What the marriages did produce, collectively, were three children whose lives were substantially shaped by their mother’s career and its costs. Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft, and Joey Luft grew up with a mother who was a public figure, who was dealing with pharmaceutical dependency and financial difficulty, and whose relationships to them were complicated by all of the above. Both Liza and Lorna have written and spoken extensively about their childhood and their mother, providing perspectives that are essential to any full account of Garland’s life but that are necessarily partial and should be understood as such.
The Financial Picture and Its Complications
One of the consistent features of Judy Garland’s adult life was financial difficulty. This is somewhat counterintuitive given the scale of her commercial success, and its causes are multiple and not entirely separable from the professional and personal pressures that surrounded her.
During her MGM years, she earned substantial sums — the contracts paid well by the standards of the period, and her box-office value gave her leverage that eventually resulted in negotiated improvements to her terms. But the studio system took a large share of performers’ earnings through various mechanisms, and Garland’s mother, as her manager during a significant part of this period, collected management fees on top of what the studio took. By the time Garland was managing her own career, in her late twenties and thirties, there was not a large financial reserve from the MGM years to draw on.
A Star Is Born was supposed to change this. The Transcona arrangement was designed to give her a producer’s share of profits as well as a performer’s salary, which would have represented a significant step toward financial independence. The film’s cost overruns, and the studio’s subsequent cuts to its running time, reduced those profits from what had been projected. The financial expectations from A Star Is Born did not materialize in the form or at the scale that had been anticipated.