Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (30 page)

A few hours later I landed at Los Angeles Airport and began a new life with my father and brother. One by one, my mother had worn us all out. She would soon wear herself out, too. Dad and Joey and I were a sad and emotionally ragged little band of refugees, and we held onto each other for dear life, but my father was determined to make a life for us. He was nearly as sick and exhausted as I was, but he thought, “I have these two children, and somebody has to take care of them. We have no other choice. Somebody has to be sane.”

For all practical purposes, my mother wasn’t herself anymore. God knows she was no longer the woman we all loved and remembered. I was almost sixteen years old by then, the same age my mother was when she first began taking the drugs that would eventually claim her life. For over thirty years those chemicals had ravaged her body, gradually robbing her of her health, her dignity, her family, and finally her life.

A lot of very uncharitable things have been written about my mother’s behavior in the last years before she died. I have no desire to add to them. What many people don’t realize is that the brain is an organ, too, and when the body is dying of the disease we call chemical dependency, the mind slowly dies with it. Drugs are a slow-acting poison, a thief that steals your life away piece by piece.

My mother wasn’t rational those last years; if she had been, she would have been horrified by her own behavior. If we’d loved her less, we could have seen her fall from grace with infinitely less pain. If she’d loved
us
less, she couldn’t have held onto the remnants of our relationship as long as she did. I’ve questioned many things about my mother over the years. The one thing I never questioned was whether or not she loved me. I knew she did. I knew that if she had been well, she would have wanted me to do whatever was necessary to keep myself safe.

Ten months later she would be gone. I would never see my mother alive again.

© Turner Entertainment

My favorite picture of Mama, 1942.

A
few months ago in London, I took a cab across town for an appointment. Shortly after we pulled into traffic, I noticed that the cabby was looking at me carefully in the rearview mirror. “Excuse me, miss,” he said, “but aren’t you Lorna Luft?” “Yes,” I said, smiling pleasantly and thinking, “He must recognize me from one of my concerts.” But then his expression changed in the old familiar way, and I thought, “Oh, no.” His face contorted, and he actually began to cry. “Your mother, oh, your mother, miss. Such a tragedy, her death. What a tragic life she had.” And he was off. For more than twenty minutes, as we inched our way through the London traffic, I remained trapped in the backseat listening for the umpteenth time as he retold the tabloid version of my mother’s life. All I could think was, “Oh, God, get me out of here.” Several lifetimes later, when we reached my publicist’s office, I shot out of the backseat, mumbled something polite to the cabby, and tried to make my escape. No luck. He grabbed my hand, kissed it tearfully, and told me he’d wait and take me wherever I needed to go next. No amount of polite dissuasion on my part could make him leave.

I have no doubt that the poor cabby meant to be kind and sympathetic. So do the endless number of my mother’s fans who still approach me almost daily to remind me of her death. People
are always telling me that I should appreciate the fans’ devotion, that I must understand how much my mother means to them even thirty years after she died. On one level, I do. But there is a special cruelty to such devotion for the survivors of that death, for Joe and Liza and I lost a mother, not a legend. We had to deal not only with the overwhelming grief, but with the public exposure of that grief and the belief of thousands that they felt the same pain we did. They did not. They certainly did feel loss, but not the loss of a beloved parent.

For years we also lived with the peculiar and fearful vulnerability that comes from learning the most heart-wrenching family news from the public media. Those who live private lives are, at the very least, given the news of a parent’s death privately by the authorities before the loved one’s name is released publicly. Celebrities’ children don’t enjoy even that basic courtesy. Tracy Nelson learned about the unexpected death of her father, former teen idol Rick Nelson, from a television broadcast while she waited at an airport. Years before, when I was eleven and we were still living on Rockingham Drive, Joey and I heard a false report of our mother’s death in Hong Kong as we were listening to music on the car radio. Our nanny, Mrs. Chapman, abruptly snapped off the radio and told us that we’d heard wrong, and fortunately, the report turned out not to be true. But the anxiety remained. What will we hear next? And will it be true this time? The press goes on about the “people’s right to know,” and loyal fans line up offering condolences, but the reality is that all this attention simply multiplies the pain endlessly. Nearly thirty years later, people still resent the fact that after my mother died, I needed to bury her and get on with my own life in order to survive. My sister would be a much healthier and happier person today if people could look at her even once and not see my mother’s face looking back at them.

