Chapter 1Grand Rapids

Foreword

The contract was renewable every six months.

That is the fact this book is built on, and it is the least dramatic sentence anybody has ever written about Judy Garland. There is no cruelty in it. There is no villain. It is a term of employment, of a kind that was standard across the American film industry in 1935, and it means that from the September she turned thirteen until the September she was twenty-eight, a corporation decided twice a year whether to go on owning her time.

An option is not a contract of the kind most people have. It does not bind both parties equally. The studio undertook to pay her; she undertook not to work for anybody else; and at the end of each six-month period the studio could either continue or stop, at its sole discretion, with no reason required. She could not.

Thirty times, at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, somebody picked up the option on Frances Ethel Gumm.

I did not set out to write a book about a contract. I set out, like everybody else, to write about the pills, because the pills are the story: the studio that fed amphetamines to a child, the girl on Benzedrine at fourteen, the ruin that follows in a straight line to a bathroom in Belgravia in 1969.

The problem with that book is that it requires somebody to have done it on purpose, and the record will not produce that person.

What the record produces instead is worse. It produces a company that fed her, schooled her on the lot as the law required, insured her, employed her mother, paid for her teeth to be capped and her nose to be reshaped with rubber inserts, put her on a diet of chicken soup and black coffee, bound her chest flat because the camera preferred it, and supplied — in an era when Benzedrine was legal, prescribed, advertised and given to grown women all over America for fatigue and weight — the medication that everybody in that position was given.

Every one of those things was done under the heading of care. Several of them were, by the standards of 1937, actual care. And no piece of paper has ever surfaced naming a prescription, a dose, or a doctor.

That absence is the subject of Chapter 6, and Chapter 6 says so in its own text, because an audit that finds nothing has an obligation to prove it looked.

I have therefore refused both of the available Judy Garlands.

The first is the martyr, assembled backward from the death certificate, in which every ovation is a wound and the childhood is a crime scene. It flatters the reader and it removes her: a person who is only ever done-to has no career, no craft, and no decisions, and this woman had all three.

The second is the unbreakable professional her defenders insist on — the trouper who always went on, whose troubles were the price of genius and are therefore not to be dwelt on. That one removes her too, by making the damage a picturesque feature of the talent rather than a thing that happened to a body.

What I have tried to write instead is an account in which the body is itemized before it is discarded. Thirteen of the twenty-one chapters here end before the option lapses in September 1950. That is a deliberate and, I know, an unusual proportion for a life that ran another nineteen years and contains Carnegie Hall in it. The reason is that the second half is unintelligible unless the reader has watched the first at full length: a girl of thirteen signed to a corporation, measured, medicated, scheduled and sold, becoming by twenty-two the most valuable musical performer in America and by twenty-eight unemployable by the only employer she had ever had.

There is a control group in this book and I want to declare it here rather than spring it.

In 1935 Louis B. Mayer had two thirteen-year-old singers under short contract. One of them was Frances Gumm. The other was Edna Mae Durbin, who became Deanna Durbin, and who appears in Chapter 4 and then not again until the last page.

Durbin's option was allowed to lapse. She went to Universal, made a series of pictures credited with saving that studio from bankruptcy, became for a period the highest-paid woman in America, and then in 1949, at twenty-seven, walked out of Hollywood, moved to France, gave almost no interviews for sixty years, and died in a farmhouse outside Paris in 2013 at the age of ninety-one.

Two girls of the same age, the same year, the same lot, the same eleven-minute short in 1936. One option renewed and one allowed to lapse.

I am not claiming that the lapse saved Deanna Durbin's life or that the renewal ended Judy Garland's. Lives are not experiments and there is no control group in the actual world. What the comparison establishes is narrower and it is the reason it is in the book at all: that the outcome was not inevitable, that a person could be a fourteen-year-old singer under contract in 1936 Hollywood and reach ninety-one, and that whatever happened to Judy Garland was therefore something that happened rather than something that had to.

A word about what this book is not, since the shelf is crowded.

