27: The Dark Side to the Golden Age of Hollywood

2022/1/12

Chapters

The chapter explores the origins of Hollywood and how it became the center of the film industry, despite its early issues with weather, production size, and legal threats from Thomas Edison.

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Hi friends, how are you? I hope you're having a wonderful day today. My name is Bailey Sarian and I'd like to welcome you to the Library of Dark History. We need like books if this is, how is this a library? I don't know. But this is a safe space for all the curious cats out there who wonder like, hey, is history really as boring as it seemed in school? Oh nay nay, this is where we can learn together and talk about all the dark, mysterious, dramatic stories our teachers never told us about.

So growing up, I don't know if you know this, but I was Judy Garland. Like I was Judy Garland. I don't know if you know that, but like I was Judy Garland and I was just Judy Garland and hi. I loved all the glitz and glamour of that Hollywood golden era. And then I want you to look a little bit deeper, of course, surprise, surprise, it has a dark

and seedy past. Well, there's a lot of nonsense going on, a lot of shenanigans were going down, okay? Unfortunately, it's still that way today. Am I right?

Hollywood. I know. I know. How many stereotypes come to mind? There are the parties, there are the beautiful people, all the glitter, the glam, and then there's the other stuff. Super dark stuff like studios covering up violent crimes, feeding kids drugs to keep them awake longer, sexual assault, forced abortions, and secret murders that happened on set. And of course...

Basically, there's a lot more drama behind the scenes than on the scenes. I know. They just turn the cameras around and what a great show. So let me open up my little dark history book here to the Hollywood chapter. Mmm. Mmm.

I found it. Okay, friends, so how did we get here? Well, we're going to go all the way back to 1883 when a guy named Harvey Henry Wilcox bought 150 acres of wide open undeveloped land near Los Angeles. And this happens to be the exact area we know today as Hollywood. But Harvey wasn't interested in making movies, maybe because like they also just didn't exist yet.

But also, Harvey was a very religious man and thought this area would be perfect, well, a perfect little place to make a religious community. Sounds like a cult leader if you ask me. Oh my god, Hollywood's a cult. Oh, I just solved the mysteries. Oh god.

Anyways, Harvey and his wife would farm apricots and figs and set up churches and help build houses. Now remember, these were like the prohibition times. And Harvey and his wife, they really leaned into that. I mean, this was just going to be a good little Christian community, you know? Well, the farming thing didn't really work out for them.

but people did start moving to the area as the population of Los Angeles started to grow. And in 1887, Harvey would officially register the town as Hollywood, California, a name his wife picked because she overheard someone say it on a train. And she was like, hey, that's a great word. I like how it sounds. I'm taking it.

And over the next few years, the town would keep developing electricity, telephone service, gas lines, and it started to look like a real city. Meanwhile, on the East Coast, that's where movies were being made. And these pioneers of the movie industry were looking for new ways to push themselves. They wanted to make movies better, developing new technology quicker and quicker.

But they ran into some problems. For starters, the weather was really bad. Plus, as movies got bigger, so did the size of the productions. It was no longer just one guy filming one actor. You needed a whole crew and a studio and space to go along with it. The other problem on the East Coast was our friend, remember him? Shout out Tommy Edison. I

Remember, he was all about like being the pioneer of the filmmaking industry and was quick to sue anyone who made any progress in his fields, his specialty. Well, these guys didn't want to get sued. So what's a filmmaker to do?

Well, these guys used their noggins and they headed to Southern California. Added bonus, if Tommy did find out you were making a movie and tried to slap you with a lawsuit, you would be close enough to Mexico that you could make a run for the border. So Hollywood had the weather, the space, no Edison. And it was a largely undeveloped area right next to both a beautiful beach and a desert that was perfect for filming westerns. Yeah.

which just so happened to be like the most popular genre of the time. So now by 1910, the film industry had arrived in California in a very big way. And with this brand new industry came a lot of workers. Carpenters, electricians, costumers, and other highly skilled workers were moving to Hollywood to help make movies, you know? So there was problems with the film industry from the very start.

there were a lot of people willing to sacrifice and do whatever it took to be a part of it. And to make things worse, California was very undeveloped and in a lot of ways it was still like lawless, you know? It was literally the Wild West and the industry moved out there specifically to take advantage of those loose labor laws and create a society that would feed the moving machine. By the 1920s, most of the major studios that we know today

MGM, Warner Brothers, Universal, Paramount, they exploded onto the scene and they were all competing with one another for that box office money.

