Birthday Girl: Fresh as the Morning

"Hey Siri," says I, "Play some Judy Garland music." And she does.

Muddle Through, Somehow

Well, every year, sooner or later, it has to be faced, and for this year today was the day.

Each Wonderful Christmas

...And you thought "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" was depressing...

From Now On

I was going to run this on Wednesday morning.

Birthday Geniuses

Two of American music's most towering figures celebrated birthdays this week; let's hear one perform the other, just about as perfectly as can be imagined.

Something Inside of Me

There's never really a bad time to listen to a little more Judy Garland, is there, and certainly a song like "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart" is both seasonal and timeless.

Join the Jubilee!

Well, it is, by all indications, a great day for the Irish, and who better to sing us in than St. Judy?

Positively, Absolutely, Undeniably, and Reliably... Perfect

This hasn't been the brightest shining week hereabouts, what with one thing and another, so it's nice to take a moment and experience some pure joy.  The picture had its premiere at Grauman's Chinese 75 years ago today, and I hope you'll agree that it really rather holds up.

Birthday Girl: a Little Song and Dance

Miss Hattie McDaniel would have been 119 today.  In her honor, let's give ourselves a little present.

Where Were You?

Technically speaking, I wasn't, yet, at all on the night of Sunday, April 23, 1961 - 53 years ago tonight - but nonetheless I know where I would have wanted to be.

Fast Away the Old Year Passes

So here's to us, for the rest of our beautiful days...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Drag Rant

What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp.

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

A few snippets of Camp at its most classic for this lovely August Saturday...

Birthday Girl: Lost

91 today.  I don't know that I've ever heard anyone but Lenya sing this, that I remember, and it boggles the mind to think that this was what pop television - even, admittedly, failed pop television - was like a half-century ago (feeling old yet?).

Through the Years

"We have a whole new year ahead of us, and wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all be a little more gentle with each other, and a little more loving, have a little more empathy - and maybe next year at this time, we'd like each other a little bit more..."

Oh, I know.  Someone wrote it for her, and she read the words, turning the really rather ordinary sentiment into something more than that only through the indomitable force of her own personality - but as we see the old year out, it's far from the worst that one could hope for this new and unknown thing, 2013.

It's only this year struck me that I'm older, now, than Judy Garland ever got to be.  Through the years turned out to be not so very long for her, although of course for us as listeners, fans, appreciators, she has more than kept her word. 

As I look forward at my own second half-century, through the years is no longer the infinite parade of possibilities it once seemed, while all the years behind stretch further and further away.  Still, as we teeter on this annual threshold between past and future, through this state of what anthropologists call liminality, I know there's so much more to rejoice for than to pine about, and at midnight tonight, we'll raise a glass to what possibilities remain and toast the year that's been.  If nothing else, it's brought us safe this far. 

New Year's Eve is a reminder that we're all, in the end, in the same boat, striking out from familiar waters into something new and strange.  Here's to us, through the years, with high hopes for the year to come.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Dream, Girls

The death this week of Tony Martin, MGM crooner and serial star-marryer (if two - Alice Faye and Cyd Charisse - can put him in that rank; it's not like he's a Mdivani or anything), provides the excuse for this week's SSCE.  It's less obscure than most to date, but instead an opportunity to see what the very toppest-of-the-top in Hollywood could pull off when no expense was spared, and how Metro did things differently.

Integrating the number into the story, for one thing:  this is the first big moment in Ziegfeld Girl, giving some stage time to all three of the picture's heroines:  Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner, and Judy Garland (we catch a bit of the last two in the dressing room right at the beginning - maybe Hedy was already off dealing with her imposing headpiece).  It makes it clear that Hedy and Lana are in it for the glamour, to be Real Ziegeld Girls (eventually, one flies and one falls), but that Judy has Talent (you can tell because she's one of the dancers, as opposed to being a showgirl, the most elite of whom didn't even have to walk).  It also means that she trades a stunning Adrian gown (just look at Hedy in hers - it's what she was born to wear!) for what is essentially a tinsel poncho, but there you go - it's the singers and dancers, if they're lucky, who become the biggest stars.  Just ask Miss Brice.