It is not a critical study of the films. They are described where they bear on the life and argued about only where the argument is biographical.

It is not a discography and it does not attempt one. Eight chapters treat particular recordings as evidence for particular claims; the rest of a very large catalog goes unmentioned.

And it is not an account of the daughters, who are living, who have careers of their own, and whose relationship with their mother is theirs.

What it is, is an account of an employment arrangement and what the arrangement produced — from a Minnesota movie house in 1924, where a family's income depended on its children being looked at, to a rented bathroom in Belgravia in 1969.

Three things about method.

The singing is treated as evidence and not as illustration. Eight chapters carry a music pass, and they were written from the recordings — the Decca sides, the MGM soundtracks, the Capitol albums, the 1961 Carnegie Hall tape, the twenty-six CBS episodes, the late concerts — rather than from other people's descriptions of them. Chapter 20 argues that the voice at the end was not ruined but replaced, and it argues it in technical terms, because "her voice was gone" is a sentence people write who have not listened to 1968.

I have not printed the lyrics. The songs are in copyright and this book describes the singing instead, which is harder and is also, I think, the right way round for a book making a claim about how she sang rather than what.

And I have graded the disputed things on the page instead of resolving them quietly. Whether MGM as an institution supplied the amphetamines rests on her consistent lifelong testimony against Mickey Rooney's flat public denial, with no document either way; both are printed and neither is adjudicated. The two terminated pregnancies rest on her own retrospective account and are reported as that. The molestation claim published in 2017 is attributed, dated, marked disputed, and names nobody. The death was ruled accidental by a coroner whose reasoning the autopsy supports, and this book says accidental rather than leaving a suggestive silence where a conclusion belongs.

A word about the register.

This is a psychological biography in the sense that it is interested in what a set of arrangements did to a person, and it is not one in the sense of offering a diagnosis. Nobody in these pages is given a condition. Where the medical vocabulary of a period is relevant — and it frequently is, because a great deal of what happened to her was pharmacological — I have described what the drugs do, which is documented, rather than what she had, which is not.

That restraint costs the book something. A reader who wants to be told what was wrong with Judy Garland will not be told, and there is a whole literature that will tell them, confidently, using terms that were not available in 1947 and applied to a woman nobody now living examined.

What I have tried to do instead is trace the mechanism at the level where it can be documented: a contract, a diet, a prescription, a production calendar, a scheduling decision, an insurance assessment, an audit.

Every one of those is a piece of paper or the absence of one, and between them they account for more of this life than any theory about her temperament.

One last thing, about what this book is not.

It is not an argument that Judy Garland was destroyed by Hollywood, because that sentence puts the agency in the wrong place and lets several thousand people off. It is an argument that a set of ordinary commercial arrangements, administered by people who mostly believed they were being kind, produced over fifteen years a woman who could do one thing better than anyone alive and could not do anything else at all — and that the arrangements were then switched off, at a board's discretion, when she was twenty-eight.

She then invented a way to work without them, in a theater in New York in 1951, and it very nearly held.

The option is the mechanism. Everything else in this book is what the mechanism did.

Chapter 1 · Grand Rapids

She was born on June 10, 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in a house on Pokegama Avenue, and she was the third daughter of a failed vaudeville act.

Every element of that sentence does work in this book and the last one does the most, so take it slowly.

Frank Gumm and Ethel Milne had met in the trade. He sang — a light Irish tenor, the kind of voice that could hold a small house and would never have filled a large one. She played piano, in pits, for whatever was on. They had performed together as a double, on the small-time circuits of the upper Midwest, and by the early 1920s they had stopped, because two people with three children under six cannot tour and because the act had not been going anywhere.

What they did instead is the thing that determines everything about their youngest daughter. They did not leave the business. They bought a building.

The New Grand Theatre in Grand Rapids was a movie house. Frank Gumm ran it. Ethel played the pit piano for the pictures, because in 1922 a film was not a self-contained object but a thing that arrived as reels and required a musician in the room to make it work. Between the reels, and before them, and while the projectionist changed over, there was live entertainment, and the live entertainment was frequently the proprietor's family.

