by Lorna Luft
It always amazes me that my mother’s beauty was not praised and nurtured during her formative years. Mama was gorgeous! I have always wished I resembled her more than my father. But Hollywood didn’t appreciate her looks as much as I do. Concerned that she was overweight and unfavorably comparing her appearance to MGM’s beautiful, mature female stars like Hedy Lamarr (even referring to Mama as a “little hunchback”), Mayer had studio doctors prescribe Benzedrine to the young, impressionable girl. A highly addictive amphetamine that suppressed appetite, Benzedrine was considered the new wonder drug at the time. Combined with phenobarbital, these stimulants made weight loss easy and doubled your energy. No one at the studio gave much thought to the long-term effects such drugs would have on their personnel. Even my grandmother, Ethel Gumm, voiced no objections. Grandmother made it her job to ensure that Mama obeyed the studio and fulfilled her obligations, for which she handled the finances. Her fee was deducted from her daughter’s salary. My grandmother was Momma Rose, the ultimate stage mother of Gypsy Rose Lee, before Arthur Laurents wrote the book and crafted the infamous character for his classic 1959 musical Gypsy.
Mama was given the surname “Garland” (chosen by vaudeville headliner George Jessel) and called Frances Garland at the time this portrait was taken in Chicago, 1934. She rechristened herself “Judy” (after the contemporary Hoagy Carmichael-Sammy Lerner Song) the following year. Photo by Bloom
While Mama was waiting to be placed in a film, she kept busy learning and rehearsing songs with Roger Edens. My mother adored Edens. He had a deep Southern accent (reminiscent of her father’s) and he came into her life at a time when she craved fatherly guidance. He accompanied her on the piano, giving her lessons in phrasing and diction, and honing her natural quick-study skills. He became her protector as well as mentor. It was the best schooling she ever had, far more useful than the education she received in the little classroom on the lot with her fellow pupils Mickey Rooney and Lana Turner. For Clark Gable’s thirty-sixth birthday party in 1937, Roger Edens wrote a new verse about Gable as an introduction to the song “You Made Me Love You.” Mama debuted the piece for the guests, reminding L. B. Mayer of his neglected prize. The song was inserted into Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937) as “Dear Mr. Gable (You Made Me Love You)” and became the movie’s highlight.
As a result, Mama was slated to appear in two musical comedies in production at the same time: Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937) with Mickey Rooney and Sophie Tucker, and Everybody Sing (1938), with Allan Jones and Fanny Brice. She sang the popular ballad “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” (one of her audition pieces for Mayer) in Listen Darling (1938), teamed again with her cherished friend Mickey in Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), and barely stopped working at MGM for the next twelve years. In addition to the movies, between 1936 and 1950, she recorded over eighty “sides” for Decca Records, participated in over two hundred radio shows, and made personal appearances to promote her films or entertain American servicemen during World War II. With their perky on-screen chemistry, the Rooney-Garland teaming was perfected in a series of popular “let’s put on a show” musicals, the best of which are Babes in Arms (1939) and Girl Crazy (1943).
“As a performer,” Mickey Rooney has said of Mama, “I thought she was the perfect partner. Her sense of timing was flawless.… A picture like Girl Crazy was hard work but God, we had fun!”1 It truly was a fun and exciting time for my mother. But the roots of some serious problems were forming. At that time, she was a sport, a team player, but the studio wanted a super-kid, capable of wonders when fatigued, magic when low, and sparkle when driven into overtime. Someone from MGM would arrive at her home at 4:00 a.m. to wash and set her hair as well as apply her makeup. She was driven to work at 6:00 a.m. The early call at home circumvented child labor laws and made the most of her time at the studio. While Rooney enjoyed a hamburger lunch at the studio commissary, Mama was given a bowl of consommé. (Mayer was especially proud of his mother’s chicken-matzo ball soup recipe that the studio commissary served every workday, but my mother was only allowed the broth.) She pushed through fifteen-hour days on little sustenance, her star rising higher and higher as the world fell in love with her voice and infectious personality.
