by Lorna Luft
I was in class at Brentwood Elementary School the day it happened. One of the teachers came running into the room and said, “The President’s been shot!” My first reaction was terror. This was my friends’ uncle Jack, someone I knew. I felt as if someone had been pulled out of my own living room and gunned down. How could this be? Everybody started crying, even our teacher. The nanny came and took Joe and me home, and the next thing I remember is seeing my mother. She was white as a sheet. She told us she was going over to the Lawfords to see if she could do anything to help, and then she left. A short while later the television announcer said the President was dead. I just sat there, crying, thinking about Uncle Jack, and the golf cart, and the big men in suits, and most of all, about how Caroline and John didn’t have a dad now. I couldn’t get over that. Someone had killed their dad.
My mother came back, and all three of us sat very close together and watched the news on television, Joe on one side and me on the other, with our mother’s arms around us. I couldn’t tell if she was comforting us or clinging to us for support. Maybe it was a little of both. Over and over we watched the news footage from Dallas of the President being shot. Every television in the house was on; even if you went into another room, you saw it. I had never seen anyone shot before, even on television, and what made it even worse was that I knew this person.
It was a terrible time. One of the things that made it so terrible was that you could never get away from the fear and the sadness. Everywhere you went, people were talking about it. Even if you got out of your own house and went to a friend’s house, her parents were talking about it, too. There was no escape. It was all-encompassing, like a shroud of sadness surrounding us twenty-four hours a day. There was silence everywhere, too, like an episode of The Twilight Zone. It was terrifying.
I vividly remember the day of the funeral. All the businesses closed down that day, and all over America people were home watching the funeral on television. Mama and Joey and I watched it on TV like everyone else. We sat in the den together, with Joey and me cuddled up on my mother’s lap, and we were all crying. My mother explained to me why the horse’s saddle had backward-facing boots in the stirrups. I remember Walter Cronkite crying, and how I’d never seen a newscaster cry. I kept wanting to pretend that it was just a TV show, that it wasn’t really happening. I kept remembering the summer at Hyannis Port, and Jackie Kennedy’s gentle voice when she spoke to me. I started crying when I thought of that familiar voice. It felt as though everything that had made me feel safe in the world died that day. If something so terrible could happen to the President, how could any of us be safe?
My mother desperately wanted to fly East for the funeral, to be there for Bobby and Pat and the others. But she couldn’t because she had the television show to do, and CBS wouldn’t give her the time off. With incredible callousness, they told her that she didn’t need to go, that in a month the nation would have forgotten about the whole thing. All my mother could do to help was to say goodbye to Jack Kennedy the only way she knew how. She decided to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the taping as a tribute to Kennedy. The network told her she couldn’t because they didn’t want the show to be “too political.” She did it anyway. She never said a word about it ahead of time; she just did it. It was the last number on the show that night, and it was one of the most memorable things I’ve ever seen. Joe and I watched from the audience as she sang, and it took our breath away.
Mama didn’t cry; instead, she put all of her love and sorrow into that song. Her face on the tape of that night is a mask of pain. The audience was stunned. All around us people were crying. I’d never seen anything like it. When the last note quivered into silence, the entire audience got to their feet and started cheering for what seemed like forever. What could the network do? They couldn’t very well cut a performance like that. The best they could do was cut the words she whispered into the camera just before she began the first note of “Mine eyes have seen the glory . . .”—“This is for you, Jack.” In an act of petty cowardice, a CBS executive directed that those words not be spoken. Six years later Joe and Liza and I sang that same song at my mother’s funeral.
Two days after the assassination, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. We saw that on TV, too. It was the first time I had seen my mother smile since Jack Kennedy’s murder. For me, though, this “execution” was almost as terrifying as the assassination. It was the second time I had watched someone gunned down on TV. It seemed as if the whole world was going mad. I wondered if anything would ever be the same again.
When I look back at The Judy Garland Show, I have such mixed feelings. It was a difficult time in our lives, but I had not yet given up hope back then that everything would still be okay someday, that Mama would be well and that we’d all be happy. When the show first started, she was happy, but as the season wore on and things began to fall apart, she seemed to age overnight. You can see it on the tapes. In the early shows she looks fit and healthy, in good voice. By the end she is still in good voice, but her weight has dropped alarmingly and her face has aged ten years. One of the most ironic moments for me is when she sang “As Long As He Needs Me,” the showstopper my English idol Georgia Brown sang in Oliver. My mother’s voice is full and rich, and she looks lovely as she leans up against her trademark trunk, but her eyes are as empty as glass as she sings about staying with her man. I can only imagine what my dad must have felt, watching her sing it.
I didn’t want the show to end. It broke my mother’s heart when they canceled it. She took it very, very personally. I still remember the last show. Joe and I were sitting in our usual place in the audience, and the last number Mama was scheduled to do was a song from Little Me called “Here’s to Us.” Overcome by emotion, she lost her temper, walked offstage and into her dressing room. Everyone waited and waited, but she didn’t come back out. Finally someone said, “Why don’t we take the kids home?” and took me and Joe to the car. I was so depressed on the way home. What would we do without Mama’s show? I feared what would happen to Mama, to all of us, with nothing to fill the vacuum.
