The Option

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.