- Convention Hall -

Judy Garland
A Fragile Waif Wanting Love
By John Brod Peters - Globe Democrat

After much anticipation, Judy Garland has come to St. Louis and gone, and the twittering reactions she left in her wake have finally subsided.

And here, as elsewhere, the Garland phenomenon manifested itself to the delight of some and to the dismay of others.  But there is no doubt at all that the Garland cult has its local adherents.

A boisterous prime has not been kind to the sweet young girl who once tripped down the Yellow Brick Road:  four unhappy marriages, a show business career of incredible ups and disastrous downs, a life fraught with apparent uncertainty -- and an unpredictable litany of phenomenal comebacks.

And the current comeback is the most extraordinary of them all, for even staunchest friends of Judy Garland's had to admit that she can't sing like she used to -- when, indeed, she can sing at all.

When she arrived in St. Louis, Judy Garland was in the home stretch of a long tour:  60 odd performances down and six more to go with no time to rest in between.  Such a pace would exhaust anyone, and Miss Garland was understandably -- if not predictably -- in bad voice for her concert here.

The critics were as kind as critics can afford to be -- but they still panned her.  And they had no choice:  the songs were a series of halting starts and hoarse interruptions.  Non-cultists who had paid to hear the Garland voice of old times' sake were disgruntled.  Many left.

But if the concert was a bad concert, it was still a good show.  And as the concert departed from the old music hall format, it approached the tone of an old time revival in the nature and vitality of its inter-communication.

This is what I, a non-believer a skeptic, had come to the show to try to discover:  the secret of the Garland mystique, the Garland charisma -- what it is in a waning and controversial songstress which attracts such devotion.   So we arranged to stand backstage to watch the performance in its entirety.

No special arrangements had been made for the show, which took place on the apron of the Ben Hur stage of Convention Hall -- except for platforms for the orchestra and a cyclorama as a non-descript background.  In such a setting, a performer would have to carry his show through his own personal force -- with little or no help from the setting.

We fidgeted backstage through a lengthy vaudeville routine which took up the first half of the show, and periodic visits to the house revealed a fidgeting audience.  Again and again, I would overhear someone ask, "Where is she?  Has she arrived?"

Shortly after 10 p.m., there was a sudden flurry near the dressing rooms and she was there:  engulfed in an enormous fur coat, accompanied by a considerable entourage.

When it had been feasible, Judy Garland had been going on stage by walking down the aisle through the audience:  a clever -- almost liturgical -- device which allowed her to be close to and identify with her audience from the start.

It was determined, therefore, that she would walk down the aisle of Convention Hall.  This in itself would be an ordeal, for Convention Hall has neither the intimacy nor the order of a theater.  And Judy Garland's worshippers do not allow her the sacred immunity from personal contact customarily accorded to prelates.

Nevertheless, something resembling an electric golf cart was ordered to the stage door to take Judy Garland halfway around the horseshoe lobby of Convention Hall to the door at the rear of the audience.

Every show seems to be an adventure for Judy Garland:  a risk, an exposure, a flight into space.  She chattered nervously to everyone backstage -- when she talks, she talks to everyone, directing her conversational gambit from one person to the next -- how big was the house?  was the air conditioning working?  would she have trouble getting in?

Finally, zero hour:  the crowd were in their seats for the second act and it was time to repair to the golf cart.  Unable to postpone the inevitable any longer, Miss kissed everyone -- as far as I know, absolutely everyone -- backstage good-bye, and gravely mounted her cart.

During the ride to the back, she worried about the size of the hall ("It's so big -- I've never sung in a place so large.") and reminded her manager to keep her well supplied with water.

She hesitated a moment at the door to the darkened hall, kissed her manager, kissed me -- we were the only two members left out of her entourage, into which I had apparently now been absorbed -- and walked down the gentle ramp into the arena.  We followed behind.

At that moment, I began to catch the power of this fragile little waif, as we stood behind her watching the garish pink and purple spotlights rake the audience into a frenzy.  There they were, and there she was -- alone.

Finally, the spotlight picked her out, glittering in a sequined suit.  The distant, restless crowd -- from where we were, all we could see were masses of moving faces -- went wild as she slowly walked away from us to them.

Having been helped to the stage by several guards, Judy Garland launched into an hour-long dialogue with her audience.  The facts of the event are history and have been adequately chronicled elsewhere:  the shouting back and forth, the spontaneous displays of frenzied emotion, the little mistakes both real and contrived, and finally the chaotic ending, in which the whole audience seemed to surge onto the stage.

Obviously, Judy Garland's secret is that she knows how to provoke and foster involvement.  Her method is easy to discover but hard to imitate:  she tears herself open -- she basically a sweet waif wanting love.

Judy Garland's secret is the secret not only of great performers but of any great public figure who provokes involvement.  She says what others dare not say for fear of embarrassment, for fear of being hurt:  "I love you.  I want you to like me, to love me, I need your love."

The pleading of this button-eyed waif of a celebrity -- pleading to you and me is utterly irresistible.  And she's saying openly and boldly what the rest of us all our lives dare say only indirectly -- when and if we say it at all.

Judy Garland's crie de coeur responds to our own, we identify, and she has us in the palm of her hand.  And in reaching out to her, we, her audience, lose a little of our own interior loneliness.

This kind of charisma must best be exercised in person, for no medium of film or television can fully overcome the barrier of the actually un-present and therefore possibly un-real.

Judy Garland, therefore, is a kind of semi-messianic figure seeking her own salvation in a kind of love-immolation to an audience which find a kind of catharsis in her very real devotion to them.

The experience of a Judy Garland performance may not turn everyone into a true believer, but it cannot fail to leave one utterly unmoved.  This, after all, is something.