LOS ANGELES — Judy Garland, the voice that carried “Over the Rainbow” into every corner of American life, earned an estimated $10.8 million across a four-decade career, yet died in London in June 1969 at age 47 with roughly $40,000 in liquid assets and approximately $4 million in debt, most of it owed to the Internal Revenue Service.

The numbers, drawn from her estate and confirmed by her husband after her death, describe one of the most extreme financial collapses in entertainment history. They also describe something more troubling: a documented system of contracts, guardianship law, and industry practice that was built, from the beginning, to ensure the money Garland earned never fully belonged to her.

The paper trail begins in October 1935, when MGM’s legal department filed a contract for a 13-year-old girl from Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The document listed her birth date as January 10, 1923. Her actual birthday was June 10, 1922 — six months earlier.

Someone had moved the date forward to make her appear younger than she was, for reasons the contract never explained.

The starting salary was $100 a week. The person who negotiated those terms and signed as the girl’s legal guardian was her mother. Her name at birth was Frances Ethel Gumm.

She had been performing since she was two and a half years old in a theater her father ran in northern Minnesota. By 12, she had played hundreds of vaudeville dates, radio spots, and club appearances.

MGM’s head of production signed her without a screen test. He heard her sing once and told his legal department to draw up the papers. She wanted to be wanted, she said herself decades later.

The only time she felt wanted as a child was when she was performing. That need, which an audience could feel from the back of a room, was also what made her useful.

A girl who performs to feel loved will perform under almost any conditions. MGM understood this. So did her mother.

Ethel Gumm had been a vaudevillian herself, a pianist and accompanist who married into the business and never made it the way she had imagined. She had been steering her daughters’ careers since her youngest was barely out of diapers.

When Judy’s father died of meningitis in November 1935, the same month the MGM contract took effect, Ethel became sole parent and guardian and filed immediately to receive a chaperone stipend drawn directly from Judy’s weekly salary. California law required a legal guardian to sign any contract involving a minor. Judy did not negotiate.

She signed what her mother handed her and walked onto the lot.

The Coogan Law did not yet exist. Jackie Coogan had earned somewhere between $3 million and $4 million as a child star in the silent film era. He sued his mother in 1938 to recover it.

By the time the case settled, he received less than $126,000. The lawsuit was public, and in 1939 the California legislature passed a bill requiring that a portion of a child actor’s earnings be set aside in a protected trust.

The law was named after Coogan. It was also, in almost every practical sense, written around him, because the entertainment industry had lobbyists and the children did not. Judy was 16 when the Coogan Law passed.

She was already two years into her MGM contract, and almost none of the law’s protections would reach her because of three specific flaws, each one worse than the last.

The original Coogan Law set no mandatory percentage. It gave judges discretionary power to require a trust of up to 50 percent of the child’s earnings, meaning a judge had to be asked, could refuse, could set any amount they felt appropriate, and no external body audited what happened to the rest. In practice, unless someone petitioned the court and paid the legal costs of doing so, nothing was protected at all.

There is no confirmed public record that a Coogan trust was ever formally established for Judy Garland. More importantly, the law calculated whatever protected amount was ordered from net income, not gross. For Garland, that distinction was the difference between protection and nothing.

The fees Ethel collected as her daughter’s chaperone came out of Judy’s earnings first, before the net figure was ever calculated.

Every dollar Ethel took reduced the pool that any court-ordered trust would have been drawn from. Net meant after any managerial or chaperone fees paid to the parent had already been deducted. Ethel Gumm received that stipend in exchange for serving as Judy’s chaperone on set and guaranteeing that Judy obeyed the studio’s demands.

The Library of Congress Law Blog, in a 2022 analysis of child labor statutes, describes the arrangement in precisely those terms: Ethel was paid by the dollar solely to ensure her daughter’s compliance with her daughter’s employer. It was legal. It was not unusual.

Elizabeth Taylor’s mother had the identical deal, plus a separate 10 percent management fee drawn on top.

In other words, the law that was supposed to protect children like Judy had a chaperone fee loophole built directly into it. The very mechanism Ethel used to extract money from Judy’s salary was the same mechanism that guaranteed the law would barely apply. That was not an accident of drafting.

It was a lobbied outcome.

Judy’s salary at signing was $100 a week. By August 1938, under the escalation terms of her original contract, it had reached $500 a week. That was the rate covering the production of “The Wizard of Oz.”

