Judy Garland vibrancy was marked subsequent to tragedy from start to decline. Before she traveled the length of the yellowish-brown brick road in The Wizard of Oz, she had to buttonhole a hard intimates vigor including a driven stage mother and a studio system that thought nothing of giving a teenage girl pills to lose weight and to save her full of zip long hours.
Her parents thought about terminating the pregnancy
When Ethel Milne Gumm scholastic she was pregnant in the slip of 1921, it wasn’t happy news. In fact, her husband, Frank Gumm, contacted his buddy Marcus Rabwin, who was a medical student at the University of Minnesota, to ask for advice approximately terminating the pregnancy.
Rabwin in addition to urged the couple to take in serve together along along after that the pregnancy, which they ultimately did. On June 10, 1922, Frances Ethel Gumm who would become Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.
When she was two and a half years earliest, Garland made her theatrical debut in Grand Rapids. It was the arrival of a lifetime of singing, as without complexity as a habit for her to environment when she belonged. As she revealed in 1963, “The without help mature I felt wanted taking into account I was a kid was considering I was going in the region of for stage, performing arts.”
Judy Garland was raised in an unhappy home
Why did Garland’s mother throbbing to halt her pregnancy? It’s impossible to know for certain, but rumors of Frank’s affairs subsequent to youthful men and young person boys could have been affecting Ethel. Frank’s happenings grew hence out of bounds for Grand Rapids that the Gumm intimates which along with included Garland’s older sisters Mary Jane and Virginia moved to California in 1926.
Living in California was beneficial for Garland’s career, but it couldn’t repair the Gumm marriage. Later in vivaciousness, Garland declared: “As I remember, my parents were separating and getting plus together for ever and a day.
Sadly, forward her parents, Garland wouldn’t have a glad domicile energy as an adult; she would have five marriages asleep her titivate by the times she died at 47.
Garland called her mother the ‘real Wicked Witch of the West’
To alleviate Garland’s career, Ethel brought her young daughter to numerous vaudeville gigs, as proficiently as a few appearances at the Cocoanut Grove (a popular nightclub). Garland also performed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934.
In fact, according to Garland biographer Gerald Clarke, it was Ethel who first provided pills ones to ramp happening vibrancy and others to nap to her not yet 10-year-primeval daughter. Ethel’s behavior makes Garland’s difficult characterization of her mom as “the valid Wicked Witch of the West” seem apt.
MGM often criticized her appearance
However, it wasn’t quite the happy ending that had been hoped for. Not unaccompanied was the studio slow to deem roles for Garland, but beast knocked out concurrence also opened her taking place to a world of criticism roughly her impression.
Studio head Louis B. Mayer allegedly called Garland “my little hunchback” (Garland was less than five feet high and had curvature of the spine).
Though she’d soon become a breakout star, these practices stayed together amid Garland for years to arrive. She said future: “From the period I was 13, there was a constant torture yourself in the middle of MGM and me whether or not to eat, how much to eat, what to eat. I recall this more vividly than all else just practically my childhood.”
No one stood up for the star
Judy Garland father died in 1935, a rushed period after she’d signed regarding at MGM. She continued to have a sophisticated association taking into consideration her mother, who was a propos the MGM payroll herself. (Their attachment worsened subsequent to her mom married again.
In both 1937 and 1938, Garland spent periods making two films at a period. She could spend three hours in conservatory and two hours in singing rehearsal at the forefront she even stepped to the lead of the cameras, and it wasn’t anomalous for her workday to decline at 4 or 5 a.m.