The other MGM difference, of course, is scale - no other studio could pull together all the resources required to do so much, so lavishly, so consistently.  Warner's went big with its Gold Diggers numbers in the mid-30s (it is, after all, where Mr. Busby Berkeley, at the helm on this movie, learned his trade), but had pretty much passed on large-scale musicals by this time (1941, by the bye).  RKO had taste and glamour, and certainly their big numbers (think Fred and Ginger) are ravishing - but few were sustained spectacles like this.  Paramount had fun, but couldn't throw this many stars into one mix - Bing Crosby pictures didn't need a raft of leading ladies the way this story did.  Fox never had taste, and the sustained tone of this number is utterly beyond the studio's reach - Zanuck's boys would inevitably have thrown in a dance break for the Albertina Rasch troupe or a Dubious Comedy Interpolation from the likes of the Ritz Brothers or worse.  After that there's pretty much only the also-rans, like Universal (which mostly dispensed with big numbers in favor of The Many Moods of Deanna Durbin) or Columbia, which had Ann Miller for fun and Rita Hayworth for glamour, but did all of it on the cheap.  Of what's left, the less said the better.  Anybody up for a Vera Hruba Ralston tap number over at Republic?

No, this is pretty much the State of the Art, MGM at its MGMiest: vast staircases, lush orchestrations, armies of Beautiful Girls, and fabulously demented costumes (look out for Eve Arden at about 5:00, managing not to look too mortified in one of the most celestially ludicrous, a Moderne explosion in an angora factory).  Adrian clearly relished these opportunities - who else could have come up the passementerie madness that precedes Miss Arden?

Over it all soars the voice of Tony Martin, a slick '40s update to the traditional Irish tenor.  Watching him, I can see why he was a better fit for Charisse than for Faye - he's a bit too solemn for the Girl from Tenth Avenue, a little too replete with self-regard (something I've always thought, too, however divine she was in Singing in the Rain, about La Cyd, so they worked).   He was originally meant to be a kind of singing Gable, and if that didn't quite come off over the long haul, he's still a pleasure to watch here.

Dream Maker, Heartbreaker...

Frances Ethel Gumm, b. June 10, 1922

She'd just be 90, which seems inconceivable.  Not just because never was someone less destined to make old bones than Judy, but also because she seems at once impossibly distant, with her roots in Vaudeville and her fierce devotion to a kind of showbiz that was fading even when she was in her too-short prime, and simultaneously eerily present.

Despite her legendary live performances, Garland was, is primarily a star of the recorded media - film, television, recordings - and so we can, at will, summon her up, appraise her all over again, experience the thrill and sadness and embarrassment and beauty of it all again and again.  They say the Judy Queens are dying off, but I believe there will always be a few of us around.

Wherever we're going, she's going our way, our huckleberry friend...

Compare and Contrast

Today, let's do a little show-biz exegesis, shall we? Herewith, three versions of one song, spanning, in various ways, three eras of entertainment and of interpretation.

First up, Judy. Her rendition - complete with an almost never-heard intro - is a reminder, among other things, of what a superb band singer she was. She brings all she's got to this number, but never for a moment lets you really think she believes it - a very Vaudeville attitude toward what could be a pretty cynical number.

Barbra's version is, as you'll see at the very end, actually from her appearance on The Judy Garland Show; in fact, it aired the fall before Judy's. Still, it's light years away from her hostess's playful but faithful rendition, poised as it is on the edge of mid-sixties "kookiness", as if just waiting for Laugh-In to happen.

