Topic Annie Get Your Gun from the General Chit-Chat forum.
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| Author | Topic: Annie Get Your Gun |
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BPfan11
Registered User
Registered:
5/18/2004
From:
Rhode Island | posted: 8/23/2004 at 1:55:17 AM ET
Okay, sorry this took so long, but I just spoke to my uncle the other day. So, the Judy Garland story:
In 1968, my uncle was playing in a jazz band and they had a 6 week gig at some club in Asbury Park, NJ. Toward the end of their gig, Judy Garland had a 1 week gig at the Garden State Arts Center, but she ended up going about a month early (maybe for a family vaca? idk). So she ended up spending a lot of time at the club my uncle was at, and got to know the band members fairly well. One night after a performance Judy Garland had attended, my uncle and the other band members were leaving the club (I know this sounds a little far-fetched, but I swear, it’s true!), it was around 2am, and they saw someone lying on the sidewalk and walked up to the person…Judy Garland. So they helped a very drunk Judy up and, since she knew them from the club, she agreed to go with them to a coffeehouse that was open 24/7.
So once at the coffeehouse, she told them how, after the Wizard of Oz, she was doing a bunch of Andy Hardy movies, and enjoying all the fame. However, along with the fame came countless promo events, radio appearances, etc., and the people in charge of her schedule would give her sleeping pills at 2 or 3 am, then they’d give her different pills at 6am to wake her up for more appearances… thus developing a drug addiction. It’s really sad that she was only a teenager and caught up in the midst of enjoying her success, and certainly didn’t realize all the harm this was causing on her.
I think it is also fairly well known that she was an alcoholic. My uncle said that he hotel (which they were both staying at during this time in NJ) would have to open its bar at 10am so she could buy a bottle of vodka, and that her diet consisted of salad, vodka, and pills. (though that may have been only during that short time) Anyway, one night that she was performing at the GS arts center, she was so drunk that she fell off the stage. People helped her get back up and she kept performing, only to fall again a few minutes later. People started to walk out, and I guess she never really performed after that. It’s really a tragedy when you think of what a talent she was. In her performances at the GS arts center when she wasn’t under the influence, she was supposedly wonderful. It’s crazy what the pressures of showbiz can do to you, or in this case, not necessarily the pressures, but how people can use you….making you fall asleep/wake up exactly when they need you to, regardless of its long term effects.
Anyway, hope you find that interesting! There were more details and more stories, but that was the main gist of it.
One side note though: her daughter, Lorna, who was 16 at the time and according to my uncle, quite a character, opened for her some nights and supposedly wasn’t a bad singer either. She somehow got herself in a position where my uncle ended up helping her learn an entire opening act in less than an hour… the story was something like, Judy didn’t like the song she had planned, so the director told her to sing “do you know the way to san jose” instead, and she of course said she knew the song (although she had never heard it before and didn’t know the lyrics or anything) and had to appear on stage in a few hours…
| Karen
Registered User
Registered:
5/3/2002 | posted: 8/23/2004 at 9:42:49 AM ET
What a story. So sad. Thank you very much for that.
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