Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me... (6 page)

Judy took out her lifts and began taping them on. Application normally took five minutes. Judy's hair was done last. On this frightful night her hair hadn't even been started. Nine o'clock was looking like a possibility if she would just stop crying. I was chattering on a lot about Freddie and David; defending them, telling her how much they really cared about her. It was exactly the wrong conversation. Crying, cursing, crying, cursing. She couldn't get the lifts on straight, and there was a possibility she would give up trying and storm out. But just then came a knock on the door. I prayed for a miracle, and it was standing in front of me in the figure of “Freddie fucking Fields.” Thank God, I thought.

*   *   *

With his sensitive antennae and completely intuitive understanding of divas, Freddie sized up the situation in seconds. “Judy, Judy, Judy,” he started, doing his Cary Grant bit. I could see her lip curl. Undaunted, he pressed on.

“You know Roz Russell didn't use just two lifts when she went into makeup.” He had her attention, although she feigned indifference. Freddie went into full action-figure mode: He was using lots of exaggerated hand and arm gestures as he identified all the places Roz Russell put her lifts.

“She would put two low on her forehead, and where you're using two, she glued on four.” A smile was starting to crack Judy's gloom look.

“She used six on either side of her neck.” Judy had now turned around to face Freddie, her amusement impossible to conceal.

“And the master string came out her ass. When you pulled it, she smiled!” Hysterical laughter followed. No one enjoyed a good laugh more than Judy. And since put-down humor was Judy's favorite kind, Freddie had found a receptive audience. All was forgiven.

“Freddie, we will not be doing shit holes like this ever again.”

“I didn't know there were any places this old.”

“Well, you should have known. You're as old as this place is.” She was laughing when she said it, and flying into her clothes while the hairdresser of the moment tried to work around the flurry of sudden activity. She did a great show that night. Better than great! The audience may have had to wait an extra hour, but they got their money's worth.

We drove back from Haddonfield that night in Freddie's limo. I was relegated to sitting in front with the driver, and since the glass privacy partition separating the driver from those seated in back had been employed, I, too, could hear nothing until the glass came down and Freddie ordered the driver to get off at the next exit. We then drove into a less-than-lively town somewhere in lusterless New Jersey and went into a bar so that Judy could “relax.”

It was a cold night, and Freddie took pity on the driver and me, allowing us to come inside, where we sat at a small cocktail table while Freddie and Judy stood at the bar. From where we were sitting I could see a woman who was overwhelmed by Judy's sudden appearance. She could not contain her excitement, and because of it—and not for any other reason—her hands were all over Judy. This happened all the time, and Judy just hated people touching her. Freddie to the rescue. He engaged the woman in conversation, and as he did so, he started undressing her, making her more comfortable. Judy immediately picked up on it, and she also kept talking to the woman who was almost too excited to notice what was happening. By the time the woman finally pushed Freddie away she was down to her bra. Everyone in the bar, except herself, was hysterical. Judy was almost on the floor. In the end the woman was a good sport. She got the autograph she wanted, and we laughed all the way home.

Freddie taught me that humor works wonders. Well—not exactly a newsflash, and easier said than done; however, I embraced the idea. I simply knew that I would have to learn to see things cockeyed as well as straight on. And I do.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Boston

The “before” the show in Boston was another thing entirely. It is still one of my most painful memories these fifty-two years later. We were staying at the Ritz-Carlton, at that time arguably the best hotel in the city. Judy had an elegant gold-and-white suite overlooking Boston Common gardens and pond. She'd decided to dress in the suite that night, which was unusual because she disliked dressing at the hotel prior to any concert, and she gave me no reason why she was changing her routine. It meant, however, that I would have to return from the setup to the Ritz to collect her.

At seven I left the Boston Garden, went back to the hotel, went up to the suite to put together the Act 2 costume change, and as I stood asking her about taking additional eyelashes to the hall, she slit her left wrist with a razor, cutting deeply into an artery. The moment was made even grislier by the fact that when she made the cut she was looking at me and smiling.

