The colorful, sequined life of Judy Garland’s ‘lucky jacket’

NEW YORK — Carnegie Hall is happy to flaunt its treasures. Benny Goodman’s clarinet is prominently displayed in its in-house museum, as are conductor’s batons once waved by Leonard Bernstein and Arturo Toscanini. But hidden away on the seventh floor is an acid-free paperboard box that the hall’s archivist, Kathleen Sabogal, keeps unlabeled.

“I kind of put it like ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’” Sabogal said as she pulled the box off its shelf in the fire-resistant Archives Storage room. Inside: a silk evening jacket worn by Judy Garland during her Carnegie Hall debut, perhaps the most storied performance in the venue’s 134-year history.

In a review of the April 23, 1961, concert, the New York Times compared it to a “religious ritual,” referring to Garland as “the goddess” and noting the “frenzies of exaltation” and “pandemonium” that greeted her renditions of “The Trolley Song” and “Over the Rainbow.”

Discussions of that night tend to elicit a certain amount of breathlessness (see above), but facts are facts: The performance was attended by a number of stars, including Julie Andrews, Lauren Bacall, Richard Burton, Henry Fonda and Rock Hudson. A live recording of the show spent 13 weeks on the top of the Billboard album chart and earned Garland the Grammy for album of the year.

Whether or not the 2½-hour performance was, as Capitol Records crowed at the time, “the greatest evening in show-business history,” it symbolized a turning point in Garland’s career. Only a year earlier, she was discharged from Doctors Hospital in Manhattan, where she had received a diagnosis of acute hepatitis and had been told she might never work again.

In a career rife with comebacks, Carnegie Hall was perhaps the biggest of them all. And, if her family’s accounts are to be believed, the singer credited at least some of her good fortune to her “lucky jacket.”

Because Garland wore it during the second half of the show, it has become known as the Act II jacket. It was the work of the Seventh Avenue studio of Norman Norell, a designer described as the “American Balenciaga” for his couture-level craftsmanship.

Over the decades, the jacket has passed through the hands of a succession of men. Some were Judy People — fans who made honoring the star’s life and work a big part of their own life’s work. Others were simply men who loved men who loved Judy. The jacket’s unlikely journey tells a story of gay life in America, and how love and devotion can intersect with sequins.

Sabogal, 60, who started at the archives department in 1989, never imagined the jacket would wind up back at Carnegie Hall. “I just never thought that anyone would part with it,” she said. But last year she received an email that was as unexpected as it was businesslike: “I am offering the jacket for sale and would like to know if your museum would be interested in obtaining it,” the owner wrote. “Please advise.”

The asking price was $250,000 — 50 times the department’s total acquisition budget for the year.

When Judy Garland died, at 47, from an accidental barbiturate overdose, she was living in London with her fifth husband, whom she had married three months earlier.

Most of her belongings, including the jacket, were still in Los Angeles, the site of the last home she had owned. Her third husband, producer Sid Luft, was the one keeping up the storage payments, and many of her things went to him by default.

The reason for the unpleasant chore: an auction of more than 400 of her mother’s belongings that had been organized by Luft. He had been hyping the sale for weeks, selling reserved seats for $25 apiece to the likes of Liberace and Debbie Reynolds. Minnelli filed for an injunction to stop it, to no avail.

“Oh, darling, I was just devastated — both when I first heard about it and again when the judge decided to allow it,” Minnelli, 79, recently told the Times.

“I don’t have a lot of wonderful things to say about Sid,” she continued, “which is awkward, because he’s the father of my sister, Lorna, and my brother, Joey. But he didn’t have the right to decide what items of Mama’s would be sold and what would stay with our family.”

On Nov. 27, 1978, Hollywood had its paddles at the ready to bid on pieces of history from one of its own. False eyelashes, golf clubs, copper cookware, musical arrangements: All went before the gavel in a ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills.

This was when the mystique around the jacket — listed as Lot No. 388, “Black Silk Jacket With Mandarin Collar” — started to take shape. “Miss Garland felt this was her lucky jacket,” a description in the catalog said. And when Joey Luft, Garland’s son, was asked if there was a particular item that held special significance for him, he singled it out. “That was her lucky jacket, and she loved that very much,” the soft-spoken Luft, then 23, said in an appearance on “Good Morning America.”

On the big day, with Lily Tomlin vacuuming up scripts and ephemera in absentia, few noticed the Minneapolis man who made off with the Act II jacket for $3,000. The man, a collector and dealer named Gerald E. Czulewicz, couldn’t believe his luck. “I could sell the jacket within 72 hours for $5,000,” he said.

Czulewicz, a collector who specialized in Uncle Sam memorabilia, was the steward of the jacket from 1978 to 1992. What happened to it next is, in many ways, a love story.

The jacket found its way into Bob Cancellare’s life and living room through Michael Benson, a Judy Garland superfan.

