Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me...

by Stevie Phillips

  *

  My mother’s older sister, her best friend, my aunt Julie, was known as “Julie, Queen of the Bowery.” This was in the days when the Bowery on the East Side of lower Manhattan was a haven for every alcoholic in New York City. The street lined with polite commerce on what is now called Third Avenue was then lined with no-frills bars cheek by jowl along ten dirty blocks, where drunks wallowed in the gutter. My aunt, who never touched liquor, owned the largest of these establishments.

  This came about because when her husband came home from World War II an alcoholic, he bought this huge beer hall where he could feed his need while serving the public—serving them much more than beer, but nothing quite as good. He died young—not unexpectedly—of cirrhosis and left Aunt Julie the business. My mother’s clan, the Weiss family, were all rather tall and stately, but not Julie. She was the runt of the litter. Yet this little lady would stand behind the bar and serve former judges and inmates alike the swill that constituted their total diet. My aunt told me she could be fined if she was caught by the ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) board serving a drunk. But drunk was all there was. So when someone fell asleep at one of the tables, Julie would go over and get him up, sometimes throw him out. She could manhandle those guys, some twice her size. In the end this led to two unfortunate incidents in which the drunks fought back.

  The first ugly episode caused Julie a broken wrist. The second and last little contretemps ended in several broken ribs. She was seventy-three at the time. Around the holidays business swelled to a point where customers could be three-deep at the bar and unpaid assistance was required. My uncles and my mother would help serve behind the bar, and I would stay in the back avoiding, detection while drying glasses. Other than that I was nothing more than an amused witness. Her only competition downtown was from “Tomato Mary,” another woman right next door. I never found out why she was called that, but I imagined it was from a red face caused by too much drink.

  Men of the Bowery inhabited a different world from Judy. She belonged to a world that I very much wanted to be a part of, and now she was drinking as much as they, and her world also no longer felt normal to me. Was it typical for so many to drink so much? As I moved around the country with Judy, I was learning that in showbiz alcoholism was a part of many people’s “normal”—people who were high-functioning professionals, well regarded and highly respected, and preferred to orbit in a refined stupor.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Have You Heard of Haddonfield?

  Every concert was thrilling. I never saw Judy phone it in, no matter how exhausted she was. Her performances were always joyous, and in some cases so intense I worried that she would spin off into some emotional hell. That never happened. Instead each appearance collided happily with the highest of audience expectations. I watched fans in very different cities react exactly the same way—streaming down the aisles in order to mob the apron of the stage, hoping to get close enough to shake her hand or to throw a rose she might pick up.

  Love of her was the common denominator everywhere, and that never got old. It made me really happy, sometimes teary-eyed happy, to see her win big. But I also felt a sadness that always floated just on top of the happiness like a storm cloud, and if I drew my eyes up and away from the ecstatic audience for a moment, I saw it lying in wait. Noël Coward wrote an exquisite song that Judy usually included in her performance: “If Love Were All.” It contains the lyric phrase “a talent to amuse.” Judy understood what that meant as surely and as deeply as anyone ever did, and she owned that talent. There were times when she understood that her talent to amuse was her undoing because it made everyone want to take advantage of her. Sadly, she was right.

  By the time I started traveling with her, she had allowed her life experience to make her unhappy, suspicious, and often mean, and therefore her talent to amuse was the only thing she had left that anyone cared about. So there were also moments when I stood backstage at the end of the performance thinking, Would these ecstatic fans feel the same way about her if they knew what I know? It was a sinister feeling. It was ironic that all anyone loved her for was her talent, because all she ever really wanted was to be loved—not just for her talent but for herself. And that was what she herself made impossible. Midway through the tour, she had turned my open heart into a dry little seed.

