What is established is that Frances was performing from toddlerhood, that the family’s economic and social life was organized substantially around the daughters’ performing careers, and that Ethel was the central figure managing those careers. She enrolled Frances in dance classes, arranged bookings, traveled with the girls to performances, and — according to several biographical accounts — had a strong commercial orientation toward her daughters’ talent that did not always account for their physical or emotional limits.
By 1934, when Frances was twelve, the act had been rechristened the Garland Sisters. The new name was reportedly adopted after a performance in Chicago where the original name generated unfavorable attention — accounts differ about the exact circumstances, but the stage name “Garland” was in use by 1934. Frances took the first name “Judy” around the same time, reportedly inspired by a Hoagy Carmichael song. The name Frances Ethel Gumm began to disappear from public use, replaced by the persona that would become one of the most recognizable in American entertainment history.
Her father’s death in November 1935 removed one of the stabilizing forces from her family. Frank Gumm died of spinal meningitis at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles on November 17, 1935, aged forty-nine. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills. Frances was thirteen years old, in the earliest weeks of her contract with MGM. The loss of her father placed her more completely under the management of her mother and the studio to which her mother had helped deliver her.