by Lorna Luft
My mother was beside herself with rage. She kept screaming and screaming at me, and I just stood there and held the phone, sobbing and shaking. Finally Mrs. Lee, who had come in and was standing next to me, couldn’t take it any longer. She took the phone away from me and said to my mother, “Please don’t scream at this child anymore. She’s having a real tough time. Leave her alone.” She stood up for me. God knows I needed someone to stand up for me at that moment.
Mrs. Lee hung up the phone, and as soon as she did, I called my dad in California and said, “Dad, I have to come live with you in California. I have to come with you right now, today, tonight. Please, Dad. Please send me a ticket. I have to come right now.” I was crying so hard I could hardly talk. I was terrified and guilty about leaving my mom; but something deep inside, some survival instinct, told me that I had to leave, and I had to leave now, or I wasn’t going to make it. I had to be with my dad and my brother, and I had to be safe. My father was wonderful; he kept trying to calm me down and said, “Of course, baby, of course you can live with me. I’ll send you a ticket tonight. I’ll have them leave it at Kennedy Airport. Mrs. Lee can take you to the plane, and I’ll pick you up when you get here. You can come home tonight.” So in the middle of a hot August night, Mrs. Lee drove me to the airport and put me on a plane for Los Angeles. On the way to the airport, I begged Mrs. Lee, “Please don’t tell my mother where I am. Promise me you won’t tell her.” She promised.
A few hours later I landed at Los Angeles Airport and began a new life with my father and brother. One by one, my mother had worn us all out. She would soon wear herself out, too. Dad and Joey and I were a sad and emotionally ragged little band of refugees, and we held onto each other for dear life, but my father was determined to make a life for us. He was nearly as sick and exhausted as I was, but he thought, “I have these two children, and somebody has to take care of them. We have no other choice. Somebody has to be sane.”
For all practical purposes, my mother wasn’t herself anymore. God knows she was no longer the woman we all loved and remembered. I was almost sixteen years old by then, the same age my mother was when she first began taking the drugs that would eventually claim her life. For over thirty years those chemicals had ravaged her body, gradually robbing her of her health, her dignity, her family, and finally her life.
A lot of very uncharitable things have been written about my mother’s behavior in the last years before she died. I have no desire to add to them. What many people don’t realize is that the brain is an organ, too, and when the body is dying of the disease we call chemical dependency, the mind slowly dies with it. Drugs are a slow-acting poison, a thief that steals your life away piece by piece.
My mother wasn’t rational those last years; if she had been, she would have been horrified by her own behavior. If we’d loved her less, we could have seen her fall from grace with infinitely less pain. If she’d loved us less, she couldn’t have held onto the remnants of our relationship as long as she did. I’ve questioned many things about my mother over the years. The one thing I never questioned was whether or not she loved me. I knew she did. I knew that if she had been well, she would have wanted me to do whatever was necessary to keep myself safe.
Ten months later she would be gone. I would never see my mother alive again.
© Turner Entertainment
My favorite picture of Mama, 1942.
CHAPTER 12
Good-bye
A few months ago in London, I took a cab across town for an appointment. Shortly after we pulled into traffic, I noticed that the cabby was looking at me carefully in the rearview mirror. “Excuse me, miss,” he said, “but aren’t you Lorna Luft?” “Yes,” I said, smiling pleasantly and thinking, “He must recognize me from one of my concerts.” But then his expression changed in the old familiar way, and I thought, “Oh, no.” His face contorted, and he actually began to cry. “Your mother, oh, your mother, miss. Such a tragedy, her death. What a tragic life she had.” And he was off. For more than twenty minutes, as we inched our way through the London traffic, I remained trapped in the backseat listening for the umpteenth time as he retold the tabloid version of my mother’s life. All I could think was, “Oh, God, get me out of here.” Several lifetimes later, when we reached my publicist’s office, I shot out of the backseat, mumbled something polite to the cabby, and tried to make my escape. No luck. He grabbed my hand, kissed it tearfully, and told me he’d wait and take me wherever I needed to go next. No amount of polite dissuasion on my part could make him leave.
