Remembering Judy Garland | Interviews

Her voice had gone years ago. She knew it herself. In the last years it was her soul that audiences came to experience. That was long after the peak of her talent, long after she had become unemployable in the movies, long after she had been decreed unreliable on a professional basis. What it came to finally, was Judy Garland and her audience, together, remembering a remarkable talent.

The talent had been killed not so much by Judy Garland as by the studio system that raised her. As a teenager she was already one of the biggest stars in the movies, and child stars in those days were treated with brutality that passed for "supervision." She was almost constantly on pep pills, sleeping pills, stimulants, depressants, getting up for a scene, coming down from a scene, losing weight, trying to unwind.

Her last movie of any consequence was George Cukor's "A Star Is Born" (1954), although she won an Academy Award nomination for a character role in "Judgment at Nuremberg" (1962). "A Star Is Born" was a massive musical, the most expensive made up to that time, and it was a grueling undertaking. Only a week ago, I talked about it with a woman who held an important position on the production team.

"Judy was marvelous for the first seven or eight months," she told me. "Everybody had heard about how temperamental she was, how impossible she was to work with, but in fact she was sunny and calm. She was off the pills, looking good, and working well.

"But the film got into trouble. It fell behind the shooting schedule, and it was well over budget. And the studio got rattled. They were working Judy incredibly hard.

"One week we came to work and there was a nurse on the set. In those days when you saw a nurse it almost always meant a star was on dope. They were going back to the same so-called solution of 10 or 15 years ago: If Garland was in trouble, or you thought she might be, put her on pills. Speed her up, slow her down. Run her like a clock.