So they came up with what they thought would be an effective method of getting people to see their movies and not their competitors' work. They would cast recurring actors and actresses that everyone could recognize and fall in love with in their films. Almost as if it didn't matter what the movie was actually about, the performers would keep audiences coming back. They called these actors and actresses movie stars. Stars.

And now we're going to pause for now. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customer surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What are your self-care non-negotiables? The things you know make you feel better even when it's impossible to make time for them.

Like that workout you try to squeeze in between kids' activities, work, and everything else you have going on, and before you know it, it gets pushed to tomorrow. Sound familiar? But it's the moments when you feel like you have no time for yourself when those non-negotiables are more important than ever. Those are the things that keep you strong, healthy, motivated, and prepared to take on everything life demands of you. So why not make therapy one of them?

Visit BetterHelp.com slash Dark History today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Dark History. Along with movie stars came a rise in attention. And with attention comes publicity stunts.

One of the first movie star publicity stunts happened around 1910 and involved an actress named Florence Lawrence. Yeah, that's a name. Florence Lawrence. Florence Lawrence. Girl. Who was said to be the greatest moving picture actress in the world. Oh, yeah.

But then out of nowhere, newspapers started reporting that she had died tragically in a streetcar accident. But then the studio said before she died, Florence filmed one final movie. So of course everyone wanted to see this thing. You know, like she died, we have to go support her and see her last movie. Then the head of the studio started taking out ads in the papers claiming Florence was actually still alive and she was going to go to the premiere of the movie. Wait, what?

It didn't matter what was true and what was false. The public was freaking eating it up, okay? And it worked. I mean, they needed their Florence Lawrence fix.

So the studio head tells reporters to show up to the train station at a specific time and have their cameras ready for the story of the century. Well, reporters and hundreds of fans gathered at the train station, clamoring to get the best view of who may be arriving. Now the train pulls in, the brakes screech to a halt, the door is open and out walks...

Florence Lawrence. Oh, she's alive, well, and in the flesh. You know what I'm saying? People are basically just fainting and dying and like they are pouncing on this poor woman. She's back from the dead. She's like, Jesus. But not really because she wasn't dead in the first place. They're like ripping buttons off her jacket. They're just losing their goddamn minds. Okay. This is really one of the first times we saw people treat an actress like a superstar.

So when the studio saw this reaction, they realized they had the power to create a public figure who had major influence. And with major influence comes box office draw.

Which is like a fancy Hollywood way of saying they could get people to the theaters and watch the movies and they can make money. Yay. Money. It's always about money, right? So talent didn't matter as long as the public was eating up the stories the studio created and were giving them all their money, okay? All the studios jumped on board and started creating stars of their own because they saw how well this was working for them.

So this works out well for the studios because the movie-going public just wants to know everything about their favorite stars. And the press is more than happy to feed them because they're using movie stars to sell their products too, right? And in order to sell more and more papers, they start publishing some pretty wild stories of their own. Hmm.

juicy affairs, murder cover-ups, wild drug parties. But the studios didn't love these stories because they worked really hard to create and keep squeaky clean images of their movie stars. You know, something that people would want to be. So

So when nasty rumors started to spread about these golden geese, they took it upon themselves to cover it up. And then it all comes to a head in 1921 when a popular comedian and movie star named Roscoe Arbuckle is arrested for rape and murder. So Roscoe Arbuckle was born March 24th, 1887 in Smith Center, Kansas. Now Roscoe was a big baby when he was born,

Literally, like he weighed 13 pounds when he was born. So a big baby. That's a big boy. You know, this is important for two reasons. Number one, it gave his mother chronic health problems that would kill her just 11 years later. And number two, it led to the creation of his nickname.

