Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (31 page)

The next morning I woke up at about nine and went into the kitchen. Jody and her sister and her mom were all in there, sitting around the kitchen table, and when I walked in, the room got very quiet. I was still excited about the concert the night before, so I just said, “Wasn’t the concert fun?” and started talking about it, but nobody answered. Finally there was a silence, and then Jody’s mother said, “Lorna, I have to tell you something very important.” As soon as she said it, Jody and her sister both burst into tears, and I thought, “No. Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear this.” Then Jody’s mom came over to me, took both of my hands in hers, and looking gently into my face, said, “Lorna, your mom passed away last night.” I later found out Jody’s mother had heard the news on the radio and called my dad immediately to find out if it was true. When he didn’t answer after a couple of hours, she became worried that I’d hear the news on the radio when I got up. She wanted to spare me that, so she told me herself.

I felt as though someone had kicked me in the stomach. I couldn’t breathe. I began to shake my head. “No, no, it isn’t true. You’re wrong. It isn’t true.” I was shaking like a leaf, but I kept remembering Mrs. Chapman turning off the radio when they said my mother had died in Hong Kong, so I said, “You’ve got it wrong.” And then, “Where’s my dad? I want to talk to my dad.”

I went straight to the phone and started calling, but no one answered. I later found out that he’d taken the phone off the hook the day before because he was getting so many calls. I dialed and dialed, but I couldn’t get through. Meanwhile, my mind was racing. Where was Joey? I knew he’d gone to spend the night with a friend, too. What friend? Where was he? Had he heard? I thought about my sister and called her in New York, but there was no answer there, either. I later found out that Liza was trying to get ahold of my dad, too, to make sure that Joe and I didn’t get the news on TV. Mickey Deans had called her from London to tell her, and she’d been calling us ever since. It was a nightmare. None of us could find each other.

I called and called and called, for over an hour, all the while fearing someone would turn on the radio or TV. I didn’t want to hear what they might say. By this time panic was overwhelming me, and I couldn’t control it. Finally I got through to my dad. Someone had just gotten ahold of him to tell him the news. The first thing I said was, “Dad, is it true?”

Instead of answering, he just very quietly said, “Honey, you’d better come home.” Then I knew. I was still trying to deny it, but I knew. Jody’s mom put me in her car and took me home.

I ran through the front door, where Joey and my dad were waiting for me. By then I’d convinced myself that I shouldn’t get hysterical, that it was probably all a mistake, that she’d overdosed again but they’d been able to revive her by now, as they always had in the past. One look at my father’s face destroyed that last bit of hope. There was such pain in his face, and in his voice when he spoke to me. Then, at last, I knew.

From that moment on the nightmare seemed endless. Liza finally got through to us and said that they were flying Mama’s body back over to New York for the funeral as soon as the autopsy was complete in London. She and Mickey and Kay Thompson, one of our oldest friends, were already making plans for the funeral. Nobody ever asked me or Joe what we wanted. I don’t think they
meant to be cruel; we were just “the kids,” and I’m sure they were trying to spare us pain. But it hurt nonetheless. We felt so left out, as though we didn’t really belong—Judy Garland’s “other daughter” and Sid Luft’s son, as the press referred to us. We probably would have agreed to whatever Liza and the others thought best, but we just wanted to be asked.

The phone rang incessantly—Liza and Kay with funeral arrangements, friends and relatives, the sympathetic and the curious. And of course, the press, who descended like vultures around the body, all hoping for a scoop or some juicy details. They camped on our front door. My mother had died of what appeared to be an overdose, and the rumor had already started to circulate that it was a suicide. I felt some people hoped it was suicide; after all, it would make such a great headline—you know, “Has-Been Singer Dies of Overdose” or “Little Judy Ends It All,” as if she were still twelve years old. It infuriated me. She wasn’t twelve years old, she sure never thought of herself as a has-been, and most important of all, she hadn’t committed suicide. I knew it, even before the autopsy reports confirmed it.

