Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (28 page)

I later learned that I had lost consciousness and passed out on the floor at the bottom of the steps. Joe saw me fall, and terrified, he called my father, who sent for a cab (an ambulance would attract too much attention). I vaguely remember coming to for a moment as my dad carried me outside. That’s the last thing I remember for seven days.

They took me to the hospital and examined me. The doctors determined that I was suffering from severe emotional and physical exhaustion. They said it was a type of mental breakdown, in the sense that my brain had simply shut down from prolonged stress. I had been staying up with my mother until seven A.M. every morning, then pulling on some clothes and trying to get me and Joe to school. When I’d get back home in the afternoon, the whole routine
would start all over again, day in and day out. My father talked to the doctors and confirmed that I hadn’t been getting enough sleep and had been under terrible emotional strain. He didn’t want me sent home to my mom’s until I was better, so after three days in the hospital they transferred me to the hotel where my dad was living at the time, for further rest. I don’t even remember the move. All together, I slept for four days straight. My dad and Vern Alves took turns watching over me while I slept. They made sure I got water periodically and tried to get some soup or juice down me every few hours. I don’t remember any of it. When I woke days later, it was night, and Vern was sitting next to the bed with me. He told me I’d been asleep for a very long time. I had no idea where I was or what had happened. That week of my life is still a complete blank.

I stayed at my dad’s a few days longer. I was too exhausted to leave, and I was also terribly confused. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Part of me was so relieved to be with my father, where it was safe and I could sleep. Part of me never wanted to leave, wanted to stay in that safe place forever. But the other part of me said, “You have to go back. You have to take care of Mama. She needs you. You have to make sure she’s all right.” That part of me was still the strongest, and after a few days of rest, I decided to go back home to my mother. My father didn’t try to stop me. He knew it was useless, that this was a decision I would have to make for myself, and that I was determined to return. He was in so much pain about it all. He had watched my mother destroy herself for years, and now he was watching his daughter fall apart, too, and he felt completely helpless.

So a few days later I moved back home with my mother and had to deal with her regrets. She was overwhelmed with guilt about what had happened to me, and she kept saying over and over, “I’m sorry I was such a bad mother. I’m so, so sorry.” And over and over I had to say, “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t worry, Mama. No, Mom, of course you weren’t a bad mother.” And on and on and on.
Somehow, it always ended up being about her feelings. I had to comfort her, endlessly comfort her, so that she wouldn’t feel bad about what had happened to me, when all I really wanted to do was go back to bed.

She was rapidly running out of resources. Not long after my hospital stay, we had to move out of the old brownstone and into the St. Moritz. Nobody told me why, but I suspect it was because we couldn’t pay the rent anymore. By that time Joe and I could pack in our sleep, so it was no big deal to move into yet another hotel. Besides, we didn’t exactly have fond memories of that hideous old mausoleum.

We left behind more than the brownstone. My mom was also going through friends and lovers at a dizzying pace as her condition worsened. One of the casualties was Tom Green. Things had been going downhill with him for quite a while, anyway. They fought constantly about sex.

By that time she and Tom were fighting about money, too. Tom had hocked two of my mother’s rings during one of her frequent stints in the hospital. I heard several stories about why he hocked them. At one point my mother said he’d sold them to buy birthday presents for Joe’s thirteenth birthday; another time he said he sold them to pay my mother’s hospital bill. He said she’d told him to; she denied it. Whatever the truth, the jewelry ended up in a pawnshop. The rings were beautiful: an emerald set with diamonds and another ring set with diamonds and pearls. I loved that emerald. We never got it back. I don’t have any of my mother’s jewelry. By the time she died, it had all been sold.

Apparently the incident with the rings was the last straw in a relationship that was already very strained. Not long afterward, my mother decided to get rid of Tom Green in true Garland style. One night she looked at me and said, “I know how to get back at that son of a bitch.”

She picked up the phone and called Bellevue Hospital, telling
whoever picked up the phone that it was an emergency, and proceeded to give an Oscar-worthy performance.

