Summer Stock (1950)
I’d never actually seen it; although I’ve seen the (almost) final number ‘Get Happy.’ If you don’t love Judy, then you might as well not continue reading. But it’s not Judy I love, and it’s not her sacrifice, or her tragedy, or her wasted life (depending how you look at it) — it’s simply her talent. And Gene Kelly too (not just as a ‘me too’) for he really is outstanding in Summer Stock. I’d never seen his dance number using just a newspaper and a creaky floorboard -- 'You Wonderful You.' Like ‘Singing in the Rain’ this is not just a dance, it’s a peek into the act of creation. Kelly starts with his own hesitant observance of a creaky floorboard, and then we watch him discover the dance he is going to invent; we see him get the idea of using the sound of the floorboard as part of the music. Then he notices the noise from the newspaper scratching against the floor. He decides to incorporate that too; and before you know it, he’s dancing. But the illusion is that he is finding this particular joy for the first time. Garland does the same thing every moment of the film. Her weight variance -- from one Summer Stock scene to another -- is legendary. At first she’s kinda pretty, but a bit matronly. But I’m thinking, it’s still Judy, And then suddenly she’s thin and gorgeous, which is what happened to her when she got skinny; she went from just pretty to luminously beautiful. There’s a fat moment, and then right after that, she appears in ‘It’s All For You’ -- suddenly very svelte -- in an odd, form fitting dress. For a second, I honestly didn't know who she was. And everyone knows they had to secure the furniture to the floor and the props to that furniture; she was so stoned they thought she might fall over and pull everything down. And yes we all know she had to be hypnotized for two weeks to lose weight for ‘Get Happy.’ Her legs are so skinny it looks like they might not hold her. But I will not make fun, I would never make fun of Judy. Kelly apparently agreed to do the film (he was the bigger 'box office') because he wished to save her career. He loved her in real life— obviously — it’s evident in every scene they have together. But he had good reason. It’s always an acting lesson with Judy — even the singing — it’s always about the kind of discovery Gene Kelly does in -- ‘You, Wonderful You’ — which he probably learned from her. Garland can’t decide whether to marry the daddy-dominated storekeeper Eddy Bracken or fall in love with Gene Kelly. Bracken woos her, talking about experiments with soil: “After were married I’m planning on making regular applications of calcium and magnesium.” This is absurd, but Judy makes you believe she's really in a dilemma. And when Kelly talks to her about love, she says, carefully, slowly: “Loves a funny thing, you never know when the lightning’s going to strike.” And as she says it, she is moving gradually to tears, and you realise she's falling in love with Kelly, or at least realising that she's in love with him for the first time. In several dance sequences she's supposed to be a farm girl being taught dance by Kelly and she appears to be actually learning. It’s about her mute, vulnerable acceptance of every ‘if’ that the script offers, and when she gives herself up to those moments, we want to give ourselves up to life in the same way. Even when she sings a dumb song like ‘Happy Harvest' -- driving a tractor no less— (perhaps the most un-Garland image one would care to see) her enthusiasm is completely genuine and absolutely infections. I would do anything for her, but of course what could I do? She’s not alive is she? But of course she is, she never died. She’s certainly with me every night when I'm up late drinking with a friend — because I'll never forget Elaine Stritch’s anecdote: after a long night of boozing, Garland quipped: “I never thought I'd say this, but — goodnight Elaine!” I used to watch Garland on the Johnny Carson show when she was skinny as a rake, and funny as hell. She told a story about Marlene Dietrich playing records of her German concert tour: “I couldn’t hear any singing — it was all applause. Only, now and then, Dietrich would say: ‘That’s Dusseldorf!,’ or, ‘That’s Frankfurt!’ Alright, my obsession with Garland is partially because she loved us so much. So let’s talk about that love. That love created us. You can create something with belief -- that’s the only good lesson we learned from COVID-19. It’s the kind of magic that happens when human minds get together, and they want to believe something -- then they can create something from nothing.There is such a thing as mass hysteria, it’s been medically documented, whole factories full of Asian women -- and women from North Carolina -- have died from bee stings that never existed, because they believed in an illness that never was. And that is the way Garland believed in us; her father was a homosexual, and she knew of his suffering. And if you dare to say we were just money to her --well damn you, yes she needed the money -- but when she reached out to those boys in their leather jackets in the front row at her concerts in the 50s, the ones who were frenziedly yelling Judy! Judy!’ — she friggin’ meant it. How could she not love us? We faggots know what it’s like to meet a woman like that. And she wasn’t a fag hag, and that’s a horrible term. Yes, she married Vincente Minnelli because he was no doubt a vulnerable and tortured gay man. Not that most people aren’t vulnerable and tortured -- but we fags tend to wear our suffering on our sleeves (and rightly so). No, I won’t let go of this idea: you can create things out of the kind of belief that Judy Garland had, and that’s not only the fiction/reality that she was falling in love with Gene Kelly in Summer Stock or the fiction that she quite regretted dumping Eddie Bracken (though he had to be dumped for the plot) -- but also, the reality that she believed in us. She believed those boys in the front row were better than their heterosexual counterparts — that they were more fun, and they were getting more nookie, and had better stories to tell about that nookie -- and a better way of telling them. Dammit, she was one friggin’ brilliant lady. And straight guys, no matter how hard you try — you'll never really know what it means to say that about a woman. And you can say I’m making this Judy up. Say it all you want. But the fact is that she not only created me, but she made me understand what a privilege it is not to be real.
