This article was originally published on WHerMoments
So you’ve watched all the Judy Garland movies, you’re a huge Wizard of Oz fan, and you know all about her on-screen life. But do you know the real story behind the movie sets and Hollywood smiles? Life for the famous icon wasn’t all happy songs and dances. In fact, there were times when the Wicked Witch of the West would have been a preferable alternative. Garland had some dark times that were in stark contrast to her sunny public image.
Tornado
Even from a young age, the Gumm family — that’s Garland’s real surname, in case you didn’t know — were beset with tragedy and scandal. In 1926 when Judy was just four, allegations started swirling like a tornado around her father, Frank.
It was a very different time, so when rumors circulated that he was involved in relations with young men, it caused outrage. His forced unhappiness ruined his relationship with his wife Ethel which, in turn, emotionally scarred their children, Garland included.
Dangerous road
Garland would later inform newspaper The New York Times, “As I recall, my parents were separating and getting back together all the time. It was very hard for me to understand those things and, of course, I remember clearly the fear I had of those separations.”
Ethel tried to distract herself by pouring her passion into her children’s future as their momager, but it turned out such misspent attention did more harm than good: it sent Garland down a very dangerous road.
Carrot and stick
Well, it was actually more like a forced push, and Garland’s mother was the one doing the shoving. Even during her early career, Ethel forced her daughter to perform, and used the stick more than the carrot.
In 1967 Garland told Barbara Walter, “[Mother] would sort of stand in the wings when I was a little girl, and if I didn't feel good, if I was sick to my tummy, 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.”
"Little Hunchback"
And so Garland began to equate her worth with acting. In the years to come she said, “The only time I felt wanted when I was a kid was when I was on stage, performing.” Things only got worse for the young actress when she got her big break and signed on with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).
At the tender age of 13, it constantly ridiculed Garland for her appearance — which was never good enough — and Louis B. Mayer even called her his “little hunchback” because of her stooped posture.
Money-maker
That wasn’t the only humiliation Garland had to endure, either. MGM tried its best to make her into the image it wanted her to present. With that in mind, it used prosthetic makeup to alter her nose and capped her teeth, all while the most beautiful women in Hollywood surrounded her.
According to Vogue in 2019 director Charles Waters, who’d worked with Garland multiple times, similarly criticized her looks. “Judy was the big money-maker at the time, a big success, but she was the ugly duckling,” he said.
Unwanted image
Waters continued, “I think it had a very damaging effect on her emotionally for a long time. I think it lasted forever, really.” It’s no wonder Garland developed a complex about her appearance.
Since it didn’t think she was physically attractive, MGM pigeonholed her with “the adorable girl-next-door” image, never used more effectively than in her iconic starring role in The Wizard of Oz. And while it was the least of her problems, that unwanted image was also out of her control. But the worst was yet to come.
Bad news
Garland suffered a family tragedy at the start of her rising career. Just three months after she signed up with MGM she received some bad news during preparations for a radio show. Her father had been hospitalized, and spinal meningitis was the culprit.
Frank managed to listen to his daughter’s show, but he passed away that night, and it devastated Garland. In an interview in 1964 she revealed, “My father's death was the most terrible thing that happened to me in my life.”
Engineered competition
It seemed that tragedy and conflict were colliding in Garland’s life. A year into her MGM contract, she met another girl who was vying for the spot as the studio’s top star. You Garland fans will know we’re of course referring to Deanna Durbin, a young blonde opera singer who was the polar opposite of her competitor in many ways.
The rivalry between them has become so legendary that it’s hard to separate the truth from the rumors, but it’s largely believed that the studio engineered the competition on purpose.
Couldn't decide
You see, the story goes that MGM only wanted one child star to take it to the top, and it couldn’t decide between Garland and Durbin. So it pitted the girls against each other, and even put them in direct competition during the musical Every Sunday.
Exactly who the studio picked officially is up for debate, since in her one-woman play Ingenue: Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland, and the Golden Age of Hollywood actress Melanie Gall indicates they meant to fire Garland, but Durbin got the ax instead.
