Rainbow’s End: Judy Garland’s Triumphs and Tragedies

“When you have lived the life I’ve lived,” Judy Garland once noted, “when you’ve loved and suffered, and been madly happy and desperately sad—well, that’s when you realize you’ll never be able to set it all down. Maybe you’d rather die first.”

This brutally honest admission of her own strengths and limitations was typical of Garland, the enthralling performer whose legendary concerts and roles in films like The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, and A Star Is Born cemented her as an icon of the 20th century.

Garland never did set her own life story down on paper. But since her death in 1969, countless books have been written in lieu of the memoir she repeatedly tried to write. According to her daughter Lorna Luft, author of the understandably defensive, harrowing, humorous, and empathetic Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir, her family has found many of these books to be exploitative and cruel.

The definitive Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, by Gerald Clarke, is probably the best of the bunch: laudatory, filled with fun, gossipy tidbits, but with a warts-and-all approach that feels demeaning, even if it is the truth. Garland supplied plenty of scintillating copy, including five marriages and alleged affairs with Joe Mankiewicz, Tyrone Power, Johnny Mercer, Yul Brynner, Orson Welles, and Frank Sinatra. Then there was her crippling addiction to pills, which eventually cost her everything—including her life.

But what Lorna’s book and her father Sid Luft’s memoir, Judy and I: My Life With Judy Garland, reveal is the magnetic pull of the woman behind the tragic star: a tiny, high-strung dynamo who was funny as hell, throbbingly emotional, devilishly manipulative, overwhelmingly loving, and a masterful storyteller. “An affectionate hug from Judy and you knew you were accepted by this rare creature,” Sid Luft writes. “You felt as though you’d never been appreciated before.”

Though her life was a cautionary tale even as she lived it, Garland never lost her sense of humor or her sense of destiny. “Oh, come on,” Judy laughingly said to a reporter who asked if she would live her life all over again. “Don’t for heaven’s sake give me that old sob stuff routine. Of course I’d do it all over again. With all the same mistakes.”

Baby Gumm

Frances Ethel Gumm was born June 10, 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Her father, Frank, was a charming, gregarious Southerner who had run off to join the vaudeville circuit. Her mother, Ethel, was tiny, strong-willed, and relentless—“the real wicked witch of the west,” according to her youngest daughter.

The Gumms were old hats at vaudeville, performing as a double act while Frank managed a theater in Grand Rapids. Their older daughters, Mary Jane and Jimmie, were already seasoned performers. But the future Judy Garland quickly became the pampered star of the family, responding only to “baby.” She was her father’s pride and joy.

“Once my grandfather got a look at her big dark eyes, he forgot that he’d been wanting a boy and fell hopelessly in love with Baby,” Lorna writes. “Mama would have that effect on people for the rest of her life. The truth is, whatever Mama might say about it years later, everybody loved her.”

She would soon establish herself as the undisputed star in the family business as well. According to Garland, at two years old she was already begging her parents to let her join her sisters onstage. One night she couldn’t wait any longer and ran onto the stage, running in circles with a dinner bell, singing “Jingle Bells.”

“Everybody started applauding,” Garland recalled, per Judy and I. “I liked it and I stayed there singing one chorus after the other. My mother was howling with laughter as she kept playing [the piano]. My father was in the wings saying, ‘Come on, Baby, you get off.’”

But enthralled by her connection with the audience, Garland just couldn’t stop. “I guess I fell in love with the lights, and the music, and the whole thing, and anyway they couldn’t get me off,” she wrote. “My father finally came out and got me over his shoulder as I rang the bell, still singing ‘Jingle Bells’ into the wings.”

Little Miss Leather Lungs

The Gumm sisters were soon a trio, and Baby, with her extraordinary, precocious voice, was undoubtedly the draw. But dark storms were brewing. According to Clarke, the family was run out of Grand Rapids due to Frank’s sexual escapades with young men (a claim Lorna denies). The family moved to dusty Lancaster, California, where Frank bought ownership in yet another theater.

Baby and her sisters hit the vaudeville circuit and were constantly on the road or being dragged to auditions. The frenetic, ambitious Ethel, according to Clarke, saw that the often-exhausted Baby was a star, and one friend alleges she even gave sexual favors to casting agents to further her daughter’s career. According to Clarke, Ethel was also the first to give her hard-working daughters speed and sleeping pills, exclaiming, “I’ve got to keep these girls going!”(Lorna and Sid claim the culprit was actually Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).)

