Judy Garland signed her first movie contract when she was just thirteen...and the legendary
entertainer died of an accidental overdose when she was only 47.
The time in between was marked by pain, and her life ended far too soon.
This is her tragic real-life story.
Judy Garland's early success wasn't the result of a lucky break: It was the result of years
of planning by her mom, Ethel Gumm.
She was a former vaudeville performer herself, and pushed all of her daughters into show
business, but she reportedly recognized early on that Garland had the most talent.
Garland toured the country as a soloist, and Gumm gave her sleeping pills so that she could
sleep on the road.
Incidentally, Garland didn't think too fondly of her mom, reportedly referring to her as
"the real Wicked Witch of the West."
In a 1967 interview, Garland told Barbara Walters that Gumm was a "mean" stage mother,
explaining that,
"She was very jealous because she had absolutely no talent."
She goes on to explain,
"She would sort of stand in the wings...and if I didn't feel good, she'd say, 'You get
out and sing or I'll wrap you around the bedpost and break you off short!'
So I'd go out and sing."
"Whenever I talk about her, and I should because she was so wicked, but whenever I start talking
about her, she inevitably knocks one earring off."
At the age of 13, Judy Garland was signed to MGM after an audition with the film studio's
co-founder Louis B. Mayer.
Stunned by her beautiful singing voice, Mayer didn't require her to go through a screen
test...he simply signed her on the spot.
It was the big break Garland and her mother had been waiting for.
But instead of all her dreams coming true, Garland found herself living in a nightmare.
"Ouch!"
"What do you think you're doing?"
MGM is the studio that made The Wizard of Oz, and producers reportedly treated Garland
harshly.
Concerned about her weight, they monitored her eating.
Food was often taken away from her, leaving her in a constant state of hunger.
According to the Independent, one telling studio memo reads:
"Judy sneaked out between takes seven and eight this afternoon and had a malted milk."
The constant hounding reportedly affected Garland's body image for the rest of her life.
Charles Waters, a director who worked with Garland on films like the 1948 musical Easter
Parade and 1950's Summer Stock, told the Independent:
"Judy was the big moneymaker at the time - a big success, but she was the ugly duckling...I
think it had a damaging effect on her for a long time.
I think it lasted forever, really."
MGM would often push its stars to the limit, and Garland would sometimes find herself working
18 hour days, six days a week.
To keep her going, and to keep her slim, the studio gave Garland drugs as a teenager, amphetamines
to keep her energy up, and sleeping pills to calm her down.
"Get on your mark, get set, go!"
After Garland's death, film critic Roger Ebert wrote about Garland's performance in the 1954
version of A Star Is Born.
A woman who had worked on the production team told Ebert:
"They were working Judy incredibly hard."
Garland was reportedly clean when she began filming, but when the production fell behind
schedule, studio execs allegedly got her back on drugs.
According to Ebert's source,
"One week we came to work and there was a nurse on the set.
In those days when you saw a nurse it almost always meant a star was on dope."
She goes on to say:
"[Studio execs] were going back to the same so-called solution of 10 or 15 years ago:
If Garland was in trouble, or you thought she might be, put her on pills.
Speed her up, slow her down.
Run her like a clock."
"The working schedules, you know, we just did one picture after another."
According to Gerald Clarke's Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, the star was subjected
to harassment at the studio from the time she was 16.
In fact, Clarke reportedly unearthed pages from Garland's unfinished memoir, in which
Garland claims that execs were routinely inappropriate towards her.
As she put it:
"Don't think they all didn't try."
She writes that Louis B. Mayer reportedly complimented her voice by placing his hand
on her left breast under the guise of touching her heart, where he coyly claimed she sang
from.
Garland writes:
"I often thought I was lucky that I didn't sing with another part of my anatomy."
Garland reportedly worked up the courage to put an end to such behavior when she was 20.
According to her unpublished memoir, Mayer cried when she put a stop to it and told her
that he loved her.
Garland claimed abuse at the hands of at least one other studio executive, whom she didn't
name.
According to Clarke's book, Garland said he became belligerent when she rejected his advances:
"He began screaming.
'Listen you, before you go, I want to tell you something.
I'll ruin you and I can do it.
I'll break you if it’s the last thing I do.'"
Judy Garland had somewhat troubled relationships with her children.
Her son Joey Luft told Closer Weekly that she was a loving mother, but her addiction
to drugs made her behave erratically.
He says,
"There were times when my mom wasn't acting right, so I'd ask my dad, 'Is she sick?' and
he explained it all to me.
It was exceptionally hard to deal with as a kid.
I was powerless.
She was a great person, but she had that addiction."
His sister, the legendary performer Liza Minelli, told Closer Weekly that Garland experienced
mood swings:
"If she was happy, she wasn’t just happy.
She was ecstatic.
And when she was sad, she was sadder than anyone.
There were no middles.
I was used only to screaming attacks or excessive love bouts, rivers of money or no money at
all."
But that's not to say Minnelli bears any grudges.
"Was she a good mother?"
"The best."
"Really because…"
"She did not leave her kids for a second.
For a second."
Garland's daughter Lorna Luft said,
"She was funny and sweet and gifted beyond belief, but she was also damaged.
There wasn’t enough love in the world, enough attention in the world, to save my mother.
No one could have saved her but herself."
Judy Garland's traumatic childhood, combined with her dependency on drugs, caused a great
deal of turmoil in her adult life, although in interviews, she would deny she had any
substance abuse issues.
"I wouldn't have had time to learn a song if I'd been that sick."
