Friend of Dorothy

This podcast contains explicit language.

I remember the first time I saw it, I was just five years old, four and a half, and it was my birthday because they would always screen it in the springtime.

And my aunt sat me down in front of the television set in our house in Queens Village, and it was like a religious experience.

I was transfixed, and I fell in love with the little girl in the blue kingham dress.

We must be over the rainbow.

When I was 12, we were going on a family vacation and we were in a place called Genovese, which today would be the equivalent of Duane Reed.

And there was audio cassettes.

There was one that said Judy Garland Over the Rainbow.

And I looked at the cassette and I said, well, she kind of looks like Dorothy, but she's older.

And I showed it to my mom and she said, yeah, she did more than just The Wizard of Oz.

She made other movies.

She played Carnegie Hall.

She had a television series and she made record albums.

And I was like, Dorothy made records.

How cool.

So they bought me that cassette and I made my family listen to that tape all the way to Hershey, Pennsylvania, and all the way back to New York.

They must have listened to it about a hundred times.

She managed to just

get right into the deepest recesses of somebody's soul and she could tap into the sadness, but more importantly, the joy within someone.

And I was miserable enough as an adolescent, so I never viewed Judy as a tragic figure.

She represented this great sense of joy to me, and that's what the voice represented to me.

I got rhythm, I got music, I got my man who could ask for anything more.

I got daisies in green pastures.

I got my man who could ask for anything more.

Old man trouble.

My name is Peter Mack, and I'm a Judy Garland tribute artist.

I have been now for 17 years.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Every episode we take on a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

50 years after her death, Judy Garland is still with us.

As the star of The Wizard of Oz, among many other things, she is part of our cultural education, passed down from generation to generation.

Her combination of incredible talent and incredible frailty continues to make her fascinating.

Just recently, she's been the subject of a biopic starring Renee Zellweger and a documentary on Showtime.

But she's always been particularly fascinating to and beloved by a community that feels a particularly special connection to her.

queer people and gay men in particular.

In this episode, Dakota Rings producer Benjamin Frisch is going to explore this special relationship through the life and work of Peter Mack, the Judy Garland impersonator you've just heard from.

We're going to look at the history and future of Judy Garland, a celebrity impersonation, and a female impersonation to try and figure out why Judy still resonates.

So, today, I'm Dakota Ring.

Who's still in love with Judy Garland?

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One person that loves Judy Garland is, as I said, Dakota Rings producer Benjamin Fresh.

Hi, Ben.

Hey, Willa.

So, how did you get into Judy Garland?

I think I saw The Wizard of Oz when I was really young.

I don't remember ever having seen it for the first time.

It was just always a part of my world, I guess.

I didn't really obsess over her as an adolescent, and I'm sort of embarrassed to admit that I knew almost nothing about her life for most of my life.

But when you're a gay person, references to Judy Garland, they just kind of pop up everywhere.

Like the term friend of Dorothy to mean a gay person.

I think I first heard that in the movie Clueless when I was a kid and I had no idea what it meant.

It's references like that that made me really want to dig in and learn more about Judy Garland.

So I recently started listening to her music and watching her movies and I got really into her 1961 live album, Judy at Carnegie Hall, which is widely considered to be the high point of her singing career.

I wanted to find out exactly why this woman was and is so spellbinding to people like me, and to people like Peter Mack, who you heard at the top of the show.

He performs as Judy Garland every Saturday in New York City.

Peter's show is one of the most wholesome things I've ever seen.

Judy curses a little and needles the audience a bit, but it all feels sort of removed from time, from another era.

The set list and style of the show changes every few weeks, but when I saw it, it was a cabaret of Judy classics from the Broadway songbook.

He wore a black sequined gown, black Judy wig, and makeup to block out his eyebrows in order to look a little bit more like Judy.

At first, it's a bit strange because you know it's a man wearing a dress in front of you, but when you see Peter actually start to sing and move around the stage, muss up his wig and throw the microphone cord over his shoulder, you totally forget that he's not Judy Garland.

What Peter is doing here, it might seem really, really niche.

He's a male Judy Garland tribute artist, after all.

But it's actually part of a centuries-old mainstream tradition.

In other words, it's not niche at all.

And to see that, we need to go back to vaudeville.

Female impersonators have existed as long as theater has existed, originally because women weren't allowed to perform on stage.

But even after that changed, female impersonation persisted as popular entertainment well into the 20th century.

