by Lorna Luft
The only real refuge for Joey and me during this terrible time was the Englunds’ house down the street. Cloris Leachman lived there with her husband, George Englund, and their four children. I adored Cloris Leachman, or Mrs. Englund, as I called her then. She wasn’t anything like most of the actresses I knew; she was the kind of mom I’d only seen on TV. She got up early every morning and cooked a big breakfast for everyone, and when Joe and I came over, she cooked for us, too. We’d go there in the afternoons whenever we could, as soon as school was out, and sit around the kitchen eating snacks and chatting with Cloris. Cloris must have suspected what was going on at our house, but she never said anything to Joe or me; instead, she let us know that we were always welcome in her home. The Englunds’ house became our safe place, the only place we could go and be all right.
Apart from visiting the Englunds, Joe and I had little social life. Even on the days my mother was okay, it was hard to bring a friend home because my mom always slept in the afternoon. She was often up most of the night, either because she was performing or because of insomnia, so what sleep she got was usually during the day. We couldn’t go swimming because the splashing would wake her, and we had to be quiet around the house. Besides, we never knew what shape she’d be in, and people were always curious about my mother because she was Judy Garland. Joe and I always called to ask permission before bringing a friend home, and even then we couldn’t be certain she would be all right when we got there. Most of the time, we just went over to the Englunds.
Eventually even that haven began to crumble. Years later I found out that George Englund was having an affair with Joan Collins during that time, and the strain on the Englunds’ marriage became severe. What upset me at the time, though, was their son Brian. I had a big crush on him—he gave me my first real kiss when I was twelve. One night Brian got drunk at a neighbor’s party and fell through a shower door. The police brought him home in a squad car. Brian was only thirteen at the time. I couldn’t understand it—why would a boy with such a wonderful mom do something so stupid? It scared me to death. His parents handled the whole incident as well as could be expected, but to me it meant that even at the Englund house, bad things could happen. Maybe no place was really safe.
Mrs. Chapman was one of the last to leave the house on Rockingham Drive. I’m not sure why she stayed as long as she did. It certainly wasn’t out of concern for Joe and me. Mrs. Chapman was the one person I wasn’t sorry to see go. The day she left our house was one of the best days I’d had in quite some time.
Her departure was truly spectacular. One night my mother went into a rage, but this time Mrs. Chapman was the target. Mama had argued with her and fired her on the spot. She told her to get out of the house that very night. Instead of leaving, though, Mrs. Chapman locked herself in our bedroom and wouldn’t come out. My mom was livid. She decided if Mrs. Chapman wouldn’t leave willingly, she’d have to burn her out. As Joe and I watched from the safety of the hall, my mom got a book of matches and started striking them one by one, pushing them under the bedroom door as she did, to set the threshold rug on fire. All the time she was doing it, she shouted at Mrs. Chapman that she was going to burn her out of the room.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Chapman had found an escape route through the sliding door leading to the pool. She grabbed a bag of clothes and left the bedroom the back way, running around to the garage to where her car was parked. When my mom saw her race across the backyard, Mama screamed with fury. Once she realized where Mrs. Chapman was heading, Mama ran toward the front of the house to try to intercept her, with me and Joey in hot pursuit. We were scared to death, but we were also very excited that Mrs. Chapman was finally going to get what she deserved. On her way through the kitchen, my mom grabbed a large butcher knife from the counter and sprinted for the front door. You can’t imagine how fast that little body of hers could move.
By the time we reached the front porch, Mrs. Chapman had started the car and was backing down the driveway as fast as she could go. In a thundering voice, my mother screamed, “If you ever come near me or my children again, I’ll kill you!” and hurled the butcher knife with all her might, right at Mrs. Chapman’s face behind the car window. The knife hit the window dead on target, shattering the windshield on the driver’s side. I still remember the sound of splintering glass and the knife clattering off the hood of the car onto the driveway. I also remember the look of terror on our nanny’s fat face.
