The Gap Between the Image and the Person
The image of Judy Garland that the general public carries is largely constructed from two elements: the girl in the blue-checked dress from The Wizard of Oz, and a general awareness that something difficult and sad happened to the person who played that girl. The headline of this article invokes that gap — “behind the magic” — and asks what was there.
What was there was not simply darkness. What was there was a complete person: a child performer with genuine talent, a daughter in a complicated family, a studio property subjected to institutional exploitation, a young woman whose pharmaceutical dependency was established before she was old enough to fully consent to it, a film actress of exceptional range, a stage performer with a gift for connection that resisted easy analysis, a wife five times, a mother three times, a friend to many, an enemy to some, an artist who kept working through conditions that would have ended most careers, and a person who died at forty-seven under circumstances that the coroner found to be accidental.
The distance between the image — the girl with the braids and the ruby slippers, the voice that promised that dreams really do come true — and the person who made that image is the distance between a studio’s marketing campaign and a human life. It is a distance worth reckoning with, not because the image was false, but because it was partial. The voice was real. The performance was real. The girl making it was also real, and her reality was more complicated, more costly, and more interesting than any image the studio could have built.