Inside Judy Garland’s Long Lost Book of Poetry

In widespread tradition immediately, Judy Garland is greatest remembered as an actress, singer, and entertainer extraordinaire whose private struggles usually overshadowed her skilled accomplishments.

While she was underneath contract for 15 years with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) throughout which she starred in career-defining musical roles in The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, Easter Parade, and quite a few others, her life was stricken by not possible work calls for. As such, biographers differ on whether or not it was her mom or MGM that acquired her hooked on amphetamines to maintain her going; regardless of the case, it led to a lifelong battle with alcohol and substance abuse.

Following her premature dismissal from MGM in 1950, she rebounded from a extremely publicized suicide try with record-breaking live performance appearances that redefined her profession outdoors of Hollywood. She obtained an Academy Award nomination for what was presupposed to be her triumphant comeback movie, A Star is Born, and have become the primary girl to win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for the dwell recording of Judy at Carnegie Hall. Still, monetary problem and drug dependence doomed the remainder of her life, and she or he died from a barbiturate overdose on the age of 47 in 1969.

But one reality about Judy Garland that always will get unnoticed of fashionable reporting on the star is that she was a passionate fan of poetry. In reality, as a teen at MGM, she self-published her personal guide of poetry referred to as Thoughts and Poems. It was 10 pages lengthy and contained eight poems. It first revealed in 1940 with solely a choose few copies given out to shut associates. Jack Chitgian Bookbinding Service in Beverly Hills, who manufactured the guide, reprinted an unknown quantity of copies within the early Nineteen Seventies after Garland’s dying. One copy that survived was bought at public sale in 2017 for $1,600.

According to Manuel Betancourt in Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall, the poems Garland wrote within the Thirties are outlined by “overly dramatic scenes of romance and glamour befitting a teenage girl who pined away for boys who were always much more interested in, say, Lana Turner, than Judy herself.” In her early years, Garland was at all times made out to be the ugly duckling when in comparison with different younger MGM stars like Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ava Gardner. Her first severe romance was with band chief Artie Shaw, who left her to elope with Turner in 1940.

But some the poems nonetheless accessible immediately learn extra subtle than lovelorn poems about being misunderstood or teenage pet love. They handle to take care of a way of whimsy and innocence whereas additionally being clever past their years. Take a poem titled “Deny Me Not,” for instance, that reads: “I tread into a sea of fire, / Of heartbreak, and of joy supreme. / Yet terrifying for its unending depth, of fatality, humility, tragedy, and through these, ghostly reality.” Her stanzas learn extra like a younger Sylvia Plath extra so than the lovestruck teenager from a Happy Days episode, which is what most current documentation on Thoughts and Poems makes it out to be.

In 1978, a plethora of Garland’s private {and professional} results that have been within the possession of her second husband Sid Luft have been bought at public sale in Los Angeles, the place Debbie Reynolds, Liberace, and Barry Manilow had reportedly expressed curiosity in attending. Among the objects up for public sale was a replica of Thoughts and Poems — maybe the identical copy that was auctioned off once more in 2017. The New York Times, who interviewed Luft forward of the public sale, included a number of traces of an untitled poem presumably from the guide of their article, which reads: “I’ve done nothing wrong, / I’ve whipped down passions, / I’ve turned my back on forbidden treasures, / Closed a quivering mind to human pleasures, / I’ve stifled all desire / Blown out burning passionate fire / With white hot breath / Through trembling lips.”

It’s virtually uncertain as as to whether Garland truly wrote these traces for Thoughts and Poems when she was 18, having simply starred within the function of a lifetime as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz. They’re oddly prophetic of a tortured life and profession that she had not but lived, the place males would take benefit of her virtually till the day she died.

Not solely did the legendary actress and singer possess one other secret expertise, she was extra refined and cerebral than her patriarchal trade and period ever gave her credit score for.