When Judy Garland died in 1969, she left behind beautiful artifacts that would preserve her as a Hollywood icon: films, heartbreaking concert performances, and television episodes she cheerfully taped alongside her three beloved children. But Garland also left behind a haunting batch of audiotapes that revealed the performer’s rage during her final years—when she was deeply in debt, losing a substance-addiction battle, and engaged in a custody battle over the children.
“She was commissioned to write her biography and kind of endlessly missed the deadline, so they ended up bringing her a tape recorder, and said, essentially, ‘Look, just press play and start talking, and we’ll type it up,’” explained Judy screenwriter Tom Edge (The Crown) of one of his most invaluable—but disturbing—research sources. “She made a start at it, but on some of them she sounds like she was in quite an awful condition. And you really hear the deep-seated anger in some of those at the way that she feels she was exploited and let down…. There’s a really palpable sense [that] she can’t quite believe that she’s been working since she was two years old, and she held this studio movie career, and was a well-paid actor…. Her whole life she has worked and worked and worked, [yet] she finds herself $4 million in debt to the IRS.”
“They are hard to listen to, honestly, because there’s so much fury there mixed in with just an incomprehension of how all this is coming to pass,” said Edge. In one tape, available online, she confesses, “I’m an angry lady. I’ve been insulted, slandered, humiliated…I’m not something you wind up and put on the stage that sings Carnegie Hall albums and you put in the closet.” She cops to personal failings: “I tried my damnedest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over, and I couldn’t. So what. Lots of people can’t.” She begs to no one in particular, “Don’t make a joke of me anymore. People say and print and believe…that I am either a drunk, a drug addict. It’s a goddamned wonder I’m not.” She admits, in another tape, “When I hear back the tapes, I hear that I slur my words very badly, but that doesn’t make too much of a difference as long as my thoughts are not slurred.”
(No matter how slurred her speech is, she regularly expresses unwavering love for and pride of her children. “I’d like to talk about my three successful children,” she says. “They’re great successes unto themselves, without a lot of help.”)
It was the fight in Garland’s voice in those tapes—as well as the wicked sense of humor exhibited in her talk show interviews—that convinced Edge that the performer was “more than a kind of cautionary tale.” He explained, “I think the thing that really surprised me, when I started looking at interview footage of her around that time, was just how funny she was. She was really sharp.” Indeed, in a 1968 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, Garland’s delivery may have been slow but her wit was quick. When the host mentioned that her fans were so loud that it is hard to hear her in concert, she retorted, “That’s because they sing better than I do.”
Said Edge, “I suppose I almost took her stature as a performer for granted, and it was really just kind of looking at how complex she was, flying on her feet and able to wrap an audience around her finger, but also really vulnerable and really carrying a sense of history and sort of, you know, damage done, but a kind of pugnacious refusal to back down or to call it a loss. There’s something really kind of scrappy about her.”
Renée Zellweger channels this swirl of tragic circumstances and conflicting emotions with ease. The film opens with Garland hitting a new low: When she and her children are ejected from a hotel room she cannot afford, Garland begrudgingly leaves her family to fly to London and perform the only job she can book—a five-week stage show. By that point, Garland’s voice was fading and her confidence as a singer was wavering. “It was difficult for her [to perform],” said Edge. “She couldn’t rely on it like she once had. She wasn’t particularly formally trained so it’s not like she’d kind of scrupulously spared her voice over the years.”
The Talk of the Town reviews were damning, and there were reports that Garland would appear onstage late, inebriated, and otherwise ill-equipped for headliner responsibilities. During one show, the performer could not even finish “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The audience—rather than sympathize with the fading star—pelted her with dinner rolls. “There was a real sense of catching this person at a point in their career and sort of bearing witness to the struggle sometimes of not wanting to be there anymore and feeling trapped,” said Edge. To the screenwriter, though, it seemed that Garland genuinely fed off the hard-won—and at that point occasional—affection from her audience. And, for every bad night, Edge said, there also seemed to be a night when Garland would get up onstage and “seemingly want to be no other place in the world.”
Ultimately, Edge decided not to reach out to Garland’s children during his writing process. “In the end I was very resistant to [listen] too closely to any one person’s idea of who she was,” Edge explained. “She was so complex because she had her life and loves broken into many pieces in order to survive a complicated family dynamic with her parents, and then the demands of the studio, and then everything that followed. And so it felt very important to try and look at her and try and get a sense for myself of what lay below the kind of the expert patter.”
By the end of the his research and writing process, Edge—like The Wizard of Oz star herself—couldn’t help feel angry about Garland’s tragic destiny. “I was kind of outraged on her behalf at all of the kind of breakages that were thrown at her during her youth, and how much she had to carry to adulthood just to make her way.” Speaking about Judy—which opens in theaters Friday—Edge said, “I hope ultimately we celebrate her [but] I think there’s a little vein of anger in that she had to fight so hard against all of the damage done to her before she was old enough really to make much choices for herself.”
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