The accounts of how MGM managed her appearance during her adolescent years are documented from multiple sources, and they are consistent in their broad outlines even where the specific details differ. Mayer and other studio executives were concerned about her weight from early in her contract. She was not, by any objective standard, overweight; she was a developing teenage girl whose body was changing in the ways that adolescent bodies change. But the studio’s aesthetic standards for its female performers were narrow and demanding, and Garland’s figure — which curved more than the studio preferred for the image it wanted to project — became a subject of active management.
The methods used to manage that figure have been described, by Garland herself and by others who were present, as including caloric restriction, directive management of what she ate at the studio commissary, and the use of pharmaceutical stimulants to suppress her appetite and maintain the energy necessary for long working days. The stimulants in question were amphetamines — specifically Benzedrine, which was at that time a legal and widely prescribed medication with known appetite-suppressing and energy-boosting properties. In the context of MGM’s industrial production schedule, where child and adolescent performers were required to rehearse for hours before filming and then film for hours after that, amphetamines became a routine tool for managing performer output.
Garland’s own account of how this medication regime began and developed was offered in multiple interviews over the years, and it pointed consistently toward studio responsibility. She said that the pills were simply administered — that they were presented as a normal part of the working environment, that she did not fully understand what she was taking, and that by the time she understood the drugs’ effects and dependencies, she was already dependent. She attributed the beginning of the process to her time at MGM, and specifically to the period around The Wizard of Oz and the intensified work schedule that followed it.