Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (52 page)

Jake located a house for us to lease in Studio City, a small city nestled against the Hollywood Hills just minutes from the Burbank television studios. It was a very cute little house, and we got a cute little dog to go with our cute little baby. With no work to occupy my time, my life had gotten so cute it was nauseating. I was trying to live a normal, sober life, but the problem was that I didn’t know what normal was; I hadn’t had a “normal” day since I was seven years old.

I started going on auditions for television work, but had little success in the beginning. I would get very close to a part, but at the last minute, the deal always fell apart. I didn’t know why, and it bothered me. Finally my manager, Bob Lemond, told me he wanted me to work with an acting coach named Jered Barclay to see if he could figure out what was wrong.

Jered is a wonderful man. I liked him immediately. It didn’t
take long for him to figure out what was wrong. I had arrived in L.A. after a career in New York, and I thought and behaved like a New York theater person. Like so many New York actors, I had an attitude about L.A. I thought the television people in Los Angeles were all slightly nuts, and I looked down on them. It was the old New York versus L.A. feud that has been going on in the acting community for years. What I didn’t realize was that I was taking that attitude into meetings with me.

Jered sat me down and said, “Look, it’s like this. In New York, they sit you down and say, ‘Let’s play Monopoly,’ so you play Monopoly. But in L.A. they say, ‘Let’s play a game, but we’re not going to tell you what the game is.’ The game is Bullshit, and you’re going to have to learn how to play it.”

When I protested that I hated all the bullshitting that went on in Hollywood, and I didn’t want to do it, he said, “Then you will never work here. You may as well pick up your baby and go back to New York, because you will never get a job in L.A.”

“But if I do what you’re asking, I’ll be just like all the rest of them. I don’t want to be like that.”

And then Jered gave me a great piece of advice. “You don’t have to be like that all the time. You only have to be that way while you’re standing in those offices. Think of it like this: Pretend it’s a piece of luggage. Call it your ‘full-of-shit’ bag. When you go to the meetings, you’re going to pick up your shit bag and carry it to work with you like a briefcase. As long as you’re in that office, you’re going to clutch that shit bag. You’re going to be Dorothy Adorable, act like everything they say is brilliant, and charm everyone in the place. The minute you leave the office, you’re going to put the shit bag in the car, go home, take a shower, and become a normal person again. As long as you don’t take it home with you, you’ll be fine. And you’ll get a job. I guarantee it.”

I took his words to heart. The next time I had a meeting, I packed up my little bag and took it with me. I was charming and adorable. One week later I landed a part in the television series
Trapper John, M.D.,
a spin-off of the
M*A*S*H
series, set in a U.S. hospital after the characters return from the Korean War. I was offered an ongoing, supporting role as a staff nurse.

I loved doing
Trapper John;
the cast was great, and it was wonderful to settle into the steady routine a television series provides. Since I didn’t have to tour anymore, I could be home with Jesse in the evening and on weekends. I found a wonderful nurse for him named Maria, and with the money from the series we were able to buy a house in Beverly Hills. I’d come full circle. I was back in my childhood neighborhood, just up Sunset Boulevard from Mapleton Drive, except now I was the mom, and the baby boy in the next room was my son. My dad lived less than five miles away, and my brother was just on the other side of the Hollywood Hills from us. Life wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good, and I was determined to make it work.

Jake was happy with the situation, too. Money had always been very important to him, and he relished the things my salary could provide for us. Along with the new house came a new Mercedes for Jake and a relatively posh lifestyle. Jake still traveled sometimes as Rick Derringer’s manager, but most of the time he was home with us in California. He loved the glamour of Hollywood—all the trappings, the glitter and the glitz. We attended a lot of the premieres, always dressed to the nines, and Jake was always having me stop so we could have our picture taken. “Stop,” he’d say as I was walking along. “Have your picture taken.” And we’d pose for the camera.

Jake always saw to it that I looked glamorous in public; he wouldn’t let me leave the house without being nicely dressed and fully made up. “You have an image to maintain,” he would tell me over and over. He was intensely aware not only of my career, but of my identity as Judy Garland’s daughter and Liza’s sister. It was very important to him that I promote a glamorous image for myself.

I began to settle into our new life, and to form a personal and
professional network. The most important of these relationships was with Bob Lemond and his partner, Lois Zetter. They became not only my agents, but important sources of friendship. Bob and Lois had formed a highly successful management team called Lemond/Zetter. They had a stable of the most beautiful men in Hollywood. If was a kind of standing joke; if you saw a really gorgeous guy, someone would crack, “He must be managed by Bob Lemond.”

Bob managed John Travolta among many others, and it was through Bob and Lois that I first got to know Johnnie. Bob was the one with the artistic sense, and Lois was the one with the business sense who provided the nuts and bolts of the operation. Bob would pick out your head shots and plan your look; Lois would call to tell you if you got the job. They were a perfect team, each balancing the other’s gifts.