  *

  Although the concerts were always wonderful, what came before and after was not. Sometimes it was plain awful, and a few times almost tragic. The before and after could not have withstood a spotlight. Often getting her onstage could involve a contest of wills, a test of my endurance, a hard sell, chicanery, or all of them. It could sometimes precipitate events that I couldn’t handle well. But there was one I wished I had filmed. My mind flies to the before at the arena in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Preparations for that night’s concert were unique.

  The arena was a shit hole. No other way to describe it. It was old and dirty, and when I walked into the dressing room I knew instantly we were in trouble. The large room was a cement bunker. Broken lockers, their doors falling off, lined one wall. Old jockstraps hung from rusty hooks, a few littering the floor. The windowpanes on the short wall contained twenty-five years of grime, grime that was growing mold. Two wooden chairs and a table with a broken leg completed the decor. The stench was so strong it was like a wall trying to stop me from entering the room. It had been collected from the accumulated perspiration of all the basketball and hockey teams that had ever played in the premises. It threatened to straighten my curly hair were I to remain there more than five minutes. The bathroom was unusable, and one had to hope the rats and mice would be annoyed enough by our presence to stay hidden from view. Sadly, the only mirror was in the john. The concert promoter that night was the nicest old man, Felix Gerstman, who had been presenting concerts all his adult life. What was he thinking?

  I had to do something fast because the arena’s maintenance department assured me this was the best dressing room in the whole place. There wasn’t even an unused, unlocked office we could use. I knew it would be advisable for Judy to dress at the hotel; however, that was turning out to be a nightmare, the main problem being that I had all her clothes with me. She accepted no calls before five, and that was when the critical sound check took place. I had to be in the hall for that. If I went back to the hotel to dress her after that, we would never make curtain time.

  I spent my lunch at a five-and-ten loading up on all the cleaning products I could carry (the backstage crew laughed when I suggested mopping to them); I also bought the biggest mirror I could find, lots of white towels, a bedpan, and a large screen. I mopped and I fumigated, I wiped and I repaired, and I have to say that it looked no better when I finished than when I’d started. But the makeup was laid out the way Madam liked, on clean white towels in front of a mirror, and if push came to shove, she could pee in a pan behind the ersatz shoji screen I’d purchased. Talk about beyond the call of duty! I was wrecked and held my breath with terror at what was coming. And when it came, I was still not prepared.

  While waiting for the limo to pull up to the stage door, I figured that warning Judy about what to expect might be a good idea. Wrong! It was a mistake that stemmed from my inexperience. Here’s an agency road rule: Never share your bad news in advance because it’s pointless to suffer before you have to. When Judy saw the hall, her face dropped; when she saw the dressing room, she wanted to drop me. Her features froze into an angry mask, and the silence that followed was more intimidating than any of the words she might have chosen. If it’s true that anger turned inward becomes depression, it was proved again that night. An old arena wasn’t something Judy could accept, even knowing that in two hours she’d be gone from it forever, and a lot richer to boot. It was instead a reflection of her awful life, an opportunity to make others suffer for her present unhappiness.

  By 8:00 p.m. she still hadn’t talked to me, but she had started crying nonstop and occasionally sob-speaking through the tears to no one in part
icular. “All the years of hard work, and this is where I end up—in a fucking rat hole. I’ll kill Freddie fucking Fields—and that cocksucker Begelman. How dare they.…” It was a sorrowful outpouring, causing the mascara she was applying to stream down her face in greasy black rivulets. Every so often she would stop the prep altogether and cry flat out for five minutes. And all the while we heard footfalls on the iron steps just above the dressing room, made by the eager concertgoers getting to their seats in the upper deck. The din was beyond awful, more icing on this layer cake of despair.

  “Judy, it will all be over soon,” I said.

  “What will be over soon? This concert or my fucking life?”

  “This concert.” I tried to sound repentant. That sometimes worked.