The Wizard of Oz, because of its enormous expense, was not a big commercial hit in its original release in August 1939; its status as one of the great movies grew over time with theatrical reissues in 1949 and 1955, its first broadcast on network television in 1956, and later as an annual television event from 1959 to 1998. Although the screen rights were purchased for my mother, Mayer at one point had his sights on the world’s biggest child star, the curled and dimpled Shirley Temple, for the lead role of Dorothy Gale. However, a deal could not be struck with Twentieth Century Fox, who had Temple under contract, and the role went back to Mama. A tale she liked to tell of the making of The Wizard of Oz involved Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, and Jack Haley—better known as the Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man. The three actors would repeatedly close ranks when skip-hopping down the yellow brick road, leaving Mama to fall in behind. Director Victor Fleming finally had enough and shouted, “Hold it! You three dirty hams, let that little girl in there!”2 Mama’s performance is what brought the movie to life, above and beyond all its Technicolor gloss and timeless charm, making it into a must-see for each new generation. She is natural, endearing, and a singer of astonishing maturity, though just sweet sixteen.
A portrait of Mama as Dorothy Gale with her dog, Toto, from The Wizard of Oz (1939). Prior to Victor Fleming assuming the role as the film’s director, George Cukor worked on the film for a short period but changed Mama’s elaborate hair and makeup to the more natural auburn appearance depicted in this photograph and what is shown in the finished film.
The Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), the Tin Man (Jack Haley), Dorothy (Mama), and the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) in a scene from The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Mama placed her hand and foot prints in cement in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on October 10, 1939, prior to the premiere of Babes in Arms (1939), with Mickey Rooney accompanying her. The following year, Mickey presented Mama her first and only Academy Award—a Special Award given to juvenile talent—for her outstanding work onscreen in the year 1939. It was a miniature Oscar statuette which she disliked, as it represented her being treated as a child, even though she was nearly eighteen. (I have that statuette now and it’s very dear to me. I treasure it, even if Mama didn’t.) Nevertheless, these two events bolstered her status in the film industry. The only downside to The Wizard of Oz—and it is significant—is the lifelong price my mother had to pay for pleasing the front office at MGM. Her life was good, it was bad, and it was ugly. The good was the opportunity to have her raw talent and hard work assisted by the greatest team of people in the world and be transformed into a shining star. The bad was being treated as a product, facing constant fatigue, and having no personal life. The ugly? Her abuse of and later dependency on prescription medications, and the ensuing breakdowns these substances helped trigger.
Mama, recipient of a Special Award (Juvenile Award) with Mickey Rooney, presenter, at the twelfth Academy Awards held at the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, February 1940.
Mama as Esther Smith in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). The natural integration of the film’s musical numbers into the story served as a model for A Star Is Born. Her appearance here would be replicated for a scene a decade later in the later film’s “Born in a Trunk” sequence, in which Mama plays a teenager. In both instances, the costumes were designed by Irene Sharaff.
Mama played on; her first over-the-title solo star billing was For Me and My Gal (1942), featuring the motion picture debut of Gene Kelly. She splendidly segued into adult roles with that film and with Presenting Lily Mars (1943). Her last adolescent role was Esther Smith, the girl next door, in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). This enduring classic was significant both for film history and for my mother, who fell for her director, Vincente
Minnelli. An older man as well as a highly skilled artist of great taste, he was just her type. Meet Me in St. Louis was also the picture that introduced her to her longtime makeup artist, Dorothy Ponedel, and to costume designer Irene Sharaff. Along with The Wizard of Oz and A Star Is Born, Meet Me in St. Louis is one of the undisputed masterpieces in my mother’s filmography. It pleased her more than any film she had made up until that time.