Clarke is an expert in portraying the surreal quality of Garland’s childhood, its instability and apartness. As Garland herself quipped, “I’ve always been called ‘the girl next door,’ but I never knew a girl next door.”

Life was about to get infinitely more complicated. In September 1935, the 13-year-old Baby—recently rechristened Judy Garland—signed a contract with MGM. But only two months later, tragedy struck when her father became ill with spinal meningitis. Scheduled to perform “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” on the radio, she received a call from a doctor sitting by Frank’s hospital bed, who urged her to sing for him.

“Knowing that her father would never hear her again, Judy sang her heart out for him, as she herself phrased it, embracing those pedestrian lyrics…with a warmth they had probably never known before,” Clarke writes. He died the next day. Her father, her only protector, was gone. Her family was now MGM, and her father figure was studio chief Louis B. Mayer, whose paternalistic ways were light years away from her gentle dad.

“Whenever he complimented her on her voice—she sang from the heart, he said—Mayer would invariably place his hand on her left breast,” Clarke writes, “to show just where her heart was.”

“I often thought I was lucky,” observed Judy, “that I didn’t sing with another part of my anatomy.”

A Treadmill to Disaster

Garland was soon a teen idol caught in the studio whirlwind. She performed her peppy best with her onscreen soulmate Mickey Rooney, in madcap musical romps powered by youthful cockiness and amphetamines. Although her star turn as Dorothy in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz cemented her status as a once-in-a-generation talent, Garland’s confidence was crushed by the studio’s abusive tactics and constant demands that she lose weight, as well as unfavorable comparisons to MGM teen sirens like Lana Turner. (Where Lana Turner was a sexpot, Mayer called Garland “my little hunchback.”)

“Until MGM, I had enjoyed being myself,” Garland would recall. “I had been judged by my talent, but in the movies beauty was the standard of judgment—and definitely I didn’t have it. And so, I began to dislike the me I saw reflected in my mirror.”

This self-hatred, not to mention her punishing shooting schedule and love of the nightclub scene, led to an increasing addiction to pills. “Judy admitted she felt she grew inches when she took Benzedrine,” Sid Luft writes. “The extra ‘bennie’ gave her the courage to march 10 feet tall.”

Clarke captures the frenetic, exhausting pace of Garland’s life in the ’40s: the obsessive love affairs, the efforts to reel in her growing instability, and her escape into fantasy and manipulation. In 1945, she married the much older, artistic, and cultured director Vincente Minnelli, whom Clarke claims preferred men (which Lorna denies). Their daughter, Liza, was born the next year.

But the well-meaning Minnelli found himself hopelessly inadequate in handling Judy’s problems. There were suicide attempts, suspensions from the studio, electric shock treatments, false accusations of abuse—all which the press began to publish. But Judy’s shining humanity continued to touch those she knew. In 1949, during her psychological treatment at a Boston clinic, she became a regular visitor to the children’s ward. On her last day, a child who had refused to speak for months began to pour out her heart to Garland.

“When Alsop warned her that they would miss their train, Judy waved him away,” Clarke writes. “‘Well, we’ll just have to miss it,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to leave this child right now while she’s talking.’ And there she remained for the next two hours, listening to her little friend’s excited babble.”

The Comeback Kid

At her nadir in the early ’50s—fired from MGM and broke, and her marriage to Minelli at an end—Garland would find a “strongman” to help her rise from the ashes in the form of a slick, pugnacious former test pilot and B-movie producer named Sid Luft. Nicknamed “One Punch Luft,” many in Hollywood felt Luft was an opportunistic operator, more interested in funding his race-horse obsession than in Judy herself.

But Luft’s memoir paints a far different picture. Written in a kind of sparse tough-guy prose, Luft does indeed write a lot about horses and brawls. But his obvious love for Garland can also send him into romantic, poetic riffs.

Luft is honest that he was caught up in the A-list glamour and fun that the teasing, childlike Garland offered him. But he also had a primal need to protect her, to be her knight in shining armor. “In my mind it was not going to be a problem,” he writes. “I was in charge. I would control and protect her until she was freed from the destructive habits of the past.”

