In a photograph snapped on the evening of April 23, 1961, a line of disembodied hands reach out to grasp for Judy Garland onstage at Carnegie Hall. They belonged to a group of men whose allegiance to the star was as passionate as it was fraught; as bound up in their identification with her strength and humor as with the many troubles of her life. Their cohort could only be spoken about in code, and in time, a whole vocabulary emerged to describe them: friends of Dorothy, the boys in the band, Best Judys. To journalists and outsiders they were objects of amusement, if not outright scorn: “the boys in tight trousers,” “ever-present bluebirds,” or as one writer bluntly called them, “a flutter of fags.”
What’s most striking about this image is Garland’s responsiveness to the people connected to those flailing limbs. Her eyes are cast downward, reciprocating their gaze, engaging them as individuals rather than an undifferentiated mass. Most accounts of that evening are of a restless and animated audience, leaping out of their seats and swarming the footlights to be closer to the singer. According to one review, the fervor was so intense “you could not tell whether the crowd was clapping, shouting, screaming, laughing, or crying. The sound suddenly had no character. It was just an expression of total approval and acceptance.”
“It was, even by the strictest definition, perfect,” Gerald Clarke, Garland’s biographer, wrote of her series of performances at the storied New York concert hall. But strict perfection is at odds with Garland’s enduring appeal. The expressiveness of her voice outpaced its technical merits. Her genius was using a flawed human instrument to communicate something far more complicated than a lovely song sung straight. She approached show tunes and pop standards with such unguarded emotion that they came to seem disarmingly personal, no matter how well-known or widely performed. Despite her music’s theatricality, the scrim separating the person from the performer was unusually thin: the draw of a Garland concert had as much to do with her glamorous presence as her unbridled singing.
The mystique of Carnegie Hall was only enhanced by the success of its recording. Judy at Carnegie Hall spent 95 weeks on the charts and 13 of them at the No. 1 spot. It won several top awards at the 1962 Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, the first ever awarded to a woman. It was a record that lived up to the hyperbole of its liner notes and soon was widely known as “the greatest night in show business history.” After a sometimes rocky 1950s, it once again reaffirmed the star power Garland had always possessed, marking the moment when the singer and her audience were in perfect sync with one another; when the peak of her powers as an artist was met with the kind of sustained and unconditional recognition she’d always sought.
Though beloved by her audience, Garland was also the subject of decades of ridicule and gossip about her romantic failure, substance abuse, and professional unpredictability. If she didn't have an enduring romantic partnership, she often found love through applause, forming a complex circuit of affection between herself and the public. This was especially true among pre-Stonewall gay fans, who heard reflections of their own perilous lives in the resilience she embodied. To listen to Judy Garland was not only to feel “total approval and acceptance,” but to be recognized for one’s difference and embraced for it too.
Born Frances Ethel Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, the yet-to-be-christened Garland was marked for success at an early age. Thrust into a performing group with her only modestly talented sisters, “Baby” Gumm was quickly singled out by her legendarily awful stage mother, Ethel, as the most likely potential star. The family relocated to Lancaster, California, where Ethel dedicated her weekends to hauling her youngest to auditions. Her efforts paid off when, in 1935, Garland was signed to MGM. Judy’s voice was so outsized and affecting that it could cow bullies into submission; it could telegraph feelings so beyond her years that executives were unsure how to make use of her. She was considered too old to be a child star, too plain to be a glamor girl, and too “fat” to be a sex symbol. MGM’s dedication to policing the young actress’ weight was notorious: hiring spies to catch her eating, pushing unhealthy fad diets, comparing her to an overweight mannequin, and most crucially, putting her on a pharmacy’s worth of pills.
From early on, shame defined Garland’s persona. Where the stars of the late 1950s and ’60s would go on to make unguarded teenage emotion central to pop, Garland disclosed feelings that seemed more related to early adolescence. The spur that sets a given track into motion often isn’t angst but embarrassment. It’s present in her earliest numbers like “You Made Me Love You,” which she originally sang from the perspective of a moony-eyed young fan longing for the impossible embrace of her idol, and reaches its pinnacle with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a song so naked in its yearning that it feels almost intrusive to listen to. By the time Garland stepped onstage at Carnegie Hall to perform both numbers, she’d grown into her powers but preserved their signature tension. The “triumph” of so much of Garland’s music is of conquering self-consciousness with talent, and in doing so, attaining a freedom unfettered from shame.
