by Anne Edwards
Finally in 1959 he chose the massive Metropolitan Opera House for a concert, and after that the Chicago and San Francisco opera houses. It would seem he did so simply because they were the largest houses available. By fall her voice suddenly deserted her, and her body swelled up monstrously. Suffering severe pain, she was rushed to New York’s Doctors Hospital. The doctors there believed she had hepatitis. She remained there in crisis and under treatment several weeks. She came very close to death. Luft took a room at the hospital to be close to her. The doctors confided in him that Judy might not be able to perform again.
It is difficult to know what went through Luft’s head at that time. Judy gave out a number of interviews in which she asserted that the doctors’ proclamation rather pleased her and that she was looking forward to retirement. However, in their circumstances at the time, retirement would not have been what Judy fantasized. They were several hundred thousand dollars in debt with no assets or capital, and at no time in their marriage had Luft proved he could support the family—certainly not in the style they both enjoyed! He must have been fairly frantic with concern, especially when her condition worsened before it got better. Getting her to agree, he came up with the money-making idea of Judy’s writing her autobiography (with a ghostwriter).
Always a good promoter, he left Judy in a very weakened condition at the hospital and went to see Bennett Cerf at Random House, whereupon he talked Cerf into agreeing to advance him $35,000 against a signature by Judy on a contract to cooperate fully in the writing of her autobiography. Luft then convinced Judy she should sign, but as her health improved, she had a change of heart.
Upon her release from the hospital, they returned to Los Angeles and the heavily mortgaged home in Holmby Hills. Judy, semi-invalided, was forced to remain inactive for over four months. Once again she gained heavily, tipping the scales at one hundred fifty pounds. She had a few sessions with a ghostwriter, but now felt her signature had been obtained under undue duress and refused to complete the interviews. But, shockingly, the money from the advance was gone. Random House did not take a complete loss on the $35,000, as the interviews were turned into a two-part article, sold by Cerf to McCall’s.
Judy was in a severe state of depression and hating Los Angeles. There were constant unpleasant articles about her, and she was always being deluged by bill collectors and creditors and pressed for money that she did not have. Recalling her happiness in England and the kindness of the British press, she decided she would like to return there. Luft and the three children accompanied her. Her fans—who had now reached cult proportions—rose up en masse on both sides of the Atlantic. For the first time they became truly active, physical, seen. Her ability to return to the stage after her serious illness and ill fortune, their own desperate need to see and hear her, was paramount—the only thing in their minds. Her life became theirs, her suffering their own; and in this transference her failure to overcome would mean their own failure. They now moved in to become part of her life, and Judy permitted— perhaps welcomed—it. Wherever she went from this time there were members of the Garland Cult, each one living only in the hope of somehow touching her life and so gaining some small measure of importance to their own lives by so doing.
After six months in England during which she was trying to be “just a housewife and mother,” the true situation came clattering down on her head with the harshness of hailstones. No money had been coming in for the entire time they had been in England. They were in desperate straits. There was only one thing for her to do if the rent was to be paid: sick or not, she had no alternative but to allow Luft to arrange another concert.
In the fall of i960 she returned to the Palladium and did two concerts. They were a departure for her in one way: she occupied the entire evening and was the only artist on the bill. Rather than being a vaudeville appearance, the two concerts were truly “An Evening with Judy Garland.” The concerts were successful, but her marriage was near its end. Knowing the only way she could break with Luft was to find another manager, she signed with Freddie Fields of Creative Management Associates. Fields flew over to London to close the deal, and Judy liked him. He was personable, charming; had a sense of humor; and—most important—assured her he could get her out of debt.
She left London without Luft, returning to New York in the midst of one of its worst blizzards and on a New Year’s Eve; and according to her own words, she had “fallen out of love.” She went on to say: “. . . During that awful blizzard of January, 1961, I went for a walk in the snow one night. I thought I was the blizzard. Suddenly I realized I didn’t give a damn about him ... for a few hours there it was difficult—like being shot out of a cannon. It was really terrifying.”
