Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (26 page)

The summer of touring had changed the way my mother treated me. Somewhere along the line she had come to regard me as a peer, a fellow performer—a friend. I wasn’t her baby girl anymore. I was her best friend. We wore each other’s clothes and consulted one another about hair and makeup. In the evenings when she didn’t have a concert and wanted to get out, we would usually go to a nightclub. I never drank there; my mother wouldn’t have allowed it, and besides, I didn’t want to. It was being there that I wanted, dancing and talking and laughing and sharing in all the excitement. My parents always loved parties, and I had inherited the same social nature. What was most important to me, though, at least in the beginning, was that it meant I was growing up. I wasn’t little Lorna anymore, the girl who had to be carried to bed in her pajamas just when the party was getting started, the kid who had to be left behind with her baby brother and the nanny. At long last, I was a grown-up.

The first nightclub I ever went to was Arthur’s, the hippest club in New York in the sixties. It was owned by Sybil Burton, Richard Burton’s ex. My mom took us there for the first time after
her Forest Hills concert. Mama and Liza and Joe and I went in a limo with Roddy McDowall, who was an old friend of my mom’s. There was a big fuss over us when we arrived, and we sat at a table in the back with the A-crowd. Everybody in the place was coming and going from our table; we were the center of attention. I was very dressed up and feeling glamorous, and everybody paid a lot of attention to me, talking to me, asking me to dance. All I could think was, “I want to stay here for the rest of my life and never go home. I don’t ever want this to end.” For a long time it didn’t.

After that first night at Arthur’s, I kept going back for more. At first I went with Mama or Liza, later with friends I’d met there. Years later, after Arthur’s had changed management and been renamed Hippopotamus, I was still going there. Soon I was making the club circuit all over Manhattan with people like Salvador Dali, and Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra, and hanging out at the Salvation in the Village with the Rolling Stones when they were in town. I even got to party there with the Beatles, my old idols. Clubbing became a kind of addiction. I lived for the nights I could go out to my favorite club. Who wanted to go to school when you could be out partying with Mick Jagger?

I was growing up in other ways as well. I knew by then that my mother couldn’t always function, and I also knew that she was used to having someone take care of her. Someone always had. Shortly after the move to New York, my father began my formal education in the care and protection of my mother. What was most important was monitoring her medication intake. I learned to go through all of her clothes and the drapes—all the places she’d hide pills—whenever she left the house. It was my job to keep the pills locked up and give her a certain number on schedule. I would count them out, so many of each color, and bring them to her with a glass of water. When my father was not around, it was my job to dilute the ones I gave her with sugar.

I also had to learn to take care of her when the medication became badly imbalanced, or she overslept and went into
withdrawal. When that happened, she’d sometimes pass out, or worse yet, have seizures. I learned how to put a stick in her mouth to keep her from choking on her own tongue and suffocating, and how to get her in a safe position until the seizure passed. I also learned who I could and couldn’t call for help. When your mother is Judy Garland, you don’t just dial 911. It isn’t that simple. I had been introduced to that painful reality years before in Hawaii. Now I wasn’t just cleaning up the mess in the room, though; I was also making sure my mother made it through the night. I became expert at who to call for help and when to call them. I might not have spent much time in school during those years, but I learned a great deal more than most teenagers ever have to know.

Her declining health continued to take a toll on her career. They were casting the lead for the Broadway cast of
Mame
and my mother wanted the role so badly she could taste it, and composer Jerry Herman really wanted her to do it. She would have been wonderful in it, too. She went all out to get the part, even staging a tryout at home. But the company wouldn’t sign her because no company would sign a performance bond on my mother with her history. She told me she was uninsurable, and she was desperately hurt by that. Everyone else understood why, but she didn’t. It was incomprehensible to her that no one would hire her. After all, she was Judy Garland, the biggest star MGM had ever produced. Now nobody would give her a job. How could such a thing have happened?

The same problems were creating havoc with her concert schedule. At the end of 1967, a month after I turned fifteen, we were scheduled to do Christmas week performances at Madison Square Garden. Joe and I were in the show with my mom. Andy Williams’s brother, Dick, was the choral director, and Gene Palumbo was the musical director. We’d rehearsed a big production number, and I even had my own backup chorus. We had red Christmas costumes and did all the traditional Christmas numbers. I think my dad had in mind sort of a reprise of the Christmas
episode of
The Judy Garland Show
—the whole family holiday thing. To say the least, it didn’t quite work out that way.

