Susie Boyt - My Judy Garland Life

For my mother and father

My
Judy
Garland
Life

My

Judy

Garland

Life

A Memoir

Susie Boyt

Copyright 2009 by Susie Boyt

All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Boyt, Susie, 1969
My Judy Garland life / Susie Boyt. 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Garland, Judy. 2. Boyt, Susie, 1969 I. Title.
ML420.G253B69 2009
782.42164092dc22
[B]
2008048568

eISBN: 978-1-60819-144-4

First U.S. Edition 2009

First published in Great Britain by Virago Press in 2008

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Contents

I had, from my beginning, to adore heroes

& I elected that they witness to,

show forth, transfigure: life-suffering & pure heart

& hardly definable but central weakness

for which they were enthroned & forgiven by me.

John Berryman, The Heroes

How
It
All
Began

Ive been half or more in love with Judy Garland all my life. Since my earliest beginnings, when I was so sensitive that my heart went out to everything strangers, ants, even that sad cluster of abandoned items in the supermarket next to the cashiers till Judy Garland has inspired and enriched my inner world.

Her presence, through her films and her recordings, her concert footage and her television shows, has consoled and invigorated, educated and disturbed. The imperative intimacy I feel with Judy Garland is similar to that which I feel for my mother or my children. It is a sort of profound kinship, a peculiar personal connection, an emergency of friendship and sympathy that has the same passion to it as a crisis. This sense of attachment to Judy Garland allows me to sidestep others ignoble concerns about the way she lived, the way she worked and her reputation in the world at large; it makes me feel I have a reasonable claim to call myself her friend.

And, although Judy Garland died five months after I was born, this has always seemed to me a two-sided affair that has suited us both. Ive felt Judy Garlands acute need of me and this prolonged fantasy you might call it of intimacy has been both sustaining and exhilarating. It has been a central part of my development as a person, as real as meat, as tears. I know for certain that something at the heart of Judy Garland connects directly to something at the heart of me. I feel implicated in her myriad struggles and triumphant in the face of her success. There are flashes of understanding between us, almost supernatural shocks of intense recognition, which assail me when I hear her sing or speak, or watch her dance.

As a young child it seemed that all anyone ever said to me was: You must learn to toughen up. You mustnt take everything to heart so. You really ought to try to control your feelings more or you just wont have a happy life. This then, I learned, was the job of childhood, the work of adolescence. If you could only gain mastery of your emotional world, why, you would be set up for ever! But how to do it? Nobody said. Was I to arrange myself so that I had no feelings at all? Was I to turn everything I felt into a secret? Or was it more a question of keeping very still and quiet for a few years until my mental capabilities could match the intensity of my heart, which had simply outgrown its casings?

Me aged six

Into this fragile environment, one day, came the voice of Judy Garland. At the cinema for the first time with my mother, I listened, transfixed, to Dorothy singing Over the Rainbow.

I had never heard anything like it in my life. It was immediately clear to me that Garlands singing bypassed all the indignity of strong feelings that I was grappling with, and instead she capitalised on her struggles. She absolutely led with them, presenting them as the best things life contains. Since early childhood I have always entertained a lot of dark thoughts I put out a welcome mat for them; I feed them and clothe them but Judy Garland seemed miraculously to transform the harsher truths of life into something wonderful, where all feelings, however dark, are good and true because theyre yours. There was an instant and I felt it even then historic meeting between us, a kind of tessellation of spirit accompanied by thick bolts of not just fellow feeling but of fellow being. I wanted to slip right then inside the screen.

From here, our life took off together in delightful ways. I had an LP of The Wizard of Oz not just the songs, but the entire soundtrack and I put it on whenever I was in my room. I mouthed the words alongside: That dogs a menace to the community. Im taking him to the sheriff and make sure hes destroyed. It was my wall paper for several years. Put him in the basket, Henry, I would murmur wryly in the face of any sort of defeat. I listened to Judy Garlands music continually, lying on my bedcover with the yellow moons and the pink stars. We cared about so many of the same things, chiefly the importance of making other people happy, a huge concern of mine, which no one else I knew seemed to speak of at all. I still believe one of the best ways to help the environment is to be 50 per cent kinder to all family, friends and strangers and then sit back and watch the world improve.

And although I did not begin to understand Judy Garlands sorrows, I saw that she had them and that they weighed heavily on her four foot eleven frame, and that she was a bigger person for them. Like thousands of others before me I felt that just by listening to her I could help. This made me immensely hopeful. The idea that uneasiness could be channelled into something beautiful, something triumphant that could somehow link us and transform us was a revelation. Even as a child I could see that Judys courage was contagious; it was almost pneumatic. Everything she did seemed like a staggering act of human generosity, designed especially to appeal to me. She must have been the most conscientious unreliable person who ever lived.

I was a conscientious and reliable and helpful girl, chubby and intense, keen to stay a child for as long as possible for ever, if I could manage it because I knew the grown up world inhabited by my parents, by my much older siblings, was far more dangerous than I could bear. To emulate Judys dance routines I started taking tap, ballet and modern classes, three days a week, in a local church hall presided over by a Miss Audrey. I loved it. It was a cruel joke that I might ever have a dancers body but I was praised and encouraged endlessly, not for my talent but because of my sheer hard work and my excellent memory which, when you are a very young dancer, can take you quite far. I worked hard also at staying cheerful, with discipline and willpower, practising my dancing for hours at a time to a record called