Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (24 page)

Being thirteen, though, I was naturally a slow learner. Sick as it made me, smoking was still a brave and cool thing to do in junior high school, and a few weeks later I got caught smoking in the girls’ bathroom. They called my mom and sent me home. My mother was really good about it. She wasn’t exactly pleased, but she sat down and discussed it with me, pointing out how foolishly I had acted and saying that next time I wanted to try something
like that, I should tell her. She would have let me try a cigarette at home if I was just curious. Every now and then I did have a cigarette at home with her, but I gave up smoking in the girls’ bathroom. Fortunately, smoking never really caught on with me. I never had problems with the socially acceptable addictions. I waited for the big stuff later on.

Boys were another matter. I’d already had my first romance with Brian Englund in the seventh grade. He’d given me my first kiss and my first charm bracelet, which I’d hidden from my mother (she would have thought I was too young to go steady). Our time together had all the poignant innocence typical of childhood sweethearts. Things didn’t always go so smoothly with boys, though, in part because of the problems at home.

My first grown-up dance was all too typical of what life is like when your parent is sick. I was in the eighth grade at the time. There was going to be a formal dance at school one Friday night, and I was very excited about going. My girlfriends and I had talked about it at school for days, planning exactly how we’d do our hair and whom we’d try to dance with. I had bought a new outfit for the occasion and carefully picked out every accessory so I would look just perfect. On the afternoon of the dance I spent hours getting ready and that evening arrived at the school gym with my friends, giddy with excitement. This was to be our big night.

I’d already gotten my mother’s permission to go days before, and I’d left the house without incident. But like all children in families like mine, I needed to call and make sure that my mother was all right before I could feel comfortable going into the gym and enjoying myself for the evening. So I sent my friends ahead, promising to meet them inside in a minute, and went to the phone booth next to the gym to call my mom. I thought she might be asleep, but I wanted to check with Lionel and be sure.

Unfortunately for me, she wasn’t asleep. She was awake, and
she was overmedicated, and she was in a bad mood. When she found out it was me calling, she got on the phone and began yelling at me, accusing me of sneaking out without her permission. I tearfully reminded her that she’d said I could go, that we’d been planning for the dance all week. Logic made no difference when she was in that frame of mind. She continued yelling at me for several minutes and then told me that she forbade me to go to that dance. I was not even to go into the gym. I was to stay outside by the curb and not move until Lionel came by and picked me up to take me home.

I hung up the phone, found my friends, and told them I couldn’t go to the dance after all because something had come up at home. I didn’t tell them what, and they didn’t ask. One of the oddities about being Judy Garland’s daughter was that everyone, even my friends, treated my mother with such awe that they would never have asked me the normal questions kids get about their moms. And I would certainly never have told them the truth, anyway. I could not, must not, tell. Not ever.

I went back outside and sat down on the curb to wait for Lionel. I could hear the music playing in the gym behind me. The Beatles, I think. It got darker and darker, but no one came. I didn’t dare move. Finally, just as the dance was about to end, our car pulled up and I got in. When I got home and went into the house a few minutes later, my mother was sound asleep. She’d been asleep ever since she’d hung up the phone. The next day she had no memory of the conversation, or of the dance. I remembered, though. It was my first dance, and I would never forget it.

It hurts when your parent is too sick to be a full-time parent. That’s true for any child. But my situation held some particular cruelties, for my mother was not only sick but famous, and some people exploited that. Children can be incredibly vicious toward the families of the famous, whom they inevitably perceive as privileged and snobby. Painful as my first dance was, the last junior
high dance of that year was even more humiliating. An older boy invited me to go to the senior prom, as they called the ninth grade graduation dance, and I was thrilled. To be asked by a ninth grader was a great honor, and this boy was very cute. Once again I bought a special outfit and got all dressed up for the big night. The boy was going to pick me up at my house, and I waited on pins and needles for his arrival. Only he never came. And he never called. I was crushed. When I got to school the following Monday, I found out why. The rumor had already gone all around the school that he’d bet a bunch of his friends that he could stand up Judy Garland’s daughter. The “date” had been a joke designed to embarrass me and make him look like a big man at school. Everyone but my friends seemed to think it was very funny, and for days I was stared and pointed at, and people would giggle when I went by. It was funny, all right. So funny that thirty years later tears still sting my eyes when I remember.

