Judy Garland on Judy Garland: New book culls lifetime of interviews

A press release from Random House sent Jan. 4, 1960, proclaimed “a book for which publishers have been angling for years has been signed and sealed.”

That book was “The Judy Garland Story.” The then-37-year-old star of such classic films as 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz,” 1944’s “Meet Me in St. Louis” and 1954’s “A Star Is Born” was excited to tell her often turbulent life story.

“It’s going to be one hell of a great — everlastingly great — book with humor, tears, fun emotions and love,” Garland said of her autobiography.

The book might have been signed and sealed, but “The Judy Garland Story” was never delivered despite several attempts before her death in 1969 at the age of 47.

But a new book, “Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters,” edited by Randy L. Schmidt, offers a glimpse of what might have appeared in her autobiography.

The book features a collection of interviews she did for print, radio and television, from her first radio appearance as a child star at MGM in 1935 to her last known interview, taped for Radio Denmark just a few months before her death.

Schmidt, a longtime Garland fan who also wrote the biography “Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter,” has divided the Garland book into sections: her MGM years, when her interviews were under strict control by the studio; and her post-studio era, in which “the real Judy kind of starts to emerge and you can tell she’s free from MGM and kind of liberated to tell her own story,” Schmidt said.

The fan magazine- and studio-generated stories are fascinating to read because they are so frothy, silly and miles away from the truth.

“Honestly, I don’t know why, but all the gossip writers keep painting me as if I’m boy-crazy!” she lamented in a 1940 Modern Screen interview. “Take the stories about Mickey Rooney and myself. I’ll give it to you straight. The columnists keep saying I’m in love with Mickey. It upsets me so; really it does. Because I’m not in love with him. Not a single bit.”

But many of her post-studio interviews are heartbreaking, especially a frank 1951 piece that appeared in Cosmopolitan shortly after she was dropped from MGM.

“At times, I have been pretty much a walking advertisement for sleeping pills,” she admitted in the piece called “My Story.”

“My relationship with the studio for several years had been a little like that between a grown-up daughter and her parents. In some ways, they regarded me as their personal property.... I didn’t want to live anymore. I wanted to hurt myself and others.”

Schmidt spent more than a year culling the material for the book from die-hard Garland fans’ personal collections, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library and the New York Public Library.

“I was able to find either articles and interviews I heard about,” he said. “And in some cases, I discovered things that I never heard about and were really obscure.”

Schmidt will be signing copies of his book Friday evening at a screening of “A Star Is Born” at the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. He’ll also be introducing the film with James Duke Mason, the grandson of the film’s costar, James Mason.

Information: www.americancinematheque.com

Follow me on Twitter @mymackie