On Judy Garland

From "Life Writing Lite: Judy Garland and Reparative Rhetorics of
Celebrity Life Writing" by Joseph Janangelo, College English

Specifically, this essay offers a rhetorical reading of entertainer Judy Garland’s early life writing projects. My work focuses on two open letters Garland published in 1950, in which she talks to the public and press to let them know “the truth” (“Open”) about her life and how much her audience means to her. As a troubled celebrity, Garland had for years been the subject of many public inquiries about her well-being. Many of them involved suspicions of mental illness and chemical dependency. Yet if stories about Garland’s life offered her multiple occasions to eat crow, she never did. Rather, she was an effective rhetorician who was adept at defusing such stories by offering cheerful and measured responses to them.

My argument is that those texts, which appeared in fan magazines, served as effective vehicles of recalling and renewing bonds with her audience and repairing  damage done to her reputation and career. In analyzing how those informal yet very public texts assert kinship with fans, I hope to draw attention to the understudied ways in which pre–Internet era celebrities communicated with the public.

My point is that these texts offer effective communicative templates for contemporary troubled celebrities who use public discourse in ubiquitous and understudied genres (for example, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, websites, blogs, and YouTube) to rebut bad press and repair bonds with fans. While we rhetorical critics and theorists have felt increasingly committed to analyzing public discourse, we have not paid as much attention as we should to these particular uses of media, which engage mass attention even if the rhetor involved is an entertainer rather than, say, a politician. After examining Garland’s texts, I will also note the hints they offer contemporary rhetorics for crafting online life writing projects.