So the household's income came from a room in which people sat in the dark and watched, and the family's contribution to that income was to be looked at.

It is worth being precise about what a movie house was in 1922, because the word now describes something entirely different and the difference is the whole reason this family existed.

A picture in 1922 was silent. It arrived as reels of film and it was, considered as an object, incomplete: it had no sound of any kind, and the experience of watching it in silence was intolerable, so every theater in the world employed a musician.

In a large city house that meant an orchestra. In Grand Rapids, Minnesota, it meant Ethel Gumm at a piano, watching the screen, playing to the action, for the length of the film, twice or three times a night.

That is a job requiring real skill. A pit pianist in the silent era improvised or adapted continuously, matching tempo and mood to a picture she might be seeing for the first time, holding a room's attention through reel changes, and doing it for hours. It was also the ordinary employment of thousands of working musicians across America, and within six years of Frances Gumm's birth the profession was destroyed entirely by the arrival of synchronized sound.

The program was not only the film. A night at the New Grand was a bill: the feature, a short, perhaps a newsreel, and live material between and around them. That live material was the theater's own responsibility to supply, and supplying it cheaply was the difference between a small house making money and not.

Which is where the children came in.

Frances Ethel Gumm went on that stage at two and a half years old.

The date is generally given as Christmas 1924. She sang, with her sisters, in front of an audience of the town's people, in a building her father owned and her mother worked in, as part of the business that fed her.

This book is going to describe, over the next twelve chapters, a corporation that treated a girl's body as an asset on its books, and it will describe it as an outrage, because it was one. It has to say here, at the beginning, that the arrangement began in a family and that the family was not a monster. It was a small business in a small town in northern Minnesota in 1924, and putting the children on between reels was what you did if you had children and a theater and no money to hire anybody.

The distinction between the two arrangements is a distinction of scale and of paper. It is not a distinction of kind.

What matters about the New Grand is not that it was exploitative — by the standards of the trade and the decade it was unremarkable — but what it taught, and what it taught was learned before she could read.

She learned that the room goes quiet when you stop.

That is a specific piece of knowledge and it is available very early to a child in that position and to almost nobody else. A two-year-old singing in a movie house on Christmas discovers, immediately and physically, that there is a state of the room in which several hundred people are attending to her and a state in which they are not, and that the difference between the two is produced by something she does with her body.

She also learned, at the same time, what the alternative was. She had two older sisters on the same stage. The Gumm children were not soloists; they were an act, and within an act there is a hierarchy, and the hierarchy is established by which of you the room quiets for.

By every account, including from the sisters, the room quieted for the youngest.

There is a story about the first performance that has been told for a century and it is worth handling carefully, because it is the kind of anecdote this book has undertaken to grade rather than repeat.

The story is that she sang a chorus, was applauded, and would not leave — that she sang it again, and again, and had to be carried off the stage by her father while the house laughed.

It comes from the family. It was told by her mother, and later by her, and it has been told by everybody since. There is no reason to doubt that something like it happened; the detail is exactly the kind of thing a family remembers about a small child and repeats until it hardens.

What should be resisted is the reading that always accompanies it, which is that the two-and-a-half-year-old had already discovered the need that would define her — that the tiny girl refusing to leave the stage is the woman in 1969 who could not stop going on. That reading is available and it is very tempting and it requires the biographer to have decided the ending before writing the beginning.

A small child who is enjoying herself will do a thing repeatedly and will object to being stopped. That is not pathology. That is a toddler.

The chapter says what happened and declines to make it a prophecy.

What can be said, without prophecy, is that the household's structure was unusual in a way that shaped her permanently.

In most families a child's performing is a diversion — something done for relatives, praised, and irrelevant to the rent. In this one it was on the same ledger as the ticket sales. The theater's takings were the household's income; the children on the stage were part of the theater's offering; and Ethel Gumm, at the piano, was simultaneously an employee of the business, the accompanist of the act, and the mother of the performers.

