Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland

Judy Garland, the girl with the pigtails in The Wizard of Oz, possessed an almost magical power as an entertainer. She was a woman of half a dozen comebacks and a hundred heartbreaks. To recount her story, Gerald Clarke dedicated ten years, travelled thousands of miles across two continents, conducted hundreds of interviews, and sifted through mountains of documents, many of which were inaccessible to other biographers.

Combining a novelist's skill with a movie director's eye, Clarke vividly recreates the golden age of Hollywood with cinematic urgency. We meet Louis B. Mayer, the patriarch of MGM; the alluring Lana Turner, Judy's friend and idol, who had a habit of trying to 'snatch' any man Judy showed an interest in; clarinettist Artie Shaw; the handsome Tyrone Power; boy genius Orson Welles; and the brilliant director Vincente Minnelli, who fathered her first child, Liza. Towards the end of her life, Garland herself attempted to tell her own story. With access to her tape recordings and her revelatory unfinished manuscript, Clarke is able to present Judy's story as she herself might have told it.