In 1950, after years of being drugged by the studio and overworked to the brink of psychosis, Garland was effectively kicked out of the film industry. At the behest of her husband, Sid Luft, she pivoted to live performances and reminded everyone what MGM had long exploited her for: the sheer power of her voice. The tour’s success reinstated her in Hollywood, but by the end of the decade, she was in a rough way. Her marriage to Luft was falling apart due to his colossal mismanagement of her fortune, and her health was rapidly deteriorating. Doctors told her that hepatitis would likely leave her incapacitated for the rest of her life. Tellingly, it was news that she initially seemed to greet with some relief, as though it would finally allow her to have a moment’s rest. But after she got wise to the extent of her financial troubles, it became clear that rest was not an option. After a period of convalescence, Garland was able to partially re-generate her liver, hire new management, and get back on the road.
Unlike her extravagant shows from the 1950s, Carnegie Hall was envisioned as a straightforward engagement. No circus acts, no cheap thrills, just Judy backed by a 40-piece orchestra. The setlist was a series of highs drawn from every era of her discography, from breakthrough hits (“You Made Me Love You,” “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”) to film performances (“The Trolley Song,” “The Man That Got Away”) to mature standards (“Do It Again”) and classics from the American songbook (“Swanee,” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”). These were songs that she had lived with and performed over and over again, that had developed a universe of popular recognition and quiet personal subtext. You don’t need to know, for instance, that Garland’s original performance of “You Made Me Love You” prompted Mayer to finally recognize her star power to hear the emotional economy of her delivery at Carnegie Hall, the ease with which she can shade reminiscence with regret. At 13 years old, she was told to sing “Zing!” at her very best because her dying father would be listening over the radio. But understanding that history isn’t necessary for grasping the heaviness beneath the song’s light heart.
After basking in the applause, the first sound that Garland makes on the record is a flattered but self-deprecating “oh!” Then she kicks off into “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You).” Self-effacement and self-empowerment go hand in hand for Garland: the song is a call to optimism in the face of personal ruin that’s paced like a stand-up comedy routine. Between warbling verses, Garland rattles off a list of troubles that run from petty slights to outright devastation, practically inviting the listener to map the song’s catalog of misfortune onto the gossip cycle surrounding her own personal life. After being deceived, told she looks stout, handed a subpoena, and having her groom get cold feet, Garland sings a mantra for survival: “Forget your troubles/C’mon get happy!”
Though that motto may be saccharine, Garland makes its positivity sound like a kind of faith. The attitude of unyielding cheer in the face of collapse, reflective of the musical theater tradition in which she cut her teeth, is like an inversion of rock’s detached cool or punk’s ferocious snarl. But it can be just as defiant of a rejection: a refusal to be diminished by life in the face of mundanity or outright ruin. Garland sums it up multiple times throughout the evening, like in “San Francisco,” where she plays up the melodrama of the original number before the arrangement quickens and she flips it from a dirge into a brassy homecoming. “That’s Entertainment!” elevates the idea to cosmic scale, paraphrasing Shakespeare to sum up theater’s ability to elevate everyday mediocrity into a vast human comedy: “The world is a stage/The stage is a world of entertainment!”
From Dorothy’s implacable longing to Esther’s hometown pride in Meet Me In St. Louis, Garland’s appeal was thoroughly rooted in nostalgia. Judy at Carnegie Hall was composed primarily of numbers that dated back to the 1920s and 1930s, which she managed to keep relatively fresh by accommodating elements of jazz and swing into her arrangements. The nostalgia she inspired in the early ’60s was two-pronged: for the Golden Age of Hollywood and the long-lost world of vaudeville, where the Gumm family had gotten its start. That nostalgia was not entirely benign: When critics needed a point of comparison for the young Garland, many reached for vaudeville star Al Jolson, America’s most famous blackface performer.
