The Later MGM Years and the Break
By 1949, Garland’s relationship with MGM had entered what would prove to be its final phase. The studio had suspended her multiple times for missed work, tardiness, and what the production reports described as erratic behavior. She had been removed from Annie Get Your Gun in May 1949 — replaced by Betty Hutton — after production was delayed by her extended absences. She was later removed from Royal Wedding as well.
The reasons given in studio communications for her removal from these productions were clinical and institutional: tardiness, absenteeism, instability, inability to complete a day’s work. These characterizations were accurate in the narrow sense that they described what was visible on the production schedule. They did not account for the conditions that had produced the state she was in.
In September 1950, MGM formally terminated Judy Garland’s contract. She had been with the studio for fifteen years — from the age of thirteen to twenty-eight. The terms of the termination were not publicly disclosed in detail, but the effect was clear: the institutional structure that had both supported and damaged her career was gone. She was without a studio, without the infrastructure that had surrounded her professional life since childhood, and without the income that the contract had represented.
The end of the MGM contract has sometimes been narrated as a liberation — as if the studio’s termination freed her from a form of captivity. This is too simple. The studio had been her professional home and her primary source of income since she was a child. The loss of it, at a moment when her health and pharmaceutical dependency were already serious problems, left her without support as much as it left her without constraint. She had no experience of managing a career outside the studio system, no financial reserves that could sustain her through a transition, and no established alternative framework for her professional life.