Me and My Shadows

by Lorna Luft

  Along with my newly improved health and state of mind, my career was looking up as well. In 1982 I heard that they were doing a sequel to the movie Grease called Grease 2, and I was ready to kill for the part. I went on a crash diet, eating nothing but watermelon three times a day, and worked hard to get into shape. I flew to California to audition, and I was thrilled when I got the role. It was my first real film role (you can get a quick glimpse of Joey and me on the boat in the Thames scene of I Could Go On Singing). We were all disappointed with the movie’s poor reception; we’d hoped it would be as big a hit as the original Grease. Still, it was a start for me.

  Just as Grease 2 was drawing to an end in 1982 and I was getting worried about another job, one of the dancers in the movie, a girl named Donna King, told me they were holding auditions in New York for the American premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s London hit Cats. I arranged for an audition as soon as I got back to New York, and it went very, very well. I read for the lead role of Grizabella, and Andrew was very impressed with my tryout. I’d never met him before, but we got along well, and he told me he wanted me to work on the show with the musical director for three or four months. I worked with the musical director and dance master every day, at the producer’s expense, learning the role.

  Andrew returned to London while I rehearsed. He was negotiating to do a movie version of Evita at the time (fifteen years before it actually happened), and Liza had done a screen test for the role. A rumor circulated through the tabloids that I was trying out for the same role opposite my sister, but it wasn’t true. I never saw myself as Eva Peron, but I desperately wanted the role of Grizabella the Cat.

  Meanwhile, Liza was in London discussing Evita with Andrew, who told my sister I had gotten the Grizabella role. Liza called me from London with the news I’d gotten the part, but said I had to wait for Trevor Nunn, the director, to formally approve Andrew’s choice. As far as Liza and Andrew were concerned, Trevor’s approval was just a formality. Four months after my original audition, Trevor came to New York and saw my final version. I had been working very hard to get ready for him, because Grizabella was clearly the role of a lifetime.

  The next day it came out in the trades that Betty Buckley had been cast as Grizabella. I was devastated. Trevor Nunn wrote me a very nice note explaining that the decision had nothing to do with my performance; it was just that they’d decided to go with another actress, someone with a different look from mine. I later found out the role had originally been written for the distinguished English actress Dame Judi Dench, who is older than I am (but not old!). Trevor’s explanation didn’t help. Intellectually, I understood his decision, but emotionally, I was desolate. My friend John Napier, the set designer for Cats, said he’d thought the role was already mine, too. To this day he says I’m the only person who ever sang the role of Grizabella and made him cry. What a painful loss that was. Sometimes this is a tough business to be in.

  After a stint onstage as Peppermint Patty in Snoopy, the sequel to You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, I was cast in a second film, a remake of the sixties beach classic, Where the Boys Are. No sooner had I finished shooting the movie than I got a wonderful opportunity to star opposite Farrah Fawcett off Broadway in Extremities, a brilliant and harrowing piece about a rapist and his victims. My life was taking a definite turn for the better.

  My newly sanitized social life began improving, too. I began going to a little eating place called Café Central after work with the members of the Extremities cast. It was a dumpy little place on the West Side with good food and what people refer to as atmosphere. We’d go there after the show for a late dinner or early breakfast. I’d get something to eat and have one drink, but I stayed out of the bathroom. If people were doing drugs in there, I didn’t want to know about it. Cafe Central soon became an actors’ hangout. It was there I first got to know Mickey Rourke and Joe Pesci. The only problem was the bartender, a guy named Bruce who never seemed to get a drink order right. No matter what I ordered, I got the wrong thing. Fortunately, Bruce turned out to have talent for something other than bartending. A year later I saw him on the TV show Moonlighting and discovered that Bruce the Bartender’s last name was Willis.

  Farrah and I became great friends during this time, too. Farrah has gotten a lot of attention because of her beauty, but she’s also one of the best—and most giving—actresses I’ve ever worked with. We had a great time doing Extremities together and were soon the best of pals. Farrah and I often sat in the dressing room after matinee and evening performances talking about our futures.