My mother would never, ever, have killed herself, certainly not in that way. The only people who thought she might were the people who didn’t know her very well. Liza and Joe and my dad and I, we knew she hadn’t. She wouldn’t. In spite of her well-publicized reputation for suicide attempts, we never considered her a suicide risk. All of her previous “attempts” had been accidental overdoses, cries for help and attention, or, on occasion, simply ploys to get us all out of a fix. If she had really wanted to die, she would certainly have succeeded many times over. She simply wasn’t the type. People who kill themselves succumb to despair, desperation, or self-hatred. In sharp contrast, my mother remained the eternal optimist at heart, in spite of her binges of self-pity, and I have no doubt that she died fully expecting yet another miraculous comeback and triumph. My mom was a phoenix who always expected to rise again from the ashes of her latest disaster. And in spite of her self-doubts, she had a very strong sense of who she
was. She had a sense of self-worth. She loved being Judy Garland. Did she secretly long to be Frances Gumm Somebody, Minnesota housewife? Are you kidding? She’d have run off with a vaudeville troupe just the way my grandfather did.

Above all, she would never, ever have committed suicide because she had us—me and Joe and Liza. Maybe she wasn’t much of a mother to us those last few years, but it wasn’t because she didn’t try, and it certainly wasn’t because she didn’t care. People sometimes look at us incredulously when we say that, but it’s true. We knew she would never willingly leave us. The fact that all three of us dismissed that possibility without a second thought speaks volumes.

For a long time after I learned what killed her, I blamed Mickey Deans. Everyone close to my mother knew that she required careful watching. I’d started monitoring her medication when I was thirteen myself, and everybody knew to check on her regularly to make sure she was all right. Later, after the coroner had found Seconal in her bloodstream and determined that an accidental overdose had killed her, we found out that a prescription for Seconal had been filled for her the day she died.

She’d apparently taken her normal dose, then sometime during the night she’d gotten up, half asleep, gone to the bathroom, and swallowed several more of the capsules. She passed out there in the bathroom and never woke up.

It took me a very long time to stop blaming Mickey Deans in particular and to realize that if it hadn’t been that night and that man, it would have been another. It was inevitable.

Mostly, though, I blamed myself for her death—not because I wasn’t there that night, but because I wasn’t there that year: “Why wasn’t I with her? Why hadn’t I gone over sooner? I could have saved her; I know I could.” I kept on thinking of all the things I had learned to do and hadn’t done those final months. I remembered the countless times my father or I had searched her clothes, unlocked doors, doled out medicine, sugared pills, and watched over her to make sure she stayed safely in bed all night. I’d learned to take a
thousand precautions; I knew an endless number of ways to avoid disaster. If I’d been with her, she never would have had access to the Seconals. If I’d been there, I would never have let her wander around alone at night. I wouldn’t have let her lock the bathroom door, as Mickey had. I should have been there. All the hard lessons of survival I’d learned in the past year vanished in the face of my mother’s death. Somewhere deep in my heart, I’d expected her to get by somehow. Somehow, I hadn’t really thought she could die.

It was still hard to believe. Everything around me had collapsed into chaos—the funeral arrangements, the visitors, the reporters—and I couldn’t accept what was happening. When things got out of hand, I’d think, “I know; I’ll call Mama and ask her what she wants us to do,” and then it would hit me all over again. I was in shock. I kept wanting to pick up the phone and call her, but she wasn’t there. There would be no voice at the other end of the line. There never would be. I almost welcomed the chaos after a while. When it stopped for a moment, in the quiet times, the pain would overwhelm me.

My dad was struggling to hold himself together, to cope with all the details and keep me and Joe from falling apart. Liza and Kay were giving him orders over the phone, and he had to accept whatever they told him because he no longer had any right to make decisions. He was just “the ex-husband.” Mickey Deans, a comparative stranger to whom my mother had been married for only five months, got to decide everything. It was bitterly painful for my father. Every little while, I’d say, “Are you okay, Dad?” and he’d try to act as though he were.

