LITTLE GIRL LOST: The Life and Hard Times of Judy Garland

Inevitably one of Judy's starstruck fans was bound to write a biography even if everything in it except his own adulation is second-hand, compiled from clippings of fan magazine gossip, reviews of her films and concerts and Judy's own recollections as rendered in a 1964 McCall's article. DiOrio fell in love with Judy when he was thirteen and began this book shortly after her death in 1969 when he was nineteen -- which probably accounts for his dense, sophomoric style. Anyway he is as chivalrous as can be to poor little Frances Gumm who represented, for him at least, ""all the glamor, the glitter and the heartbreak that was Hollywood,"" defending her against all those others, friends and lovers, who saw her, especially in the last years, as a neurotic woman and an unreliable performer, trapped in alcohol and barbiturates. You get the feeling that had he, Albert DiOrio, Jr., been around and not just gaping in the audience, he would have rescued her from the tyranny of MGM, all those husbands who couldn't arrest the disintegration, and her own pain. ""There is a limit to just how much one woman can take"" says DiOrio with feeling. True. And among all those burdens it's a shame that this flatulent and untruthful book should be inflicted on her memory even if DiOrio sings You Made Me Love You to his heartbreak girl over and over.