by Lorna Luft
Naturally, I wasn’t quite so philosophical at the time. I was hurt and humiliated by the public collapse of my relationship with Burt, and when Liza invited me to join her in Italy for a while, I jumped at the chance. Her father was directing her in A Matter of Time, what turned out to be the last movie of his life. We didn’t realize it yet, but Vincente Minnelli was already in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and the shoot in Rome was difficult. It was very painful for my sister. There wasn’t much knowledge of Alzheimer’s at the time, and we didn’t understand why Vincente was acting so strangely. We kept trying to laugh it off when he made odd mistakes. One day he came into the dressing room and called Liza “Yolanda.” She kept saying things like, “Oh, he’s just got his mind on the film,” but I knew she was worried. We comforted ourselves with the notion that he was getting older, and that he hadn’t directed a movie in many years. It was tragic to watch the brilliant man who’d directed An American in Paris struggling just to function.
While my sister was trying to deal with her father’s deteriorating health, I was trying to mend my hurt feelings and bruised ego. I was partying with my girlfriend Manuela Poppatakis while I was in Rome (her mother was the French actress Anouk Aimee from A Man and a Woman). As it was for my mother, partying at clubs always seems to be my cure for heartache. Liza’s movie was constantly being shut down because of a strike (Italy was very big on strikes), so we had all the free time in the world. Liza and Manuela and I would go to a club called Jackie-O’s every night, stay till dawn, sleep until three the next afternoon, go to lunch and dinner, and start all over again at Jackie-O’s. Every now and then Jack would fly over from California, but most of the time we girls were on our own.
That was the time of the “spaghetti westerns,” as they called them in the mid-seventies, and I kept meeting these Italian “cowboy” actors. One of them who thought he was the next Clint Eastwood introduced himself to me. He told me his name was Fabio Testi, and someone whispered to me that he was the “Italian Burt Reynolds.” Talk about the wrong recommendation! Fabio kept asking me out, but I knew we’d never get his ego through the door. I nicknamed him “Fabulous Testicles” and laughed at him with Manuela and Liza. I never wanted to date an actor again. This time I was holding out for my prince.
Amazingly enough, my prince actually showed up, right on cue. No kidding, he really was a prince, and I don’t mean the artist-formerly-known-as, either. His name was Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, but we called him “Stash.” He was descended from royalty in some obscure European country that I’d never heard of.
Our meeting was straight out of the movie Roman Holiday. Manuela and I were in the midst of sightseeing one afternoon at about four o’clock on an exceptionally beautiful day. It was that magic time when afternoon is just starting to hint at evening. We had just reached the bottom of the Spanish Steps when I looked up, and there he was! An Italian god, straight out of the cinema, and absolutely gorgeous. Six feet tall, long dark hair, and a flowing cape. He smiled at me, and to my infinite joy, it turned out that my friend knew him. She introduced us, and after spending the evening being charmed by him, I went home with him after dinner. I was in the mood to be seduced, and the prince was the guy to do it. He was very good at it (I later learned he’d had lots of practice). We spent a passionate week together, and then he left for some island hundreds of miles away. Liza was afraid I’d be devastated, but I wasn’t. I knew it had been what they call “a romantic interlude,” not true love. When Liza asked me if I was upset, I just started singing, “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and we rolled around on the floor laughing.
Stash had been just what I needed at the time. I later found out that although his bloodlines were genuine, he wasn’t what you’d call a prince of a guy. It didn’t matter. He was there when I needed him, and that was all I cared about.
At the time I broke up with Burt, I wondered how I could have let myself become involved in such a miserable relationship. I thought then that I knew what miserable was, but I was wrong. Then I met Jake Hooker, and I found out.
No one sets out to marry the wrong person. Nobody sits down in a rational moment and says, “Just think, this person will wreck my life. We’ll be absolutely miserable together. So I know what I’ll do; I’ll marry him!” My parents certainly didn’t. The Las Vegas bookies might have bet against my parents’ marriage, but Mama and Sid thought they’d live happily ever after. Love is a great deal more complicated than that. I don’t think Jake set out to make me miserable. It just worked out that way.
