Her collaborations with the directors and composers who worked with her in the post-MGM years — with Cukor on A Star Is Born, with Stanley Kramer on Judgment at Nuremberg, with the television producers who made The Judy Garland Show, with the musical directors who organized her concert tours — were professional partnerships in which she was not a passive party. She had opinions about material, about approach, about what she wanted to do and what she didn’t. Those opinions were sometimes exercised in ways that created conflict and difficulty; they were also sometimes exercised in ways that produced better work than would have been possible without them.
Her relationship to the pharmaceutical dependency she was managing was not one of helpless capitulation, though it was also not one of successful resistance. She attempted to reduce or stop her medication use multiple times. The psychiatric hospitalizations of the late 1940s and 1950s were partly oriented toward addressing the dependency. The attempts were not consistently successful, and the nature of the dependency that had been established over decades made it extremely difficult to address. But the attempts represent agency, even when they failed.
She also made choices about how to present herself to her audiences — the combination of warmth and wit and vulnerability that characterized her concert persona was not simply the unmediated expression of a distressed personality. It was, at least in significant part, a crafted performance of a specific kind of connection with an audience, developed through decades of stage experience, refined through the feedback of audiences that had been responding to her since she was a child. The performer who walked out onto the Carnegie Hall stage knew exactly what she was doing. The brilliant imprecise quality of what she did there was not an accident.