A Star Is Born

 

Only yesterday I discovered Judy Garland, and more importantly, Judy Garland in A Star Is Born.

I had been having dinner with three friends who are all very successful in their fields. I have a lot of friends who are successful in their chosen fields and I'm very happy for them. And somewhat bewildered and ashamed of my own failure. There is the risk or fear perhaps of eventually becoming a person who is around success but that no one any longer expects anything from.

To get to the knot of the thing; I missed my last train and stayed at the house of one of my friends. A wonderful man in his early fifties.

I woke in the morning and my host put on some Dusty Springfield. He starts telling me an anecdote about when Dusty came out.

'She was gay?' I mutter.

'Are you FUCKING kidding me?' He screams. 'You are the worst fag hag EVER. I'm telling everyone on Facebook immediately.'

Which he does.

It's only a short skip from there to him remembering my admission, a year previously, of having never seen A Star Is Born.

'You're watching it right now,' he insists.

'But I -'

'Immediately.'

It's the original three hour plus version where all the lost scenes are replaced by stills photographs and what remains of the sound clips. Take my eyes.

At first I'm just humouring him. To me Judy Garland was the girl I watched every christmas day afternoon skipping up a yellow brick road with a bunch of hangers on and a can do attitude. I've always kind of loathed Technicolor. When I was very little I loved watching black and white films. I believed, for far longer than I'm willing to admit, that the world was monochrome until about 1950. And all the more glamorous for it.

As soon as the film starts I'm struck by how ahead of its time it is. There's a fly on wall quality to the filming that makes it feel more real than I'd anticipated. And then Garland's voice sounds a few moments before we see her. And there's no big entrance. Same for James Mason, he just kind of sidles in mid action and becomes a part of the scene.

As we're watching my friend gives me little snippets of Garland's biography. By the time this film was made she had already suffered a great deal. Divorces, breakdowns, problems with addiction. She was constantly haunted by the notion that she wasn't beautiful enough, a notion that had been firmly planted by the big cheeses who shaped her career. Did you know that the blue gingham dress she wears as Dorothy was specifically to 'blur' her figure? No, me either.
Mason, from the very beginning, touches her in a very moving way. He strokes her face, moves her around by her tiny shoulders with a distinct familiarity.

'He looks like he owns her,' I say. 'Or rather that she belongs to him.'

'Spot on,' my friend says.

There's a scene in the film where she's given a make over by three exasperated men who have no idea what to do about her problematic nose. She comes out to meet Mason looking like a Geisha in a terrible wig. He takes all the make up off and pulls a strip of rubber from her nose. She looks fine just the way she is as far as he's concerned. Whilst reading about her life later on in the day I discovered that she had been treated in the exact same way in real life; forced to wear rubber on her nose, something or other over her teeth. I remember her face in the film as she tells Mason that she's ugly, she doesn't look right, just before he scrapes all the make up off and disabuses her of the idea. She looks in the mirror desperately. She doesn't look in character. She looks real and so sad. This happens several times in the film. You see her experience the immediacy of love, its desperation, her unwillingness to give up on it despite the damage it wreaks on her life. She's a sponge, porous and vulnerable and utterly compelling. My friend says that she was one of those who could never fully be a person, she only existed within her art. Or something to that effect. Well, I thought, child stars, it so rarely ends well. A director once told me those moments of truth in acting are called 'leaking' and casting agents love them. Garland was one big leak. How can you not love someone who stares out at you from a screen and begs for you to really see her?

And then of course there's her singing voice. There's so much power coming from such a tiny vessel and beneath it the constant catch of a sob.

She produced this film and starred in it in 1954. She was dead by June 1969 at the age of 47.
Seven years older than me. I feel like my life is barely beginning and she was already on the decline, worn out by a world she had no clue how to live in.
Three hours plus later I get it. I finally understand why she is the icon she is. Why Rufus Wainwright re-created her Judy At Carnegie Hall show, why Somewhere Over The Rainbow is so tragic, why she is still so loved.
For me she had always been just another talented mess brought down by alcohol, or Liza's mum, or a gay icon because well, she was so camp! She wasn't camp. She was utterly sincere.
Obviously I was weeping like a sore by the end. For the sadness of the film, for the briefness of her life.

'See,' my friend says. 'I told you so.'

I'm thankful that no one made me live my life so fast, youth rushing past in a blur. No time to figure out who you are, what you want, who to love or be loved by. I was a terrible writer at twenty. I'm a better writer now. I'll be even better in twenty years time I suspect.

I wanted to be a success at twenty but I was a child. I couldn't understand why my peers seemed so much more able to navigate their worlds. I could never get going, move past a certain point. My twenties were spent moving from job to job treading water. My thirties were much the same. It's only in the last couple of years that things have started to make sense. I still have no idea what I'm doing most of the time but I am much clearer on what I want.

My friend Kate told me a theory the other day, though I may be recalling it inaccurately; We have four rings on the cooker. One is family, one friends, one career and one love. To be successful you have to disregard one ring. To be really successful you have to disregard two. If you become a success when you're still a child then those rings are decided for you aren't they? And then how would you ever get them back? I'm not successful. Not yet. But I know better now what is worth and not worth having.
Thirty five years ago I watched a pretty young girl click her heels together and intone that there was no place like home. And at forty I know what she means.