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

by Stevie Phillips

  Unfortunately for him he didn’t realize just how furious I was. I made a fist, pulled back my arm, and with all the strength I had left in my weary body, I punched him as hard as I could in the face. He went sprawling backward into the table behind him, on whose fancy white cloth at least fifty set-ups were resting. The table went over with him on top of it. I don’t think it was the force of the blow that sent him reeling; it was more likely the shock. I didn’t wait to find out. I was out of there before anyone could ask: “Who is she?”

  *

  Back in New York I stayed home, allowing my anger to cool for a while, refusing to respond to David’s calls. But after about a week, I knew I wanted to go back to work as long as it meant I would never have to work for Judy again. I was bored sitting at home. There was nothing for the “good little wife” to do, plus—I wasn’t her. Although I discovered reading again, I had much too strong a work ethic to curl up in a corner with a book during the working person’s day. And when I questioned myself about looking for a job, the answer was always the same: Forget about that! I had now put three years into FFA. That, I believed, was my equity. I wanted to turn it to account for myself. I wanted David’s job—well, not quite.

  It was time for me to be an agent, a real agent, not a stage manager, not a dresser, not an assistant or a trainee. I needed to advance my career. I had to get back. I no longer had any fear that limiting my boundaries would cost me my job. My confidence had taken a huge leap. Freddie and David knew that they could always trust me to get the job done. Any job. And I knew that after what I’d been through in the last two years, there was damn little I couldn’t handle.

  *

  I didn’t learn anything about Judy from this episode that I didn’t already know, but I learned something hugely valuable about myself: I was totally dependable, responsible, and capable. I could be counted upon in any situation to act with reasoning intelligence to bring things to a reasonable conclusion. Were these qualities always there, lying dormant, waiting to be tapped? I don’t know. But I had now been tested time and time again, and I didn’t disappoint myself or anyone else. Grasping this gave me confidence, and the confidence was brand-new. I would never feel threatened about my job again. I was “womanpower” worth having.

  I met with F&D and made my demands. I wanted to be an agent. I wanted five hundred dollars a week. They agreed to my terms. They needed more manpower. (We weren’t up to calling it womanpower yet.) The business was growing. Freddie was talking about opening an office in LA. “If you’re going to be successful, you better remember this,” Freddie said: “The business belongs in the hands of the people who sign the clients!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  One Kind of Husband

  And now to Sid Luft. He was an ape! When we met, he was an attractive man in his late forties who was built like a truck. He was strong, with the kind of hard body that suggested he worked out. And he knew how to hit. Judy assured me of that. She told me on a number of occasions that she and Sid had gone a couple of rounds together, but mercifully, I wasn’t on hand to see them. I wouldn’t like to think of him, or any man, laying a hand on any woman, but that’s not reality, and it wasn’t Sid’s. He was, however, responsible for one of Judy’s great comebacks, having produced the movie A Star Is Born years after Judy was fired from MGM. But their marriage was fraught with difficulty, and they were not living together when Freddie signed her as a client late in 1960.

  Sid didn’t think twice about manhandling me. It happened on the very day that Judy was leaving for London to start A Child Is Waiting. After all Judy and I had been through together, David thought it was appropriate for me to bid Judy good-bye. “She wants to thank you,” he told me. I was now a fledgling agent in the office. I had no clients, and I was just starting to learn how to deal in TV. I didn’t have to go to the Stanhope that day, and I shouldn’t have gone. Or at least I should have realized that there was something else going on. But I bought David’s bullshit once more and went to the hotel (now an expensive Fifth Avenue co-op) where she was staying prior to flying out that night.

  I arrived only to discover I had been summoned to be the reliable babysitter for the afternoon. Judy needed her younger children—Lorna, who was then ten, and Joey, seven—out of the suite so she and David could negotiate her departure with Sid Luft, who had a shared custody arrangement for their two children. Sid wanted to keep Judy from taking Lorna and Joe out of the country. He had booked a suite in the same hotel and was intending to stop her however he could. Judy asked me to take the children to Central Park and to check in with her in an hour to find out if it was okay to bring them back to the hotel. I counted the minutes.

