# The Option *Judy Garland and the Studio That Called It Care* — Legendary Biographies No. 296 - **Subject:** Frances Ethel Gumm, professionally Judy Garland - **Written by:** Nora Feldstein - **Shelf:** Screen & Stage / Performing Arts - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 186 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-576-3) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Desmond Vale (ISBN 979-8-90623-685-2) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/296-the-option.html ## About this book A six-month option on a thirteen-year-old singer, signed by her mother in September 1935, approved by a California court as the law required. It bound one side. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer undertook to pay Frances Ethel Gumm; she undertook not to work for anybody else; every six months the company could continue or stop, no reason required. Refusing a picture meant suspension without pay, added to the end of the term. Thirty times somebody in an office picked the option up. In September 1950, after fifteen years and close to thirty pictures, nobody did. Judy Garland was twenty-eight. Almost nobody at the studio was cruel to her. The book treats that as the worse finding. Chapter 6 is an inventory rather than a story: teeth capped, rubber discs in the nostrils to alter the shape of her nose on camera, a chest bound flat because the parts required her to read as younger, a commissary that served chicken soup and black coffee whatever she ordered, and Benzedrine, which in 1937 was legal, prescribed and advertised. Every item was administered by someone whose job was to look after her. No document has ever surfaced naming a dose, a date or a prescriber, and the absence is itself the finding. In 1935 Louis B. Mayer had two thirteen-year-old singers on short contracts. The other was Deanna Durbin, whose option was allowed to lapse in a routine administrative decision. She went to Universal, became for a period the highest-paid woman in the United States, and stopped in 1949 at twenty-seven. The comparison serves one purpose: the outcome was made rather than fated. Thirteen of the twenty-one chapters end before the option lapses. The New Grand Theatre in Grand Rapids, where the children were the entertainment between the reels. The broadcast of November 16, 1935, sung six weeks into the contract while her father lay in a hospital bed with a radio. The Wizard of Oz described strictly as a workplace. Chapter 20 argues the voice at the end was not ruined but replaced. ## Contents 1. Grand Rapids 2. Rumors 3. The Gumm Sisters 4. Every Sunday 5. Zing! 6. The Commissary 7. Dear Mr. Gable 8. Oz 9. Mickey 10. David Rose 11. The Trolley Song 12. The Pirate 13. Termination 14. The Palace 15. Transcona 16. Begelman 17. Carnegie Hall 18. Nuremberg 19. Sunday Nights 20. The Instrument 21. Cadogan Lane ## Questions **Who is The Option about?** Frances Ethel Gumm, professionally Judy Garland. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Option — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,729 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 56,500 words, 21 chapters, 186 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Nora Feldstein writes for Legendary Biographies, published by Greenlight Publishing. A full author profile is available at legendary-biographies.com.