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Save 25% with promo code AUDIO25, get free shipping, or claim your exclusive $5 coupon at genicol.ca slash podcast. 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 I would always screen it in the springtime. And my aunt sat me down in front of a television set in our house in Queens Village, and it was like a religious experience.
I was transfixed, and I fell in love with a little girl in the blue kingdom 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 Reade. 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 100 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 right sense of joy to me, and that's what the voice represented to me. I've got rhythm. I've got music. I've got my man who can ask for anything more.
I've got daisies in green pastures. I've got my man who can ask for anything more. Old man's trouble. My name is Peter Mack, and I'm a Judy Garland tribute artist.
I have been now for 17 years. This is Decoder Ring, 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's 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 in the subject of a biopic starring Renee Zelliger and a documentary on Showtime.
But she's always been particularly fascinating, too, and beloved by a community that feels a particularly special connection to her. Queer people, and gay men in particular. In this episode, Decoder Ring's producer, Benjamin Frisch, is an 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, on Decoder Ring, who's still in love with Judy Garland? One person that loves Judy Garland is, as I said, Decoder Ring's producer, Benjamin Frisch. 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 setlist 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, must 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 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, but that was a man up there on stage in front of a film. Some of these performers became quite famous. Julian Elton 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 asked me this year as to who is making my costumes.
Frank DiCaro is a writer and the author of drag, combing through the bigwigs 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 Eltonch 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 offstage emir. Drag and female impersonation continued happening in many 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.
I'm not all to you. Come up and see this. Come up tonight. I've seen the people.
Judy Garland wasn't one of those personalities. Female impersonators who I know who were 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 life is truly 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 poll are the divas that gay men aspire to, ultra-confident women that have everything under control, have a way of moving through the world in command of the people around them. Joan Crawford is an ur-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. There she was with these glamour pusses like Lana Turner and Hedy Lamarr, 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. And now, with a banana sensation swinging the nation, there's Ben and Vincent. It's the cop, it's the old bananas.
It's the old man's. It's the old man's. You may think joint stiffness comes later in life, but people in their 30s and 40s already feel it. Why?
Because collagen production naturally declines in their 30s, impacting joints. Genicol Anti-Inflammatory has amino-lock collagen, clinically tested to support joint health, mobility, and reduce joint pain. Made by a Canadian family company with 25 years joint health experience. Save 25% with promo code AUDIO25, get free shipping, or claim your exclusive $5 coupon at genicol.ca slash podcast.
Today, I'm keeping another promise by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch. Mr. President, thank you very much. As we all live through the chaos of another Donald Trump presidency, it can be easy to lose sight of his most troubling legacy.
The U.S. Supreme Court has reshaped the country's legal landscape on abortion, guns, religion, and more. I'm Susan Matthews. In Slate's new season of Slow Burn, we're taking on Trump's first Supreme Court pick.
We'll look at the influence that Neil Gorsuch has in this moment. He is the most unpredictable vote on this court. Including his surprising pushback against the president who nominated him. Nobody showed Gorsuch who joined the majority on this.
He is the justice and most likely to be a true wild card. This is judicial activist. Slow Burn, Becoming Justice Gorsuch. It's a story that will shape America for years, even lifetimes to come.
Out May 13th, wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Barbra Streisand.
Frank DiCaro again. He had this career that was so absurdly mainstream. I mean, he was on Here's Lucy as Phyllis Dillard. He performed as Barbra Streisand, circa A Star is Born, singing Don't Rain on My Parade in an open convertible at a primetime television salute to the Super Bowl.
He was on a Super Bowl salute dressed as Barbra Streisand. That is the most mind-blowing thing that I think he's ever done 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 of the Fits.
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 Son, 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 play. 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 answer her voice teacher than Judy Garland. 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 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 I would bring social services. 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 in 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 thought 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 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, messing up the hair, all of those little things that she would do.
When you're singing a song, slinging the microphone cord over your shoulder. If she was here now, she would say, 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 O'Lally.
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've recently gone through a breakup of many years, and I was sitting across from me, and I thought, oh my god, this kid's really cute. So Judy is not only my guardian dealer, 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 they were 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 way. 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 to 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 is just less popular than it used to be. You know, we're so oversaturated in celebrities and different people alike that it's kind of just busy and noisy. It used to be that seeing a celebrity was rare.
You 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 megatours 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 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 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 early 20s. Knowing that someone 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's 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.
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 repeatedly, which is, thank you for keeping these people alive. 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 the 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 Minnelli once said, nobody sang it better than her mother did. So the pressure is on at that point. So really make sure this is it.
If you haven't won them over by this point, you certainly don't want to lose them on Over the Rainbow. So it's a responsibility to sing that song. If having a little blue bear's shine, be on the rainbow, while your wife can't find me. This is Decoder Ring.
I'm Benjamin Frisch. And I'm Willa Paskin. You can find us on Twitter at Willa Paskin. And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decoderring 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.
Clear 11 is our research assistant. Thanks to Ross Pemple, Andrew Kahn, and June Thomas. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in a few weeks.
Thanks for listening.