I have no doubt that the poor cabby meant to be kind and sympathetic. So do the endless number of my mother’s fans who still approach me almost daily to remind me of her death. People are always telling me that I should appreciate the fans’ devotion, that I must understand how much my mother means to them even thirty years after she died. On one level, I do. But there is a special cruelty to such devotion for the survivors of that death, for Joe and Liza and I lost a mother, not a legend. We had to deal not only with the overwhelming grief, but with the public exposure of that grief and the belief of thousands that they felt the same pain we did. They did not. They certainly did feel loss, but not the loss of a beloved parent.
For years we also lived with the peculiar and fearful vulnerability that comes from learning the most heart-wrenching family news from the public media. Those who live private lives are, at the very least, given the news of a parent’s death privately by the authorities before the loved one’s name is released publicly. Celebrities’ children don’t enjoy even that basic courtesy. Tracy Nelson learned about the unexpected death of her father, former teen idol Rick Nelson, from a television broadcast while she waited at an airport. Years before, when I was eleven and we were still living on Rockingham Drive, Joey and I heard a false report of our mother’s death in Hong Kong as we were listening to music on the car radio. Our nanny, Mrs. Chapman, abruptly snapped off the radio and told us that we’d heard wrong, and fortunately, the report turned out not to be true. But the anxiety remained. What will we hear next? And will it be true this time? The press goes on about the “people’s right to know,” and loyal fans line up offering condolences, but the reality is that all this attention simply multiplies the pain endlessly. Nearly thirty years later, people still resent the fact that after my mother died, I needed to bury her and get on with my own life in order to survive. My sister would be a much healthier and happier person today if people could look at her even once and not see my mother’s face looking back at them.
At fifteen, though, I understood none of this. At fifteen, I still thought my mother would live forever.
When I landed at LAX on that hot August night in 1968,1 began a whole new life. My father and Patti met me at the airport and took me home to my dad’s apartment in Westwood for some R and R. I needed it. I was an emotional wreck, barely able to function. For the first few days I holed up and did almost nothing but cry and sleep. I was overwhelmed with guilt and grief and fear and anger. I had left my mother, my greatest childhood fear, the one thing I’d always said I would never do. “Oh, no, Mama, we won’t leave you. We would never leave you,” my brother and I had told her that night in Las Vegas after my father had tried to take us. Six years later Joey and I were both gone, driven to leave by despair and a survival instinct that told us if we didn’t leave, none of us was going to make it. The truth was, as I now realize, we hadn’t left her. She had left us, taken away by an illness that had first seduced her and then left her to die. None of us could have stopped it.
It didn’t take long for my mother to find out where I’d gone, and at first the fallout was horrendous. She called my father’s apartment constantly, demanding to talk to me and my dad, alternately enraged and guilt-stricken. My dad knew I didn’t need any more of this insanity, but he couldn’t stop her from calling. Poor Patti was answering the phone: “No, Judy, he’s not here right now. Not now, Judy, Lorna’s in the shower . . . Lorna’s asleep . . . Lorna’s not here.” Aft
er a week or two of this, my dad said, “Lorna, you’re going to have to talk to her. She won’t accept it from anyone else.” I finally did. I told her I loved her but that I needed to live with Daddy for a while. I was just worn out.
After a while, the phone calls were less frequent. She still called regularly, but no longer several times a day. And sometimes I called her. I missed her terribly, yet I dreaded those phone calls. She’d given up screaming and yelling at me. Instead she made me feel guilty. My mother could have taught a class in how to induce guilt. She should have been Jewish. She was a brilliant actress, the master of the finely tuned emotion, and she could play you like a fiddle when she chose to. She knew exactly how to play me. “I understand what you’ve done. I understand that I’m not a good mother. It’s no wonder you left me to live with your father. I deserve to be all alone.” And on and on until I was sick to my stomach and in tears. It was really hard. Still, I couldn’t go back. Every time I thought of the craziness and the rage and the days and weeks without sleep, my brain would just shut down. I couldn’t live that way anymore.
