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

by Stevie Phillips

  After an absence of a few weeks, Begelman was back in New York. Judy was in thrall to him. Obsessively. They’d been having an affair for some months, and the affair was forever tripping down a rocky road; for the last many weeks it had been caught on some insurmountable boulders due to David’s disappearance. Judy did not, like other women, tell everything to her hairdresser, because her hairdresser sometimes changed as often as her wardrobe. I was her confidante; she told me everything, and I knew about the affair from the beginning. I often wished I did not, because David was my boss. It put me in the very uncomfortable position of being in the middle when Judy sought insider information. She would ask me questions about his wife, Lee, and where he’d been on certain nights, questions I couldn’t answer—sometimes because I didn’t know, and sometimes because I didn’t want to.

  Recently he’d gone on a trip abroad, and had dared to take his wife along with him. And how did Judy know that? Not from me. She’d checked with his housemaid, whose confirmation had sent her into a tailspin. She could not be jollied out of it. I faced daily questions like: “Do you think he’s sleeping with Lee?” What was I supposed to answer? My best shot at a response was: “How could he be sleeping with her if he’s in love with you?”

  Answering her question with a question wasn’t really answering her question at all, and I preferred doing that to lying. Judy was sure that David was in love with her. And I was happy to leave it right there. I knew the truth, and it was ugly. David was ugly. I had now been in his employ a year and a half, and I was learning what a liar he was. The truth would have hurt. The truth might have cured some other person, but not Judy, who lived in a make-believe world.

  She would sometimes tell me the romantic things David told her, and I knew they were all lies. She giggled like a schoolgirl when she confided: “We’re making wonderful plans to travel.” Travel with David? He was a different kind of addict: a gambler and a workaholic who went on vacation only when forced to by his wife, and this is exactly what had happened. Lee Begelman had her social set, a finite group of wealthy couples, the wives of which performed good works mostly for themselves, and who spent hours on the phone each day discussing how to spend their husbands’ money. One day Lee announced that they were all going yachting in the Greek Islands, and off David went with a small library to forfend against the boredom he suffered around Lee’s entitled entourage. He told Judy he was going to London on business. “What plans are you and David making?” I asked Judy. “We’ll rent a marvelous big yacht just for the two of us, and we’ll cruise the Greek Islands.” There’s no other word for it. David was a cruel man.

  It hurt me to see Judy taken in by David’s outrageousness, but I could not or would not attempt to convince her that David loved no one but himself. She believed what she wanted to believe, and in spite of their fights about his prolonged absences, regardless of his limp ad-libbing about his failure to get a divorce, Judy remained a believer. And now David had come to Boston to attend her concert and was dressing in a room almost next door when she slit her wrist. Judy Garland would show him. Judy Garland would die for him. Who was Judy Garland really punishing? It wasn’t David Begelman.

  I made a tourniquet out of a towel and a hairbrush. Then I picked up the phone to call David while Judy sat docilely by. She didn’t cry or scream or have any reaction at all, for that matter. She was standing when she did it; now she sat down on the bed and, staring straight ahead, calmly waited for David to arrive. David immediately called for a doctor, and one arrived in record time; in fact he got there so fast it made my mind spin a fiction that Judy had stationed him downstairs in the bar in advance for her own nefarious purpose. That, of course, is ridiculous, but I do have a sense that she knew what she was doing, that in fact she had planned it. Could she have known that what she had done or the way she had done it was not serious enough to cause a major problem? It sounds awful to even think such a thing because the slice she made looked ghastly, but that may be the truth of this horror. Maybe this was not so much a suicide attempt as it was a scream: I hurt! Come take care of me. Come love me!

  It was a gash in a life careening out of control, a huge, ugly gash that would hopefully make David see her, and see the pain that was tearing her apart. If she did it for effect, the effect on me was shattering. I was angry that she would do such a terrible thing to herself, and, at the same time, do it to me. My anger filled a space in my being like air filling a balloon. And I didn’t know how to show it. I even felt guilty for having it. How could I be angry at someone who was so sick? Well, it is possible. The anger stayed with me for a long time, for years, until the balloon inside me got so old and weak that all the anger seeped out. Only the picture remains.

