Susie Boyt's memoir tells how she uses her obsession with Judy Garland to deal with life's ups and downs. Fellow Judy fan Jackie McGlone meets her – and tries on their heroine's shoes for size
THEY are not ruby slippers, but they are definitely the next best thing. Here I am sitting in the lobby of a luxurious hotel, in London's Covent Garden, slipping my size threes into a pair of slightly scuffed white leather mules. I think they look ri
diculous with my opaque black tights, but author Susie Boyt begs to differ.
She claps her hands and says, looking down at her own feet, which are encased in sandals the enviable colour of the Emerald City: "Oh look… they were made for you."
Certainly, these shoes embody the sense of becoming someone else once put on, briefly transforming the monochrome world of London into a rainbow-coloured Munchkinland.
Boyt insists on taking a photograph with my mobile phone of my feet in these iconic shoes. And they are indeed iconic, because they belonged to Judy Garland – she even wrote her name on the leather soles, although she wore them only in her dressing-room.
We look at her signature and at each other and our eyes fill up, especially when Boyt produces a pair of Judy's false eyelashes, a pot of blue eyeshadow and a crimson lipstick, which surely still bears the star's DNA. There's even the tiger-tooth brooch that Orson Welles gave her when they had a brief affair in the late 1940s.
By now you'll have guessed that Boyt – and I – are dedicated fans of the peerless Judy, although I can't compete with this novelist's passion for her. After all, she's duetted with a grumpy Mickey Rooney, taken tea with the world's largest collector of Garland memorabilia, enjoyed an illicit late-night spree behind the scenes at the Minnesota Judy Garland Museum (hence the eyeshadow), wept tipsily at Judy's tomb in Westchester, New York, and even sat in this very hotel with Liza Minnelli.
Indeed, such is Boyt's devotion to the blessed Judy that she's written a magical memoir, My Judy Garland Life, for anyone who's ever held a candle to a star. Proof copies arrive garlanded in scarlet ribbons, complete with glass-beaded badge showing the ruby slippers on Judy's blue ankle-socked feet. Apparently, these pins are now much coveted in London clubland.
Part modest autobiography and part biography, it's a beautifully written book filled with what Boyt describes as "controlled revelations", as admirers of her four accomplished novels and her brilliant newspaper column, about the morality of glamour and the aesthetics of ethics, might expect. Indeed, you would have to have a tin heart not to be moved by it, since Boyt confesses that she has been "half or more in love" with Judy Garland all her life, although the world's greatest entertainer died in 1969, five months after Boyt was born.
"I know for certain that something at the heart of Judy Garland connects directly to something at the heart of me. I feel implicated in her myriad struggles and triumphant in the face of her success. There are flashes of understanding between us, almost supernatural shocks of intense recognition, which assail me when I hear her speak or sing or watch her dance," she writes in My Judy Garland Life.
Like thousands of others, Boyt felt that by listening to Judy she could help the troubled star. This made her immensely hopeful as she was a sensitive child, a conscientious, reliable and helpful little girl, chubby and intense, keen to stay a child for as long as possible – "for ever if I could manage it" – because she recognised that the grown-up world inhabited by her parents and her much older siblings was more dangerous than she could bear.
She is the daughter of two artists: her father is this nation's "Greatest Living Artist", Lucian Freud, and she is Sigmund Freud's great-grandaughter. Her mother, Suzy Boyt, was a famous beauty, who abandoned her career as a painter to become a single mother and have five children with Freud, whom she met when he taught her at Slade School of Fine Art.
Boyt is their youngest and her parents parted before she was born. She says as a child she missed her father so much it was a physical pain. She was born in a tall, thin house with no foundations – quite a metaphor! – in an eerie, Gothic London square. Her sister Rose is a novelist, as is her half-sister, Esther Freud; her other half-sister is Bella Freud, the couturier.
With her heart-shaped face, silken blonde hair and wide grey eyes, uncannily like Lucian Freud's, Boyt retains that longed-for air of innocence, despite being the mother of two daughters, Mary (seven) and Cecilia (two). Last time I interviewed her, I called her Alice in Wonderland in stilettos (Jimmy Choos, actually). Today, in her crisp green-and-white cotton dress, she's Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz in wedges.
"I did ask my husband, 'Do you think I should I wear red shoes for this interview?'" she confides, when I mention this. Apparently, Tom Astor – a film producer (Tank Girl, Joy Division) and youngest son of another glamorous dynasty – to whom she has been married for more than ten years, simply rolled his eyes heavenwards.
Ruby slippers aside, Boyt has found many odd links between herself and Judy, including the fact that her father met her. Brought over to her at a party in London some time after the film A Star is Born, he shook her hand but it didn't quite come out right: only three of her four fingers made it into the handshake. "Hey, you missed one!" she cried and they shook again; this time the wayward little finger was included.
"I've asked him to tell me this story time and time again in case any new details emerge. I feel for that finger sometimes."
A quiet, bookish little girl, Boyt grew up, like Judy, longing for the stage, even if it meant being the dresser in the wings. But it was not to be.
However, she can sing and bravely took to the cabaret stage in Brooklyn, last October, performing Judy's Do I Love You, Do I? When she watches the film her husband made of her – her fellow performers included New York cabaret star Mary Cleere Haran – all she can say is, hey, it holds up. And she's just won a walk-on part for one night in a charity raffle in Les Misérables: "I'll be a beggar or a harlot."
Already at work on her next novel – The Nursery, a dark, psychological comedy set in a London kindergarten – I'm thinking The Nanny Diaries meets Turn of the Screw – Boyt is also about to return to her role as a bereavement counsellor for the charity Cruse, after a maternity break. She first became interested in their work when they counselled her through her own grief following the death of her boyfriend, who was killed in a climbing accident when he fell from a roof at Oxford University, where they were both students. Her Cruse counsellor helped her so much, she says, that she decided to train too.
In My Judy Garland Life, she reveals she also turned to Judy. Every day for a whole year after her fiancé's death, she watched Garland in The Concert Years. "I told Lorna Luft, Judy's daughter, this when I met her. She said, 'Why on Earth would you do that?' and I said, 'Because it made me feel better." Her grief is secure now, though, and dwells far away in her past.
"What does it say about this extraordinary performer that I've felt linked to her so powerfully all my life?" Boyt wonders. "What does it say about me? Whatever strange alchemy has been at work between us, the facts are these: I wasn't there at the moments of her greatest triumphs and her cruellest despair. But she has been at mine."
We talk about how her book has captured the same tremulous quality that Judy had and the importance of always chasing rainbows, to coin a phrase. Certainly, after so much pain and sadness, she's contented now.
"You should hear my chirping and whistling," she laughs.
Reluctantly, I remove Judy's shoes and hand them back to Boyt, who is returning to her pretty Regent's Park home, presumably to bake a cake for afternoon tea – she's famous for her fancies and even iced a cake for her father's 80th birthday with her interpretation of one of his nude self-portraits.
Then together, we murmur: "One, two, three: There's no place like home, there's no place like home."
• My Judy Garland Life by Susie Boyt is published by Virago, priced £15.99.
The full article contains 1484 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