“If I only had a heart”
Another rumor suggests that MGM offered Durbin the role of Dorothy, but she let Garland take it in her place. Whatever the truth, Garland ended up as the victor in their rivalry, and Durbin disappeared from Hollywood.
And with the lead role in The Wizard of Oz under her belt, surely things became better for Garland after that? Actually, if anything, they got worse. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, because she was about to go on a quest for a heart.
Backyard musicals
Not her own heart, of course, but someone else’s. Remember Garland’s frequent co-star at MGM, Mickey Rooney? Well, he starred alongside her multiple times, and they had such great stage chemistry that the studio had the pair act together in the “Backyard Musical” film series.
In 1937 at the tender age of 15, Garland fell in love with Rooney. Yet in life, just as in their films together, she was always cast as the girl-next-door instead of the romantic lead.
Something special
It’s impossible to say whether her roles made a difference in the eyes of Rooney, but either way Garland’s love was unrequited, at least in the same sense. Although he did love her, it wasn’t in a romantic sense, as Closer reported in 2020. Rooney explained, “There was more than a love affair. It was so special.
It was a forever love.” So while Garland didn’t find the affection she wanted, at least she wasn’t alone in her traumatic journey through Golden-Age Hollywood.
Endemic problem
When she was 16, Garland began to see the true nature of the man behind the curtain at MGM, though she didn’t reveal any of this at the time. Instead, her troubling experiences were discovered in a biography that never officially saw the light of day.
Biographer Gerald Clarke chased the notes down, and what he discovered was shocking. Although it’s common knowledge that sexual harassment was endemic back in her day, no one knew Garland herself had endured it.
Too much power
Clarke relayed what he learnt in his book, Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland. He wrote, “Having sex with the female help was regarded as a perk of power, and few women escaped the demands of Mayer and his underlings.
Between the ages of 16 and 20, Judy herself was to be approached for sex — and approached again and again. ‘Don’t think they all didn’t try,’ she said. Top on the list was Mayer himself.” Hardly a day went by without his advances.
Confrontation
Clarke continued, “Whenever he complimented her on her voice — she sang from the heart, he said — Mayer would invariably place his hand on her left breast to show just where her heart was.
‘I often thought I was lucky,’ observed Judy, ‘that I didn’t sing with another part of my anatomy.’ That scenario, a compliment followed by a grope, was repeated many times until, grown up at last, Judy put a stop to it.” She did what many people couldn’t, and confronted him.
Testing boundaries
The next time Mayer made his move, Garland told him, “Mr. Mayer, don’t you ever, ever do that again. I just will not stand for it.”
Apparently, Mayer began weeping and replied, “How can you say that to me, to me who loves you?” But Garland didn’t fall for his crocodile tears; she wrote, “It’s amazing how these big men, who had been around so many sophisticated women all their lives, could act like idiots.” Yet Mayer wasn’t the only one to try his luck with Garland.
Ruination
Although Garland stated this man was an executive, she didn’t give his name. Clarke’s book continues, “Eschewing any pretense of small talk, he demanded that [Garland], too, have sex with him. ‘Yes or no, right now — that was his style,’ Judy recalled. When she refused … 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.’” Then there were the Munchkins.
Marauding Munchkins
Apparently, Garland had to endure numerous abuses at the literal hands of the actors who played the Munchkins whenever she was on set. Sid Luft, one of Garland’s husbands, elaborated on the topic in his memoirs, Judy and I: My Life With Judy Garland.
“They would make Judy’s life miserable on set by putting their hands under her dress,” he described. “The men were 40 or more years old. They thought they could get away with anything because they were so small.”
Making music
Garland didn’t have any luck in love even when she met Artie Shaw at age 16. He was a bandleader and loved her voice, so they had music in common. The starlet fell for his charms hard and was deeply in love with him, so it seemed to her like she’d found the one.
“Artie described her as bubbly, full of fun, lively and intelligent,” Clarke wrote in his book. Yet in hindsight it seems clear that Shaw didn’t feel as strongly about Garland as she did for him.
Inexperience
To begin with, Shaw was experienced in both life and love. He was 28 years old and had two previous marriages under his belt. “He said they never did anything,” Clarke revealed, “although she tried. He would lean down to kiss her forehead when they said goodbye and Judy would turn up her lips.”