Mama and Vincente wed in 1945, when her divorce from her first husband, bandleader and composer David Rose, was finalized. The Minnellis were a union made in MGM heaven. Although they did not enjoy a private relationship as successful as their working one, they did manage to make two masterpieces together: Meet Me in St. Louis and my sister, Liza, born Liza May Minnelli on March 12, 1946. Despite this time of great professional and personal happiness, Mama was becoming notorious for budget-busting delays caused by her tardiness and temperament, the result of her growing dependence on medication as well as her willful behavior. A true actress emerged in The Clock (1945) a full-fledged drama that Minnelli directed at her insistence. She reunited with Gene Kelly for The Pirate (1948), directed by Minnelli. The production was a difficult one. Mama’s unhappiness with the material—fearing that it was not commercial enough—endangered her fragile mental state. The production evolved into a Gene Kelly showcase (what else does anyone remember from the film, other than a scantily clad Kelly in “The Pirate Ballet” sequence?) more so than a Kelly-Garland joint teaming. The Pirate led to a major depressive episode. However, she rallied sufficiently to make Easter Parade (1948), teaming with the great Fred Astaire and directed by her friend Charles “Chuck” Walters. The plot involved an older vaudevillian as mentor and eventual partner to a much younger performer. It was the old Pygmalion-Galatea tale—shades of her future A Star Is Born plot.
Mama’s dependency on prescription drugs was the worst-kept secret in Hollywood by 1949. According to my father, her drug use was the source of comment in tabloid publications as well as an investigation by Harry J. Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and America’s first “drug czar.” The ghost of drug dependency was always in my mother’s home. Everybody was ill-equipped to deal with that part of her story. None of her husbands understood it. MGM didn’t understand it, either. No one knew the physical and psychological effects of addiction. They were as much in the dark as my mother. Mama now squirreled pills just as she previously hoarded cookies or candy bars from watchful eyes. She was a childlike person and she didn’t want to get caught. She seemed to crank up her own gossip machine. MGM public relations had its hands full keeping the lid on speculation about alleged affairs with bandleader Artie Shaw, screenwriter-producer (and later director) Joseph L. Mankiewicz, screen heartthrob Tyrone Power, and the legendary Frank Sinatra. Mama’s erratic behavior forced Mayer to replace her in several projects, most notably in Annie Get Your Gun (1950), a starring role ultimately played by Betty Hutton. In Summer Stock (1950), Gene Kelly partnered with her as a favor, believing he was indebted to Mama for her invaluable support in launching his film career.
Summer Stock was nothing earth-shattering—a throwback to the type of light romantic musicals she’d done with Mickey Rooney over a decade earlier, but it contains her show-stopping “Get Happy” number. Clad in a rakish man’s hat and fitted black jacket that reveals every inch of her gorgeous gams, her lips lacquered fire-engine red, Mama brings the house down with her triumphant rendition of Harold Arlen’s gospel-flavored tune. (The sequence was photographed several weeks after the main filming was completed in 1950 and after she lost ten pounds. She looks so different in this sequence that for many years people speculated that it must have been inserted from an earlier, unreleased Judy Garland film.) “Get Happy” was a high note to end on: Summer Stock would be her last film for MGM, despite the film’s commercial success. During preproduction of Royal Wedding (1951), she was placed on her third and final suspension, replaced by Jane Powell, and her days at the studio were over. Mayer later stated with apparent sincerity, “There has never been any other motion picture star to equal Judy Garland in genius and love of the public. The bitterest moment of my life was when I had to let her go.”3
Mama films “Get Happy,” her final solo musical number in Summer Stock (1950) and her last completed film for MGM.
Mama, attired in her tramp costume to re-create the “A Couple of Swells” number from her famous film Easter Parade (1948), made theatrical history with her record-breaking nineteen-week run at the famed Palace Theatre, New York City, during the 1951–1952 Broadway season.
