Steamy Couples III: Many Hours of Filming and Pills or Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli

**This article is part of a special summer series focused on legendary (sometimes a bit cursed) movie couples.

"The day she died, the neighbors came to jeer. This is the result of all the liquor and pills . But when I saw her lying back like a queen... she was the happiest corpse I ever saw," sang Liza Minnelli in Cabaret about a certain Elsie, although she could just as easily have been singing about her mother, Judy Garland, who died at just 47 after a life of excess, immersed in alcohol and drugs. She was discovered dead on June 22, 1969 , in her bathroom in London. Her face, which in reality had not reached 50 years of age, seemed to have surpassed that age decades ago. It was a tragic death, but a bit like in the Cabaret song, Garland herself had said just a few years earlier: "I am bored to death to be seen as a tragic figure ."

But let's go back to the beginning. Because Judy Garland also had time to fall in love . Not everything in her life was tragic, although some things certainly were: for example, her stage debut alongside her older sisters at just two years old, and from the beginning her mother decided to give her pills to help her keep up or to relax her to sleep. Or the fact that the MGM executives (headed by Louis B. Mayer , with whom she began working at 13), who worked their actors to exhaustion and at a dizzying pace, aggravated the problem by prescribing stimulants and depressants. "They knocked us out with barbiturates , and after four hours of sleep they woke us up and gave us amphetamines so we could work 72 hours straight," Garland once recounted of her filming of The Wizard of Oz (1939).

"They would knock us out with barbiturates, then wake us up and give us amphetamines so we could work for 72 hours."

It didn't help that MGM, to alleviate the actress's alleged weight problem , once again put her on a very restrictive diet (based on chicken soup, coffee, 80 cigarettes a day and hunger-suppressing pills, which were added to the hundreds of other pills she was already taking). When she was just 14 , Louis B. Meyer called her "my little hunchback" , with the affectionate idea of ​​polishing her image a little. Before filming The Wizard of Oz and becoming the mythical Dorothy at just 16, the studio had made her Mickey Rooney 's partner and did not allow her to go to parties or go on dates. At 19, she married the composer David Rose (who had already been married), at 20 she had an abortion and at 21 she divorced him. It was the following year that she met Vincente Minnelli.

"They had a complex relationship, with moments of great creative and personal connection but many significant tensions," David Felipe Arranz , a philologist, journalist and professor, as well as the author of several books dedicated to cinema, tells this newspaper. "At first, their relationship was passionate: they met on the set of Appointment in St. Louis (1944), where their professional chemistry transferred to the personal. Garland admired Minnelli and he saw her as his muse . Appointment in St. Louis tells the epic story of family sagas in the United States and the father's internal migrations due to work."

Minnelli had been wanting to make his way into the Hollywood musical scene for years, which was quite poor at the time (with the honorable exception of Fred and Ginger ). Although he had started with Paramount in a somewhat bleak world, he later met producer Arthur Freed (the same one who, when Shirley Temple was only eleven years old, locked her in his office and told her she was going to be a new star, while dropping his pants), who introduced him to Hollywood and to MGM. In fact, before Date Night, he had worked with Judy Garland on some previous project, and later insisted that she (who after The Wizard of Oz was a somewhat glittering star) star in his film. They married after filming and in 1946 had Liza. It was strange because at first, she hated the director's perfectionist nature, who could demand that the same take be shot up to 25 times.

"Their collaboration on films like Clockwork (1945) and The Pirate (1948) strengthened this sentimental bond," says Arranz. " Clockwork , which takes place in New York in 1945 and is one of the first romantic urban films from which all current romantic cinema draws, and The Pirate , an impressive musical spectacle with extraordinary chemistry between Gene Kelly and Garland, which cleverly blends the world of traveling comedians and pirates, with a prodigious script by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett... Clearly, it is inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean saga!"

But things weren't going so well on a personal level. In 1947, when Garland was just 25, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. She was subjected to electroshock therapy and attempted suicide by slitting her wrists. She began arriving late to film shoots (or not at all), and her marriage to Minnelli began to deteriorate. After 15 years, MGM terminated her contract as she was recovering from her second suicide attempt. By 30, she was already a veteran, and when, at 35, she was told she was suffering from hepatitis and wouldn't live much longer, she took it as practically good news. She divorced Minnelli in 1951 , although she married three more times. The divorce coincided with Minnelli's most prolific period in Hollywood.

Garland's final years were marked by financial difficulties , although she returned to film with A Star Is Born (everyone was convinced she would win an Oscar for that film, but she came away empty-handed). After that, she only worked in three more films, the same number of marriages she had after Minnelli. Her last performance was in Copenhagen, a few months before her death in 1969. It was Liza who called her father to tell him her mother had died, and he wept bitterly upon hearing the news.

In 1947, when Garland was just 25, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. She was subjected to electroshock.

Much has been theorized about the sexuality of Vincente Minnelli, who never actually declared himself homosexual, although according to his biographer ( Emanuel Levy ) he lived openly as gay in New York. “On one occasion, Judy returned unexpectedly from the studio and discovered Minnelli in bed with a man who worked for them,” also wrote Gerald Clarke. Much has also been said about the magnetism that Judy Garland, a gay diva, produced in homosexuals. Michael Joseph Gross responded to this in an article in The Atlantic more than 20 years ago: “They didn't like her, but her audience. The hordes of other gay men who gathered in her name to hear her moving interpretations of old romantic songs that reduced the queen to torrents of self-pitying tears.” According to Gross, they liked the diva's tragic, almost masochistic vulnerability, who, on the other hand, liked to surround herself with homosexuals.

There's a particularly sad anecdote about Garland in her later years: a fan visited her dressing room after one of her final concerts, and she was listening to a gramophone recording of the performance she had just finished. Applause followed, and then she burst into tears and looked at herself in the mirror: "You're a star," she said to herself. "You're a star." Shortly after, she would go somewhere over the rainbow.