by Lorna Luft
Dad had grown up in an upscale New York neighborhood where he and his sister were the only Jewish kids on the block, and he’d sometimes come home to anti-Semitic graffiti. Even though the family was well-off financially, my dad always had to fight to survive in the social scheme. He had an eccentric, strong-willed Russian mother who designed clothes but would rather spend her time at the track than in a tearoom. Dad had an eye for the ladies and for a good piece of horseflesh. He was a self-described “tough little son of a bitch.” He’d had to be. Nobody thought he was right for my mother—except Mama.
My dad was also a lady-killer, as charming as they come. Lady actors were nothing new to him, either, so when he started to going out with Mama, he had some idea of what he was getting into. He’d gotten involved in producing B movies when he came to California, and he’d dated a lot of movie stars—Hedy Lamarr, Gene Tierney, Eleanor Powell—a whole string of beauties. By the time he met my mother, he’d already been married twice, the second time to American actress Lynn Bari. It wasn’t as if he suddenly went from dating Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm to dating a “Star.” He knew about actors—the egos, the neuroses. He’d also heard about my mother’s track record with men. His heart might have heard Dorothy saying hello, but his head knew exactly what he was getting into.
For my mother, though, Sid Luft was something else again. She’d never really known anyone like him. He was handsome, of course, a real hunk who knew how to carry himself. But it wasn’t just that. Mama had known a lot of handsome men, and she’d usually had her pick of them. My dad was different. He was bluff and straightforward; he tackled problems straight on. If somebody bothered my mother, if somebody said something about her that he didn’t like, he’d turn around and just deck them. If too many Hollywood types hung around, bothering my mother, he’d tell them to get out.
Most amazing of all, he would say no to my mother. No one but my mother’s mentor, Roger Edens, had ever really done that before, and Roger was a father-figure, not a lover. My mother was used to having everyone cater to her, including her sisters. She knew how to throw a tantrum. When my mom was little, according to my aunt Jimmy, she would lie on the floor and scream until she got her way. She wasn’t neurotic back then, Jimmy said, just spoiled. But when Mama tried that kind of thing with my dad, he’d tell her to sit down and shut up. This was something completely new to my mother, and in a way, nice, and sort of charming. My father didn’t flatter my mother and cater to her the way everyone else did, and she liked it. She trusted him. You can’t trust people who are always flattering you. They usually want something. My dad didn’t want anything. She could trust him. He made her feel secure.
It was a good thing my dad could handle her, too, because my mother drove most men crazy. Even for my father, being with my mother was a struggle.
Early in their relationship, my dad learned the hard way what could happen if he made my mom angry. A few months after he met my mother, my dad got a call from his old high school sweetheart. He hadn’t seen her since she’d gotten married years before. Now she was divorced, and she wanted to see him again, to talk about old times and see if there was still anything between them. It meant flying to Denver, where she lived. Dad knew my mother would have a fit about his seeing an old girlfriend, so he decided not to tell her right away. His plan was to meet with his former girlfriend, see how it went, and tell my mother only if it looked as if he wanted to pursue the old relationship. If it all came to nothing, there would be no reason to mention it. After all, he and my mother had made no commitments at that point, and he didn’t want to face her wrath for nothing.
His plan seemed foolproof. Dad had a business associate in Oklahoma, so he told my mom he was flying to Tulsa to talk to his associate about a horse, and he took a plane to Oklahoma. When he got to the airport there, he bought another ticket, this time to Denver, without telling anyone. His high school sweetheart met him at the airport, and they spent the evening together. So far, so good.
But when he returned to the hotel in the wee hours of the morning, there was a long distance call waiting for him. He was astonished, since no one but his old girlfriend knew where he was. He took the call, and it was Mama. She pleasantly reminded him that she was expecting him to attend a party in L.A. the next night to meet her California friends, and asked him what time his plane would arrive in Los Angeles, so she could pick him up at the airport. Floored, he managed to mumble the flight information before hanging up. How on earth had she known where he was? He hadn’t told a soul.
Simple. The FBI had found him. When you’re Judy Garland and you want something, you just pick up a phone and call somebody. Anybody. My mom wanted to find my dad, so she just picked up the phone and made a person-to-person call to J. Edgar Hoover (whom she’d never met) and asked him to find Sid Luft, right away. Mr. Hoover did. Years later she just picked up the phone and called President Kennedy to ask his advice on how to handle the personnel on her television show. None of this seemed unusual to her. That’s simply what you did when you were Judy Garland.
The brush with the FBI was a real eye-opener for my father, part of his education as Judy Garland’s “man.” Lesson number one: Never kid a kidder, especially when that kidder is one of the greatest actors who ever lived. My father was an amateur when it came to lying. He didn’t do it often, and when he did, my mother always knew. My mom, on the other hand, was a professional. She’d been trained since childhood by the best directors in Hollywood. She could outact—and outlie—anyone she knew. You couldn’t fool my mother because whatever you tried to do, she’d done before and done better. She hadn’t believed my father’s Tulsa story for a minute. My dad had tried to get one by her, and she’d busted him. He flew to Los Angeles that day a wiser man.
