# Judy Garland: The Story Behind The Wizard of Oz
Some performances are remembered. A very few become part of the language itself. When Judy Garland, at sixteen years old, stepped out of a sepia-toned Kansas farmhouse and into the Technicolor wonder of Oz, she did something no one — not the studio bosses who had nearly cut her greatest song, not the directors who had nearly miscast her, and perhaps not even Garland herself — could have predicted. She created the most beloved musical performance in the history of cinema, and in doing so, she gave the world a heroine who would follow her for the rest of her life, like a shadow cast by the brightest light.
The Girl Who Wasn’t the First Choice
Dorothy Gale was not written for Judy Garland. When MGM bought the film rights to L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel in 1938, studio chief Louis B. Mayer had another child star in mind entirely: Shirley Temple, the dimpled, tap-dancing phenomenon under contract to 20th Century Fox. Temple was the bigger star, the safer commercial bet, and — in Mayer’s estimation — the more natural fit for a Kansas farm girl.
Producer Arthur Freed thought differently. Freed had watched Garland — then a sixteen-year-old contract player signed at thirteen — grow from a vaudeville prodigy into something MGM had never quite seen: a teenager with the emotional instrument of a grown woman. The problem was business, not art. Temple belonged to Fox, and Fox would not lend her. Legend has long held that Fox executives, sensing they held the cards, demanded Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in exchange — a price Mayer would never pay. Whether or not that particular story is precisely true, the deal collapsed, and the role fell, almost by default, to the girl who had been Freed’s first choice all along.
There was still a chorus of doubt inside the studio. Garland was sixteen playing twelve. She had a woman’s voice and a woman’s figure, and the studio worked tirelessly to disguise both — binding her chest, fitting her with a restrictive corset, feeding her a diet of chicken soup, black coffee, and cigarettes, and keeping her on a strict regimen that would today be recognized as punishing. But when she opened her mouth to sing, every doubt evaporated. She was cast, and film history quietly changed course.
A Troubled Production in a Land of Make-Believe
The making of The Wizard of Oz was, by every account, an arduous journey down its own yellow brick road. Filming ran from October 1938 through March 1939, and the production chewed through directors the way the Kansas tornado chewed through farmhouses.
The first director, Richard Thorpe, lasted about nine days. His version of Dorothy was a chic, almost sophisticated figure — a blonde wig, heavy “baby-doll” makeup, and a fashionable polish that owed more to the studio’s glamour machine than to Baum’s plain Kansas girl. Producer Mervyn LeRoy reportedly took one look at the rushes and fired Thorpe on the spot, scrapping his footage.
George Cukor came in next, for all of three days, and his brief tenure proved decisive. It was Cukor who told the young Garland to stop acting and simply be herself — to play Dorothy as a real girl rather than a studio confection. He had the blonde wig removed, toned down the makeup, and told her, in effect, to trust the plain truth of the character. Then Cukor left for Gone with the Wind, and Victor Fleming took over to direct the bulk of the picture. King Vidor, uncredited, directed the sepia-toned Kansas sequences that open the film.
The set was a wonderland of hazards. Margaret Hamilton, cast as the Wicked Witch of the West, wore copper-based green makeup so toxic she could not eat while in costume and had to subsist on liquids through a straw. During the filming of her fiery exit from Munchkinland in October 1938, a mistimed pyrotechnic effect left her with second- and third-degree burns on her face and hand; she was hospitalized for six weeks, and her stunt double, Betty Danko, was later seriously injured in a separate broomstick accident. Buddy Ebsen, originally cast as the Tin Man, suffered a near-fatal reaction to the aluminum dust in his makeup — it coated his lungs — and was replaced by Jack Haley, with the makeup reformulated as a paste.
And then there was Garland herself: sixteen years old, working six-day weeks under blazing Technicolor lights that raised the stage temperature to punishing levels, in a costume that restricted her breathing, performing take after take while the studio’s publicity machine sold her to the world as the embodiment of wholesome American girlhood. One much-retold backstage anecdote — reported by several Hollywood chroniclers — holds that when Garland was seized by an uncontrollable fit of the giggles during the “We’re Off to See the Wizard” sequence, the exasperated Fleming pulled her aside, slapped her once, and ordered her back to work. Whether the story is literally true or has grown in the telling, it captures something real about the production: a child working under adult pressures, in a factory that did not pause for childhood.
