by Sid Luft
I was reliving that moment in New York with Dr. Salmon. Who were the suppliers? Dr. Noah Dietrich, Lorna’s pediatrician and a distinguished UCLA professor, was against pills. Judy could not have been scoring any from him. Dr. Morton, her obstetrician, would not supply her. I couldn’t ask her directly, as I was supposed to be ignorant of the fact that she was taking pills, and I was dealing with a person who had problems but could only kid about them or bury them.
The stakes were higher now, so I arranged with the staff to watch her more closely. I sympathized with her restlessness but was unable to reach her. And then one night Judy casually expressed the desire “to do something.” I was encouraged. I came up with a personal appearance in Louisville, Kentucky, the first week in May, the day before the Kentucky Derby. Lawrence Wetherby, the governor of Kentucky, had called me. He wanted to declare the event Judy Garland Day. I was aware Governor Wetherby was probably looking for an easy way to please his constituents, but it sounded amusing, something to do, to fill in. We were at the beginning of December and Judy said, “May is months away.” I said, “Darling, think about the traveling, and singing, and the Kentucky Derby.” Neither of us had ever attended Churchill Downs. “It’ll be a kick.” “You’ll be in shape again.” Something to look forward to.
Harry Rabwin, the brother of the Gumm family friend Dr. Marcus Rabwin, was a lawyer, and he contacted me at the office on behalf of Judy’s mother, Ethel. He relayed her message that she was very sad about her lack of relationship with Judy. Ethel needed financial help, she wasn’t well, and she longed to see her new granddaughter. I explained to Harry that I, too, was in a quandary about Judy’s total rejection of her mother. “Harry,” I reassured, “Maybe one day it’ll go away. Judy’ll come around.”
I was sympathetic, but I was seriously preoccupied with Judy’s state of mind. I didn’t share those concerns with Harry. Instead, I agreed to personally mail Ethel a monthly check.
Ethel was not the person Judy had described, the “demon woman” who had double-crossed her and exposed her and finked on her at Metro for a salary. Nor was she the forceful woman who purposely separated Judy from her father to go on needless trips. However, it might have very well felt like that to a little girl. She was not an aggressive monster lady who forced Judy into show business either, as from all evidence you could not keep Baby Gumm off the stage if you tried. And Ethel certainly did not propel Frank to an early death.
As in a mystery-game hunt I’d been attempting to fit the pieces of Judy’s life together in the hopes of better understanding her. I knew that it was Frank, not Ethel, who delivered Judy to MGM. Judy’s agent, Al Rosen, had arranged for the MGM talent chief, Jack Robbins, to listen. Judy, who was thirteen, appeared even younger, and Robbins remarked, “I’m looking for a woman singer, not a child!” Rosen prevailed, and it was Frank, not Ethel, who played the piano for his daughter, who belted out the latest hit, “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.” Judy then sang for Ida Koverman, Louis B. Mayer’s personal assistant. Koverman listened and, without voicing a reaction, rang for her boss. The short, burly Mayer joined her. This time Roger Edens was asked to play the piano; it was the start of Judy and Roger’s long, close creative and personal friendship. Mayer, the essence of tough and sentimental, the great Hollywood mix, remained expressionless as he listened to the child prodigy.
In the time it took for father and daughter to return home to the L.A. suburb of Lancaster, Mayer had decided to give Judy a seven-year contract without any particular role in mind. That same month, Frank the movie exhibitor who so recently shook hands with Louis the movie mogul, fell mortally ill with an ear infection. The day after Judy announced the news of her MGM contract on the Wallace Beery Shell Chateau broadcast, her father died at age forty-nine. And Judy became the family breadwinner at age thirteen, earning $150 a week.
Judy’s recollection of the period leading up to the MGM audition is fraught with anti-Ethel sentiments:
I didn’t know my father very well, because my mother dominated me so. . . . I was thinking that in so many cases of people who start out as children in show business there’s usually a mother in the background, but you never hear about the father. Stage fathers are the most nondescript unheralded lost generation in the world.
