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The shadows deepened further as this prodigious child navigated a home life where her mother’s influence was less nurturing matriarch and more tyrannical stage director. Biographers have meticulously documented how, from an alarmingly young age, this mother regularly supplied her with a cocktail of pills—uppers to sustain her through grueling performances and downers to force sleep upon her exhausted frame. This horrifying routine, orchestrated by the very person meant to protect her, became an insidious pattern that would tragically define the rest of her existence. Speaking decades later, the star herself confessed the heartbreaking reality: “The only time I felt wanted when I was a kid was when I was on stage, performing.” This desperate craving for acceptance made her an easy target for manipulation, and her mother, described by the star in a candid 1967 interview with Barbara Walters as “mean” and “very jealous” due to her own lack of talent, exploited this vulnerability without remorse. She would stand in the wings, delivering chilling threats: “You get out and sing, or I’ll wrap you around the bedpost and break you off short!” The psychological torment was relentless, compounded by the star’s later claims that her mother had not only wanted to abort her but had also boasted about her schemes to induce miscarriages. This constant emotional and physical abuse left indelible scars, molding a fragile spirit desperate for love and validation, unknowingly preparing her for an even more predatory environment. But what happens when the confines of a suffocating family give way to the infinitely larger, more ruthless machinery of early Hollywood?
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