Judy and I

by Sid Luft

  Though Judy was feeling fine, she was now without a career. She did make an appearance at a Democratic fundraiser on July l0, a banquet for Jack Kennedy as he faced off against Richard Nixon in the presidential campaign. For the dinner at the Hilton Hotel, Judy sat with Jack on the dais. I was at a table between Rose and Joan Kennedy. Judy sang “Rock-a-Bye” for Jack, and she was in great voice. I was struck by her stamina and vivacity. She’d have to give a full performance sooner or later.

  Liza was very friendly with a little girl whose family manufactured hearing aids. They were affluent and lived well, and their daughter spent her summers in a private school on the French side of Lake Geneva. Her uncle, a young rabbi, began to visit us along with her parents while Judy was recuperating at home. He adored Judy and they got on, spending hours at the piano noodling away, making up crazy lyrics, and exchanging a nutty kind of repartee: Judy would say, “Tony Bennett,” and the rabbi would proclaim, “Barber!”; he’d say, “Frank Sinatra,” and with a flourish on the piano keys Judy would answer, “Maître d’”; and so it went. Judy was perky, her wit as fine as a razor’s edge. It was clear in her present nontoxic state that nothing had dulled.

  The mother of Liza’s friend encouraged us to send Liza along to Annecy with her daughter—she’d learn French, and it’d be a different kind of summer holiday. Liza was so excited by the idea that we had to agree. And so we arranged Liza’s summer.

  Perhaps Liza going off to France gave Judy the idea to travel abroad herself. Or maybe she’d been inspired by correspondence with friends such as the distinguished British actor and writer Dirk Bogarde. In any event, Judy came to me and said she’d like to take a vacation on her own. She’d gone from being an invalid to being well, and she wanted a change of scenery, to travel. This in itself was an unusual request from someone who was, in general, phobic about getting in a car, let alone boarding an airplane. I was thrilled. We didn’t have the money for her to travel in the style she’d been accustomed to, so I said I’d sell a piece of art that we owned by the French painter Maurice de Vlaminck. It was a painting that we both loved, but I thought it was important that she go.

  Judy left for New York, where she stayed with Eleanor Lambert Berkson and visited friends. Then she traveled with socialite Sharman Douglas to London. Our relationship was smooth. We were more in love than ever.

  PART V

  On and Off the Road

  39

  We stand today on the edge of a new frontier—the frontier of the 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats.

  —John F. Kennedy, July 1960

  JUDY’S HALLUCINATORY CIRCLES dotting the is floated on the Savoy Hotel stationery. The perpetual schoolgirl script and the content of her letter—someone busy, full of life—were reassuring to me:

  Darling—

  How I miss you—London is not the same without you. Had a good trip over—after a lovely party at Roddy’s and arrived on time to find beautiful weather. Had a hectic press conference with the usual newspaper bastards. The result—the usual—“fat,” “matronly, but happy.” Fuck ’em! How are my babies! Tell them that I’m thinking of them every minute and how I love them. I talked to Liza and she will either come to London for a couple of days or I shall go to see her in France. The recordings had been put off ’til Aug. 2 so I shall go to Rome on Wed. the 20th and come back here to record. Had dinner last night with J. Clayton and Pat. We dined in my room as I was exhausted and wanted to get to bed early which I did. Worked with Soily Pratt this morning and have new arrangements set. I’m going to Dirk [Bogarde]’s in the country today at 5:30. There’s a party Sunday and I’ll be back here on Monday.

  They’ve passed a law taking all of the whores off the streets. It’s a little like taking the trolleys out of San Francisco. Some of the color has gone. But the girls still advertise on bulletin boards outside the pubs. It’s either French lessons or massage. Both interesting but underground. Am thrilled about Kennedy. Everyone here thinks he’s great. Tell Lenny I’ve called Joyce Grenfell and will see her when I return from Rome. She’s busy Sunday and can’t make Dirk’s party.