Her total earnings from the film came to $9,649. The film would go on to become one of the most watched motion pictures in American history. Garland would not see a dollar of its long-term revenue.

In September 1940, a new contract was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. Garland was 18, internationally famous, and under a deal that started at $2,000 a week escalating to $3,000 against an annual guarantee of $680,000. The new contract postdated the Coogan Law by a full year.

Whether a trust was ever formally established for her under its provisions is not confirmed in any publicly available record.

What the record does confirm is what MGM was doing with her in exchange for that salary. She was put on amphetamines to sustain 72-hour work shifts, then given sleeping pills to bring her down afterward. On the set of “The Wizard of Oz,” her diet was restricted to chicken soup, black coffee, and cigarettes.

A corset was fitted to flatten her chest and stomach.

Mayer, who ran the studio and had signed her contract, sexually harassed her for years, groping her, he told people, to demonstrate what gave her voice its feeling. An MGM executive, according to her biographer Gerald Clarke, called her a fat little pig in pigtails. Ethel Gumm, who was paid to ensure Judy obeyed the studio’s demands, does not appear to have raised her voice against any of this.

Margaret O’Brien, who co-starred with Garland in “Meet Me in St. Louis” in 1944, told an interviewer in January 2022 that her own mother had been willing to stand up to Mayer, and that Judy had told her plainly that Ethel was not. “I’m not saying anything out of turn,” O’Brien said, “because Judy mentioned that about her mother.”

By the early 1940s, Garland had begun finding her own footing. Psychoanalysis, introduced by a producer she was involved with, gave her a language for what had been done to her. Ethel’s formal managerial role receded as Judy reached adulthood and gained legal control of her own contracts.

But the pharmaceutical dependency Ethel had started, uppers in the morning and sleeping pills at night, begun before Judy turned 10, did not recede.

In a 1967 interview with Barbara Walters on the Today show, Garland said, “My mother was truly a stage mother, a mean one. She was very jealous because she had absolutely no talent.” Ethel Gumm had been dead for 14 years by then.

She died of a heart attack in Santa Monica in January 1953, estranged from her daughter, at roughly 56 years old. Judy was 30.

She did not pursue legal action. Ethel’s arrangement had been legal. The law had been written to accommodate it, and whatever claim might have existed had died in Santa Monica with her.

With Ethel Gumm gone and the MGM contract expired, Garland needed representation. In the 1960s, she found it, or thought she had.

Freddie Fields and David Begelman were two of the most powerful talent agents in Hollywood at the time, the kind of men whose phone calls got returned the same day. They ran Creative Management Associates, and they took Garland as a client when her career was in need of rebuilding. She trusted them with access to her finances.

That trust would cost her almost everything she had left.

Two more decades of the same followed. Her agents embezzled from her accounts through a pattern of forged checks and unauthorized withdrawals that a subsequent investigation placed at several hundred thousand dollars. The IRS placed liens on her home.

In July 1967, federal tax agents seized most of her remaining earnings.

In the spring of 1969, she was performing in a small Copenhagen hotel ballroom five nights a week, each fee going directly to creditors she would never fully pay down, in a room a fraction of the size of any stage she had filled 20 years before. She died in London that June. She was 47 years old.

Her estate held approximately $40,000 in liquid assets. Her outstanding debts, primarily to the IRS and partly traceable to her agents’ embezzlement, totaled approximately $4 million. Frank Sinatra paid for the funeral.

Her husband stated after her death that her estimated lifetime earnings were $10. 8 million.

The Coogan Law was reformed in the year 2000. The new version mandated that 15 percent of a child performer’s gross earnings, not net gross, be set aside in trust. It closed the chaperone fee loophole by name.

It declared for the first time in the statute’s history that the earnings belong to the minor.

That reform came 61 years after the original law and 31 years after Garland’s death. The contract that started everything was signed in October 1935, with a birth date six months off from the truth, at $100 a week, by a mother who had been managing her daughter’s appearances since the girl was two and a half years old.

At the end of a career that crossed four decades and earned her a place in every serious account of American popular music, the documented remainder was $40,000 and a debt the estate could not cover. The law that might have stopped it was not fixed until the year 2000. The gap between those two dates, 1935 and 2000, is the space in which Judy Garland’s fortune disappeared.