The Untold Truth Of Judy Garland

Judy Garland was the poster-child for old Hollywood glamour. After starring in 1939's The Wizard of Oz, the teenage actress was catapulted into fame. While Dorothy touched American hearts in her search for happiness "Over the Rainbow," the actress behind the wholesome character would never find it.

Behind-the-scenes of her hit movies, Garland's life was marred by a lifelong drug addiction passed to her as a child through the hands of her very own mother. Garland was tormented by studio executives manipulating her every move — from starving her on a diet of coffee and cigarettes to pushing her to abort her first child. Still, Garland was taught at a very young age that the show must go on — and it did, even if that often meant dosing herself with amphetamines to stay awake and covering the self-inflicted scars on her wrists.

Garland spent her life looking for Oz and dreaming of a place somewhere over-the-rainbow where the world was shiny and technicolor. Unfortunately, the yellow brick road through Hollywood would never lead her there.

Garland was a child of show business whose family moved to California to pursue fame when she was just 4 years old. At the helm of her career was her pushy mother who she described as "the real Wicked Witch of the West." Garland may have been trying to escape her mother's influence through most of her career, but her yellow brick road was a path to drug addiction and substance abuse.

According to The New York Times, Garland's mother started the young actress on a regimen of "pep pills" when she was just 10 years old in order to keep her and her two sisters lively during auditions. To combat the uppers, she'd dole out sleeping pills to her three daughters in the evening. MGM only compounded these problems after they signed her in 1935 by encouraging the young star to continue to lose weight. At the ripe age of 13 years old, Garland found herself addicted to drugs.  

According to Sid Luft [via People], feeding narcotics to child actors was a common practice that was almost always swept under the rug. It was a dark secret hidden beneath the sheen of old Hollywood glamour and wasn't just limited to 13-year-old Garland. Both Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney experienced similar treatment.

Garland's hit Meet Me in St. Louis may have gifted the world with the classic "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," but it's also inadvertently spawned Hollywood icon Liza Minnelli. It was on that very set that Garland first met director Vincente Minnelli, who would become her second husband. The pair went on to have daughter Liza, and Minnelli helped Garland shed her girl-next-door image to adopt more mature roles — things were as shiny as they seemed in Oz. But Garland's husband was hiding a deep secret.

According to Vanity Fair, Judy Garland wasn't supposed to be home when she walked into her bedroom to find her husband in a loving embrace with a male employee. The actress immediately ran to the bathroom and starting slitting her wrists with a sharp object. Minnelli forced the tool out of her hand, and just a day or two later, Garland showed up for work at the studio like nothing had happened. The bandages wrapped around her wrists were the only reminders of her trauma. This was her first suicide attempt.

Judy Garland's demons were far scarier than the Wicked Witch of the West, and the biggest house in Kansas couldn't squash her suicidal thoughts. In Sid Luft's memoir, the actress' ex-husband recounts Garland's more terrifying, violent suicide attempts.

Luft claimed that Garland's pill addiction soared to new levels after they got married. She'd hide her vices wherever she could — from pills hidden within packages of cigarettes to empty vodka bottles tucked deep inside her clothes hamper. These pills inexplicably gave Garland an impulse for self-mutilation.

"When Judy came out in her short white lace negligee, her arms were in front of her and she said, 'Look, darling, what I've done,'" Luft detailed in his memoir [via Express]. "Her wrists had been slashed and she was bleeding profusely."

On another occasion, amidst her dissolving marriage to Vincente Minnelli, the actress slit her own throat with a piece of broken glass. Though Vanity Fair describes this incident as a minor injury, The Mirror describes a similar suicide attempt where Garland slashed her own throat and was later found in a pool of her own blood.

An alarming number of Judy Garland's five husbands were hiding their homosexuality. It was a weird misfortune she inexplicably passed down to her daughter Liza. Catching Vincente Minnelli in bed with another man was one thing — a fluke, a strange misfortune — but for history to repeat made it truly feel like Garland's demons were greater than herself. Did the universe really have it out for the actress?

Love was in the air for both Garland and Liza in the mid '60s. In the summer of 1964, Garland married her fourth husband, Mark Herron, while she was still legally married to Luft (the pair tied the knot for real the following year when the divorce was finalized).  Herron played matchmaker for Liza and introduced her to Peter Allen, the man who would become her first husband. On their wedding night, Liza caught Allen in bed with his boyfriend, setting an unfortunate precedent for the rest of their marriage. What no one knew is that behind closed doors, Allen and Herron were having a secret affair.

Garland and Herron's marriage was short-lived. They divorced 17 months after their Las Vegas ceremony. Garland claimed the actor had beaten her, and he claimed that he had only hit the actress in self defense.

Garland had a lion's share of terrible things happen to her in her life — the addiction, the suicide attempts, the alleged domestic abuse. For the actress, none of those things held a candle to the loss of her father, Francis Gumm, which she claimed "was the most terrible thing that ever happened to [her] in her life."

"The terrible thing about it was that I couldn't cry at my father's funeral," she wrote [via The New York Times], "I'd never been to a funeral. I was ashamed because I couldn't cry, so I feigned it. But I just couldn't cry for eight days, and then I locked myself in a bathroom and cried for 14 hours.

Garland's father died of spinal meningitis shortly after the actress signed to MGM. This left her alone with her mother, who pushed MGM's agenda and encouraged flagrant pill abuse and her very first abortion. Though Garland deeply mourned the loss of her father, she admitted that they were not very close. She wanted to be closer to him all of her life, but never got the opportunity.

Many speculate that the early death of Garland's father caused the young actress specifically seek out older partners, including her first husband who was more than a decade older than the star.

Despite the fact that Judy Garland already had four unsuccessful marriages, the star didn't give up on love. In 1969, the actress wed her fifth husband, Mickey Deans. Some could say Deans was her true love, but most would probably say Garland married her enabler. Deans was her drug dealer. The couple met in 1966 when the musician pretended to be a doctor in order to deliver Garland a package of stimulants.

By the time Deans and Garland wed, she had already been suffering from a litany of health problems from years of drug abuse and extreme dieting. Despite her teenage daughter's attempts to dilute her pills with sugar, the damage irreversible. A decade prior, when she was just 37 years old, Garland was diagnosed with hepatitis and advanced cirrhosis of the liver. She spent seven weeks in a hospital.

Three months after Deans and Garland exchanged vows during a secret church ceremony, she was found dead in the bathroom of her Chelsea home at the age of 47. The actress had finally succumbed to her addiction. Her cause of death was an accidental overdose of barbiturates.