Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (22 page)

Eventually a fire truck did come and put out the fire. Our rooms were okay, but the closets were damaged and the clothes ruined. Ironically, it turned out that there was a shaft running between Mark’s closet and my mom’s, so the smoke was sucked through to her side and had ruined all her clothes. She was furious when she found out her plan had backfired. That was the end of her calm demeanor. When the firemen finally emerged with the news that the fire was extinguished, she told them that it had been started by “something electrical,” which was patently ridiculous since the clothes had obviously burned first. The firemen, though, didn’t ask a single question. Instead, they all lined up to get Mama’s autograph. Somehow, it seemed appropriate. A perfectly ridiculous ending to a perfectly ridiculous day.

By that time I was too tired to worry much about anything. My only concern was Mark and what would happen if, and when, he came back. I needn’t have worried. He and Mama made up as quickly as they’d parted. That night Joey and I found ourselves on a plane back to L.A., while my mother and Mark spent a few days alone. I came home careworn but otherwise all right. I had survived my first major crisis, but I’d only begun to learn the same hard lessons my father was still struggling to master.

Until that week in Hawaii in 1965 I’d really never seen one of my mother’s crises firsthand. Up until then I had been pretty well protected. I’d known for a long time that my father hadn’t let my mother sleep in a room with a lock on the door, but I’d really never thought about why. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that
my dad had originally removed the locks from her rooms when I was only a few weeks old. In the grip of her postpartum depression following my birth, my mom had made a suicide attempt, and my father had broken down a door to get to her, injuring his shoulder in the process. After that, there were no more locks. My father knew that it wasn’t her first attempt to harm herself.

It wasn’t her last attempt, either. She’d overdosed with barbiturates after Joey’s birth, again in the grip of a deep postpartum depression. Two years later she’d slit her wrists in a Washington hotel, with me and Joey asleep in the next room, oblivious to the whole episode. In 1961 she’d tried to throw herself out a hotel window; poor Vern Alves had to drag her back in and hold her down until she quit thrashing. Later that same year she’d been hospitalized with an intentional drug overdose. By the time she died, she’d had her stomach pumped so many times, it’s a wonder she had one left.

Those of us who were close to her don’t believe that Mama ever had any real intention of killing herself. When you really want to kill yourself, you don’t call someone first and say, “You’d better get right over here; I’m going to commit suicide now,” and then take a fistful of sleeping pills, which is what she usually did. If you really want to kill yourself, you get a gun and blow your head off. Even when she used a razor, she never cut herself deeply enough to bleed to death. My mother’s suicide attempts were a way to release anxiety and get attention. Some of the attempts were drug reactions that she didn’t even remember later on.

There was, however, a family history of suicide. At least one of my great-aunts killed herself, and so did one of Mama’s sisters. I didn’t know until later that the oldest of the Gumm Sisters, Suzy, killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates that first year we were on Rockingham. She had tried to kill herself the year we saw her in Vegas and almost succeeded, but my mother only told me at the time that “Aunt Suzy is very, very sick.” Aunt Suzy’s second attempt succeeded, but again I wasn’t told the truth. I was only told
that my Aunt Suzy had died. The official story was that she’d had cancer. Even my grandma Ethel had tried to kill herself when my mother had excluded her from her life shortly before I was born, and she nearly succeeded.

But if my mother’s suicide attempts weren’t genuine, the moods that produced them were. When my mother was low, she was frighteningly low. She went down deep, to the very depths.

No one, least of all my mother, knew when the descents would begin. It wasn’t as if she decided to plunge into a severe depression. They hit her hard, usually as the result of a drug interaction, and once they started, they spun quickly out of control. When my father was in the house, her mood swings were fairly well controlled because my dad monitored her medication, saw that she got enough rest, and tried to protect her from pressure. Dad consulted regularly with Mama’s doctors about the proper dosage levels for her medicine—which her body now required to function—and tried to see that Mama followed their instructions. He locked up the medicine as soon as each prescription was filled and counted out the pills himself for each dosage. If he suspected she’d found a way to increase the dosage, he tried to reduce their potency. With Benzedrine and other medicines that came in capsules, he would carefully cut them open, pour out half the powder, replace it with sugar, and seal the capsules again. No matter what he did, though, my mother always managed to get her hands on more medicine than was good for her. Her address book was filled with page after page of doctors, and she knew how to manipulate many of them into giving her what she wanted. Anyone that drug dependent, much less someone as convincing as my mother, can find ways to get more medicine.

