The image of Judy Garland in a blue plaid dress and red shoes skipping down a yellow brick street is one of the most iconic in cinema. However, the angel-faced girl who sang Somewhere over the rainbow In 1939, she ended her days singing in bars for a hundred dollars a night, addicted to drugs, virtually homeless, and owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. The star who made Hollywood studios millions died penniless, a victim of the same industry that made her a legend.
On June 22, 1969, Mickey Deans broke down the bathroom door of the house he was renting with his wife in London. What he found marked the tragic end of one of the most extraordinary voices Hollywood has ever known: Judy Garland lay lifeless. He was only 47 years old and died virtually penniless despite making millions for the studios.
Coroner Gavin Thurston concluded it was an accidental barbiturate overdose. “This is clearly an accident in a person used to taking barbiturates for a long period of time.”he explained. But Garland’s death was much more than a simple accident: It was the inevitable result of a life marked by abuse, exploitation and an industry that had occupied her since she was a child.
Frances Ethel Gumm – Judy Garland’s real name – was born on June 10, 1922 in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. She was the youngest of three sisters, daughters of two vaudeville artists. At the age of two and a half, little Frances was already on stage with her sisters, the Gumm Sisters. Her mother, Ethel, was a controlling and ambitious woman who tried at all costs to make her daughters stars.
It was Ethel who, when Frances was barely ten years old, began giving her pills: Amphetamines in the morning to give her energy, sleeping pills in the evening so she could rest. This destructive routine that would shape her entire life began before the girl could understand what was happening to her.
In 1934, the sisters changed their last name to Garland. Frances chose the name “Judy,” inspired by a popular song. A year later, Louis B. Mayer, founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, hired her immediately after hearing her extraordinary voice. This contract that seemed like a dream would become his nightmare.
MGM subjected the teenager Garland to a brutal regime. Since he was barely 1.30 meters tall and appeared boyish, those in charge at the studio constantly monitored his weight. One of them even called her “a fat little pig with pigtails.” The study’s solution was cruel: They forced them to go on a diet.
Garland could only consume chicken soup, black coffee and cigarettes, as well as appetite suppressant pills. The studio attached a corset to his waist and a prosthetic to his nose. They put caps on his teeth. All the time They forced them to work up to 18 hours six days a week.
“They forced us to work day and night,” he recalled years later. “They gave us pills to keep us going long after we were exhausted. Then they took us to the studio hospital and knocked us out with sleeping pills. After four hours they woke us up and gave us the stimulants again so that we could work for 72 hours straight. Half the time we were hanging from the ceiling, but that was our way of life,” he knew how to rebuild from this hell.
When he finished filming The Wizard of Oz in 1939, Garland was already addicted to drugs at the age of 16. This role, which catapulted her to global fame, also cemented her chemical addiction and eating disorder.
The abuse at MGM wasn’t just physical and chemical. According to his biographer Gerald Clarke, author of Become Happy: The Life of Judy Garlandthe teenager was constantly sexually harassed. Louis B. Mayer, who has been compared to Harvey Weinstein, groped her in his office while she sang. Because of her short stature he also called her “the bell ringer”.
Garland’s third husband, Sidney Luft, revealed in his memoirs that the actors who played the Munchkinlanders The Wizard of Oz They also harassed her. “They made his life hell on set,” Luft wrote.
When Garland became pregnant at age 19, her mother, husband David Rose, and MGM urged her to have an abortion. The studio organized the process discreetly. Pregnancy, they argued, would ruin her image as an innocent girl. This practice was not uncommon: actresses such as Bette Davis and Ava Gardner were also forced to terminate pregnancies in order to “preserve” their commercial value.
Garland’s desperate search for love and stability led him to marry five times. Her first marriage, to composer David Rose in 1941, was an attempt to escape her mother and the studio’s control. It only lasted three years.
(In 1945 she married the director Vincente Minnelli They had a daughter, Lisabut the marriage failed in 1951. Her third marriage, to Sidney Luft in 1952, was her longest: thirteen years. They had two childrenLorna and Joey, but Garland’s addictions, suicide attempts, and constant fighting ultimately separated them.
Her fourth husband, actor Mark Herron, was gay and, according to Garland, he was physically abusive. They separated a few months after their marriage. Finally, met Mickey Deans in 1966when he handed him a pack of stimulant tablets in a New York hotel. They married in March 1969. The marriage lasted exactly three months.
In 1950, MGM had terminated Garland’s contract. Her erratic behavior, constant absence, and addiction had made her too much of a risk. The dismissal led to several suicide attempts. According to Luft, Garland made at least twenty suicide attempts during their marriage.
Garland continued to play. In 1954 he played the main role A star is born for Warner Bros., which earned him an Oscar nomination. In 1961 he recorded Judy at Carnegie Hallan album that made her the first woman to win the Grammy for Album of the Year. But these successes were increasingly sporadic and short-lived.
Financial mismanagement and embezzlement by her representatives and husbands led to her becoming bankrupt. By the late 1960s, Garland had hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. The money he earned from his last appearance in New York in 1968 was immediately confiscated from the treasury.
In December 1968, Garland came to London for a five-week nightclub run Talk of the town. He was virtually homeless and sang in bars for just a hundred dollars a night. Her performances have been described as an “emotional car crash.”
A review by observer of January 14, 1969 described her as follows: “Now thinner, almost emaciated, with hair slicked back like a child’s. With her hand on her hip, she struts, staggers, stomps and roams wildly and restlessly, her big brown eyes sweeping over the audience in search of a friendly face.” The audience regularly booed her. He showed up late, spoke slurred, drank and smoked on stage.
Their last performance took place on March 25, 1969 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Three months later she was dead. The obituary on Los Angeles Times He listed the illnesses that plagued his life: Hepatitis, fatigue, kidney problems, nervous breakdowns, near-fatal drug reactions, overweight, underweight and injuries from falls. All the result of decades of abuse, exploitation and addiction.
His daughter Liza Minnelli explained years later: “He didn’t die of an overdose. I think he just got tired. He lived on a tightrope.”. His other daughter, Lorna Luft, wrote: “There was not enough love or care in the world to save my mother. No one could have saved her but herself.”
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