of the Year: Rufus Wainwright,” Out, December 2006. EBSCOHost. 10 Stephen Holden, “Judy at Carnegie Revisited, This Time Without Judy,” The New York Times, June 15, 2006, E25. 11 Tim Murphy, “Il Divo; Even before Rufus Wainwright Wrote an Opera, He Lived One. And We’re Hardly through Act One,” New York Magazine, April 26, 2010. http:​//lin​k.gal​egrou​p.com​/ apps​/doc/​A2242​75970​/AONE​?u=ny​pl&si​d=AON​E&xid​=f120​ 1731.​ 12 Will Hodgkinson, “Friday Review: Home Entertainment: Rufus Wainwright,” The Guardian, May 7, 2004, 22. 13 Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 194.

117

Bibliography

Alexander, Shana. “Judy’s New Rainbow.” LIFE, June 2, 1961. “Authors vs. Actors.” New York Times, September 6, 1925. Barrett, Ion. “Entertainer of the Year: Rufus Wainwright.” Out, December 2006. Boyt, Susie. My Judy Garland Life: A Memoir. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009. Bronski, Michael. Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984. Caron, David. “Shame on Me or the Naked Truth about Me and Marlene Dietrich.” In Gay Shame, edited by David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, 117–31. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Carson, James. “‘I’m Not Boy Crazy!’ Asserts Judy Garland, Debunking the Hollywood Match-Makers’ Gossip.” In Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Randy L. Schmidt, 49–57. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014. Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004. Chonin, Neva. “Rufus Wainwright: Rufus Wainwright.” Rolling Stone, June 11, 1998. Clarke, Gerald. Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland. New York: Dell Publishing, 2000.

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

Cohan, Steve. “Let’s Hear a Round of Applause for the Camps in the Band.” In The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics, edited by Matt Bell, 35–56. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2016. Contreras, Daniel. Unrequited Love and Gay Latino Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Craig, Carol. “Old Enough to Know What She Wants.” In Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Randy L. Schmidt, 108–13. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014. Crawley, Mart. The Boys in the Band: A Play in Two Acts. New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1968. Currid, Brian. “Judy Garland’s American Drag.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 46, no. 1 (2001): 123–33. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. New York: Routledge, 2014. Edwards, Anne. Judy Garland: A Biography. Plymouth, UK: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2013. Empire, Kitty. “Nowt as Queer as Folk.” The Guardian, October 12, 2003. Feldman, Adam. “Judy Blooms.” Time Out, June 8–14, 2006. Fricke, John. Judy Garland: A Portrait in Art & Anecdote. Singapore: Bulfinch Press, 2003. Friedwald, Will. The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums. New York: Pantheon Books, 2017. Funke, Lewis. “Judy Garland in Concert; Attracts Cheering Fans to Carnegie Hall.” New York Times, April 24, 1961. Furia, Philip. Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Garland, Judy. “How Not to Love a Woman.” Coronet, February, 1955. Garland, Judy. “My Story by Judy Garland as Told to Michael Drury.” Cosmopolitan, January, 1951. 119

B ibliography

Goldman, William. The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway. New Jersey: Limelight Editions, 2006. Goode, James. “Judy.” In Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Randy L. Schmidt, 234–67. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014. Green, Jesse. “Does Judy Garland Still Matter?” New York Magazine, March 29, 2012. Gross, Michael Joseph. “The Queen Is Dead.” The Atlantic, August, 2000. Hall, Gladys. “Punch and Judy.” In Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Randy L. Schmidt, 20–30. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014. Halperin, David M. How to Be Gay. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012. Harris, Daniel. The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. New York: Hyperion, 1997. Harris, Mark. Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. Harris, Radie. “Broadway Ballyhoo.” The Hollywood Reporter, April 27, 1961. Hodgkinson, Will. “Friday Review: Home Entertainment: Rufus Wainwright.” The Guardian, May 7, 2004. Holden, Stephen. “Judy at Carnegie Revisited, This Time without Judy.” The New York Times, June 15, 2006. Hopper, Hedda. “Clean New Comedy Broadway Success.” The Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1961. Hulsey, Hillary. “Just Another Fan of Your: Renegotiating Judy Garland’s Star Status and Contemporary Fandom.” MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 2014. Jablonski, Edward. Harold Arlen: Rhythm, Rainbows & Blues. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. “‘Judy at Carnegie’ Capacity $20,100; Star’s Surcharged Gotham Comeback.” Variety, April 26, 1961. 120

