What the record can also establish is the quality of her artistry. That is documented in recordings, in film, in the testimony of the musicians and directors and collaborators who worked with her, and in the responses of the audiences who heard her. The artistry is not contested in the way that some of the biographical details are. It is there in the recording, available for evaluation, not dependent on any particular person’s account of it.
What Happened to Dorothy
The question in the headline — what was behind the magic — has an answer that this article has tried to give in full, with appropriate qualification of what is established and what is uncertain. The diets were real. The pills were real. The studio pressure was real. The control that MGM exercised over a child performer’s body, schedule, appetite, and pharmaceutical state was real and it was consequential.
What was also real was the performance. The voice that sang “Over the Rainbow” in October 1938, recorded for a major studio film in the last years of classical Hollywood’s dominance, was the voice of a sixteen-year-old girl who had been performing since she could walk. It was not produced by the diets or the pills; they were managing what the studio perceived as problems with her production as a commercial property. The voice came from the talent, the training, and the specific kind of musical intelligence that Garland had been developing her entire life.
The girl in the gingham dress clicking her heels was not a simple image. She was a child who had been told that her body was wrong, that her weight was a problem, that her figure needed to be hidden and managed. She had been given pills to make her thin and awake, pills to make her sleep when the first pills wouldn’t let her. She was wearing a corset to flatten the body that puberty had given her. She was performing, in other words, within constraints that the studio had imposed on every aspect of her physical existence — and she was doing it brilliantly, making the performance look natural and heartfelt and free.