Garland covers two songs popularized by Jolson on Carnegie Hall: George Gershwin’s “Swanee,” which she had also performed in 1954’s A Star Is Born, and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” In both cases, her pleas to return home to “mammy” have aged as poorly as the blackface she once donned for 1939’s Babes In Arms. But these are the only wrinkles in an otherwise flawless evening, and reminders that the feigned, backward-looking innocence of the American songbook is far more dated than the worldliness of Garland’s singing.
After a lifetime of stewing underneath a veneer of perfect poise, Garland developed a razor-sharp wit and self-deprecating sense of humor that would make her a talk show favorite toward the end of her life, even as she was left slurring and glassy-eyed in her seat. Her stories between numbers are genuinely funny, as when she recalls using a safety pin to affix an ill-fitting evening dress for a seated performance at a piano: “I sat down and the pin came undone and into my derrière. I’ve never sung so high or so fast.”
On the other hand, the anecdote she tells of a journalist flattering her all night only to publish an article about how fat she’s gotten is hard to laugh off, even as it’s played for comedy. “I’ve spent years and years and years trying to please through singing or acting,” Garland once raged on tape recordings for a memoir that never materialized, “and yet I’ve constantly been written or talked about as an unfit person.” Those tapes reveal the flipside to the concert’s circuit of affection, the life largely not captured on record: of lonely, inebriated nights in far-flung hotel rooms, stone broke and many miles from her children, years of anger surfacing as her battle-honed sharpness dissolves into chemical slush.
The most affecting numbers on Judy at Carnegie Hall are the ones where she communicates pain and loss, like the aching way she phrases “The man who won you/Has run off and undone you” on “The Man That Got Away,” or her powerful belting as the song blazes to a climax. In that number and “Stormy Weather,” Garland’s use of dynamics demonstrates her tight rapport with her backing band, allowing the music to swell and recede so that almost pitifully small levels of woundedness eventually culminate into pyrotechnic displays of emotion.
“Come Rain or Come Shine” rides a breakneck drum line that becomes increasingly frantic as it’s accompanied by strings, horns, and a relentless ride cymbal, with Garland’s voice growing more ragged with desire the more aggressive the music becomes. By the end of the song, her ferocity is matched by a crowd that won’t stop screaming. “Alone Together” dramatizes its deep weariness and devotion with a pitch-black vortex of woodwinds and strings. Wielding the powerful lower end of her contralto for all of its resolve, and the corroded edge of her vibrato for all of its turbulent emotion, Garland encircles the audience with her passion while conveying a fear it might not be enough to protect them.
Later, after flubbing a verse in “You Go to My Head” and gamely carrying on, she hedges her performance of “If Love Were All” by bringing the lyrics sheet onstage for a performance backed only by piano. Garland more than makes up for her caution by how totally she occupies the loneliness at the song’s heart and the despair of its final lament: “But I believe that since my life began/The most I’ve had is just a talent to amuse.” Though their music is quite different, Garland’s appeal is not entirely dissimilar to that of later performers like Elliott Smith or Kurt Cobain, although her scorching honesty is complicated by her need to express herself through the veil of other people’s songs. If those performers gained part of their power from raw disclosures of pain, what animates Garland is an almost unbearable dose of dramatic irony.
This capacity to read Garland beyond face value—to sense, for instance, as she breaks down over the hopelessness of her partner’s addiction in A Star Is Born, that she was also talking about herself—also placed her at the forefront of camp. The “failed seriousness,” as Susan Sontag later put it, of a child star who developed a lifetime of trademark tics to cope with the spotlight, has been a boon to generations of drag queens and actresses in want of an award-winning biopic.
Though the lexicon of contemporary gay culture is unthinkable without “Judy, Judy, Judy,” the audience who clamored for Judy at Carnegie Hall inhabited a vastly more hostile world than the modern listener. Apart from the brutal policing and social ostracization, the 1950s and early 1960s was a heyday of Freudianism in America, and the profile that emerged of homosexuals as effeminate, repressed, and grotesquely sentimental elicited both patronizing sympathy and flagrant contempt. In a very homophobic article for Esquire in 1969, William Goldman managed to sum up both: “First, if [gays] have an enemy, it is age. And Garland is youth, perennially, over the rainbow. And second, the lady has suffered. Homosexuals tend to identify with suffering.”