It was an equally bitter moment for Mayer’s star. Devastated, and feeling isolated after losing her professional home and family, Mama attempted suicide on June 19, 1950, by cutting her throat with a broken edge of a water glass in her bathroom. The gash was not deep at all; she survived to read the next day’s headline, “Judy Garland Slashes Throat After Film Row.”4 The news shocked the public and caused an outpouring of sympathy from her fans. Katharine Hepburn, whom my mother held in the highest regard and was a great fan of as an actress, made a surprise visit to my mother’s bedside to rally her during this difficult time. Mama never seriously tried to kill herself. Mama’s suicide attempts were last-resort methods to gain attention and release anxiety. I believe she felt trapped, misunderstood, and was making a desperate plea for understanding. The act also managed to release her from her contract—which had two years to run and could have prevented her from taking other jobs. She obtained her release from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in September 1950. Without MGM resources to shield her, Hollywood’s perception of Judy Garland was changing. She was now a deeply troubled celebrity. She had endured electroshock therapy and various hospitalizations. After fifteen years and twenty-nine movies, Mama was suddenly unemployable in the movie business at age twenty-eight, running low on funds, and relying on old friends to see her through. Emotionally, physically, and financially, my mother was spent.
Radio work kept my mother going, but on her slippery slope, even her fragile marriage was now in jeopardy. A legal separation from Vincente Minnelli was in place by Christmas 1950, when Mama made a holiday trip to New York City. There, she encountered Michael Sidney Luft, and a surprising attraction developed. Mama responded to his rugged good looks and personality—so like a character from a Damon Runyon novel and so unlike the refined men she usually favored. A man of many rough edges, and somewhat brash, Sid Luft was a former test pilot, B-picture producer, and gambler with a penchant for the racetrack. He’d already been married twice, and the hard-drinking Humphrey Bogart was his good friend. When he met Judy Garland, my father saw her as both a lover and an opportunity—a conduit for reflected fame. He fell in love with Judy the person as well as Judy the commodity. For her part, Mama saw Sid Luft as a white knight charging to her rescue, the ideal catalyst to deliver her from the bad times and into a new era. The two married on June 8, 1952, with initial A Star Is Born negotiations started. It was an eventful period. They knew Mama was pregnant with me. I was born on November 21, 1952, at 4:17 p.m. by Cesarean section at St. John’s Hospital, Santa Monica, weighing six pounds, four ounces. Mama chose “Lorna,” from a favorite play—Clifford Odets’s 1937 Broadway hit Golden Boy, which was made into a popular 1939 movie—and because it would sound nice with “Luft.” My father liked it because it was similar to his mother’s name, Leonora, and he had a crush in grade school on a classmate named Lorna Doone, after the famous Victorian novel by Richard Doddridge Blackmore. Unlike my elder sister and younger brother, I wasn’t given a middle name. Dad’s explanation was that I didn’t need one. When I asked him about my name as a girl, my father told me that “Lorna Luft” was chosen as it would look great on a marquee. I was a showbiz kid from birth. Shortly after I was born, my mother slid into a postpartum depression.
Mama re-creates the “Get Happy” number from Summer Stock onstage at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium, 1952.
Mama with my father, Sid Luft, at Romanof
f’s, a popular Beverly Hills restaurant, April 1952.
THE YEAR 1953 BEGAN IN NEW YORK CITY, WHERE MAMA HAD TRAVELED AS a guest of Jack L. Warner to sing at his daughter’s coming-out party. No doubt pleasure was mixed with business while my parents were in Manhattan. Two days later, on January 5, my grandmother, Ethel Gumm, died suddenly in Santa Monica at the age of fifty-nine. Although the two had been estranged at the time of her sudden death, Mama took it hard. They had a contentious relationship for years and she was plagued with guilt and deep sadness.
Mama wasn’t down for long. With two partners, Edward L. Alperson (who owned rights to the 1937 A Star Is Born production) and Ted Law (a Texas oilman and Dad’s partner in a horse stable business called Walfarms), the Lufts formed Transcona Enterprises, holding 75 percent interest in the company; Alperson 20 percent; and Law 5 percent interest. An obscure town in Manitoba, Canada, where Dad had often flown with the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II, provided the company name. Jack Warner invested some of the profits from the sale of the Warner theater circuit and, with Mama’s recent concert successes, was about to gamble on A Star Is Born, destined to become the most expensive film Warner Bros. had ever undertaken.
