Judy and I

by Sid Luft

  Judy was on her own, with her career and with the children, but I was gung-ho to turn over control of her career to someone else. Begelman was assigned to work exclusively with her. As it turned out, he was Johnny-on-the-spot on tour. He was the new troubleshooter, so I could finally release those reins, and I did so without giving it a second thought. Even though we were apart, I was relieved knowing that Judy was in good hands. Or so I thought.

  Judy’s concert tour officially kicked off with her playing the State Fair in Dallas on February 21, then moving on to Houston. She paused for a couple of weeks to film Judgment at Nuremberg in Hollywood, and we reconnected and reconciled on Joey’s sixth birthday. I was with her for the next show in Buffalo, and then we were off to Washington, DC, where Judy sang at Constitution Hall on April 8. While in DC, we accepted an invitation to the White House, having the privilege of visiting with Jack Kennedy during his first few months in office.

  In the coming years, JFK would ring Judy from either the White House or Camp David and ask her to sing to him over the telephone. He’d request “Over the Rainbow,” by then a tune beloved by the world—and least appreciated by Judy, probably because she had to sing it so many times. But the fans never knew, and President Kennedy was a fan. Milt Ebbins, Peter Lawford’s personal manager and partner, was at Camp David one weekend with Peter and his brother-in-law the president. Kennedy loved showbiz stories, and after a round had been exchanged, he expressed a desire to reach Judy and have her sing to him. Judy was located somewhere in New York and obliged the president with several renditions of his favorite melodies.

  Milt Ebbins subsequently became a personal friend of Jack’s, much to the Kennedy clan’s consternation. Peter rarely traveled without Milt. Peter, whose life was also to end as the result of his addiction to narcotics, loved Judy and remained a loyal friend. Years later the jazz singer Mel Tormé wrote a book around his brief relationship with Judy in the 1960s when he came to work for her on her CBS TV specials. Mel was not understanding of her condition—he’d gone into it thinking he was working with a normal person—and he denigrated her in his book. Peter never spoke to Mel again; in fact, when Peter and Milt happened to be passengers on the same airplane, Peter ignored him.

  Sunday, April 23, 1961, was a night that went down in history. It was the highlight of the tour when Judy played New York’s Carnegie Hall. I was backstage with Judy when Fields and Begelman showed up. Were they surprised to find me in her dressing room! Judy suffered one of her anxiety attacks just before the show. She was standing over a toilet and vomiting and I thought, This girl isn’t going to make it. We’ll have to cancel the show. Outside, thousands jammed the streets surrounding Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street. The doors were held until just minutes before showtime, leaving the crowd to nervously speculate that Judy might not take the stage. She was really unsteady on her feet, even a few seconds before the curtain opened, but she pulled herself together. She insisted upon performing that night, and she went out there and just killed them!

  A who’s who of show biz assembled that night at Carnegie: Julie Andrews, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Burton, Carol Channing, Henry Fonda, Rock Hudson, Spencer Tracy. The list goes on. Roger Edens was there, too. “Good, solid, raw talent creates excitement . . . that was the charm of the Carnegie Hall concert,” Judy’s longtime musical mentor explained to Show Business Illustrated, describing the magic he and the rest of the audience experienced that night. “I had never seen her on the concert stage before. I still don’t believe anything like this could happen. She practically burnt the house down. She said, ‘Let’s do it,’ as though she had never done it before. It’s there and when she touches it, it emerges. It’s alchemy.”

  The night before Carnegie Hall, Judy had told me, “I want to get away from everything and get a good night’s sleep for tomorrow. I’ve had a rough tour and I need the rest.” I checked us into a suite at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel overlooking Central Park, where we played gin until about three o’clock in the morning until she finally fell asleep. She promised to not take any pills, but I stayed up all night just to be sure that she didn’t. Not so much as an aspirin! She didn’t. Not one pill. She was clean as a whistle for Carnegie. And that’s still one of the great albums of all time. Judy at Carnegie Hall sold over a hundred thousand copies in just the first few months of release and went on to win five Grammys, including Album of the Year.

  Shortly after Carnegie Hall, Judy told me she had good news. She had met with Fields and Begelman, and they agreed to put me on payroll of Kingsrow as an associate producer at $400 a week. “Let’s go out and celebrate!” she said. I played along. We went to P. J. Clarke’s, where the owner sat down with us and talked about racehorses and breeding until we closed the place down at 4:00 AM.

  “That was some goddamn celebration,” Judy said coldly when we ducked into the limo and headed for the Dakota.

  “Well, the guy kept the place open for us,” I told her. “He loves to talk about bloodlines.”

  “I’m not interested in bloodlines!” she snapped. “I’m interested in what you thought of what I did for you.”

  “You mean that $400 a week?” I said, knowing where this was headed. “Why, that’s a two-bit tip for a groom compared to what I’ve given and done for you. You don’t know a fucking thing about finances. If you think that $400 a week is anything, when you’re making $100,000 a week, you’re misinformed.”

  With that, she slapped me in the face. It was the first time she’d ever done that. She was angry at me for not paying attention to her after she had ordered Freddie to put me on the payroll. But that $400 a week was an insult and she didn’t even know it! I said to Judy, “Shove it! I don’t need your $400.” We continued on to the Dakota in silence.