When she did fall apart, Dad saw that someone took care of Joey and me while he took care of her. As children on Mapleton Drive, we never saw our mother sick or seriously upset. My father made certain of that. Once my parents had divorced, though, there was no one to protect either my mother or us. Mark Herron tried
for a while, but he was in way over his head. He couldn’t begin to compete with an old pro like my mother.

Until that spring in Honolulu, I had seen only one of my mother’s “sick spells.” I was really little at the time. We were staying at a hotel, and my mother came into the room in her nightgown. She had just woken up after sleeping many hours. She seemed disoriented. She walked around the living room in a circle a time or two, looked up at the ceiling, and then fell over and passed out cold on the floor. The minute it happened, the nanny had grabbed hold of Joey and me and guided us into the other room, saying, “Your mom’s fine. She’s just real tired, but she’ll be okay.” When we saw her a little later, she was okay. What I didn’t understand at the time was that I had just witnessed a form of withdrawal. My mother had slept so long that she was several hours overdue for her usual dose of medication. The result was a seizure. Once the medicine got into her bloodstream again, she recovered. Years later I was to see this reaction several times, and sometimes it became my responsibility to nurse her through it. At twelve years old, I would become my mother’s keeper.

When
The Judy Garland Show
was cancelled and she went back on the road, her medication intake skyrocketed and her mood swings rapidly worsened. Fields and Begelman had abandoned her, she had no money, and the IRS was hounding her. The most frightening symptom for Joe and me was the outbursts of rage that would suddenly grip her. In the months following her marriage to Mark, these outbursts worsened dramatically. Complicating my mother’s unhappiness about her career and financial situation was Mark’s sexual orientation. I didn’t understand the implications at the time, but guys came to the house regularly to see him, and Mark and my mother had many fights about it. Jealousy and suspicion of other men began eating my mother up. The odd thing about their relationship is that Mark really cared about her. But he couldn’t change his sexual orientation, and the result was a disaster. The fights between them grew worse and worse.

My mom was in bad shape by then. With the TV show canceled, she hadn’t been able to pay off her debts. She and my father, who didn’t have a job, still owed a fortune from the Mapleton Drive days, and the IRS was after both of my parents for back taxes. Dad had scaled down his lifestyle dramatically, but my mother resisted. In her movie star world, where someone else had always taken care of her, reality was simply unacceptable, unintelligible, really. How could this be happening to her? After she’d worked so hard, and made so much money?

She was about to get another profound financial shock. It was while we were living on Rockingham that she found out one of her managers, David Begelman, had been embezzling her money. My brother was home with Mama and his best friend the day she found out. Joe was outside by the pool when the chaos started. He could hear my mother screaming and yelling, and a short while later he heard the crashing of furniture and of objects being thrown. Joe and his friend took refuge in the pool house while the ranting and raving went on. About dusk Joe heard a loud splash. My mother had jumped into the pool.

Joe looked at his friend and said, “Good. Maybe this will cool her off.”

But when Joe crept out to look a few minutes later, he was just in time to see a trail of wet footprints and my mother’s form disappearing into the house. A moment or two later the crashing and screaming started all over again.

Joe’s friend looked at him and said, “Gee, your mom’s really mad. Do you want to sleep at my house?”

Joe said no, he’d sleep in the pool house until Mama calmed down, and his friend went home.

Things were very bad with Mark by then, too. She wasn’t working much, either, and my mother was always miserable when she couldn’t perform for long periods of time; apart from the money, she desperately needed the creative outlet. She only felt truly alive in front of an audience. It was a very, very low period
in her life. By that time she had been on prescription medication for more than twenty-five years, much of the time at toxic doses. Her nervous system had begun to deteriorate under the strain. Sometimes she would simply lose control, and it always seemed to be in the middle of the night.