  I crossed the street with the two children and their attractive red-haired Irish nurse, who seemed to be kind and devoted to them. We took the Fifth Avenue bus downtown to the little zoo in Central Park, some fifteen blocks south. When it came time to make the checkin call Judy had requested, I could find no pay phone anywhere in the park. (Before cell phones, one had to go to a pay phone on the street, and chic Fifth Avenue never accepted such eyesores.) So while the children were enjoying the seal pool, one of the liveliest attractions in the zoo, I walked to commercial Madison Avenue, where, if I had a quarter, I could make the call on any corner.

  I asked the nurse to stay exactly where she was. Even though the zoo is small, I didn’t relish the idea of chasing through its various animal houses looking for her. David answered the phone in Judy’s suite and told me to stay put and check back in another hour. Ugh. When I came back, the children were gone. No, they’re here, I said to myself. The seals, especially at feeding time, are such a popular exhibit that they draw crowds two-and three-deep around their fence. I ran around and around the circular pool assuring myself that the nurse and children had to be somewhere in the crowd. But no! Then I ran like a crazy person all over the zoo looking for them. I checked all the bathrooms, and everywhere I went I asked strangers if they had seen this nurse, knowing one could not miss her fire-engine-red hair. But no one had seen them anywhere but at the seal pool. How strange is that? I thought. I was in a panic. I couldn’t call Judy and tell her I’d lost them.

  And then it dawned on me that the nurse had to be working for Sid. It was the only notion that made sense from the discussions I’d been party to, in which Sid was painted as a schemer and an opportunist. However, at that moment, it was also the only hook for me to hang on to. Given the battle then waging between Judy and Sid, it was the one scenario that worked.

  In the taxi on the way back to the Stanhope I wrote a script for what might be happening. A kidnapping plot was afoot. Money for Sid the motive! The closer I got to the hotel, the more likely my scenario seemed. What made it possible were the two principals in the ongoing negotiation: David, a merciless extorter who would push anyone’s back to the wall and then beat them down, and Sid Luft, about whom everything was said to be unsavory, underhanded, and slimy. But no more so than David!

  When I got back to the Stanhope, the desk clerk could see how concerned I was, and, even though he was not supposed to give out room numbers, he told me where Sid was. I think the clerk saw himself as an incidental character in an unfolding plot. It was clear to everyone behind the desk that something improper was happening. Famous wife and sullen husband in suites on separate floors. The level of interest rises among the staff.

  I went directly to Sid’s suite. I knocked on the door, and when he opened it I could see the children playing on the carpet in the living room straight ahead. I confronted him, told him that Lorna and Joe were in my charge, and I wanted them back. Sid looked at me as if I were a total loony just before he slammed the door in my face. At least I knew the kids were safe. But that was hardly the point. I never for a moment thought they had come to any harm. What to do? I knew I must do something to get them back or face ugly consequences. Both Sid and Judy had vile tempers.

  I knocked on the door a second time and appealed to Sid in some limp, whiny fashion, hoping
that such an appeal would gain more traction. However, the reverse was true. This time he was far more annoyed with me and wanted to put an end to the nuisance I was causing. I never expected him to do what he did, which was to pick me up and throw me across the corridor. Literally. One hundred twenty-five pounds of me was like a paperweight to him. I bounced off the opposite wall and lay crumpled on the floor like a balled-up piece of paper trash.