Two days after her death we flew to New York and were taken to the apartment of a friend of Liza and Peter’s. Liza and Peter and the others were all there. That’s when we were told that it would be an open-casket funeral. I kept thinking, “What are you doing? Mama would hate everybody staring at her like that. You can’t do that!” A huge event had been planned, one that twenty-two thousand people eventually showed up for, and an endless procession of onlookers would file past that open casket. I was horrified. It seemed like a kind of violation. Before things went any further,
before those thousands of people lined up to see my mother’s body, I wanted to see her first. So I said, “I want to go see her.” And everybody objected all at once, saying, “No, you don’t; you don’t want to do that.” And I got really angry then. I was sick and tired of being told what to do. I said, “Don’t tell me what I want. I want to go. I want to see Mama.” Nobody was going to tell me I couldn’t see my mother one last time.

Then my dad said, “If you’re going to go, I’m going with you.” And Liza said, “I’d better go, too.” And then Joey said, “I just—I just can’t.” I was glad he didn’t want to, but I couldn’t believe the others would let Mama be buried without seeing her one more time. We called ahead to the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel to tell them we were coming so they’d close the place off, and then Dad and Liza and I got into the limo that took us to the funeral home. As we approached the mortuary, I looked up and saw thousands of people jamming the streets. I panicked at the sight of them and said, “Please, there’s got to be another door. I don’t want to go in there.” The funeral director led us through a private entrance and into the main room. The place was empty. He had cleared it out for us.

When I saw my mother’s coffin there in the center of the room, I got really scared. I backed up, and for a moment I wanted to turn around and go out again. But I couldn’t. I had to see her one more time.

After a moment’s hesitation, I began inching slowly toward the open casket. I had never seen a dead person before, except on television, and I didn’t know what to expect. My dad followed along next to me. My sister followed behind, even more slowly. We all three crept to the side of the coffin and looked inside.

There lay a tiny person in a gray dress on a bed of yellow roses. The first thing that went through my mind when I saw her was, “Oh, they’ve made a mistake. That’s not her.” I didn’t recognize her. I could find no trace of the beautiful face I had watched in the makeup mirror as a child. I looked at the tiny, emaciated body, and then I noticed her hands. When I saw her hands, I knew.
Those were my mother’s hands. And as I looked down at them, it hit me at last.

My father was standing next to me on one side, and as I started to cry, he put his arms around me. And then he started to cry, too. He stood there looking at her, sobbing as if his heart would break, and I was stunned. I had never seen my father cry. We kept trying to comfort each other, but we were each too caught up in our own pain to do the other much good. We must have stayed there together about ten minutes, and then suddenly I wanted to go. I had to get out of there. It was all beginning to seem surreal, like some kind of frightening nightmare.

The three of us went back out through the private entrance and climbed into the rear seat of the limo, Liza first and then me in the middle between her and my dad. The driver pulled away from the curb, and when he did, my dad just disintegrated. I don’t know exactly why it happened at that particular moment; maybe it was leaving her behind that final time, but he said, “She always did break me up,” and he gave way to convulsive sobs. I’d never seen that kind of grief before, and I felt helpless. He was beside himself by that point. I put my arms around him and held him like a child as he collapsed into my arms.

It was the worst moment of my life. My mother lay in a box in that terrible place, and my father, the strongest man in the world, the one person who’d always kept me safe, was beside himself with grief in my arms. Liza started to sob, too, and I kept thinking, “What will happen to me now? Who will take care of me?” I was so scared. We all three put our arms around each other and cried uncontrollably. We were beyond comfort; the only thing we could share with each other was our grief. We’d been holding ourselves together for days, years really, and in that moment it all came crashing down on us.

We went back to the apartment, and it was like going back to a circus, with phones ringing off the hook and the press everywhere. We pulled ourselves together and carried on. What else was there to do?

The funeral was the next day. I remember that I didn’t have anything appropriate to wear, so someone went out and bought me a long navy blue dress and a big hat. It was a hot New York day at the end of June, and the limo could hardly get through the streets to the funeral parlor because there were so many thousands of people there. I was used to crowds; I’d gone to my mother’s biggest outdoor concerts, but I’d never seen anything like the crowds that day. They were everywhere; some of them had even brought along little record players and were playing my mother’s recordings. Everywhere I looked out the windows of the limo, there were faces, thousands of them.