Every spare second of Judy's life for the last two years has been tied up with a red, white and blue ribbon and handed to the lads in uniform!

There were a gang of soldiers around the merry-go-round at the Venice Fun House, all watching this gal. She was cute and red- haired, and sometimes she'd look down from her white horse and grin at them. Finally, she slid off, collected her windblown crony from another ersatz Whirlaway and walked off. The soldiers leered after her the way they do, not missing a thing - the swing of the slim shoulders, the darling figure italicized by a green jumper, the wonderful legs. "Now, there," breathed one of the guys, "is something for the boys." The gal, it so happened, was Garland, and that guy didn't know how right he was. There've been overseas broadcasts, recordings, canteens, camp tours, the gamut. Her mom worries about her. "Honey, take it easy. You've got circles like a panda."

"How can you take it easy, darling? It's such a tiny bit to be doing anyway, and, oh gosh, but they're sweet guys."

She's been in and out of more Army camps and Naval bases than your best beau, and that, you'll admit, is getting around. She's sung in California, Texas, Illinois, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York. Calls the ones she's visited cozily by their last names, "Shanks, Dix, Ord." The ones still coming up get the works. "Fort Schuyler, Fort Hancock." No question at all in the minds of the guys about what to call her. She's Judy from the word go and she loves it. "Awed like crazy, aren't they?"

That's her accompanist Earl Brent riding her. "Can you hear them Greer-ing Garson?"

"Listen, I'd bat them if they gave me any Miss Garland stuff," she flames, getting pink in the face. "I'd know they'd been coached or something." Coached is just what they aren't, so it's "Hey, Judy, how about 'You'll Never Know'?" or "Good gal, Judy," or "Aw, Judy, 'Let's Make Love.'" Whereupon everyone hoots - no one louder than Judy. She'll never get over the way they all talk at once and screech for their own pet tune, but then clap and yell like claques no matter what she sings.

Most of the camp audiences are divinely noisy. They'll hum along with the tune and even sing snatches of it if it's good and rowdy. But, recently Judy struck a gang of lads that were quiet as mice. They wanted "I Love You Truly" and "Always" and "My Blue Heaven". Not one yelled for "Dinah" or "Murder He Says". In subdued young voices they asked for "Hello Mom" and "The Sidewalks of New York," for "Stardust" and "Girl of My Dreams". Judy sang them all with a funny lump in her throat that she didn't quite understand. When it was getting late-ish, one lad called out, "Over There." The response was tremendous, and suddenly it hit Judy that these kids were going out. Right away. She wrote a letter home that night. "Mom - these kids tonight were terrific. This feeling they have for America, you could almost reach out and touch it, it was so real.

She sang for another bunch about to be sent across, and they, incredibly, were the heppest, grooviest gents she'd ever run into. Wanted nothing but swing stuff. Noise. "Knock Me a Kiss." "Beat Out the Love." Harlemana. "'Sfunny," she thought, "They all take it so differently. But gosh, they all can take it."

So can Judy, who manages to look awfully wonderful on very little sleep, meals at peculiar hours and recurring spasms of camp-fright. She was terrified every second at first. The insignia were completely bewildering, and colonels and corporals were all mixed up in her mind. Doubtless, by now, everyone's heard the story of how - having been drilled for days by her sister Jimmy that stripes were one thing, eagles and maple leaves something else again - she "Thank you, Corporal"-ed a Colonel who introduced her at Randolph Field.

That's the only slip so far, though. So far being almost two years. Judy, you know, was the first star to tour the camps. She was at it long before Pearl Harbor. The week-end of December Seventh, she was at Ord. There'd been a big, joshy breakfast at the Officer's Mess, and then she'd dashed over to the theater to keep a date with a nice private who wanted her to sing "Zing Went the Strings of My Heart" for him, so's he could write home and tell his folks. His friends had obviously gotten wind of the tryst, for the joint was jumping with khaki.

zing went the strings...

