Judy Garland on drugs, drink, suicide attempts and her loathing of Hollywood

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Judy Garland never finished her memoir that she wanted to write to give her side of her exploitation at the hands of Hollywood, drugs and suicide bids
Author Randy L Schmidt has pieced together her innermost thoughts in Judy Garland on Judy Garland, Interviews and Encounters
She revealed her anger at myths created about her by the studio, the pills she was given to slim and to sleep and the effect it had on her
Actress died at the age of 47 in 1969 from an accidental overdose

Published: 06:15 EST, 3 September 2014 | Updated: 09:13 EST, 3 September 2014

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Judy Garland never finished more than 65 pages of the memoir in which she wanted to reveal her side of her very public struggles from the age of three that led to nervous breakdowns, suicide attempts, pill overdoses, alcohol abuse and her early death in 1969.

Garland wanted to tell the world about the ruthless studio system at MGM Studios that she was swept into at the tender age of thirteen and was never able to escape.

She wanted to hit back at the toll endless work days took on her, the lack of real schooling, how she was plied with pills to thin and pills to sleep and crush the endlessly perpetuated myths and lies about her life and loves.

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On the rise: Judy Garland, aged 13 in late 1935 just after she signed for MGM, the studio that boasted it had 'more stars than there are in the heavens'. She felt she was the 'ugly duckling' of the studio

Four years to stardom: Frances Ethel Gumm, left, performing with her vaudeville family in 1934. By 1938 she played Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz and cemented her place in film history (with the help of Toto)

In 1960, publisher Random House gave her a contract to write what she promised: 'It's going to be one hell of a great - everlastingly great - book with humor, tears, fun, emotion, and love.'

In the frenzy of her crazy life, Garland could never focus and complete the project. But now in Judy Garland On Judy Garland, Interviews and Encounters (Chicago review Press), Randy L. Schmidt has meticulously researched her most important newspaper, magazine and TV interviews in what the publishers claim is the closest we will ever come to that autobiography.

Near the end of 1959, publisher Bennett Cerf visited Garland in her room at Manhattan's Doctors Hospital where she was recuperating from hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver that doctors predicted would permanently derail her career.

She signed a contract and Cerf paid an advance of $35,000 for what he hoped would be his next bestseller from the 37-year-old star.

I'm not something you wind up and put on the stage that sings a Carnegie Hall album and you put her in the closet. I'm gonna write a book and I'm gonna talk, because I can do something besides sing

Twenty years earlier in 1939, she had rocketed to fame as a young girl in the company of her faithful dog, Toto, in the Wizard of Oz.

By now, Garland was a ghost of her former self and spent seven weeks lying in that hospital bed.

Her hypnotic brown eyes had become little dark spots, sunken in her face. The once famous legs and ankles were now fat and heavy and she had a hard time squeezing into her shoes.

Doctors prescribed retirement saying she'd be a semi-invalid, but that's not how Judy felt.

'There have been a lot of stories written about me, some of them fantastically distorted', Judy announced from her hospital bed. This book is going to set the record straight'.

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At the time, she meant it. 'I'm going to talk. Maybe somebody will read it and maybe somebody will learn a little of the truth of this so-called legend! That's what I'm supposed to be, a legend.

'Read the truth, though'.

Screaming into the recorder, she was ready to expose everyone.

'I'm not something you wind up and put on the stage that sings a Carnegie Hall album and you put her in the closet. I'm gonna write a book and I'm gonna talk, because I can do something besides sing. I don't always have to sing a song.

Judy Garland on stage in Las Vegas in footage from 1956

Success at any price: Judy Garland in the backyard of her Bel Air home on Stone Canyon Road, 1940. She would later rail at the lies spun by the studios, the 18 hour days and being fed pep pills and sleeping pills

Love interest: Judy Garland classmate Mickey Rooney during the production of 'Thoroughbreds Don't Cry' in1937. They were paired in ten films in the 1930s and 1940s and the studio generated publicity that they were sweethearts off screen as well

Memoir that never was: Schmidt has meticulously researched interviews with Garland to put toegether, in her own words, what he thinks she'd have said in her autobiography

'There is something besides 'The Man That Got Away' or 'Over the Rainbow' or 'The Trolley Songs'. There's a woman. There are three children. There's me! There's a lot of life going on here.

'I wanted to believe and I tried my damnedest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and I couldn't. SO WHAT!'

Judy returned to Los Angeles to recuperate and recovered from her latest health incident but never completed the memoir.

Her third husband at the time, Sid Luft, had already bet and lost the entire book advance at the racetrack in New York. Garland tried for another book deal from Cerf and Random House ten years later in 1966. There was no second offer despite her pleas.

