Hollywood: The New New Garland

It was a time, if ever there was one, for the tic. It was time for all the attractively nervous and neurotic gestures, twitches and gloom, that have long characterized the performances of Judy Garland. She came on stage last week in Chicago’s great Arie Crown Theater and, after telling the 5,000 people there that she was so happy she just wanted to sing, started out with Hello Bluebird. Bluebird got stuck in her throat. She hacked and coughed and failed to clear it. “The bluebird is in a little trouble,” she said cheerfully.

Then her voice cracked in the middle of the last note of Do It Again and she shouted, “Oh, damn it.” She walked off stage and came back with a glass of water and a peppermint Life Saver. She cleared her throat, coughed, sipped water, sucked on the Life Saver, sat on the piano bench and said amicably, “Why don’t you people just mill around for awhile.”

New Wardrobe. When she got up, she tore through “Rockabye your baby with a Dixie melody,” hit all the right spots, and drew a tightrope champion’s applause when she reached the other end. Singing Swanee, she pointed to an imaginary note high in the air, raised her sights, and shot a clean hole right through the middle. More applause. With a trip offstage for throat spray, she went on, getting better and better, until at the end some 300 people rushed the stage to shake her hand.

Where once she might have been expected to come apart like a sleeping pill in a puddle, she had turned near disasters into comedy skits and had brought off a remarkable performance despite a condition locally known as Chicago throat. She looked different, too. The wattles and jowls were gone. She has lost more than 30 Ibs., now weighs 102, but when someone asks her how much weight she has lost, she says, “About 185 Ibs.”—i.e., her former husband, Producer Sid Luft. Instead of the familiar semi-kimono paunch-hiding maternity robes, she was wearing tight skirts and ski pants.

Life Begins. “I think right now is possibly the best time of my life,” says Judy Garland III. “I’m really starting to do my best work. I have three marvelous children, and I think I have a brand-new career opening up. Things have been different since my hepatitis attack in 1959, when they told me I might not live. I guess I was so concerned about my liver that I didn’t have time to worry about anything else. Also, I turned 40 a few months ago. and when you hit that stage you feel that maybe now people won’t think of you as a stupid backward child that you wind up and send out on a stage to sing.”

She describes her new way of life as “halfway between a nun and an athlete.” On concert days she goes into total seclusion (“like Stalin lying in state”), and when the awaited hour comes near she does laps backstage to warm up. “I’m not a half child any more,” she burbles. “Before, nobody ever let me do anything for myself. Everybody took care of things for me. First my mother, then my husband. Oh, the early days at M-G-M were a lot of laughs. It was all right if you were young and frightened—and we stayed frightened. Look at us—Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney and me—we all came out of there a little ticky and kooky.

“Now I’m getting a little too old to be towed around. I’m out of debt, and it’s a nice feeling to have money in the bank. I have inner satisfaction and peace of mind for a change. I’m doing my best living now and I’m very optimistic. I have a lot of things to look forward to.”