Judy Garland the girl with the pigtails in THE WIZARD OF OZ was an entertainer of almost magical power. The woman of half a dozen comebacks & a hundred heartbreaks. To tell her story Gerald Clarke took ten years travelled thousands of miles across two continents conducted hundreds of interviews & combed through mountains of documents many of which were unavailable to other biographers. Combining a novelists skill & a movie directors eye Clarke re-creates the golden age of Hollywood with cinematic urgency: Louis B Mayer the patriarch of MGM; sexy Lana Turner Judys friend & idol who had a habit of trying to snatch away any man Judy expressed interest in; clarinettist Artie Shaw handsome Tyrone Power; boy genius Orson Welles & brilliant director Vincente Minnelli who fathered her first child Liza. Towards the end of her life Garland tried to tell her own story. With access to her tape recordings
- & her revelatory unfinished manuscript
- Clarke is able to tell Judys story as she herself might have told it.