The untold story of Judy Garland

Judy Garland is now a myth, a paradigm and a warning: don’t let your daughter on the stage! It’s the cognitive dissonance that is thrilling and awful, like a child that dies: Dorothy kicked off her ruby slippers and turned to Benzedrine. It is a narrative that erases Garland as surely as the drugs ever did. When I think of Garland, I don’t think of the chaos, born at MGM Studios where they drugged her to make her slender and biddable. They called her the ‘little hunchback’ and because she was schooled with Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner she believed it. I marvel at the music.

She was extraordinary, not because of her illness, but despite it. She was less than five feet tall and when she sang she looked first anxious, then amazed, as if she could not believe the sound was hers. The musical, which developed in response to the Great Depression, is an artform in which an ordinary person sings, and becomes transcendent.