  “Shut up; you’re no better than the rest of them.” “The rest of them” meant virtually everyone in her life up to that moment. She held everyone she’d ever met responsible for her feeling like a victim. Clearly I wasn’t to blame, but I was the only one there to absorb her anger. I, too, felt like a victim. Even though I could still rationalize that I was merely a victim of circumstance, a circumstance that would end, it didn’t help. It was a feeling I’d gotten used to, but don’t confuse “being used to” with “being comfortable with.” I felt as if my body temperature was dropping. At times I would actually start to shiver as if seized by a cold dread that I would soon be facing a much larger problem—that she would not perform. What then? Never once was I able to reassure myself that Judy would finally do what she had committed to. There was always a chance that she would not, or worse, that she would do something awful, and I would be left to explain. And I would be blamed.

  *

  Great entertainers like Jack Benny, George Burns, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr., were now making huge sums of money in Las Vegas. Could Judy do that? Could she get there again? And if she could get as far as Las Vegas, could she get all the way to Hollywood? So much depended on these concerts. My job depended on these concerts! It had been explained to me early on that getting her out on the stage on time each night was my job—all 150 percent of it. (The extra 50 percent was about getting through the show without a glitch so that I wouldn’t get scorched at the end of it.) Never gonna happen tonight, never gonna happen tonight.… The loop ran around in my brain, repeating nonstop. Eight thirty, and she was redoing the mascara for the third time. How long would it be before ten thousand people began clapping in unison, or worse, stamping their feet over our heads?

  After the mascara came the instant facelift. Those of you unfamiliar with this procedure probably never hung out in Gray’s Theatrical Drugstore while it still occupied the corner of Forty-third and Broadway. The facelift came in two pieces that looked like ordinary flesh-colored Band-Aids. Each had adhesive on one side that went against your skin just like any other Band-Aid, but at other end of the material there was an elastic string with a hook on the end of it; the corresponding piece had the same elastic with an eye. One could put the two pieces on either side of the face by the ears, connect the two elastics under the hair, and voila—everything that gravity had dragged down got drawn up tight again. The trick was to get them on straight. If they went on askew—as was totally possible under these volatile circumstances—you might end up with a crooked smile or, worse, singing out of the side of your mouth.

  Judy took out her lifts and began taping them on. Application normally took five minutes. Judy’s hair was done last. On this frightful night her hair hadn’t even been started. Nine o’clock was looking like a possibility if she would just stop crying. I was chattering on a lot about Freddie and David; defending them, telling her how much they really cared about her. It was exactly the wrong conversation. Crying, cursing, crying, cursing. She couldn’t get the lifts on straight, and there was a possibility she would give up trying and storm out. But just then came a knock on the door. I prayed for a miracle, and it was standing in front of me in the figure of “Freddie fucking Fields.” Thank God, I thought.

  *

  With his sensitive antennae and completely intuitive understanding of divas, Freddie sized up the situation in seconds. “Judy, Judy, Judy,” he started, doing his Cary Grant bit. I could see her lip curl. Undaunted, he pressed on.

  “You know Roz Russell didn’t use just two lifts when she went into makeup.” He had her attention, although she feigned indifference. Freddie went into full action-figure mode: He was using lots of exaggerated hand and arm gestures as he identified all the places Roz Russell put her lifts.

  “She would put two low on her forehead, and where you’re using two, she glued on four.” A smile was starting to crack Judy’s gloom look.

  “She used six on either side of her neck.” Judy had now turned around to face Freddie, her amusement impossible to conceal.

  “And the master string came out her ass. When you pulled it, she smiled!” Hysterical laughter followed. No one enjoyed a good laugh more than Judy. And since put-down humor was Judy’s favorite kind, Freddie had found a receptive audience. All was forgiven.

  “Freddie, we will not be doing shit holes like this ever again.”

  “I didn’t know there were any places this old.”

  “Well, you should have known. You’re as old as this place is.” She was laughing when she said it, and flying into her clothes while the hairdresser of the moment tried to work around the flurry of sudden activity. She did a great show that night. Better than great! The audience may have had to wait an extra hour, but they got their money’s worth.

