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

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  (#1) Judy Garland Was Forced To Develop An Eating Disorder To Maintain Her Weight

  It's reasonable to assume that few would call Judy Garland a "fat little pig in pigtails." But that's exactly what studio execs told the 14-year-old Garland when she first tried to enter show biz. After signing with MGM, Garland was immediately put on a strict diet and had her calories counted by the execs. In fact, sometimes, she would reach for a plate of food, only to have it swiftly taken from her.

  Whenever Garland snuck away from set to have a snack, execs would inform each other about her diet-breaking actions in internalized memos. When she was 18, to avoid this cheating, she was encouraged to smoke 80 cigarettes a day. She was even forced to pop pep pills to keep her awake and quell her appetite. However, this only perpetuated a cycle of binging and purging that likely contributed to her eventual death.
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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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  (#3) Natalie Wood Was Allegedly Raped By A Famous Actor

  When she was a 16-year-old child star, Natalie Wood was reportedly raped, repeatedly, by a superstar actor who claimed he could help her land more mature film roles. According to one of her biographers, Wood long said that this actor made her his "sexual hostage" during the encounter, in which she was lured to a hotel room under the pretense of auditioning. Though the identity of her attacker has never been completely certain, rumors have long persisted that it was Kirk Douglas.
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  (#4) Shirley Temple Was Just 12 Years Old When She Almost Fell Victim To The Casting Couch

  Arthur Freed was a high-powered film producer during the Golden Age of Hollywood, with The Wizard of Oz, Easter Parade, and Singin' in the Rain among his many credits. Shirley Temple, arguably the most famous child star of all time, was looking to transition to more grown-up film roles when, as a 12-year-old in 1941, she was invited to Freed's office. In her autobiography, Temple recounted their meeting. "To visit an executive of such stature was enough to send my spirits soaring," she wrote. During the meeting, however, Freed had other things on his mind. He unzipped his pants and exposed himself to the pre-teen. Frightened and nervous by the unexpected turn of events, Temple says she started giggling, which enraged Freed and likely saved her from an even more traumatizing experience. "'Get out!' he shouted, unmindful of his disarray, imperiously pointing to the closed door. 'Go on, get out!'"
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  (#5) Tommy Kirk Was Fired After Walt Disney Found Out He Was Gay

  In the 1950s and '60s, Tommy Kirk was one of the most popular and prolific child actors of the era, a bona fide Disney superstar. But Kirk was far from happy. "I knew I was gay, but I had no outlet for my feelings," he said in a 1993 interview. "It was very hard to meet people, and, at that time, there was no place to go to socialize. It wasn't until the early '60s that I began to hear of places where gays congregated." At one of those places, he met a 15-year-old boy who he started dating. But when Walt Disney caught word of the relationship, he promptly fired Kirk. "I was caught having sex with a boy at a public pool in Burbank. We were both young, and the boy's mother went to Walt," he told Movieline. "I was quickly fired."
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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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  (#7) Bobby Driscoll Was Fired By Disney After He Got Acne During Puberty

  Throughout the '40s, Bobby Driscoll was an acclaimed child star who made dozens of high-profile movies and even won a juvenile Academy Award. He was the first actor Walt Disney ever put under contract. But by the early '50s, Driscoll was growing up - a cardinal sin for a successful child actor. Though he had just signed an extension on his contract, Driscoll was fired by Disney and the contract canceled. And all because the onset of puberty came with a serious bout of acne. The studio claimed his acne would be impossible to cover up with makeup, and this was apparently reason enough for them to terminate his contract. Driscoll ended up drifting for the rest of his life, becoming addicted to drugs and eventually dying, penniless and alone, in 1968 at age 31. No one claimed his body, and he was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave.
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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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  (#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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  (#10) MGM Tried To Remake Elizabeth Taylor

  MGM was having a hard time finding the right child actress to play the lead in National Velvet, but when they found a virtually unknown Elizabeth Taylor, they knew they'd hit the jackpot. In the leadup to filming, however, the studio tried to remake her into their own image of what a star should look like. She was 12. To prepare her for filming, they had her baby teeth pulled out and forced her to wear braces. They also wanted to give her a more masculine haircut, but her parents refused. They also wanted to change her name to Virginia but were again refused. It was the first, but certainly not the last, time that Elizabeth Taylor would be treated more like a product than a person.
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  (#11) Allen Hoskins Was Forced Into A Damaging African American Stereotype

  It's no secret that Old Hollywood was not the most culturally sensitive or politically correct environment. But many of the only roles African American actors were offered at the time just furthered damaging stereotypes about Black people. Take Allen Hoskins, for instance. Hoskins is famous for playing Farina in more than 100 Our Gang (a.k.a. The Little Rascals) movies. Viewed through a modern lens, there is nothing remotely okay with how Farina as a character is portrayed or the things Hoskins had to do in the name of the character. His hair was typically in pigtails, his clothes - often girls' nightgowns - were shoddy and patched together, and his image and mannerisms were a grotesque caricature. And when Hoskins had outgrown the role, the media crucified him for simply aging out of his most famous character.

  "Master Hoskins is graduated from the Gang because he is no longer little and cute," The Register of Sandusky, Ohio, wrote.
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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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  (#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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