Judy Garland

The amphetamine contract

Frances Ethel Gumm had no say in her name or her work schedule. At two years old she was already on stage in Grand Rapids because her parents needed the family business to succeed. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought her as a child and reinvented her identity to create a profitable product.

There was no childhood.

Louis B. Mayer called her his little hunchback. She was petite and did not fit the aesthetic standards of the stars of the era. But her voice had a vibration that no one else could replicate in a recording studio.

In 1939 she shot The Wizard of Oz after Shirley Temple turned down the role of Dorothy. The studio supplied her with pills to wake up and others to sleep. She worked eighteen-hour days under lights that gave off unbearable heat.

And audiences fell in love with a technical lie.

Her diet consisted of chicken soup, black coffee and eighty cigarettes a day to maintain the weight producers demanded. In 1944 she starred in Meet Me in St. Louis, where she met Vincente Minnelli. He was one of the few who knew how to capture her beauty on screen, but the marriage did not solve her drug dependence.

A divorce from reality

Judy tried to become a dramatic actress in The Clock under the direction of her husband. They married in 1945 and had Liza, but stability was a foreign concept in their home. Her nervous breakdowns and constant delays on set led MGM to terminate her contract in 1950.

She attempted suicide by cutting her throat with broken glass in the bathroom. She survived and found refuge on the stages of London and New York, where her fans treated her like a martyr. Her tour of the London Palladium in 1951 brought in figures that temporarily saved her finances.

In 1954 she returned to movies with A Star Is Born. Warner Bros. invested a fortune, but exhibitors cut the film because it ran nearly three hours. She lost the Oscar to Grace Kelly, and that night marked the end of her run as a leading lady at the major studios.

The system spit her out when she stopped being docile.

She spent the following years jumping from one television show to another. In 1961 she gave a concert at Carnegie Hall that was recorded live. The album won five Grammy Awards and spent thirteen weeks at number one on the sales charts. But the money vanished into the hands of managers and ex-husbands.

The final debt at the Chelsea

Her final years were a run from the tax inspectors. In 1969 she accepted a series of concerts at London's Talk of the Town club because she desperately needed cash. She was extremely thin and sometimes forgot the lyrics to her songs. The audience threw bread and plastic cups at her when she arrived late to performances.

She married Mickey Deans in March of that same year. It was her fifth marriage and the shortest of them all. On June 22, 1969, her husband found her dead in the bathroom of their rented home in the Chelsea neighborhood.

The autopsy confirmed an accidental barbiturate overdose. She was 47 years old and owed four million dollars to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.