Inside Judy Garland’s Long Lost Book of Poetry

In fashionable civilization today, Judy Garland is champion remembered arsenic an actress, singer, and entertainer extraordinaire whose idiosyncratic struggles often overshadowed her nonrecreational accomplishments.

While she was nether declaration for 15 years with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) during which she starred successful career-defining philharmonic roles successful The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me successful St. Louis, Easter Parade, and galore others, her beingness was plagued by intolerable enactment demands. As such, biographers disagree connected whether it was her parent oregon MGM that got her hooked connected amphetamines to support her going; immoderate the case, it led to a lifelong conflict with intoxicant and substance abuse.

Following her untimely dismissal from MGM successful 1950, she rebounded from a highly publicized termination effort with record-breaking performance appearances that redefined her vocation extracurricular of Hollywood. She received an Academy Award information for what was expected to beryllium her triumphant comeback film, A Star is Born, and became the archetypal pistillate to triumph the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for the unrecorded signaling of Judy astatine Carnegie Hall. Still, fiscal trouble and cause dependence doomed the remainder of her life, and she died from a barbiturate overdose astatine the property of 47 successful 1969.

But 1 information astir Judy Garland that often gets near retired of modern reporting connected the prima is that she was a passionate instrumentality of poetry. In fact, arsenic a teen astatine MGM, she self-published her ain publication of poesy called Thoughts and Poems. It was 10 pages agelong and contained 8 poems. It archetypal published successful 1940 with lone a prime fewer copies fixed retired to adjacent friends. Jack Chitgian Bookbinding Service successful Beverly Hills, who manufactured the book, reprinted an chartless magnitude of copies successful the aboriginal 1970s aft Garland’s death. One transcript that survived was sold astatine auction successful 2017 for $1,600.

According to Manuel Betancourt successful Judy Garland’s Judy astatine Carnegie Hall, the poems Garland wrote successful the 1930s are defined by “overly melodramatic scenes of romance and glamour befitting a teenage miss who pined distant for boys who were ever overmuch much funny in, say, Lana Turner, than Judy herself.” In her aboriginal years, Garland was ever made retired to beryllium the disfigured duckling erstwhile compared to different young MGM stars similar Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ava Gardner. Her archetypal superior romance was with set person Artie Shaw, who near her to elope with Turner successful 1940.

But immoderate the poems inactive accessible contiguous work much blase than lovelorn poems astir being misunderstood oregon teenage puppy love. They negociate to support a consciousness of whimsy and innocence portion besides being omniscient beyond their years. Take a poem titled “Deny Me Not,” for example, that reads: “I tread into a oversea of fire, / Of heartbreak, and of joyousness supreme. / Yet terrifying for its unending depth, of fatality, humility, tragedy, and done these, ghostly reality.” Her stanzas work much similar a young Sylvia Plath much truthful than the lovestruck teen from a Happy Days episode, which is what astir existing documentation connected Thoughts and Poems makes it retired to be.

In 1978, a plethora of Garland’s idiosyncratic and nonrecreational effects that were successful the possession of her 2nd hubby Sid Luft were sold astatine auction successful Los Angeles, wherever Debbie Reynolds, Liberace, and Barry Manilow had reportedly expressed involvement successful attending. Among the items up for auction was a transcript of Thoughts and Poems — possibly the aforesaid transcript that was auctioned disconnected again successful 2017. The New York Times, who interviewed Luft up of the auction, included a fewer lines of an untitled poem presumably from the publication successful their article, which reads: “I’ve done thing wrong, / I’ve whipped down passions, / I’ve turned my backmost connected forbidden treasures, / Closed a quivering caput to quality pleasures, / I’ve stifled each tendency / Blown retired burning passionate occurrence / With achromatic blistery enactment / Through trembling lips.”

It’s astir doubtful arsenic to whether Garland really wrote these lines for Thoughts and Poems when she was 18, having conscionable starred successful the relation of a beingness arsenic Dorothy Gale successful The Wizard of Oz. They’re oddly prophetic of a tortured beingness and vocation that she had not yet lived, wherever men would instrumentality vantage of her practically until the time she died.

Not lone did the legendary histrion and vocalist person different concealed talent, she was much refined and cerebral than her patriarchal manufacture and epoch ever gave her recognition for.