These accounts of Mayer’s behavior represent Garland’s testimony and Clarke’s reconstruction from her account. They describe a relationship of institutional power in which a studio head’s behavior toward a female performer he had signed as a child was conditioned by the assumption that his authority over her was total. Whether every specific incident occurred exactly as she described it cannot be confirmed from independent documentary evidence. But the structural conditions that would make such behavior possible and consequential are well established: Garland was financially dependent on MGM from the age of thirteen, her mother’s management of her career had transferred practical authority over her professional life to the studio, and the industry context provided no meaningful external check on how studio executives treated contract players.
Her early MGM years produced a substantial body of work. She appeared in Pigskin Parade in 1936, then in a series of films with Mickey Rooney that became enormously popular: Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Babes in Arms (1939), Strike Up the Band (1940), Babes on Broadway (1941), and others. She was, by the late 1930s, one of the most commercially successful performers on the MGM roster — a fact that gave the studio both strong financial incentive to keep her productive and strong incentive to manage the things it perceived as risks to that productivity.
She was also, during these years, a developing artist under conditions that were as artistically stimulating as they were personally difficult. The studio had coaches, choreographers, vocal directors, and orchestrators of real quality. Roger Edens, who became a long-term collaborator and musical director, worked closely with Garland from her earliest MGM years. Arthur Freed, the producer and lyricist who became her principal creative partner at the studio, recognized her abilities with an appreciation that went beyond their commercial value. These relationships — with professionals who saw her talent as something to develop rather than simply exploit — coexisted with the industrial management of her body and schedule that was doing her lasting damage.