Watching the George Harrison bio the other day , I found myself thinking of one of my greatest musical heroes Judy Garland.
The question that was bothering me is: if her story was a success story, why does it feel like a failure. By the age of 39, she was done. An unreliable drunk and she rose and fell from there on in.
But between her ridiculous marriages, her terrifying drug and alcohol dependency, her no show Judy reputation and those consistent attempts to manage some way out of her nightmare of her life till, as Ray Bolger put it "She just wore out" at the sad young age of 47.
All her artistic abilities seem so tempered by the fragileness of her humanity. She reminds me a little of Michael Jackson without the creepiness -instead of creepiness was a will to keep on going, to protect her children, to move onwards for money, to embrace success as not world love, but comfort from the financial slings and arrows of too many thieves,
How could one of our greatest stars have been so much like us? How could not our love have fulfilled her?
And what constitutes the goodness in her life, if she was unhappy, surely then she had a bad life? So is that how we account her, and our, life: if we are happy, our life is good, without success, (much) money, but with something that can replace the needs of the ego; a certain job in existence. Isn't that enough?
In that sense, she had a dreadful life. She never found that which made her life worth living.
But in any other sense, she so profoundly moved so many of us, how can that be true?