NONFICTION - July 4, 1993

JUDY GARLAND by David Shipman (Hyperion: $24.95; 512 pp.) . The public’s fascination with entertainer Judy Garland never seems to subside--the notion that anyone could so aggressively squander such formidable talents seems to hold a lot of appeal for Hollywood fans. Shipman, a film historian, has compiled a mountain of details about all those things that usually sell movie biographies--sex, in this case the homosexuality of Garland’s father and some of her husbands, as well as her own bisexuality; drugs, from the weight-control pills ingested by a nervous starlet to the barbiturates that eventually killed her, either by choice or by muddled accident; and excessive behavior, from late appearances on movie sets to destructive flirtations. The book is dense with detail, and the picture Shipman paints is of a child who barely got out of her dysfunctional family intact, only to be thrown headlong into Hollywood--a place where Garland, having just given birth to her third child, was wired up for a television appearance in case she won the Oscar for best actress, only to be unceremoniously unhooked, without a word of acknowledgment or sympathy, when she lost to Grace Kelly. The image of Garland crying in that hospital bed is a metaphor for the book, at once too painful to look at and impossible to ignore.