Mrs. Chapman drove away as fast as she could, with the three of us still on the porch. Joey and I were clinging to our mother with excitement. We didn’t say a word; we just looked at each other, but inside I was cheering, thinking, “Go, Mom! Get rid of the old bat!” The next morning when we got up for school, Lionel arrived, looked at the scorched carpet, and asked me, “What happened here?”
“All hell broke loose,” I told him.
Pause. “Where’s Mrs. Chapman?” he asked next.
“Gone,” I replied succinctly.
“Ah,” he replied, equally succinct. At that point Lionel was all we had left. The rest of the staff had disappeared. Even if their nerves could have survived it, my mother could no longer pay them. Loyal, long-suffering Lionel. We loved him wholeheartedly.
Soon even Lionel was gone, and it was just me and Mama and Joey in that house. That was the really bad time. With the staff gone and Mama unable to function much of the time, I was now in charge. Secret-keeping is the first priority in addictive families, and I knew instinctively that I couldn’t tell anyone else what was going on. Liza had been out on her own for years, and telling Dad would mean more court hearings and custody battles.
I was thirteen or fourteen, but it was up to me to take care of Mama and Joey. We’d started running out of food and money regularly. Sometimes I would call Marc Rabwin late at night, and he would bring us hamburgers and groceries and food money. Marc was a doctor, our oldest family friend, and he had known my mother since Grandma Ethel was pregnant with Mama forty-four years before. He was the closest thing to a grandfather I had left; I knew he’d keep our secrets.
Besides, I needed help. I needed it desperately. Mama and Joey were depending on me.
Collection of John Fricke
Mama and me at the Palace, August 1967.
CHAPTER 9
Rites of Passage
Help arrived from an unlikely quarter. His name was Tom Green, and early in 1966 he became my mother’s “personal publicist,” which was Garland code for somebody my mother wanted to have around all the time. A few months after Mark Herron’s departure, Tom bought my mother an engagement ring. That didn’t surprise me. My mother had always needed a man in her life on pretty much a daily basis. People have called my mother promiscuous in the last few years of her life, but I never thought of her that way. She was tired, increasingly sick, and insecure about the toll her illness was taking on her looks. She was also lonely, and she needed someone to give her constant affection and emotional support. My mother held onto me and Joey a lot during those years, literally and figuratively. She needed to be physically close, to be touched. This part of her nature fed the later rumors that my mother was bisexual, which is patently ridiculous. There were never any gray boundaries for her sexually, except with men. With men, she had trouble separating friendship and sex, at least near the end. Many of her male admirers had the same problem.
I never understood why my mother and Tom Green got together. Maybe it was just because he wasn’t a “macho-type guy” like my dad and Mark Herron had been. Mark was gay, but I hadn’t realized it when he married my mother. I’m equally certain my mother didn’t realize it, either, not until after she married him. Mark was handsome in a traditional masculine sense; there was nothing to mark him as homosexual. He was not effeminate, and he didn’t flaunt his sexual orientation. In the sixties it didn’t occur to any of us to wonder whether he preferred men to women, just as it didn’t occur to Liza when she married Peter Allen. We didn’t even talk about those things in those days.
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Tom wasn’t like Mark, though. Tom wasn’t traditional at all. For starters, he wore green eye shadow. It was discreetly applied along the edges of his lashes, but it was visible. He also wore lip gloss a decade before American men even used hair spray. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Tom was different. I had grown up with a “regular guy” for a father. I knew what they looked like. Tom was something else again. At thirteen I looked at him with skepticism and suspicion.
Meanwhile, as they say, life goes on. At thirteen your primary interest is not in your mother’s sex life. If my mother’s boyfriends made her happy, at least for a while, that was all I really cared about. I was a whole lot more interested in my own “sex” life, even if that just meant going to the school dance or watching Peyton Place on television. In between family crises I was as anxious as the next girl to find out what growing up was all about. And like most teenagers, I found out it wasn’t very easy.