Streisand at this age - just 21 - is amazing to watch; she's not so much performing as possessed by a talent she's still trying to figure out how to handle. That makes the bridge of this arrangement, a mishmash of other love songs, so odd and so oddly effective. How is it possible that this awkward, basically uneducated and unworldly girl can be at succeeding moments the gawkiest thing since My Friend Flicka and a one-woman compendium of twentieth-century show-biz?

Finally, the state of the art, turn of the century edition. Audra McDonald has the most "trained" voice of these three, and she gives a sense of acting the part of a nightclub belter rather than being one. Still, she's got the chops to put this one over, and her manic break midsong is if anything even more fun than Babs's.

What does it all prove? Honestly, I'm not at all sure, although I do know that I adore all three. I've never understood the need to choose one diva and automatically shower filth on any other. I think that maybe the lesson is: talent will out.

When it Comes to Happiness...

I don't care; this is the kind of thing in the face of which I'm perfectly helpless. As so often, though, if you pay too much attention, it grows deeper and, inevitably, darker. Happy go lucky? Sometimes. Her own superintendent? Rarely, and least of all here, a star on the ascendent. And there's the way that the choreography - and Judy is too rarely praised for her gift for motion, if not, strictly speaking, for dance - seems just barely to be reining her in.

And that happiness? She didn't, at least consistently, have her share; but how much more she gave, and gives.

The Perfect Blendship

I'm especially fond of pictures of Judy - and there are many - with her friends. They tend to be taken at times that reinforce the mantra one hears from so many people who knew her: that at least some of the time, and often much of the time, she had a wonderful time. That's somehow comforting.

Of course - this being Judy - it also stirs up feelings quite opposite, ones that dwell on the special sadness of someone who knew and was adored by everyone interesting in the whole world who still managed to squander all that and die alone, sharing a house with someone who, by comparison, she barely knew.

One can also marvel at the idea that one of these remarkable creatures is still with us. Images like this seem as much ancient history as if they were of Jenny Lind, David Garrick, and Lillie Langtry.

Accept Some Substitutes

Thinking about Judy Garland requires accepting a certain blurring of boundaries: in the way that she herself performed, turning a standard concert recital into a kind of primal drama uniting the spectators and the spectacle (will she? can she? she must! she can!); in the way that images from the end blur with the beginning, Dorothy overlaying TV Judy or, just a few years later, The Oldest Woman in the World; or how even today we look for Judy moments in her daughter (think how hard it must be, at 60-odd and one of the bigger stars in the world, to have people still startled - and somehow not always pleased - that you're still alive, let alone performing, let alone frequently doing so quite well).

The boundaries even blur between the woman who was born Frances Gumm and the image that she became, which continues, in ways large and small, to flourish even in her still-mourned absence. Here we see, for example, Garland impersonator extraordinaire Mr. Jim Bailey, who has been performing Judy onstage almost twice as long as she did. When he did a series of concerts in London this past summer, one paper wrote, "Bailey inhabits Garland’s persona to such an extent that, well, there she is. It is a supreme illusion, a sort of perfect madness... It is not like someone acting. It’s almost insane." And that seems right, appropriate.

I first saw Bailey more than twenty years ago; he was Judy-Dorothy at a Wizard of Oz convention held, of all places, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In attendance were celebrities big (Margaret Hamilton*) and small (literally - a number of the Munchkins). Bailey was the no-questions-asked star, however, and marvelous. Now it strikes me that more years have passed between that lovely Philadelphia Saturday 'round about 1980 and today than did between Dorothy-Judy and the Sixties-Concert-Judy Bailey currently performs. And he's been doing it, one way or other, long enough that Judy herself coached him on the fine points.

It's all enough to make one a little dizzy, but somehow that seems right, too. I think I need to sit down and listen for a while, perhaps to Carnegie Hall Judy, perhaps the finest one of all...

* Tiny, sharp, and very dear. I have her autograph tucked away somewhere - she appended next to her signature WWW in memory of her role, long before those letters meant anything else.