  Put her in an institution. Get her the help she needs! That’s the scream that was raging in me. It never came out of my mouth. Could anyone have institutionalized Judy without her permission? Maybe not, but it didn’t matter because there were no candidates. Everyone was too busy exploiting her. To this day I think I should have tried harder to get her the help she so obviously needed. I should have appealed to David to get her serious attention. I should at least have tried. I didn’t. I knew then as I know now that any plea for saving Judy would have been gratuitous, made for wanting to hear the sound of my own voice—for all the attention such a plea would have received. But maybe had I at least given lip service to this tragedy I might have felt less guilty. Here’s my cop-out: I was only a foot soldier doing my duty. And my duty was to obey orders. There was only Do the job and shut up, or quit. I’ll say it again. Quitting wasn’t ever an option.

  When I describe what followed, you may find it despicable. I do. I was repulsed by my own behavior, but I knew I was doing what Judy wanted me to do. “Here’s a hundred,” David said, peeling a bill off a large roll and putting it into my hand. “Buy enough bracelets to cover the bandages.” Judy sat by, admiring David’s take-charge capability. There wasn’t an iota of protest from her. Under the circumstances one might think she would want to go to the hospital, or at least pull the covers up over her head. Wasn’t anyone going to cancel the concert and give her tender, loving care? Heavens no! Judy was now ready to go out onstage, and if Judy intended to perform that night knowing full well that she had slit her wrist on the way to the theater, so be it. If buying bracelets to cover her wrist was the only thing I had to do to hold on to my job this night, I would do it. “Hurry,” Judy told me. I ran out into the streets of Boston to find a store where I could buy enough cheap bangles to cover the bandages the doctor had put on her wrist. It wasn’t so easy at seven o’clock on a Saturday night, but I was on a mission and I would do whatever I had to—beg, borrow, or steal—to get her onstage. And get there she did. She did such a wonderful show no one could have suspected she wasn’t at the top of her form. On second thought, maybe she was.

  That Judy desperately needed help was clear even to a naive dummy like me. I was brought up to believe that when someone was ill, you took him or her to the doctor. But the point here is that “doctor” (as opposed to pill pusher) was not the help she wanted. It wasn’t the kind of help she felt she needed, and it wasn’t the kind of help she would have accepted. It was a hard lesson for me.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Reality Checks

  I was wearing chicken soup stains the day Judy called me out onstage to sing “Just in Time” with her. No, I’m not making this up. I didn’t think it would ever happen, although she had threatened to do it at the last concert, and that day was now here. It was the culmination of a tour to establish her reliability that had taken us on the road for months in 1961, against the hope that Hollywood would take another chance on her. Freddie’s strategy had proved successful. Alas, that afternoon I spilled soup down the front of my beautiful, almost-new, brown wool A-line dress when a lumpy electrician backed into me with a ladder in a place where I should never have been standing. This is what happens when you drink your lunch standing up.

  The lovely Lanz dress, sof
t and warm when I’d zipped it up early that morning, was now ruined and still wet around the chest area from repeated soakings in several of the Armory’s bathrooms. I hadn’t brushed my hair all day, and one heel was barely hanging on to its shoe. Judy couldn’t’ve cared less about what I looked like as I stood in the wings as usual for the encores, a towel hung over my right arm like a Victorian maitre d’, and the earphones I’d used in the light booth to call the show still hanging around my neck. She did take away the liebfraumilch in my right hand and passed it off to a stagehand paging the curtain, lest I walk out holding booze the audience might think was hers. Then she grabbed my arm and pulled, and suddenly I was out onstage, framed in the spotlight, and totally terrified that I was really going to have to sing. My throat was closing with the fear of it, and I was positive no sound would come out.

