But this is no parlour game. Her triumphs and calamities were chronicled with tireless vigour. The opportunity to put her on the kind of pedestal that comes complete with pigeon droppings. In keeping with today's appetites for tabloid allegations couched as valuable data, Clarke devotes inordinate attention to determining just how bisexual were many of the men in Garland's life, just how many married men or father figures she fooled around with, and just how foul she could be while wallowing in substance abuse. The kind of nugget to be found here is the interview with William Tuttle, who was once head of MGM's make-up department and told Clarke of having dropped a benzedrine pill while in Garland's presence.
Rock bottom is reached with an anecdote about a wastebasket used as a chamber pot.
One nominal justification is Clarke's access to previously unavailable autobiographical material from Garland herself. Quoted only briefly, her taped rantings are excruciating, fuelled by the raging bitterness and pathos that shaped her final years. Clarke describes her as screaming. There is an art to the clever exploitation of such pain. But an author with a fondness for words like rutilant, cunctatory and exundant, and with a tendency to sound more like a perfunctory chronicler than a muckophile, is apt to lack the bare-knuckles brutality that the genre increasingly demands.