Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland.

Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland * Gerald Clarke * Random House $29.99

It seems at first slightly anachronistic: yet another biography of Judy Garland, icon of old, here in the first months of the 21st century. We feel about her as we do about Marilyn Monroe and James Dean: What more can possibly be wrung from this brilliant and tragically short life?

Almost 31 years after her death, Garland remains an enigma: Is she a quaint curio of a vanished age or something more enduring? In Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, Gerald Clarke compelling argues the latter.

Understanding the magical connection Judy had with her audiences is a prize that's eluded chronicles up to now, and it's really the only justification for another Garland saga. To this end, Clarke, who conducted more than 500 interviews and had access to Garland's unpublished autobiography, succeeds admirably, possibly even brilliantly. He defines not only what made Judy's magic so potent in her lifetime but also, critically why it endures today.

Judy was not just a singer but a singing actress, putting the words before the music and backing them up with her own triumphs and disappointments. Singing transformed her right before the audience's eyes. "The real artist confides a secret to audience," Clarke writes, "and Judy's was so obvious that few could see it: She was desperately in love with those who came to see her." Offstage she was uncertain and insecure; only onstage, in her own words, was she "truly, truly happy."

Delving further, Clarke looks into the power of music itself. He cites the physicians of ancient Egypt who sang rather than recited the prescriptions, believing words without music "lacked the capacity to heal." Garland, Clarke believes, "had more than a little in common with those shamans ... She was not singing songs: She was dispensing spiritual health and enlightenment, sustenance for the soul."

It may be that such insight needed the distance of time. From the vantage point of the year 2000, Judy's tales of woe aren't nearly as overpowering as they once were. The sensationalism of her suicide attempts, drug use, and affairs has long since evaporated, and we can see her life now with a balance of detachment and empathy. Clarke tells a straightforward story: Judy's affairs with women--her MGN publicist, Betty Asher; among them--are chronicled as matter-of-factly as those with men, and the homosexuality of several of her husbands--particularly Vincente Minnelli--is presented as part of the integral fabric of her story. Once, discussions of sexuality provoked either cries of protest or lurid headlines; it is a great relief that such days have passed, for to understand Judy's story is to move beyond both the cries and the whispers.

That's not to say there are no juicy tidbits here. Who can deny being titillated by the affair between Mark Herron and Peter Allen--while the former was married to Judy and the latter to her daughter Liza? But Clarke handles even such revelations as this with a candid, forthright style. The book avoids getting bogged down with ephemera. Clarke writes briskly, his narrative strictly chronological, starting with Judy's parents and ending with her funeral.

By presenting her life without the usual clutter and myth, he offers us a chance to see her fresh--a chance to grasp, finally, why the little girl on the yellow brick road and the woman dangling her feet off the stage at Carnegie Hall remains so powerful and vivid in our collective psyche and why she won't go away.

Mann is the author of Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood's First Openly Gay Star and the forthcoming novel The Biograph Girl.