In vaudeville, female impersonation was just another one one of the acts.

Joe E.

Jeffries is a professor of theater studies at NYU and the New School with a focus on gender performance.

Generally, these acts took the form of the impersonator coming out and telling perhaps a funny little story, singing a song or two, maybe doing a simple dance, and some of the acts at the end would take off the wig to reveal that Indeed, this was a man underneath this outfit, because portions of the audience might not have known up until that point that that was a man up there on stage in front of them.

Some of these performers became quite famous.

Julian Eltinge was a vaudeville star for decades, appeared in films, and was one of the highest-paid stage actors of his era.

Here he is on camera in 1929, dressed in a full showgirl frock, complete with a huge feather-plumed headpiece and feather boas cascading off his dress.

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen.

Well, here I am back in Hollywood, making my first talking picture.

I have had several ladies on the set and ladies around the different studios ask me this year as to who is making my costumes.

Frank DeCaro is a writer and the author of Drag, Combing Through the Big Wigs of Show Business.

He was someone who was kind of the RuPaul of 1912.

He was the hottest thing.

He had a magazine.

He was on Broadway.

He was in films.

He had a Broadway theater named after him in 1912.

I mean, it's still there.

It's a multiplex on 42nd Street, but it's there.

At this point, there wasn't a strong connection between homosexuality and cross-dressing on stage.

What Eltinge was doing was thought of more like a magic trick than it was like gender performance, an impression he contributed to with his hyper-masculine off-stage demeanor.

If you called him a drag queen, he'd take in the alley and punch in the nose.

He was a staunch defender of his masculinity.

Drag and female impersonation continued happening in many traditional traditional heterosexual environments well into the 1950s and 60s.

Joe E.

Jeffries again.

In New York City in the 60s there were places like the 82 Club, which was a mafia-run establishment in the basement at 82 East 4th Street down in the Bowery.

had a lavish floor show of female impersonation, 25, 30 female impersonators, and was performing nightly, three times a night, for a primarily heterosexual audience.

because you couldn't serve alcohol to known homosexuals in New York City at this point in time.

Some of these performers were female impersonators, but some were a subset of the female impersonator, the celebrity female impersonator.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when celebrity impersonation cross-pollinated with female impersonation, but it too can be traced back to the early 20th century stage.

There was a performer named Albert Carroll who impersonated both male and female celebrities on Broadway in the 1920s and 30s.

Celebrities like Groucho Marx, John Barrymore, Gertrude Lawrence, and even Queen Elizabeth I.

By the 1950s and 60s, celebrity impersonation was a staple for female impersonators.

Some popular figures early on to impersonate would have been Tallulah Bankhead, Catherine Hepburn, and Mae West, who all had big personalities and mannerisms to imitate.

Judy Garland wasn't one of those personalities.

Female impersonators who I know who are working in the 50s and 60s will tell me Judy Garland was the last person we wanted to do an act as because, well, let's face it, she wasn't glamorous, right?

I mean, she's not wearing outrageous outfits.

I mean, yes, she has mannerisms that are a little kooky and off.

I mean, she's eminently imitatable.

But as far as how the female impersonators wanted to look and present themselves, she's a little dowdy for them.

So they just kind of strayed away.

Not to mention the voice.

She's such a vocal powerhouse that to find somebody who can vocally do her live is truly, you know, remarkable.

So she's a daunting figure to attempt to build an impersonation act around.

But over time, and despite the difficulty of doing her vocal justice, Judy became a staple.

And to explain why, I want to explore the idea of divas a bit.

Explore a little why gay men love certain women, from Mae West to Catherine Hepburn to Lady Gaga to Judy Garland, so much.

I think that there are two kinds of divas that appeal to gay men, and you can think of them on a spectrum.

At one pole are the divas that gay men aspire to, ultra-confident women that have everything under control, have a way of moving through the world and command of the people around them.

Joan Crawford is an er example of this kind of diva, but Marlena Dietrich, Joan Rivers, and Madonna would also probably apply.

On the other end of the spectrum is not the kind of diva that you want to be necessarily, but the kind of diva you feel you are.

These figures are often tragic, whose exploits in the world make you feel a kinship with them.

Figures like Whitney Houston, Britney Spears, and Amy Winehouse fit this mold.

But Judy Garland is the ultimate feeling diva, an immensely talented woman whose real life was hardly glamorous.

Judy was born Frances Gumm in 1922 into a family of vaudeville performers, making her theatrical debut at age two and a half.

