Five Marriages and What They Represented
Judy Garland was married five times between 1941 and 1969. The five marriages — to David Rose, Vincente Minnelli, Sid Luft, Mark Herron, and Mickey Deans — have been described in various accounts as evidence of romantic impulsiveness, as a search for the stability her childhood had not provided, as a consequence of her pharmaceutical dependency, and as an entirely human record of a life in which relationships were subject to the same stresses as every other aspect of her existence.
Her first marriage, to musician and bandleader David Rose, began in June 1941, when she was nineteen. Rose was twenty-nine. The marriage was not long-lived; by some accounts, Garland’s mother and MGM were both unenthusiastic about it, seeing the romantic relationship as a potential distraction from her professional obligations. The account in Gerald Clarke’s biography describes a pregnancy that ended with an abortion, with Ethel Gumm and studio representatives involved in the decision. Whether Garland herself wanted the termination is not something the record establishes with certainty. The marriage was dissolved in 1944.
Her second marriage, to director Vincente Minnelli, was a professional partnership as much as a personal one. Minnelli directed her in Meet Me in St. Louis, which was the film that established the romantic relationship, and their collaboration extended through The Clock and other projects. Their daughter Liza was born in March 1946. The marriage formally ended in divorce in 1951, following a period of significant personal difficulty for both parties. Liza Minnelli went on to a performing career that in many ways matched the scope if not the specific character of her mother’s.