Frances Gumm became Judy Garland after a Chicago laugh at Gumm
Vaudeville’s Gumm Sisters drew giggles for their surname until George Jessel pushed a change. Frances Ethel Gumm reinvented herself as Judy Garland, signed with MGM at thirteen, and soon wore Dorothy’s shoes—while remaining Hollywood’s anxiously managed “girl next door.”
Born June 10, 1922 in Grand Rapids, Minnesota to theatre-running vaudevillians Ethel and Francis Gumm, she first sang “Jingle Bells” on her father’s stage at age two. After a 1926 move to Lancaster, California, Meglin Kiddies shorts and circuit tours built the act. In 1934 Chicago, Jessel urged a prettier name—stories credit Carole Lombard’s Lily Garland, critic Robert Garland, or a “garland of flowers” quip. By late 1934 they were Garland Sisters; Frances chose Judy from a Hoagy Carmichael song.
Burton Lane’s tip sent her to Louis B. Mayer; MGM signed the thirteen-year-old after she sang “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.” At four feet eleven and a half inches she was squeezed between child and adult casting, fitted with tooth caps and nose discs, and needled by Mayer’s “little hunchback” label. Father Francis died of meningitis in November 1935. Pairings with Mickey Rooney in backyard musicals and, above all, The Wizard of Oz (1939) made “Over the Rainbow” her signature.
Serious roles in the 1954 remake of A Star Is Born and the 1961 courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremberg each earned Academy Award nominations. Judy at Carnegie Hall (1961) made her the first woman to win the Grammy for Album of the Year; that year she also became the youngest Cecil B. DeMille Award honoree. Eleven studio albums spanned 1939–1962. Dependency on prescribed stimulants and sleep drugs shadowed the workload; she died June 22, 1969, aged forty-seven, of accidental barbiturate overdose. The AFI later ranked her eighth among classic Hollywood stars.
Source: Judy Garland
