In the world Garland entered at thirteen, there was no regulatory floor below which studio treatment of a child performer could not descend without consequence. The studio’s practices were governed by commercial interest, by industry norms, and by the values — or lack of them — of the people in charge. MGM under Mayer was a studio where commercial interest was the primary value. The question asked about any practice was whether it served the studio’s interests, not whether it served the performer’s.
This context does not exculpate specific individuals who made specific decisions. It explains how a system could operate as it did without any of its participants necessarily seeing themselves as doing something wrong. The physician who prescribed Benzedrine to a teenage girl because the studio needed her thin and energized for a production schedule was operating within the norms of his profession and the demands of his employer. The production manager who kept a sixteen-year-old on set for fourteen hours was operating within the norms of film production as he understood them. The executive who commented on a young woman’s weight in terms she experienced as humiliating was operating within a culture in which female performers’ physical characteristics were treated as business assets subject to business management.
None of this made the practices harmless. The cumulative effect of pharmaceutical management that began in childhood, of dietary restriction that made normal nutritional intake impossible, of production schedules that made adequate rest impossible, was pharmaceutical dependency, eating disorder, and the psychological damage that results from being treated as a productive instrument rather than as a person. These effects were real and they were long-lasting. Garland carried them for the rest of her life.