My dad stayed with us occasionally when we first moved into the Rockingham house, but he never really lived there. He was more a visitor than a resident in our lives by then. The fighting between my parents was unbearable by then. As my mother’s anger grew, so did the stories she told about my father. By that time she was blaming everything on my dad. One time the gardeners put rat poison around our house, and Joey’s dog ate some of it and died. The next day she told Joe and me that my father had climbed the fence during the night and poisoned the dog. Joe and I just looked at each other. We knew it wasn’t true. Other times she’d show us these terrible bruises on her arms and say my father had hit her. By then she was so under the influence of Ritalin that she was injuring herself on purpose, then saying that my father had done it to her. One time I watched her go to the stucco wall that ran behind the garage at Rockingham and throw herself against it repeatedly in a fit of rage. She even put her bare arm against the rough stucco and scraped it until she was bleeding. Two hours later she showed me the bloody scrapes on her body and said, “Look what your father did to me!” I’d just watched her do it to herself.
The stories she told us got increasingly fantastic. She said my father had scaled the wall, vandalized the house, beaten her up, and escaped without notice, all in the course of an hour or two. Mama had always told us stories—everyone knew my mother told real whoppers—but it had never been this bad before. Joe and I kept our mouths shut and tried to calm her down. Contradicting her would have been pointless. All we wanted was a little peace.
I didn’t mind when my parents finally divorced. I just wanted all the fighting to be over. I still clung to the hope that when the divorce became final, everything would calm down again. As long as Mama was happy and we could see Dad on the weekends, Joey and I were content. We were used to the separations by then, so it wasn’t traumatic for us not to see our father every day.
Over the years people have seen our decision as an indictment of our father, which is absolutely untrue. Mama was sick by then and she would get sicker, with profound consequences for us all. Even at her sickest, though, the one thing Joey and I never questioned was whether our mother loved us. We knew she did. She loved just looking at us, and she never went to bed on tour without our pictures lined up on the bed table next to her, where she could look at them as she fell asleep. She was the most affectionate of mothers. There are hundreds of candid photos of our mother with us at home, at the airport, backstage during breaks—and she is almost always touching us in those pictures. She was always happiest when one of us was sitting on her lap or cradled in her arms; she loved to cuddle up on the couch with us in the evenings when we watched TV. When we went to bed, she would sit next to us and gently run her fingertips up and down our arms and over our faces until we fell asleep. She held our hands everywhere we went until we got too old. One of my most vivid memories is the way she drummed her fingers lightly on my palm when she held my hand. I asked her once why she did that, and she told me she was tapping out the music in her head. Mama was our whole world. My father understood that. She was his whole world, too.
Even the custody fights wouldn’t have been that bad for us if the professionals hadn’t gotten involved. Unfortunately, my mother’s greatest fear by then was that she would lose me and Joey, either because my father would take us or because we would choose to live with him. She was terrified that we’d choose Dad and not her. She convinced herself that we were afraid of our father and might give in to him out of fear. When she took us to the office of the court-appointed psychiatrist, her greatest fear was that we’d tell him we wanted to live with our father. If she had known what happened in that office, my dad would have been the least of her fears.
I can’t imagine how such a sadistic therapist stayed in practice, much less qualified to testify in custody cases. The doctor’s name was Dr. Duval. His office was in Culver City, near the old MGM lot. During my first session, he asked me what I was most afraid of. I told him, “Needles.” I’d been phobic about hypodermic needles ever since my appendectomy in England. The next time I went to see Dr. Duval, he asked me to take my clothes off and lie down on the table in his office. It was covered with a white sheet, with a small pillow at one end. I took off everything but my little knickers and lay down on my back. Next he told me that he’d gotten permission from my pediatrician to do the next thing. Then he picked up a tissue box and, holding it in front of me, took out a hypodermic needle. He held the needle an inch or two from my face. I panicked and started saying, “No, no, no,” as he slowly moved the needle down toward my bare chest.
In an odd, rhythmic voice, he asked me, “How frightened are you of your dad?”
“What do you mean?” I answered, terrified.
“How frightened are you of your dad, Lorna?”
“I’m . . . I’m not . . . I don’t know.”
“You’re frightened, very frightened, aren’t you, Lorna?” he chanted hypnotically, moving the needle a hair’s breadth above my naked body.
By then I was crying. “Yes, yes.” I sobbed.
“Good girl. Good, Lorna.” The needle moved away. He made a note on his notepad. Then he picked up the needle again.
Week after week, these “sessions” went on. Each time I went there, Dr. Duval made me take my clothes off and lie on my back while he moved the needle near my body. To this day, I can remember how it felt lying on that white sheet, naked and completely vulnerable. It was frightening beyond description. He never actually put a needle into me; he didn’t have to. That’s the nature of psychological torture. The fear is more than enough. After a while I knew what he wanted to hear and would have said anything he wanted.
“Do you want to be with your dad?”
“No.”
“Do you love your dad?”
“No.”
I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t tell anyone. I was too afraid. Joey never said anything about his sessions, either, so I assumed he was all right. If I’d known then what the doctor was doing to my brother, I would have told anyone who would listen.