  One evening as Jake and I stretched out on the couch watching television, The Tonight Show came on, and Johnny Carson began interviewing a Farrah look-alike who had just been cast as the lead in a major television series. Johnny asked her how she’d gotten the part. In a baby-doll voice she said, “It was the strangest thing. I’d never done any acting in my life, but one day I was just coming up in the elevator of this building in L.A., and this man came in and handed me his card and said, ‘Are you an actress?’ I said no, but I’d like to be. So I called him and now I have this series.”

  I rolled off the couch and screamed, “What elevator!” At which point Jake said to me, “You know whose fault that is? It’s your costar’s.” So the next day I burst into Farrah’s dressing room and said, “It’s all your fault that we’re being paid a dollar-fifty! It’s the hair and the teeth.” Then I told her about the show, and she screamed laughing. All during the performance that night I would mouth to her on stage, “It’s all your fault.” It was extraordinary that while we were there trying to be real actors, for no money, bimbos were cashing in on Farrah’s looks.

  Out of all the good things happening in my life during that period, by far the best was my decision to have a baby. I’d always expected to have children “someday,” but up till then it had been easy to postpone someday, under the circumstances. One day early in 1983, shortly after my thirtieth birthday, I found myself standing in front of a store window in New York staring at a display of baby clothes and thinking, “I want to have a baby. Now.” Almost overnight, I became obsessed with having a child. I really do believe our bodies are programmed to tell us certain things, and my body was telling me that the time had come. I longed for a baby of my own.

  I’d had one pregnancy, two or three years before, but that one had been an accident that ended in a miscarriage, a serious one. I didn’t know I was pregnant until I miscarried. I was at Studio 54 one night, and I’d gone into the restroom when a horrific feeling swept over me, and I suddenly started bleeding heavily. I hadn’t taken any drugs yet that evening, so I thought I must just be having an unusually bad menstrual period. I sat down and asked an attendant to please bring me up a Coca-Cola to settle my stomach. By then the bleeding was worse, so I had someone track down Jake, and I told him we had to go home. Given my phobia of hospitals, I was hoping I could handle it at home.

  The bleeding continued to worsen on the way home, and Jake insisted I call a doctor when we got there. I did, and the doctor said it sounded as if I was having a miscarriage. I told him that was impossible. He wanted me to come in, but I refused. Instead I lay on our bed, wrapped in towels and ice to slow the bleeding, and checked in with the doctor every hour or so. Finally the doctor said, “You have to come to my office right now. This is serious.” By that time it was five A.M., and I’d been bleeding for hours. So Jake wrapped me in towels and half-carried me down to a cab and over to the doctor’s office.

  The doctor took one look at me and told me we were going to the hospital immediately for surgery. I continued to refuse, but he told me I’d pass out soon and have to go anyway. Panic-stricken, I called my godfather, Dr. Lester Coleman, and he told me to go to the hospital and he’d meet me there. When we got there, I was taken straight to the operating room, where they put an ether mask on my face before I knew what was happening and performed a D and C to stop the bleeding. When I woke up from surgery, Jake and Lester were there with me. The whole
thing was over so quickly that the pregnancy didn’t seem real to me. I didn’t feel as if I’d had a miscarriage; I felt as if I’d had an operation. I’d never known I was pregnant, so I didn’t feel any sense of loss when the pregnancy terminated naturally.

  Fortunately, I recovered quickly and completely, so when I decided I wanted a baby two or three years later, there was no problem medically. Jake and I talked it over, and we both agreed it was the right time. Three months later I was pregnant, right on schedule. Once again, I was very fortunate, and with my body clean and healthy, the prospects for a healthy baby were excellent. I’d also gone on the Cambridge Diet a few months before, so I was slimmer than I’d been in a long time as well.

