Judy, Judy, Judy

All the things Garland was

by Steve Vineberg

When you watch the ebullient, chubby-faced teen Judy Garland in musicals like Pigskin Parade and the 1938 Broadway Melody and, of course, The Wizard of Oz, or in her storybook ingenue roles in the '40s, it seems almost impossible that she'd end up as the fervently over-the-top belter of the '50s and '60s. That shocking transition is chronicled in the new box Judy (32 Records): four CDs accompanied by a half-hour video of excerpts from her TV show, which aired in 1963-'64. No wider-ranging sampling has ever been taken of Garland's career. The first disc begins with the tunes she sang at seven, as half of the Gumm Sisters vaudeville act, in a pair of 1929 Warner Brothers shorts; the final disc concludes with her rendition of "Over the Rainbow" in a London concert appearance less than six months before her death in 1969, at 47.

The Gumm Sisters sides are really just curios for serious Garland collectors -- the girls sound like baby copies of the Brox Sisters and other popular close-harmony female groups of the era. But this first (and best) disc offers a dozen wonderful recordings of Garland between 1935 and 1947 -- her golden period. The voice you hear on "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart" is already so full-throated and controlled that the hint of baby talk in some phrases keeps catching you off guard. The number begins as a ballad and then swings, halfway through, into a junior-miss version of a boogie-woogie; its subject isn't really romance (Garland was 13) but the joy of singing.

You'll find most of the songs you might expect on this disc: "Stompin' at the Savoy" (her first single); "Over the Rainbow"; "For Me and My Gal," with Gene Kelly; "The Trolley Song," from Meet Me in St. Louis. And the justly famous dramatization of an adolescent crush (from the 1938 Broadway Melody), "(Dear Mr. Gable) You Made Me Love You," with its sudden, startling leap from little-kid awe to a declaration of emotional commitment belted out in the last verse ("I don't care what happens/Let the whole world stop"). But there are also items you haven't heard before, from '40s radio shows: "All the Things You Are," "I've Got You Under My Skin," and a lovely rendition of Gershwin's "Liza," which is dedicated to her eight-month-old daughter.

Judy was assembled by diehards, so it weighs more heavily on her concert years than on her career as MGM's leading musical-comedy heroine. I don't share the general enthusiasm for the Garland of A Star Is Born (1954) and beyond, bleary-faced and desperate for audience approval, one hand clutching a mike for dear life, the other curled against her hip, come-hither style. The accepted wisdom about the later Garland tracks is that as her voice deteriorated under the strain of chemical addiction and psychic distress, as she quavered more and more on held notes and garbled more and more final consonants, her feelings came through more nakedly than ever before -- and there's no denying that's true. But the spectacle of a woman coming apart at the seams isn't, perhaps, for everyone.

Disc two offers a number of pleasures: "Get Happy," from the underrated Summer Stock; Harold Arlen's great torch song "The Man That Got Away," from A Star Is Born (the earliest and least troubling of her diva recordings); "How About Me" and "Me and My Shadow." But the neurotic underlayer in her singing gains the upper hand for good around 1960 -- in this collection, that happens on "Who Cares" -- and never loses its hold.

The last two discs are dedicated to The Judy Garland Show, which is legendary among her fans, but on most of these tracks she sounds pretty bad. (And, as the video clips attest, she looks worse.) The odd tune is sweetly modest ("When Your Lover Has Gone," on the video) or genuinely affecting ("Cottage for Sale"), but she shoots for too many boffo refrains, and it's painful to hear her rip through songs she once glided through, like "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe." She shouldn't have attempted "Shenandoah," and her wet-eyed version of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" is embarrassing. (It's even more jarring on the video, where her trademark gestures, designed to hug the audience to her, are weirdly at odds with the lyric.) And her duets with guests like Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, and daughter Liza Minnelli always feel forced, competitive.

If you have the same difficulty with the psychodramatic side of Garland as I do, you may find another new CD, Judy Garland in Hollywood (Turner Classic Movies), a tonic. It offers two dozen performances from Garland's movies, beginning with "The Texas Tornado," from the 1936 Pigskin Parade, and ending with three numbers from 1963's I Could Go On Singing. There's little overlap with the Judy box, and you may have forgotten she ever sang some of these songs, like "F.D.R. Jones" (from Babes on Broadway), Jerome Kern's "Look for the Silver Lining" (Till the Clouds Roll By), Rodgers & Hart's "Johnny One Note" (Words and Music), Arlen's gorgeous heartache of a song "Last Night When We Were Young" (In the Good Old Summertime), the "Friendly Star" duet with Gene Kelly (Summer Stock). When she performs "Happy Harvest," the joyous Judy Garland of the "Stompin' at the Savoy" days seems to return in grown-up form. That's how I prefer to remember her.