  Freddie called me up the next day and said, “What happened last night?”

  “What happened? You opened up an account for me, that’s what happened.”

  “Wasn’t that something?”

  I said, “Why don’t you shove it up your ass, Freddie,” and hung up. Fields and Begelman were just busting my balls! They were controlling Judy’s every move, and I was being treated like some kind of butler or servant. What did they think it cost to take Judy Garland out for the night? To go out to dinner and go dancing, it was easily $200 or $300. She was earning $100,000 to $200,000 a week and I got $400. It was a slap in the face. Literally.

  For Judy, that summer was filled with concerts all up and down the East Coast: Atlantic City, Miami Beach, Hartford, White Plains, Newark, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and so on. Out on the West Coast she played Hollywood and San Francisco. Although we were separated much of the time, Judy and I were usually in good fettle. I felt as though we were trying to hold on to the relationship and make contact with each other. We always seemed to like the idea of her doing these concerts and me being away from her. It was a job to her. There was no cocking around when it was just a job to earn money. She knew I was busy with Aerophonics. I was going my way, she was going hers, and then we’d connect with each other when we could.

  I received a letter from her explaining that she was moving to a summer house in Hyannis Port, adjacent to the Kennedy compound. “Have peace of mind—we’ll all be fine,” she wrote. “I couldn’t do anything to hurt them—and I know you feel the same. Goodbye for a while. —Judy.” She seemed distant.

  I continued to live at the house on Mapleton Drive for a few months while she was touring, but I was so deep in debt that I was eventually forced to sell it. I never wanted to, of course. I later said to Judy, “Let’s fix it up and go back and live there,” but she associated that house with some dark days. I was able to sell it for $225,000, but after all the debts had been paid, just $10,000 remained. The sad commentary is that the property has since been sold in the neighborhood of $6 million.

  Within a day or two I read in the news that Judy had been hospitalized in Hyannis Port for a “kidney attack.” This sort of news in the past had been a cover for another over
dose, and I called the hospital right away. I tracked down Judy’s doctor to inquire about her condition and let him know her history of abusing medications. Judy was furious. “How dare you start probing into my personal life?” she shouted into the phone at me. “Calling my doctor behind my back!”

  “I was concerned about you.”

  “Well, don’t be concerned.”

  One of the next times I saw Judy, she casually told me, “You know, Sid, I’m going to divorce you.”

  For some reason, this time I believed her. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond but said, “Well, if that’s the way you want it—but think it over carefully.”

  We didn’t see each other for some time after that. I went back on the road, traveling the country for work.

  That fall, Judy and the kids settled into a rented house at 1 Cornell Street in Scarsdale, an affluent New York suburb, and Fields and Begelman secured a part for Judy alongside Bobby Goulet in Gay Purr-ee, a full-length musical cartoon feature. She spent several weeks in Hollywood recording the singing and speaking voice for the lead cat, named Mewsette.

  Judy and I reconnected in November, and I moved into the house in Scarsdale with her. As the year wound down, she just kept right on going. She played Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre before finishing out the tour with a show at the Armory in Washington, DC.

  Judy flew to Berlin for the world premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg, the film that soon earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She then returned home to Scarsdale in time for the holidays, which we spent together with the children. It was an unusually blissful time for our family.

  The year 1961 signaled the rebirth of Judy Garland. It was a new incarnation, a new Judy for the 1960s. Just take a look at what she did from January through December. It’s incredible! Around this time, Shana Alexander profiled her for Life magazine, saying, “Judy Garland today is not only the most electrifying entertainer to watch on the stage since Al Jolson. She has moved beyond talent and beyond fame to become the rarest phenomenon in all show business: part bluebird, part phoenix, she is a legend in her own time.”

  That story followed Judy from one venue to another. Word was starting to get out that she was really healthy and in great form again. If you look at that rundown of 1961, there were forty-four concerts. It was a real ball-buster! For the first time in a long time, Judy was alert and fit and in very good physical shape. “This is the best year of my life,” she told the American Weekly. “I’m well again—can you believe it?”

  From the Catskills to the Boston Garden, when Judy and Fields and Begelman were on a roll, it was one successful concert after another. Judy was flattered by all the attention, and there was no denying her. Leopold and Loeb gave her whatever she wanted. “It’s not like the usual artist-manager contract,” Judy told James Goode in Show Business Illustrated. “We’re partners; they see that the lights work and the curtain goes up.”

  I have to give those guys credit. They were clever enough to see her potential, and they tried their best to keep her going. It’s just like a vintage automobile. It might overheat or blow a tire, but you get a guy to fix it up. You fix the water pump, fix the radiator, fix the ignition, change the spark plugs, crank it up, turn the key, and see if you can get up the hill. That was Judy. All she needed was some electricity, some speakers, a piano player, a drummer, a spotlight, and some people to applaud her.

