The death of Dorothy
"Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was more than a song: it was the anthem of a persecuted community.
On 22 June 1969, Judy Garland died in London. Her fifth husband, Mickey Deans, found her lifeless in the bathroom of their rented mews house in Belgravia that morning. The coroner recorded the cause of death as an accidental overdose of barbiturates. Judy Garland was 47 years old. Only twelve days earlier she had celebrated her birthday.
Garland, born Frances Ethel Gumm in Minnesota in 1922, had been on stage since the age of two. At seventeen she became world-famous: in "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) she played Dorothy Gale, a girl from Kansas who dreams herself into a dazzling world beyond the rainbow. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" became her signature song and a quiet anchor of longing for people who found no place in the real world.
In the 1940s and 1950s, those people included thousands of gay men. At a time when homosexuality was a crime in the USA and gay bars were regularly raided by the police, a Garland show was considered a safe meeting place. Anyone who was "a friend of Dorothy" understood the code immediately: he was one of us. The expression, derived from her film character Dorothy Gale, became the secret password of a persecuted community.
Garland's own life echoed this sense of being torn apart. The Hollywood system had plied her with stimulants as a child, sedated her with sleeping pills as an adult and finally dropped her. Addiction, depression, financial hardship and endless comeback attempts marked her final years. A few months before her death, she had struggled through a run of concerts at the "Talk of the Town" in London, sometimes brilliant, sometimes barely able to stand.