The Song They Almost Threw Away
At the heart of the film sits a song that almost didn’t survive it. “Over the Rainbow,” with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, was written specifically for Garland — Arlen composed it with her voice in mind, and Harburg’s lyric gave Dorothy a longing that every listener could recognize as their own: a place “where troubles melt like lemon drops.”
After a preview screening, studio executives decided the Kansas opening dragged and ordered the song cut. To them, it was a slow ballad in black-and-white, sung in a barnyard, holding up the story’s momentum. Arlen and Harburg were devastated. Freed, LeRoy, and the film’s musical staff fought to have it reinstated, arguing that the song was the emotional key to the entire picture — the reason the audience would follow Dorothy anywhere. Legend holds that Louis B. Mayer relented when he was told that the song was the one with the hit record potential, and that Decca was waiting. Whatever tipped the scales, the song stayed.
It went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song. It became Garland’s signature for the remaining thirty years of her life — the song she sang at nearly every concert, the song audiences demanded as their birthright, the song the American Film Institute would later name the greatest movie song of all time. A studio executive’s impatience nearly erased it. Instead, it became immortal.
The Ruby Slippers and the Machinery of Magic
In Baum’s novel, Dorothy’s magical shoes are silver. On screen, they became ruby — a change made, quite simply, to show off the glories of three-strip Technicolor. Designed by MGM’s legendary chief costume designer Gilbert Adrian, the shoes were covered in red sequins and became, arguably, the most famous footwear in film history. Multiple pairs were made; one pair would eventually sell at auction for sums that would have astonished the 1939 production accountants.
The shoes matter because they reveal how the film was built: every element engineered for maximum wonder, and every element dependent on the girl at its center. The tornado, the Munchkins, the Emerald City — all of it was scaffolding. The story only works if you believe that this particular girl wants to go home, and audiences believed it because Garland made them believe it.
A Modest Beginning, Then Forever
The Wizard of Oz premiered on August 15, 1939, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, and opened nationally on August 25. Critics were largely admiring — Garland’s performance was singled out almost universally — but the film was enormously expensive. At a cost of roughly $2.7 million, it was among the priciest productions MGM had ever mounted, and its initial box-office returns, while respectable, did not cover that cost. By the hard arithmetic of the studio era, it was something of a disappointment.
Garland received the Academy Juvenile Award at the 1940 ceremony, presented for her work in The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Arms — a special miniature Oscar that recognized what the industry already knew: a star had arrived.
But the film’s true afterlife had not yet begun. In 1956, CBS broadcast The Wizard of Oz on television for the first time, and beginning in 1959 it became an annual television event — a ritual appointment viewing for generations of children who had never seen it in a theater. Year after year, tens of millions of viewers watched Dorothy click her heels. The film climbed the American Film Institute’s lists until it rested at number six among the greatest American films ever made, and “Over the Rainbow” at number one among movie songs.
The Role That Defined — and Haunted — Her
Here is the paradox at the center of Judy Garland’s life: the role that made her immortal also became the cage she could never quite leave. Dorothy Gale was innocence, hope, and home — and Garland, who had been working since she was two and a half years old, who had lost her father at thirteen and been remade by a studio system that treated her body as raw material, understood longing in a way few child performers ever have. She sang “Over the Rainbow” as someone who knew exactly what it meant to dream of a better place.
For the rest of her career, audiences wanted Dorothy. They wanted the rainbow. Garland gave it to them — she sang the song at the Palace, at the Palladium, at Carnegie Hall, in London and Copenhagen and Sydney — but those who listened closely could hear the cost in it. Late in her life, she said of the song, “I tried my damnedest to believe in that rainbow that I tried to get over, and I couldn’t.” It is one of the saddest and most honest sentences any great performer ever uttered about their own signature.
And yet — and this is why we still watch — the performance itself remains untouched by any of that sorrow. Watch Garland in The Wizard of Oz today and you see no studio machinery, no diet, no sixteen-year-old girl being asked to carry a $2.7 million picture. You see Dorothy. You see a girl who is frightened and brave in the same breath, who loves her dog and her aunt and her uncle with a fierceness that needs no explanation, and who discovers, in the most famous last line in movie history, that there is no place like home. The studio gave her a pair of ruby slippers. She gave the world something far more durable: proof that a song, sung truly, can outlast everything — even the rainbow it reaches for.