Fatty Arbuckle, which was the nickname he was most well known by. Now Fatty over here was a singer and a dancer who was discovered by a Hollywood bigwig in the early 1900s. He started appearing in silent comedies, which is weird, like silent comedies. What do you think about it? Like how? I don't know. Anyways, but the joke was usually about his weight and soon he became one of the most famous comedians in America.

Knock, knock, knock. Who's there?

We don't really know exactly what happened at this party, but what we do know is someone named Virginia Rappe started feeling very sick. Some sources say that she started screaming at the party and when her friends asked her like, "What's wrong? What's wrong?" She started yelling, "He did it!" Others say that once she started feeling sick, she just went home and immediately hopped into bed and she just never got out.

Whatever the case was, a few days later, she died. And it was later determined she had a ruptured bladder. So a friend of hers went public and said that the reason her bladder was ruptured was because she had been raped to death by Fatty Arbuckle.

The press caught wind of what happened and it quickly became the biggest story in the country. Soon, rumors started circulating about how Fatty had been abusive to this woman, slapping her around and forcing her to have sex with him. Other stories said the reason she died was because Fatty was, well, fat and crushed her to death.

He went to trial a total of three times on three different sets of charges, but he was never convicted. But the trial took so long that it didn't matter. Fatty's image was completely destroyed, his films were banned, and his career never recovered. So the studios weren't so worried about Virginia. From their perspective, they had invested lots of time and money into making Fatty a star, and all of that was now lost.

The other studios took notice as well. So they realized how destructive and expensive a scandal like that would be for them too. The studios decided to make sure that something like this would never happen again. So enter to the scene, The Fixer.

Now, fixers came in two flavors. They were either bodyguard types or public relations hacks. The studio hired them to investigate any problems popping up with their stars or even things that looked like they could be a problem. Then they would fix them. Fun fact, the word fixer actually comes from the word used to describe someone who gets rid of bodies or cleans up evidence at crime scenes. Hmm.

But first, we're going to pause for an ad break. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.

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Your cash back really adds up. There are stars as people, but as little money-making machines who have to present a perfect image to the public at all costs. Now, this would become especially bad when we see the studios use their fixers and their power to create and control their stars from a very young age, force-feeding them drugs to stay awake and drugs to fall asleep and working 18-hour days before they're even 17 years old.

Basically, if you wanted to be a star, your life was no longer your own. You see, actresses had it pretty much the worst. Okay, look, their hair was usually dyed and cut instantly after they signed their contract. Then they were forced to stay under a certain weight. And if they couldn't do it on their own, the fixers would step in to keep food away from them, swiping it out of their hand.

slapping it. Slappers, slapping the food away. Instead, they fed them things like coffee and diet pills. So, that's nice. The actresses even had appearance reviews with the studio heads, and even their names would be changed. You were just a blank slate, baby. MGM once held a contest to have the public vote on the stage name for a young actress named Lucille. And that's how Lucille became Joan Crawford. Girl.

Yeah, we're talking about you. Fun fact, Joan always hated her new name because it reminded her of crayfish. Can I just say, side note, I just finished Mommy Dearest not that long ago. Joan, Joan, Joan, Joan, Joan. Not you, girl. Joan Crawford, she was something. Wow. Maybe another day. Okay, but anyways, you should read that if you haven't.

And okay, look, it wasn't just superficial stuff. The studios didn't let you have relationships with like your kids without their permission. They called this a morality clause, which they could kind of use to apply to just about anything. The big problem with these morality clauses was that they gave studio heads the legal power to basically say anything was in violation of it. For example, let's say a female star got pregnant.

The studio could make her get an abortion because it was a violation of her morality clause, which many times was just a reflection of the religious and social idea of the studio head and the public at the time. So the morality clause would end up feeling like a prison sentence in a way. So the studios didn't care about what kind of effect this would have on the actor as a person. And if they didn't cooperate with the studio, the studio would straight up ruin their lives.