That was understandable. For ten years Luft had been in absolute control of her life—his influence perhaps even more powerful than Ethel’s or Mayer’s had ever been. For a decade he had been as necessary to her survival as her pills had been, and she was not at all sure she could make it without him.
29In order to help her become financially solvent, Freddie Fields and his partner, David Begelman, involved her in two years of such intensive activity that only a superwoman or a robot could have survived. First they settled a three-year legal battle that had raged between Luft and CBS, setting up two television spectaculars for her. Then they negotiated a $50,000 contract for a cameo role in Stanley Kramer’s film Judgment at Nuremberg (it had been seven years since A Star Is Born) and a voice-over in an animated film called Gay Purr-ee, in which her voice was that of a little cat named Mewsette; signed her to star in two films—A Child Is Waiting and I Could Go On Singing; booked her first on a fourteen-city, six-week concert tour (to end in New York at Carnegie Hall); followed that with a second concert tour which brought her one-night concert appearances to a total of forty-eight in the time span of one year; and arranged for the recording of what was to be a best-selling album. It was almost humanly impossible, but Judy did it all, managing at the same time to receive a nomination for an Academy Award for Judgment at Nuremberg and giving a concert (Carnegie Hall) that would go down as an all-time great in entertainment history. She had become a living legend; but the price she was to pay was to be excruciatingly high. Daniel Webster never made a worse deal with the Devil.
The harder she drove herself, or Fields and Begelman drove her, the more towering her fears became. She relied upon the same arrangements, always sang in the same key, and seldom introduced new material. For her audiences, who loved the ritual of the familiar, there most probably would have been a riot if she had not sung her standards, but the truth was that she felt safer with old material.
“It was practically impossible for Judy to learn anything new,” Bobby Cole (who was her musical director in many concerts in the sixties) states. “She was afraid. And I tell you something, you take forty Dexedrine a day, fifteen milligrams, and you’re going to be afraid too. She was a medical phenomenon. Forty Dexedrine in one day—that’s enough to keep a horse up for ten years! Honey, how are you going to sleep unless you take downers too? You’ve got to take Seconals and then you take something else—ten, twelve downers; and even then you’re going to wake up. To get her to go to bed you had to use a narcotic sledgehammer. She’d take them and sit there for fifteen minutes, and we would have to carry her to bed. It ruined her. It killed her.
“You can’t explain anyone who lives on speed. Heavy speed. It is complete, total paranoia. I don’t mean she wasn’t conscious of her performance or her audience. She knew everything she was doing. I’ll tell you something: a performer is like a fighter, you know; the bell rings and you’re on. I’ve seen her. She had a little [dressing-room] tent at the side of the stage. We used to walk through the little tent before she went out. I threw up my hands—that’s it, I thought. I was going out and killing myself. I would walk through and there she was! She was on. That operates. When you’re a performer, that operates.
“I’ll never be able to say that Judy Garland was not aware of her audi
ence—never,” Cole continues. “She was always aware of her audience—always. As a matter of fact, she was thoroughly other-people-oriented. So that’s not what speed does. What speed does is to make you very nervous, very paranoid. If there was one guy in an audience of thirty thousand who didn’t clap quite as hard as somebody else, she’d know that. That’s what she felt.”
There is no way of soft-soaping the brutal truth. Judy was a confirmed and habitual addict; and during all the years she had been one, no one close had done anything about withholding pills from her or helping her get assistance to withdraw. Many of those financially dependent upon her aided and abetted her habit, with or without evil intent. It was no longer easy for her to obtain pills, as it had been during her MGM days with pill-dispensing doctors in the studio’s employ. Fearing she might not be able to make a performance without “ups” (thereby jeopardizing their own security), some of those closest to her made sure she had an adequate supply at hand during these times, often withholding them from her until she was in her dressing room or wings, to ensure that she would appear.