It was about that time that the late-night visits started. They always seemed to happen in the small hours of the morning. Mama would come into the room where Joe and I were sleeping, with Mrs. Chapman on the other side of the partition, and wake us up, saying that she couldn’t see. She would be hysterical and temporarily blind, hallucinating from the medication. I would get up to calm her down and then go and take care of her in the next room so Joey wouldn’t be frightened. Other times there would be fights during the night between her and Mark. I would lie in bed listening to the yelling and screaming, pull the covers over my head, and think, “Please don’t come closer; please don’t come closer. Please don’t come in the kitchen.” And I would remember Hawaii and think, “Please don’t let that happen again.” I’d curl up and put the pillow over my ears and tell myself repeatedly, “It will stop. It will stop.” For years afterward I slept with the covers over my head that way. Usually, though, the outbursts didn’t stop.

When the fights got really bad, I’d go to Mama’s nurse for help. Snowda-Wu, or Snowy, as we called her, had come back with my mom and Mark from Hong Kong after my mother’s concert tour in the Far East the year before. Mama had had the bad luck to arrive in Hong Kong the day before the worst typhoon in Hong Kong’s history. Terrified, she’d taken too many sedatives; Mark found her unconscious on the floor in the middle of the night, barely breathing. Panic-stricken, he managed to get her to a hospital in spite of the storm, where they pumped her stomach—unsuccessfully—and put her into an oxygen tent. The doctors had no hope she would recover and told Mark so. One nurse actually pronounced my mother dead the next morning, and the news was leaked to the press. Poor Mark tried to stop the story and continued
to insist that Mama was not dead, that doctors should continue trying to revive her. Thankfully, he was right. Mama recovered, but not without some damage to her heart, liver, and throat. Doctors told her she would never sing again. Instead of frightening her, the prediction infuriated her. A few days later she proved them wrong by serenading guests at a Hong Kong nightclub. My mother had more endurance than anyone I’ve ever known.

Mark had hired a nurse to take care of Mama when she came home from the hospital in Hong Kong. The nurse was Snowy, and my mother liked her so much that she hired her and brought her back to the U.S. to live with us at Rockingham. Snowy moved into the pool house as my mother’s live-in nurse. I was never completely clear about whose orders Snowy was working under; I was told it was “one of Mama’s doctors.” I don’t know what Snowy was told, either. I only knew that she was the one who gave my mother shots when Mama felt bad or got upset, and that the shots seemed to make Mama feel better. The injections were most likely Thorazine or paraldehyde, powerful antipsychotic and anticonvulsant drugs that were prescribed for alcoholic seizures during the sixties. I didn’t understand yet that the shots were feeding my mother’s addiction, and I didn’t think Snowy knew it, either. In those days the process of addiction wasn’t nearly so well understood as it is today.

Mark was rarely around by that time, so when things got out of hand in the house, it was my job to either calm Mama myself or go get Snowy. Mrs. Chapman pointedly ignored every emergency, and I didn’t want Joey to have to deal with our mother’s crises. He was still so young. He would wake up every time our mother had one of her night spells, but I’d always go over to him and say, “Joe, stay there and pretend you’re asleep.”

And he’d say, “What are you going to do?”

I’d tell him not to worry, that “Everything will be all right,” and then I’d go for Snowy. I’d race around the pool to the pool house in the middle of the night to wake her up. Snowy would grab her medical supplies and come running in to wherever Mama
was. She would gently but firmly restrain Mama and begin talking to her while she prepared the injection. Then she’d look up at me as if to say, “It’s okay; I’ll take over now,” and I’d think, “Thank God.” After a while my mother would calm down, and I would go back to bed, relieved that Mama would be all right now. She wouldn’t hurt herself. I was never afraid for myself in those moments; I was always afraid for her. Really afraid.

In the long run, of course, the injections didn’t make things better; they made things worse. As my mother’s chemical intake escalated and her body deteriorated, her outbursts became increasingly frightening. I didn’t always see them, but I sure heard them. There would be screaming and the sounds of things crashing in nearby rooms, and the next day there would be lots of broken lamps and missing breakables. The furniture took a terrible beating. When my mother was in a rage, she would throw herself against things—walls, furniture, anything, until she was black-and-blue. Snowy would have to give her another shot of whatever the doctors had prescribed to calm her down. Nothing else stopped her.