I’d first met them through my friend Maxine Messenger, the columnist from the
Houston Chronicle
who’d helped me out of the jam with Danny Thomas years before. After going on tour with
They’re Playing Our Song
a couple of years before, I’d felt my career—and my marriage—both needed a boost, so I’d signed with Bob and Lois to manage me. Jake wasn’t exactly crazy about the arrangement, and he certainly didn’t like Bob and Lois personally, but he also recognized it was a good career move. Lemond/Zetter was highly respected in the business, with good connections to all the networks, and as long as they were getting me work (and they were), Jake was willing to put up with the arrangement. Bob had a reputation as a star maker, and Jake wanted me to be a star.

Life wasn’t perfect, but it was, as they say “good enough.” I had a wonderful little son, a nice home, people to love, and work I enjoyed. My marriage wasn’t the kind of thing they write songs about, but then whose was? My two magical weeks at the Ford Center Family Program were rapidly fading into a memory as the demands of everyday life took over. I had found a measure of understanding and peace in Palm Springs that summer, and if I
wasn’t really applying my new knowledge to my relationships with those around me, at least I was staying sober myself. I told myself that was enough, and tried not to think too much about it. I had faced about as much truth as I could take for the time being.

What I didn’t yet understand was that once you take the first steps on the long journey to health, there’s really no going back. One way or another, life will force you to make choices you never wanted to make.

Collection of the author

With Vanessa outside the house her grandmother was born in, Grand Rapids, Minnesota, 1992.

I
t’s remarkable how patterns repeat in families without our even knowing it. That had become very clear to me at the Ford Center. All three of my mother’s children had developed serious addiction problems. In spite of what we’d experienced as children, or more accurately because of it, we had each followed a similar path. For me and Liza, it was cocaine and alcohol, and in Liza’s case, pills as well. For Joe it was primarily alcohol. Yet at first none of us realized we were repeating a pattern. I never made the connection between my coke use and my mother’s medication until I went to the Ford Center.

Unfortunately, addiction wasn’t the only destructive pattern that ran in the family.

I had unknowingly repeated my family’s pattern in marriage as well. In marrying Jake, I had chosen an alcoholic, someone who needed a partner with the training I’d received during those years on Rockingham Drive. I was an expert codependent. I knew how to put Jake to bed, how to deal with his abusive moods, how to cover up for his excesses, how to lie to myself about the reality of our mutual addictions. I had married Jake because I felt comfortable in the role of enabler. It was what I did best.

Compounding the difficulty, I had also repeated my
grandparents’ pattern of mixing business with family, and with the same dismal results. My mother and my grandmother’s relationship had been destroyed when Grandma Ethel became more of a manager than a parent to my mom. And even though my mom had been desperate to escape her mother’s control, she had made my father into her manager because it was what she felt comfortable with. She was frightened to make her own decisions; she wanted a man who would take over the role her mother had played in her formative years. I did exactly the same thing. Bitterly as I’d resented my father’s attempts to manage my career, I had broken free of my dad by marrying a man who took my father’s place professionally.

Being my mother’s daughter, I had repeated her mistake. And as the years went by, that mistake gradually eroded my relationship with my husband.

Somewhere along the line Jake had stopped being my husband and became my manager instead. I felt like his client, not his wife. He was obsessed with making me a star, and to do so, he tried to control every aspect of my life. If I left the house when he wasn’t there, I had to call him and tell him where I was going. If I wasn’t on the set or at home, he had to know exactly where I was at all times. If he disapproved of my plans, it meant either an argument or canceling my plans.

It was like being a teenager with a strict parent.

He kept a careful eye on my weight and became very insistent I diet if I put on a few pounds. He was also concerned about my makeup and my hair. He oversaw what I wore, onstage and off; his image of me was a glamour queen, and he liked me to attend premieres with plenty of sequins and a flashy look. He even insisted I dress up to go to the grocery store. Our evenings together were always photo opportunities in Jake’s mind; we could never just relax and have a good time. We constantly had to position ourselves so we’d appear in the press the next day, and Jake always made sure he was in the frame with me, the star-maker husband.

Watching me on screen, he critiqued every aspect of my performance. Most of his comments were critical; I was never good
enough. I still remember seeing the first screening of
Grease
2, and as all of us in the cast walked out together, excited about seeing the film come together, Jake’s only comment was, “You acted too tough. You should have played it softer.” I felt completely deflated. He never seemed to have a word of praise for me.

Auditions, career moves; these became the only topics of conversation in our home. He dreamed of me becoming a big star, a one-name celebrity like my mother and sister—“JUDY” “LIZA,” and finally—“LORNA.” No last name required. I think he was deeply disappointed that I never seemed to attain the legendary status he was always hoping for. During the last years of our marriage, we rarely discussed anything but business.

By the time we moved to California, there really was no marriage in the usual sense of the word. We were manager and client by then, not husband and wife. I switched to Bob Lemond’s management primarily because I didn’t think my marriage could survive much more of Jake’s management, even if my career could. Since Lois had all my checks mailed directly to Jake, he could still control the money, and that seemed to be what mattered most to him. He never allowed me to see the accounts, to use a credit card, or even have a checkbook. He said I couldn’t be trusted with money.