“You have to help me,” she sobbed into the phone. “My husband’s taken an overdose, and he’s going to kill himself!”

I could hear the person on the other end say something, and then my mom replied, “His name’s Tom Green . . . No, no, he’s not here. He’s at the Alrae Hotel. You have to help him. Please! He’s just taken an overdose of sleeping pills, and I’m afraid he’s going to die. You have to help him before the pills get into his system!”

More sobbing, more talking on the other end, and then, “Please, please save his life. He’s had a breakdown. He needs help.” Sob, sob.

I sat in the chair by the phone, eyeballs popping, watching her. A moment later I heard her say, “Yes, yes. Oh, thank you, thank you. Yes, right away.” And then, “Oh, by the way. He’s got a Judy Garland fixation. Please be kind.” My jaw dropped.

Then she hung up, turned to me, and said, “That ought to do it.”

Sure enough, as I found out later, an ambulance went screaming over to the Alrae Hotel in the middle of the night, two big attendants took poor Tom Green to the hospital by force, and they pumped his stomach. All the time they were dragging him down the hall to pump his stomach, he was shouting, “I know who did this! It was Judy Garland! I tell you, it was Judy Garland!” And the emergency team said, “There, there, now, it’ll be all right. We’re going to take good care of you.”

My mother knew how to get rid of a man.

The same dramatic flair she’d used to get rid of Tom Green got us into and out of quite a few other fixes, too. By that time Joe and I had lived in more hotels than you could count. We might not have been born in a trunk, but we were more or less living out of one. It was kind of like, “If this is Tuesday, it must be the Plaza.” There was one little catch: we were out of money, but the hotels
still insisted on getting paid eventually. By that time nobody seemed to know where the money had gone; between the IRS, at least one crooked agent, my parents’ old debts, and a string of canceled concerts, my mom was flat broke. My dad was, too. For years afterward there would be IRS agents knocking on the door in the middle of the night.

None of this deterred my mother from going first class. She had been going first class since she was thirteen, and she didn’t know any other way to live. She had no idea what things cost or how to keep track of her money. Someone else had always done that for her, ever since she was a kid, and the result was that no matter how much she worked those last years, there was never any money. Either she spent it, or somebody else took it (she was a sitting duck for unscrupulous managers), yet she continued to live as though we were in the land of Oz, first class all the way.

Every now and then, though, reality caught up with us in the form of an eviction notice.

One day I got a call at school to come home right away, and when I got to the hotel, I was told that my mother was trying to kill herself and that she wanted to see me. So I went up to her room, and there she was sitting on the window ledge with a horde of reporters with cameras gathered in the street below. I looked at her and said, “Mama, what’s going on? Are you all right?”

She looked at me and said, “I’m fine, honey. We can’t pay the bill, so I’m threatening to jump out the window.” Then she had me call the manager, the same guy who’d been threatening to evict us for nonpayment, and say, “How’s it going to look for you when Dorothy jumps out your fucking window, huh?” My mother had a pretty rich vocabulary when she was angry. Of course, the manager caved in. As soon as he said we could stay, my mother calmly climbed back into the room.

Sometimes she’d use this stunt as a diversion to give me and Joe time to pack up the suitcases and get our stuff out of the hotel so they couldn’t hold our things as collateral. One time a frustrated
manager, afraid to evict her, refused to clean our room. After several days of this treatment, she was furious, so she stripped all the sheets off the bed and soaked them in the bathtub. Then she hung them all out the windows of this first-class hotel and shut the windows to hold them in place, flapping in the wind like a tenement clothesline. In less than a minute our room was overrun with hotel personnel armed with fresh sheets and cleaning equipment, accompanied by the manager, who said, “Okay, okay, you win. I give up.” Then she called her lawyer, told him she’d taken care of the problem, hung up, and said, “Haven’t had this kind of service in years” (or something less printable), and screamed with laughter. She’d won again. She always did. It was astonishing. She most definitely didn’t take no for an answer.

