Other accounts complicate this picture. Mickey Rooney, who worked with Garland extensively in the Andy Hardy series and other MGM productions, disputed the claim that the studio supplied drugs to young performers. He said in later interviews that Garland “chose that path” and denied that MGM initiated the medication regime. His denial stands as a counterpoint in the record, though it is worth noting that Rooney was himself a beneficiary of the MGM system he was defending, and that denials by participants in a system are not necessarily more reliable than the accounts of those who experienced its effects.
Gerald Clarke’s biography Get Happy, published in 2000 and drawing on extensive interviews and access to a draft of Garland’s unfinished autobiography, provides a detailed account of the studio relationship. Clarke describes a culture at MGM in which the management of young performers’ bodies, schedules, and pharmaceutical states was normalized to the point where no single person necessarily saw the full picture of what was being done to any individual performer. The studio did not, in this account, have an explicit policy of drugging its performers. It had a set of practices — casting physical standards, production schedules, commissary orders, physician referrals — that in combination produced the pharmaceutical dependency that Garland later described.
The Mayer relationship, which Garland described in charged terms in later interviews, was not simply the relationship of employer and employee. Mayer took a quasi-paternal attitude toward his contract players, and this orientation — expressed in paternalistic praise and humiliating criticism, in gestures of concern and gestures of control — gave studio executives power over performers’ self-perceptions that extended beyond the professional into the psychological. Garland later said that Mayer called her his “little hunchback” and similar diminishing names when commenting on her appearance. Clarke’s biography, drawing on Garland’s own account, also describes an incident in which Mayer made unwanted physical contact with her when she was around twenty years old, and her rejection of that contact.