You never hear about Gypsy Rose Lee’s father, just her mother. From the time we moved from Minnesota to California, there was dissention in our home between Mother and Father, and Mother always used me as a pawn with my father. They’d have a fight. I don’t think anything in the world frightens a child more than their parents fighting. It’s all right if there is basic love in the home, then you can have a fight and the kids don’t lose their security, but if there isn’t any love between the two, fighting becomes such an awful thing for a kid, because his whole life is threatened.
One of the reasons they were fighting was this man that my mother was attracted to, I didn’t know about it for a long time. His name was Bill Gilmore [the Gumms’ next door neighbor in Lancaster]. . . . She married him after my father died. I don’t know what kind of relationship they had . . . it went on for twelve years. At any rate, my parents would argue and fight and she’d come in the middle of the night and wake me up and dress me and say we’re leaving Daddy, all through my early years. And if ever I would say . . . “I don’t want to leave Daddy,” she’d make me feel terrible, because she’d say I didn’t love her and then make me feel very guilty about loving my father. In the meantime, she left the other two girls with my father and she would put me in the backseat of the car, wrap me up, and to release her frustrations, she’d just drive hour after hour, ninety miles an hour. Hell-bent for an accident, around mountains and curves and everything. I was terrified. I don’t think I ever went to bed at night without wondering whether I was going to be awakened and taken out in the night.
And then she’d take me to Los Angeles, where we’d register at a crummy hotel and we’d stay there, sometimes, about three or four months. We’d go around singing and she’d take a job as a music teacher or a singing teacher [at Maurice Kusell’s Theatrical Dance Studio in Hollywood]. During that period, my sisters would periodically join us, if she got the three of us a job. . . .
We’d work little places around town. Little joints, we’d work the Star Theater in Long Beach, we always went there; the Hippodrome Theatre down on Main Street, where all the actors say they’re working because they’re breaking in a new act and it isn’t true. It’s such a terrible place, you’re always saying that as an excuse. The rats backstage were so big we named them. And that’s where we worked on the bill with a man who threw up for an act. Hadji Ali was his name. He’d come out with a big turban, his wife was his assistant, and he would swallow twenty-seven hazelnuts and one walnut, then he’d walk into the audience and let the audience tap his stomach and he’d come up onstage and he’d say, “Now I will bring up the hazelnuts, and when you want me to bring up the walnut just holler.” He’d bring them up, then someone would say “Now.” He’d bring up the walnut, and finally at the end of his act he built a great big fire and then he drank water and on top of that, kerosene . . . then he’d throw up the kerosene on it and make the fire enormous and then the water would come up and put it out, that was his finale. And God help us if he ate any lunch that day. We worked with all kinds of class acts like that. In the meantime, my father was actually a very good provider, but my mother had this maniacal streak to be completely independent of him through her kids.
The stage was the only thing I ever knew, and I remember being very happy on the stage. My feeling was that Dad must have loved the two girls more than he loved me, because he kept them and he didn’t insist on keeping me. It wasn’t until years and years and years afterwards when I finally asked one of my sisters why he hadn’t kept me and she told me that he actually loved me more than anybody in the family but he just couldn’t bear to tear me back and forth and have a screaming fight with me in the middle. Mother defeated him. But he was a very strong man, my fat
her. Very strong—there was nothing weak about him at all. He was a fighting Irishman, you know, French Irish. But for years there was no marriage and I don’t know why they decided to stay together, maybe because of the children. Daddy owned a corner theater [the Valley Theatre in Lancaster]. Very successful. . . . So during the school year when I had to stay in Lancaster, I spent my evenings at the movies. I saw every picture . . .
Clearly it was not the time to bring up the subject of Ethel to Judy. But my concern for her was deepening. She had taken to spending her nights in the den with the door closed. I braced myself: the more cut off she became, the more alert I became. There was torment in her face, and especially in the eyes. And there was nothing I could do. I realized that this was about more than getting into shape for her next project; she was impatient with the lull after giving birth, the in-between time. Her energy level was low, and she picked herself up by getting speed from someone. As always, the effect of the pills was toxic, but this time Judy’s personality change was radical: her eyes were red rimmed, conversation was out, and she became more and more remote. In the past she may have kept secrets and had mysterious facets, but I knew that her general nature was vibrant, up, and fun—the opposite of the Judy I now saw before me.
