Standing in the wings of London’s Talk of the Town cabaret club, a nervous Judy Garland looked out at her audience.
She’d been a huge Hollywood icon for three decades, starring in The Wizard of Oz, Easter Parade and A Star Is Born.
But now, aged 46 and addicted to drugs and alcohol, that all seemed so long ago.
“I can’t go on. I just can’t do it,” she told her production assistant Rosalyn Wilder, at one of her shows in January 1969.
Rosalyn told her: “Of course you can. You’re Judy Garland!
“I’m here and I’m not going to move, so you go on and if you get into a crisis and feel like you can’t do anymore, then come off because I’m going to be here and we’ll talk it through. If you don’t want to do anymore it’s fine.”
It was Rosalyn’s job to make sure the star made it onto the stage during a five-week cabaret residency in the Leicester Square club, and she reveals sometimes it would take more than just words of encouragement.
As we sit in the same venue where Garland performed 50 years ago, now London’s Hippodrome Casino, Rosalyn recalls she had to coax her on stage with the promise of pills – though she never once handed them over to the troubled star.
Rosalyn says: “She had this little bottle of pills and said, ‘Can I have some water?’ And I said, ‘Yes of course you can’. Then she said, ‘I’m just going to take these’.
“But I told her, ‘I tell you what, let’s do a deal.
“You give me the pills and you go on, and I’ll hold the pills because you don’t really need them. You’re absolutely fine.
“But if when you’re on stage and you really can’t go any further without the pills, I’ve got them in my hand so you can always come back and get them.’
“She was a bit unsure and once more I said, ‘Honestly, it’s absolutely fine. They’re not going to leave my hand, you can go on and I’ve got them here’.
“So I got her on – and she didn’t need them in the end. I knew that once she got on stage the chances were that she would stay on. It was getting her on stage that was the hard thing.”
Six months later, in June 1969, Garland was found dead in the Belgravia flat she shared with fifth husband Mickey Deans.
Her tragic demise is the focus of a new film, Judy, starring Renee Zellweger as the Over the Rainbow singer and Jessie Buckley as Rosalyn. Her former production assistant was at Talk of the Town for 20 years, and is a grandmother. She is one of the few people who has had an intimate insight into what former child star Garland – real name Frances Ethel Gumm – was like.
“My first impression of her was she was tiny. She was absolutely minute,” the 80-year-old from north-west London says.
“This is a woman who’d been used, abused and kicked around and made to feel as if she wasn’t worth a dime.
“And she was struggling. I tried really hard to be nice to her and to be kind to her and to encourage her, to make her feel that she could do what she was here to do and in a way to believe in herself.
“Which I thought she needed to do. If somebody’s really down and out, had such a bad time for so long, to try and make them believe they can do it is difficult.”
Garland was in the spotlight from as young as two years old, pushed to perform by her mother, Ethel.
According to biographer Gerald Clarke, Ethel was the first person to introduce her daughter to pills – even before she had turned 10.
By the age of 17, when she was starring as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, Garland was addicted to barbiturates and amphetamines.
Rosalyn says: “Lots of people should’ve been held to account.
“Between the studio and her mother, Judy couldn’t cope. She was vulnerable.
“She had lost all of her confidence. When people slap you down all the time and say, ‘Oh you’re drunk again’, or ‘You’re on those pills again. Look at your hair, look at this that and the other’, you lose your confidence.
“The thing that makes us all feel good is when somebody says, ‘You’re looking good this morning’. So I thought it was important to show her kindness.”
One of Garland’s most talked of performances was a particularly bad night at the club on January 23.
Garland’s doctor had advised her not to perform but, not wanting to let down her fans, she still made it to the venue – albeit an hour-and-a-half late.
She may have been an icon, but the audience was unforgiving. In an attempt to win them over she opened with I Belong To London but she was met with heckles and a barrage of bread rolls and cigarette packets. “There were odd nights when she would turn up very, very late and the audiences were obviously not too happy,” Rosalyn says.
“When she was an hour-and-a-half late and they gave her a hard time, she would shrivel and fall down. They threw bread rolls at her. I could only cringe. What else is there to do?
“You can’t walk on stage and say ‘don’t do that’. You just stand there and hope they’ll stop. Burt Rhodes, her musical director, would just play the music and carry on.
“But it put her off, people shouting and throwing bread rolls at her.
“When she came off after it went badly, I was never going to say to her, ‘That was dreadful’. I’d just say, ‘Are you OK?’. She never said anything if it went badly.”
Despite this disastrous performance, many of Garland’s shows at Talk of the Town proved she still had a raw gift.
Rosalyn says: “She had an extraordinary talent, she really did and she was a great, great entertainer. And she’s a still a legend because you can still listen to that voice and still hear the magic.
“She did have some wonderful nights here. She enjoyed it when it went well. That was when you could really see what she was – inside there was still that glowing ember that was Judy Garland. She absolutely transformed as soon as she got on that stage.
“There’s nothing more fascinating than standing in the wings with somebody and on they go… suddenly you see something change and a force takes over. They become what they are. She’d come off and I’d say, ‘You smashed it’.”
When Rosalyn was first approached by filmmakers to consult on the new Judy biopic she had her initial doubts.
“I said, ‘Please don’t make a film exploiting her’ – because she had been exploited all her life.
“Her death was the end of a terrible, terrible indictment of the way people had behaved towards a human being. It was unforgivable.”
Rosalyn spent time on set meeting the cast and director to make sure the film did Judy justice.
Source: Read Full Article