Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland: Biography - Tapa dura

[A] masterful biography. (SUNDAY TIMES)

A Hollywood biography in the classic mould...[it is the] deep insecurity allied with greatness that Clarke explores so well. This is a sympathetic biography in that it seeks explanations, although Clarke properly makes no attempt to gloss over the Garland (GLASGOW HERALD)

This biography carries us through Garland's show-stopping highs and pill-popping lows in high style, showing her considerable wit and glamour as well as the misery of a young performer manipulated by the studio...Clarke's biography whips smoothly through the years with minimal hyperbole and his subject emerges triumphant. (OBSERVER)

There have been plenty of books on Judy, but Clarke is the only writer to have access to her 68 manuscript pages of her unfinished biography. Drawing on a remarkable number of sources, he has produced the definitive life. (SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

Judy Garland. The girl with the pigtails in THE WIZARD OF OZ. The brightest star of the Hollywood musical & an entertainer of almost magical power. The woman of half a dozen comebacks & a hundred heartbreaks. To tell her story, Gerald Clarke too k10 years, travelled thousands of miles across two continents, conducted hundreds of interviews, & ug through mountains of documents, many of which were unavailable to other biographers. Combining a novelist's skill & a movie director's eye, Clarke re-creates the golden age of Hollywood with cinematic urgency, bringing to vivid life the characters who played leading roles in the unending drama of Judy Garland: Louis B Mayer, the patriarch of MGM; sexy Lana Turner, Judy's friend & idol, who had a habit of trying to snatch away any man Judy expressed interest in; clarinetist Artie Shaw, handsome Tyrone Power; boy genius Orson Welles & brilliant director Vincente Minnelli, who fathered her first child, Liza. Toward 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 Judy's story as she herself might have told it.