I had first met Jake Hooker when I was a kid. He was seventeen or eighteen then and living with Lynne Allen, Peter Allen’s sister. Liza was married to Peter at the time, and I had just moved to New York with Joe and my mom. I must have been about fourteen. I remember being at the Plaza Hotel. Liza was upset about something and said, “I need to talk to Lynne.” I was accustomed to running errands for my sister, so she put me in a taxi and sent me over to pick up Lynne and Jake. I didn’t think much of it at the time. To me, Jake was just some guy with long hair who was dating Lynne. I remember that Joe and I nicknamed him “Jake the Snake” (because of his snakeskin boots) and “Jake the Rake” (because he liked to play around). That should have been my first hint.
I’d seen Jake off and on while my mother was alive, always very casually, and when I’d opened at The Talk of the Town in London a couple of years before, Jake had looked me up. I was flying off to Australia at the time for a show, so I hadn’t thought much about seeing him. But then I met him again in 1976, a few months after my breakup with Burt. I’d gone to London to do an appearance at the Palladium with Eddie Fisher. It was exciting for me to play the Palladium. It’s a magical place for me. In spite of its size, it’s an intimate theater that makes you feel the audience is up onstage with you. I was first there fourteen years earlier, when my mom filmed some of her concert scenes for I Could Go on Singing, and the theater is filled with memories of my mother. It’s still my favorite venue.
Jake sent a message backstage after the performance asking if he could see me while I was in town. I told him okay.
I was in a dangerous state of mind, though of course, I didn’t know it. I was still smarting from my breakup with Burt a few months before. My fling with Stash had helped, but I still wasn’t back on my feet.
Jake and I started dating. At the time he played guitar in a rock band called the Arrows, and I liked the other band members, too—I thought the guys were funny and cute. Jake was very attentive to me. Just as with Burt, the attention never stopped. It was constant. And after a while, just as with Burt, Jake’s interest began to wear me down. After all, I liked him, and there was a sense of connection with him because he knew my sister well, and knew Peter Allen, too. I had loved Peter like a brother. So I thought, “This is sort of nice.” It was a way of feeling connected to my past without being suffocated by it the way I usually was.
I wasn’t in love with Jake, but I liked him, so when it was time for me to leave London and he asked me to come back and live with him there, it sounded as if it might be a good idea. I thought, “This could be interesting. What do I have going for me in L.A. anyway?” England could give me a new career start, away from my father and from my mother’s ghost, and I’d always loved London, ever since I’d lived there as a little girl. So I decided, “Why not? Let’s do it.” I flew home to L.A. and went by my Dad’s house to tell him and Patti that I was going back to England again. When they asked me how long I’d be there, I said, “Forever.” It was clear that I wasn’t going to be talked out of it. My dad had been after me for years to get some focus in my life, to stop partying so much, to concentrate on my career, but all his advice had fallen on deaf ears. What could they say besides “Have a nice time”?
Although I was bold enough to move to London with a rock singer and live with him out of wedlock, I wasn’t bold enough to tell my father what I was up to. Rather than tell him about Jake, I lied and said I was moving in with t
wo girlfriends there so I could work in England and Europe. I hadn’t been able to tell my dad the truth about my rock-and-roll lover any more than Sid had been able to tell me that I was conceived before marriage, or that Patti was sleeping in his bed years before. I couldn’t look my father in the eye and tell him the truth. Instead, I made up something and took the next plane to London.
Jake was waiting at Heathrow Airport with a limousine and a bottle of champagne when I got there. He was nervous and excited, anxious to impress me. I think maybe he’d been worried I wouldn’t come. He told me he’d spent the whole week picking out curtains and fixing up his flat for me, and in the limo he talked nervously about how he hoped I’d like everything. He’d already polished off one bottle of champagne waiting for my plane to land, and he opened a second one as we drove. I sipped a few drops in the limo as the driver took us back to the flat, but I didn’t drink often in those days, so Jake finished the second bottle, too.
