Dorothy’s ruby slippers have been preserved in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. The gingham dress has been auctioned and preserved and displayed. The film is available in multiple formats on multiple platforms, watched by people who were not born when it was made. The image of a girl clicking her heels and saying “there’s no place like home” has outlasted almost everything else about the studio that made it.
What it has not outlasted, and what continues to be discovered by those who go looking, is the full account of the person who put on that dress and sang those songs and made that image — not despite what she went through, but in the middle of it, and because she was the artist she was.
Echoes: What the Story Left Behind
The story of what happened to Judy Garland at MGM did not end with MGM. Its implications extended forward in time through the careers of other performers who passed through the same institutional system, through the legal and regulatory changes that were eventually made to protect child performers, and through the cultural conversation about the entertainment industry’s treatment of its youngest and most vulnerable participants that has continued ever since.
The Coogan Law was strengthened in California in 2000, requiring that a portion of a child performer’s earnings be set aside in a trust that the parents cannot access — addressing the financial protection that Jackie Coogan’s case had originally inspired but that the original legislation had not fully secured. The protections for child performers’ physical working conditions and educational requirements have also been expanded over the decades since Garland’s MGM years. These reforms did not undo what was done to her. They represent the industry’s eventual, partial acknowledgment that what had been done to performers like her required a different legal framework.