  Judy lived on applause. That was her life, that was her gift, and she knew how good she was. She knew she was the best. She might not have given anybody that impression, because she was a great actress, but I knew her better. Judy was more than just a voice. She was more like a three-act drama. She was a force. As Moss Hart said, Judy had “that little something extra.” Judy knew what she could do to an audience, and she knew when she would be a failure. The applause was her food. Those people who came to see her and applaud her were hungry, too, and ready to eat her alive. They needed her. But she needed them.

  “A really great reception makes me feel like I have a great big warm heating pad all over me,” she told Life. “People en masse have always been wonderful to me. I truly have a great love for an audience, and I used to want to prove it to them by giving them blood. But I have a funny new thing now, a real determination to make people enjoy the show. I want to give them two hours of just pow!”

  Judy’s audiences applauded her if she coughed! But she coughed better than anybody I knew. And they applauded when she asked for a drink of water. She’d turn her back to the audience, talk to her piano player, and then she’d say to the audience, “Talk to yourselves for a few minutes and give me a breather and I’ll be right back with you,” and they went hysterical. Nobody ever did that to an audience!

  42

  JUDY WENT TO CALIFORNIA for work at the start of 1962, leaving me to close the Scarsdale house. Once I joined her on the West Coast, we lived together in a rented house at 924 Bel Air Road. She was doing a special with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra for CBS, and I was working on Aerophonics business. Judy was so proud of me when I brought the Aerophonics music hardware back home to show her. She said, “What did my Sid do?” She showed it to Fields and Begelman, but they didn’t give a fuck. They couldn’t afford for me to be successful. Not at that point. They still needed Judy to pay their rent.

  Then came A Child Is Waiting for Stanley Kramer, a picture I never saw. I do know it was a story about mentally disabled children, and Judy played the part of their music teacher. She really loved working with them, but that picture was very trying for her. By the end of production, she had started taking medication again. I don’t know what she was on then, but I am certain she was on something.

  I thought things would surely improve once she finished making the picture, but Fields and Begelman committed her to go to England to make another movie, The Lonely Stage, which would later become I Could Go On Singing. I thought to myself, These guys are nuts to do this to her. I fussed and fumed about it. It was bad enough that she’d just done all those concerts, but now she was doing two major motion pictures back to back. How could she do it? I knew Judy well enough to know that she had to have a breather. She needed at least a month to recover in between pictures. In the past, she might be all right for the first week or so, but when things got going and she wasn’t getting enough rest, she would most certainly resort to more pills.

  “Don’t worry,” Judy assured me, “I can handle it. Freddie and David can handle it.” Of course they were telling her, “Sid’s going to try to get in your way. He’s going to be jealous.” They were much subtler, I’m sure, but because of my objections, they had a clandestine meeting without letting me in on their activities. I couldn’t even bring myself to talk to her about it, I was so frustrated at the time. Helpless. The modus operandi for her new lifestyle was that Sid should not be included. I wasn’t invited to any of their meetings. “Keep Sid out of it,” she had told them, which I only learned years later. I felt like an outsider.

  For whatever reason, as soon as she completed A Child Is Waiting, Judy moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel. She said it was because of the pressure of making the movie, so I didn’t question her. Liza was with her, but Lorna and Joey were with me at the house in Bel Air. She wasn’t at the hotel for more than a couple of weeks when she packed up and said, “I’ve gotta get out of this atmosphere.” I told her OK, and that I would make preparations. “I want to go to New York alone, ahead of you,” she said. “You close up the house and bring the children to New York.”

  It took me several weeks to close the Bel Air house. During that time, I received a call from Grant Cooper, a prominent Los Angeles trial lawyer, telling me that Judy wanted me to sign documents for a legal separation. I refused. “It’ll blow over,” I told him. “Judy always acts this way. That’s the way she takes out her frustrations and fears on me. She’s done it before.”

  It seems Judy considered herself separated. I found out later that she was going out with Eddie Fisher while in New York. H
e mentioned it in his autobiography—what an utter asshole. He was still married to Elizabeth Taylor. Years earlier, when he was with Debbie Reynolds, they got lost while looking for a house on Mapleton Drive and stopped by our place. They knocked on our door, came in for a drink, and I remember Eddie was so shocked to meet Judy Garland.

  When we got to New York and checked in at the Stanhope, I learned that Judy had reserved a suite for the children and me on a floor separate from hers. She knew I was in the hotel but, for whatever reason, she wouldn’t see me. She was really off from the pills and booze, and she just stayed locked in her room. Our friend Dr. Lester Coleman went up to her room. Judy really liked this guy and she’d called him over. Lester told me there were martini glasses everywhere and the place was in disarray. He said, “She is a very sick woman, Sid. She’s not capable of taking care of kids.”

  With that information, I made up my mind that, for their own safety, the children would stay with me. On the morning of April 28, I still hadn’t seen Judy, but I was on the phone with her from one floor to the other. We were screaming at each other and she was saying she wanted the children. She didn’t want to see them; she just wanted to take them. Judy wanted the children to get on a plane with her and Liza and go to Europe, but I told her I didn’t think it was right of her to take the kids to England at this time. I didn’t think she was well enough. “Leave the children here with me,” I suggested. “I’ll bring them over.”

  “I want the kids to go with me!” she screamed.