One of the most disturbing examples of an actress who was wildly abused by the studio system and never got any justice was Patricia Douglas. Okay, so Patricia, Patricia, Patricia Douglas, she was born in 1917 in Kansas City. And like many girls of the era, she was drawn to the glamour of Hollywood.

So she headed out west and she became a dancer and a background actor in movies. Now she was only 16 years old in 1933 when she got her big break and started appearing on screen in movies for MGM. Now part of the whole deal that stars had in their contracts with studios was that they were required to go to parties to promote their brand.

So Patricia was contractually required to show up, make nice, take some photos, schmooze about, you know, normal Hollywood BS, no big deal. Except MGM never told Patricia that this one party they sent her to was a bachelor party for one of the studio employees. And the female attendees were expected to have sexual relations with the men there.

This might be a good time to point out that Patricia was still a teenager at the time, and so were many of the other girls at this party. Patricia wasn't a big enough star that the studio wanted to protect her, but she was just famous enough that she would be enticing to partygoers. At the party, Patricia was raped.

So the fixers step in to do their thing, cover up the incident and make it go away, including trying to force Patricia to keep quiet. However, Patricia had been in Hollywood for a few years by this point and knew all about these like types of shenanigans that went down. So she immediately went to the press and told them what happened. Now, unfortunately for Patricia, the press reported on the event, but instead of saying what really happened, they downplayed everything.

The media once again, uh huh, am I right? Yeah, come on. Everything bad, everything bad, yeah. Now despite the press hanging Patricia out to dry, behind the scenes the studio was in a huge panic. Louis Mayer, who was the head of MGM, needed to deal with this quote unquote problem. And he needed to deal with it now. So Louis hired his personal fixer to start convincing people to say this never happened.

And on top of that, they were going to start poking holes in Patricia's entire life story. One young actress who was at the party denied that it was a rape in any way. And she actually described the party as a jolly affair with lots of good, clean fun. Other party goers started saying Patricia was a huge drunk and was making everything up to get attention. And the final nail in the coffin, well, that came when Patricia tried to sue the studio.

Now, it turns out the studio's fixer paid off Patricia's lawyer, and on the day of the trial, he never showed up. Patricia didn't know. She ended up losing the case, and just like that, her time in Hollywood was done and over with. Could you imagine? And worse, the studios realized that once again, they could solve any problem by just throwing money at it instead of changing their behavior, because that's too much work.

Patricia's story is probably the best example of what would happen if anyone spoke up about the studios. Hers was perhaps a cautionary tale. People were afraid of the studios and the studios liked it that way. And the studio's bully reputation really gets highlighted with the next character in our story. Somebody who tried to cooperate with all the madness instead of fighting back. A woman named Margarita Carmen Cancino. Oh, let's pause for an ad break first. This

Visit BetterHelp.com slash Dark History today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Dark History. Garita was born on October 17th, 1918. Hey, isn't that when the Spanish flu started?

It might be. Shout out to you, Spanish flu. Hey. Now from the start, she was a smart and committed girl who wanted to make everyone around her happy. Her father, Eduardo, was born in Spain and was a pretty successful dancer. But in early 1931, he hit some hard times and he stopped getting jobs. Cash was drying up and he needed to solve this problem fast. That's when Eduardo got the idea to have his daughter join the act.

and he decides to like really play up how exotic the name "Cansino" is. So he takes his daughter to a beauty salon. He has her hair dyed black, and from that day forward, the two of them would perform in casinos all over the West Coast. The Cansinos would make a decent living as a father-daughter dance duo called the Dancing Cansinos down in Tijuana. But Margarita didn't know about any of the money they made,

You see, Eduardo would send her out to the river to catch fish for dinner, saying that they couldn't afford any food. And if Margarita couldn't catch any fish, he would beat her, just making it like a point only to hit her in places the audience wouldn't see the next night, all while screaming at her about how stupid she was.