These “therapy sessions” went on for a couple of months, but it seemed like a lifetime. Finally, as Joe and I were climbing the stairs to the doctor’s office one afternoon, I accidentally found a way to bring it to an end. The outdoor staircase leading up to Dr. Duval’s door was very steep. Joey was in front of me, and as we climbed, Joe shouted, “Watch this!” and slid down the banister to the ground. It looked like fun, so of course, I had to do it, too. The only problem was that I shoved my arm underneath the banister as I slid and forgot to pull it out when I hit the bottom rung. My arm got caught at the bottom and took the full force of my descent. There was a loud crack as I landed, and a shattering pain shot through my forearm. The nanny was right behind me, and she took me upstairs to Dr. Duval. He put some ice on my arm and told the nanny, “I think she’s broken it. We’d better cancel this session so you can take her to the emergency room.”
I had never been in so much pain in my life, yet I had rarely been so happy. All I could think was, “I don’t have to stay with Dr. Duval.” I would gladly have broken the other arm and both legs if it meant not seeing him again.
The nanny drove me home, where my mother took one look at me, said, “Oh, my God!” and rushed me to the emergency room. When they showed me the X rays of my arm, I couldn’t believe what it looked like. I’d shattered my whole forearm. They called it a greenstick fracture because if you take green wood and bend it hard enough, it splinters. That’s exactly what had happened to my bone. It had splintered lengthwise. To this day I get a shock sometimes when I touch that arm. The doctor couldn’t set it because of the way it was shattered, so he wrapped my arm in gauze and put a cast on it.
That evening I sat out by the pool with my brother. We had a big basket chair hanging from ropes near the pool that you could swing in. With my newly broken arm carefully propped on the edge of the chair, I was gently twirling the chair around and around, then letting it spin back. Joey had wedged into the chair next to me. At eight years old, his tiny frame didn’t take up much room. As we sat quietly together in the dusk, Joe touched my good hand.
“Lorna?”
“Yes?”
There was a small silence. “Lorna, I don’t want to go to Dr. Duval anymore. Please don’t let them make me.”
I glanced down at his sober little face and then looked at the cast on my arm. “Don’t worry, Joey. I’ve taken care of it. You don’t have to go there anymore.” Joe sighed and leaned against me in quiet contentment, safe in the knowledge that his big sister would take care of him. It was thirty years before I found out how terrifying Joe’s trips to the doctor really were. If either of my parents had known what that doctor did to Joe, they would have killed the man. I would have helped them.
Just as with my appendicitis attack, Mama took wonderful care of my arm. When it was time for me to go back to school, my mom decorated my cast with glitter and feathers and glue, just as she’d decorated my eye patches years before. She got out one of her glamorous scarves for a sling, and I thought I looked really cool. Since I couldn’t write with my broken arm, I didn’t even have to do my homework when I returned to school. All my classmates signed my cast, and I was a celebrity. Each time the doctors changed my cast, Mama decorated the new one. Finally, just as at Lady Eden, the teacher sent a note home to my mother, asking her not to decorate my cast anymore because everyone in my class now wanted a broken arm. Apparently this presented a safety hazard.
The only downside was that nobody had told me what weeks in
a cast does to your muscles, so when the doctor removed the cast permanently and I saw my shriveled forearm, I was horrified. My arm had been skinny enough to begin with, but now it looked downright withered. It didn’t help that my mom seemed equally concerned. She told me how Peter Lawford (her old friend and Easter Parade costar) had injured his arm when he was a kid and how, as a result, his arm had never developed properly. I was convinced that I was going to grow up with a freak arm. Fortunately, my arm was back to normal in a few weeks.
Eventually the courts awarded my mother full custody of me and Joe, with my father given visitation rights on the weekends and every other Wednesday. After the visitation issues were resolved, things calmed down between my parents. Dr. Duval testified that living with our mother would be in Joey’s and my “best interest” at the hearings. Mama never found out what he’d done to Joe and me. Another person who testified on my mother’s behalf was our nanny. Her name was Mrs. Chapman.
I never found out where my mother found Mrs. Chapman. She just showed up at our house one day. She was a short, squat southern lady with graying hair, a face that would freeze water, and two grown daughters who lived nearby. I don’t think she was a career nanny; she never wore a uniform like our other nannies, and she certainly never behaved like any of them. A workman put up a partition in the bedroom Joey and I shared, and Mrs. Chapman moved in with us. She stayed with us all day, and at night she slept just a few feet away. There was no escaping her. It was like sleeping in a cave, just a few feet away from a slumbering bear.
My mom was touring again, and Mrs. Chapman took care of me and Joey in her absence. I use the phrase “took care of” very loosely. As soon as my mother left town, Mrs. Chapman would bring over her three-year-old granddaughter and let the little monster run wild. The child’s name was Dawn, and she had every ounce of her grandmother’s charm. Dawn was a brat, running all over the house and climbing on everything. She’d even get into my mother’s belongings. If I ever said so much as “Don’t do that” to Dawn, Mrs. Chapman would punish me. She never punished Dawn, even when Dawn broke things.
