[June 10th would have been Judy Garland’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Garland’s performances, leading up to a weekend post on LGBTQ icons.]
On power moves
behind the scenes and even more powerful presences on the screen.
Across my more
than 11.5 (!) years of researching and writing these blog posts I’ve learned a
ton (certainly one of the main reasons why I continue to do it; my hope that y’all
are learning too is another), enough in fact that I can break down the things I’ve
learned into sub-categories. One of the more striking and telling such
sub-categories would have to be the things I’ve learned about famous women across
our cultural landscape, and more exactly about the layers to their careers and
successes that have been too often left out of our collective memories and
narratives of them. That would definitely apply to Lucille Ball and her truly groundbreaking
work as a television producer (seriously, Star Trek!), and I’d say it applies as well to the many
layers of Marilyn Monroe’s life and career (which I traced in that whole
weeklong series) beyond the sex symbol iconography. And I hope that this week’s
series of posts has already reflected things I’ve learned about Judy Garland’s
acting career and performances that have likewise expanded my sense of this
already-iconic-but-perhaps-in-a-too-limited-way cultural figure.
Like Ball and
Monroe and so many other powerful women, Garland’s career and legacies went way
beyond acting, and indeed beyond performing on screen at all. In 1961, the same
year in which she made the triumphant return to film acting in Judgment at Nuremberg about which I
wrote in yesterday’s post, she settled a longstanding contract dispute with CBS
and went on to sign two significant
deals with the network: first for a series of stand-alone specials in
1962-63; and then a $24
million offer (well over $100 million in 2020s numbers, and thus described
as “the biggest talent deal in TV history”) to produce and star in a weekly
series. Titled simply The Judy Garland
Show, that series debuted
on September 29, 1963; it only aired for one season (26 episodes), not
least because CBS decided to schedule it against NBC’s Western mega-hit Bonanza, but The Judy Garland Show would go on to receive four Emmy nominations,
and in any case reflects Garland’s power behind the scenes as well as the power
and draw of her name and presence.
And, through
her, so many other powerful names and presences. Here are just some of the guest
stars across the show’s first three months, from that late September premiere
through the end of 1963: Barbra
Streisand (nominated for an Emmy for her appearance), Lena Horne, Tony Bennett,
Count Basie, Mickey Rooney, Peggy Lee, Bob Newhart, Carl Reiner, and Mel Tormé. This
wasn’t just a late-night talk show format where the stars would chat for a few
minutes, either—it was a groundbreaking performance and sketch show,
at least somewhat akin to (but of course preceding by more than a decade) Saturday Night Live. I don’t know enough
about television history to say with any definitiveness whether The Judy Garland Show had an influence
on such later shows—but I do know that its general absence from our collective memories
should not in any way be taken as proof that it wasn’t influential or didn’t
leave such a lasting legacy. When it comes to the lives and legacies of powerful
and seemingly already famous showbiz women like Judy Garland, after all, we
still have a lot to learn.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Garland works or moments you’d highlight?
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