TODAY Rick’s Flicks begins its serialization of Harry Richards’ book, THE JUDY WATCH.
Harry Richards is a free lance writer out of Missoula, Montana. He has spent much of his life observing, studying and analyzing the work of Judy Garland. While now over fifty books have been written about Judy Garland, Richards believes his is the first to look exclusively at her live concert career. Richard enjoys being a father and grandfather. He likes flowers, reading and watching vintage films.
THE JUDY WATCH
by Harry Richards
DEDICATION
For the lady who sang them
For Harold Arlen who wrote them
For Roger Edens
and Kay Thompson
and Leonard Gershe
and Mort Lindsey
and Gordon Jenkins
and Conrad Salinger and Norman Jewison
all of whom no doubt contributed more than we know
For Christopher Finch
and Richard Shickel
and John Fricke
and Ron O’Brien
and Rex Reed
and Clifton Fadiman
and Brooks Atkinson
and Joel Dorn
who have written so splendidly about her
For Joe and Lorna and Liza
who have always said it right
With cheers to her cheering section
Mickey Rooney
and Ann Rutherford
and Ray Bolger
and Margaret Whiting
and Jackie Cooper
and Jerry Herman
and Shana Alexander
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” . . . she somehow promises people a return to Oz.”
That description of Judy Garland is wrapped in quotation marks because someone else said it. Unfortunately I have lost a file that contained the source of the comment. It is such a glowing assessment of Judy Garland’s relationship with her audience and theirs with her that I must use it — with a fervent wish that I could acknowledge the author.
* * * * * * * *
New York Times photo
J U D Y O N E
Living it again in order to set it down here, I found myself astonished when I could not remember the month when I first saw Judy Garland on stage. I thought of my family and friends who, if they knew, would share my surprise and expect me to remember date, day and hour.
I knew it was a balmy summer evening. In southern California. It had to be 1957. I was sure it was Saturday. And in those days it would have been unusual for the show not to begin at 8:30. For a time I refused to look it up. I was finding it fun to speculate. I wanted to be — want to be — as honest as memory allows, but there are facts that are not that important. This is neither a biography nor an autobiography. It is a memoir. An appreciation of Judy Garland, live.
She was appearing in an amphitheater under California’s dependable skies. The park was green, but I was greener. This was my first time. I was barely believing it all. My friend John had driven us to Griffith Park in Los Angeles, and as we walked towards the Greek Theatre I was more than excited. We called them movie stars then. I was on my way to see the shining star I fell in love with when I was six years old.
I did not know on that Saturday evening that the excitement I felt was a tame version of what would happen inside me in future whenever I would live through the on-stage explosion that was a Judy Garland concert. Those who know her only from the television screen, only from movies; those who know her only in her timeless performance in The Wizard of Oz; and those knowing Judy Garland only from recordings cannot imagine the dynamism of the dynamo she became before an audience, an audience I suspect she may have hated as much as she loved us and needed us.
A friend once told me that if she were asked to describe my personality with one word, she would choose fan. As I followed Judy Garand’s work and career and life, the singer became the center of my entertainment, and as my primary short-term goal was always being alert for notice of her next performance near enough for me to attend, she became a focal point in my daily living. I began corroborating my friend’s expressed opinion and living my life as a fan. That Saturday night at the Greek, as we called it out there then, was the genesis of live fandom, my dedication to seeing and hearing in live performance someone I had admired most of my life.
This initial performance was the first time I heard the Garland overture: two opening phrases of The Man That Got Away, followed by most of The Trolley Song, then half of Over the Rainbow, finally a strong-on-the-downbeat Man That Gor Away, concluding with the final phrase of Over the Rainbow. (See JUDY NOTE # 1 at the end of this WATCH.) When the orchestra in the Greek Theatre pit began The Trolley Song in the overture I heard a young woman behind me ask, “What’s that they’re playing?” The voice of a sudden authority replied, “It’s The Trolley Song. That’s one of her biggest numbers.”
I could not resist turning to look at him. Older than his date. Suit and tie. People dressed for concerts then. But the tie was, is, an unforgettable orange. He wore glasses almost opaque from my side of them. I quickly looked away when he smiled at me as if to suggest that he was willing to share his knowledge with me, too.
The myopic man with the tie was my first inkling of a special kind of concertgoer at Judy Garland’s performances. Concertgoer, not fan. I admit that she had fans besides me. Everyone knows she had fanatical fans, still has. But she also attracted a lot of fans so-called that deserved to be called by any other name.
The man behind me was a relatively innocuous beginning, the first in line of a years-long stream of countless authorities that I would encounter in the rows of seats, on the aisles, in lobbies, at intermission bars. Know-it-alls who knew everything about some facet of the life and career of the giant star they never called by any other name than her first.
