LIZ SMITH: Remembering Judy Garland.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

The Stonewall Inn, September 1969. The sign in the window reads: "We homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the Village."

Wednesday, June 10, 2015 by Liz Smith

Remembering Judy Garland on her Birthday, and Recalling What She Didn't Have to Do With The Stonewall Riots.
“SOMETIMES, people have too much talent. So much that they can’t live a normal life. That was Judy. She just had too much talent!”

So said June Allyson, MGM sweetheart and a gifted star often put in the unenviable position of being a “threat” to Miss Garland if Judy misbehaved.

June and Judy performing together for the first time in 1963.

Today is Judy Garland’s birthday. She would have been 93, had she not died in 1969 of an accidental overdose in London at the age of 47. Time was not initially kind to Garland’s legacy, but that has changed. The bad years are, well — the bad years. Her incredible body of work — some of it still surprisingly fine in the last months of her life — have been reappraised and re-appreciated. The fabled TV series is available for all to see on DVD. Turner Classic Movies worships her. The Carnegie Hall album still stands as one of the greatest live recordings ever. (A phenomenal million seller in 1961.)

Find Judy on YouTube, sit back and be astounded.

Today I want to reprint a piece written four years ago by my good friend Mr. Wow, aka Denis Ferrara. This gives a vivid glimpse of the Judy legend — what it was and wasn’t — in the year of her death, 1969.

It also tells the initial, mythical connecting tale of gay liberation in its early, vibrant incarnation:

DON'T give me credit, here’s Denis Ferrara:

Denis Ferrara and friend in 1969. He says: “The Chihuahua didn’t accompany me to The Stonewall. I didn’t need any props.”

"June 28th is the anniversary of the famous Stonewall riot: an event that changed history. Gay people battled their way out of the closet with bricks and uprooted parking meters and a defiance so shocking it scared the men of the New York Police Department. And despite many challenges, gay people have never gone back in that closet.

"Now, unlike many gay men of my age who lived near and/or hung around Greenwich Village in 1969, Mr. Wow will notclaim to have been a participant in the riot, an observer or even having been at the Stonewall earlier that night. I wasn’t even in the Village that night. I had, however, been down there the night before, and attempted to get into The Stonewall, on Christopher Street and Sheridan Square. The Stonewall was my very first bar — so exciting with its two jukeboxes and the little dance floor in the back that looked like a chessboard, lit from below. But the bouncer who usually allowed 16-year-old Mr. Wow onto the premises was away. No amount of eye-batting or promises of more could dissuade this dragon at the wooden door to allow me in. “How old are you?” I swore I was 19. “You look 15. Go away!” I wanted to argue that I’d been let in when I was 15, but better to wait for the friendly bouncer another night.
So I wandered off, found a few similarly displaced acquaintances and spent the hot summer night camped (and camping it up) on various stoops, loitering outside other bars and making general teenaged nuisances of ourselves.

The "street kids" who were the first to fight with the police.

"At six o’clock AM on the morning of June 27, Mr. Wow and his pals were standing on Sixth Avenue right off Christopher Street. We were about to go our separate ways, when I said, “Wait, girls, today’s the last day Judy’s laid out, we should go up and see her!” Judy had died on the 22nd. (Back then, if you weren’t overtly masculine, you talked like that. Later, I dropped my “Oh, Mary’s” and “Miss Things.” A guy I met around that time said, “I thought you were really cute, until you started talking! Why do think that’s necessary?”)

"Now, the funny part was I wasn’t even much of a Judy Garland fan. No fanatic, at any rate. I knew who she was, what she supposedly represented to gay audiences, I was aware of her many dramas, suicide attempts, tales of her ruined voice, the “scandal” of her new much younger husband,Mickey Deans. And of course her recent shocking/not-so-shocking death. I loved her MGM musicals, especially “Presenting Lily Mars.” And of course I’d seen “A Star Is Born.” I didn’t think then, and don’t think now, it was her finest hour. But, yes, of course she deserved the Oscar over Grace Kelly, for heaven’s sake!

“A Star Is Born.”

"But I’d never seen her perform live, and had never listened to any of her later recordings. (My one memory of her ill-fated TV series was visiting relatives on Sunday — there was Judy on the tube, in stark black and white, and looking rather fascinating to me. “Eh, she’s drunk,” said one of my uncles, switching to “Bonanza.”) So, I knew nothing of the thrall she held over audiences, gay and straight.