'I've always loved Judy Garland. She is an irresistible little woman - but one of the most tragic in the world. I'm sure that one day she's going to do herself in', Cerf prophetically stated.

I wanted to believe and I tried my damnedest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and I couldn't. SO WHAT!

Judy was serious though, for a while at least. She tape-recorded rants and reminiscences and worked on titles. Ideas included: 'Ho-Hum: My Life', 'Judy', 'So Far so Good', 'And Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Judy Garland'.

That was the extent of her efforts to put a book together before she shelved the project.

She said: 'When you have lived the life I've lived, when you've loved and suffered, and been madly happy and desperately sad, well, that's when you realize you'll never be able to set it all down. Maybe you'd rather die first'.

Born Frances 'Baby' Gumm to vaudevillian parents in Tennessee, she was on the stage at age two-and a half with her sisters, Mary Jane and Dorothy Virginia, singing a chorus of 'Jingle Bells', accompanied by their mother, Ethel, on the piano.

That led to more shows on the vaudeville circuit, dance school, their film debut in a 1929 short and a stage performance with vaudeville legend, Georgie Jessel who later became a Hollywood filmmaker.

In 1935, her ambitious father, Frank Gumm, took Baby Gumm to see studio mogul, cigar chomping czar Louis B. Mayer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's casting office.

She stood 4'11" tall at age thirteen and began to sing. She was signed to a contract and stepped inside the largest and most glamorous dream factory and would stay with them until 1950.

Garland began schooling with stars Mickey Rooney, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor. She wasn't in their league of good looks but they couldn't sing like she could.

Seductive: Judy was sick of the studio putting out false stories about her private life to generate interest. She said: 'When a studio puts you under contract, its publicity department starts turning out news copy about you that you read with astonishment. You think, can this be me they're talking about?'

A trail of broken hearts: Garland met her second husband, director Vincent Minelli while working together on a film. She would have five husbands in all throughout her life

She said: 'When I was at Metro, I don't think I was much over 12-years-old, and they didn't know what to do with me because they wanted you either five-years-old or eighteen with nothing in between.

'Well I was in between, and so was little Deanna Durbin. We just went to school every day and wandered around the lot. Whenever the important stars had parties, they called the casting office and said, "Bring those two kids".

'We would be taken over and we would wait with the servants until they called us into the drawing room where we'd perform. We never got five hundred quid, though. We got a dish of ice cream and it would always be melted'.

Garland was cast in movies to sing, dance and act and she was around all the big stars on the studio lot -- Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Myrna Loy, Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford.

Judy made her first film in 1937, Every Sunday, a musical short with Durbin. As a teenager, Judy's weight started to fluctuate and studio executives demanded she lose the weight and take 'pep pills' to slim down.

They'd give us pep pills. Then they'd take us to the studio hospital and knock us cold with sleeping pills. After four hours they'd wake us up and give us the pep pills again... That's the way we got mixed up. And that's the way we lost contact

She had to lose weight when the studio announced she was being cast in the role of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz in 1938.

It was embarrassing to Garland because chatter about her diet was in all the movie magazines along with an invented romance with fellow child star Mickey Rooney.

MGM put out stories about all of Judy's fictitious likes and dislikes, her favorite foods and desire to eat like a truck driver, her physical activities including motorbiking.

Judy tried to feel normal and gave interviews saying she had a normal life while being a star at sixteen. But life was anything but normal.

Surrogate childhoods were invented for the child stars. With Judy, that destroyed any hope of finding roots and stability that could possibly make up for the isolated, lonely childhood she felt growing up and the early death of her father when she was only twelve although she wasn't close to him.

It was a six-day work week at MGM for 14 years with 18 and 24-hour shooting sessions and a very public life devoid of normal friendships.

'They'd give us pep pills. Then they'd take us to the studio hospital and knock us cold with sleeping pills. After four hours they'd wake us up and give us the pep pills again.

'That's the way we worked, and that's the way we got thin. That's the way we got mixed up. And that's the way we lost contact.

'No wonder I was strange. Imagine whipping out of bed dashing over to the doctor's office, lying down on a torn leather couch, telling my troubles to an old man who couldn't hear, who answered with an accent I couldn't understand and then dashing to Metro to make movie love to Mickey Rooney'.

Mother: Judy wanted to write her autobiography to remind everyone that she was a mother-of-three too. She said: 'I'm not something you wind up and put on the stage that sings a Carnegie Hall album and you put her in the closet. I'm gonna write a book and I'm gonna talk, because I can do something besides sing'

Garland and Rooney became an onscreen power couple and were paired in ten films in the 1930s and 1940's including the Andy Hardy series and it infuriated Judy that the studio put out publicity that they were romantically involved in real life.