Meanwhile, my mother was managing to survive. She did a few benefits and some television shows and spent her nights clubbing so she wouldn’t have to be home alone. In December she flew to London for a series of shows at a night club, The Talk of the Town, and stayed to tour Europe for a while. In January of 1969, four months after I left, we got the news that she’d married a man named Mickey Deans in London. He was her fifth husband. Like everyone else in America, we heard about it on the evening news. I remember thinking, “Who the hell is Mickey Deans?” She hadn’t said a word about him to Joe or me—none of the “I’m going to marry Uncle Mark” discussion that had preceded her marriage to Mark Herron—and we didn’t have the faintest idea who he was.
We found out later that he had been the manager at Arthur’s, the first nightclub I’d gone to, three years before. He was younger than Mama, and more than anything else, he was someone who happened to be there to fill the vacuum created by Joe’s and my departure. My mom announced to the press assembled in London that at last, she’d found true love, someone who could just love her for who she really was. I just sighed and wondered how long this one would last.
Mickey, of course, had no idea what he was getting into, and he certainly wasn’t up to the task. He thought he’d married Dorothy, or at least Dorothy after the tornado, and he’d bought into my mother’s recurring optimism that her life would still turn out like an MGM musical. He had no idea how to cope with a woman in the final stages of addiction. She was dying in front of his eyes, but he never realized it. He started planning a string of Judy Garland Theaters and pretty much went along for the ride.
In late May, Mickey and my mom returned to New York briefly to try and sell the Judy Garland Theaters idea. They stayed with Mama’s old friend Charlie Cochran at his apartment there. My mother was feeling really sick by then, and Charlie was worried. He wanted to put her in the hospital, but she didn’t want to go, and Mickey didn’t think it was necessary. He took her to a doctor who suggested they switch her from Seconal to Thorazine, hoping her system would tolerate the Thorazine better. A few days later she celebrated her forty-seventh birthday resting in bed at Charlie Cochran’s apartment.
Joe and Liza and I all called her for her birthday. She sounded tired, but otherwise she seemed better than she’d been in a while. She was always happy when she first had a new man in her life; it seemed to renew her optimism, and she usually cut back on her medication for a while after she began a new relationship. And it was her birthday, so she was getting lots of attention, and that always had a therapeutic effect. Ironically, the fact that her body was now failing rapidly had calmed her and temporarily reduced her need for stimulants. Her body was giving up on her, and she was content just to rest for a while.
I was so relieved to find her sounding happy for a change. We had a good conversation—no guilt, no making me feel bad because I wasn’t with her. She told me that she and Mickey were going back to London in a few days, and that she wanted me and Joe to come over for summer vacation there. We could stay with her all summer and come back to California when school started in the fall. We talked about making plans to fly over when school ended in two weeks, and then I wished her a happy birthday and said good-bye.
That was the last time I ever talked to her. Five days later she and Mickey flew back to London, and four days after that, sometime late on Saturday night, June 22, 1969, she died. Later I would be glad that our final conversation had been such a good one.
I got the news of her death from a friend’s mother. I had gone to a concert that night with a good friend from school, Jody Henderson. We’d gone to see the Young Rascals, a rock group from England that was popular at the time, and afterward I spent the night at Jody’s house. We’d had a great time and come home exhausted shortly after midnight and gone to bed. I was sound asleep in the twin bed in Jody’s room when for no apparent reason, I woke up. It must have been about three A.M., the time of my mother’s old night raids. I sat up in bed, wide awake, and looked around the room. It was dark and quiet. Everything looked fine. I felt a little odd, as though I’d had a dream that I couldn’t remember. Finally I thought, “Oh, well,” and lay back down again. A few minutes later I drifted back to sleep.
