Why Jessie is Judy’s saviour
ROSalyN WIlDer, production assistant for impresario robert Nesbitt, was charged with holding the hand of troubled superstar Judy Garland during a five-week engagement at london’s fabled Talk Of The Town nightclub in 1968.
The curtain went up if Garland could be coaxed out of her dressing room.
The Talk Of The Town shows form the backdrop of Judy, director rupert Goold’s exquisite study of heartbreak which portrays Garland as a lonely goddess — and Jessie Buckley as the young woman determined to look after her in the twilight of her career.
renee Zellweger gives a performance of rare fragility as Garland; one that honours the stature of a oncegreat artist whose gifts are dissipating. Judy (which opens here on October 2) should place Zellweger right at the forefront of the forthcoming awards season.
Wilder met producer David livingstone while he was developing the Pathe Uk and BBc Films picture. Her reminiscences were incorporated into a screenplay based, in part, on Peter Quilter’s play end Of The rainbow, which starred Tracie Bennett as Garland.
She watched wistfully as Zellweger and Buckley acted out a moment from her life half a century ago in a brilliantly replicated Talk Of The Town room, while behind them, sequinned showgirls were put through their paces by choreographer lynne Page. ( The interior had been constructed in the auditorium of the Hackney empire in east london. like the london Hippodrome, which housed The Talk Of The Town, it was designed by famed theatre architect Frank Matcham.)
‘I don’t know what to say,’ she told me. ‘Just to be faced with somebody on a screen calling themselves rosalyn Wilder is very odd.’
She recalled working with top- of-the-bill names of the calibre of Shirley Bassey and lena Horne. ‘everybody went to the Talk Of The Town. People dressed up. you didn’t turn up in jeans.’
TH
e thought prompted a darker memory. ‘It was a challenge when Judy wouldn’t turn up,’ she said. ‘and when she did turn up, she often wouldn’t go on. ‘It wasn’t fun. It was heart-stopping. But I never disliked her. I never got cross with her. I got frustrated and I felt unhappy for her. you had to coax her to do most things,’ she told me.
Wilder felt that Garland’s much younger husband, Mickey Deans, and a couple of others in her entourage were opportunists who treated her badly. ‘ They slapped her around,’ she said.
‘I don’t mean physically, but it was a sort of mental slapping around. They would laugh at her, mock her,’ she said, her distaste clear even after all these years.
‘Have another pill, Judy. Have another drink, Judy. Oh, you’re late Judy, they’d say.’
She wondered why Deans and his cohorts didn’t help Garland get to the venue earlier.
‘They waited till it was half past ten to get her out of the hotel. The floor show was at nine and Judy Garland was at eleven,’ Wilder said, reciting the bill as if the show was yesterday.
‘you couldn’t get cross with Judy really, because her whole life she was being used and abused by all sorts of people, and eventually it rubs off on you. I think she was just clinging on. She came down backstage once and I said to her: “are you all right?” She said: “Not terribly. I need to take some pills.”
‘I said to her if she went on stage, I would stand in the prompt corner with the pills and some water and, if she needed them, I was right there.
‘I never gave her any,’ she added. ‘Once she was there, the lights were there, the audience was there, the orchestra’ s behind her and that’s when Dr Showbiz kicked in. The magic was there and she had this magnetic hold when she sang, even though this was right at the end of her career.’
For Garland’s last performance, lonnie Donegan, who had stepped in a few times, was put on standby. But Garland made it. ‘I never saw Judy again,’ Wilder said quietly. ‘She passed away six months after The Talk Of The Town.’
Buckley met with Wilder twice before shooting began.
‘I had a cup of tea at the Hippodrome, then she taught me how to drink champagne at an early hour,’ the young actress said with an infectious snort of laughter. ‘I think it was about 12 noon.’