I suppose I just still love the girl who was up there on the screen in the 30’s and 40’s–not only the girl from Oz and St. And I’m not drawn to sagas of self-destructing divas. I’m not a Judy cultist–I didn’t standingly ovate at the Palace or the Palladium or Carnegie Hall (I never saw her perform live) I wasn’t one of the 20,000 mourners who filed past her open coffin at Frank Campbell’s funeral parlor in 1969 I didn’t bid on her ruby slippers when they came up at auction. Well, I care–at least enough to read all of Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, by Gerald Clarke, biographer of Truman Capote. When is enough enough? What is there left to say? And–more than 30 years after her death–who cares? press releases to “in-depth” journalism by Shana Alexander and Barbara Grizzuti Harrison–and, in case you missed it back in 1975, a reissue of Gerold Frank.

Just last year saw Judy Garland: Beyond the Rainbow by Sheridan Morley and Ruth Leon, and Rainbow, a collection of Judyana ranging from M.G.M. There are also memoirs by her last husband, Mickey Deans, and her younger daughter, Lorna Luft, and her star turns in so many other autobiographies, from Mickey Rooney’s to second husband Vincente Minnelli’s. Meyer’s: In 315 pages he chronicles its breakage, day by excruciating day, through the two months during which he and Judy met, fell in love, got engaged and split). John Meyer called his 1983 memoir Heartbreaker (the heart was Mr. More recently there have been The Complete Judy Garland: The Ultimate Guide to Her Career in Films, Records, Concerts, Radio, and Television, 1935-1969 (1990) and John Fricke’s handsome, fact-filled Judy Garland: World’s Greatest Entertainer (1992) and David Shipman’s solid Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (1993). Steiger reveals that when young Frances Gumm changed her name to Judy Garland, “she took on the vibration of the number nine.”)

And what about the paperback quickie, Judy Garland, by Brad Steiger, rushed out in 1969, the year of her death? (In his extended section on “Judy and the Occult,” neatly divided into subsections on astrology, graphology and numerology, Mr. Somewhere over the rainbow Judy Garland is plaintively asking the bluebirds why then, oh why yet another biography? Didn’t the job get done in 1975, the year of Anne Edwards’ less-than-accurate biography, and Gerold Frank’s exhaustive study, and Young Judy by David Dahl and Barry Kehoe, and Christopher Finch’s excellent Rainbow: The Stormy Life of Judy Garland ? Two years earlier there had been Little Girl Lost, a fan’s tribute from Al DiOrio Jr., and three years before that, The Other Side of the Rainbow, Mel Tormé’s unhappy account of Judy’s doomed television series. Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, by Gerald Clarke.

Get happy gerald clarke