Get Happy (68 page)

Hurt and angry, and weary still, Judy thus arrived in Melbourne, and, to the outrage of the local press, locked herself in her suite at the Southern Cross Hotel for the next thirty-six hours. Now the mishap at the Sydney airport had its belated and disastrous effect. She took too many of the Chinese doctor’s pills—“she was pissed out of her brain,” as the blunt-spoken Miller phrased it—and on May 20, the night of her performance, Judy had to be virtually dragged from her room, not showing up at Melbourne’s Festival Hall until an hour and seven minutes after the curtain was supposed to go up.

If she had done nothing but sing, the audience, so close to riot that the nervous management had brought in forty policemen to keep order, probably would have forgiven her even then. But singing seemed
to be the last thing she wanted to do. In a mood that Mort Lindsey, her conductor now for three years, had never seen, she was more disposed to clown around, snatching his baton and pretending to lead the orchestra herself. “You are late,” someone yelled. “I could not get out of that hotel,” Judy answered. “Have another brandy,” someone else suggested, as the crowd of seven thousand began heading, one by one, for the exits. “Where are you going?” Judy inquired of one departing group. “We’re going home and you should, too,” came the answer.

A bad performance deserves bad reviews. But not since 1880, when it had hanged Ned Kelly, Australia’s Billy the Kid, had Melbourne meted out the kind of punishment it now gave Judy. Had she thrown a kangaroo on the barbie while singing obscene words to the national anthem, she could not have aroused more patriotic indignation from the Australian press. Her bizarre behavior was viewed not as a personal failing, but as a deliberate insult to the nation, the latest from a series of American stars who, according to the
Melbourne Truth
, regarded folks Down Under as “a bunch of ignorant hicks.”

That anger was not confined to the editorial pages. As she walked toward her plane at the Melbourne airport, Judy heard a chorus of jeers, a brutal good-bye from two hundred people who had come to wish her ill. Small wonder that in Hong Kong, where she and Mark flew on May 23, she complained that she was not feeling well. What was she suffering from? she was asked. “Australia,” Judy replied.

Another kind of storm arose in Hong Kong, as Typhoon Viola sent ninety-mile-an-hour winds and rains raging across the island, threatening to crack open the windows of the suite Judy and Mark shared on the twenty-second floor of the Mandarin Hotel. Unable to leave the hotel, they thoughtfully surrounded themselves with a pile of books and magazines and prepared to sit out Viola in comfort. But there was no comfort to be found, inside or out. When she opened
Time
, Judy discovered a snide account of the Melbourne debacle, which the magazine contrasted, rather cruelly, with Marlene Dietrich’s almost simultaneous triumph in Moscow. “At 41, Judy Garland may have gone over the rainbow for the last time,” the
Time
story began, and as Judy read it in that
exotic city, with the very floor swaying beneath her, she finally cracked. “We can’t go on this way,” she screamed. “Gimme those pills and we’ll die together!” Mark pulled her into bed instead, and they clung together under the covers, like two lonely and frightened children, praying for the peace of morning.

Unwilling to wait, Judy slipped into the bathroom sometime during the night and swallowed enough Tuinals to send her sprawling to the floor. That was where Mark found her several hours later. No ambulance could move through the typhoon’s fury, but with help from the hotel staff, Mark was able to lift her into a wheelchair and push her himself to nearby Canossa Hospital. For a long time it appeared that rescue had come too late. She lay in a coma for more than fifteen hours. At one point, in fact, Mark was told she was dead, a message that was flashed around the world.

That was wrong, though not by much. Once again her remarkable constitution pulled her through. When Judy finally awoke, she began, as she had so many times before, a quick and almost miraculous recovery. On June 1, four days after Mark had pushed her comatose body through the hazardous streets, she was back in her hotel, making calls and issuing orders. “She’s getting mean as hell again,” Mark wrote a friend in Los Angeles, “which means she’s getting well again, thank Christ!”

Her successes in the early sixties had interrupted but not changed the wearisome rhythm that had come to govern Judy’s life. As predictable as the tides, as insistent as a metronome, that pitiless movement all but guaranteed that failure would follow success—success, failure. After her fiasco in Melbourne, it was inevitable that she would soon enjoy a triumph; inevitable, too, given her itinerary, that she would enjoy that triumph in London, the scene of so many treasured moments. What was not inevitable was the way in which it came, unplanned, unscheduled and unexpected, like a burst of blissful sunshine after the weather forecasts had called for rain.

“I’ve been told not to sing for some time because I’ve been very ill,” Judy sadly announced when she arrived in Britain on June 30, and for
once London could not shake her depression. Three weeks later, she was, indeed, in a psychiatric nursing home, the result of another halfhearted suicide attempt—she had cut her wrists again. Her wounds were not serious, however, and even her doctor could not prevent her from leaving her bed long enough to drive to the Palladium for the “Night of 100 Stars,” British show business’s annual charity fundraiser.