“He had a great smile and an infectious manner,” Cancellare, 89, said. “I thought he was beautiful.”

They met each other in the mid-1980s at a Gay Men’s Health Crisis support group. At the time, Cancellare had recently lost his partner to AIDS, and Benson’s lover was dying.

They never saw eye to eye on art and culture. Cancellare was a lover of classical music and opera who collected African sculpture, Japanese porcelains and the odd Indonesian sword, and he never quite shared Benson’s passion for all things Judy. But he was happy to help his partner buy Garland memorabilia during their years together.

For all his encouragement, though, there was one thing he couldn’t provide: the enthusiasm of a true fan.

In 1990, Benson reached out to John Fricke, a leading Garland expert, to compare collections, Judy Person to Judy Person. Soon, the two were hatching a plan for an exhibition at Lincoln Center to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Garland’s birth.

Both men knew they wanted the Carnegie Hall jacket on display, and they knew who had it. So they approached Czulewicz about a loan.

They ended up with more than 20 costumes, including the jacket, and they squeezed them into a gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. In a review, a Times critic called the display “intense,” adding that it was “slightly over the rainbow, or at least over the top.”

Love doesn’t always follow the smoothest path: Benson soon started a relationship with Zimmermann, and they were the keepers of the Judy jacket for a few years. They placed it in “several fashion shows,” Zimmermann said, as well as in an exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in London.

Once Benson and Cancellare were reunited, the jacket took up residence in the Chelsea apartment, where it remained well into the 21st century. Encased in a fiberglass vitrine, it was displayed against a wall hung with many of the African masks from Cancellare’s collection.

Benson died, from AIDS, in 2001. Cancellare held on to the jacket for another two decades. As the years went by, what had once been an engaging conversation piece at the couple’s New Year’s parties became “part of the furniture.”

“After 20 years, what difference does it make?” Cancellare said. “When we first got it, it was like a treasured object. But after a while, it just got ... It was time for it to move on.”

On June 10, 2022, what would have been Judy Garland’s 100th birthday, the jacket was back in Los Angeles.

The spectacle was the work of the jacket’s new owner, John Thomas, 66, a veteran of the Hollywood memorabilia trade. He was most definitely not a Judy Person (“I haven’t even seen ‘Wicked,’” he said), but he knew a good investment when he saw one.

He had reached out to Cancellare when he was in the early stages of putting together the centennial exhibition. After dinner one night at an Italian restaurant in Chelsea, Thomas got a close-up look at the garment in Cancellare’s apartment. His opening offer was $8,000.

Cancellare didn’t go for it.

Thomas tried a different tack. “I went in with, ‘Oh, all the young kids today, they don’t know who Judy is, it’s so important that we share this with them’ — almost tears,” he said of his performance.

They ultimately reached an agreement: $75,000, to be split between Cancellare and Zimmermann.

“Judy Garland’s sequined jacket has entered the building!” Carnegie Hall announced in an Instagram post on Dec. 9, 2022. Three nights later, it was displayed in the venue’s second-floor Rose Museum, where fans were invited to look it over before taking their seats for a Garland tribute performance.

After the show, Sabogal, the Carnegie Hall archivist, extended an offer to Thomas: If he ever wanted to put the jacket on long-term display, the Rose Museum would be ready to receive it. When she heard from him 16 months later, it wasn’t to propose a loan.

Thomas’ $250,000 asking price hadn’t come out of nowhere. It was the same amount he had identified as the jacket’s value for insurance purposes. Still, for an archives department with an acquisition budget in the range of $5,000 a year, $250,000 was a lot of money.

Thomas wasn’t so sure about that. “I said, ‘Look, if Carnegie doesn’t have 25 people who can pony up $10,000 each, what are you telling me?’” he recalled. He knocked $10,000 off the price, framing the discount as his personal contribution.

So began an unusual fundraising effort, with one of the world’s most famous arts institutions rattling a virtual tin cup in hopes of “bringing the lucky jacket back home to Carnegie Hall!”

Which is how Carnegie Hall came to set a goal of $300,000 for its fundraising push — 100 times what Czulewicz had paid for it at the auction nearly half a century ago.

When Thomas delivered the jacket to Carnegie Hall in August 2024, it was folded neatly and wrapped in tissue paper. “It was pretty low-key,” Sabogal said of the handoff. It will remain with the archives department until the sale is complete.

Nicole Bloomfield, a textile conservator, has given it a thorough examination and proposed a course of treatment. With the exception of “scattered areas of loss” — Bloomfield’s rather poetic description of missing rhinestones, sequins and beads — the jacket is in good condition.

When Carnegie Hall formally takes ownership, as it hopes to do by spring, the jacket will become as much the property of the Judy People as the non-Judy People. Practically everyone agrees that’s for the best.