Judy Died For Our Sins
I’ll go my way by myself — this is the end of romance. The last performance of the last episode of The Judy Garland Show, 29 September 1963–29 March 1964. Judy, humiliated by CBS, and not for the first time: subjected to three different producers, innumerable changes to format and casting, several sniping press releases, and the occasional summons to network headquarters in New York for notes (e. one heartbreaking g.: “you’re touching the guests too much and must stop”). I’ll go my way by myself — love is only a dance.
Face drawn, eyes of liner and shadow, she wears a floral shift cinched about the waist — almost a housecoat, but for its dusting of sequins. I’ll try to apply myself and teach my heart how to sing. Where the camera catches these, they read as explosions of dark light. I’ll go my way by myself like a bird on the wing. Judy holds her silvery microphone delicately, blinking back tears, the camera tight around her face. The occasional quavering smile is intimate: sudden-slow, rueful, a secret between her and the audiences she feared as much as she feared to live without. I’ll face the unknown — I’ll build a world of my own.
CBS blamed her for the show’s failure, and told the press that she terminated the contract to spend more time with her children. This would not be the last comeback to come back to bite her — the Palace was still ahead — but it was among them. No one knows better than I myself: I’m by myself, alone. The number was cut by network executives, who considered it too dark.
And in and through and underneath it all, that voice. Real and nontrivial are the ways in which it was always flirting with disaster — the ways in which it threatened to crack, the ways in which it was all throat and husk, the ways in which it strained to perform an elaborate and unsustainable fiction over and against its own limitations. But no less real, and no more trivial, are the ways in which it — this warbling vibrato’d formal mess of technique and training — was a failure from the start. No operatically precise Jeanette MacDonald, Judy, no restrainèdly all-pro Babs. Half the charm of a torch singer is how she’s always about to gutter.
Yet it is failure that we want, in times of crisis — failure that comforts us for our own limitations, failure that impels us towards our own transcendences. Judy’s Technicolor voice (saturated, klieg-lit, realer than real; impossible, unbalanced, doomed), the voice for whose loss we once burned Manhattan, is the voice par excellence for disaster.
- We’re watching: Julio Torres’ standup set at Paste Studios.
- We’re reading: Danez Smith’s “The 17-Year-Old & the Gay Bar.”
- We’re listening to: Neko Case, K.D. Lang, and Laura Veirs, “Atomic Number.”
