Judy Garland’s Studio-Enforced Diet Of Cigarettes And Amphetamines
Watching Dorothy dance in The Wizard of Oz you’d never guess the kind of hardship that Judy Garland, the actress who played Dorothy, was put through by the studio’s executives.
Wikimedia CommonsEven Judy Garland couldn’t escape Hollywood scandal.
Garland was only 13 years old when she auditioned for the film producer and co-founder of MGM, Louis B. Mayer. It seemed like a lucky break, but for Garland, it turned into a nightmare.
Just a year later, when Garland was 14 years old and about to star in her first feature film, MGM started bullying Garland into losing weight. The studio was so successful in brainwashing Garland that she ended up referring to herself as a “fat little frightening pig with pigtails.”
Garland was put on a strict diet of chicken soup and black coffee which she supplemented with cigarettes and diet pills.
Meanwhile, the much older studio executives sexually harassed her. According to Garland, Mayer would tell her that she had a beautiful voice that came from the heart. As he said so, he’d put his hand on her left breast.
“I often thought I was lucky,” Garland later remarked, “that I didn’t sing with another part of my anatomy.”
It is thus not at all surprising that Mayer’s treatment left the star with an eating disorder and a drug addiction that lasted all her life.
In the end, Judy Garland died of a drug overdose at just 47 in 1969.
