Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland
Gerald Clarke
510pp, Little, Brown
£20
Buy it at BOL

In his new biography of Judy Garland, Gerald Clarke quotes his subject complaining about the sex appeal of her co-stars. "I don't like myself," she moaned to her drama coach on Ziegfield Girl in 1940. "When Lana walks onto the set, all the guys whistle until she gets across. When Hedy walks on, there's a sigh of I don't know what. And when I walk on, they say: 'Hi, Judy!'" Garland was later to revise her opinion of Lana Turner's merits, saying that "talking to her is like talking to a beautiful vase", but for that moment, on the edge of womanhood, the child star Judy Garland was not content to be someone people could talk to - she wanted to be precisely the kind of girl no one felt they could talk to.

Every movie fan must now have their own immediate, free-associative view of who Judy Garland was - not because she was such a stalwart at MGM (she was fired a number of times), but because she had been with the starry studio since her youth. She grew up in the movies, too fast and not at all, retaining both a childlike energy and a childlike frailty, even as she sabotaged her body with adult weapons. Which Judy Garland first comes to mind? Is it the girl-next-door of the Andy Hardy films, the pigtailed innocent of The Wizard of Oz? Is she the sweet-voiced sister from Meet Me in St Louis or the complicated, gutsy heroine of A Star Is Born? Is she, perhaps, the drug-addled singer who made thousands weep? Is she overweight in your memory or gauntly thin? Is she, only, Liza Minnelli's mother?

Her story has been told in countless books and documentaries since her death from a drug overdose in 1969, and one imagines this might create difficulties for the biographer, but Gerald Clarke has his own take on Garland's life. The legend begins with an attempted abortion: Ethel Gumm, the future Judy's mother, already had two children and could not afford or cope with more. She tried to get rid of the child, but a friend told her it could cost her her own life. If she kept the baby, the friend said (with an irony forever lost on Ethel), she would have "the happiest baby in the world". When the girl was born, Ethel pinned all her hopes on her - not because she wanted her to be happy, but because she was Ethel's best chance of a ticket out of the sticks and onto the stage. Frances, or Babe, as the youngest was called for many years, had an extraordinary gift: she looked like a child and sang like a woman.

The Gumm sisters (sometimes called the Gumdrops, and later changed to the Garland sisters) started out as a trio, with Frances on stage by the age of two, but they ended up leaving Babe, the most popular by far, to give solo performances. Ethel, a wildly pushy, unaffectionate woman, took the role of stage mother to heady new heights. She drove her daughter around the country, accompanying her on the piano. She had her sights set on Hollywood, but her daughter was rejected by everyone there until she changed her name. In the end, it was not Frances Gumm or Frances Garland but Judy who was welcomed with open arms, and by 1935 her mother's stubborn design had been fulfilled.

Gerald Clarke brings to the story something that might account for Ethel's disillusioned desperation: her husband, Frank Gumm, was, Clarke writes, "basically homosexual".

It's a rather casual phrase for such a dramatic revelation - indeed, the revelations are so dramatic that one is inclined to disbelieve Clarke, to think him the sort of biographer who sets out to dredge up scandal or abuse. But he does cite his sources, and after a while, the sources themselves become part of the excitement: Clarke, the author of a bestselling biography of Truman Capote, appears to have an ingenious knack for seeking out the extras in Garland's life. He has spoken to the boy who took the tickets at her father's old movie theatre, to her best friend down the street in the small desert town of Lancaster, California, to a boyfriend from her teenage years; he has consulted local lawyers and barbers, dredged up letters and recorded reminiscences - in short, he has assembled a small army of marginal storytellers, and there seems no reason to suspect the account he gives.

The theme continues: Not only was Judy's father servicing boys in the back row of his cinema, but her husband, Vincente Minnelli, was also gay - or, according to Clarke, "at least largely so". He would dress up in drag, at least two male actors claimed to have had flings with him, and Clarke gives evidence of one "almost certain" other. When colleagues at MGM told Judy they were under the impression that her future husband was not, as they put it, "marrying material", she insisted that it was "just his artistic flair". Many years later, their daughter Liza discovered her husband Peter Allen in bed with another man - not only that, but, Clarke claims, unbeknownst to either Liza or her mother, Allen was also sleeping with Judy's husband Mark Herron.

The story has an almost too-perfect circularity to it, and what, in the end, can we do with this information? Conclude that, since the loves of her life had been gay, Garland became a gay icon, and that the feelings of her fans were reciprocated in ways we could not have known? Clarke makes no connection between husbands and fans, suggesting that her gay following is to do with her audience's affinity with the public abuse she had suffered. The only thing the sexuality of her father and lovers seems to indicate is that she wanted to be loved by men who could not really love her, or that she was afraid of men who might. Feeling unloved is, in any telling, the story of Judy Garland's life; she always dreamed of something better. She said that when she sang "Over the Rainbow" it always made her cry, and even the most hardened cynic might, on hearing the cracking voice of late recordings of that song, wonder what had happened to the little girl who first sang it.

Although much of Get Happy is taken up with what will for many be a familiar account of loves and losses of self-control, perhaps the most arresting part is the section on Garland's late youth and early adulthood. Through the studio's difficulties in casting her - "they didn't know what to do with me because they wanted you either five years old or eighteen, with nothing in between," she said - something about her can be clearly seen.

Garland doesn't seem to have experienced the change from child to adult as a transition, she seems to have carried both extremes within her all her life. This is not merely because of her experiences - the fact that she was singing at the Cocoanut Grove at the age of nine, for instance - it was a strange and unique fusion she possessed. When she was twelve, Garland (then Frances Gumm) performed an act in which she sat on stage covered in a shawl so that only her face was visible in the spotlight. She sang a melancholy torch song with a deep, womanly voice. Only when the applause had started did she throw off the shawl and reveal her childish form; it was this uncanny factor that had audiences raving. But it wasn't always so successful - she tried singing love songs straight, her child's body unhidden, and had to stop, because people thought it just too weird.

The studio never really stopped treating her as a child, so much so that it is difficult to think of her as a mother. When she was pregnant with Liza, Louis B Mayer protested, "we simply can't have that baby have a child!", and it's as if she made herself unable to deal with adult life, or parental life, by abusing her grown-up body. After several drying-out programs, Garland was sent to a hospital in Boston, where she was particularly popular on the children's ward. "If I was cured at Peter Bent Brigham," she said of the hospital, "it was only because of those children." Clarke writes that she became very close to one girl, who had been so badly abused she had been catatonic for two years. Garland, who had got through her own childhood by singing, spent a good deal of time with the silent girl. At the end of her three-month stay, she went to say goodbye. As Garland bent down to kiss her, the child spoke for the first time.

"Judy!" she shouted, "I love you! I love you! Don't leave!" Perhaps only now did the glamour of the MGM stars seem less significant than being Judy - the person everyone felt they could speak to.

• Gaby Wood is writing a book about dolls and automata for Faber.