There is no version of that arrangement in which the affection and the accounting can be separated, and this book will argue that Frances Gumm never learned to separate them and never had occasion to. By the time she was old enough to notice that being loved and being profitable might be different things, she was under contract to Louis B. Mayer and the distinction had become academic.

The sisters should be introduced, since they are in almost every professional engagement of the first twelve years and the literature treats them as scenery.

Mary Jane, called Suzy or Suzanne, was the eldest, born in 1915. Dorothy Virginia, called Jimmie, was born in 1917. Frances was born in 1922, five and seven years behind them, which is a large gap in a children's act and shaped everything about how it worked.

An act with a seven-year age spread cannot be three equals. The two older girls were adolescents when the youngest was in primary school, and the material had to be pitched so that a child could be in it — which in practice meant the child got the novelty spot, because a very small girl singing is a novelty and two teenagers singing is a chorus.

So the structural favoring of the youngest was in the act's design before anybody made a judgment about talent. She was placed at the front because she was little.

And then it turned out she could actually do it, and the placement became permanent, and by the early 1930s the act was in substance a soloist with two backing singers who happened to be her sisters.

Both of them left the business in their twenties. Both married. Neither wrote a book of the kind that appeared about her from every other direction, and the interviews they gave over the years are notable for containing no bitterness at all about the arrangement — which is either remarkable generosity or evidence that the arrangement felt normal to everybody in it, and this book suspects the second.

The town should be described, because the exile from it in Chapter 2 is the first of the ruptures.

Grand Rapids in the 1920s was a mill town on the Mississippi, in the north of Minnesota, with a paper industry and hard winters and a population in the low thousands. The Gumms were people of some local standing: a family that owned a business on the main street, a father who was liked, a mother who played for the church as well as the pictures. They were not wealthy and they were not poor. They were the sort of family that a small town knows.

That is the last community she ever belonged to. Everything after Lancaster is a company, an act, a studio or a tour, and the difference between a town and a company is that a town does not have an option to renew.

What "a failed vaudeville act" means in practice should be spelled out, because the phrase carries a judgment it does not deserve.

Vaudeville in the 1910s was an enormous industry organized into circuits, and an act's standing was measured by which circuit it played and where on the bill. At the top were the big-time houses in the major cities, two shows a day, headliners, real money. Below that were the small-time circuits: three or four shows a day, smaller towns, less money, and no security.

Frank and Ethel Gumm were a small-time act. They worked. They were not going to headline the Palace, and by the early 1920s they had two children and a third coming and had done the arithmetic that thousands of performing couples did in those years.

That arithmetic almost always ended one of two ways. Either you left the business entirely and took ordinary work, or you found a fixed position inside it — a house, a job, something with a roof.

They bought a theater, which is the second option and the better one, and it kept them in the trade for another twelve years.

So "failed" is the wrong word and this book will not use it again. They were two working performers who reached the ceiling of a small-time career and converted, sensibly, into proprietors.

Their third daughter did not have a ceiling, and that turned out to be the difference between one generation and the next.

A word about Ethel Gumm, because she is the second most consequential person in the first half of this book and the literature has been unkind to her in a way this book is going to try to avoid without exonerating her.

The standard portrait is the stage mother in its purest form: driving, cold, ambitious through her children, the woman her daughter would later describe in language of remarkable bitterness. There is evidence for that portrait and this book will present it as the years go on.

What the portrait leaves out is that in 1922 she was a working musician who had given up her own performing life for a household, in a marriage that Chapter 2 will show was under a strain she could not discuss with anybody, in a town seventy miles from nothing, with three children and a business whose survival depended on people continuing to come.

She was also, on the evidence of what her daughters could do by the ages of six and eight and ten, an extremely good teacher.

The received account has her manufacturing a prodigy. The likelier account is that she recognized one, in her third child, in a house where music was the family trade, and then did what the trade taught: got her a costume, taught her the arrangement, and put her in front of a room.