To me, being grown-up meant smoking cigarettes, drinking cocktails, and dressing up in high heels and glamorous outfits like the ones I’d tried on in my mother’s closet when I was small. Drinking cocktails wasn’t much of a temptation for me, since I hated the taste of liquor and felt sick after the smallest sip. I thought that I was allergic to alcohol. So experimenting with liquor was never really a part of my life, even though it would have been easy enough to raid the bar at home while my mother was sleeping. Smoking was another matter. My mother had always smoked like a chimney, several packs a day, so of course, I had to try it for myself.
My best girlfriend at the time was Katy Sagal, who lived a couple of blocks away from our house on Rockingham. Long before she became Peg Bundy on the popular TV show Married with Children, she was just the girl down the street. She was sweet, and we got along really well. Katy’s mom smoked, too, and one afternoon after school we decided to sample one of her mom’s cigarettes. We were in the eighth grade at the time. We went to Katy’s house, and Katy managed to filch a cigarette and some matches from her mother’s purse without getting caught. We went out in the backyard behind some bushes, and Katy lit up the cigarette, took a drag, and handed it to me. We passed it back and forth between us, coughing and choking the whole time, with tears running down our faces. Rocket scientists that we were, we finished the whole thing anyway. By the time we’d finished, I was so sick that I could hardly stand up. Mrs. Sagal was starting to wonder where we’d gone, and Katy was madly trying to fan the smoke away before her mom caught us. I wasn’t much help. I was too busy throwing up behind the bushes. A few minutes later we went back in the house, me white-faced and nauseated. I told Katy’s mom that I thought I was getting the flu and that I’d better go home. Katy and I must have smelled like a couple of chimneys, but Mrs. Sagal didn’t say anything. Maybe she thought our green faces were punishment enough.
Being thirteen, though, I was naturally a slow learner. Sick as it made me, smoking was still a brave and cool thing to do in junior high school, and a few weeks later I got caught smoking in the girls’ bathroom. They called my mom and sent me home. My mother was really good about it. She wasn’t exactly pleased, but she sat down and discussed it with me, pointing out how foolishly I had acted and saying that next time I wanted to try something like that, I should tell her. She would have let me try a cigarette at home if I was just curious. Every now and then I did have a cigarette at home with her, but I gave up smoking in the girls’ bathroom. Fortunately, smoking never really caught on with me. I never had problems with the socially acceptable addictions. I waited for the big stuff later on.
Boys were another matter. I’d already had my first romance with Brian Englund in the seventh grade. He’d given me my first kiss and my first charm bracelet, which I’d hidden from my mother (she would have thought I was too young to go steady). Our time together had all the poignant innocence typical of childhood sweethearts. Things didn’t always go so smoothly with boys, though, in part because of the problems at home.
My first grown-up dance was all too typical of what life is like when your parent is sick. I was in the eighth grade at the time. There was going to be a formal dance at school one Friday night, and I was very excited about going. My girlfriends and I had talked about it at school for days, planning exactly how we’d do our hair and whom we’d try to dance with. I had bought a new outfit for the occasion and carefully picked out every accessory so I would look just perfect. On the afternoon of the dance I spent hours getting ready and that evening arrived at the school gym with my friends, giddy with excitement. This was to be our big night.
I’d already gotten my mother’s permission to go days before, and I’d left the house without incident. But like all children in families like mine, I needed to call and make sure that my mother was all right before I could feel comfortable going into the gym and enjoying myself for the evening. So I sent my friends ahead, promising to meet them inside in a minute, and went to the phone booth next to the gym to call my mom. I thought she might be asleep, but I wanted to check with Lionel and be sure.
Unfortunately for me, she wasn’t asleep. She was awake, and she was overmedicated, and she was in a bad mood. When she found out it was me calling, she got on the phone and began yelling at me, accusing me of sneaking out without her permission. I tearfully reminded her that she’d said I could go, that we’d been planning for the dance all week. Logic made no difference when she was in that frame of mind. She continued yelling at me for several minutes and then told me that she forbade me to go to that dance. I was not even to go into the gym. I was to stay outside by the curb and not move until Lionel came by and picked me up to take me home.
