A thousand fans stood outside the stage entrance, on 56th Street, unwilling to go home. After a while Garland opened her dressing-room window and threw them kisses, but they still wouldn’t leave. An hour and a half later, most of them were still there when she finally emerged. “It was like that famous crowd scene from A Star Is Born,’ ” a columnist wrote, “as she tried to get to her big black limousine, surrounded by police and friends, as her admirers tried to get close enough to touch her.” Like A Star Is Born, yes, except that in this case the star was reborn. “She was queen again,” Polly Bergen says, remembering the star-packed after-party at Luchow’s, where Garland arrived a little while later, beaming, to applause and shouted bravos. Her reign would be brief.

The album remains, still vivid and astonishing, and listening to it, and imagining the evening (“probably the greatest evening in show business history,” according to the original liner notes: a mild exaggeration, perhaps, but a forgivable one), you hear why people say what they say. The multi-Grammy-winning record—No. 1 on the Billboard charts for 13 weeks in 1961, and never out of print since—is, according to music critic Will Friedwald, “just about the single greatest live album by a singer of popular American standards.” Judy at Carnegie Hall is a talisman for many. Whoopi Goldberg: “When she sings Come Rain or Come Shine’ and she combusts onstage at the end of it, that’s how I always wanted to be as an actor. That has always been one of my bars to reach, that state of grace that she goes into at the end of that song, when she sounds like she’s shaking like a branch that’s being blown, and she’s slightly off-key—just slightly. But it doesn’t matter, because she’s on fire.” Barry Manilow: “Name me one other artist, ever, whose concert is celebrated 50 years after the concert was done When her voice was in tip-top shape, everything she did was filled with the truth. I think that’s the big difference between her and everybody else. Everybody else, oh yeah, they’re great singers—they do vocal acrobatics. But they don’t tell the truth. This woman always told the truth, and especially that night.” And then there’s the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, who performed and recorded a re-creation of the concert, with the identical song list and orchestrations, at Carnegie Hall in 2006. (He’ll also perform the show for two nights this summer at London’s Royal Opera House.) Some felt this feat was disrespectful, but Wainwright’s motives appear to have been sincere: “Right after the Iraq invasion,” he says, “I was so kind of horrified by what had happened [after] 9/11, where there was this moment of hope where everybody looked as if they wanted to get together and fix the world, and Bush decided to throw a wrench in it completely I was living in America, and I just couldn’t stand it, except when I would put on the Judy Garland record, and it reminded me of this sort of golden era, this hopeful time, this excellence that we once treasured.” It was indeed a hopeful time, Camelot’s brief flicker, and it was a hopeful time for Garland too. Fields and Begelman’s master plan seemed to be on track. In February 1962, Garland was nominated for a best-supporting-actress Oscar for her cameo role in Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg; that same month, a CBS TV special she did with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin was a smash hit, leading the network to sign her to a four-season, $24 million variety series. But she ran afoul of her Sunday-night competition, NBC blockbuster Bonanza, and of CBS president James Aubrey Jr., who turned out to detest her. And we know the rest of the sad saga: she couldn’t stay away from pills, and her health worsened, as did her love life. She met her fifth husband, Mickey Deans, in 1967, when he delivered prescription drugs to her hotel room. When they married, in March 1969, she said, “This is it. For the first time in my life, I am really happy. Finally, finally, I am loved.” Three months later, soon after her 47th birthday, Deans found her dead of a barbiturate overdose in the bathroom of their London apartment. The two-day viewing of her body at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, in Manhattan, became a mass spectacle, drawing thousands of mourners—and preceded by just days the Stonewall riots, a coincidence that has linked the two events in many people’s minds and cemented Garland’s status as a gay icon. [#image: /photos/56cc4c4dae46dea861df136b]|||||| <a href="/hollywood/features/2000/04/judy-garland-excerpt-200004">• A selection from Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland (Gerald Clarke, April 2000) <a href="/hollywood/features/2002/03/judy-garland-200203">• Liza Minnelli channels her mother’s dark years (Jonathan Van Meter, March 2002) But Judy Garland was a great artist and remains an icon to people of all persuasions, and the audience at her greatest concert was distinguished as much by its diversity as by its passion. And while Garland was never one to dwell in the past—her signature song is nothing if not a yearning for a splendid future—when I asked Lorna Luft if her mother ever talked about Carnegie Hall, Luft nodded vigorously. “She said, That was something, wasn’t it?’ ” Luft told me. “And it was.”