“Of course, Judy Garland was the greatest entertainer of the 20th century or
any century. Her singing made a direct assault on the heart that no one else
has ever matched. When Judy performs, every moment in life becomes a rite of
passage, a disaster or an epiphany so exhilarating that you need to raise
the calibre of your personality in order to meet it.”
This book is a bit insane. It is too much. It is well over the rainbow. It is
embarrassing. At the same time it is a brilliant analysis of embarrassment;
it suggests that such strength of feeling is maybe something “to be prized”.
What a self-deprecating, funny, moving, entertaining read it is, a mad love
letter (“I inhale her and exhale her”) from Susie Boyt to Judy Garland, who
“created a whole new theatrical idiom in which glamour and frankness nudge
and jostle unabashedly”. Its unabashedness is its delight, and a large part
of its moral courage.
It conjures up a hopeless openness of empathy, presents its readers with a
sensitivity which, by its nature, can't not be damaged, then radiates
cowardly-lion bravery. It makes for a new kind of memoir, one that finds a
way to insert, philosophically and emotionally, between the plain words “my”
and “life”, the everyday pathos, bathos and surreality of being alive in the
modern, celebrity-glutted, couldn't-care-less Western world.
Garland, “the most conscientious unreliable person who ever lived”, was a
child of Hollywood, the first globally famous girl-next-door, the smallest
person ever to inhabit such a big voice, and a symbol, all her life and via
her far too early death, of the industry's ruthless self-consumption. “Over
her early performances there hovers a sort of permanent dew.” Her perennial
and lovely brightness, her trooper spirit, her sweet convincing familiarity,
her gift for consummate performance and her salty sense of humour (“Madam, I
have rainbows coming out of my ass”) are as legendary as her pyschological
problems, her drug-taking and her wildness. “The word incautious actually
features in the coroner's report on her death.”
Boyt, herself a fine novelist and columnist, was born a child of Freud,
daughter of Lucian, a beloved but often absent father, and great-grandchild
of Sigmund. She was the fifth child (“it soon seemed to me quite clear that
all the major personality types had been taken”), born into an
upper-middle-class, still cash-poor childhood in “a family that takes making
people feel better very seriously ... By the age of eight I was good at all
manner of consoling”.
Art meets psychoanalysis meets entertainment meets reality in the bravura
performance of My Judy Garland Life. Garland, it is said, once flung open
the windows of her own psychoanalyst's office (one of 16 analysts or so,
over time) and sang to the crowd on the pavement below, who had worked out
when her weekly sessions took place. Boyt's memoir (“over me - sad to say -
there hangs no dew”) is about the right and the longing of everyone to be
understood as special, about everyday failure, grief, loss, terrible and
mundane bereavement, and the hard work of self-consolation crucial to
survival. “I'm interested in the exact point in life at which the love
stops,” Boyt says. It is a courting of belief and existentialism - a study
of the hopeful, hopeless state of being human, beautifully and bathetically
illustrated, with stills of Garland alongside pictures from Boyt's life and
fanship.
Though it's “of the fold” itself, it strips fanship to its bones. It
luxuriates in obsession while openly discussing the self-hurt all obsession
signals. It subversively pairs Garland with John Berryman, drops Whitman,
Pope and Yeats into its fusion of responsibility and dream, and is a
poetically infused work in its own right: “After childbirth you have to
close your emotions down for a few months because the slightest, lightest
thing feels deeply poignant, even a litter bin in the street, a piece of
white toast, cold and elastic.”
What is extraordinary about it is its incautiousness, its flung-openness, its
huge moral heart. “The time to make up your mind about people is never.” If
you love Garland, it goes without saying that you'll love My Judy Garland
Life, full of great stories about her. “When she was appearing in Houston
... the Supremes were appearing on the same block and one afternoon they
telephoned Judy's room and asked if they might come up and meet her.
‘Impossible,' Judy's companion said. ‘Miss Garland is taking a nap.' Diana
Ross asked, ‘Well, can we come up and just watch her sleep?'”
If you don't care what Judy looked like when she was asleep, well, this book
says, you ought to. Wouldn't you want someone to care about you when you're
asleep? Wouldn't the world be better if we all cared more? It's by this
philosophy of kindness, this righteous, unfashionable, excoriating and
infectious encouragement of generosity, that Boyt's and Garland's stories
come together. “I'm drawn to those who tell me she helped to mend a hole in
a heart or she made a large heart even bigger by lodging in it.”
Meanwhile, Boyt, who wonders what would have happened had her great
grandfather ever met her beloved, gets to meet a munchkin, to interview
Lorna Luft and Liza Minnelli (“Liza is completely unafraid of embarrassment
... who else could pronounce with a straight face that ‘everything I know in
life I learnt from Charles Aznavour'?”), to duet with Mickey Rooney and feel
“the most Judy-ish I have ever felt” (for which she pays a righteous wad of
cash) and to sit in Judy's own bathtub in Grand Rapids. “For a second I
consider removing my clothes, but I'm not insane.”
This book, though, is stark naked. It wears its vulnerability like a birthday
suit, and does so for all of us, in a spirit of born celebration. Can
cynicism really be so simply out-argued? Can a book really be so analytical
and high-kicking, so fragile and defiant at the same time? An insecure,
anguished, megalomaniac, voracious, truly altruistic piece of modern
thought, this wonderfully clever book gives its whole self, flings its arms
out in a rainy street like a wonderful diva. Brava.
My Judy Garland Life by Susie Boyt
Virago, £15.99; 312pp Buy
the book
