In the years that followed, she faced both the ordinary financial demands of a life with children, multiple residences, and significant personal expenses, and the extraordinary costs of the pharmaceutical dependency and the medical care associated with it. She owed substantial back taxes. The financial management of her career, through multiple managers over multiple decades, was not consistently effective at preserving what she earned.
The financial difficulty was not simply a consequence of mismanagement by others. Her own choices — in whom she trusted with financial management, in the scale of her personal expenditure, in the decisions she made about which professional engagements to accept — contributed to the picture. But the structural conditions of her early career, in which a studio had retained most of what she earned while she was building the reputation that made her valuable, were also real constraints.
By the mid-1960s, Lorna Luft’s memoir describes a period in which Garland was performing in venues that were significantly less prestigious than Carnegie Hall for fees that were significantly less than her earlier earning capacity. The London engagement of 1968, whatever its artistic merits and demerits on any given night, was in part an economic necessity: she was still a performer whose name could sell tickets, and selling tickets was still what she needed to do.
On the Question of MGM’s Responsibility
What did MGM owe Judy Garland? The question sounds simple, but it involves decisions made by individuals who have been dead for decades, in institutional and legal contexts that no longer exist, under industry norms that have been substantially reformed since the period in question.