Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (34 page)

Then one evening after rehearsal, about two weeks after I arrived, Norman Twain stopped by and casually asked me if I’d like to go to dinner. I said, “Sure,” and went off to the restaurant with him. Who knew that I was about to become the main course? About halfway through the meal conversation came to a standstill, and I noticed he looked very uncomfortable. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “You know, Lorna, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you.”

My stomach clutched, and I immediately said, “Oh, no. I’m not fired, am I?” One look at his face told me it was true, even before he replied. I burst into tears and said, “But why? Aren’t I doing a good job?”

He mumbled something about it being hard for him to say
why, that they’d just decided to go in a different direction,
yadda yadda yadda
—classic showbiz double-talk that meant nothing, as we both knew. Then he told me that the homely girl who’d been hanging around me all that time was replacing me in the part. I felt even sicker at this news. You mean they’d been planning to replace me all along? I asked him to please take me home, and he did. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

I called my dad with the news, sobbing so hard I could hardly talk, and then I cried all night. The next day Sid called up the producer to give him a piece of his mind. At the time I didn’t know what they told him, but they’d apparently given him the impression that I’d been a real screwup, because the following day a letter arrived from my dad that made me feel even worse. It was a truly horrible letter telling me that I couldn’t just expect to tuck my tail between my legs and come crying back home. I suppose he was trying to make me keep a stiff upper lip (my mother had written Liza a similar letter after her first show-business failure as a teen), but the effect on me was disastrous. I was devastated. I was all alone in New York, I’d just been fired from my dream job, and now my own dad thought it was all my fault and told me I couldn’t come home. Eighteen years old, and already a failure. I was in the depths.

Thank God for my sister. I’ll be forever grateful to her for her help at that moment. Liza was in Europe filming
Cabaret,
and she called me the minute she heard what had happened. She comforted me, telling me those things happened to everybody, and she told me she’d take care of me until I was on my feet. And she did. She hooked me up with her business manager, enrolled me in the Herbert Berghof Studio and paid the fees, and supported me financially so I could stay in New York. She was wonderful.

Even so, I was depressed about the whole episode for a long time. Your feelings are tender at this age. I thought about the day, four years earlier, when I’d told my mother I wanted a career in show business. I was about thirteen at the time, and she sat me
down, looked very earnestly into my face, and said, “Look at me, baby. Is this the way you want to look in thirty years?” Her face was white and pinched, hollow-cheeked with illness, with wells of sadness in the depths of her dark eyes. At forty-three years old, she already looked sixty, and she knew it. All my life she’d talked about how hard it had been for her to work throughout her childhood, how exhausting and lonely it was to live out of suitcases, how painful it was to be fired, to read nasty reviews. Show business is, after all, one of the few businesses fueled almost entirely by rejection. It’s a performer’s job to be rejected, to go to dozens or even hundreds of auditions knowing you’ll be told you’re not wanted. But like everyone else in my mom’s family, I was already hooked. I didn’t have that killer instinct some actors have, but I did have the single-minded notion that performing was what my family did.

So I signed up for classes with Uta Hagen at the Berghoff Studio, took voice and dance lessons, and a few months later moved out of the Barbizon Hotel for Women and into a cute little studio apartment on the East Side with two kittens named Fred and Ginger. Life was beginning to be good again. At eighteen, you can only be depressed for so long. It didn’t hurt that
Lolita, My Love,
was a colossal flop. It opened in Boston to disastrous reviews and never even made it to New Jersey, much less New York. Along the way almost everybody in the cast got fired at some point, including the director himself. More than a year later I finally found out why I’d been fired. A friend of mine who worked for the William Morris Agency found out that the wife of one of the big shots had suspected her husband was interested in me and had insisted on having me fired. No wonder they’d given me all that double-talk about “going a different way.” Finding out the reason for my dismissal was a huge relief. I hadn’t done anything wrong after all. I called Sid and told him what had happened. It was then he finally told me that the producer had implied to him that I’d been unreliable, coming late to rehearsal and acting irresponsibly in general. In retrospect, I think he wrote me that horrible letter in part because he
was afraid I’d follow my mother’s pattern in her later years. Whatever the reason, he was almost as relieved as I was at the news. Everything considered, I was probably lucky to get fired when I did.