Neighbors who lived near them at the time would later say that Margarita never said a word and just promised she'd get everything right the next day. Now you might think it doesn't make much sense that Eduardo couldn't afford to feed either of them and you'd be right. I mean it turns out Eduardo would get paid for the performances and they immediately spend all the cash on alcohol or gambling. But

But the two big reasons Eduardo took Margarita out to Tijuana were that Margarita was a minor and wasn't allowed to perform in local LA nightclubs.

And two, at the time it was a popular place for Hollywood moguls to just go hang out, have a drink, and enjoy the local sex workers. He was really hoping to make Margarita a star, and he wanted to make sure she would do anything he said to like make that happen. So when Margarita was 16 years old, she had her first big break. A Fox executive happened to catch one of her performances and immediately signed her to a six month contract.

The only condition that executive had was Margarita had to change her name. So she did to Rita Consino. Rita appeared in 16 films between 1934 and 1937. Eventually, she met two men who would change the course of her life forever.

The first guy, Eddie Judson, was like her father and he was obsessed with Rita becoming a star. The two of them got married in 1937, the year they met, and Eddie immediately got to work setting up publicity events for his wife all around town, telling her he would leave her if she didn't cooperate.

Because of this, she earned the nickname the most cooperative girl in town. Like what a great nickname. Thanks. Thanks. He also forced her to dye her naturally brown hair a deep red because he thought she looked too Latina.

He even made her go through painful electrolysis treatments to move her hairline back and attempt to look more white. With her brand new look, Rita was attracting all the big power players in town. Rita's husband, Eddie, arranged a meeting with a second man who would change the course of her life. His name was Harry Cohn. How come everyone's name is Henry or Harry or... Those are like the two. Everyone's name was that.

Harry was the head of the 20th Century Fox studio. Yeah, so money, great. Harry told Eddie that he loved what he saw, aka a cash cow that could be sold to the public as both the wholesome girl next door and the exotic sex pot at the same time. But he tells Eddie he has two conditions for signing a deal with her. First, she has to change her name, again,

Harry wants Rita to go for something more all-American. So she agrees to take her mother's maiden name and becomes Rita Hayworth. Yes, that Rita Hayworth. Now the second condition Harry had was more controversial.

Harry told Eddie he needed to have sex with Rita. When Rita hears this, she finally snaps. Snaps. Because, by the way, Rita has been in this meeting the entire time these two men were having a meeting about her career. Just no one's talking to her, right? Rita tells the men there's no chance in hell that something like that is ever going to happen. Harry gives in and agrees to sign Rita to a seven-year contract. But from this point on, he makes sure to make...

Rita's life a living hell. Well, remember the fixers from earlier? Whenever Rita was on shoots, Harry would have a fixer place a bug in her dressing room to make sure she wasn't saying anything bad about him, you know, to listen in. Harry also gave himself a final say regarding anything having to do with Rita. So Harry was right about one thing. The public loved Rita Hayworth. I mean, she starred in a bunch of films over the next few years, including her most iconic role

Gilda, where Rita played the femme fatale in a detective thriller. And Rita owned that role so much it became synonymous with her public image. Fun fact, when the United States government was testing atom bombs in World War II, there was actually a picture of Rita Hayworth painted on the side of one of them. And the name of that bomb? Gilda!

Eventually, Rita became so famous that she was able to leave Eddie and move on to a string of other famous affairs. She had five husbands in total. We're not judging.

a little. One of the most prominent of those husbands was a man named Orson Welles. In 1942 he was known for being a 25 year old boy wonder who made a film called Citizen Kane. Rita was completely smitten with Orson who she thought was charming, handsome, and just like so talented and the two got married in 1943 during one of Rita's lunch breaks on her film shoot.