When we got to the flat, he continued drinking vodka and orange juice to steady his nerves. By the time his nerves were “steady” enough, it was time for bed. We crawled into bed for my first night in our romantic London hideaway; Jake took me in his arms, looked into my eyes, and vomited champagne and orange juice all over the bed. Afterward, he promptly passed out. I cleaned up the mess as best as I could with Jake out cold in the middle of it all, and then I did my best to fall asleep as he snored beside me. “Welcome to England,” I thought.
The next day Jake was embarrassed and apologetic. He told me he’d been nervous, afraid I’d be disappointed in the flat. I told him not to worry, that it was okay. I’d had a lifetime of training in thinking, in spite of the evidence, that “it was okay,” so I just tried to make him feel better and forgot about it. The whole episode was prophetic of our future together, but at the time I somehow missed the point. I’ve always been strong on hindsight.
Most of the time, though, we had fun. I worked sporadically in Europe, but mostly I just parried and enjoyed my independence. So much for the new career start. Jake and I clubbed with the Rolling Stones, the Who, and other “cool” people in the world of rock, and all of this appealed to my rebellious spirit. It was the seventies, and I was in the middle of the biggest party in London. The Arrows had their own television show in England at the time, and Jake was a minor celebrity. So I played and enjoyed being what I thought was a grown-up.
Months later, when Jake said, “We’re gonna get married,” I said, “We are? Okay.” I thought, “What a perfect way to really get away from my family. It’ll be great.” I’d like to say I thought it all through, but I didn’t. I just sort of drifted into the marriage without ever fully realizing what I was doing.
I called my dad and Patti with the news. We were going to get married in London on Valentine’s Day, 1977. I flew back to L.A. in January for a wedding shower with my family and old friends, and then I went back to London to get ready for the wedding ceremony. Ceremony? Performance was more like it.
Our wedding made all the London papers. “Judy’s Little Girl Marries Rock Star.” It wasn’t exactly what my mother had envisioned for me when I was little. We got married at St. Bartholomew’s Church in London. The ceremony itself was traditionally Anglican. Reverend Peter Delaney, who had married my mother and Mickey Deans—and officiated at my mother’s funeral—years before, performed the ceremony. I wore an outfit designed by Dee Harrington, Rod Stewart’s ex-girlfriend. Made of off-white satin, it was an off-the-shoulder tunic and harem trousers, and I wore flowers in my hair. It was the ultimate rock-and-roll wedding. Everybody who was anybody came. The Stones were there, the great jazz singer Annie Ross, the Who—everybody you could think of who was a hot item at the time.
Everyone but my family. On his only daughter’s wedding day, my father was in California with Patti and Joe. None of them could afford to fly to London for the wedding. Sadly, I didn’t really miss my dad that day. I was still running away from my past, from being little Lorna, Daddy’s girl, still relishing my independence. I was also uncomfortable about having my father see for himself how I was living. I had started doing cocaine and had gone to great lengths to conceal it from him. I knew he would have had a fit if he’d known about it. From my point of view, Dad just wasn’t cool enough to understand the way I lived. It would be another twenty years before Dad got to attend my wedding to Colin Freeman in a beautiful English castle. The second time around, Dad was a guest of honor. Not the first time, though.
After the wedding we had a reception at Tramp, a hot London club owned by my friend Johnny Gold. The whole affair was a circus, with thousands of people in the street and press everywhere. It was out of control, and so was I, though I was a long way from facing that yet. I didn’t want to think about what I was doing with my life. I didn’t want to think about anything.
Ten years before, I had watched my parents’ marriage fall apart. I’d spent another five years watching my mother rush from one miserable relationship to another. Between them, my parents had ten marriages. What had I learned from all of this? Apparently, absolutely nothing. I was by-God determined to screw up my own life as thoroughly as they had ruined theirs. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and a bad marriage was only the beginning for me. Marrying Jake wasn’t the problem; it was only a symptom of something much darker and more destructive in my life.