She had an uneasy home life and lived in fear of her parents separating, which they did constantly.

She was signed to MGM Studios at age 13 and was infamously hooked on pills to keep her weight down and her energy up.

And she continued to struggle with addiction through multiple marriages and financial mismanagement for her entire life.

Peter Mack again.

She had bullies at MGM.

You know, she was being called names.

She was being called a fat little hunchback by the owner of the studio, Mr.

Mayer, and told that she was fat and I had the kids calling me names.

And she felt like she didn't fit in.

Here she was with these glamour pusses like Lana Turner and Hedi Lamar.

and she really felt like the odd kid out.

And she came from a broken home.

I came from a broken home.

So there were things that I could relate to.

Her most famous character is even more relatable.

As Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, she's a girl who leaves an oppressively dull, black-and-white home to find a color-soaked world of friends and a new chosen family, where just being yourself is enough to overcome adversity.

It's a perfect metaphor for adolescent queer longing.

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By the 1970s, then, Judy had become a part of the drag canon and was being performed by conspicuously queer artists right under the noses of unthinking heterosexuals.

You may not have heard of Jim Bailey, but like Liberace and Elton John, he was a mainstream success.

He became famous in the late 60s for impersonating stars like Judy and Barbara Streisand.

Frank DeCaro again.

He had this career that was so absurdly mainstream.

I mean, he was on Here's Lucy as as Phyllis Diller.

He performed as Barbara Streisand,

Circa, A Star is Born, singing Don't Rain on My Parade in an open convertible at a prime time television salute to the Super Bowl.

He was on a Super Bowl salute, dressed as Barbara Streisand.

That is the most mind-blowing thing that I think has ever been on TV related to drag.

And it was just what television was like in the 70s.

And if you needed further proof of how mainstream Bailey's style of drag impersonation was, here's Bailey performing as Judy at the opening ceremony of the 1984 Winter Olympics.

build a little home for two more.

Bailey might be the most famous Judy Garland impersonator of all time, but there have been many other notable ones.

T.C.

Jones, Jimmy Lane, Caleb Stahn, Jimmy James, and Tommy Femia, to name a few.

And then, of course, there's Peter Mack, who continued to love Judy Garland's music into his high school years in the mid-1990s.

I started singing with Judy's albums in my basement.

I could come home from a really lousy day at school, having my eyeglasses broken, in one case, having a sewing needle jabbed into my shoulder multiple times, and being called every gay slur you can possibly think of.

But I would go downstairs and listen to Judy's albums when I got home and sing along with them, and that was how I started singing.

And then my mom started getting me voice lessons.

So that's how I started singing.

It was because of Judy.

She was my first voice teacher, I guess.

You can't ask for a better voice teacher than Judy Garland.

Beatrice Fairfax, don't you dare never

tell me

I did not fit in the kind of hard-hat working-class football neighborhood that I grew up in.

It was a tough time.

I had missed about 52 days of school, and I was told that I was on the brink of being kicked out of school anyway.

Because of that,

I would stay home.

I was sick.

My mother would keep me home.

Then they would would bring social service.

She was being an unfit mother.

Meanwhile, she was just trying to protect me.

Even when mom dropped me off at school, made sure I went into the building, I would walk clear out through the other side because I was terrified.

And

after I missed that many days, they decided they would ease me back in.

And so

nobody knew I was there, supposedly.

And I went from my guidance counselor's office where I was being hidden to a social worker's office.

And in the hour that I was gone, I came back and on my winter jacket, it said in bold black marker, I suck cock.

And I had a breakdown.

I dropped out of high school in the 11th grade because I was on the brink of committing suicide.

Second time, I thought it would be better to bump myself off.

I attribute the fact that I had Judy's records to listen to, her movies to watch,

some of her television shows.

That voice is what saved me because I would always turn to that voice to listen to or to sing with.

And that's what got me through the other end of the tunnel.

And I signed myself out of school that year

and started going on auditions when I was in my senior year, doing eight shows a week and getting paid pretty nice money for it and doing what I loved.

I did a cabaret show called Judy and Me, which was just me singing as myself, using Judy's songs to tell my story and for me to explain why

I feel Judy resonates with the gay community and why she resonated with me and how she saved my life.

So we did that.

And then a friend of mine saw it and said, this is more than a one-person show, Peter.

This is

a play.

You should really turn this into a play.

