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Her home life, however, was anything but magical. Her mother had reportedly wanted to end the pregnancy but was unable to, and the family was shaken by ongoing rumors about the father’s secret relationships with teenage boys and young men.
In June 1926, the family quietly relocated to Lancaster, California, after whispers about her father’s personal life began to spread.
Her parents, who worked as vaudeville entertainers, had a marriage that was a constant cycle of breaking apart and coming back together, something she remembered vividly.
”It was very hard for me to understand those things and, of course, I remember clearly the fear I had of those separations,” she said.
Her mother was very jealous
As a small child, she was brought into nightclubs to perform at venues wildly inappropriate for someone her age.
Her biographers later wrote that her mother regularly gave her pills to stay awake, and others to help her sleep. It was a routine that would haunt her for the rest of her life.
As she later revealed in 1963, “The only time I felt wanted when I was a kid was when I was on stage, performing.”
Speaking with Barbara Walters in 1967, the star said her mother was a “mean” stage mother.
“She was very jealous because she had absolutely no talent,” she said. “She would stand in the wings, and if I didn’t feel good, she’d say, ‘You get out and sing, or I’ll wrap you around the bedpost and break you off short!’ So I’d go out and sing.”
In later years, she would often claim that her mother never her, that she had planned an abortion until a medical student friend convinced her parents otherwise, and even tried to induce a miscarriage.
“She must have rolled down nineteen thousand flights of stairs and jumped off tables,” she would say.
Her mother would also take delight in recounting her schemes and strategies to the neighborhood ladies.
Breakthrough
In 1935, the juvenile signed with MGM. Two years later, she finally appeared on screen when she performed “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It)” in Broadway Melody. It was the breakthrough she desperately needed. As writer John Fricke explained:
“One movie would be wrapping up and she’d been in rehearsals for the next one. This overlapping went on from the late ‘30s into the early ‘40s.”
But even as her career took off, the studio fed her insecurities. Louis B. Mayer allegedly called her “my little hunchback,” and she was put on a harsh regimen of cottage cheese, chicken broth, and amphetamine-laced diet pills to keep her weight down.