  *

  Thousands of miles traveled had brought me to that moment. Many of them traversed over well-paved roads. Boring rides in limousines. Overheated or freezing limos. On the way to airports, from airports to hotels, from hotels to gigs, from gigs to restaurants—or wherever else we went at two in the morning—from “wherevers” back to hotels, and finally back to airports. Those rides became too tedious to endure—except for the day in which her hand began a trip from my knee, where she had placed it when the car lurched, to my crotch. As it slowly crept no more than an inch every two or three minutes, I started to panic. Her move wasn’t inadvertent. Judy did nothing inadvertently. Like Alice, I grew smaller and smaller as I shrank into the upholstered corner on my side of the car. Her arm, however, grew longer and longer as it stretched across the length of the backseat.

  Omigod! What am I going to do? It was, for me, a close encounter of the unwanted kind. In an instant my body turned rigid, and I stopped breathing while every possible weak-kneed simpering response like, I don’t think so. Please! Not my thing. I wish you wouldn’t collided in my head. I rejected them all. Breathe, Stevie. Dare I look at her? I mustered all the courage I had and turned in her direction. I hesitate to recall the pained expression I must have worn. Take another breath and say something, I commanded myself. Nothing would come out. Her hand was now fully in my crotch, and she was staring straight ahead. Then she turned and smiled. What did it mean? Why was I even thinking about that? What should I do? The idea of being intimate with Judy revolted me. I wanted to reject her. And it wasn’t just because she was a woman, although a relationship with another woman did not interest me. It was because I didn’t like her. That was the biggest Oh no!

  In that minute I knew, as surely as I knew my name, that I no longer liked her and I could admit it to myself. I loved her talent, but I didn’t like her. The pass might not have been as distasteful if it had come from someone else. Beyond that, there was that other big Oh no! She was the great Judy Garland, and I was her assistant cum roadie cum wet nurse cum all other things menial. I was scared. Will I lose my job if I take her hand away? Will I offend her? These insipid questions were exploding in my head. Breathe, Stevie.

  And then suddenly it didn’t matter. If I lost my job, so be it. It all happened in that moment. I took another deep breath, and then I took her hand and put it back in her lap. I looked at her and smiled. And when I did, I understood that I had the courage of my conviction. After that I would never doubt it again. She smiled back, and we both moved on. It was another step forward in my real education, but I’m grateful that I was not tested again. She kept her hands to herself after that.

  Having car sex with Judy Garland was in no way the right answer to alleviating boredom, but after a while one simply had to do something. I was drowning in my own miserable small talk. “Tell me what it was like working with Gene Kelly in The Pirate,” and then there would be little snatches of fun when she talked about working with Mickey, Fred, and Gene. But I was not knowledgeable enough, or insider enough, to discuss the great professionals like the producer Arthur Freed and the other creative geniuses that she had worked with, like the composer Roger Edens and the choreographer Busby Berkeley.

  In these countless car rides I went with her through every movie she’d ever done, patting myself on the back each time I remembered some silly casting detail, while unintentionally boring her to death. And when she was bored she was nasty. I was predictable in my style, formulaic in my conversation, and, with Judy, limited mostly to praise of her voice, her clothes, her wit, and her last performance. Thank God she never tired of praise.

  *

  Away from her I tried recapturing the feelings I had had for her before we met. She was, after all, the living incarnation of my childhood dream. But it became more and more difficult even to pretend I was in awe when we were together. The dream disappeared when the real Judy Garland entered the room. Clearly I had nothing in common with her, or she with me. She was sophisticated; I only thought I was. I was totally naive. Going on her concert tour was the first time I’d been out of New York. She was worldly; I was inexperienced. My husband was the first man I’d slept with.