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

“Judy Garland, Fan Comments.” Turner Classic Movies Database. Accessed March 17, 2019. http:​//www​.tcm.​com/t​cmdb/​perso​ n/686​89%7C​90673​/Judy​-Garl​and/f​an-co​mment​s.htm​l. Kaiser, Charles. The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Kaplan, James. “Over the Rainbow, and Then Some!” Vanity Fair, May 2011. http:​//www​.vani​tyfai​r.com​/holl​ywood​/2011​/05/j​ udy-g​arlan​d-201​105. Lane, Kirk. There Will Be Rainbows: A Biography of Rufus Wainwright. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010. Martin, Michael. “Rufus Wainwright on Music, Gay History, and Informing the Next Generation.” Out, May 17, 2016. McLean, Adrienne L. “Feeling and the Filmed Body: Judy Garland and the Kinesics of Suffering.” Film Quarterly, 55, no. 3 (2002): 2–15. Meyer, John. Heartbreaker. New York: Doubleday, 1983. Murphy, Tim. “Il Divo; Even before Rufus Wainwright Wrote an Opera, He Lived One. And We’re Hardly through Act One.” New York, April 26, 2010. “Over & Over the Rainbow,” Time, May 5, 1961. Paglia, Camille. “Judy Garland as a Force of Nature.” New York Times, June 14, 1998. Petersen, Anne Helen. Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema. New York: Plume, 2014. Rivera, Sylvia. “Sylvia Rivera’s Talk at LGMNY, June 2001 Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, New York City,” CENTRO Journal XIX, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 116–23. Rogers St. Johns, Adela. “Love Song For Judy.” In Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Randy L. Schmidt, 146–51. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014.

121

B ibliography

Rose, Billy. “Pitching Horseshoes.” New York Daily News, September 1, 1950. Russo, Vito. “Poor Judy.” Gay News, December 11, 1980–January 7, 1981. Sarris, Andrew. “The Cultural Guilt of Musical Movies.” Film Comment, September/October 1977: 39–41. Schmidt, Randy L. “Preface.” Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Randy L. Schmidt, xv–xxiv. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014. Schulman, Lawrence. “Judy Garland in the 21st Century.” Garlands for Judy (June 2012): 8–10. Schulman, Lawrence. “Judy Garland: The London Studio Recordings 1957–1964.” ARSC Journal 43, no. 1 (2012): 119–28. Schulman, Michael. “The Wild Child Grows Up.” New York Times, June 5, 2016. “Séance at the Palace,” Time, August 18, 1967. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “To a Skylark,” Shelley: Poems. London: Penguin Books, 1956. Shipman, David. Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend. New York: Hyperion, 1992. Smith, Larry David. Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, and the Torch Song Tradition. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004. Smithson, Corey Michael. Relished Vices: A Self-Portrait in Essays. Smashwords, 2016. Smithson, Corey Michael. “The Unified Theory of Judy Garland.” Corey Michael Smithson. Accessed April 19, 2019. http:​//www​. core​ymich​aelsm​ithso​n.com​/Page​s/Pag​es_Sh​ows/U​nifie​dTheo​ ry.ht​ml. Spencer, Walter Troy. “Too Much My Dear.” Village Voice, July 10, 1969.

122

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

Strausbaugh, John. Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture. London: Penguin Press, 2006. Trebay, Guy. “At Carnegie Hall, a Judy Is Born.” New York Times, June 4, 2006. Udovitch, Mim. “The Importance of Being Rufus.” Rolling Stone, June 10, 1999. Williams, William B. “Judy Garland.” Make Believe Ballroom. New York, NY: WNEW, April 23, 1962.

123

Also available in the series

1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi

A lso available in the series

23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….. by Eliot Wilder 25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard 42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtro­ mbones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel

125

A lso available in the series

55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris 58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

126

Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson

A lso available in the series

88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Elizabeth Sandifer 89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford

104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia 119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney

127

A lso available in the series

120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli 121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton 126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay 128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin 129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony 131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman

132. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow by Samantha Bennett 133. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel 134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson 135. Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry 136. Odetta’s One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson 137. Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible by David Evans 138. The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin 139. Tom Petty’s Southern Accents by Michael Washburn 140. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines by Ian Bourland 141. Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach by Roshanak Kheshti 142. The Wild Tchoupitoulas’ The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner 143. David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler 144. D’Angelo’s Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick

128