Judy Garland’s third husband has a posthumous memoir out, and parts of it will be very uncomfortable reading for “Wizard of Oz” fans.
In “Judy and I: My Life With Judy Garland,” Sid Luft claims that the 16-year-old Garland was groped by Munchkins on set, People reports.
“They thought they could get away with anything because they were so small,” he wrote. “They would make Judy’s life miserable on set by putting their hands under her dress. The men were 40 or more years old.” Luft, who was married to Garland from 1952 to 1965 and fathered two of her children, died in 2005.
Garland died from an overdose at 47 in 1969. The unfinished memoir was found among Luft’s papers last year and has now been published, the Sun reports.
There have long been rumors of misbehavior among the movie’s 120 or so Munchkins, and the Guardian recounts tales of wild hotel parties. However, the last survivor, Jerry Maren, says the only troublemakers were a “couple of kids from Germany who liked to drink beer.” In the memoir, Luft, a manager and producer who engineered her comeback, details Garland’s drug abuse and suicide attempts.
He rarely spoke about her when he was alive, though in 2001, he told the Telegraph: “Whatever bad things happened, you don’t fall out of love with somebody like her. All I know is that if anyone tried to save a woman who was breaking apart, I did.”
Last month, Garland’s remains were moved from New York to Hollywood.