Nearly two decades ago, biographer Gerald Clarke, while researching a book on Judy Garland, stumbled upon an old gossip column that the actress was working on a memoir for Random House.
This piqued Clarke's curiosity, and she later told Entertainment Weekly about it. No memory was ever published. Clarke sent his research assistant to the Columbia University Library, where the publishing company stores his files, to see if there were any letters about the project. There were 30.
"Oh, by the way. There is also an autobiography," said the researcher.
It was incomplete, there were only 68 pages. But Clarke was shocked by what he discovered in that document: that Garland, one of the world's most famous actresses, was repeatedly groped and harassed by Louis B. Mayer, the famed producer, and co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios.
With the world haunted and revolted by accusations of S- harassment against actresses and actors against some of the biggest names in Hollywood (Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, Dustin Hoffman), it is worth remembering that this intolerable behavior has been tolerated in show business as long as the light has shone.
Historic victims include Marilyn Monroe, Beverly Addland, Joan Collins, and even Shirley Tempe, who confessed to being abused in their own memories.
"Everyone knows what goes on on audition couches, but no one thought Judy had been subjected to S- pressure from the top brass at MGM," Clarke explained during an interview with ABC News.
It started around the time when Garland was playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. She was 16 years old.
"Having S- was seen as an advantage of the power and few women escaped the demands of Mayer and his minions," Clarke wrote in Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland speaking about the abuse cases.
"Between the ages of 16 and 20, Judy received several S- advances. I'm sure they all tried," she explains. The first on the list was Mayer himself, who always praised her voice. To "prove" that she sang from her heart, the producer would place her hand on her left breast to show where her heart was. "I often thought I was lucky I didn't sing with another part of my anatomy," she recounted. That scenario was repeated many times until, finally, grown up, Judy stopped him. "Mr. Mayer, don't ever do that again. I just won't stand for it," she dared to say.
"How can you say that to me that I love you?" he asked Garland, who described her contempt for him decades later in her unpublished memoir, writing that "it's amazing how these great men, who have been with so many sophisticated women for their whole lives, they could act like idiots."
If Mayer was the most persistent, he was not the vilest, as Clarke wrote.
"Another executive, whom Judy did not identify, summoned her to her office, like so many other Metro stars. Avoiding any pretense to speak, he demanded to have S-. That was her style," Judy recalled. When she refused…she started to scream. "Listen, before you go, I want to tell you something. I'll ruin you and I can do it. I'll kill you if that's the last thing I do," she said in a threatening tone.
In addition to being threatened and harassed, Garland was humiliated to make her lose weight. She abused drugs and alcohol and died in 1969 of an apparent accidental overdose of barbiturates. She was 47 years old.
There is something ironic and disturbing about Clarke's discovery of the abuse Garland endured.
In 2009, roughly a decade after her biography was published, Hollywood trade magazines were abuzz after the book was picked up for a movie, where Garland would be revived on the big screen thanks to the performance of Anne Hathaway.