Clearly, my mother took their relationship seriously. From then on my parents were officially a couple. When my mother’s separation from Vincente Minnelli became official about the same time, she went public about her relationship with my dad.
The press didn’t like it one bit. Sid Luft? With Judy Garland? No, no, no. He didn’t fit their image; he didn’t fit anyone’s image of whom my mother should be with. The press didn’t like him, and he sure didn’t like them. He had no use for columnists, and he wouldn’t cater to their demands. It was the beginning of a lot of bad press for my dad.
Meanwhile, my mother was trying to remake her career. Ever since the MGM disaster she had struggled professionally. With the help of her friends she’d done a few radio appearances with old friends like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. But for the most part, she was adrift in her career. Still, she had to keep performing. It was not only financially necessary; for her it was emotionally necessary. Performing was her life. She’d been doing it since she was two years old. She couldn’t live without performing, didn’t want to. If she went too long without working, she’d be climbing the walls.
So she continued to search for a way to keep doing what she loved best. Friends had suggested she try the concert circuit, but she was uncertain. She hadn’t really toured since her vaudeville days as a Gumm Sister. The promotional tours she’d done for MGM had, for the most part, been nightmares. The huge crowds, the pushing and the screaming, the fear of failing before a live audience; all these things made her hesitate to tackle the concert circuit. But she had to do something, and movies seemed neither possible nor desirable. So she wavered.
That’s where my dad came in.
When Mama finally confided her business troubles to him, my dad was emphatic. He thought a concert tour was “a hell of a good idea.” On a concert tour she could sleep all day if she wanted; she could get as chubby as she wanted, too, and no one would care. After all, weren’t some of the greatest concert singers overweight? She wouldn’t need to starve herself and live on diet pills as she had for her films, and she wouldn’t have to drag herself out of bed at dawn, starved for stimulants. Of course she should do it, he told her. It would be wonderful. She could reinvent herself in another country, another sett
ing. She could put behind her all the unhappiness and bad press from her MGM days.
She took Dad’s advice. Scared but excited, she went to England and prepared to open at the London Palladium. She wanted my dad to go with her for moral support, but at first he refused. He had business concerns of his own, and besides, he wasn’t sure it was a good idea for him to be too closely involved in her business dealings. She had managers for that. That plan lasted about two weeks. A few days after Mama left, Dottie Ponedel, a makeup woman and close friend from her MGM days, called my dad and suggested that he come over to London because it “would mean a lot to Judy.” Two days later Dottie called again from London.
My dad finally gave in. After all, the FBI might show up at his front door next! He flew to London, arriving the day before the Palladium opening. From then on, there was no going back for my father. Ready or not, he would be involved in “Judy’s business” for the rest of her life.
A lot of people have criticized my dad for that. They have implied that he got involved in my mother’s business because he wanted to ride on her coattails, take advantage of her fame. Nothing could be farther from the truth. One of the results of her studio upbringing was that she got used to having everything done for her when she was a teenager, and she kept those habits in her adult life. My mother and Vincente were in debt when they separated; they hadn’t been able to pay the taxes on their homes. Financially, my father was much better off before he married my mother. Dad came from an affluent family, and by the time he met my mom, he had produced several B movies and invested in thoroughbred horses with Prince Aly Khan.
The most hurtful part of the accusations against my father is the widespread notion that his gambling ruined my mother financially. Once he married my mother and became a target for photographers and curiosity-seekers, he stopped going to the betting windows at the track himself. He wanted to remain anonymous, so he would give the money to his close friend and business partner, Vern Alves. Dad would write down the bets he wanted Vern to place, give the money to Vern in cash ahead of time, and have Vern place the bet at the track. Vern would also collect the cash if the horse won and give the money to my dad afterward. Dad would give him a percentage for placing the bet. This was the system Dad and Vern used during my childhood years in Beverly Hills. Vern still gets angry at the allegations that my dad gambled away all the family money. Vern says that he knows exactly what happened during those years because he handled the money personally, and that my dad used his winnings to pay the house mortgage and other expenses. According to Vern, Dad was always hoping his winnings would be enough to carry the family through the latest emergency. Compared to her years at MGM, my mother didn’t work that much when I was small, and there was never enough money to support the lifestyle she was used to.
My father was my mother’s protector, financially and in every other way. He wanted to take care of Mama. He loved her, he wanted to help her, and in those days he was still under the illusion that he could solve all her problems if he just tried hard enough. As for managing her, he didn’t really have much of a choice. Mama demanded it of him. All her life people had been managing things for her. To my mom, taking care of her was part of loving her.
Besides, nobody said no to my mother for long. What Mama wanted, Mama eventually got, especially where my dad was concerned.
So from then on, my parents were in it together—planning, traveling together through Scotland and then Europe. It was romantic, and they had the time of their lives. When she was happy, Mama was more fun than anybody, and they had a grand time. Onstage my mother was a phenomenon, and offstage she was almost as exciting. My father had fallen for her hook, line, and sinker. After Mama, everyone else was dull by comparison.
