Or did they? Every artist wants attention and admiration –that’s why they perform, exhibit or publish–but Garland’s needs seem to have been especially naked and desperate. “Her desire for constant approval was pathological,” wrote Vincente Minnelli, the second of her five husbands, in a memoir quoted by Clarke. She became addicted to applause at age 2, as Frances Gumm of the singing Gumm Sisters, and came to believe, Clarke says, that “she was only as good as the folks out front said she was.” Late in her life, one witness saw her backstage listening to a playback of the concert she’d just given. " ‘Oooh!’ she cried when she heard the first burst of applause. Then, leaning into her makeup mirror, she kissed her own reflection. ‘You’re a star!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re a star! You’re a star!’ "

But she never believed it. She hated her looks: when she was growing up among MGM’s starlets, Louis B. Mayer called her “my little hunchback.” She put manic energy into undermining her public and private lives. Her drug addiction got so ravenous that at parties she’d raid hosts’ medicine cabinets. She racked up a good-size list of lovers–Frank Sinatra, Tyrone Power, James Mason, Yul Brynner–but seemed to put up with ugly humiliations. One unnamed partner, according to an unnamed source, would make her sing “Over the Rainbow” after giving oral sex.

You didn’t want to know that, and it may not be true. Clarke’s biography is a weird mix of deep dish and high-toned prose. People don’t get married, but “approach the altar”; moviegoers’ hearts beat like “libidinous tom-toms.” Its oddest moment may be his comparison of the notorious agent David Begelman to Belial in “Paradise Lost”: “But beneath Belial’s sleek exterior,” he writes, " ‘all was false and hollow.’ False had been Begelman’s promises to Judy. Hollow had been his pledges of rewards and riches." This bombast is no substitute for thought. When Clarke, author of the 1989 “Capote,” has to explain why so many gay men took Garland to heart, he simply tells us that closeted homosexuals, like Judy, suffered “demeaning jokes and casual contempt.” That’s it? And when he must describe her transcendent artistic moment, the 1961 Carnegie Hall concert, Clarke can only throw vague, wordy compliments: “… Greatness, true greatness, was hers, and on that soft April night in Manhattan she ascended to heights untrodden by any of her contemporaries.” With a life as disastrous as Garland’s, there’s nothing inappropriate about down-and-dirty pathography. But false and hollow is the pretense that this book is anything more.