A former U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics, Harry J. An-slinger, once recommended to MGM executives that she be given a year’s rest because of her drug problem. It was rejected by the studio and Anslinger was told, “We have fourteen million dollars tied up in her.” That was after a Los Angeles policeman, knowing Judy’s problem, reported it to Anslinger. Anslinger met with Judy, and Judy confessed a doctor was supplying her with vast amounts of morphine and amphetamine; but his agency was unable to move in because of the studio’s intervention. Then Anslinger had gone to Charles Seragusa, former Executive Director of the Illinois Crime Investigating Committee, and then his superior. They managed to get the doctor’s license revoked, but another immediately took his place.
And that was how it was. One supplier would replace another. Judy never dealt with these people directly. It was always through someone exceptionally close to her, and that person was generally the recipient of much of her love and dependence.
She gave her first concert without Luft and under the aegis of Fields and Begelman in February, 1961, in Dallas, Texas. It was essentially the same show she had given six months before at the Palladium, but the performance was harder-edged, better. What gave the show a new quality was the overpowering chemistry between Judy and her audience and the exultation her appearance brought out in them. They shouted encouragement, screamed their love. “No entertainer has ever given such a show in Dallas,” a Dallas newspaper declared.
Two nights later she was in Houston, and so were many members of that same Dallas audience. The Garland Cult had swung into action. They gave her four standing ovations in Houston; and a stagehand, carried away along with the audience, unwittingly entangled himself in the curtain, struggling for ten minutes before his muffled cries for help were heard.
After the Dallas debut, Judy complained that she had made a lot of money in her life but had never really touched it. Fields and Begelman came to her hotel after the concert with a large brown paper shopping bag filled with the night’s receipts—ones, fives, tens, twenties—and throwing it into the air, let the money cascade down and around her. Judy roared deliriously with laughter. They stayed close to her on tour and often thought of similar antics to make her laugh. It helped her through, for Judy had a great sense of humor and never, never lost her ability to laugh.
Twelve cities and fewer weeks later, Judy returned to New York thirty pounds lighter, nervous, but tremendously excited about the last concert of this tour—Carnegie Hall. Backstage before the performance, Judy was more keyed up than usual. It was not only because this was New York and Carnegie Hall, not only because she would be singing before a star-studded audience comparable to the one that had greeted her first Palace appearance—but because she had one new number, “San Francisco,” to sing, and because the song included a tough comedy opening. New material always frightened her. Those close to her managed to reduce the potency of her pills without her knowledge, but she was still heavily on speed. The concert was to be recorded live as well. It remains as testimony to the incredible heights to which Judy rose that evening.
Inside, Carnegie Hall was filled to capacity. Outside, those Garland fans who could not get in waited on this cool, brisk evening (April 23, 1961) for comments from those who had been fortunate enough to secure seats. All were ready to rush around to the stage entrance at the end of Judy’s performance —to comfort her if she failed, to cheer her if she succeeded.
Speaking on a Barry Gray radio show, Rex Reed, who was shortly thereafter to become a noted film critic and columnist, recalled his own impressions. “I’d just come to New York, and that was the thing I wanted to do all my life—to see Judy Garland. I think it was probably the greatest experience I’ve ever had in the theater. I had never seen that much love given to a performer. I had a marvelous seat—right next to Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. I only knew them by reputation. I wasn’t writing then; I was working as an office boy in some publicity office.
“Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson grabbed me. We were holding on to each other, and Tony Perkins was right in front of me; and [Leonard] Bernstein . . . even Hedda Hopper was there—and Betty [Comden] and Adolph [Green] and Lauren Bacall—just everybody I’d ever heard of; and they were all really with this lady. And it wasn’t just the cult who supported her. This was show business and this was the hardest audience to please—really an audience of hard-nosed professional critics. And it was the greatest triumph in anyone’s life. I mean, it was something unequaled to me.”
And Judith Crist recalls on the same program, “I remember Bernstein, the tears running down his face, screaming. But not just Bernstein, but Hank [Henry] Fonda, who is normally an impassive man—’Bravoing.’