I was determined to get to the source of her misery. I had enough confidence in her love for me. I viewed this as a storm, a squall that would ride itself out, but I didn’t want to be stranded not knowing the cause or the cure. So I began to talk to the doctors at hand.
I contacted Marc Rabwin. He warned me, “It’s the amphetamines.” He explained that coming off them could be hellish. He spoke openly about MGM, those years when she’d been fed speed. We discussed the dangerous cycle of uppers and downers. He began to educate me. I went to Judy and I told her I loved her but she must be able to trust me; whatever the hell it was, “don’t cut me off.” Judy promised, but to no avail.
Whenever I left for work I talked individually to everyone in the house, explaining that if there was any sign of Judy disappearing, or staying in the bathroom for an undue length of time, to ring me right away at the office. “Watch her every second, man,” I warned the houseman, Taylor.
The next day, he rang the office. “I’m scared, Mr. Luft. She’s in the bathroom, not answering. I can’t get in.” I sped home. Fortunately, it was just minutes away. I raced into the bedroom, and I could see blood oozing out from under the door. I proceeded to dislocate my shoulder busting down the bathroom door. I could feel my heart in my temples. Judy was wedged in between the bath and the door. I finally got it open and picked her up. Blood, bright red in sharp contrast to the whiteness of her skin, was pouring out of her neck. I thought, she’s dying, I’m losing her. Judy had cut her throat with a razor blade.
Luckily, Vern and Bobby were able to have doctors, not paramedics, at the house in minutes. These men saved Judy’s life. They also ensured that the press would remain ignorant of the extreme danger Judy had inflicted on herself. I made certain this would be one Judy catastrophe that would never make the news. The doctors transfused her and stitched her up right in our bedroom.
My mind raced. This time she had not “nicked” her neck, she had actually cut her throat with a razor. What demons inhabited her soul just when life seemed so rich and productive? It was a gigantic puzzlement that she would poison herself with pills, and that the toxic reaction to whatever she swallowed would create an impulse for self-mutilation. Go write an opera about that!
Now my day’s work included visits to physicians, to psychiatrists, to technicians, searching out what could be done. I came away knowing more about her emotional history at MGM rather than receiving any enlightenment on the present. There was to be one saving grace: I learned that postpartum depression often occurred, and was equally serious, in women without Judy’s unique psychological history. And it was this explanation I conveniently opted for. Nevertheless, there was a tiny chime ringing in the back of my mind that, perhaps, the scratch she put on her throat when she was suspended at MGM was not, as everyone proclaimed, simply an attempt to wrest attention for herself.
The miracle was that Judy awakened from the horror show the next morning with a desire to eat: “Hi, darling, is everything all right?” The surgical bandage about her throat didn’t inhibit my little darling from throwing back a trencherman’s breakfast of eggs, pancakes, sausages, coffee, and toast with extra marmalade. Her first serious meal in weeks. After watching her wolf down the food I experienced the big moat Judy threw around herself in any sensitive situation. I was treated as someone apart, a fan in the audience. She did not wish to know what really happened, nor was she eager to explore the effects of her behavior, on either herself or the rest of us.
“Darling,” I suggested, “you may need someone to make sense, help you figure out these mysterious depressions.”
“Ah, Sid,” she said. “Don’t pay any attention. It’s over with,” Judy reassured me with her familiar pizazz. Again, I chose to believe her. A kind of relief washed over me. She quickly ordered a three-string pearl choker from Saks Fifth Avenue, and she never took it off. She wore it to bed.
