There are enough extraordinary and scandalous stories in the life of movie legend Judy Garland to fill a book on their own. From her early days at MGM and her star-making turn in The Wizard of Oz to her later dramatic work and her one-woman shows, Garland’s life and career are among the most talked about in all of Hollywood history.
But one of the most scandalous stories from her life also involves another of Hollywood’s most legendary performers. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, MGM hit upon a winning cinematic formula when they paired Garland with the comic actor and fellow former child star Mickey Rooney.
The duo appeared in a string of so-called “backyard musicals,” from the B-movie comedy Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry in 1937 through to the Rodgers and Hart biopic Words and Music in 1948. And it was around this time, Garland later claimed, that studio heads supposedly began to control her and Rooney’s performances with an astonishing cocktail of drugs.
“They’d give us pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted,” Garland later explained. “Then they’d take us to the studio hospital and knock us out with sleeping pills … Then after four hours they’d wake us up and give us the pep pills again so we could work 72 hours in a row. Half of the time we were hanging from the ceiling, but it was a way of life for us.”
This endless mixture of amphetamines and barbiturates kept the two stars on their grueling schedules, which included a ceaseless string of new movies, public appearances, and publicity tours. Rooney, admittedly, later disputed Garland’s extraordinary claims—but no matter how true they were, many of her fans point to this punishing and endlessly demanding schedule as the cause of Garland’s tragic drug dependency issues, which went on to plague her for the rest of her life.