Get Happy

Judy Garland. The girl with the pigtails in THE WIZARD OF OZ. The brightest star of the Hollywood musical & an entertainer of almost magical power. The woman of half a dozen comebacks & a hundred heartbreaks. To tell her story, Gerald Clarke too k10 years, travelled thousands of miles across two continents, conducted hundreds of interviews, & ug through mountains of documents, many of which were unavailable to other biographers. Combining a novelist's skill & a movie director's eye,...
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Judy Garland. The girl with the pigtails in THE WIZARD OF OZ. The brightest star of the Hollywood musical & an entertainer of almost magical power. The woman of half a dozen comebacks & a hundred heartbreaks. To tell her story, Gerald Clarke too k10 years, travelled thousands of miles across two continents, conducted hundreds of interviews, & ug through mountains of documents, many of which were unavailable to other biographers. Combining a novelist's skill & a movie director's eye, Clarke re-creates the golden age of Hollywood with cinematic urgency, bringing to vivid life the characters who played leading roles in the unending drama of Judy Garland: Louis B Mayer, the patriarch of MGM; sexy Lana Turner, Judy's friend & idol, who had a habit of trying to snatch away any man Judy expressed interest in; clarinetist Artie Shaw, handsome Tyrone Power; boy genius Orson Welles & brilliant director Vincente Minnelli, who fathered her first child, Liza. Toward the end of her life, Garland tried to tell her own story. With access to her tape recordings - & her revelatory unfinished manuscript - Clarke is able to tell Judy's story as she herself might have told it.