"Hi, queen," there was a lanky lad at the piano, and he was playing "Zing Went the Strings".

"Hi," she grinned, and walked up to the mike. "Zing" was only the beginning. There was "It's a Wonderful World" and "You Are to Me Everything" and "Intermezzo", then back again to "Zing". Smack in the middle of the zillionth chorus, an officer dashed up on the stage and sort of shoved Judy away from the mike. "The Japs have just bombed Pearl Harbor," he told them, and everyone just gaped at him, saying nothing. Even when they finally grasped what he'd said, no one spoke, but it was in their young faces. Something new and fierce and terrible. Groups of them got up and left, and Judy thought hysterically, "They're going right to the front this minute. Oh jeepers they're mad."

That night she flew back to Los Angeles and landed in the blacked- out airport. Mom was there to meet her, and her sister Jimmy. They sat up late that night, talking and talking. "It seems so queer," Judy said. "When I left Hollywood on Saturday we all felt so smug and safe. Then bang. American casualty lists and blackouts and horrible radio bulletins. And for the first time in years she wanted to put her head in the crook of Mom's neck and cry her eyes out.

It began in earnest then for Judy - the endless canteen work, bandage rolling, singing for thousands of soldiers and sailors and marines. Buying more bonds and selling them and singing some more. Singing till her throat felt like something a Dodgers fan had scrapped after that World Series.

She's got the mean kind of a throat that murders her every once in a while when she's very tired, but it used to be ten million times worse before she was de-tonsiled. The de-tonsiling, incidentally, is her pet story. "Did I ever tell you about my tonsils, Bet?" She and her buddy, Betty Asher, are downing sodas in the commissary. "You did," says Betty, resignedly. Judy's getting That Look again.

"It seems," she begins, "that I'm allergic or something to ether. It takes mobs of it to black me out. They'd just think they had me, and I'd open one eye and the doctor would scream, 'Pour it on.' Have I told you this?"

"Yes, hon. Fifty-one times."

"Oh." She broods into her soda. "I wonder if I told Marge. Hey, Marge - "

seeing triple...

The story, anyway, is this. After much, much ether she faded and stayed out for 17 hours. Which is much too long. When she came to, a nurse was blowing oxygen in her face via a little hissing tube. Hissing, as Judy tells it, in exactly the same key the ether had. Judy, thinking it was still ether and seeing at least triple in her bleariness, pounced on the poor lone nurse screeching, "Just give me one more whiff of that stuff. Just one more, and I'll murder the whole three of you."

Minus her tonsils, her range is terrific, and she brags obnoxiously about how loud she can sing. This helps when, occasionally, drastic things happen like mikes going dead.

The most drastic occurrence to date, however, was when Judy stepped out on the stage at one camp to find a half-filled auditorium. Asthe place is usually jammed to the gills, her heart crash-dived. "Old poison ivy Garland," she thought. "A has-been at twenty. They probably made these fellows come. Like K.P. or something." Then someone yelled, "'Presenting Lily Mars' is across the street at the movies. You can't beat that kind of competition, Judy." An hour later hundreds of boys trooped in yelling, "Hi, Lily," and begging for the entire Lily Mars score.

Poison ivy is hardly the word, you see. Further evidence of that is the loot she collects at camps and naval training bases. She has a scarf made of parachute cloth, a gift from some paratroopers, sergeants' stripes, lieutenants' bars, majors' leaves and wings, and you name it, she's got it. Not to mention dozens of practically love letters from boys all over the world.

She broadcasts by shortwave to Alaska, Australia, New Guinea, and even to ships at sea on a program called "Mail Call." The boys write in requesting songs and giving their APO address and some phony name, Butch or Shorty or Dogface. Then Judy sings for them. She keeps it up hour after hour because she can't stand to think of some of them waiting and waiting and never hearing his name called. The letters that pour in after the broadcasts are really something.

gobs of love...