"Still, we all decided that going to see Judy Garland laid out at Frank Campbell’s would be a “fun” thing to do. (I know — but now you tell me about how sensitive you were at 16.) So, we boarded an uptown bus and pretty soon there we were in front of Frank Campbell’s — five motley, long-haired, fey boys in jeans and tee shirts. There was still a line of mourners traipsing past Judy’s open casket. (The funeral would begin in a few hours.) While we stood there, I thought I’d impress my friends with my vast knowledge — “Rudolph Valentino was laid out here.” Nobody was impressed. They didn’t know from the silent screen’s Sheik of Araby.

Outside Judy's funeral.

"Soon, I was standing in front of the coffin. I looked in. I must tell you that I always wish I hadn’t. Judy Garland was the deadest person I’ve ever seen. Nothing could be done to disguise the ravages of her final years. She didn’t look peaceful. She didn’t look pretty. Suddenly, I felt ashamed. This wasn’t fun at all.


	The Alamac Hotel, my home in 1969.

"Outside again, the heat was climbing. We made our casual good-byes and headed to our various “homes.” I was living on Broadway and 71st Street in what was then The Alamac Hotel. (Now it’s a super-expensive condo.) The Upper West Side was still very “Panic in Needle Park”-ish but I liked it. So I crossed Central Park, and went to bed.

"You know when you’re a kid, how you can sleep forever — a whole day, even? That’s just what I did. I’d been up the entire night. I was beat from ... being young. So I slept and slept and slept. I didn’t wake until the morning of June 29. I switched on the radio. (I loved the radio!) And that’s when I learned my life had changed while I slept.

The raid on the Stonewall was being treated in a very jocular manner — oh, those sissies, thinking they can fight the cops. My own concern — my only concern — was would the bar ever re-open? After all, though the phrase “Gay Liberation” took a few days to take hold, I’d been living in a liberated fashion for some time. I hadn’t experienced prejudice because I hadn’t experienced anything of value to my thought process yet. I didn’t work. I didn’t have to pretend to be something I wasn’t.

"However, even for an immature type like me, by the end of the week I realized something incredible had happened. You could see it and hear it and read about it. (I devoured and saved for years the famous Village Voice cover story on the event.)

"In an effort to mock and minimalize the riot, the tale of grief-stricken gays mourning Judy took hold in some quarters. Believe me, the patrons of the Stonewall weren’t Judy Garland fans. At all. (That group was over at Julius’s or Uncle Charlie’s, and they weren’t up to rioting.) Divine irony and coincidence collided. Judy was on nobody’s mind as the boys wrenched up a parking meter to bash down the Stonewall doors and free their imprisoned friends. (The terrified cops had barricaded themselves in the bar, after raiding it.)

"The Stonewall re-opened briefly as a juice bar, which was OK by me — I didn’t drink, yet. But the semi-exciting, forbidden furtiveness of gay life — even in the louche and loose Village — had altered irrevocably. “Camp” was serious business now. I’d experienced and rather enjoyed that forbidden vibe. I thought it was “exciting” when the music stopped and lights would go up at Stonewall — there was a cop on the premises!

Judy, having a good laugh at the idea that SHE had anything to do with the Stonewall Riots.

"There would still be raids on other bars, and the battle for equal rights had just begun, but I realized that there wasn’t really anything attractive or sexy about fear of being who you are; cops should have better things to do.

"I never became an activist. I was too busy really having fun after the dam burst. (Although I did march in the early Gay Pride parades, when it meant something more than mere spectacle.) Christopher Street and Greenwich Avenue became one long invigorating, joyous, cruisy conversational jaunt — you’d walk and meet friends and bring them along and meet other friends and everybody seemed in tune, as if we could all read each others’ minds, finish each other’s sentences. Even in wintertime, there was a warmth that came from an entire group of people demanding their right to live and love — and yes, just plain make love — fearlessly. I’m glad I’m the age I am, saw what I saw, lived how I lived. I’d be happier with a bit more hair, but ... that’s 58 for you. [Mr. Wow is now 62]

"And Judy? Well, a month after the Stonewall riot, I was over at some fellow’s house. I was poking around through his record collection, and pulled out a striking-looking album. In giant red letters it declared “Judy. Judy. Judy at Carnegie Hall. The Historic Concert.” It was a two-record set, which impressed me. I opened it up and read all the liner notes. The guy woke up and found me engrossed in raves about Miss G. “Oh, you like Judy, huh?”

“Well, yeah, kind of. Is this good?”

“It’s great. Listen, it’s an old album. I need to get a new one. It’s a little scratchy. You can take it if you want.”