  Well that’s all for now. Write me and tell me everything. But mostly that you love me and miss me and I do you—

  Judy

  P.S. To Joe and Lorna

  X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

  On her trip to Rome, Judy also visited the island of Capri, where she called me frequently from the hotel. She was rested and tan, and very excited about John F. Kennedy’s progress in the race to the White House. The hotel was owned by a retired British vaudeville star. This gave Judy an idea: “Darling, something for me to consider?” I told her I couldn’t see her flouncing into the salon in the evening to sing one or two favorites. “First, we’d have to buy a hotel, darling, and we ain’t got no money, not yet.” As usual, money was the least of her considerations.

  Ten days passed and I yearned to be with her. Judy was lonely as well, so we arranged to meet in London. We reunited at the Westbury Hotel, where we were nestled in a garishly posh suite. It was sort of a high-class whorehouse effect, with deep red velour and lacquer, which added to our mood of celebration. We were unrepentantly nostalgic and romantic. Judy sustained the warm, marvelous persona she’d left home with. We went out dining and dancing, both happy to be back in London, our home away from home.

  One night Judy said, “Darling, maybe we could live in London? Bring the whole family over. I’d really love that.” At this stage in the development of Aerophonics I could be stationed as easily in London as in New York or Los Angeles. And Liza was in Annecy, already in Europe, so why not bring the rest of the family over? I thought that might be the best therapy in the world for Judy. The next day, I found a real estate broker, and in a matter of days there was a house available in Chelsea, owned by director Carol Reed. I quickly managed a second mortgage on our Mapleton home, and within three weeks we were tucked into the Chelsea house, the children settled into private school. I was immersed in Aerophonics, monitoring Davis Engineering in Coral Gables, while Judy planned a trip to Annecy to visit Liza.

  Freddie Finklehoffe arrived in London with his wife, Carolyn. Judy had tried to work with Freddie back in Los Angeles on the book Bennett Cerf contracted her to write. Freddie was a screenwriter but knew little about writing books, and they’d accomplished very little. The time had been spent casually, Freddie throwing back the Cutty Sark and Judy telling funny stories. Nothing came from it except a few laughs and a friend around to amuse Judy while I took meetings, and by the time we moved abroad the project had been dropped. But, absurdly, Freddie decided Judy had let him down, and here he was in London expecting us to support him. It was another one of his fantasies.

  Freddie and Carolyn were merry bohemians. Freddie would pixie me to death. He was amusing, disarming, but I had one pixie in my life and that was enough.

  He would lament, “Sid, I’ve gotta have $500, I’ve gotta, Sid.”

  “Freddie, you owe me already,” I’d reply.

  “But, Sid, if I don’t get it, there’ll be hell to pay. You gotta.”

  Freddie had sent me glowing letters in the past thanking me for my generosity, but I never got any of the money back. His ongoing attachment to Judy from the Metro days was genuine, but once the funds dried up Freddie would take a powder and not be responsible. At the moment I was anticipating severe financial setbacks. I’d cooled it on the horses; in fact, Rainbow Farms was history. So I told Freddie, not only did I not have to “gotta,” I wasn’t going to “gotta.” So the Finklehoffes took off.

  Generally our life was homespun, close to the hearth—Judy in the kitchen working with the Spanish cook, afternoons in the park with the children. She was conscious of Aerophonics having already recorded a demo tape for us, and she was interested in its potential. At the same time, I was indeed running out of funds. The cash flow was down to nothing, and there was the question of how to keep up the mortga
ge payments on Mapleton, the children’s schooling, and the doctor bills from the past six months, not to mention our lifestyle. Paradoxically, I was never more content in my marriage. I wasn’t desperate. I was confident of the future; even though I was having a rough time, I knew it would pass.