  I got the news I was pregnant a few weeks into my run in Extremities. I was so excited I went straight from the doctor’s office to a department store and bought a crib. A friend of mine named Randy Booth, a musical director I knew from my stage tours, helped me paint the spare bedroom for the baby, and Jake and I filled it with furniture and baby clothes before I was even pregnant enough to show. We painted the room blue with a little nursery-style border, which turned out to be fortunate. The doctor told me shortly afterward I would be having a boy. I was ecstatic. Jake was as excited as I was.

  Farrah was excited for me but also worried because Extremities is such a physical play, and she was afraid I might get hurt doing the rough-and-tumble blocking. I wasn’t worried; I had no morning sickness and felt just fine. It turned out, though, that Farrah’s fears weren’t unfounded. Not long after I joined the cast, James Russo, who originated the role of the rapist off Broadway and also did the film, left the show and was replaced by Tom Waite. He was thrown into the very difficult part with little rehearsal time to perfect his scenes. He was even a little too rough for Farrah at times, and Farrah is one of the strongest women I know. He would hurt her unintentionally in the scenes where they struggled.

  I’d already taken one fall onstage during the They’re Playing Our Song tour. A crew member had forgotten to fill the holes where a door had been removed, and my heel got caught in a hole. I fell and injured a disk in my back. At the time, I recovered in a few days, but the injury came back to haunt me. One night while I was doing a scene in Extremities with Tom, he had to yank me into the fireplace when I handed him something. He pulled hard, and I slid and slammed my back against the rear wall of the fireplace. I couldn’t move. There I was, wedged into that fireplace onstage, in so much pain I couldn’t move. They literally had to stop the show and carry me offstage, put me in a taxi, and take me straight to the hospital.

  Once we got there, the doctors examined me, but they couldn’t x-ray me because I was pregnant. They told me I had a damaged disk and would have to stay off my feet completely because of my pregnancy. So much for doing the play.

  To complete the fiasco, when I called the producer the next day to tell him they’d have to use my understudy, it turned out I needn’t have worried. My understudy had gone on the night before, but they’d never finished that night’s performance. Not long after I was carried offstage to the hospital, Farrah had broken her arm in the next scene. Poor Tom was devastated by guilt—he’d taken out two actresses in a single performance! That finished off the play; they had to close the production.

  As a final touch to the entire strange experience, Farrah called me a few days later to say that her arm was feeling better, but guess what? She was pregnant. She’d just been telling me the week before that she didn’t see how I did it; she didn’t think she could deal with her career and a baby at the same time. Surprise! Her son Redmond would be born just a few weeks after my son. Farrah and I had a good laugh over the whole situation. Our lives had apparently turned into a sitcom.

  Pregnant and with a damaged disk, I suddenly found myself relegated to the couch with a sore back and a rapidly growing body. Too rapidly. With a license to eat and nothing to do all day, I filled the empty hours with food. You name it, I ate it—entire pizzas, bags of chips, and cookies, box after box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip. It was astounding. The first month of my pregnancy I gained ten pounds, and by the time the baby was born, I’d gained over seventy-five and waddled like a duck. Jake was worried and so was the doctor, but I looked the doctor in the eye and lied about what I was eating. I wasn’t about to give up my cookies.

  I stocked up on maternity T-shirts with logos that said things like “Under Construction” and pretended my alarming bulk was all baby. Too fat to work, there was nothing to distract me from the refrigerator, and with my system free of chemical stimulants, there was nothing to curb my appetite. Just as with the cocaine, I could never have just one. Late in the pregnancy I went into the recording studio to do a disco version of “Where the Boys Are” with the Village People, and I still laugh at the picture we made: the cop, the cowboy, the construction worker, and the circus fat lady! Luckily, they were a great bunch of guys who congratulated me on the baby and discreetly avoided mentioning my girth.

  It didn’t fully dawn on me how big I’d gotten until I went to the premiere of Where the Boys Are in my ninth month. The posters for the opening showed photographs of my head on another woman’s body. By the time they’d done the publicity photos, I’d already put on too much weight to pose. I had to take the doctor with me that night because I was so close to delivering. There I was, waddling into the theater, with Jake and the doctor riding herd on either side of me. I jammed myself into the theater seat, and once the lights went down, spent the next two hours watching my formerly ninety-eight-pound body prancing around in a bikini and a series of skimpy costumes.