In his book Judy and I, her ex-husband Sid Luft claimed,
"Judy had been determined to look like a 'movie star', she wanted to be camera slim...Her
excuse was the weight issue, when in fact she was dependent...She confessed it was virtually
impossible for her to sustain a work mode in front of the cameras without taking some
kind of medication."
Garland also suffered from postpartum depression, for which she was given more medication.
Luft thought he could help his wife manage her addiction.
As he explains it:
"I wasn’t thinking of Judy as a clinically ill person, or, 'This is an addict.'
I was worried something awful had happened to the delightful, brilliant woman I loved."
Judy Garland's self-destructive behavior didn't stop at drug abuse.
After being fired from MGM in 1950, the singer tried to take her own life on two occasions
while married to her second husband Vincente Minnelli.
Her depression reportedly contributed to the stress that ultimately led to their divorce.
She reportedly tried to kill herself again while married to Sid Luft, and he reportedly
found her in the bathroom.
In his memoir Judy and I, he writes:
"Judy had cut her throat with a razor blade...What demons inhabited her soul just when life seemed
so rich and productive?
It was a gigantic puzzlement that she would poison herself with pills, and that the toxic
reaction to whatever she swallowed would create an impulse for self-mutilation."
Garland soon tried taking her life again by slashing her wrists.
Luft writes,
"When Judy came out in her short white lace negligee, her arms were in front of her and
she said, 'Look, darling, what I've done!'…She was bleeding profusely."
According to an obituary in the Los Angeles Times, Luft says Garland tried to kill herself
20 times throughout the course of their 13-year marriage.
In 1960, Judy Garland balked at the idea that she was troubled, grandly proclaiming,
"People think of me as a neurotic kid, full of fits and depressions, biting my fingernails
to the bone, living under an eternal shadow of illness and collapse.
Why do people insist on seeing an aura of tragedy around me always?
My life isn't tragic at all.
I laugh a lot these days."
"Where'd you get 'em?"
"I shot 'em.
I'd like to sing for you."
But by 1967, Garland's optimism was evidently on the wane.
She admitted in an interview with McCall's that her life had been a hard one, saying,
"Do you know how difficult it is to be Judy Garland?
And for me to live with me?
I've had to do it, and what more unkind life can you think of than the one I've lived?
I'm told I’m a legend.
Fine.
But I don’t know what that means.
I certainly didn't ask to be a legend.
I was totally unprepared for it."
According to her obituary in The New York Times, Garland had been under psychiatric
care from the time she was 18.
But none of the treatments seemed to help, whether it was psychoanalysis or electroshock
therapy.
As Liza Minelli told 60 Minutes,
"She'd make up the most terrific stories for [the doctors].
And she would do it in the car, going over there.
She'd say, 'Now, what's a good dream?
What can I say I dreamt?'
And I'd say, 'Well, don't you think maybe you should tell him what you really dreamt?'...And
she said, 'But he always looks so bored.
I mean, I can't stand it if he's bored."
Towards the end of her career, Judy Garland's fame and money were dwindling.
In Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir, written by Lorna Luft, Garland's daughter, claims
her mother was in bad shape by the mid-1960s.
As she puts it, Garland was, quote, "homeless broke."
In fact, Garland was reportedly singing in bars for just $100 a night.
Meanwhile, Liza Minnelli was beginning to find success in her own career and helped
financially support Garland.
At the time of her death from an accidental overdose of barbiturates, Garland was performing
sporadically.
Friends claimed she seemed to be in good spirits the night before she was found dead on June
22nd, 1969.
She'd only recently married Mickey Deans, her fifth husband.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Garland was thrilled with the marriage, telling the
press,
"Finally, finally, I am loved."
Of course, her fans were absolutely devastated.
"She looked gorgeous.
She really did.
I only hope she's happy."
Judy Garland was reportedly rather hard to work with.
According to her obituary in The New York Times, work dried up following her performance
in the 1954 melodrama A Star Is Born.
The publication claims:
"She was overweight for a star, consistently ill and more temperamental than ever.
Hollywood would not risk employing her."
According to PBS,
"Garland was abruptly fired from playing Annie Oakley in the MGM production of Annie Get
Your Gun for excessive tardiness, [being] overweight, drunkenness, and 'instability.'"
Although MGM cast her in other projects like the 1951 musical Royal Wedding, which she
was dropped from, the writing was already on the wall.
As PBS reports,
"Her tardiness and absenteeism led to a final dismissal from [the studio]."
Nevertheless, she wasn't about to give up.
As The New York Times wrote in its obituary for Garland:
"Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the career of Judy Garland was that she was able
to continue as long as she did, long after her voice had failed and long after her physical
reserves had been spent in various illnesses that might have left a less tenacious woman
an invalid."
In December 1968, just months before she died, Garland began a five-week run in London's
Talk of the Town.
The shows sold out, but critics were far from kind.
For instance, the Observer wrote:
"It is all immaculate and meaningless.
The shoddy, tarnished world that created her has emasculated her.
In her we see the broken remnant of a gaudy age of showbiz which believed that glamour
was a good enough substitute for genius."
A year later, Time magazine wrote In Garland's obituary,
"[Those final performances] turned out to be the biggest flop of her life."
"[She looked like a] walking casualty."
Did the ill-fated comeback and Garland's subsequent heartbreak contribute to the decline of her
mental health?
Speaking to Time in 1972, Liza Minelli said,
"She let her guard down.
She didn't die from an overdose.
I think she just got tired."
As legendary actress Bette Davis said,
"For a talent like Miss Garland, it's just tragic.
They don't come around like that very often."
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).