After they took their vows, a friend asked Rita, what's next for the happy couple? Like, what are you guys up to? And Rita was like, I gotta get back to the studio. So that was their honeymoon, I guess. The funny thing is, is that Orson Welles would later say that Rita never actually liked being a star, but she didn't wanna let anyone down. You know, she was already there. Her friends would say she seemed happiest whenever she was with Orson, which would be cute if Orson Welles hadn't cheated on her with countless other women.

like Judy Garland, but more on that later. It was around this time that Orson began outright ignoring his wife for months at a time. The cheating didn't bother Rita, but the neglect did. She filed for divorce in 1948. Apparently during the divorce, Rita told Orson, "'The only happiness I've ever had in my life has been with you.'" And Orson responded with, "'Well, if this was happiness, imagine what the rest of your life has been.'"

So, he seemed like a really nice guy. Aww.

Rita Hayworth would spend the rest of her life chasing love, garnering the affection of many powerful men who either expected her to be Gilda the sexpot or wanted to control her. At one point, she even married a prince. Yeah. And she was like straight up a princess. Like good for her. By the 60s, Rita began to suffer from early onset Alzheimer's, but she wasn't diagnosed until 1980. Like that's a long time. Yeah. The

The studio blamed her inability to remember lines on alcoholism. Super nice. Then came Dorothy herself, none other than the iconic Judy Garland. Oh, yes. If Patricia was an example of somebody trying to speak out against the studio system and Rita was an example of somebody just trying to go with the toxic flow, then Judy is the best example of somebody who tried both ways

to disastrous results, sadly. Now we're gonna pause for an ad break. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.

This is an ad by BetterHelp.

Poor, poor Judy. She's still one of the most iconic movie stars in the world.

She made quite a few movies, to say the least, but her most famous role was in The Wizard of Oz.

But what you may not know is that she was abused for most of her life by the studios that wanted nothing except for her to be their lap dog, their cash cow, their money maker. She was Britney Spears before Britney Spears was Britney Spears. You know what I'm saying? Like Judy, poor, poor Judy. Bless her soul. Judy over here was born Frances Gum in Minnesota on June 10th, 1922.

She always preferred the name Judy because of a popular song, but nobody really knows where she got Garland from, like what was that about, but it's okay, you know.

She was the daughter of two old-time stage performers, and because of that, she started training in dancing and singing at a very young age. Now, she appeared on stage for the first time when she was just 12 years old, and from that point on, she pretty much never left. At age 13 years old, MGM signed her to be their next big star. Just a few years later, she started acting in major films, and by the time she was just 17, she starred in The Wizard of Oz.

Well, her experience as a 17-year-old on set wasn't like freaking what you would expect. It was terrible, upsetting, and freaking dangerous. For starters, they wanted her to work 18 hours a day for six days a week. And in order to stay awake, the studio would give her speed. Yeah.

And when it was time to sleep, for the three or four hours she was allowed, they would give her a sleeping pill. To keep her weight where they wanted it, she was given a daily diet of black coffee, chicken soup, and diet pills, and phenamines, and 80 cigarettes. Four packs a day. She's how old? She's 17. She's 17 years old. What are they doing? They didn't give a shit. They didn't give a fuck.

The crazier thing about it is that like all this was legal because she'd signed a contract.

And they had a fixer to protect the details from getting to the press. To make it even more fucked up, they would only give her things like food and sleep when they thought she did good work, like as a reward system. If she said she was tired or she like didn't want to do something, they would say that she didn't care about her friends at the studio or that she would make everyone lose their jobs just playing some serious mind games and putting a lot of pressure on her.

So Judy learned at a very young age how to give people what they wanted in order to get what she needed. Needed as in what she needed to just survive. So when The Wizard of Oz took off, things actually got even worse for her because the studio wanted to make more and more movies to keep making more and more money, right? So eventually Judy realized the studio needed her and she would fight back like in her own way, for example.

Judy decided she wanted a family, but she knew the studio would never allow it. So she decided to get pregnant and hide her pregnancy until she started showing. Once her pregnancy was that far along, there was nothing the studio could do about it, you know? Unfortunately, before Judy's pregnancy could get to the safe window, Judy's own mother would expose this secret to the MGM studio.