There was the ticketholder who specialized in the songs cut from films before their release. The expert in pirate recordings and lost recordings, these usually live recordings of European concert engagements. There was a smaller number of specialists on thought-lost-but-now-found recordings. But too many overheard comments came from scholars of all her illnesses and each of her suicide attempts. This last subject, which has been of endless interest to some followers and much of the general public, is intriguing for me since I am a fan convinced that Judy Garland never made a serious attempt to take her life.
But that Saturday night at the Greek — my retrospect of which finds me harder on my fellow traveler in the row behind me than I was at the time — that night I was a loing way from my career down the road as a three-hundred-sixty-five-day-a-year devotee of Miss G.
At this point in the life of her stage show Judy Garland still had with her the chorus of young men billed as Judy’s Boy Friends. They danced and sang a song about her, each holding up a placard proclaiming a letter of her name, appropriately shifting places to create descriptive words from the letters. “She’s gay,” the chorus sang, when the word was still by and large a shibboleth and not yet meaning anything in common parlance except happy and lively. “She’s gay. She’s gaudy. She’s angular.”
Her first solo was By Myself, the splendid Howard Dietz-Arthur Schwartz song that was the first band on her just released album — vinyl then — titled “Alone.” The album sleeve featured a trench-coated Judy (yellow, a personal favorite color of hers), hugging collar to throat, standing on a lonely beach. It was an unusually arranged version of the song but nothing like the developed, acted-out one she would sing in her English film The Lonely Stage (in America, I Could Go On Singing).
She next sang Mean to Me, the old standard by Roy Turk and Fred Ahlert that had held a permanent niche in Ruth Etting’s repertoire. This small song is one of Judy Garland’s underestimated masterpieces. Arranged by Gordon Jenkins it is perfectly toned, timed and modulated.
Mean to Me was also from the new “Alone” album, and she made a gentle pitch for the LP, momentarily not being able to remember the name of the label. “I’ve been fired so many times I don’t know who the hell I’m working for.” Then she mentioned the growing multiplicity of labels. “I remember when there were only four major labels. Now we have Dot, Verve. But ‘Alone’ is Capitol.”
Now, as Alan King took the stage, Judy Garland disappeared, leaving me nonplussed by her considerable makeup, highly arched brows and her sleek black dress which did not quite conceal her once more broadening waist. (“Do you suppose this figure will ever come back?” she once asked an audience.)
Acquaintances don’t believe me when I tell them that I lived almost ten years in Los Angeles and Hollywood without a car. I could never have lived that life without staggeringly generous friends. In those naive salad days before I owned a car, I took for granted all the chauffeuring and shepherding here and there across Los Angeles County. I took for granted even a dear friend like John L. who drove me to shop, took me apartment hunting and invited my lonely self to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at his folks’, picking me up and driving me back, twenty miles each way.
And it was John who had gotten me to the Greek on this Saturday night. His driving me there had saved me a three-hour bus trip on the city’s public transportation, I had sent off for my ticket five minutes after reading the newspaper ad ; but John had trusted his luck, which held true, and bouight a last-minute ticket at the box office. He sat fifteen rows behind me.
At intermission, when I mentioned our star’s surprising appearance, John L. replied, “She’s showing us her New York sophistication. I’m sure that when she comes back — John said “returns” — “she will be our down-home Judy.” She came back minus much makeup but in flowing red chiffon, and danced with her many Boy Freinds, I’m not sure how appropriately since she was singing about The Man That Got Away.
Later in her program there came for me a thrilling, and I now a realize, a premonitory moment while she was singing Rock-A-Bye Your Baby. She reached “and swing it from Virginia,” then as she sang with lilt and vibrato “to Tennessee with all the love that’s in ya’,” at least half the audience burst into applause. Realization rushed through me that the moment I had always liked best in the song, countless others liked as well. Later in her concert life the Garland nuts like me would applaud perhaps too much at her performances. But I would become furious when we were taken to task by reviewers. I suspect that more often than not they were right. I recall William Goldman writing in Esquire that the star herself seemed to have become superfluous to her performing audience. Hard words. But written perhaps with some justification.
With my next reaction on this baptismal evening I moved from premonition to shock. Judy sang Swanee and called her daughter Liza on stage to sing it with her. I had the fan’s long-held belief in Judy as victim of an untalented stage mother. I felt more than queasy with Judy’s second generational repetition of what had been done to her. My shock became surprise as an eerily poised Liza, so small down there beyong the footlights, sang Gershwin’s rouser very well with a big, shattering voice.
