Judy Garland & Liza Minnelli, Too Many Damn Rainbows

For millions of fans, Judy Garland will forever remain a relentlessly cheerful adolescent (Dorothy) skipping along a yellow brick road toward the other side of the rainbow. Liza followed her down that hallucinogenic path, searching for the childhood, the security, and the love that eluded her. Ferociously loyal but fiercely competitive, they live, laugh, and weep again in the tear-soaked pages of this remarkable biography from the entertainment industry's most prolific archivists, Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince.
Judy Garland is universally accepted as a talented, traumatized, and relentlessly cheerful adolescent (Dorothy) skipping along a yellow brick road toward the other side of the rainbow. With her ferociously loyal but fiercely competitive daughter, Liza, she lives again in this ironic, tear-soaked, postmodern spin.
Darwin Porter is the award-winning author of at least 50 celebrity exposés. A reviewer (Examiner.com) once described him as the master of guilty pleasures. He is the Nietzsche of Naughtiness, the Goethe of Gossip, the Proust of Pop Culture. Porter knows all the nasty buzz anyone has ever heard whispered in dark bars, dim alleys, and confessional booths. And lovingly, precisely, and in as straightforward a manner as an oncoming train, his prose whacks you between the eyes with the greatest gossip since Kenneth Anger. Some would say better than Anger.
Until upheavals in technology disrupted travel patterns and publishing protocols, Danforth Prince sustained a long career as a researcher and co-author of many editions of the FROMMER GUIDES. Today, he presides over Blood Moon Productions, a feisty independent press devoted to stories and pictures about people who used to consume the imagination of the American public. He's also the Innkeeper for MagnoliaHouseSaintGeorge.com, a historic, celebrity-centric AirBnb on Staten Island in New York City.

Judy Garland & Liza Minnelli: Too Many Damn Rainbows, by Darwin Porter & Danforth Prince

As Reviewed by DIANE DONOVAN, Senior Editor at California Bookwatch, The Midwest Book Review, & Donovan's Bookshelf

More than anything ever published before, this book provides a comprehensive overview of Judy Garland's troubled, scandal-soaked marriages to five men, three of whom were gay, and deep insights into her repeated humiliations. Husbands were not her only problem: Her show-biz career in the aftermath of her "firing" from MGM was a traumatized mix of buoyant and/or sometimes suicidal movie deals and concerts, many of them sold out and delivered to audiences of devoted (sometimes fanatically loyal) fans.

Her beaux were memorable and varied, many of them show-biz stars and in some cases, political lions in their own right. They included John F. Kennedy, bandleader Artie Shaw, avant-garde filmmaker Orson Welles, billionaire Prince Aly Khan, matinee idol Tyrone Power, Yul ("The King and I") Brynner, and James Mason, her co-star in A Star Is Born. Also prominent (and notorious since she was underaged at the time) was her teenaged dalliance with the much older actor, Spencer Tracy. And the book covers, non-judgmentally and tenderly, but with a disarming candor, the "frantic" behind the scenes politicking of her (aborted) CBS-TV series, depressions "as deep as the Mariana Trench," her inglorious, self-destructive manias, and the multiple embarrassments (and boyfriends) in the years preceding her demise.

Because so much information is included, it would have been too easy for Too Many Damn Rainbows to have become weighty and overloaded. The information is complimented (and the weighty feel of over 700 pages is countered) by the book's inviting structure. Sidebars of information, photos on nearly every page, and an attention to lively, controversial, appealing details makes this read a delight.

The only prerequisite to enjoyment is some basic familiarity with or interest in either Judy Garland or Liza Minnelli.​ Permeating everything is an abiding respect and admiration for a woman who's remembered as "the greatest entertainer in the history of American show-biz."