Get Happy

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Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland is a biography of entertainer Judy Garland. Published in 2000, Get Happy is author Gerald Clarke's follow-up to his 1988 biography of Truman Capote. Clarke conducted some 500 interviews, including some with subjects who had not previously spoken about Garland, and also drew upon tape recordings that Garland had made in the 1960s for an autobiography. He found Garland's unpublished 68-page manuscript in the Random House archives. Clarke spent ten years on the book, and only made his final decision to write about Garland after reading the extant biographies. "I did not want to write a book about her if the definitive book had already been written....So, I sat down and I read the biographies that had already been written and came up with no real impression of Judy....There was a disconnect between the woman who emerged from the pages and the woman I saw in the movies and heard on the records....I knew that the book had not yet been written."