Meanwhile, she was going through people faster than hotels. And the sicker she got, the stranger the people surrounding her became. I called them the “Garland Freaks,” because they worshipped my mother like a goddess, but they also poisoned her with that worship, catering to her every whim in the sickest possible ways. These were not her fans—they were freaks. They didn’t really care about her as a human being; to them she was a celluloid legend, and they wanted to be around her and soak up some of the aura so they could say, “Oh, yes, Judy is a close personal friend.” If anything, they encouraged her sickness because they could identify with it, because it made them feel better about themselves, and because, to be blunt, they could profit from it. These hangers-on were invariably male and usually gay. Sometimes she found them, and sometimes they found her. For a long time she used them primarily for late-night support. She would meet them at the stage door after her concerts, or practically anywhere, and they would give her their phone numbers.

Late at night, when she couldn’t sleep, she would start calling them and talk for hours. It was fine with me, because it meant I could get a little sleep now and then. When I got desperate for rest, I would call one of the less crazy ones and say, “Get over here
now. She needs to talk.” I learned to talk on the phone so that nobody could hear what I was saying, even someone standing right next to me. The person would come over to keep my mom company, and I would go to bed. My mother had to have someone with her all the time by then; if she was alone for even an hour, she would fall apart. She’d always had a fear of being alone, but by this time it had developed into a full-blown phobia.

I wasn’t very tolerant of the people who surrounded my mother during those last years. A decade later, I would party at Studio 54 with people who looked just like them, but at the time I was just fifteen. This was 1967, long before the underground culture “came out.” Whenever a new one came through the door, Joe and I would just look at each other and roll our eyes as if to say, “Where does she find these guys?”

I didn’t mind the late-night visitors; in fact, I was grateful for the help. After a while, though, she started hiring some of these people. That was really a mistake, since they had no credentials except admiration for my mother. By then my mom’s health had degenerated so much that she was easy prey for anyone who came along. She would call these people “my new managers” and put them on salary. When the inevitable business disaster followed, she’d always end up calling my father and saying, “Please, Sid, you’ve got to help me straighten this out.” Since he was still trying to rescue her, he’d always get sucked into the whole mess, come back, and try to straighten things out. Sometimes when my dad arrived in the middle of one of the disasters and found her surrounded by her newest “staff,” he looked as if he thought he’d walked into a zoo. These weird-looking strangers would tell my father, “Look, Sid, this is what Judy wants.” My father would swallow his resentment and try to fix the problem. Even Dad was wary of a personal relationship with my mom at that point, but he kept trying to bail her out professionally. When it came to her work, he was always the one she ended up turning to, to “fix things.” Somehow, though, things never stayed fixed.

The groupies who came and went from our apartment became the emotional support system my mother depended on. Most of them were gay, and some of them made sexual advances to my mother. It was an odd situation, one that I never understood and sometimes resented. I didn’t mind their being gay; they had every right to live their lives as they chose. What I objected to was their trying to be something to my mother they never could be. In my opinion, a gay man has no business leading on a heterosexual woman. It seemed to me these “suitors” were lying to her, both explicitly and implicitly. These men owed it to my mother to be honest with her. They weren’t.

Part of the fault lay with my mother. She had a powerful and often unhealthy ability to make-believe that things were what she wanted them to be, instead of what they were. She had been the heroine in too many romantic movies. In real life this meant that if a man told her she was beautiful and that he loved her, she immediately cast him as the romantic hero of some MGM musical. These men flattered her continually: “Judy, you’re beautiful. Judy, you’re the best. Don’t ever let anybody tell you you’re not.” My mother had always needed a lot of praise, but by then, with her health declining and her fortieth birthday long past, her need for reassurance had grown enormously. The groupies surrounding her catered to that need, flattering her shamelessly when it wasn’t good for her. She had always been willing to listen to the lie she wanted to hear, so it came as no surprise to me that she accepted whatever these men told her, however outrageous. I would look at some of the men who professed to be eligible bachelors, ready to fulfill all my mother’s romantic fantasies, and think, “Please! You’ve got to be kidding!” Anyone with less of a need to believe them would have seen the obvious in a New York minute. Yet my mom, one of the most intelligent women I’ve ever known, was determined to be blind.