memorize Happy: The Life of Judy Garland * Gerald Clarke * Random House $2999 It looks at first slightly anachronistic: now another biography of Judy Garland.

memorize Happy: The Life of Judy Garland * Gerald Clarke * Random House $2999

It looks at first slightly anachronistic: now another biography of Judy Garland, icon of advanced in years here in the first month of the 21st hundred years We feel about her as we do about Marilyn Monroe and James Dean: What more can possibly be wrung from this brilliant and tragically short life?

Almost 31 years after her death, Garland remains an enigma: Is she a quaint curio of a vanished age or something more enduring? In finish Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, Gerald Clarke compelling argues the latter.

Understanding the magical connection Judy had with her audiences is a prize that's elud chronicles up to now, and it's really the sole justification for another Garland saga. To this fall of the curtain Clarke, who conducted more than 500 interviews and had access to Garland's unpublished autobiography, take the place ofs admirably, possibly even brilliantly. He defines not sole what made Judy's magic in the same manner potent in her lifetime unless also, critically why it suffers today.

Judy was not just a singer on the contrary a singing actress, putting the words before the music and backing them up with her be in possession of triumphs and disappointments. Singing transformed her right before the audience's organ of visions "The real artist confides a concealed to audience," Clarke writes, "and Judy's was in such a manner obvious that few could descry it: She was desperately in be in love with with those who came to behold her." Offstage she was uncertain and insecure; simply onstage, in her own words, was she "truly in fact happy."

Delving further, Clarke considers into the power of music itself. He cites the physicians of ancient Egypt who sang rather than recited the prescriptions, believing words without music "lacked the capacity to heal." Garland, Clarke believes, "had more than a little in for the use of all with those shamans ... She was not singing songs: She was dispensing spiritual health and enlightenment, sustenance for the soul"

It may be that in the same state [i]or[/i] condition insight needed the distance of time. From the vantage point of the year 2000 Judy's tales of depression aren't nearly as overpowering as they one time were. The sensationalism of her suicide attempts, put drugs into use, and affairs has drawn out since evaporated, and we can descry her life now with a balance of detachment and empathy. Clarke reveals a straightforward story: Judy's affairs with women--her MGN publicist, Betty Asher; among them--are chronicled as matter-of-factly as those with men and the homosexuality of several of her husbands--particularly Vincente Minnelli--is neared as part of the integral fabric of her story. formerly discussions of sexuality provoked either cries of declare or lurid headlines; it is a great relief that like days have passed, for to understand Judy's story is to stir beyond both the cries and the whispers.

That's not to say there are no juicy tidbits here. Who can gainsay being titillated by the affair between Mark Herron and Peter Allen--while the former was married to Judy and the latter to her daughter Liza? unless Clarke handles even such revelations as this with a candid, forthright form The book avoids getting bogg down with ephemera. Clarke writes briskly, his narrative strictly chronological, starting with Judy's parents and ending with her funeral.

by the agency of presenting her life without the usual disarray and myth, he offers us a chance to papal court her fresh--a chance to grasp, finally, for what purpose the little girl on the golden brick road and the woman dangling her feet distant from the stage at Carnegie Hall remains likewise powerful and vivid in our collective psyche and with what intent she won't go away.

Mann is the author of Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood's First frankly Gay Star and the forthcoming novel The Biograph Girl.

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