At 13 Judy Garland signed with MGM, and the studio decided she was too fat, put her on chicken soup, black coffee and cigarettes, and handed her pills to keep her going and more pills to knock her out, and by the time she finished The Wizard of Oz she was hooked on both. She had been on stage since she was two, as Frances Gumm, the youngest of the Gumm Sisters. Her mother, Ethel, managed her, and according to her biographer first gave her pills, for energy and for sleep, before she was ten. Judy later called her mother the real Wicked Witch of the West. MGM signed her in 1935. Louis B. Mayer and the studio bosses reportedly called her a fat little pig with pigtails. Mayer insisted on the diet himself: chicken soup, black coffee and cigarettes, with pills to take her appetite away. The studio supplied the pep pills, and when they left her too wired to sleep after the long days on set, it supplied sleeping pills for that. She and Mickey Rooney, she said later, were worked "days and nights on end", once for 72 hours straight, and kept going on pills. She was 16 when filming began on The Wizard of Oz, and by the time it ended she was addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates. The girl in the gingham dress singing about somewhere over the rainbow was being starved by the studio and dosed by it. The rest of her life was pills, husbands, comebacks and collapses. "At times," she said, "I have been pretty much of a walking advertisement for sleeping pills." She died in London on 22 June 1969, aged 47, of an accidental overdose of barbiturates. At MGM a growing girl's hunger was treated as the problem, and the studio had a chemical for it. Hollywood has never stopped thinking that way. It has only changed the delivery, from a bottle of pills to a weekly injection.