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All famous women are treated as objects but female artists, if addicts, have a particularly gruesome fate. Amy Winehouse, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe: their privacy is stripped away, their lives made cautionary tales for girls.
Why, I sometimes idly wonder, have I seen, in a mainstream biography, a photograph of Marilyn Monroe’s corpse? But that is normal; their gifts are swallowed by the less essential, but more thrilling truth that they were, even as they produced great art, gravely ill.
When Winehouse was sober, she rarely appeared in newspapers; when she used drugs, she was stalked through the streets. It was as if that, when healthy — when whole — the female artist does not adequately inhabit the narrative created for her and so is less interesting. The gift is, in this telling, only a subplot of the real narrative, which is misogynistic and made only of schadenfreude: a gifted woman’s fall. If there is talent, it must be paid for, and with an early death.
I hoped that in the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp these private tragedies might be treated kindly. Both Monroe and Garland would have expert testimony. They were subjected to appalling abuse in Hollywood, and, in an initial stripping away of their selves, even denied their own names. They were really called Norma-Jean Baker and Frances Ethel Gumm.
They deserve our compassion and our gratitude; but even now Monroe’s extraordinary comic gifts are eclipsed by her sexual allure, which was only her best and most-long running joke. Such sensitivity is a fantasy lying somewhere I cannot find it. It’s most likely beyond the rainbow. How else can you explain the treatment of Judy Garland in the biopic Judy, starring Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland?
In Judy, Garland’s mental illness is the real show. It is treated with more curiosity than the thing that should bewitch us: her voice, which was, and remains, the very best in film musicals — the most complex, the most passionate. Judy’s intention is explicit from the timeframe. It is set in 1969; later that year Garland will die of an accidental overdose of barbiturates in London. The setting is her last engagement in Britain, at The Talk of the Town nightclub where, due to her illness, she is always late, often confused, and, once, is heckled on stage. She should, of course, not have performed at all but Bernard Delfont (Michael Gambon), the impresario who put her there is presented as avuncular and kindly, another victim of Garland’s maddening caprice. He is not an exploiter. How could he be, when he is played by Albus Dumbledore?
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