When The Wizard of Oz opened in American theaters in August 1939, audiences saw a girl in a blue-checked dress clicking her heels and longing for home. The performance was radiant, the voice was luminous, and the face was open and earnest in a way that made the fantasy feel like something real. What the audience could not see was the industrial machine that had produced those ninety-eight minutes of magic — the fourteen-hour rehearsal days, the strict dietary monitoring, the pills to wake up and the pills to sleep, and the elaborate physical management of a teenage girl whose body MGM had decided looked wrong for the role she was performing.
She was sixteen years old when shooting began on The Wizard of Oz in October 1938. Her name at birth had been Frances Ethel Gumm, given to her on June 10, 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. By the time filming started she had already been a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player for three years, had appeared in a dozen films, and had been the subject of ongoing studio management of her weight, her schedule, her image, and her professional future. She would turn seventeen during post-production, before the film’s August premiere. The headline’s “16” is accurate for the bulk of the filming period, and it sits in the middle of a pattern of studio control that predated Oz and continued for more than a decade afterward.
The story of what Frances Gumm experienced at MGM, and what it meant over the course of the life that followed, is not a simple story about monsters and victims, even though it involves real abuses of power over a child. It is a story about how the American entertainment industry in the mid-twentieth century treated its youngest and most profitable performers — about how studio contracts became a form of total institutional ownership, about how medication was administered to keep performers productive, and about how the girl who sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” so memorably that she would never fully escape it also built a career of extraordinary range and resilience that lasted thirty years beyond the film that made her famous.