Singers: End of the Rainbow

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The Scarecrow came to her funeral; so did Andy Hardy. So, in spirit, did the countless legions of Judy Garland's fans, 21,000 of whom appeared in per son and jammed the streets of Manhattan's Upper East Side last week to file past the bier where her body, dressed in the ankle-length gown she had worn at her fifth wedding, lay in state. Many were moved to tears when a young girl from The Bronx began to play Judy's records on a battery-powered phonograph. Some, of course, came only out of curiosity. Others were responding to a remembered image of the plucky, wide-eyed little girl in The Wizard of Oz who had said: "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Be cause if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with."

Why Change? Unlike Dorothy of Oz, Judy Garland never really had a backyard to call her own. Born Frances Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minn., Judy was a vaudeville trouper at the age of five. Her father died when she was twelve, and her mother, as Judy remarked bitterly years later, "was no good for anything except to create cha os and fear. She was the worst — the real-life Wicked Witch of the West." The nearest thing to a home that Judy had was the MGM lot in Hollywood, where — between long agonizing hours before the camera — Louis B. Mayer sent her to the studio school with the rest of his adolescent stars.

To her studio, Judy was not a child but a box-office property with rare nat ural gifts. Rarest of all was the instinctive, trembling vocal style that somehow managed to combine womanly pathos and childish innocence. There were no singing lessons to mar her delivery, nor any acting lessons to ruin the uninhibited intensity of her stage presence. "She was so sweet," recalls Jack Haley, who played the Tin Man. "I would say, 'Well, Judy, if you ever become a star, please stay as sweet as you are,' and she would say, 'I don't know what could change me, Jack. Why would anything change?' "

But she did change. At 21 she was visiting a psychiatrist regularly and living on pills: pills to put her to sleep, pills to wake her up, pills to help keep her weight down. Eleven years, two husbands, and 20 movies (including the Andy Hardy series with Mickey Rooney, Meet Me in St. Louis and Easter Parade) after making Oz, she had established herself as the best of a bevy of girlish filmland warblers that included Gloria Jean, Deanna Durbin and Jane Powell. But she could no longer handle the pressure of stardom. She began showing up for work late or sick, then did not show up at all. She was suspended once, twice, and finally, in 1950, fired for good.

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