Judy then sang a telescoped version of her rendition of After You’ve Gone in For Me and My Gal. And in those days she always concluded with Over the Rainbow.
When eventually our applause demanded an encore, she came back on stage and appeared to listen to shouted requests. But finally she said, “The Trolley Song is what we rehearsed and The Trolley Song is what you’ll get whether you like it or not.” Big laugh. Much applause.
But earlier, before that single encore, as she began the coda of Over the Rainbow,” sitting on the rim of the stage — where she really did not fit; she was obviously repeating a successful ritual performed elsewhere but had to jam her body between tall footlights that were in the way; and the lip of the stage curved upward enough that even with the help of her waif costume, she did not easily dangle her legs into the orchestra pit — As she began the coda to Over the Rainbow, she stopped singing mid-phrase and signalled the orchestra to stop as well. She said she had gotten, “a little dizzy back there,” and could they start again? She finished on pitch, in soaring voice.
When after the concert, sitting with John L. in the small bar of the Ambassador Hotel (ah! home of the Coconut Grove), I remarked on her pause in the song, John said, “I felt she was in total control throughout her show, including those closing moments of Over the Rainbow.”
* * * * * * * * * *
JUDY NOTE # 1 : I have described the Garland overture, as it came to be called, as including The Man That Got Away when I first heard the overture at this Greek Theatre performance. I am not one hundred percent certain that the song was part of the overture at that time. I am sure about Over the Rainbow and The Trolley Song. I may be retrojecting The Man That Got Away from other live performances. I have a friend who says that sometimes it is enjoyable to wonder. In this instance I have found it more rewarding to wonder than to try to locate the historical fact. I am sure that the song was part of the overture by the following year when I saw Judy Garland at the Coconut Grove, though it was cut from the live performance album.
Judy Garland’s best recording of this gut-wrenching, nut-twisting song by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin is her original sound track rendition for the George Cukor film A Star Is Born. Simultaneously with the release of the motion picture, a 45 rpm record of the song was released as was a 33rpm album, which included two fine numbers deleted from the movie, Here’s What I’m Here For and Lose That Long Face.
I mentioned above the strong-beat version of the song typically played in the overture to Judy Garland’s live performances. I carried a memory of this strong beat from the film and from that 45 which I owned and almost wore out before having the long-playing album. I believed for years that later as she sang The Man That Got Away in live performances she lost that torch-like beat, if that’s the kind of beat it is. I missed it in her delivery and in whatever band or orchestra backed her, though at times I felt that the band was preserving the original, pulsing rhythm more faithfully than she was. In those concert years she more and more tended to present the song as operettic ballad rather than torch song, even trilling the r in thrill.
The orchestral beat — da-da-DAH-da — on Frank Sinatra’s recording called The Gal That Got Away, is very pronounced. Ever the thief, he tried to steal this song from Judy Garland as he would later try to steal New York, New York from Liza Minnelli. He may have succeeded with the latter. Today many people would ignorantly identify it as a Sinatra song.
I have written what I have believed for years, but I should include here fresh evidence and some slightly revisionist memory. After the American Film Institute’s presentation on television of yet another of their infamous lists, the time the 100 great songs, including The Man That Got Away, I watched A Star Is Born again several times. To my astonishment I found that my memory had played me false. Gently false. Not even in the movie — that is, on the movie sound track — does she give the song quite the torching quality I had been carrying in my head, nor did Danny’s band behind her, rather, around her (if you recall the CinemaScope shot).
However I might describe how she sings her song and whatever my memory might be, her delivery of it in the film is superb. In his American Popular Song from the Revolutionary War to the Present, David Ewen quotes Time magazine’s description of her singing The Man That Got Away in A Star Is Born. “Her big, dark voice sobs, sighs, sulks and socks it out like a cross between Tara’s harp and the late Bessie Smith.” Her nomination as best actress by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences may be the group’s first recognition of a kind of acting different from playing a scene.
Another surprise in these most recent viewings of The Man That Got Away as performed in the movie, she smiles a couple of times while singing it. My wife always described Judy Garland as living her lyrics — none of this empty-headed nonbsense of a mouth full of great big smiles while moaning melancholy words. I was discouraged by those smiles, breif though they are. But after additional viewings I see that they are not a disregard for the lyrics but an expression of Esther’s (her character’s) joy in her own singing.
The best orchestral version of The Man That Got Away is that by the obviously small but terrific band on a 33rpm album called “The Long Lost Holland Concert, the rarest Garland ever” (Obliggato Label G1H60).
NEXT Friday POST May 18
Until then,
Enjoy a movie,
Rick
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