We rehearsed until late Christmas Eve and returned to open the next night, Christmas day. By the time the first four performances were over, my mother was exhausted and strung out. She had an increasingly bad cold, and she ended up in the hospital with bronchitis. My dad ended up canceling the rest of the week’s run, and we forfeited all the money, not to mention having to pay off all the production expenses.

Nobody got kidnapped that year, but let’s just say we should have stuck to doing Christmas on TV. In real life it didn’t work out quite as well. Christmas with Judy Garland was not exactly
Meet Me in St. Louis
by that point. “Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” she’d once sung. Little Margaret O’Brien had the right idea in that movie. You needed a good grip on that wooden sword at Christmastime. You just might need to whack a few snow people.

Madison Square Garden was just the tip of the iceberg, of course. As my mother’s health continued to degenerate, a vicious cycle developed. So she had to keep on working to deal with the debt. Working meant expending more energy than she had left, and that in turn meant more amphetamines to carry her through. As the cycle continued, her anger and despair mounted.

The concerts continued, alternating triumphs and fiascoes. The disasters were frightening to watch. She did a concert with Tony Bennett when she was badly overmedicated. Joe and Dad and I were all there that night, sitting in the audience. Tony went on first, and when no one was watching her, my mom apparently got her hands on some medication backstage. By the time she went on for her part of the show, she could barely walk. The minute I saw her come onstage, I knew what had happened. We all went rushing backstage in a panic. We kept pacing up and down, trying to figure out what to do. Should we get her offstage? Ring down the curtain? Call an ambulance? Tony went out onstage once to try to help her through a number, but after that he wouldn’t go out there with her
again, and I don’t blame him. She could barely talk, much less sing, and she was completely incoherent. She just sort of staggered through a few numbers, and the minute it was over, we put her in a cab and got her home, where we kept her for a few days. The press release for that night said she had been suffering from food poisoning.

That particular night had been frightening. Sometimes, though, my mother wasn’t frightening; she was just plain infuriating. The Boston concert that same year is a famous example. We’d gone to the Chelsea Naval Hospital the afternoon before opening night, and my mother had spent a lot of time with the disabled veterans there. My mom had always been wonderful with people with disabilities. That night at the Chelsea hospital, Mama was at her best. She went from room to room, bed to bed, talking to each of the men, alternately charming and comforting them, and signing autographs. Gene Palumbo, her music director, came along to play the piano so she could sing for them. Before she left for the theater, she invited all the vets to the concert the next night as her guests. She was still at her best when she arrived at the theater. She had the audience on their feet throughout the performance. She was electrifying.

By closing night the situation had changed. That night she decided not to go on. She was mad at Sid, had been locked out of her suite at the St. Moritz because the bill hadn’t been paid, and her personal effects had been impounded. Joe and I went on over to the theater to talk to my dad, and there he was, sitting in this tiny little office with the head of the theater. My dad had already been on the phone to her with no luck, so he decided to let Joe—the “baby”—give it a try.

My brother got on the phone and said, “Mama? I really want you to come and do the show.”

“I’m not coming.”
Click.
She had hung up the phone.

Joe tried again. “Mama?”

“Don’t you get it? I’m not coming.”
Click.

Joe dialed the phone one last time. “Mama, I . . .”

Loudly, “Don’t—you—speak—English? I’m—not—com—ing!”
Bang!

Joe looked at Dad. “I’m sorry.”

Dad said, “Don’t worry about it.” Then he looked at me and said, “Your turn to give it a try.”

I said, “What should I say?”

He sighed and said, “Anything that will get her here.”

So I squeezed into the little office with the rest of them and called my mother. “Hello, Mom.”

“What?” she snapped. Then, “Are you there with your father and Joe?”

“Oh, no, Mama,” I lied, “he’s not here. Mama, please come and do the show. I really wish you would.”

“I’m not doing that Goddamned show!”

Then she was off and running, “I want all the money up front . . . I want . . .” Ranting and raving—I want, I want, I want.

Finally I said, “But, Mama . . . Mama, remember when we went to the hospital yesterday and you invited all those Vietnam veterans to come see you? Well, they’re all here, Mama.”

