Her older sisters, Mary Jane Gumm (born 1915) and Dorothy Virginia Gumm (born 1917), had already established a sibling act by the time Frances was old enough to join them. The three girls became known as the Gumm Sisters, performing at their father’s theater and on the regional vaudeville circuit, with Ethel playing piano accompaniment. The act drew on the standard elements of vaudeville: singing, dancing, novelty, and the particular audience appeal of child performers who could match adult technique with youthful energy.
In 1926, when Frances was four years old, the family moved to Lancaster, California, a small city in the Antelope Valley about sixty miles north of Los Angeles. The move was driven, at least in part, by a desire to be closer to the entertainment industry centered in Hollywood. Frank Gumm took over management of a theater in Lancaster; the family’s life continued its established pattern of theatrical work and domestic routine. But the proximity to Hollywood opened new possibilities. The Los Angeles area had a functioning infrastructure for child performers — studios, coaches, agents, and audition circuits — that the rural Midwest could not match.
Ethel Gumm became the primary driver of her daughters’ professional ambitions. Accounts of her relationship with Frances in particular describe a mother who saw her youngest child’s talent as exceptional and who pushed her accordingly. Garland herself, in later interviews, offered complex and sometimes contradictory accounts of her mother’s role. In a 1967 television interview, she described her mother as having been jealous of her, as having used performing as a form of control, and as having been fundamentally oriented toward her daughters’ careers rather than their wellbeing. She was not the only source for these characterizations; others who knew the family corroborated aspects of Ethel Gumm’s driven, sometimes harsh management style. But accounts of this kind, offered decades after the events they describe, by a person whose relationship with her mother had been complicated and painful, should be understood as one perspective on a relationship that had multiple dimensions.