Ultimately though, he had his sights on another woman: Hollywood heartthrob Lana Turner. And initially, Turner had no interest in Shaw. But then Garland admitted her feelings for him.
Mischievous
Clarke wrote, “Lana had a little mischievous quality.” This no doubt played a part in her renewed interest in Shaw, and his moves on their first date convinced Turner further. She said, “Artie would paint me a romantic dream with a white picket fence around it. His eloquence stirred me.”
According to Turner’s friend and fellow actress, Ann Rutherford, it spurred the couple into action. “She didn’t believe in sex before marriage, so if you wanted to [have sex with] Lana, you had to marry her,” she explained.
Love triangle
And that’s exactly what Shaw did. He and Turner ran off to Vegas for their nuptials, but neither of them told Garland how they felt. So how do you think she found out? It was in the newspaper headlines the following day. “She screamed,” Clarke said. “She was so devastated by it.
She went to her room and banged her head against the wall.” The Shaw-Turner love triangle was the first that Garland was involved in, but it wasn’t the last.
Wandering eye
In her second love triangle Garland herself was the other woman. On her 18th birthday, she struck up a relationship with the musician David Rose. He even gifted Garland an engagement ring!
The catch was that he was already betrothed to the singer Martha Raye, and MGM wasn’t happy seeing their wholesome girl-next-door with a married man! They told Garland to wait a year for Rose’s divorce to finalize, and she did. But Garland’s eye wandered in the meantime.
Scandalous
Before the wedding could go ahead Garland began an affair with the songwriter Johnny Mercer. It was only a brief liaison, and one that Garland was quick to call off. All the same, the news was scandalous at the time; it caused quite a stir in the media.
While she went back to Rose in the end, her encounters with Mercer were far from over. They got back together later in life, and he even wrote a song based on his feelings for her called “I Remember You.”
The real Wicked Witch
At the time the tabloids called Rose and Garland’s relationship recovery “a true rarity,” and they almost went on to start a family. Perhaps they would have done, too, if it hadn’t been for her mother Ethel, whom Garland called “the real Wicked Witch of the West.”
She and MGM were apparently still in control of Garland’s life, and together they practically forced her into having an abortion. Writer Jane Ellen Wayne wrote in her book The Golden Girls of MGM, “Married or not, the MGM girls maintained their virginal image.”
The Power
Even though Garland and Rose continued their marriage, they clearly weren’t happy, as was made evident by her affair with Tyrone Power. In 1943 — a year before her marriage broke down — Garland was mired in scandal again when she had an affair with Power.
This didn’t go unnoticed, especially not by Garland’s publicist and rumored lover, Betty Asher. She was keeping tabs on Garland and reporting back to MGM about everything she did, so obviously the studio found out about the relationship.
Refused consent
Garland felt the pressure on all sides and wanted to make things official with Power. To that end, she tried to convince him to divorce his wife so they could be together. Unfortunately for her, Mrs. Power refused to consent, so the relationship ended. During their time together, though, Garland fell pregnant again.
But nothing had changed since her previous pregnancy, and she had another abortion. After a trial separation, Garland and Rose divorced and their marriage ended in 1944.
Liza
In 1945 Garland fell pregnant for a third time, and her new husband director Vincente Minnelli was the father. She got to keep it and they called the baby Liza. For once it looked like everything was going smoothly for the actress, yet behind the scenes, she was still under enormous pressure. In fact, she suffered a nervous breakdown on set.
Garland received private help, and was even well enough to return to work in time, but she returned to a psychiatric hospital later that year after an attempt on her own life.
Not-so-golden age
Throughout her life Garland struggled with mental health and addictions, no doubt caused by her low self-esteem and the traumatic life experiences she’d suffered in the so-called “Golden-Age” Hollywood. She passed away in 1969 and since then, her daughter Lorna Luft has spoken about her mother’s legacy.
She said that even though Garland had a tough life, she didn’t want to be remembered for the tragedy. "We all have tragedies in our lives,” Luft in 1999 told The Guardian, “but that does not make us tragic.”