Random In Old Hollywood Child Stars Were Forced To Do Drugs, And Other Awful Realities (13 items)

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  (#13) Judy Garland Was Forced To Have Two Abortions

  Yet another brutality forced on young Judy Garland, she was no longer, legally-speaking, a child, but she was still under the thumb of MGM and an overbearing stage mother. She was also still playing teenagers in a string of successful films for the studio. When she got pregnant at 20 years old, the studio and her mother conspired to get her an abortion. A couple years later, she became pregnant again and, again, was forced to have an abortion. Garland herself called the abortions "inhumane actions" and never forgave herself.
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  (#8) Jackie Coogan's Parents Squandered His Fortune

  Another very real threat faced by many child actors of Old Hollywood came not from a cold-hearted studio system, but from within their own families. The most famous case of this is Jackie Coogan, the wildly popular child star of Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, Oliver Twist, Tom Sawyer, and dozens of other movies (as an adult, he played Uncle Fester on The Addams Family). From his childhood work, he had amassed a fortune somewhere between $3 and $4 million. When he turned 21, however, he discovered that his mother and stepfather had spent nearly all of his money, leading lavish lifestyles on their son's hard-earned dime. Jackie sued them and won, but after legal fees, he only recouped about $126,000. As a result, in 1939, the California Child Actor's Bill - also known as the Coogan Act - was passed by the state legislature, which ensured that studios who employed child actors placed 15% of any child performer's pay in a special trust.
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  (#12) Baby LeRoy Was Terrorized By W.C. Fields

  At 16 months, Baby LeRoy became the youngest person ever to be put under a movie studio contract. He is most well-known for three W.C. Fields films he did in 1933 and 1934, but Fields was no fan of the infant star. Director Norman McLeod said, "He believed that Baby LeRoy was stealing scenes from him...He used to swear at the baby so much in front of the camera that I sometimes had to cut off the ends of the scenes in which they appeared." It's also rumored that Fields once spiked Baby LeRoy's baby bottle with gin in an attempt to quiet the fussy infant. Baby LeRoy retired at age three.
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  (#6) Judy Garland Was Sexually Assaulted On The Set Of 'The Wizard Of Oz'

  The indignities heaped upon Judy Garland in her early career are shockingly high in number. While still a teen during the filming of The Wizard of Oz, she was groped on set by some of the actors who portrayed Munchkins. Garland's third husband, producer Sid Luft, revealed the abuse decades later in a memoir. "[The actors who groped her] thought they could get away with anything because they were so small," Luft recalled. "They would make Judy’s life miserable on set by putting their hands under her dress. The men were 40 or more years old."
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  (#9) Jay North Was Abused By His Aunt

  He was beloved the world over as Dennis the Menace, but child actor Jay North faced a very different menace off the screen. In between Dennis the Menace's shooting schedule, he would travel around the country with his aunt and uncle doing promotional events for the show; his aunt was also his minder on set. But decades later, North revealed that he was abused by her both physically and verbally whenever he didn't meet her exacting standards. Like many victims of abuse, he lived in a world tightly controlled by his abuser. His aunt isolated him from the rest of the cast, and she even dyed his hair to ensure his famous locks stayed a particular shade of blond.
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  (#2) MGM Fed Judy Garland And Mickey Rooney A Constant Supply Of Drugs

  Mickey Rooney worked as a child actor at MGM alongside Judy Garland. The two were frequently paired together on screen as teenagers, but beneath their happy veneer was a very dark secret. The studio was feeding them a near-constant supply of pills to keep them in performance mode. Garland later said:

  They had us [Judy and Mickey] working days and nights on end. They'd give us pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they'd take us to the studio hospital and knock us out with sleeping pills - Mickey sprawled out on one bed and me on another. Then after four hours, they'd wake us up and give us the pep pills again so we could work 72 hours in a row. Half of the time, we were hanging from the ceiling, but it was a way of life for us.

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