JaneJoCaro

Judy Garland visits Fred Astaire & Gene Kelly, rehearsing The Babbit and The Bromide on the set of “The Ziegfeld Follies” in 1944

JUGENEA SNIPPET

While on location in Palm Springs filming ‘Girl, Crazy’ , Gene and Judy make a decision 

Judy Garland with her first husband, David Rose.

« Marriage is important. If people break up, there should be solid reasons why they can’t go on. Ours were personality reasons. Our personalities were so conflicting that we could hardly agree on one point. And yet we wanted to please the other so badly that these differences never came out into the open. . . . We really had too much respect for each other, too MUCH consideration for the feelings of the other. I would seem to agree with him because I didn’t want to hurt him. He did the same thing. We tried hard to change, not the other person, but OURSELVES. We tried to make ourselves over from inside out, but you can’t do that. You can’t change the real you. You can only pretend to. So—there was a constant heaviness in the air. »

« Sometimes [my singing voice is] so loud it surprises me. But that’s the way I’ve always sung. I’ve never trained my voice, possibly because I use the right muscles in my throat. When I was a kid in vaudeville, people would say I’d lose my voice before I got much older. That alarmed my mother, so she sent me to a vocal coach. The first lesson had me trying to blow off a piece of paper pasted on my forehead. ‘Breath control,’ she said. Next she had me singing with a pencil in my teeth. ‘Poor diction,’ she said. I told her I didn’t usually sing with a pencil in my teeth. I think a lot of talent is dried up by too many lessons. If you’ve got it, it usually comes out anyway. »

Judy Garland and Charles Walters on a date at the Mocambo (1943).

« We almost got married at one point before [she wed] Vincente [Minnelli]. But I was just getting started, and she was a big star. I’d worked too long and too hard to get to Metro—on my own—and I couldn’t be Mr. Judy Garland! »