“We had to work eighteen hours a day,” Garland later told an interviewer, describing the production pace at MGM during this period. “They’d give us pep pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they’d give us sleeping pills — of which we’d take not too many — to get us to sleep. Then they’d wake us up and give us the pep pills again so we could work seventy-two hours in a stretch.”
The specific attributions here matter. This account — of pills, of extended working hours, of a cycle that made normal functioning dependent on pharmaceutical management — is Garland’s own later testimony. It is consistent with what Clarke documented in Get Happy, with what has been reported about MGM’s practices more broadly, and with the pharmaceutical dependency that the remaining decades of her life would make evident. Mickey Rooney’s denial is part of the same record. The two accounts cannot be fully reconciled, and it is not this article’s position to adjudicate a dispute whose principals are dead. What can be said is that Garland’s account of pharmaceutical management at MGM was specific, consistent across multiple interviews, and corroborated in its general outlines by other participants and by the pharmaceutical history that her life subsequently documented.
The film that emerged from these five months of production was a remarkable piece of work. “Over the Rainbow,” written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg and performed by Garland in the Kansas sequence, became the film’s most enduring element. It was almost cut from the final version — MGM executives felt the number slowed the picture’s opening — and was retained only after pushback from Arlen, Harburg, and Freed. Garland’s performance of it, delivered with a quality of yearning that the song itself required, was what fixed the film in American cultural memory. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.