Fortunately, when my mom was well—well for Mama meaning healthy and properly medicated—she still came through for me when it really counted. When it came time to tell me the “facts of life,” my mother did it in a wonderfully straightforward and caring manner. And when it came to “women’s matters,” she was careful to make sure that I knew what to expect so that I wouldn’t be frightened the way she had been as a girl when her body had started to change. Like most women of her generation, Grandma Ethel had discreetly avoided talking with her daughters about bodily matters, so that when my mother’s first period began, she thought something had gone horribly wrong with her body. She explained these things to me just as she had explained them to my sister seven years earlier, and on the day my first menstrual period began at thirteen, my mother congratulated me on becoming a woman, and we toasted with a glass of wine. She made it seem like a wonderful thing, a blessing—instead of the usual view of the menstrual cycle as “the curse.” She was great, and I loved her for it.

She didn’t do quite so well with the other changes I was going through during those early teen years, though. By that time I was beginning to understand the connection between my mother’s mood swings and her pill intake, and my view of her “medication” gradually began to change with this new understanding. It was becoming clear to me that “Mama’s pills” were a problem, and I didn’t like it. I was also beginning to rebel against the chaos of our lives. I resented the loss of stability and peace I had known as a little girl. I was also getting old enough to recognize when my mother was behaving inconsistently or irrationally, and since I was no longer an adoring child, my mom was beginning to get on my nerves.

When she acted irrationally, I would roll my eyes as if to say, “Please! This is nuts!” I was still keeping my mouth shut, but I would glare at her defiantly with “Look who’s talking!” written all over my face. I would still go to bed at night and quiver after one of our fights, and sometimes I would think bad things about my mother, like “I wish you weren’t even here!” Later I’d feel frightened and guilty for having even thought it. My mother couldn’t understand what had happened to her little Lorna (after all, Mama thought, there was nothing wrong with
her,
so it must be me). Her solution was to take me to the doctor for a checkup.

The doctor looked me over and told my mother that I was a perfectly healthy young girl experiencing the normal changes associated with the hormonal shifts of puberty. My mother asked him if that meant I was retaining water, and the doctor said that might be happening periodically. For reasons I’ll never understand, my mother interpreted this to mean that I had water on the brain. She even went so far as to explain to me that she now understood why I had been acting so irrationally lately; I had water on my brain! In another belief that defies explanation, she also decided that the solution to my hormonal madness was for me to take birth control pills, and she persuaded the doctor to put me on them. At that age I
needed birth control pills like a lizard needs skates, but for some reason my mother was convinced the pills would make me more rational. Maybe she thought they would drain off all that water in my head!

From her point of view I guess I did seem pretty crazy at times. The Beatles were a case in point. In spite of having watched her own generation go crazy over Frank Sinatra (and having gone pretty crazy herself the night she met Elvis Presley), she simply could not understand my virtual obsession with the Beatles. Mama herself had first told me about them two years before when she’d returned from a concert in England. She said that she had done a concert in London called “Night of 100 Stars,” and she’d met the Beatles. When she came home she told me about these four boys from Liverpool with long hair who had sung that night. When the Beatles hit big and came to America on their first tour, I naturally had to see them.

I was one of the chosen few who actually got to see the Fab Four during their famous concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. Not only that; I got to see them twice, and from the best seats in the house. The first time, Leslie’s mom, Betty Bacall, took me. She and Leslie were in Los Angeles that summer, and she took Leslie and me to the concert to see our idols. It was incredible. Even at all my mother’s concerts, I had never seen people go crazy the way they did with the Beatles that night. The audience was completely out of control, screaming hysterically, sobbing, and fainting. I was almost as fascinated by the crowd as I was by the performance onstage.

