What the Headline Really Means
The headline that brings readers to this story makes a contrast: Dorothy at sixteen, and behind the magic, strict diets, pills, and studio pressure. Having read the documented account of what those diets and pills and pressures were, it is worth being precise about what the evidence actually establishes and where the responsible account reaches its limits.
Garland was sixteen when shooting on The Wizard of Oz began. She wore a breast-flattening corset to accommodate the studio’s decision that her adolescent body looked wrong for the character. She was on a diet — the terms of the restriction have been described in various ways in different accounts, and some of the more extreme versions (cigarettes, black coffee, and soup only) are disputed by historians who have examined the production records more closely. The broad fact of caloric restriction and weight management is not disputed; the specific daily menu is harder to establish with precision.
She was taking amphetamines during this period. This is her own testimony, it is consistent with what is documented about MGM’s practices, and it is supported by the pharmaceutical history of the years that followed. Mickey Rooney’s denial is in the record. The weight of the evidence, and the weight of what Garland’s own life after MGM demonstrated about the nature and depth of her pharmaceutical dependency, supports her account more than it supports his.
The studio exercised control over her weight, her schedule, her image, and aspects of her medical care that would today be recognizable as institutional abuse of a child performer. The industry context of the 1930s and 1940s did not provide the regulatory frameworks that would today make much of what MGM did illegal; the practices were normalized within the industry, though they were not therefore harmless.