Determined to recapture her former glory, Garland and Luft launched a series of wildly successful concert series that restored Garland’s confidence, and produced her 1954 comeback A Star Is Born.

But Luft also paints a portrait of himself as an arrogant fighter in over his head, who frantically searched the cigarette cases, clothing seams, and bath powder where his wife would hide her drugs. He admits he was an enabler, desperate to save Garland from her insatiable demons and exhausted by her suicides attempts and drug-fueled games.

Lorna Luft, who vehemently defends her father, also notes that he (and Garland) successfully shielded her and her brother, Joey, from the worst of their mother’s disease. Coddled by nannies, playing with her best friend Leslie Bogart and the Kennedy children, they only saw the best of their mother as small children—a funny, deeply loving, comforting presence. “She was always happiest when one of us was sitting on her lap or cradled in her arms,” Lorna writes. “When we went to bed, she would sit next to us and gently run her fingertips up and down our arms and over our faces until we fell asleep.”

Let It Burn

Garland’s three children could not be sheltered forever. By the 1960s, Garland and Luft were broke, their marriage sputtering to an end as Judy became increasingly manic. As Lorna heartbreakingly recounts, her innocent childhood idyll was smashed on vacation in Hawaii, when she woke up to her mother and her mother’s fourth husband, Mark Herron, in the middle of a brutal brawl.

“My mother was wearing her nightclothes,” Lorna writes. “She was deathly white, and one of her eyes was blackened and swollen like an egg. Mark was completely naked. He was very drunk, and my mother was far from sober. Both of them were covered with blood. They were screaming at each other; my mother was shaking with anger. Some of the furniture had been knocked over, and there was blood splattered around the room.”

Lorna spent the night cleaning blood from the vacation bungalow, then awoke in the morning and took her brother to breakfast. When she got back, she was met with her mother, sunning her legs, in full famous-girl mode. “Mama had on a huge hat and movie star glasses, and she was looking out over the ocean,” she writes. “Behind her, through the open door of our beach house, smoke was billowing into the air. When she noticed our approach, my mother turned to us and said casually, ‘Don’t go inside. The house is on fire.’”

She explained calmly that she was burning Heron’s clothes. Just then, Steve McQueen, who was staying next door, barreled over like his character in The Towering Inferno yelling for wet towels to battle the fire. A languid Garland was unimpressed.

“Don’t be a hero, Steve,” she said. “This isn’t the movies. Just sit down and wait for the fire department like everyone else.”

A befuddled McQueen sat down next to Lorna and Joey, and waited for the real firemen to arrive.

But Not for Me

“I’m goddamned mad!” a defeated Garland yelled into a tape recorder toward the end of her life. “I’m an angry lady! I’ve been insulted! Slandered! Humiliated! I wanted to believe, and I tried my damnedest to believe in that rainbow that I tried to get over—and I couldn’t! So what! Lots of people can’t…. I hate anybody’s guts who used me, because I wanted to be a nice girl.”

A vagabond for the last few years of her life, Garland traveled with Joey and Lorna from hotel to hotel, often unable to pay their bills. One day, Lorna rushed home from her latest school to find her mother standing on the ledge of a New York City hotel room, a crowd of reporters cruelly snapping pictures below. Lorna writes:

I looked at her and said, “Mama, what’s going on? Are you all right?” She looked at me and said, “I’m fine, honey. We can’t pay the bill, so I’m threatening to jump out the window.” Then she had me call the manager, the same guy who’d been threatening to evict us for nonpayment, and say, “How’s it going to look for you when Dorothy jumps out your fucking window, huh?”

Lorna eventually moved in with her father, fleeing like Joey and Liza before her, her body exhausted and breaking down from constantly caring for her deteriorating mother. Judy Garland died of an accidental overdose in London on June 29, 1969, at the age of 47.

“My mom was a phoenix who always expected to rise again from the ashes of her latest disaster,” Luft writes. “She had a very strong sense of who she was. She had a sense of self-worth. She loved being Judy Garland. Did she secretly long to be Frances Gumm Somebody, Minnesota housewife? Are you kidding? She’d have run off with a vaudeville troupe just the way my grandfather did.”