Once the Palladium opening was behind her, my mom knew that she’d found her place professionally once again. She loved being out under the lights, singing to all those people. At MGM she’d played to a soundstage full of crew members and recording machines. Now she was singing to a live audience once again, people who laughed and cried and were mesmerized by her presence. It was astonishing, like being two years old again and singing “Jingle Bells” to delighted applause. For my mother, it was more exciting, and more addictive, than any medicine. Mama loved her audiences; she came alive in front of them. And now, instead of her parents applauding wildly in the front row, there was my father, cheering her on from the wings.
It was wonderful. It was magic. It was the rebirth of a legend.
When they returned to the U.S. at the end of the tour, my dad searched for ways to keep the magic going. It was my dad who conceived the idea of my mom opening at the Palace. A vaudeville mecca in its heyday, the old Palace Theater in New York City was the ideal venue for a former Gumm Sister. My dad found the building rundown and threadbare; he and the promoters refurbished the old landmark, restoring it once again to its former splendor. In 1951 the theater was reopened by my mother, restored, like the Palace, to her glory days. No one who was there that night has ever forgotten it. It became a part of theater history.
From then on there was no stopping my parents professionally. My dad got my mom booked at concert halls, and that same year the two of them formed Transcona Enterprises, their own corporation. My father had begun negotiating for the film rights to A Star Is Born. He planned to produce it himself, with the backing of Jack Warner and Warner Brothers. It was a perfect vehicle for my mother. The film would play into the public’s perception of her crises, and by exploiting the rumors—the headlines about pills and suicide—put them to rest. More important, it would give my mother the great acting role she’d always longed for. Best of all, my parents would use their own production company. For the first time in her career, my mother would have control over one of her films. She was thrilled, hoping the trauma of her last years at MGM would soon be a thing of the past.
It seemed like the perfect plan, and it almost was. My father hired Vern Alves as his production assistant, and Transcona started preproduction for the movie. Then something happened that put a kink in their perfect plan. A big kink.
My mother discovered she was pregnant with me.
Growing up, I had no idea that I was already on the way when my parents got married. It was just not the kind of thing your parents told you in the 1950s. I must have been seventeen or eighteen before the truth dawned on me. I knew when my parents’ wedding anniversary was, and of course, I knew when my birthday was, but I had never done the math. It had never occurred to me.
I found out about my own conception years later from a book about my mother. By then I knew better than to believe most of what people wrote about my mother, so I decided to ask my dad. It was a memorable conversation. It went something like this:
ME: Dad, can I ask you a question?
SID: What?
ME: Was Mama pregnant with me when you got married?
SID: (long pause) Where’d you hear that?
ME: In this book.
SID: (longer pause) Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything. I mean, well, you know, we were planning on getting married, anyway. . . .
And that was the end of that conversation. My dad couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. Just the fact that I’d asked the question scared him to death. Contrary to his image, my dad is a pretty traditional guy. He was embarrassed to tell his daughter that he’d gotten her mom pregnant before they were married. More important, he didn’t want me to think that he and Mama had to get married. He didn’t want me to be hurt, to feel that they hadn’t wanted me.
So my parents planned their wedding. They couldn’t afford to wait very long, and they didn’t want the press to find out and turn the wedding into a media circus. They decided to get married privately at a friend’s ranch in Las Vegas. Using their real names, Frances Gumm Minnelli and Michael S. Luft, they had a friend get the license from a local justice of the peace. On June 8, 1952, they drove out to their friends’ ranch and got married in a private ceremony. Not exactly the dream weddi
ng most people would imagine for Judy Garland, but to my father, it might as well have been. Mama, he says, looked beautiful. His face still lights up when he talks about it.
Soon after Louella Parsons ran a headline reading “Judy’s Secret Marriage Revealed.” The bookmakers in Vegas sold odds on how long the marriage would last: six months was the guess, five years at the outside. It’s not surprising. The press didn’t like my dad, and my mother’s marital track record wasn’t that great, either. But my parents beat the odds. Maybe they didn’t exactly live happily ever after, but with Dad, Mama came closer than she did with anyone else. They truly loved each other. I’m not sure the world ever figured that out.
My poor sister found out about the marriage the hard way—on television. Liza already knew Sid. Since my mother traveled a lot, Liza lived with Vincente much of the time, but she and her nanny sometimes visited Mama and Sid. Liza liked my dad pretty well, but she didn’t want our mother to marry him. A few weeks earlier my mom had asked Liza if she wanted her to marry Sid, and Liza had said, “But what about Daddy?” Like all kids of divorced parents, Liza still hoped her parents would get back together, even though that was clearly out of the question. When she and her father heard the news, Liza was hurt. Mama had married another man besides Daddy, and she’d done it without even telling Liza. It was a lot for a six-year-old to accept.
Things got better for everyone after the wedding. My parents moved into a house on Mapleton Drive in Beverly Hills and settled down to stay, at least for the time being. They hired a nurse and a full staff of servants, and Liza divided her time between my parents’ home and Vincente’s. They were a family now, and my mother was happy and excited about the pregnancy. All of this made up for a lot to my sister. So when Mama asked Liza to call my father “Papa Sid,” Liza did it willingly. My dad, for his part, happily accepted the role of stepfather. Liza was a part of my mother, and that was enough for him.