Like most of the other stellar one hundred, Judy was there only to be seen. Like them, she was expected to do nothing but say hello, then sit down and watch the show, the high point of which was to be that year’s sensation, the Beatles. But a frail hello was not what those sitting out front wanted to hear from Judy. “Sing, Judy, sing!” they shouted, all but rioting when she walked away from the microphone. “We want Judy!” they chanted until the organizers were forced to push her back. “Over the Rainbow,” she sang, then, on demand, an encore of “Swanee.” But still the cheering continued, going on so long, in fact, that the rest of the program had to be scratched. She had sung many showstoppers in her long career, but never before had Judy actually stopped the show. “It’s nice to be home again,” she said.

In just a few minutes an audience in London had restored what an audience in Melbourne had so abruptly stolen—her self-confidence—and with Mark at her side, Judy rode the rest of the year on a wave of excitement. She traveled to Rome and Athens, she cut a new record and, in November, she twice returned to the Palladium to share the stage with a promising newcomer—Liza. “Terribly good, isn’t she?” said the proud mama after Liza, already a polished performer at eighteen, set that old house rocking with a voice as powerful as a trumpet. “Beautiful” was the word Mark used to describe the final five months of 1964, and Judy seemed to agree. All her old friends said that she had never looked better or happier, Mark bragged to John Carlyle. “They say it’s thanks to me. That of course gives me a huge amount of pride. I hope it’s true. I try. And I love her more each day.”

If the rhythm—high to low, low to high—stayed the same, the tempo did not. Sometimes, in the mere space of a week, she could travel that bumpy road from success to disaster—or back again. “Judy Begins with Failure, Ends in Triumph” was how the
Toronto Star
, for instance,
summarized her week at the O’Keefe Centre in February 1965. Her Monday opening was terrible, said the
Star
, and she canceled two shows on Wednesday. But by Saturday, closing night, she was in top, exuberant form, joyfully bouncing through thirty minutes of encores. “The question then is which is the real Judy?” the paper’s critic asked in some exasperation. “Was Monday just a bad night—made worse by a cold and laryngitis? Or was Saturday the exception, one of those occasional big nights that pop up as a career declines?” The answer was that both were the real Judy. Though the good performances still outnumbered the bad, no one, including Judy herself, could predict at the beginning of the night which kind she was about to give.

Singing is a physical act, and singers, like athletes, have limited working lives, almost all losing some of their vocal agility by their mid-forties. In Judy’s case, the aging process was accelerated by a style of singing, flat-out and full-throated, that, over the years, had demanded too much of those tender membranes called the vocal cords—her machine, as she liked to say. “My, I’m a loud lady,” she joked. “No crooner, I.” Perhaps even more damaging had been her style of living, too many drugs over too many years. Indeed, in the sixties she added to her pharmacy a new, amphetamine-like drug—Ritalin—that actually speeded up the destruction, making her throat perpetually dry.

At its zenith in 1961, when she appeared at Carnegie Hall, Judy’s voice had already lost some of its radiance by the time she began her TV series in 1963. By 1965, when she appeared in Toronto, her machine had become a quirky and often undependable instrument, rich and velvety on the best nights, harsh and strident on the worst. The quality of the sound is never the full measure of any singer, however, and through force of personality and manner of presentation, the exceptional ones—Judy, most conspicuously—continue to give enjoyment long past their prime. Youth may have the muscle, but age has the experience, the artistry and understanding that come only with time.

Such distinctions were, for some, beside the point. For her most fanatical fans, Judy was always magical, an object of worship and veneration. They attended every opening night and, like participants in some
ancient mystery rite, showed all the signs of cultish delirium, applauding and jumping out of their seats with excitement before she so much as opened her mouth. That many of these fans were homosexual provoked disapproving sneers from more than one national journal. Writing in
Esquire
, William Goldman, for instance, spent an entire article fulminating about the “flutter of fags” who came to the Palace in the summer of 1967, Judy’s third visit to that lucky stage. “The boys in the tight trousers” was
Time
’s equally disparaging phrase.

Seeking explanations for her homosexual following, both magazines indulged themselves in psychological mumbo-jumbo. But the true explanation was perhaps too obvious to catch the attention of such flatulent minds. The homosexuals of that closeted era identified with Judy because they, too, were the objects of demeaning jokes and casual contempt—for proof, all they had to do was read
Time
and
Esquire
—and they derived comfort and inspiration from her ability to survive similar assaults. As many times as she fell down, Judy always managed to pull herself up—and they hoped that they would do the same. Many heterosexuals, the great majority of her audience, made the same identification, of course. Judy’s appeal breached all borders.

Year after year she crisscrossed the continent, giving concerts in big cities and small, performing in theaters, auditoriums and stadiums and singing under roofs, open skies, canvas tents and one huge dome—Houston’s Astrodome. Steadier work might have relieved some of that increasingly onerous burden, but producers, who were happy enough to hire her for guest appearances on TV, shuddered at the prospect of offering her long-term jobs. Turned down for several movie roles—Mama Rose in
Gypsy
was one—Judy was also rejected by Broadway, vetoed even as a replacement for Angela Lansbury in Jerry Herman’s long-run hit,
Mame
. “If it all falls apart because she doesn’t show up on opening night,” Herman’s producers told him, “we will have destroyed everything we all worked so hard to create.”