  I looked at the image on the screen and couldn’t believe it was me just a year earlier. “Oh, God,” I thought, “I’ll never look like that again.” I got so depressed watching the movie that I cried through the whole thing. Afterward my friend Nikki Haskell gave the cast a party, and when it came time to leave, I couldn’t get off the couch. I had to have two people pull me to my feet. It was a scene straight out of I Love Lucy, before Little Ricky’s birth. Jake tried to be supportive, but I still felt very low.

  The worst moment of my pregnancy occurred at Blooming-dale’s sometime in my ninth month. I literally got stuck in a department store. Since I was afraid to go through the revolving door in my condition, I decided to go through the regular door. Except I was so big, I got stuck and couldn’t move—couldn’t go in or get out again either. There I was in all my glory, jammed fast in the door at Bloomingdale’s. I had to call for help, and the only way they could get me out was to have someone put his foot on my bum, and shove me firmly until I came free of the doorjamb. Talk about humiliation; I kept wishing I could just melt away on the spot.

  In between cookies and soap operas, I did manage to squeeze in a baby shower. Liza and Nikki Haskell gave me a shower at a place called Serendipity, on Sixtieth Street. It was an ice-cream-and-soda place, which seemed all too appropriate under the circumstances. Liza and Nikki had rented the top floor, and more than fifty people came. My sister’s secretary, Roni Agress, made out the guest list and did a lot of the planning, and it really was a wonderful party, what the papers referred to as a “star-studded event.” Farrah was there, of course, almost as pregnant but considerably thinner than I was. There were piles of beautiful gifts, and the whole event couldn’t have been better.

  The baby was due on April 2, but by late April I could hardly walk and was still having only mild labor pains. Finally, early on the morning of April 24,1 called the doctor and said I couldn’t take one more day of the discomfort. The doctor agreed, so Jake took me in to Mount Sinai Hospital a little after six A.M. to induce labor. They put me on an IV drip with a labor-inducing drug, and I suddenly found myself in labor with a vengeance. Jake and I had done all the Lamaze classes so we’d be ready, but nothing could have prepared us for what lay ahead. It was one of those nightmare labors, the kind you see in the movies that make you afraid to have a baby.

  For one thing, the labor seemed endless. A friend from my
Lamaze class who was having twins arrived a few hours after I did, had her twins, and was back in her room long before I was ready to deliver. As the hours wore on, I began to beg for pain medication, but my doctor was hesitant to give me anything.

  Late in the evening, after I’d been in labor for more than sixteen hours, he finally agreed to give me epidural anesthesia. The catch was that because of the injured disk in my back, the space they could use to insert the needle in my spine was unusually tiny. And even though I was desperate for relief from the pain, my childhood needle phobia made the procedure nightmarish for me. Because the risk of serious injury to my spinal cord was so high, they had to have two nurses actually sit on me while they slowly inserted the needle. It hurt like hell. When they were finished and my lower body gradually began to numb, the relief was exquisite.

  By then it was past ten P.M., and I was exhausted, but I was still having trouble delivering because of the baby’s size. Worried I might not be able to deliver normally, they transferred me to an operating room a little before midnight and began to prepare for an emergency cesarean. I was ready for anything at that point; all I wanted was for someone to get that baby out of me.

  The doctors decided to try for a normal delivery one last time. The obstetrician already had the forceps around the baby’s head, but he still wouldn’t come out. In desperation the anesthesiologist finally folded his arms Indian style, grabbing his elbows with the opposite hand for support, and thrust his arms straight down on my abdomen with all his strength, literally forcing the baby out. And out he came, all nine pounds of him, with a loud popping sound from the force they’d applied, like a cork out of a champagne bottle. The baby was so big that his head broke my tailbone as it came free, and I ripped badly in either direction.