Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland

Description

To tell Judy Garland's story, Gerald Clarke took 10 years, travelled thousands of miles across two continents, conducted hundreds of interviews, and dug through mountains of documents. He re-creates the golden age of Hollywood with cinematic urgency, bringing to life the characters who played leading roles in the unending drama of Judy Garland: Louis B. Mayer, the patriarch of MGM; sexy Lana Turner, Judy's friend and idol, who had a habit of trying to snatch away any man Judy expressed interest in; clarinetist Artie Shaw; handsome Tyrone Power; boy-genius Orson Welles; and brilliant director Vincente Minnelli, who fathered her first child, Liza. Toward the end of the life, Garland tried to tell her own story. With access to her tape recordings - and her revelatory unfinished manuscript - Clarke is able to tell Judy's story as she herself might have wanted to.

Gerald Clarke is the author of CAPOTE, the much acclaimed bestselling biography of Truman Capote. He has also written for many magazines, including ESQUIRE and TIME, where for many years he was a senior writer.

'[A] masterful biography.' SUNDAY TIMES 'A Hollywood biography in the classic mould...[it is the] deep insecurity allied with greatness that Clarke explores so well. This is a sympathetic biography in that it seeks explanations, although Clarke properly makes no attempt to gloss over the Garland excesses.' GLASGOW HERALD 'This biography carries us through Garland's show-stopping highs and pill-popping lows in high style, showing her considerable wit and glamour as well as the misery of a young performer manipulated by the studio...Clarke's biography whips smoothly through the years with minimal hyperbole and his subject emerges triumphant.' OBSERVER 'There have been plenty of books on Judy, but Clarke is the only writer to have access to her 68 manuscript pages of her unfinished biography. Drawing on a remarkable number of sources, he has produced the definitive life.' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'I am not generally a huge fan of biographies as they tend to drive me crazy with their desire to shock and reveal or-worse- do a gloss job on some star's life. But GET HAPPY does neither...written in a detailed, direct and honest way, giving no real opinion but telling her story.' SUNDAY HERALD, Books of the Year 'A clear, documentary style and the simple appraoch of a start, middle and end makes this book quite a new wheel rather than the reinvention of an old one.' IRISH TIMES 'With the same empathy he brought to his extroardinary biography of Truman Capote, he gives a warmly witty account of another mismanaged genius that leaves on hungry to revisit her legacy of films and recordings.' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'An interesting vignette of life behind the Hollywood scenes.' GAY TIMES