Leslie and I were so excited we were about to burst, but we sat quietly and took it all in without a peep. We didn’t dare peep. The only mom I’ve ever known who could be as intimidating as my mother was Leslie’s mother. When Lauren Bacall gave you
that look,
you shut up and minded your manners. And she gave us the look that night, the one that said, “Just because these other people
are acting like lunatics doesn’t mean you can. You’re going to act like little ladies.” We did.

The next night I was back again, this time with my father and Bridget. My father didn’t glare; he just looked around at the hysterical teenagers as if they were all insane, and as usual, I minded my manners. He and my mother had been pounding those manners into me from the time I could toddle.

The high point of my entire junior high school career was going backstage after the first concert to meet the Beatles in person. Leslie’s mom took us back. She had been to a party with them the night before, so they said, “Ah, Lauren Bacall,” and came over to greet us. I even got to shake hands with them. I had a huge crush on George Harrison at the time, having inherited my family’s passion for skinny musicians, and I was simply awestruck to be meeting the Fab Four in person. I was so awestruck I didn’t even ask for their autographs; instead I just said what I thought was polite and even asked John Lennon courteously about his wife.

As we got ready to leave, Leslie and I said, “Nice meeting you,” and then Paul asked us if we didn’t want them to autograph our programs. I told him we hadn’t wanted to trouble them, but then John smiled and said, “That’s what we’re here for,” and proceeded to write “Love, John Lennon” on both our programs. George, Paul, and Ringo did the same. Leslie and I returned home in a state of altered consciousness, and I spent months afterward listening to their records every waking moment and staring at the Beatles posters on my bedroom wall. My mother thought I’d completely lost my mind. I don’t know what happened to those programs. They eventually got lost in one of our countless moves. I hate to think what they’d be worth today.

Whatever my mother thought, in many ways the Beatles kept me alive during those difficult days. I think adults forget how passionate those first celebrity crushes are, and how important they are to a child who is just beginning to grow up. The
Beatles helped me define who I was, what I found attractive in a man, and how my generation fit into the world. And when things were dark on Rockingham Drive, I could get lost in the music of the Beatles and forget about the darkness and the silence for a while.

Even in the darkest days, though, there were moments of light. My mother had a wonderful sense of fun, and it never left her completely, even when things were bad. She loved a funny story more than anything, especially when she got to tell it, and she could be silly in ways that were truly inspired. When Mama was feeling well, she was still Joe’s and my favorite playmate. I remember one night Tom Green had a whole lot of money from somewhere, and he and my mother went to the supermarket and bought the place out. They stocked the kitchen with food, and then my mother decided she was going to make a shepherd’s pie, which was one of her specialties. We were all in the kitchen, and Tom was rolling up the meatballs when my mother picked up a big spoon, leaned forward, and started shouting, “Hey, Batter! Batter! Batter!” The next thing we knew she’d tossed a meatball into the air and whacked it across the kitchen like a baseball. Then she whacked another one, and someone caught it. The next thing I knew we had a full-fledged baseball game going on, with the spoon for a bat, hitting meatballs all over the kitchen and running bases. We never did get our shepherd’s pie, but no one cared because we were exhausted from laughing ourselves silly. There was minced meat everywhere, even on the ceiling.

Though Lionel was still getting stuck with much of the cleanup, in many ways I was becoming the adult in our little family. Tom Green and other friends helped out when they could, but when everyone went home and it was just me and Mama and Joey, I was often the grown-up in charge. The pills knocked my mother out of commission regularly, and my survival instincts told me that I’d better make sure everything was
all right or no one else would. I kept an eye on the food supply, and when there were no groceries in the house, it was my job to figure out a way to get some.