Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,644

This is the grave of Judy Garland.

Born in 1922 in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, Frances Gumm grew up in a vaudeville family. Both her parents performed and had traveled around plenty doing so before buying a movie theater in that town. They did show movies in the theater but they also did a lot of performances and the kids were part of the act, as they usually were in these vaudeville families. So Gumm first appeared on stage at the ripe old age of 2. In 1926, the family moved out to California, evidently because of a scandal around her father having sex with a man. They ended up in Lancaster, where her father ran another theater and her mother started managing the careers of her daughters that she wanted to get into the pictures.

The Gumm Sisters became known as the Garland Sisters in 1934, as Gumm was not exactly a great movie name. They had some song and dance stuff that they toured with and they appeared in a few movies together, mostly shorts. Frances changed her first name to Judy in 1934 as well. The group broke up not because of Judy, but because Suzanne flew to Nevada for a quickie marriage to the jazz drummer Lee Kahn.

Shortly after, Louis Mayer heard about the Garland Sisters act and he brought Judy in for an audition. It took Mayer about 3 seconds to sign her once he heard her sing. She didn’t even have to do a screen test. She was 13 years old and Mayer wasn’t sure what to do with her since she wasn’t old enough to be in adult roles but was obviously too old for the little kid roles. She was also tiny and had more a cute thing going on than most stars of that era (can you imagine Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn or Joan Crawford playing cute?).

So it took a little time for Garland to get big but when she did, it was not surprisingly working with Mickey Rooney. They made a perfect screen couple. He was already a biggish star and she wasn’t, so she mostly played supporting roles at first, with actresses like Lana Turner getting the Rooney love interest part. But does anyone believe in a pairing between Rooney and Lana Turner? C’mon, she’s so far out of his league. But Garland and Rooney–both cute and funny and good at song and dance. Perfect. So starting in Babes in Arms in 1939, Garland was the lead and they appeared together in series of successful pictures.

However, Garland was already a mess personally. Her cute thing in fact made her feel super insecure around her other female stars. MGM signed Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor around the same time for comparison and she felt ugly. Self-confidence was long a big problem for Garland. Also, her father died of meningitis shortly after Garland signed with the studio and she lost that rock in her life. The studio had a good strategy for getting their stars to be peppy in their performances–a lot of amphetamines. Then they happily dished out some barbiturates for sleep. Well, Garland wasn’t the only one to get addicted to pills, but she certainly did get addicted to pills. Rooney himself distanced MGM from these claims though. He noted that there was one person responsible for Garland’s addictions and it was Judy Garland. Fair enough.

In any case, Garland was in no way personally prepared for the fame that would come after The Wizard of Oz. Garland was not the first choice for the role of Dorothy. MGM tried to get Shirley Temple, but she was under contract with Fox and the studio wouldn’t loan her. Then they wanted Deanna Durbin, but that didn’t work out. So they went with Garland. I hardly have to explain the film. It still remains the most famous film of the 1930s with the general public. Has anyone not seen the film? I assume kids still watch it today, but I guess I don’t really know if that’s true.

After The Wizard of Oz, Garland was one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood and MGM put her to work. She immediately did Babes in Arms with Busby Berkeley. Little Nellie Kelly in 1940 was notable for her having to kiss a man for the first time in her life and having to learn an accent. She wasn’t very good at either, though she certainly leaned into men after this. Shortly after, she started seeing Artie Shaw but he left her for Lana Turner, which did not help her self-confidence issues. In fact, she liked musicians and started seeing a number of them, sometimes at the same time. She got pregnant by David Rose and had an abortion. In fact, abortion would be a go-to for Garland at this phase in her career, where she was still playing fairly young but also had become a big star with big star appetites. Speaking of big appetites, one of her affairs was with Orson Welles.

In 1944, Garland was cast as the lead in Meet Me in St. Louis, with Vincente Minnelli directing. They fell in love and married. Of course Liza is their daughter. For Garland, this was a relatively stable time in her life, but it really wasn’t that stable. They divorced in 1951. She worked pretty steadily in these years, exclusively in musicals except for The Clock, her first real dramatic role and almost her last, as people didn’t see her that way. By 1950, MGM had given up on her anyway for being such a mess. But she did do some great movies later in her life. She ended up with two Academy Award nominations. The first was for A Star is Born, in 1954, and the second for Judgement at Nuremberg, in 1961. Her role in the latter isn’t huge, but she was very good in it and it makes you wonder what she could have done with directors who gave her more quality dramatic roles.

The thing about the latter film is that Garland was such a complete mess, she had not worked between those two Academy Award nominations. Evidently, the biggest problem she had on Nuremberg is that she was so happy to be working again that it was hard for her to do her crying scene. But that was also about it for her. Already by the late 40s, she was a serious drug addict, including morphine. There were suicide attempts, missed shoots, expensive delays in production while she got treatment, just a vicious cycle. She wasn’t bankable enough for studios to put up with this. She was fired from several films. She did have something of a recovery in the early 50s and did a lot of Broadway, to a good deal of success. She did some TV too and had her own show for a year in the early 60s. But at this point, she was just hanging on. She owed ridiculous amounts of back taxes, having just not paid anything for several years. She had contract issues with networks and studios.

We could go on with the shitshow of her life, but it’s a well-known story. She finally overdosed from a massive intake of Seconal in 1969. She was 47 years old.

Judy Garland is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Los Angeles, California. Interestingly, this is not her first place of burial. She was originally in New York but her kids wanted her in Los Angeles where they felt she belonged and so she was moved to this glassed in thing in 2017.

If you would like this series to visit other people involved with The Wizard of Oz, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frank Morgan is in The Bronx and Ray Bolger is in Culver City, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.