With the necklace firmly clasped around her neck, she began organizing a large at-home party. It was getting into the holiday season. Judy threw herself into Christmas and the children. We were Christmas shopping on Rodeo Drive and ran into Elizabeth Taylor in a toy store. Elizabeth was married to the English actor Michael Wilding at the time. She took one look at my new black Mercedes-Benz, a postwar breakthrough in their body design, and remarked to her husband, “Why don’t you drive a car like that, Michael?” Judy reveled in that moment, proud of her husband’s taste. She’d regained her exuberance about life.
Around this time, Jack Warner appeared at the Canon Drive office for an out-of-studio lunch meeting. He said, “Sid, don’t make Man o’ War. I’ll give you a movie, The Bounty Hunter, practically in the can. This’ll replace Man o’ War in the deal.” Then he put it to me: “I’d like you to start preparing A Star Is Born right away.” I would have preferred the experience of Man o’ War. However, I reasoned I’d better go for it before anything else happened. So I told him I could hardly wait to begin.
I was treading water now, and I didn’t want to drown. I was pleased Judy seemed to have so quickly pulled out of her trauma. I wasn’t comfortable with pushing it under the carpet, but at the same time I considered it a never-to-be-repeated postpartum occurrence. We were making love again—husband and wife, lovers, business partners, Mom and Dad. I was hopeful.
Judy’s party was a huge success. She sang with Sinatra, who was going to work for Capitol Records. He accepted a small part in From Here to Eternity for little to no money. He was feeling much better. Soon he’d be off to Spain to be with Ava Gardner, who was on the set of The Barefoot Contessa and rumored to be traveling with the famous bullfighter Dominguín. Frank needed to confront his estranged wife to figure out their future. I never communicated Jack’s sentiment about his playing the role of Norman Maine, and Frank continued to express his enthusiasm for the part.
Jack took the opportunity to ask if we would come to New York over New Year’s as his guests. Actually, he wanted Judy to sing for his daughter Barbara’s coming-out party at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City.
Jack had been divorced from Jack Jr.’s mother for many years, and in the 1930s had married the actress Ann Alvarado in a celebrated Eastern Seaboard wedding. They’d honeymooned in Europe, along with Ann’s daughter Joy from her earlier marriage. Ann Warner was a stately woman with black hair and blue eyes, very much a kind of silent film beauty. She wasn’t involved with the Hollywood set, as she chose to live out of state on a ranch she shared with a close female companion. Curiously, the ranch was run by her ex-husband Don Alvarado, a failed actor. This bit of information was never written up in the press.
Ann had remained Jack’s trusted friend and his number-one hostess when available. She offered Judy a gift of a natural mink coat for performing at her daughte
r’s party. The carrot of the mink coat appealed to Judy. Nevertheless, traveling to New York was going to be work. We’d be met in Chicago (changing trains from the Super Chief to the 20th Century Limited) by Warner’s publicity department and the press. In New York, there’d be a limo waiting and more press, more interviews, and more work. I told Judy maybe the train ride would be good, relaxing. She’d come back with a gorgeous new coat. I reminded her how much she loved trains. Judy was never happier than on a train curled up with her books, for a brief time protected from the external world. She agreed to the gig.
Shortly after Christmas Day we picked up the Super Chief downtown and rode along with Liza and Lorna and their nanny to Pasadena, where we bade our good-byes for the week. In New York we checked into the Waldorf Astoria Towers.
Eleanor Berkson had asked Judy to participate in a big charity event at the Waldorf’s Starlight Roof a day or so after the Warner bash. Judy would be joined by friends and people she enjoyed—the Palm Beach crowd, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Meantime, it was all over town that Judy Garland was singing at Barbara Warner’s coming-out party. The night of the event Judy wore a black velvet gown, her pearl choker, of course, and a little bejeweled Juliet cap, so called after the costume device for Shakespeare’s famous female; the Elizabethan fashion caught on in the 1950s. I was seated not at the Warners’ table but in the front, with C. Z. and Winston Guest, the society folk who hobnobbed with show folk. Judy had a dressing room, so she didn’t sit with us; she was treated as the performer. She sang for about an hour, having rehearsed in the afternoon.