  My back went into some kind of spasm I’d never known. I was hurting badly and couldn’t get up. Finally I crawled to the elevator and, using a tall sand-filled ashtray for support, pulled myself up with difficulty. The elevator man helped me limp into the old-fashioned phone booth that lived in the lobby, while behind the desk everyone stared, and without any alternative, I made the call to Judy. She went ballistic. I could not explain, given the screaming coming through the phone, that the fucking nurse was a no-good double-dealer. After listening to the stream of abuse leveled at me, I then told David what really happened. He asked me not to leave the hotel. Dummy that I was, I stayed, cowering on the seat in the phone booth.

  How would David solve this problem? Well, he could always sell drama to Judy. They both feasted on it. So it had to be David’s suggestion to hire hit men, and given his Las Vegas experience, he knew exactly whom to call. Goons were hired to break down Sid’s door and grab the children. They were very effective, and I hope they beat Sid up in the process and left him on the floor in as much pain as he had left me.

  As Judy rushed from the hotel with the children and David in tow, she saw me in distress sitting in the phone booth. At the top of her lungs, and she had lungs aplenty, she screamed some of her favorite curse words at me, “You cunt, you cooze!” and everyone in the lobby looked not at her but at me.

  The next day headlines of the New York Post screamed: “Judy Hires Goons!” and it told the story of the kidnapping without ever once mentioning my name. But it was clear to me that David had concocted a script that was scandalous, in which I had played some traitorous role. My guess is that he’d told Judy I had conspired with Sid, and that’s the reason she exited calling me every awful name I’d ever heard, and some that I hadn’t. I could just imagine David embroidering the narrative as he conveyed it. So like him to amuse himself in this way.

  *

  My husband picked up the pieces and took me home, where I rested in bed for the next three days, but three days was my limit. Bored and less sore than before, I went back to work amid his protests. I was so pill-averse at that point that neither he nor anyone else could get me to take so much as an aspirin. But I was young and strong, and fortunate not to have sustained a permanent injury. The idea of suing Sid Luft never crossed my mind, and had I decided to do that, I wouldn’t have gotten any support from Judy because by the time I set foot back in the office, she and Sid were good buddies once more. All I could draw from that idiocy is that if someone was willing to fight with her, she could then conclude that they must care about her. Huh? Weird logic.

  F&D were unwilling to judge Sid, at least not out loud. They never once put him down to Judy. From their standpoint Sid was a savior, willing to put up with the hard time with her that they were not, and as I was no longer in the picture full time, having a body in place for her was worth more than money. Sid, on the other hand, hated F&D and wanted to take them to court. He was sure that they had stolen Judy’s money, and I’m not sure he was wrong. I saw David endorse Judy’s name on the back of many concert checks. He did it right in front of me. It was clear he was copying her signature. What I did not know at the time was what account those checks went into. I still don’t. They could have gone into Judy’s account just as easily as his. I had no paper trail and did none of the company’s bookkeeping. Many years later, however, when David, by then president of Columbia Pictures, was knee-deep in scandal, having been caught forging Cliff Robertson’s name on a check he cashed for himself, I realized that it was not only possible that he had cashed Judy’s money but most likely that he had. And it was a lot of money, much more than the ten thousand he was trying to steal from Cliff Robertson, perhaps more than a few hundred thousand.

  My feeling now is that he stole from Judy to get the money he needed for his and Lee’s very lavish lifestyle. It’s also possible that he used that money to settle his gambling debts, debts that he would have created with money borrowed in casinos using Judy’s name, and paid for with Judy’s earnings, for no matter how much David made—and he has to have made millions over the long haul—he never had enough. He was always deeply in debt.

  *

  If I learned anything from Sid, it was that there are men who like to live off women. They don’t do any of the heavy lifting; they simply set themselves up in a cozy corner and call themselves advisers. In my opinion Sid wasn’t fit to shine Judy’s shoes. He was neither as smart as David nor nearly as charming. But they had a lot in common. Both were gamblers, hustlers, and liars. Sid liked horses, David, who lived like a pasha, liked expensive homes, the best restaurants, pricey jewelry and clothing. And each bet the farm on being a winner while they were both such losers.

