The audience that came to see her in the concert context understood, on some level, that this was part of what they were witnessing. There was a quality to her live performances — a sense that what was being witnessed was not guaranteed, that it required something from her that was not automatic — that contributed to their emotional intensity. The same quality that made some performances variable gave the best of them a feeling of genuine stakes that more consistently produced performances did not have.
This is a complex relationship between a performer’s condition and the quality of what that condition produced. It is not an endorsement of the conditions, or a suggestion that pharmaceutical dependency made her art better. It is an observation that Garland’s audiences were responding to something real — to a performer who was putting everything she had into a performance and who did not always have everything — and that this quality of genuine expenditure was part of what made the experience of hearing her live different from the experience of hearing most other performers.
The Children and the Complicated Inheritance
The three children of Judy Garland — Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft, and Joey Luft — grew up in circumstances that were unusual in multiple overlapping respects: as the children of a famous parent, as children whose mother’s health and pharmaceutical dependency were ongoing family concerns, and as people who had front-row access to one of the most interesting performing careers of the twentieth century.
All three have spoken and written about their mother with varying degrees of openness. Liza Minnelli, who became the most publicly prominent of the three, has been largely protective of her mother’s memory while acknowledging the difficulties of their family life. Her statement after Garland’s death — “She didn’t die from an overdose, I think she just got tired” — captured something about her daughter’s understanding of the accumulated cost of the life her mother had lived, even as it declined to accept the clinical facts of how that life ended.