Meanwhile, I had settled back into the nightlife of New York all too happily. During the day I went to class, but at night I hit the clubs with my friends, and with my sister when she was in town. Once again it was the Hippopotamus (formerly Arthur’s) or Adam’s Apple every night, partying with the rich and famous. One night, in that oddly tight little circle of the rich and famous, I ran into the most unlikely of all clubbers, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, there at the Hippopotamus. She was there with Aristotle Onassis, sitting in a back booth. I went to greet her and was very pleased to find that she remembered me. She invited me to sit with her, and I remember sitting next to her in the booth, hearing that same soft beautiful voice, and feeling like a little girl again. I also remember noticing that her husband was oddly inattentive. He seemed almost unaware that she was even there. I had just moved into my first apartment at the time, and Mrs. Onassis sat there with me and discussed the relative merits of various kinds of sheets. It was nice, kind of a mother-daughter style discussion, and I remember thinking how odd but wonderful it was to sit with her again after all those years. She was such a sweet lady, and that night, she seemed very much alone. Her husband seemed completely isolated from her, in his own little world.

Things were definitely looking up for me. I was beginning to feel that I might get a bite of that big apple after all. About a year after I arrived in New York, I got a call to audition for
Sugar,
a musical version of
Some Like It Hot,
about to open on Broadway. The director was Gower Champion, an old friend of my mother’s from her MGM days, and he greeted me warmly when I showed up to read. When I received a callback for a second audition, I was surprised. I knew I wasn’t right for the Marilyn Monroe role, but I went back a second time, and soon for a third. Finally Gower
invited me to his house one evening to inform me, with gentle anxiety, that he wouldn’t be able to cast me in the role. I took the news calmly and told him that I already knew that I was wrong for the part, that I’d been surprised to be called back in the first place. Gower was very sweet, and very relieved to find I was taking the news so well. It seems that he’d heard about the
Lolita
fiasco and thought I’d been treated very badly. He hadn’t wanted to hurt my feelings again. I reassured him that I was just fine. Before he said good-bye to me that day, he told me that I was very special and that he would find a part for me because I deserved one. I was touched.

Soon afterward I got a call from an acquaintance of mine, a girl who worked in David Merrick’s office. David Merrick had been my dream producer ever since I’d seen his production of
Oliver!
in London when I was a kid and decided I wanted to dance and sing like that. My friend Fran told me that something was about to happen to me, but she couldn’t tell me what. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued.

A short while later she called me again and said that Mr. Merrick wanted me to come down to the Shubert Theater and meet with Samuel “Biff” Liff, a dear man who is still a special friend. By now I was really curious. I went down to the theater to meet Mr. Liff, who told me that they were interested in having me audition for
Promises, Promises
—a hit musical written by Neil Simon, with music by Hal David and Burt Bacharach. The show had already been running on Broadway for three years and was a big hit. I sang something for them and went home, not really expecting much from the audition.

A little while after I got home, Fran called me again. After some pointless chitchat, she finally said, “I can’t stand it. I’ve got to tell you this, but you’ve got to promise not to say anything yet.” I promised. Then she told me that David Merrick had decided to cast me in the lead for
Promises,
but that no one was supposed to
know it because the girl currently playing the lead hadn’t been told yet.

My heart stopped. Part of me felt bad for the girl who already had the part, thinking, “Oh, no, they’re going to fire her just like they fired me.” But the bigger part of me was turning cartwheels with excitement, thinking, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I wonder if it’s true!” It was true. A couple of weeks later Merrick called to offer me the part. I was euphoric. I would not only be opening on Broadway; I would be opening in the lead role of a major musical. It was incredible. I called everyone I knew with the news.

