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Iron Women: The Ladies Who Helped Build the Railroad
One of the chapters in the book Iron Women: The Ladies Who Helped Build the Railroad is about the Harvey Girls. Judy Garland portrayed Susan Bradley in the musical The Harvey Girls released in April 1926. The movie was a huge success for MGM. The subject matter and Judy Garland made the film popular. Garland was a much-loved performer whose warmth and spirit, along with her rich and exuberant voice, kept theatergoers entertained with an array of delightful musicals. The singer-actress died on June 22, 1969.
Standing in line outside the funeral home, a 23-year-old Queens housewife explained why she had joined thousands to pass by the coffin of Judy Garland. “Everyone’s got sadness and problems, everyone gets lonely,” she said. “Judy Garland made all of us feel something tied her and us together.” It is not to say that Judy Garland would never have been a legendary entertainer had she led a happy life, but certainly part of what captivated her audiences was the awareness of what she brought onstage with her. She was a child star, a superstar at 17 in The Wizard of Oz, and the leading movie musical actress by 1948. She also was seeing a psychiatrist when she was 18, attempted suicide at 28, had four failed marriages, and had been addicted to uppers to perform and downers to sleep since her early years at the movie studio.
For almost the last twenty years of her life – more than half her career – Garland followed failures with smashing comebacks almost with regularity, most notably in A Star is Born in 1954 and at London’s Palladium in 1960. Even after her voice failed Garland pushed her frail legs and bony face through exhausting performances, so that, in 1967, Vincent Canby wrote in a review, “that the voice is now a memory seems almost beside the point.”
In 1969, Garland was living in London with her fifth husband, Micky Deans, a 35-year-old New York discotheque manager. She had performed unevenly at a London supper club earlier that year, but in June seemed happy in her new marriage. At 10 A.M. on Sunday, June 22, Deans was awakened by a telephone call from one of Garland’s friends in the United States. His wife wasn’t in bed, so he called her in the bathroom. He got no answer, but found the door locked, which was usual for Garland since her early days on crowded movie sets. He climbed out onto the roof of their house to look in the bathroom window. He saw her sitting with her head slumped over in her lap.
Doctors said Garland had died of “an incautious self-over-dosage of sleeping pills.” They said it was not a suicide, that probably she had taken her usual
dose of Seconal to get to sleep, then awakened and confused, swallowed more pills. Liza Minnelli saw her mother’s death in less clinical terms. “It wasn’t suicide,” she said in a statement soon after. “It wasn’t sleeping pills, it wasn’t cirrhosis. I think she was just tired, like a flower that blooms and gives joy and beauty to the world and then wilts away.”