And I turned it into a six-person play.

And

Judy, whereas in real life, I would just listen to her record albums and they would comfort me.

Every time we hear the music, Judy comes to life and she counsels me through all of these horrible things that are happening with my mother and father, plus the terrible things that are happening in school.

Initially, I was playing myself and we tried to find an actress to play Judy.

We were having a hard time doing so.

And a friend of mine said, just play Judy, Peter.

We know you can do the voice.

You've You've done it.

Just do it.

Why don't you play Judy and hire another actor to play yourself?

And that's what happened.

We just hired another young actor to play me at 16, and I started playing Judy.

A big part of impersonating Judy isn't just the voice, though.

It's the mannerisms, the little things.

During the show, I was really taken by this one detail: the way Peter throws the microphone cord over his shoulder.

It appeared studied.

Like, I'm not sure I've ever noticed Judy Garland do that during a filmed performance, but seeing Peter do it, it makes you feel like that's the only way Judy could have thrown a microphone cord over her shoulder.

You have to immerse yourself in it.

You have to listen to the recordings over and over and over again, watch the movies, watch the television shows.

It's homework, but it's fun homework for any of the characters, but particularly for Judy.

The elbow,

the dangling arm,

mussing up the hair,

all of those little things that she would do.

When you're singing the song, slinging the microphone cord over your shoulder.

If she was here now, she would say

marvelous,

marvelous, Ben.

I think it's wonderful you're doing this podcast.

I don't really, I know pod people.

I don't know podcasts.

So this is a marvelous way to get your way out there.

So maybe you'll give me a break here and get some more people at my shows.

Peter doesn't just perform Judy.

He and his husband, John Mack, do about 60 different women between them.

Joan Crawford, Betty Davis, Ethel Merman, Megan Mulally.

Their real golden goose is Golden Girls Live.

Peter plays Sophia, John plays Dorothy, which pays their bills and which they perform several times a week at the theater they rent together in the theater district in Manhattan.

So how did you two meet?

We actually met at a screening of The Wizard of Oz in Chelsea.

It doesn't get gayer than that.

I had recently gone through a breakup of many years, and I was sitting there very nervous, and Peter and his brother and his aunt came and sat across from me.

And I thought, oh my God, this kid's really cute.

So Judy is not only my guardian, Diva, but she's also my matchmaker.

Peter thinks of what they do more as tribute art than as drag.

Now, RuPaul has called me a drag queen, and I will gladly take it because I can't think of a higher compliment.

I think there's drag and there's tribute art, and it's not to say that one is better than or superior to.

They're just different.

Drag is typically, I think, a little more

over the top.

Tribute art is more about, it's like character acting.

You want to make the audience believe you are that person.

And I think drag is just a little bit more

larger than life.

This, I think, we walk a fine line.

Peter is trying to create the most authentic experience possible.

I don't like it to ever be campy or over the top or a caricature.

And I'd seen that happen too many times with Judy, and people were using her addictions to get cheap laughs and portraying her as this pill-popping, falling down drunk.

And

I didn't want to do that.

My mantra is imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, not battery.

So

that's how I approach what I do.

And the whole goal is to make the audience, when they come into that theater, hopefully by the second or third song, they feel as though they're watching Judy and that by the time they walk out, particularly with the current show that we're doing, that

they know a lot more about her than they did before they walked in.

And hoping that we're helping to preserve her legacy.

Peter wants to preserve Judy's legacy because he's anxious that Judy, as a performer, is not as known to younger generations as she used to be, as she should be.

But he's trying to change that with a kind of female celebrity impersonation that is itself, unlike the kind of drag you see in gay bars or on RuPaul's Drag Race, sort of on the wane.

It's kind of a lost art, I think, in the drag scene.

Queen Robert is a Brooklyn-based drag queen who specializes in impersonations like Kathy Bates and Jennifer Coolidge.

Drag used to be considered largely female impersonation.

Now with Drag Race, everybody out there is trying to create their own brand and become their own

vision and their own character.

Ironically, creating your own character is more true to the vaudevillian roots of drag than doing celebrity impersonation.

But the point stands that the kind of celebrity impersonation that Peter does, it's just less popular than it used to be.

You know, we're so oversaturated in

celebrities and different people to like that it's kind of of just busy and noisy.

It used to be that seeing a celebrity was rare.

You'd have to be lucky enough to be in the right city and be paying the right money to see someone perform.

I think that that was part of the appeal of the Impersonator.