After that my life became a happy whirlwind of activity. I had only two weeks to learn the role. They turned me over to Charlie Blackwell, the brilliant stage manager, who taught me the part and rehearsed me until I had it down cold. From morning to night I rehearsed my songs, walked through my blocking, practiced my lines, and worked with the choreographer. At night I fell into bed, exhausted. I was giddy with it all. Pictures of me from that time period show a skinny kid, all legs and eyes, my face glowing with excitement and the sheer joy of living. I was eighteen years old, and New York was mine.

One of the great moments of my life was the morning I stood in front of the William Morris office, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, gazing up at it as if I were in a scene straight out of the titles for the television series
That Girl.
I was about to walk in and sign with William Morris, the king of the theatrical agents, when who should walk up but the
Lolita
producer who had fired me the year before! Apparently he hadn’t heard the news about
Promises
because he looked at me sympathetically, as if to say, “You poor thing,” and said, “How are you?”

“Just fine!” I replied. “The best day of my life. I open on Broadway tonight!” And I ran into the Morris building. That moment, that encounter, is still etched in my memory. It was like a scene from a forties movie—a moment of triumph, and of sweet, sweet revenge. It couldn’t have been better if I’d staged it myself.

Opening night was the Palace, with my mother and Joe, all over again for me, except worse. As I stood in the wings waiting to go on, I could hear my knees knocking together and feel the blood rushing through my temples. My mind was a blank. I hadn’t even done a full technical run-through yet, for the intricate set pieces were only moved around in performance (the expense of the technicians made rehearsing with the sets prohibitively costly). The front row was filled with my friends and my godparents, Lester and Felicia Coleman, though my family hadn’t been able to come. I was so excited I could hardly breathe. When I finally came bursting onstage, my friends began clapping and cheering wildly, and somehow I got through that first performance without disgracing myself. Most of it is a blur now; the one thing that sticks out in my memory is my fellow actors making sure I didn’t get knocked unconscious by a flying set piece. Afterward, the audience applauded enthusiastically, and seemingly everyone drowned me in flowers. Best of all, the attention was for me, not for my family. Mr. Merrick hadn’t publicized the fact that I was Judy Garland’s daughter, though undoubtedly most people knew it. After the performance there was a party, and once again I was showered with praise and attention. Little Lorna had finally arrived. For the first time in my life, I was the center of attention—not Mama, not Liza—me. It was glorious.

After that night it seemed as if my whole life fast-forwarded into high gear. Nineteen seventy-one was a watershed for me. Besides appearing every night in
Promises
(twice on matinee days), I appeared on eight television shows that year, including David Frost, Mike Douglas, and a host of others. I even had my own fan club, founded by a woman who lived downstairs from my sister, complete with my own fan club newsletters. Now I was the one giving autographs at the stage door and reading my own fan letters. It was heady. Liza was back in town by then, and I got to party with my big sister and her new steady, Desi Arnaz (her marriage to Peter had dissolved by then). I even wore Liza’s glamorous clothes, inheriting some of her best hand-me-downs, like her
unsheared sheepskin coat. It was very exciting. Sid and Joe and Patti came to visit when they could, always for the holidays, and life was about as good as it could get.

I did
Promises
for nearly a year before it closed. I have wonderful memories of that time. One of the funniest is the first day the choreographer Michael Bennett came to see the show. He was the brilliant man who went on to codirect
Follies
and
Company,
and create
A Chorus Line.
Michael was the new kid on the block; he’d just finished doing
Company
to rave reviews, and his star was rising rapidly. About six months after I started
Promises,
we were told that Michael would be coming in to brush up the show. We were all very excited to get him. The day he arrived, I had just gone up to my dressing room after the performance when a strange man (Michael, as it turned out) came bursting into my dressing room without knocking and pointed at me, saying, “You two [meaning me and my leading man] have a case of the cutes. Get downstairs right now!” And he swept out again. Realizing who he was, I just stood there and thought, “Hello, Mr. Bennett, it’s nice to meet you, too.” I was floored, but I went downstairs immediately and lined up obediently with the rest of the hastily assembled cast. The only thing going through my head was, “The choreographer can’t fire me, can he? Only the director or producer can do that.”