I learned many things that night that I could have gone on through life never needing to know. One was that blood doesn't leak out; it spurts, it arcs. I can see it still on the gold-and-white bedspread, on the flocked wall covering and matching drapes, and on me. I was wearing my new favorite outfit, my first-ever ensemble, a three-piece outfit manufactured by my husband's uncle, from whom I bought the most wonderful designer rip-offs wholesale. The fabric of my wool challis blouse matched the lining of my coat. I definitely loved it too much. That night when I walked into her room I thought I looked so snazzy. But all I see now is her blood all over my once-beautiful ensemble, on my skirt and coat. My hands. My hair. I stood there horrified. This was her normal! This is what she did. This is who she was. This is the kind of a teacher she was.

I was beginning to understand that these events were all about manipulation and control. Judy's suicidal episodes gave her power. With every horror she became the center of “his” attention. “‘His' attention” was owned by the man of the moment. She craved his love much more than the adoration of her fans. They were strangers. It would soon be over for her—this episode—and she would go on to the next, but not so for me. I would never forget it. It would be seared into my memory, and I would replay it forever. You know what else? I still feel sorrier for me.

So why slit her wrist on that particular night? Let me repeat it: It's a love story. On that particular night she did it for David, for the love of this man who was, at this moment in time, the single most important consideration in her life. (I often wondered—still do today, and will for as long as I live—if I could have sat her down in a totally sober moment—of which there were none—and asked her: Judy, what's more important to you? Being in love? Or singing? What would her answer have been? Some may think they know that answer, and they may be right. But I do not know it. I never have, and I don't think I ever will.) But let me get back to her heart, and her affair with David Begelman.

After an absence of a few weeks, Begelman was back in New York. Judy was in thrall to him. Obsessively. They'd been having an affair for some months, and the affair was forever tripping down a rocky road; for the last many weeks it had been caught on some insurmountable boulders due to David's disappearance. Judy did not, like other women, tell everything to her hairdresser, because her hairdresser sometimes changed as often as her wardrobe. I was her confidante; she told me everything, and I knew about the affair from the beginning. I often wished I did not, because David was my boss. It put me in the very uncomfortable position of being in the middle when Judy sought insider information. She would ask me questions about his wife, Lee, and where he'd been on certain nights, questions I couldn't answer—sometimes because I didn't know, and sometimes because I didn't want to.

Recently he'd gone on a trip abroad, and had dared to take his wife along with him. And how did Judy know that? Not from me. She'd checked with his housemaid, whose confirmation had sent her into a tailspin. She could not be jollied out of it. I faced daily questions like: “Do you think he's sleeping with Lee?” What was I supposed to answer? My best shot at a response was: “How could he be sleeping with her if he's in love with you?”

Answering her question with a question wasn't really answering her question at all, and I preferred doing that to lying. Judy was sure that David was in love with her. And I was happy to leave it right there. I knew the truth, and it was ugly. David was ugly. I had now been in his employ a year and a half, and I was learning what a liar he was. The truth would have hurt. The truth might have cured some other person, but not Judy, who lived in a make-believe world.

She would sometimes tell me the romantic things David told her, and I knew they were all lies. She giggled like a schoolgirl when she confided: “We're making wonderful plans to travel.” Travel with David? He was a different kind of addict: a gambler and a workaholic who went on vacation only when forced to by his wife, and this is exactly what had happened. Lee Begelman had her social set, a finite group of wealthy couples, the wives of which performed good works mostly for themselves, and who spent hours on the phone each day discussing how to spend their husbands' money. One day Lee announced that they were all going yachting in the Greek Islands, and off David went with a small library to forfend against the boredom he suffered around Lee's entitled entourage. He told Judy he was going to London on business. “What plans are you and David making?” I asked Judy. “We'll rent a marvelous big yacht just for the two of us, and we'll cruise the Greek Islands.” There's no other word for it. David was a cruel man.