As Garland's star rose, she was still outshone at the time by Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor.

'Judy was the big money-maker at the time, a big success, but she was the ugly duckling. I think it had a very damaging effect on her emotionally for a long time. I think it lasted forever, really', said Charles Walters who directed Garland in many films.

With the success of Wizard in 1940, Garland had the top-selling hit song of 1939 with 'Over the Rainbow', and thought she had met her perfect mate, 29-year old bandleader Artie Shaw.

A starry-eyed Garland would read about Shaw's elopement with Lana Turner in February 1940 in the Hollywood gossip columns. Heartbroken momentarily, she got over it and started dating musician David Rose.

I'm sure psychoanalysis has helped a great many people, but for me it was like taking strong medicine for a disease I didn't have. It just tore me apart

They eloped to Las Vegas in July 1941 but the marriage only lasted two years. Judy attributed the breakup to conflicting personalities and that she was too young. She tried marriage again two years later in June 1945 when she fell in love with film director Vincent Minnelli who directed her in Meet Me in St. Louis. She quickly became pregnant with her first child, Liza, born nine months later.

Fearing she would not be a good wife and mother and repeat the patterns of her own mother, Judy went into therapy.

'In an effort to learn why I had never been able to get closer to people, I took a series of psychoanalytical treatments. I'm sure psychoanalysis has helped a great many people, but for me it was like taking strong medicine for a disease I didn't have. It just tore me apart'.

Back at the studio, she was back in the double world of fantasy vs reality.

'When a studio puts you under contract, its publicity department starts turning out news copy about you that you read with astonishment. You think, can this be me they're talking about?

'I don't like the invasion of my private life. A person needs to have an identity of their own. When you're a star, it's virtually impossible'.

She confessed she had always been sensitive as a child 'and I certainly have been bothered often with sleeplessness.

'At times I have been pretty much of a walking advertisement for sleeping pills. Even though pills come on doctor's prescriptions, as mine did, they can be a tremendous strain on the nervous systems. I was having my share of troubles with the studio and, there's no doubt about it, my physical condition didn't help'.

Tragedy: Judy Garland was found dead at the age of 47 by her fifth husband Mickey Deans in 1969 (pictured together left) after an accidental overdose. She fought drink and drugs all her life, and blamed the studios for her problems. In 1967, right, she was fired from the film Valley of the Dolls when she turned up drunk to work

On reflection: Garland said that she hated Hollywood... 'I hate the sun', she said, 'For 36 years I looked out the window every morning and there it was, always the same. And I don't like swimming pools. But I stayed there and I don't know why, perhaps because I thought it was my home'

Under a lot of pressure - she had made five pictures since Liza's birth - her marriage to Minnelli was rocky and she walked off the M-G-M lot. She was promptly suspended and declared unfit to work.

She spent the next eight months at a Boston hospital after a nervous breakdown and a suicide attempt by slashing her wrists. Studio head Louis B. Mayer picked up the hospital tab for her recovery.

She returned to Hollywood and jumped right into rehearsal for the film Royal Wedding, a 1951 musical comedy film starring Fred Astaire and Jane Powell.

Judy was jumpy and irritable. 'I felt humiliated and unwanted. All my newfound hope evaporated, and all I could see ahead was more confusion. I wanted to black out the future as well as the past. I didn't want to live anymore. I wanted to hurt myself and others.

I felt humiliated and unwanted...I wanted to black out the future as well as the past. I didn't want to live anymore. I wanted to hurt myself and others

'Yet even while I stood there in the bathroom with a shattered glass in my hand, and Vincent and my secretary, Tully, were pounding on the door, I knew I couldn't solve anything by running away - and that's what killing yourself is'.

The marriage was over and Garland revealed she was 'very nervous and ill and had to call the doctor many times'.

MGM released her from her contract and she was now a free agent. Her new love interest, producer Sidney Luft, came to her rescue and became husband number three in 1952. Together they produced A Star is Born, a unanimous success and for a brief shining moment, it seemed that she was becoming more stable.

But the troubled marriage was over in three years after the couple had two children, Lorna and Joseph.

She had two more husbands, Mark Herron, an actor and her tour promoter she married in 1965. That lasted six months and her fifth husband, musician Mickey Deans, was the one who found her dead in the bathroom of their rented London home in June 1969 at age 47, after what was ruled an accidental overdose of barbiturates.

Garland always believed the studio was responsible for starting her down the road of her dependency on drugs. She hated Hollywood.

'I hate the sun. For thirty-six years I looked out the window every morning and there it was, always the same. And I don't like swimming pools. But I stayed there and I don't know why, perhaps because I thought it was my home'.