They allowed people to experience the glamour of an icon in the comfort of your local gay bar, perhaps hundreds of miles away from New York or Los Angeles.

These days, celebrities are everywhere.

If I want to see Lady Gaga, I can just type Lady Gaga into the search bar on YouTube.

They're also more physically accessible, with huge mega tours and Las Vegas residencies.

There's just a lot less scarcity of celebrity now, and so a lot less need for celebrity impersonators.

But because Judy died young and so long ago, we don't have access to her in the same way we do with more modern celebrities.

But I think that there's another powerful force working in Judy's favor, and that, ironically, is her place in straight culture.

Unlike most pieces of gay culture, early Judy Garland fandom comes from being sat in front of the Wizard of Oz as a child, in mostly straight households.

It's the fact that the Wizard of Oz has remained such a classic for everyone that young people continue to be exposed to it, and thus so many gay people have the reference point regardless of their background.

Then, when they're a little older, they find the special queer valence that Judy Garland possesses through interaction with other gay people.

Brian Lauder is a writer at Slate and co-host of Outward, Slate's LGBTQ podcast.

For me,

there was a sense somewhere along the way where someone was like, you know, you need to, to be like a good gay, like understand who Judy Garland was.

And so then I went and like

did that sort of

haphazard research.

What is good about it is knowing that our community has had a

particular cultural history, not just a political history, not just a history of tragedy and triumph.

And that adds richness to like your view of where you come from, or at least it does for me.

I mean, I've listened to that Carnegie Hall concert, not so much because I love hearing Judy Garland sing, but because

I like to think about all of the gays in the audience, you know, in the 60s who were living for her the same way that I might have lived for, you know, Lady Gaga when I was in my younger, early 20s.

Knowing that someone else else related to Judy that way is enriching to my sense of myself as a gay person.

Queer culture isn't passed down through family lineage in the same way that straight culture is.

It's passed down through chosen family, yes, but it's also passed down through art and media.

Knowing there is a kind of lineage of love for and devotion to art, it makes you feel a part of a community, even if the objects of devotion have changed.

Peter Mack also sees himself as part of a lineage.

Someone once said to me, you know, Judy Garland is your role.

It's ridiculous.

Hamlet is nobody's role any more than Judy Garland is anybody's role.

What I do with the role makes it my own, but that doesn't make it mine.

From a social aspect, with Judy specifically, we have to keep Judy going.

One, you're brilliant at it.

I can say that.

Yeah.

Not just as your husband, but because we feel we have to correct the misperceptions about Judy.

Again, one of the things that we hear hear repeatedly, which is thank you for keeping these people alive.

Because, again, for the younger generations,

they're not familiar with a lot of these ladies, or they don't know the body of work.

And so this

show or this kind of a show brings that and leads them to the real person.

Because we have the return customers who say, I downloaded Judy at Carnegie Hall, or I bought episodes of the television series.

I rented a star is born.

That's what we want.

I want you to go and see the real thing after you see me, because there ain't nothing like the real thing.

Personally, I don't think Judy is going anywhere anytime soon.

But the idea is that she might.

And I try and take that for what it is.

The implication that there will be other artists and singers who will mean as much as she did to future generations of gay men.

Because even though the specifics of Judy matter, all the songs and her trials and tribulations and how she swings the microphone cord, it's her meaning that matters more.

The promise that exquisite beauty and joy can coexist with terrible hardship.

And that, you know, somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue.

All you need is to hear Peter Mack sing that song, which he closes out his show with every night.

to remind yourself of what Judy is still trying to teach us.

And how does it feel to sing over the rainbow at the end of a show?

I look forward to it

because you'll hear murmurs from the audience, especially once they hear the intro.

Sometimes you'll hear someone crying, and

it's huge.

It's a big responsibility because,

as Liza Minelli once said, nobody's sang it better than her mother did.

So

the pressure is on at that point to really make sure this is it.

If you haven't won them over by this point, you know,

you certainly don't want to lose them with Over the Rainbow.

So it's the responsibility to sing that song.

If happy little

bluebirds fly

apart.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Benjamin Frisch.

And I'm Willipaskin.

You can find us on Twitter at Willip Haskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed in Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written and produced by Benjamin Frisch and edited by Willa Paskin.

Benjamin Frisch also does illustrations for every episode.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Thanks to Ross Semple, Andrew Kahn, and June Thomas.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you in a few weeks.