It hurt me to see Judy taken in by David's outrageousness, but I could not or would not attempt to convince her that David loved no one but himself. She believed what she wanted to believe, and in spite of their fights about his prolonged absences, regardless of his limp ad-libbing about his failure to get a divorce, Judy remained a believer. And now David had come to Boston to attend her concert and was dressing in a room almost next door when she slit her wrist. Judy Garland would show him. Judy Garland would die for him. Who was Judy Garland really punishing? It wasn't David Begelman.

I made a tourniquet out of a towel and a hairbrush. Then I picked up the phone to call David while Judy sat docilely by. She didn't cry or scream or have any reaction at all, for that matter. She was standing when she did it; now she sat down on the bed and, staring straight ahead, calmly waited for David to arrive. David immediately called for a doctor, and one arrived in record time; in fact he got there so fast it made my mind spin a fiction that Judy had stationed him downstairs in the bar in advance for her own nefarious purpose. That, of course, is ridiculous, but I do have a sense that she knew what she was doing, that in fact she had planned it. Could she have known that what she had done or the way she had done it was not serious enough to cause a major problem? It sounds awful to even think such a thing because the slice she made looked ghastly, but that may be the truth of this horror. Maybe this was not so much a suicide attempt as it was a scream: I hurt! Come take care of me. Come love me!

It was a gash in a life careening out of control, a huge, ugly gash that would hopefully make David see her, and see the pain that was tearing her apart. If she did it for effect, the effect on me was shattering. I was angry that she would do such a terrible thing to herself, and, at the same time, do it to me. My anger filled a space in my being like air filling a balloon. And I didn't know how to show it. I even felt guilty for having it. How could I be angry at someone who was so sick? Well, it is possible. The anger stayed with me for a long time, for years, until the balloon inside me got so old and weak that all the anger seeped out. Only the picture remains.

Put her in an institution. Get her the help she needs! That's the scream that was raging in me. It never came out of my mouth. Could anyone have institutionalized Judy without her permission? Maybe not, but it didn't matter because there were no candidates. Everyone was too busy exploiting her. To this day I think I should have tried harder to get her the help she so obviously needed. I should have appealed to David to get her serious attention. I should at least have tried. I didn't. I knew then as I know now that any plea for saving Judy would have been gratuitous, made for wanting to hear the sound of my own voice—for all the attention such a plea would have received. But maybe had I at least given lip service to this tragedy I might have felt less guilty. Here's my cop-out: I was only a foot soldier doing my duty. And my duty was to obey orders. There was only Do the job and shut up, or quit. I'll say it again. Quitting wasn't ever an option.

When I describe what followed, you may find it despicable. I do. I was repulsed by my own behavior, but I knew I was doing what Judy wanted me to do. “Here's a hundred,” David said, peeling a bill off a large roll and putting it into my hand. “Buy enough bracelets to cover the bandages.” Judy sat by, admiring David's take-charge capability. There wasn't an iota of protest from her. Under the circumstances one might think she would want to go to the hospital, or at least pull the covers up over her head. Wasn't anyone going to cancel the concert and give her tender, loving care? Heavens no! Judy was now ready to go out onstage, and if Judy intended to perform that night knowing full well that she had slit her wrist on the way to the theater, so be it. If buying bracelets to cover her wrist was the only thing I had to do to hold on to my job this night, I would do it. “Hurry,” Judy told me. I ran out into the streets of Boston to find a store where I could buy enough cheap bangles to cover the bandages the doctor had put on her wrist. It wasn't so easy at seven o'clock on a Saturday night, but I was on a mission and I would do whatever I had to—beg, borrow, or steal—to get her onstage. And get there she did. She did such a wonderful show no one could have suspected she wasn't at the top of her form. On second thought, maybe she was.

That Judy desperately needed help was clear even to a naive dummy like me. I was brought up to believe that when someone was ill, you took him or her to the doctor. But the point here is that “doctor” (as opposed to pill pusher) was not the help she wanted. It wasn't the kind of help she felt she needed, and it wasn't the kind of help she would have accepted. It was a hard lesson for me.