Judy Garland first appeared onstage when she was two and a half years old. It happened in a small movie theater in Minnesota. In the 1920s, when films were still silent and musical accompaniment was the responsibility of pianists, her parents—her father a businessman without a particular specialty, her mother a pianist—bought a small movie theater and turned it into a fairly profitable family business. Her father showed the films, while her mother accompanied them on the piano. On Fridays, however, when audiences wanted something more than a movie, an additional performance had to be arranged. Luckily, the Gumm family had enough children. Every Friday, the three Gumm sisters began appearing onstage, singing songs to their mother's accompaniment. The youngest, two-year-old Frances, was held by the hands so she would not run away. But she had no desire to escape. Baby Gumm, as she was billed, loved performing for audiences. From then on, only the stage gave her a sense of happiness, warmth, and comfort. When Baby turned six, the family moved to California. All three sisters began taking dance lessons and gradually became professional musical performers, or, as they were called then, vaudeville artists. Because the name Gumm, which reminded audiences of the chewing gum then coming into fashion, provoked laughter, the girls changed their surname to Garland, and the growing Baby chose the romantic first name Judy.
The children's success planted vague dreams in Mrs. Gumm's head. She imagined her daughters stepping out of an enormous Cadillac in luxurious fur coats and diamond necklaces. After graciously signing autographs for their delighted fans, the girls would disappear through the gates of a fairy-tale palace surrounded by a tropical garden. These pleasant dreams came to an end when both older daughters decided to marry and leave the stage. The willful girls' decision meant the end of Mrs. Gumm's financial security. She did not wait for thirteen-year-old Judy to follow her sisters. Instead, she made a desperate attempt, dragging the girl to an audition at MGM, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. One look at Judy was enough for Mr. Mayer to recognize her immense talent.
Karabas and His Malvina
Louis B. Mayer was called a monster in Hollywood, but, as we know, everything in this world is relative. His studio was not merely the center of a powerful film industry, and he did not always behave as shamelessly as one might expect of a “shark of capitalism.” Among other things, Mayer gave thousands of creative people—actors, directors, artists, and photographers—a roof over their heads and a decent income. He cared for many of them like a father. Many, but unfortunately not Judy. For some inexplicable reason, he treated this one little hen, which would lay not golden but diamond eggs for him over the following sixteen years, cruelly and heartlessly, ultimately provoking her early death.
As for Judy, from the very beginning she regarded movie work as a form of slavery. The exhausting, hours-long shoots in soundstages bore no resemblance to the concert platforms she had known and loved since early childhood. If she could have, if some Pierrot had come to her rescue, she would have run away, leaving Karabas empty-handed. But her mother stood guard over the boss's interests. Through threats, physical punishment, and psychological manipulation, Mrs. Gumm kept her daughter in submission.
“I went through hell,” Garland said in an interview. “Crying was useless. Dying didn't work. So I laughed. Every time she hit me, I laughed. The only thing she taught me was never to punish my children. For that I am grateful to her.”
During her first three years at the studio, Judy appeared in seven films. A day on the soundstage could last sixteen hours. The lights gave off tremendous heat, there was hardly any air to breathe, and the corsets obligatory at the time squeezed the chest. No wonder actors fainted. They had to sleep there on folding cots, and could only dream of a hot shower. What more is there to say? In short, regulated working hours for film actors and luxurious star trailers had yet to come into use.
Accumulated exhaustion led to poor sleep, lack of sleep to depressed spirits, and consequently to mediocre performances before the camera. We have no information about how MGM dealt with this problem among adult actors, but a simple solution was found for Judy: from the age of fifteen she was given psychotropic medication every day. English-language biographers describing this regular “medical assistance” use the word “drugs.” But this does not mean narcotics in the modern sense. No, Judy was not hooked on cocaine, heroin, or anything of that sort. Here “drugs” simply means medicines: sleeping pills and sedatives. Exactly which ones is not specified. Yet, considering the rather primitive level of psychopharmacology in the early twentieth century, it is not hard to determine. The powerful antidepressant amitriptyline was widely used as a relaxant, with dangerous side effects including reduced blood pressure, fainting, and irreversible disturbances of heart rhythm. Barbiturates and diphenhydramine, notorious as the drug of choice among people attempting suicide, were primarily used as sleeping medications. The degree of addictive dependence produced by all these drugs is one hundred percent. The risk of side effects depends on dosage and duration of “treatment.” Judy was “treated” without interruption for at least ten years. Excruciating headaches, mood swings, chronic fatigue, and two suicide attempts were the results of this “regular medical assistance.”