"And so I trundled back to West 71st Street with Judy at Carnegie Hall under my arm.
I turned on my crappy record player. I put the needle to the overture, which was thrilling in itself. By the time an exhausted Judy was crying, “Good night, I love you, God bless!” I was crying too. I had lost my heart to Judy. I didn’t feel so ashamed anymore that I’d made a sport out of seeing her laid out.

"At least I could say, “Yes, I saw Judy Garland.” I didn’t have to say where."

"Good night! I love you! God bless!"

Liz Smith’s Complicated Relationship With the Closet

By JONAH ENGEL BROMWICHNOV. 15, 2017

Liz Smith, the grande dame of New York’s gossip pages, played down the juiciest bit of information about herself when promoting her memoir, “Natural Blonde,” in the pages of New York magazine in 2000.

“All this crap about ‘coming out’! Honey, I don’t think I have ever really been in,” she said.

In truth, Ms. Smith, who died Sunday at 94, was private for years about her interest in women. (Even in the book, there was only one blatant confession of an intimate relationship with a woman, from 1946.)

Iris Love, the classical archaeologist who was a romantic partner of Ms. Smith’s between 1978 and 1996 — and who lived with her between 2010 and 2016 — said Tuesday that she was not sure why the gossip columnist, who was twice married to men and twice divorced, preferred to keep quiet about her relationships with women.

“She had a huge following and maybe, I’m just hypothesizing, maybe she thought that this might turn some of her readers away,” she said.

At the height of her influence, in the 1980s and early ’90s, Ms. Smith covered for still-closeted celebrities like Malcolm Forbes and promoted conservative socialites like Pat Buckley, whose husband, William F. Buckley Jr., the editor of National Review, had written that people with AIDS should be tattooed.

For those reasons, she came under fire by the columnist Michelangelo Signorile, who during the run of the magazine OutWeek named and shamed closeted gay celebrities whom he saw as hypocrites in the midst of a deadly pandemic.

“My feeling was that at that point in time, we were in a national emergency, a health emergency, and government wasn’t doing anything,” Mr. Signorile said in an interview Monday. “All these people were in the world with the same people who were ignoring the crisis.”

At the time, he said, Ms. Smith was “promoting the people who were hurting us.”

In an era when few celebrities were openly gay, Mr. Signorile’s columns created an uproar and led to the coining of the term “outing” in a 1990 Time magazine story. Though OutWeek’s ire was directed toward public figures, the idea of being outed suddenly became even more stifling for an aging community already battered by AIDS and anti-gay violence.

“People were a combination — not just afraid of being outed, but afraid of dying,” said Michael Adams, the chief executive of SAGE, an advocacy organization for older lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adults.

Sandy Warshaw, 84, was a private citizen working for the city of New York during that time. She considered running for a City Council seat but decided not to, partly because she was concerned that she might be outed were she to become a public figure.

She told her family that she dated women in 1993, after leaving the government. But she said Tuesday that, even now, coming out was a continual process, and that her privacy around it is related to her age.

“I do know some people who are still estranged from their families,” Ms. Warshaw said. “I do know some individuals who bear the scars of what they grew up with. I didn’t. I just knew it wasn’t safe.”

Coming out “remains very hard for older generations,” Mr. Adams said. “The mantra of L.G.B.T. people and communities has been ‘come out, come out,’ and at the same time you have people who lived through generations where for the most part, the only way to survive was to hide and stay closeted. People for whom it was literally a matter of life and death.”

He said that the difficulty of coming out could be multiplied by where you were from; it was one thing to come out in San Francisco and another in Biloxi, Miss.

And so it was for Ms. Smith, who was born Mary Elizabeth Smith in Fort Worth in 1923 to a strict Baptist mother.

Ms. Love, 83, said that Ms. Smith had been less at ease with her sexual orientation than she was. She said her own family was open-minded, and her studies had made her comfortable with a broader realm of human sexuality.

Ms. Love, who was still grieving when reached on Tuesday, called Ms. Smith “an angelic, courageous, tough tiger,” adding that “she carried on with her writing until recently she could not hold a pencil.”

Even after “Natural Blonde” came out, Ms. Smith kept relatively mum. Speaking to The New York Times at the age of 85, she said: “I don’t think I owed gay people any explanation. I don’t know that anybody ever wins discussing the most intimate part of their life.”

But in an interview in July, Ms. Smith said she regretted having waited so long to come out.

“It sounded defensive to protest that I thought myself bisexual, like I wouldn’t admit that I was a lesbian,” she said. “I wasn’t a happy convert to any particular sexual thing. But I eventually got tired of defending myself and said, ‘Say whatever you like.’”

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