  When she was in her best of all possible worlds, Judy had a great imagination, and one day while on our way to somewhere, she told me she’d come up with a suggestion to relieve our limo despair. “I’m going to teach you the Mort Lindsey arrangement of “Just in Time” (a superb song written by the Broadway king Jule Styne for the show Bells Are Ringing). Judy didn’t bother to ask if I could sing. If I couldn’t I might then become the victim of some of her outrageous nasty humor for a couple of rides. Truth is I sang in tune and played the piano a bit.

  *

  Let’s talk for a minute about what Judy thought was funny. She had a fine, funny, and fertile creative mind. She loved hearing a good joke; she would howl with laughter, and she was a good joke teller herself. But her best indoor sport was put-down humor, the Don Rickles variety that identified a human target and then eviscerated it with a sharp blade. It was mean humor and often dealt with one’s physical attributes. For instance, Billy Barty, the wonderful elfin actor who was featured in movies and countless TV shows once the little box became so popular in the fifties, did not fare well with her. All things small in stature got “Barterized.” She loved to toss a good “bart.” Of Debbie Reynolds’s husband, Harry Karl—whose manners she deplored—she quipped: “He eats two-minute eggs with his fingers.” Then there was also more subtly nasty humor.

  One of my favorite Judy moments happened in an elevator at the Beverly Hilton. Judy and I stepped in on the twelfth floor. Richard Nixon and another gentleman stepped in on the tenth. Nixon looked at Judy and then turned toward the front, showing her only his back. On the fourth he turned around and said, “And you must be Judy Garland.” She smiled politely and, without missing a beat, replied, “And you’re Richard Nixon.” Back to the car and “Just in Time”!

  *

  Mort Lindsey’s arrangement was brilliant, and difficult. It contained eleven halftone key changes: one modulation every eight bars. A whole-tone key change is hard enough to sing, but a halftone is impossible—unless, of course, you’re Judy Garland with a voice of liquid magic. When she performed the song onstage, it was nothing less than amazing. You could only listen in total awe of where that voice could go and admire the versatility of her enormous talent. She could take a melody anywhere, put it through the wringer, and squeeze tears out of the audience. On the other hand, when I attempted to make the halftone changes that came so effortlessly to her, I was lucky that Jule Styne was nowhere within earshot. But repetition, herein the substitute for talent, finally put me on the road to nine, ten, and, yes—at last—eleven key changes. I thought I was home free. Not so fast.

  Once I had mastered the key changes in the melody, she started singing the harmony along with me. The new fun was seeing how far I could now go before I crashed. The answer: not very far. “You better get it right,” she warned, “because in the last concert I’m going to call you out onstage to sing it with me.” It was a teasing moment she was relishing, and so was I. It was always good to see her in
a good mood.

  “I dare you.” I told her. “Daring me is treading on very dangerous ground,” she warned. I had no doubt that was true. The Judy Garland I’d come to know was willing to try anything—twice—to avoid a rush to judgment. She made it easy to believe that trying kinky things was fun for her. There were always sly sexual intimations about relationships with women that were titillating and bore further investigation, but that was really treading on dangerous ground, and after the touching incident in the limo, I didn’t want to go there. But the stage was not dangerous ground, it was sacred ground, and that was different. Performance was something she didn’t share except with superstars. Judy was the single and complete owner of whatever concert stage she walked out onto. I could count on her not wanting to share her moment with me—not even as a joke.

  “You better be prepared,” she warned. “I’m gonna do it.” Not bloody likely, I continued to think. The only nonsuperstar she ever got out on the concert stage with her was Liza, which fell into another category entirely. Occasionally she would call Liza up from the audience to spell her for five minutes. It gave Judy an opportunity to catch her breath, mop her wet head, and gulp down some water. She would sit with her legs hanging over the apron—mugging and stealing the scene—while an earnest thirteen-year-old Liza kicked up her heels to her own choreographed rendition of “Swanee,” and I, up in the booth, intoned a prayer that Li’s unwashed underwear—peeking out from under her short skirt—couldn’t be seen by the audience.