And they did exactly what Judy feared. They forced her to get an abortion. Their reasoning? The public wasn't ready to see her as a mother.

That's fucked up. As time went on, Judy sank into a deep depression. I wonder why. We just don't know. We just don't know. They had her working these long hours, insane expectations on and off screens. This had major psychological effects on her as well as physical, which is not surprising. Judy once said the studio became a haunted house for her. Every day when she went to work, she had tears in her eyes and

and resistance in her heart and mind. Judy once missed 17 straight days of filming because she wasn't feeling well. So when a director of one of her films asked about it, she said like, "It's a struggle to get through the day. I use these pills. They carry me through." Instead of adjusting their expectations, the studio charged her $100,000 for the cost of her psychiatric care and their lost time.

Like her drug problem was a burden to them as if they didn't force feed it to her for years. As years go on, Judy has a harder and harder time performing due to her struggles with eating disorders, sleeping, suicide attempts, and drug use.

She would go in and out of treatment centers through marriages and divorces, and her health just started to decline, and money became even harder to come by. The narrative portrayed to the public by the studios and their fixers was that she was a tormented artist who was difficult to work with and couldn't control herself. So of course she's putting the blame all on Miss Judy.

No matter what Judy said to try and draw attention to the fact that she was abused throughout her time with MGM, no one at MGM was ever held accountable. Sadly, Judy Garland died from an accidental drug overdose in 1969 after consuming the very same sleeping pills MGM gave her in the first place when she was just a child.

So the golden age of Hollywood was not at all that glamorous, now was it? I mean, this was just a little tiny little snippet of a huge ass problem that still goes on today. Thank you so much. From the smoke-filled studio parties where young women were raped to the erasing of all identities as a way to like fully controlling the sleep and diet of their biggest stars. Accountability was nowhere to be found.

So if you want to end on some kind of bittersweet note, after Rita Hayworth died in 1987, her agent reflected on a trip they took to Brazil. You see, one day, Rita disappeared from the group, like panicked. Everyone was like searching for her everywhere. She was nowhere to be found.

But then the phone rang and a voice says, hey, I heard you're looking for Rita Hayworth. She's a mile up the road on the beach. So her agent and her family, they all head to the beach to like where they see a group of kids flying beautiful, colorful kites. And sitting in the middle of all the kids was Rita Hayworth with a huge smile on her face. Her agent says he had never seen her so happy before.

be well everyone thank you so much for learning with me today a little bit of um you know how dark hollywood's past really was you know there's also something else like did you know hollywood used to be called hollywood land we should do an episode on that

Anyways, remember don't be afraid to ask questions to get the whole story because we deserve that, don't we? Yeah, we do. Now I'd love to hear your reactions to the story so make sure to use the hashtag darkhistory so I can follow along over on social media. And don't forget to join me over on my YouTube where you can watch these episodes on Thursday after the podcast airs and also catch Murder, Mystery, and Makeup which drops every Monday. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. I hope you have a wonderful day and you make good choices.

Dark History is an Audioboom original. A very special thank you to one of our historical consultants, Movikarma, who can be found on Instagram at M-O-V-I-K-A-R-M-A.

This podcast is executive produced by Bailey Sarian, Kim Jacobs, Dunia McNeely from 3Arts, Ed Simpson, and Claire Turner from Wheelhouse DNA. Produced by Lexi Kiven. Research provided by Ramona Kivitt. Writers Jed Bookout, Michael Oberst, Joey Scavuzzo, and Kim Yagid. And me, Bailey Sarian. And a big thank you to our historical consultants, Mova Karma and David Lazar.

And I'm your host, Bailey Sarian. Bye! Amazon Pharmacy presents Painful Thoughts. I'm sick. So I took my sick to the doctor. The doctor gave my sick a prescription. Now my sick and I are in line at the pharmacy, mingling with all the other sicks, on its way to becoming an even worse sick.

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27: The Dark Side to the Golden Age of Hollywood