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Next, more sentimentality. To spell Judy in her nightly 90-minute appearances, there are song-and-dance interludes by her daughter Lorna, 14, and son Joey, 12. Neither has overpowering show-business potential, but the fans love them. Judy also gets a breather by coaxing such professionals in the audience as Duke Ellington or Bea Lillie onto the stage. Finally, and inevitably, comes Over the Rainbow. Some nights when she is too drained, it is more croaked than crooned. "Stay here and sing" someone cries amid the shrieks and bravos. "Don't ever go away!" Later, when she emerges from the stage door, some 200 worshipers are waiting —even if it is 2 a.m. They don't tear at her, though, as they might some other superstar. They reach out for Judy tenderly, as if she were the last frail leaf of November.
Happy Bluebirds. Such adulation, says her third husband Sid Luft, father of Lorna and Joey and producer of her current tour, "is greater than she ever had before." Judging from the full houses at the Palace, he must be right. Curiously, a disproportionate part of her nightly claque seems to be homosexual. The boys in the tight trousers roll their eyes, tear at their hair and practically levitate from their seats, particularly when Judy sings: If happy little bluebirds fly
Beyond the rainbow,
Why, oh why can't I?*
Psychiatrists offer multiple explanations for the phenomenon. Manhattan's Dr. Leah Schaefer claims that homosexuals gravitate toward superstars because "these are people they can idolize and idealize without getting too close to. In Judy's case," she adds, "the attraction might be made considerably stronger by the fact that she has survived so many problems; homosexuals identify with that kind of hysteria." Agrees another Manhattan psychiatrist, Dr. Lawrence Hatterer: "Judy was beaten up by life, embattled, and ultimately had to become more masculine. She has the power that homosexuals would like to have, and they attempt to attain it by idolizing her."
But Garland affects a far broader audience than her ever-present little bluebirds. She has the true entertainer's capacity for transmitting her feelings across the footlights. Nor is it a oneway message. "Audiences," she says, "have kept me alive." As she told her exuberant cult at the Palace last week: "Everything I want is right here."
* A female impersonator at Manhattan's East Village, who specializes in imitating Judy's style and bills himself as Bonnie Garland, showed up at the Palace premiere in the same costume Judy wore.