She was not only what was done to her. The things that were done to her were real and consequential and are accurately characterized as institutional exploitation of a child. But she was also someone with genuine artistic intelligence, genuine professional judgment, and genuine capacity for the choices that defined the best of her work. The full picture requires both.
The Wizard of Oz After All This Time
The film that made her name — that created the gap the headline identifies between the image and the person — has had a cultural life of its own that has continued independently of the biographical facts about its making. It has been watched by every generation since its release. Its images — the ruby slippers, the yellow brick road, the tornado, the Emerald City — are among the most widely shared visual references in American culture. “There’s no place like home” is a formulation that has been repeated so often that it no longer needs the film for its meaning.
For Judy Garland, the film’s extraordinary cultural longevity was a fact she had to live with and that shaped the remainder of her career in specific ways. She was Dorothy in the public imagination whether she wanted to be or not. Every subsequent performance was, for some portion of the audience, a return to or a departure from the girl in the gingham dress. The concert audience that came to hear her sing at Carnegie Hall in 1961 was partly an audience of people who had grown up with The Wizard of Oz and who experienced her adult voice as a continuation of something that had begun with the child who sang “Over the Rainbow.”