The distance between that appearance of freedom and the reality of her working conditions is precisely the gap the headline identifies. It is a gap worth knowing about, not because it diminishes the performance — which was genuinely excellent — but because it changes what the performance means. What Garland was able to create under those conditions is not less impressive for having been created under them. It is more impressive.
She made things look easy that were not easy. She made a managed, controlled, pharmaceutically maintained performance look spontaneous and free. She made a studio’s commercial product look like a piece of genuine human expression — and it was, because her talent was genuine even when the conditions of its production were not.
The rest of her career — the thirty years after The Wizard of Oz, the Palace Theatre and Carnegie Hall and A Star Is Born and Judgment at Nuremberg and the Judy Garland Show and the hundreds of concerts in between — was the same process continued. She kept making things look like what they weren’t: she made hard work look effortless, complicated emotional circumstances look like pure expression, a body under pharmaceutical stress look like a performer in full command of her instrument.
She was not always successful. There were nights and productions and engagements where the effort showed, where the conditions won, where the performance did not achieve what she was trying to achieve. The record of her career includes these as well as the triumphs. The human record usually does.