Collection of the author
Working with Sammy Davis, Jr., at Lake Tahoe.
CHAPTER 15
Clueless
When I was a little girl, I loved St. Joseph’s children’s aspirin—tiny orange tablets with a delicious citrus flavor. They call them Children’s Panadol in England; they taste wonderful. I had no idea they were medicine; as far as I was concerned, they were just candy, my favorite candy. I didn’t understand why I only got to have one or two at a time. After all, they were so small.
Then one summer afternoon in Hyannis Port, when I was eight years old, I found the “orange candy” in the bathroom cabinet and proceeded to take advantage of my good luck by eating the whole bottle. Fortunately, my mother found out what I’d done, or I might not be here today. Terrified, she called the doctor, who told her to induce vomiting immediately. Apparently the doctor instructed her to use milk-soaked bread for the purpose, so Mama stuffed me with the soggy mess until she succeeded in making me throw up. After I had seemingly vomited up my stomach lining, she was so relieved that she celebrated by giving me the spanking of my life. Unable to understand why she had to spank me after all that vomiting, I cried hysterically as my mother repeated, “Don’t you understand? You could have died! You could have died! Don’t you ever do that again!” That evening, as further punishment, I had to stay home with a sitter while the rest of the family went to watch my sister perform at the Tent.
At the time I couldn’t understand why Mama was so angry at me; only years later, as a parent myself, can I understand my mother’s terror that afternoon. And only since reading piles of Al-Anon books can I understand the irony of the fact that my mother, so concerned about my first “overdose,” was hospitalized for the same problem that summer—though I seriously doubt she’d swallowed St. Joseph’s aspirin. The whole incident made a deep impression on me at the time. I was convinced that if I took a drug, someone would make me throw up, so for years I resisted taking any kind of medication. Unfortunately, however, the lesson didn’t last.
One trait of members of addictive families is we never recognize our own addictions. We may recognize everyone else’s, but never our own. My mother couldn’t acknowledge her problem; to herself she justified her use of stimulants and depressants by resolutely labeling her drugs “medication.” After all, she reasoned, they were prescribed by a doctor. It wasn’t as if she were in some back alley buying hashish. The fact that most “patients” don’t tape their medicine under carpets or sew it into the drapes completely escaped her.
I was equally blind to my own behavior. After years of watching my mother deteriorate, I avoided “Mama�
��s medication” like the plague. I wouldn’t go near the pills that had killed my mother. Prescription drugs? Not me. For most of my young adult years I rarely even drank alcohol. Though I never thought of my mother as an addict—that would have been too harsh a word—I did know that prescription medication had ruined her health and eventually killed her. I was afraid to take the same pills my mother had taken. Instead, I took the “fun drugs,” the party drugs everyone else took—you know, the “harmless,” “recreational” ones that you could smoke or snort at night to enjoy yourself.
Incredible, isn’t it? My mother wasn’t the only one in denial all those years.
I guess my first experimentation with drugs was with nicotine, the day I stole my first smoke with Katy Sagal behind the bushes in her backyard. But tobacco never really stuck with me. I thought smoking was cool at that age, but at the most, I never smoked more than a pack of cigarettes a week, and even that stopped before I was out of my twenties. My first “real” drug was marijuana. I’d gone to a party with an older friend when I was fourteen, and everyone there was smoking pot, so when they offered me a joint, I took it. I really didn’t know what the stuff was, so when I went home, I told my mother what I’d done at the party. I expected her to be as nonchalant as she’d been when the school caught me smoking in the bathroom. Wrong! Mama had hysterics, yelling at me about how I was going to become a drug addict. Smart-aleck teenager that I was, I just thought, “Yeah, right. You should talk.” By that age I’d already been educated about “Mama’s pills.”