  What I most loathed about David—his cheating, his lying, his taking advantage of anyone who allowed it, in other words, his cruelty—had to be as apparent to Freddie as it was to me. I don’t know why he was willing to put up with it, except to imagine that he didn’t want to go forward alone, and as awful as David was is also as skilled as he was. A year or two before Freddie died, I visited him and we talked about David. I told him I thought that David had stolen huge sums from Judy. I sensed he agreed with me, but he didn’t give it up. “Why are you protecting him now?” I asked. Freddie didn’t have an answer.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Endings, Beginnings, and Endings

  It was time to stop thinking about ending my marriage, and end it. It was so over for four years out of the five, and now I was becoming intolerant of the little things. I was sick of having to dine with my husband’s parents once a week. They were refugees with one foot still in Germany, where they had lost many dear relatives to the Holocaust. They were sad, joyless people who doted on their only child, the light of their lives. I dishonored them by never being fully present at dinner. I desperately wanted to be alone. Immersed in self-delusion, I thought my dinners with Judy were more important. I could get Frank and Dean on the phone (for Judy). I was self-congratulatory because they knew my name. I traveled to places I never thought I’d see. Me at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, me sitting at a blackjack table at the Sahara in Las Vegas, me at lunch in the Savoy Grill in London. Not me in a little German restaurant with bad food and a deaf waiter. I was so intolerant, so selfish. I thought I had earned the exciting life I was participating in. What was wrong with that? My perception was adolescent. My values the same. And the truth is that I was chasing after clients and hadn’t yet accomplished anything to be proud of. My interaction with big stars came only because of Freddie and David.

  Meanwhile, what I had at home was far better: the love of a good man. However, coming from my parents’ home, I didn’t know what a good man was. I had no role model. So without being able to see what really mattered, I ended the marriage and chose the fast-but-empty lane. In securing the divorce, I ran roughshod over my husband, which was easy to do because he was so patient and kind.

  I’ve blocked out what I said to him. I do remember that he grew silent, made no protest. He didn’t try to persuade me to stay. Tutored by his thrifty folks, he asked to keep all our money. The money didn’t mean much to me, and I thought he was entitled for what he’d gone through. I agreed without once thinking how I would put down the security for an apartment of my own. I went to Mexico for a “quickie” in Juárez. The proceeding was conducted in Spanish, and I understood little, somehow an appropriate ending to a marriage I also didn’t understand. The irony was complete. I hadn’t heard the rabbi on the day I married, and I didn’t understand the attorney on the day I divorced.

  As well, I didn’t real
ize I was developing a case of hardening of the emotional arteries. All I knew was that I had seen how the beautiful people lived, and I wanted all their trinkets: the houses, the cars, the jewels, and the clothes. When I think back on who I was then, it’s hard for me to love that girl, but possible to forgive her. And I would have to forgive her a lot for what she did next.

  *

  I had an affair with David Begelman. I gave myself permission to do that because Judy was leaving to work at CBS. David would no longer have her in his backyard; nor would I. We both made it clear that we were staying in New York: he to run the East Coast office, I to take my place as an agent representing Liza. It was our excuse to shake free, if only temporarily. Judy, who had to have a man in her life, put Sid Luft back in place, and they moved into a new home in Brentwood.

  With Judy gone, David’s attention turned to me. I was flattered. He let me know—by the length of time he held my hand, by the way he appraised me, by his lingering and sometimes smoldering looks—that he was interested, but he didn’t make a pass. I think he feared rejection. He was like the kid with his nose pressed against the candy store window. I thought about it a while before I let him know he could enter. And how did it happen? One day while at work I simply took the hand on my shoulder into mine as he stood behind me looking at a contract on my desk. He walked me into his office, locked the door, pressed the button to draw shut the mechanical drapes—signaling to his secretary that he didn’t want to be disturbed—and undressed me. It was midday.