It is unlikely that Judy's mother understood the danger to which her daughter was exposed. But if she had known the truth about these medicines, would she have chosen another path, or would her behavior have remained unchanged? It is equally unlikely that Karabas-Mayer appreciated even the immorality of forcibly medicating a healthy person. There were no laws at the time under which he could be held accountable. Nevertheless, one cannot fail to note the strange fact that no traces of Judy's “treatment” (and possibly that of her colleagues) survived in the studio archives. These medicines cost considerable money, and an accounting department that recorded every cup of coffee drunk on set would surely have recorded the incomparably greater expenses for medication.
When Judy, after her contract with the studio had ended, publicly accused her mother, Ethel Gumm, and her employer, Mayer, of causing irreparable damage to her health, both declared her a liar. But Judy's eldest daughter, the actress Liza Minnelli, confirmed her mother's words. She pointed out that when Judy came home from filming she smelled strongly of acetone. The source of the smell was paraldehyde, a psychotropic drug widely used at the time. This extraordinarily powerful sedative was used to induce forced sleep in patients with epilepsy and alcoholic psychosis. Injecting such a strong drug into a healthy person, which Judy essentially was, was unquestionably a crime.
Judy was never able to free herself from psychotropic drugs. There was a period when she tried to fight her dependence on sleeping pills. It ended with her almost entirely losing the ability to sleep. To occupy herself during the long sleepless nights, she began cooking. “I became an excellent cook,” she admitted, “and now I can treat my friends to dishes I have made myself. But I still haven't managed to solve the problem of insomnia.” She worked for Mayer for sixteen years and was forcibly given psychotropic medication for at least ten of them—certainly long enough for a drug dependence to develop.
The Wizard
It would be unfair to claim that all those years spent working for Mayer brought young Judy nothing but suffering. Of course she also had moments of happiness. During her first three years at the studio, the girl became a brilliant professional. And when her star-making moment finally arrived—the role of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz—she was superbly prepared. The famous sequence in which Dorothy sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was performed and filmed in a single take with one camera. It is still used to teach acting in leading theater and film schools around the world. And the song itself was named the “best song of the twentieth century.”
Unfortunately, Soviet audiences were deprived of the pleasure of seeing this film; the times did not permit it. We learned who Judy Garland was only half a century later. Yet we did get our own Wizard. Apparently, someone informed Stalin of the film's unprecedented popularity, and, so as not to deprive Soviet children of the joy of meeting the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, the government decided to create its own version of the fairy tale and promote it by every means then available. Thus appeared A. Volkov's book The Wizard of the Emerald City. The publisher was instructed to treat the book, which was in reality merely an adapted translation of the American original, as an independent work of authorship. Under no circumstances were Frank Baum's book or Victor Fleming's film to be mentioned. And they were not. Yet, strangely enough, the illustrations for Volkov's book showed characters who seemed to have stepped straight off Hollywood screens, while its heroine, Ellie, the Soviet equivalent of Dorothy, was nothing less than a portrait of sixteen-year-old Judy Garland.
Judy was unlikely to have grasped the scale of her astonishing success or understood the enormous income her work in The Wizard brought Mayer. For another twelve years, during which she made twenty films, she remained Mayer's powerless slave, bound hand and foot by an inhuman contract.
When filming began on her last film, Easter Parade, in 1950, it turned out that her earnings were $650 a week—an absolute minimum for an actor's salary at the time. Mayer paid even beginners more. A sum that had seemed enormous before the war had become practically nothing afterward. Unfortunately, Judy had neither a lawyer nor a powerful partner to defend her interests and negotiate better terms with the studio.
Worse still, it turned out that throughout those years the studio had carefully documented all losses caused by canceled shoots blamed on Judy. There were many cancellations, because she was exhausted, stuffed with medication, and felt ill almost all the time. Biographers say that she began vomiting the moment her car passed through the studio gates. Although this was more likely a psychological reaction than a symptom of any illness, she could no longer film that day; the chauffeur would turn around and take Judy home. The result was an astronomical debt for the time: $100,000. It could not be deducted from Judy's salary because that was far too small. When MGM finally terminated Garland's contract, the celebrated actress was thrown out of her own home and left owing Mayer an enormous sum.