  Other friends were in and out of our life. Ted Law had remarried and spent the greater part of his honeymoon in London with us. I was very happy for Ted; I thought he’d paid his dues with his previous wife. We had a lot of empathy for one another. Ted was thrilled to see Judy so well. He knew it was a kind of triumph, one I’d worked hard for. There were Judy’s old pals—Dirk Bogarde, who lived with a gentleman who’d been married at one time to the actress Glynis Johns. Judy was “Darling Judy” and Dirk was concerned about her. He was devoted and eager to be her friend. Whenever she was invited to their country home I was absolutely pleased to see her go there. I knew that most likely Noël Coward would also be a guest and that Judy would perch on top of the piano while Noël played, and she’d sing his songs, one after the other. So whenever she came to me and said, “Just to get out of town, darling, I know you’re busy. If you’d like to come please do, but I’d like to visit Dirk over the weekend,” I’d encourage her to go. There were no drugs and she was very straight. She’d receive attention from the supportive peers, and she could dish and relax.

  Occasionally I’d join Judy in the country home of Fleur Cowles and Tom Montague Meyer, and composer Lionel Bart frequently spent the evening at our house. Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher would come over whenever Elizabeth was in town from Rome, where she was filming Cleopatra. The four of us enjoyed a pleasant tea at our house, and it struck us funny that here we were, four Americans, meeting for tea, not drinks. The English press had lambasted Fisher for leaving Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth; now there was a bigger scandal brewing.

  That afternoon, Eddie took me aside and asked if I would meet him, alone, the following day at the Dorchester Hotel, where he and Elizabeth were staying. He appeared anxious and unhappy. The press was pouring out a lot of heat and steam. Eddie felt he was getting the shit kicked out of him. I commented that the circles under his eyes were worse than mine! I told him when we met at the Dorchester that he should get an agent and go to work. He was essentially sitting around and holding Elizabeth’s hand. “Let her hold your hand for a while,” was my advice to Fisher. I tried to explain that women like Elizabeth and Judy were self-centered, and that he might try to take a stand. “Don’t sit by and get wasted.” I’d no idea what he actually wanted to hear from me, but I had the impression he was ignoring my suggestions even as I spoke. In fact, he may have intended to tell me something else entirely. It was, of course, only later that we learned from the press exactly what was causing his depression: Elizabeth had fallen in love with her costar Richard Burton.

  I was facing my own personal issues: for the first time in my life I was struggling with an excess of weight. I’d started gaining while Judy was in the hospital, and continued as I wrestled with the burden of our growing financial responsibilities. The larger the debts, the bigger I got. Drinking relaxed me, but it was a sensitive area, as Judy was completely sober. We were happy together, yet I was alone on the heath with the bottle. I’d always considered myself a social drinker, but I was aware my drinking had accelerated.

  I wasn’t a drunkard, but I was close to it at times. My drinking didn’t interfere with my marriage. I wasn’t out of control. I suffered no personality change, only the occasional hangover. However, a few years later when Judy and I were temporarily estranged, she’d bring up my “drinking in London” as a weak and negative action on my part. Since that was a period when she was clear of intoxicants, she had to call me on it. In hindsight this criticism of me was the tip of a bigger iceberg, one in which she felt inwardly diminished by her chemical dependencies and I, in her view, was so free of them as to make her envious, even hostile. The fact that I was assiduously fighting to keep her sober and alive was not, in her toxic states, experienced as a loving and positive action but rather as a show of superiority: she was “weak,” and I was “strong.” In her sober mode I was, of course, never able to question or discuss these deep-rooted dysfunctions, which Judy would neither admit to nor take responsibility for.

  I’d admired Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and I was aware he was involved in every conceivable kind of entrepreneurial action—real estate, manufacturing, little pieces of many business schemes. He was a consultant for British business opportunity, and he became fascinated by the Aerophonics prototype. Subsequently, he introduced me to a fellow who had been with Rolls-Royce and was currently managing director of British Overseas Airways Corporation.

  Doug and his wife, Mary Lee, socialized with the Queen of England and Prince Philip. Their personally inscribed photographs were prominently displayed in the Fairbanks living room. I was under the impression that Doug aspired to be appointed ambassador to England. Although the treasured appointment never came about, their friendship with the royals continued. To his credit, Fairbanks never aped an upper-class British accent.

  When we’d have dinner at Les Ambassadeurs, Doug would decline the menu, sighing, “Every time I have to eat these dinners, it’s troublesome.” The food was too heavy for his pristine tastes. He watched his diet religiously. A physically handsome man, he took exceptional care of himself, believing in high colonics and pretty young girls whose photographs were filed in one of his desk drawers.

