The commissary order that directed kitchen staff to serve her chicken broth rather than what she ordered — an account that appears in multiple biographies — represents this dual character precisely. It was presented as a form of care: the studio was looking out for her figure. It was experienced as a form of control: a teenager’s ability to decide what she would eat at lunch was removed by institutional decision. The distinction between care and control, in this environment, was not always clear, and that ambiguity was part of what made the institutional relationship so difficult to resist and so difficult, in retrospect, to assess.
Mayer left MGM in 1951, the same year the studio terminated Garland’s contract. The alignment is not coincidental in the sense that both represented the end of an era. The institutional conditions of the classical Hollywood studio period were changing under legal and commercial pressure, and the individuals who had operated within those conditions were leaving the stage as the conditions changed. But for Garland, the end of the MGM period was not the beginning of freedom in any simple sense. The effects of what had been done to her during those fifteen years went with her.
The Specific Character of the Pharmaceutical Management
The pharmaceutical management of Judy Garland’s performance has been described in general terms in many accounts of her life, but the specific character of what was happening to her — pharmacologically, psychologically, and physically — deserves more careful attention than the summary “they gave her pills” provides.