Show and Tell

By Stefan Kanfer

Entertainers elicit an extraordinary range of responses from their audiences--admiration, love, even secular idolatry. They ought to be praised and analyzed for the gifts that cause such reactions. But these days it is not enough for performers to be gifted or versatile. As a new wave of show-biz biographies gloomily illustrates, stars must now be pumped up into symbols of their profession or indictments of their society. It was in just this spirit of distorted inflation that Albert Goldman last year took Lenny Bruce from shlepper to counterculture shaman in 13 uneasy chapters.

Among the personalities lately subjected to runaway inflation, none is more pathetic than Judy Garland. Along the parabola that describes her career, Garland made 37 films. Only a handful are memorable and only one, The Wizard of Oz, is a classic. But she gave more than 100 concerts and broadcasts that brought millions of listeners in on her waif length. Eventually her performances also exhibited--as at a sideshow--a manic-depressive grotesque who shrilled off-key and forgot once familiar lyrics. In the last years she attracted throngs of gay and melancholy Garland freaks whose adulation was a form of cruelty. Echoes of the cruelty and the applause that masked it can still be detected in three predatory biographies:

Young Judy, by David Dahl and Barry Kehoe (Mason/Charter; $9.95), explores Grand Rapids, Minn., and Lancaster, Calif., for fragments of the true Judy. The authors emerge with gossip about Frances Gumm, whose vaudeville father was a homosexual and whose mother sought vicarious recognition in her child star. For Dahl and Kehoe The Wizard of Oz is cinema `a clef; the Dorothy who sang Over the Rainbow was the actress herself. "Frances never stopped trying to get home," they burble in a style that Rona Barrett might envy. Young Judy covers only the childhood of Garland's 47-year-long life and is only about one-fourth as egregious as Anne Edwards' Judy Garland (Simon & Schuster; $9.95). Author Edwards, an English film scenarist, belongs to the Ptolemaic school of cinema biography. In this genre, all global events are subordinated to the subject: "Frances Ethel Gumm, the future Judy Garland, was born on June 10, 1922, about the same time as Benito Mussolini marched on Rome and took up the reins of dictatorship. Not even Ethel in her greatest moments of fantasy could have imagined that her third baby would some day come to represent to a nation fighting the Fascism of Hitler and Mussolini the ideal American girl."

Far more professional--and garish--is Gerold Frank's oversized Judy (Harper & Row; $12.50). Ex-Ghostwriter Frank is a sob brother with impeccable credentials (I'll Cry Tomorrow; Beloved Infidel). He merchandises anecdotes with the craft of an attorney summing up for the jury. But does the author stand for defense or prosecution? Frank's descriptions of Garland on Garland are acute and empathetic: "She saw herself so impersonally she could say of her photograph, 'I don't like her hair that way,' or of herself on the screen, 'She could have done that better.' " Judy's choice of a name for her first born, "Liza Minnelli. It will look good on a marquee," has a certain premonitory appeal. But every amusing aside is counterweighted with repellents--tantrums fueled by Dexamyl, catastrophic marriages, endless breakdowns and cancellations. Near the end, Frank reports, one of Garland's children begged her to make a promised stage appearance, if only for a group of wistful paraplegics. Judy's reply: "If they can wheel them in, they can wheel them out." Such anecdotes diminish both biographer and biographee and make the reader wonder why this sorrowful woman was worth 700 pages of heavy industry. Is the neon gossip meant to illuminate the warts, Judy and all? Or is it the mandatory downer for some future wide-screen version of Garland starring, say, Liza Minnelli?

Apparently, the greater a star's candle power, the dimmer the biographer need be. As proof, see Donald Zee's Sophia (McKay; $8.95). By now, Sophia Loren's ascent from the rubble of Naples to the gold of Carlo Ponti should be as familiar as the tale of the princess and the frog. But to Zec, a British journalist, each incident, each phrase, is worthy of a marble bas-relief: " 'Sometimes I felt I wasn't having the baby for Carlo; I was having it for the world,' smiled Sophia." After such reportage, an audience cannot be blamed for doubting even so gifted a performer when she avers that despite her wealth, she works mainly for the "luffofart."

Humphrey Bogart (Little, Brown; $12.50) is Nathaniel Benchley's "attempt to bring life to what is rapidly becoming a legend. The literal-minded," warns the author, "will complain that the quotes in this book cannot be accurate, and this is probably true." The problem is not one of accuracy but of familiarity. Benchley's frail chronicle offers the standard stories of Hollywood's old rebel, who pursued independence the way Sam Spade sought the Maltese falcon. Defining the difference between himself and most everybody else, Bogart used to claim that the world was about two drinks behind. Benchley, with his arch collage of pictures and incidents, is a lot farther back than that.

Charles Higham's Kate (Norton; $7.95) displays a similar flaccidity. "Hepburn stood back nobly," begins the chronicle, "not asking to see the book in manuscript or proof . . . not even calling me to see how I was progressing." Hepburn's celebrated diffidence was never more wisely employed. Higham's hushed approach, his claim that "she is the greatest actress of our time . . . because her honesty demands she must suffer nakedly in front of our eyes" is incense, not biography.

Juliet Colman may be forgiven for adoring her father in Ronald Colman (Morrow; $7.95). Still, the early intelligence that the actor was "a man's man but women's idol" gives warning that the book is a family correspondence that has embarrassingly escaped into general circulation. The Briton's jaunty charm and his finely constricted delivery are far better commemorated in Lost Horizon, A Double Life, and other ancients that so persistently prove the durability of celluloid over pulp.

John Cottrell's Laurence Olivier (Prentice-Hall; $10.95) is by far the most literate of the new biographies, though it has a tendency to tiptoe all about its subject. Some negative observations are offered about Lord Olivier's vulgarities and his tendency to rant. But the book is mainly an enlarged poster of theatrical quotes: "Range and virtuosity"--James Agee; "Unforgettable"--Kenneth Tynan; "The most lovable person in the theater''--Dame Sibyl Thorndyke; "Simplicity and humility"--Kirk Douglas.

Yet one quote--from Olivier himself--gives the whole show away. As he concluded a performance of Othello, the world's greatest actor swept past his applauding co-stars and into his dressing room. "What's the matter, Larry? It was great!" said an actor. Olivier growled back loudly: "I know it was great, damn it, but I don't know how I did it. So how can I be sure I can do it again?"

Therein lies the flaw in virtually all biographies of entertainers. Performance is a mysterious process, often beyond the comprehension of performer--and critic. That mystery is worth dissection; everything else is a banal fever chart of catcalls and triumphs.

Gossip was once the province of the fan magazine or the newspaper column. With the diminution of these outlets, the stories have found their way between cloth covers. No matter how thick those covers, they cannot disguise the poverty and pretension of the contents. It may be true, as Edwin Booth observed, that most actors' work is writ on water. Alas, it is truer to say that most actors' lives are rot on paper.

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