That the room in question paid the family's bills is the fact that makes it complicated. It does not make it a conspiracy.

The father is harder, and Chapter 2 is where the difficulty arrives.

Frank Gumm, on all the available evidence, was the parent his youngest daughter loved. That is not in dispute in any source, hostile or friendly, and it held for the whole of her life: forty-seven years, of which she had him for thirteen, and she talked about him until the end.

He was warm where his wife was efficient. He sang to the house himself, from the stage, in a voice that people in Grand Rapids remembered fifty years later. He ran a movie theater in a town that did not have much and he seems to have enjoyed running it.

He was also, by the summer of 1926, the subject of talk that made the family leave Minnesota, and the next chapter is about what the record does and does not hold on that.

For the moment, only this. The most important thing about Frank Gumm, for the purposes of this biography, is that his daughter believed the family's expulsions were about him and that she learned before she was five that a household can be uprooted overnight by something a person finds out.

She was four when they left. She was thirteen when he died. In between, in a desert town outside Los Angeles, a mother began driving her daughters seventy miles each way to audition for people, and the act that had been the entertainment between reels in a small Minnesota theater became a family's entire economic strategy.

There is a last thing about Grand Rapids and it concerns what the town did with her afterward.

It kept the house. The building she was born in still stands and is a museum, and the town holds an annual festival, and a pair of the shoes from Chapter 8 was displayed there until it was stolen in 2005.

That is an unremarkable thing for an American town to do with a famous daughter and it is worth one observation.

She left it at four and never lived there again. She had no adult relationship with the place at all. The town's claim on her rests entirely on the first four years of a forty-seven-year life, and on a theater her father ran, and on the fact that a birth certificate says Grand Rapids.

Chapter 21 will record what one pair of those shoes eventually sold for, and it is a great deal more than the New Grand Theatre was ever worth.

That is what the New Grand was preparation for, though nobody in the building in 1924 could have known it.

There is one more inheritance to record and it is the one this book will keep coming back to, because it explains a technical fact about her singing that has never been satisfactorily accounted for.

She was raised inside the material.

The songs of the American popular repertoire — the standards, the vaudeville numbers, the sentimental ballads, the novelty songs — were not something she learned. They were the furniture of the house. Her father sang them from a stage; her mother played them; the act rehearsed them; the theater's programs were built out of them.

By the time she was ten she knew, in the way a native speaker knows a language, several hundred songs: how they were constructed, where the release came, which ones an audience would take and which they would not, and what could be done with a lyric that had been sung ten thousand times before.

That is the difference between her and almost every popular singer who came after her, including the great ones. They learned the repertoire. She was raised in it, in a house where it was the trade, in the last decade in which that was possible — because the industry that produced such households was destroyed by sound film before she was ten, and no child born after about 1930 could have had the same education.

Chapter 17 describes a woman of thirty-eight taking a standard apart in front of two and a half thousand people at Carnegie Hall.

She had been doing that, in an amateur way, since before she could read, in a movie house in Minnesota, between the reels.

A child who has learned that the room goes quiet when she stops is a child with a skill. A child who has learned that the family's rent depends on it has a job.

Frances Ethel Gumm had both by the age of six, and she never had anything else.

That is the thesis of this book stated at its earliest possible point, and it should be tested rather than accepted, so here is the test the following chapters will apply.

If the argument is right, then at every subsequent stage of her life the same structure should be visible: an institution with a commercial interest in her, a set of arrangements administered by somebody else, and no available position from which she could decline.

Chapter 3 is a family act on a collapsing circuit. Chapter 4 is a corporation with a renewable option. Chapter 14 is a concert career with three dependents attached. Chapter 19 is a network with a guarantee to protect.

Four institutions across forty-three years, and at no point in any of them a week in which the money did not depend on her getting up and doing it.

The theater in Grand Rapids is where that started, and the people who started it were her parents, and they were not doing anything unusual.