And then there were the concerts, through all of it. The Palace Theatre in 1951. Carnegie Hall in 1961. Hundreds of other engagements in between and after. Each of these was Judy Garland alone on a stage, with musicians behind her and an audience in front of her, doing the thing she had been doing since she sang on her father’s stage in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The pharmaceutical dependency, the financial difficulty, the complicated personal life — all of these were real, and all of them were present in varying degrees on any given night. But on many of those nights, in many of those halls, what was present most powerfully was the performance.
She worked for the last time in a context she could enjoy — a performance for an audience that wanted to hear her — in the final months of her life. Even in London, even in difficult circumstances, she performed. The performance was what she knew how to do. It was what she had always done.
What the full record of her career demonstrates is not that suffering produced her artistry. It demonstrates that her artistry was present throughout — that the voice and the instinct and the intelligence that had been in evidence from the age of two and a half on her father’s stage in Grand Rapids were the constant, and that everything else — the studio system, the pharmaceutical management, the marriages, the financial difficulties, the health crises — was what happened around them.
She was not a tragedy. She was a life, complicated and real and productive and difficult and extraordinary, and the people who heard her sing and couldn’t explain exactly what happened to them in that experience were not imagining it.