“No one had any intention of leaving the theater,” she continues. “It was absolute pandemonium. It ended and the entire audience, instead of rising to leave, ran to the footlights like moths attracted to a screen door. They ran to the footlights with their hands in the air, screaming, ‘Judy! Judy!’ and she touched all the hands she could. Then Rock Hudson lifted Lorna and little Joey on the stage, and she hugged them and leaned down to kiss Liza, who was in the front row, and the audience screamed for more; and the children were touching people’s hands and it was like a sea. You couldn’t tell where the seats were and where the aisles began because the entire Carnegie Hall was a sea of People. She came back out to kind of throttle the emotion and the pandemonium. People couldn’t get back to their seats so they all sat in the aisles, disobeying all the fire laws of New York City—and they all just sat there together bathed in perspiration.”
And John Springer, who handled her public relations and spent part of the night backstage and part out front, added, “It was like the lemmings. They just moved in one mass forward.”
She came onstage, svelte-looking, vibrant; her hair was in an upsweep; she was back to a measure of her once-slim self and wore modish black toreador pants and a blazing-blue-sequined Mandarin jacket. Behind her was Mort Lindsey conducting one of the largest orchestras she had ever appeared with.
She began the first half with “When You’re Smiling”—and for forty-five minutes, without pause, went on singing one favorite after another. No tricks, no gimmicks; set aside were the chorus boys and the tramp routines. There was just Judy on that cavernous stage, a microphone clutched in her hand and that symphony-sized orchestra backing her up. She looked like some small tropical, glittering bird perched in the center of a massive black forest.
The first half of the concert ended with “That’s Entertainment.” Her audience was exhausted, and yet on some sort of emotional binge. Strangers were grabbing each other’s hands. Yet when the house lights went out after intermission and the stage lights came on, and as they waited for Judy to reappear, there was once again that unexplainable terror that she might not make it—that she had nothing left to give.
And Judy, if consulted, might have agreed with them. Staggerin
g to her dressing room, she gasped and held her arms tightly about herself as if in excruciating pain. Near sobs, she told anyone close she was too exhausted—that she didn’t see how she could go back on. In her dressing room she tore off her drenched and unpleasant-smelling outfit, then sipped a glass of white wine as her hairdresser blew icy air over her heaving back and shoulders with a portable dryer. Yet within ten minutes her makeup had been repaired, her soggy hair dried and repuffed, and she had been zippered into another costume.
Someone commented that she had made a miraculous physical recovery. “Well, you know, I’m like Rocky Graziano,” she replied. Then, managing a nervous laugh, she headed back for the stage, where the curtain was about to rise.
“You stand there in the wings,” Judy reflected a few weeks later, “and sometimes you want to yell because the band sounds so good. Then you walk out and if it’s really a great audience, a very strange set of emotions come over you ... A great reception can really throw you. You can lose control of your voice and it takes two or three numbers to get back into your stride. I lift my hand in a big gesture in the middle of the first number; and if I see it’s not trembling, then I know I haven’t lost my control.”
When she stepped back out onstage, she ran nervous fingers through her stylish hairdo, causing it to collapse. Standing center stage, she smiled as she waited for the encouraging applause to fade and then, with a toss of the microphone wire and her head, sang “I’m Gonna Love You Come Rain or Come Shine” with all her heart. In the middle, she raised her hand in that famous palm-out, exaggerated gesture. It wasn’t trembling. For forty-five incredible minutes she sang as she had never sung before—bringing down the house with her new number, “San Francisco.” Near the end she asked, “Aren’t you tired of hearing me sing?” Her audience screamed back their denials. And she went on singing, closing finally with “Chicago.” The applause, the screams were thunderous. She called out to them, “Good night! I love you very much!” They screamed louder. “Good night! God bless!” she called from the wings. That was when the audience moved down to the edge of the stage and she returned to touch their hands. “I don’t ever want to go home, do you?” she had said to them earlier in the evening. No one seemed to want to.