On one occasion she needed medical assistance. She had no money for doctors, and, swallowing her pride, Judy called Mayer from a public telephone booth and asked him to pay for her treatment. There was nothing extraordinary about the request. As already mentioned, Mayer did sometimes look after former employees, giving them small pensions and, in certain cases, paying their medical bills. For some reason, Judy was not among the fortunate few. His answer was: “We are not a charity. Go somewhere that treats beggars and the homeless.”
This happened in Boston, and the nearest medical institution to the telephone booth from which Judy had called Mayer was a children's clinic. So she went there. What happened next was extraordinary: the young patients, discovering that Dorothy from the Land of Oz herself was lying in a bed beside them, began to recover more quickly. The chief physician suggested that the unexpected medical effect might be related to the powerful positive emotions that meeting their beloved heroine inspired in the children. Judy was offered free treatment at the clinic for the rest of her life. Thus, emerging from Mayer's dungeon into the world, the twenty-eight-year-old star discovered, to her amazement, that she was loved and admired by many people. She understood that life was not so bad after all and was worth living.
But most importantly, she finally decided to devote herself to what she loved most in the world: singing onstage. Garland dedicated the remaining twenty years of her life to performing, released sixty albums of songs, filled the largest concert halls around the world, and even appeared in film musicals—although not for Mayer. After moving to New York, she returned to Hollywood only a few times, reluctantly. There she was awarded a 1954 Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical for A Star Is Born, and, as a singer, two Grammy Awards in 1962.
Judy became a frequent and much-loved guest on television and eventually hosted her own show on CBS. Garland died at forty-seven from an overdose of sleeping pills. Her life has been studied in detail by many biographers, none of whom found any indications of possible suicide in her last days. Taking sleeping pills was a familiar ritual for Judy, as for many other stars. Unfortunately, not everyone can always calculate the correct amount.
Personal Life
Garland never found lasting happiness in family life. Judy married five times. The person responsible for the breakdown of her first marriage, to musician David Rose, was Mayer once again, a man who truly played a fatal role in the life of this charming woman. Initially the boss approved his actress's marriage, although he reasonably thought there was no need to rush to the altar at nineteen. But the pregnancy that followed the wedding was another matter. Judy Garland having a child meant canceled shoots and losses in the hundreds of thousands. It was comparatively easy for Mayer to explain to Judy's mother that having a baby would have a disastrous effect on her career. It was just as easy for her to convince her son-in-law. Persuading Judy herself to terminate the pregnancy, however, proved impossible. The usually obedient girl put up unexpected resistance. But her mother found a way to deal with her daughter this time, too.
“My mother and my husband invited me to go for a drive,” Garland recalled in an interview. “I thought, why not? And got into the car. We stopped on the edge of town outside some shabby little house. We went inside. Half an hour later, my pregnancy was over.”
The marriage was over as well. Judy could not forget the harm her former husband had done to her and feared that she would never be able to become a mother.
She regarded the birth of her daughter Liza as a blessing. Judy thought her marriage to Liza's father, director Vincente Minnelli, would last forever. But Mayer's fatal influence intervened here, too. Working with Judy on the same projects, Minnelli, as director, had to represent the interests of his employer, Mayer. Forcing his wife to observe an exhausting shooting schedule, knowing the harm that psychotropic drugs were doing to her, he could hardly have avoided pangs of conscience. Evidently, fear of losing his job proved stronger than love for his wife. This could only wound a sensitive young woman who by then understood what kind of man Mayer was and would have preferred her husband to be her protector rather than her overseer.
Moreover, Minnelli turned out to be bisexual. One day Judy found him in the bedroom with an actor from their studio. The incident nearly ended in tragedy: Judy tried to cut her wrists. The marriage subsequently broke down. For the rest of her life, Judy was unable to overcome her negative attitude toward homosexuality. When she discovered that her song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” had become an anthem of the American movement for the freedom of same-sex love, she did not conceal her annoyance.
Garland married for the third time in 1952, to her manager Sidney Luft. She gave birth to their daughter Lorna, who became an actress like Liza, and son Joey, who chose a career in photography. The marriage lasted twelve years. Garland married twice more. At forty-three, she married impresario Mark Herron but left him a year later. A few months before her death, in March 1969, she married a young English musician, Mickey Deans. Judy moved into his apartment in London's Chelsea district. She had grown fond of England during her final years, and English audiences returned her affection. That apartment became Garland's final refuge. One June night she swallowed her sleeping pills as usual but decided to take a hot bath before bed. Her husband, returning late from a concert, found her there.