I hung up the phone, found my friends, and told them I couldn’t go to the dance after all because something had come up at home. I didn’t tell them what, and they didn’t ask. One of the oddities about being Judy Garland’s daughter was that everyone, even my friends, treated my mother with such awe that they would never have asked me the normal questions kids get about their moms. And I would certainly never have told them the truth, anyway. I could not, must not, tell. Not ever.
I went back outside and sat down on the curb to wait for Lionel. I could hear the music playing in the gym behind me. The Beatles, I think. It got darker and darker, but no one came. I didn’t dare move. Finally, just as the dance was about to end, our car pulled up and I got in. When I got home and went into the house a few minutes later, my mother was sound asleep. She’d been asleep ever since she’d hung up the phone. The next day she had no memory of the conversation, or of the dance. I remembered, though. It was my first dance, and I would never forget it.
It hurts when your parent is too sick to be a full-time parent. That’s true for any child. But my situation held some particular cruelties, for my mother was not only sick but famous, and some people exploited that. Children can be incredibly vicious toward the families of the famous, whom they inevitably perceive as privileged and snobby. Painful as my first dance was, the last junior high dance of that year was even more humiliating. An older boy invited me to go to the senior prom, as they called the ninth grade graduation dance, and I was thrilled. To be asked by a ninth grader was a great honor, and this boy was very cute. Once again I bought a special outfit and got all dressed up for the big night. The boy was going to pick me up at my house, and I waited on pins and needles for his arrival. Only he never came. And he never called. I was crushed. When I got to school the following Monday, I found out why. The rumor had already gone all around the school that he’d bet a bunch of his friends that he could stand up Judy Garland’s daughter. The “date” had been a joke designed to embarrass me and make him look like a big man at school. Everyone but my friends seemed to think it was very funny, and for days I was stared and pointed at, and people would giggle when I went by. It was funny, all right. So funny that thirty years later tears still sting my eyes when I remember.
Fortunately, when my mom was well—well for Mama meaning healthy and properly medicated—she still came through for
me when it really counted. When it came time to tell me the “facts of life,” my mother did it in a wonderfully straightforward and caring manner. And when it came to “women’s matters,” she was careful to make sure that I knew what to expect so that I wouldn’t be frightened the way she had been as a girl when her body had started to change. Like most women of her generation, Grandma Ethel had discreetly avoided talking with her daughters about bodily matters, so that when my mother’s first period began, she thought something had gone horribly wrong with her body. She explained these things to me just as she had explained them to my sister seven years earlier, and on the day my first menstrual period began at thirteen, my mother congratulated me on becoming a woman, and we toasted with a glass of wine. She made it seem like a wonderful thing, a blessing—instead of the usual view of the menstrual cycle as “the curse.” She was great, and I loved her for it.
She didn’t do quite so well with the other changes I was going through during those early teen years, though. By that time I was beginning to understand the connection between my mother’s mood swings and her pill intake, and my view of her “medication” gradually began to change with this new understanding. It was becoming clear to me that “Mama’s pills” were a problem, and I didn’t like it. I was also beginning to rebel against the chaos of our lives. I resented the loss of stability and peace I had known as a little girl. I was also getting old enough to recognize when my mother was behaving inconsistently or irrationally, and since I was no longer an adoring child, my mom was beginning to get on my nerves.
When she acted irrationally, I would roll my eyes as if to say, “Please! This is nuts!” I was still keeping my mouth shut, but I would glare at her defiantly with “Look who’s talking!” written all over my face. I would still go to bed at night and quiver after one of our fights, and sometimes I would think bad things about my mother, like “I wish you weren’t even here!” Later I’d feel frightened and guilty for having even thought it. My mother couldn’t understand what had happened to her little Lorna (after all, Mama thought, there was nothing wrong with her, so it must be me). Her solution was to take me to the doctor for a checkup.