  We drove back from Haddonfield that night in Freddie’s limo. I was relegated to sitting in front with the driver, and since the glass privacy partition separating the driver from those seated in back had been employed, I, too, could hear nothing until the glass came down and Freddie ordered the driver to get off at the next exit. We then drove into a less-than-lively town somewhere in lusterless New Jersey and went into a bar so that Judy could “relax.”

  It was a cold night, and Freddie took pity on the driver and me, allowing us to come inside, where we sat at a small cocktail table while Freddie and Judy stood at the bar. From where we were sitting I could see a woman who was overwhelmed by Judy’s sudden appearance. She could not contain her excitement, and because of it—and not for any other reason—her hands were all over Judy. This happened all the time, and Judy just hated people touching her. Freddie to the rescue. He engaged the woman in conversation, and as he did so, he started undressing her, making her more comfortable. Judy immediately picked up on it, and she also kept talking to the woman who was almost too excited to notice what was happening. By the time the woman finally pushed Freddie away she was down to her bra. Everyone in the bar, except herself, was hysterical. Judy was almost on the floor. In the end the woman was a good sport. She got the autograph she wanted, and we laughed all the way home.

  Freddie taught me that humor works wonders. Well—not exactly a newsflash, and easier said than done; however, I embraced the idea. I simply knew that I would have to learn to see things cockeyed as well as straight on. And I do.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Boston

  The “before” the show in Boston was another thing entirely. It is still one of my most painful memories these fifty-two years later. We were staying at the Ritz-Carlton, at that time arguably the best hotel in the city. Judy had an elegant gold-and-white suite overlooking Boston Common gardens and pond. She’d decided to dress in the suite that night, which was unusual because she disliked dressing at the hotel prior to any concert, and she gave me no reason why she was changing her routine. It meant, however, that I would have to return from the setup to the Ritz to collect her.

  At seven I left the Boston Garden, went back to the hotel, went up to the suite to put together the Act 2 costume change, and as I stood asking her about taking additional eyelashes to the hall, she slit her left wrist with a razor, cutting deeply into an artery. The moment was made even grislier by the fact that when she
made the cut she was looking at me and smiling.

  I learned many things that night that I could have gone on through life never needing to know. One was that blood doesn’t leak out; it spurts, it arcs. I can see it still on the gold-and-white bedspread, on the flocked wall covering and matching drapes, and on me. I was wearing my new favorite outfit, my first-ever ensemble, a three-piece outfit manufactured by my husband’s uncle, from whom I bought the most wonderful designer rip-offs wholesale. The fabric of my wool challis blouse matched the lining of my coat. I definitely loved it too much. That night when I walked into her room I thought I looked so snazzy. But all I see now is her blood all over my once-beautiful ensemble, on my skirt and coat. My hands. My hair. I stood there horrified. This was her normal! This is what she did. This is who she was. This is the kind of a teacher she was.

  I was beginning to understand that these events were all about manipulation and control. Judy’s suicidal episodes gave her power. With every horror she became the center of “his” attention. “‘His’ attention” was owned by the man of the moment. She craved his love much more than the adoration of her fans. They were strangers. It would soon be over for her—this episode—and she would go on to the next, but not so for me. I would never forget it. It would be seared into my memory, and I would replay it forever. You know what else? I still feel sorrier for me.

  So why slit her wrist on that particular night? Let me repeat it: It’s a love story. On that particular night she did it for David, for the love of this man who was, at this moment in time, the single most important consideration in her life. (I often wondered—still do today, and will for as long as I live—if I could have sat her down in a totally sober moment—of which there were none—and asked her: Judy, what’s more important to you? Being in love? Or singing? What would her answer have been? Some may think they know that answer, and they may be right. But I do not know it. I never have, and I don’t think I ever will.) But let me get back to her heart, and her affair with David Begelman.