Silence.

“They’re all here waiting to see you. They rolled them all in here in their wheelchairs.”

Another silence. And finally the big line. “Well, if you can wheel them in, you can wheel them out.” And she hung up. And that was the end of that.

I looked at my father. I was crying with anger and frustration.

“What did she say?”

I told him. He sank back in the chair and put his hands to his temples. Another migraine. “Well, that’s that.” He was furious. I knew how he felt, but I was also worried. I knew my mother needed the money. But when she got like that, there was no talking to her. She never did show up that night, or the nights after. I tried not to look while they took all the vets out in their wheelchairs.

Sad to say, those moments were getting more and more frequent. I don’t know how many concerts she eventually canceled. Sometimes she never even made opening night. An engagement at Caesar’s Palace went down the drain when she refused to go on but demanded her money, anyway. Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion in
The Wizard of 0{,
died the day she was scheduled to open, and she said she was too upset by his death to sing that week. Her reaction might also have had something to do with the fact that my dad had Patti Hemingway with him that night, and my mom was livid. She could put up with a theoretical woman, but a real flesh-and-blood female on my dad’s arm was another matter entirely. She might not want him back as a husband, but that didn’t mean anyone else could have him. He was
hers.
(In actual fact, of course, he was. To this day, two wives and thirty years later, he’s still waiting to get back together with her.) The result was another huge blowup, and another concert series down the drain. It was an endless, hopeless downward spiral.

For a long time during this period, my dad still clung to the illusion that he could fix things, that he could make it better. He still thought he was Atlas. Even with all the professional disasters, he tried to maintain some semblance of a normal family life—normal for us, anyway. The Christmas concert fiasco was a classic example. When we’d finished rehearsing that December 24 for the Felt Forum concert, it was about five P.M., and we were all exhausted from the run-through. My mom had already left, and it was just me, Joe, Sid, and Patti. We’d all been so busy we’d completely forgotten it was Christmas Eve. My dad looked at his watch and suddenly said, “Oh, my God, it’s Christmas tomorrow! Come on, everybody; the stores are about to close!”

And off we all went. In the midst of all the trauma, none of us had thought about the holidays, but my dad was bound and determined that we’d have some kind of Christmas. We took a taxi to Bloomingdale’s and got there just before closing. We literally took off running, Joe and Patti and I racing along behind Dad, and ran
down the aisles of the store as Dad shouted “Grab this! Grab that! Grab one of those!” It was like a scene from a Marx Brothers movie. At one point Dad grabbed a fishing rod. I remember saying, “What are we going to do with that?”

“I don’t know. Hang it out the hotel window and see what we catch? We’ll wrap it up!” By then we were all laughing so hard we were crying, our arms loaded down with useless gifts. We made it to the counter just in time to pay for all the stuff before the store closed, and when we got back to the Plaza, we wrapped up some of the things to take back to the “mausoleum” for Mama. The next morning, when we returned to the hotel, Dad and Patti had wrapped up the rest of the things and put them under a tree my dad had found and managed to decorate. Sid might not have been Ward Cleaver, but he was pretty remarkable in his own way. Not exactly a traditional Christmas, but Christmas nonetheless. The memory still makes me smile. It helped carry both Joe and me through the disaster of the concert cancellation the next week.

The concert failures were just the most public symptom of my mother’s problems. The personal toll was actually much more serious. It was becoming harder and harder for her to get along with anyone for long. She went through one relationship after another because she just wore everyone out. By then there were regular outbursts almost everywhere—at home, in restaurants, you name it. One of the more spectacular outbursts did make the papers. She was supposed to go to London with a friend named Ray Filiberti (a business partner of my dad’s) and his wife Sharon, and Sharon didn’t like my mother one little bit, especially when there was liquor involved. Most people catered to my mom, but not Sharon. When Sharon and my mom were together on a flight to London for eight hours, the result was disastrous. They got into an argument over a card game, which soon led to screaming, yelling, and throwing drinks at one another. It was horrendous, and the papers had a field day with it. My mother turned right around and took the next plane home, canceling her planned engagements in London. Twenty-four
hours later those red suitcases of hers were back in the house, and Joe and I thought, “Oh, God. Here we go again.”