What those practices were not is the single cause of everything that followed. Garland’s life after MGM was not simply the extended consequence of what MGM had done to her. It was the life of a complex person dealing with pharmaceutical dependency that had been established in institutional conditions she had not chosen, navigating financial pressures partly of her own creation and partly inherited from the structure of the industry she had grown up in, maintaining relationships that were complicated by the pressures on her and on those around her, and simultaneously producing work of genuine and often extraordinary quality.
She was not only a victim of what was done to her. She was also an artist of exceptional range and ability, someone who continued to find in performance a resource and a connection that sustained her through conditions that would have ended most careers. The Carnegie Hall concert, made at thirty-eight after the studio contract had been gone for eleven years, the MGM contract for two additional years before that, and multiple crises in between — that concert is not a survivor’s last gasp. It is the work of an extraordinary performer at a peak of ability. The same is true of her performance in A Star Is Born, of her work in Judgment at Nuremberg, of dozens of recordings in which her voice did what few voices of her generation could do.
She was Dorothy at sixteen, and behind the magic there were pills and diets and studio control. She was also much more than that — and she spent the remaining thirty years of her professional life demonstrating it, imperfectly and magnificently, in performance after performance that audiences still listen to and watch.