One sailor wrote that her songs were all that made his life bearable for him and his shipmates, as they had broken the ship's sole coffee pot, and, coffee-less, were all in perpetually pre- breakfast humors. When he got into port, what was that little sailor's utter ecstacy to discover a shiny new coffee pot, "with love from Judy."

The letters that tear her apart come from kids who've spent weeks in foxholes and jungles, where no entertainers ever venture. They write to tell her how much her "Command Performance" records mean to them. These are tremendous recordings of her voice that are dropped by parachute, together with a victrola, to all the lonely outposts of the war. The gist of the letters is this: "Thank you, thank you, Judy, for thinking of us." One boy wrote, "Your voice, a woman's voice, gave us more inspiration and guts than a dozen pep talks from the sergeant." Still another, from the depths of his loneliness wrote: "Your voice is so wonderfully soft, yet strong, and there's laughter behind it. I have your picture, and your face is that way, too. I think you are a girl a man could love and fight for. Will you write and tell me what you're like?"

She wrote, but there's much she didn't tell. Small things that you pick up from her hair-dresser and the technicians who work with her, from the girls who sell her clothes at Magnin's, from some sailors she danced with at the Hollywood Canteen. Soldier, she's like this...

She's a honey, and if there were nothing more to her than the line of jive she can spiel off at will, the quick little-girl smile and that intangible impishness, she'd still enchant you. But there's so much more. After you'd gotten to know her, you'd discover her sweetness, her sympathy, her unshakable loyalty. You'd learn to love her intensity, her sudden shyness, her whole funny little sensitive, hard-boiled self.

You'd love the way she wrinkles her nose over shrimp salad or cocktails or anything she's not mad for. You'd chortle at the chatter about her hideous hair that's "absolutely straight". Laugh at the tales about her miniature poodle Choo-Choo, who, in spite of a pedigree two miles long, has a completely barrel-house personality and adores mutts, garbage and low-brow people.

You'd love the naturalness of her as she talks about which clothes are right for her and which make her look "sad. Completely sad." The small nose wrinkles..."Pink and red, for instance, aren't for Garland. Not with my red hair and freckles. I love brown, navy and gray for suits. Wild prints and green for dresses." Hats she cannot take, you'd discover, unless they're on the back of her head and completely out of sight. Even those eventually wind up in her little Mrs. Miniver-Rose-nailed hand. She's crazy about shoes, but is unfazed by rationing. Thinks two pair a year is plush. Her two little tickets will buy a good pair of walking shoes and gay black numbers for afternoon clothes and night work.

You'd like the scrubbed young face with just the right color lipstick on the nice, honest mouth. The wonderful smile, the strong, warm handshake. She is, we think you'd agree, a girl a man could love.

She spends hours reading and answering her overseas mail, tears pouring down her cheeks as often as not. One of the most moving letters said, "I close my eyes and pretend it's my girl singing." And "Thank you" is the way the letters always end.

"They're thanking me." Stuff like that kills her, but being Judy, she goes out and evens things up a little by buying the biggest bonds she can afford. By begging the studio to let her do more and more camp shows, or dream of dreams, go overseas! She wants to go terribly and not just to Ireland or England. "But right out to where they really need a good hot chorus of 'Dinah'. Italy or New Guniea or someplace."

over there...

Here's what we mean. She was riding in a jeep over a bumpy road not so long ago, and she turned to the sunburned Southern soldier next to her - "Want to know what I want more than anything in the world?"

The GI had heard that one before. "Yeah, honey, you wanna drive this thing."

Her brown eyes went wide. "Jeepers, could I?"

"Reckon you could."

They swapped seats and Judy drove blissfully for a second. Then, not looking at him, she said, "This is heavenly, but it isn't what I really want most."

"No?" he was a little hurt.

"I want to be on a recon truck with a piano in it singing 'Over There' when the Yanks march into Berlin."