  During one of our dinners out with Fairbanks, Judy held everyone in thrall with old Hollywood stories, which Doug certainly could relate to. That night she told about how the MGM commissary had entertained the MGM/Loews theater distributors with a dinner featuring all the studio’s big stars. Judy had been asked to sing, and a new comic on the lot was elected to perform. It was quite an opportunity for the unknown comedian. When his time came to entertain he walked about the tables, jauntily exhibiting confidence. As he approached Louis B. Mayer’s table, not knowing with whom he was kibitzing, he greeted the mogul with “Hiya, nosy!” En masse, everyone drew a deep breath; a blanket of silence covered the MGM commissary as the naive comic continued, “Are you havin’ a parfate?” Judy could barely finish the story she was laughing so hard. “That was the last anyone ever saw him again.”

  Eventually I shared Fairbanks’s offices on St. James’s Place. He introduced me to a doctor who dispensed injections of pregnant women’s urine, a new regimen which helped patients lose weight. The diet was extremely effective, and within a relatively short time I returned to my normal weight and physique.

  40

  LIZA WAS DRESSED like a French schoolgirl. She looked happy. The landscape was serene, far from the hustle and bustle of cities, a tranquil combination of lake and mountains. Clearly, Annecy agreed with Liza, and she was speaking French beautifully for so short an exposure. I was impressed, and so was Judy, who couldn’t stop hugging her daughter. I asked Liza what she thought was the best restaurant in town and she said, “Pop, there is the best restaurant in the world on the other side of the lake, called Père Bise.” I told Liza to invite a friend—that we’d be eating at Auberge du Père Bise that very night.

  We hired a driver to pick up Liza and her friend, and we met at the restaurant around eight. It was a magnificent evening—the air was pure and the sky mixed with soft grays and streaks of violet, high like a vaulted church ceiling. We walked into Père Bise like an ascension.

  Someone called out, breaking my reverie, “Hey Sid!” I turned and recognized Dick Lassiter, whom I’d flown with during the war. He was with a group at a large round table. We embraced and he explained he’d borrowed an airplane and flown it out of Cincinnati to Switzerland for the week. I’d known Dick when I worked for ATC as a civilian; he was part of the Army Air Forces, their youngest colonel. He’d enjoyed the excitement and the glamour of Beverly Hills, to which I had introduced him. Dick and other fliers would come up from Long Beach to have dinner and look for starlets.

  As it turned
out Lassiter was sitting at Père Bise with the Lear family: Bill Lear, his wife Moya, their daughter Shanda, and Bill Jr. The Lears had left California and were living outside Geneva, where they’d built a California ranch–style house. Bill was in the process of building the Lear jet, one of the reasons Lassiter was there. Mrs. Lear’s father had been a famous vaudevillian whom Judy knew as a child. He was part of a Greek comedy team that would jump in the orchestra with an ax and beat up all the musicians. Apparently audiences at the time found this excruciatingly funny.

  Liza had been correct: we were served superb food. Throughout the meal we exchanged tastes with Dick and the Lears. After dinner we sat together, and they invited me to play golf the next day. Bill explained that he’d established an office in Switzerland to facilitate the manufacture of certain aeronautics parts. He was, in fact, still raising monies. He’d built a fuselage and designed the wing, but there wasn’t an airplane as yet. It began to feel like the early years of my relationship with Judy—creative, evolving, a constructive momentum.

  The following morning, we were arming up on the green to play on the practice range. In the distance a couple was walking on the eighteenth tee about eighty yards from where we stood. Suddenly, I saw the woman fall to the ground, and the man tried to lift her up. Then I heard her scream. I ran across the green to help, and as I turned her over I saw her eye was a mess. Her husband was an older, slight person, so I picked her up and brought her into the clubhouse. She was in excruciating pain. An ambulance was called, and she was quickly taken to the hospital where, tragically, she lost her eye. One of us must have hooked a deadly golf ball.