The next morning I woke up at about nine and went into the kitchen. Jody and her sister and her mom were all in there, sitting around the kitchen table, and when I walked in, the room got very quiet. I was still excited about the concert the night before, so I just said, “Wasn’t the concert fun?” and started talking about it, but nobody answered. Finally there was a silence, and then Jody’s mother said, “Lorna, I have to tell you something very important.” As soon as she said it, Jody and her sister both burst into tears, and I thought, “No. Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear this.” Then Jody’s mom came over to me, took both of my hands in hers, and looking gently into my face, said, “Lorna, your mom passed away last night.” I later found out Jody’s mother had heard the news on the radio and called my dad immediately to find out if it was true. When he didn’t answer after a couple of hours, she became worried that I’d hear the news on the radio when I got up. She wanted to spare me that, so she told me herself.
I felt as though someone had kicked me in the stomach. I couldn’t breathe. I began to shake my head. “No, no, it isn’t true. You’re wrong. It isn’t true.” I was shaking like a leaf, but I kept remembering Mrs. Chapman turning off the radio when they said my mother had died in Hong Kong, so I said, “You’ve got it wrong.” And then, “Where’s my dad? I want to talk to my dad.”
I went straight to the phone and started calling, but no one answered. I later found out that he’d taken the phone off the hook the day before because he was getting so many calls. I dialed and dialed, but I couldn’t get through. Meanwhile, my mind was racing. Where was Joey? I knew he’d gone to spend the night with a friend, too. What friend? Where was he? Had he heard? I thought about my sister and called her in New York, but there was no answer there, either. I later found out that Liza was trying to get ahold of my dad, too, to make sure that Joe and I didn’t get the news on TV. Mickey Deans had called her from London to tell her, and she’d been calling us ever since. It was a nightmare. None of us could find each other.
I called and called and called, for over an hour, all the while fearing someone would turn on the radio or TV. I didn’t want to hear what they might say. By this time panic was overwhelming me, and I couldn’t control it. Finally I got through to my dad. Someone had just gotten ahold of him to tell him the news. The first thing I said was, “Dad, is it true?”
Instead of answering, he just very quietly said, “Honey, you’d better come home.” Then I knew. I was still trying to deny it, but I knew. Jody’s mom put me in her car and took me home.
I ran through the front door, where Joey and my dad were waiting for me. By then I’d convinced myself that I shouldn’t get hysterical, that it was proba
bly all a mistake, that she’d overdosed again but they’d been able to revive her by now, as they always had in the past. One look at my father’s face destroyed that last bit of hope. There was such pain in his face, and in his voice when he spoke to me. Then, at last, I knew.
From that moment on the nightmare seemed endless. Liza finally got through to us and said that they were flying Mama’s body back over to New York for the funeral as soon as the autopsy was complete in London. She and Mickey and Kay Thompson, one of our oldest friends, were already making plans for the funeral. Nobody ever asked me or Joe what we wanted. I don’t think they meant to be cruel; we were just “the kids,” and I’m sure they were trying to spare us pain. But it hurt nonetheless. We felt so left out, as though we didn’t really belong—Judy Garland’s “other daughter” and Sid Luft’s son, as the press referred to us. We probably would have agreed to whatever Liza and the others thought best, but we just wanted to be asked.
The phone rang incessantly—Liza and Kay with funeral arrangements, friends and relatives, the sympathetic and the curious. And of course, the press, who descended like vultures around the body, all hoping for a scoop or some juicy details. They camped on our front door. My mother had died of what appeared to be an overdose, and the rumor had already started to circulate that it was a suicide. I felt some people hoped it was suicide; after all, it would make such a great headline—you know, “Has-Been Singer Dies of Overdose” or “Little Judy Ends It All,” as if she were still twelve years old. It infuriated me. She wasn’t twelve years old, she sure never thought of herself as a has-been, and most important of all, she hadn’t committed suicide. I knew it, even before the autopsy reports confirmed it.