At fifteen, though, I understood none of this. At fifteen, I still thought my mother would live forever.

W
hen I landed at LAX on that hot August night in 1968,1 began a whole new life. My father and Patti met me at the airport and took me home to my dad’s apartment in Westwood for some R and R. I needed it. I was an emotional wreck, barely able to function. For the first few days I holed up and did almost nothing but cry and sleep. I was overwhelmed with guilt and grief and fear and anger. I had left my mother, my greatest childhood fear, the one thing I’d always said I would never do. “Oh, no, Mama, we won’t leave you. We would never leave you,” my brother and I had told her that night in Las Vegas after my father had tried to take us. Six years later Joey and I were both gone, driven to leave by despair and a survival instinct that told us if we didn’t leave, none of us was going to make it. The truth was, as I now realize, we hadn’t left her. She had left us, taken away by an illness that had first seduced her and then left her to die. None of us could have stopped it.

It didn’t take long for my mother to find out where I’d gone, and at first the fallout was horrendous. She called my father’s apartment constantly, demanding to talk to me and my dad, alternately enraged and guilt-stricken. My dad knew I didn’t need any more of this insanity, but he couldn’t stop her from calling. Poor Patti was answering the phone: “No, Judy, he’s not here right now. Not now, Judy, Lorna’s in the shower . . . Lorna’s asleep . . . Lorna’s not here.” After a week or two of this, my dad said, “Lorna, you’re going to have to talk to her. She won’t accept it from anyone else.” I finally did. I told her I loved her but that I needed to live with Daddy for a while. I was just worn out.

After a while, the phone calls were less frequent. She still called regularly, but no longer several times a day. And sometimes I called her. I missed her terribly, yet I dreaded those phone calls. She’d given up screaming and yelling at me. Instead she made me feel guilty. My mother could have taught a class in how to induce guilt. She should have been Jewish. She was a brilliant actress, the master of the finely tuned emotion, and she could play you like a fiddle when she chose to. She knew exactly how to play me. “I
understand what you’ve done. I understand that I’m not a good mother. It’s no wonder you left me to live with your father. I deserve to be all alone.” And on and on until I was sick to my stomach and in tears. It was really hard. Still, I couldn’t go back. Every time I thought of the craziness and the rage and the days and weeks without sleep, my brain would just shut down. I couldn’t live that way anymore.

Meanwhile, my mother was managing to survive. She did a few benefits and some television shows and spent her nights clubbing so she wouldn’t have to be home alone. In December she flew to London for a series of shows at a night club, The Talk of the Town, and stayed to tour Europe for a while. In January of 1969, four months after I left, we got the news that she’d married a man named Mickey Deans in London. He was her fifth husband. Like everyone else in America, we heard about it on the evening news. I remember thinking, “Who the hell is Mickey Deans?” She hadn’t said a word about him to Joe or me—none of the “I’m going to marry Uncle Mark” discussion that had preceded her marriage to Mark Herron—and we didn’t have the faintest idea who he was.

We found out later that he had been the manager at Arthur’s, the first nightclub I’d gone to, three years before. He was younger than Mama, and more than anything else, he was someone who happened to be there to fill the vacuum created by Joe’s and my departure. My mom announced to the press assembled in London that at last, she’d found true love, someone who could just love her for who she really was. I just sighed and wondered how long this one would last.

Mickey, of course, had no idea what he was getting into, and he certainly wasn’t up to the task. He thought he’d married Dorothy, or at least Dorothy after the tornado, and he’d bought into my mother’s recurring optimism that her life would still turn out like an MGM musical. He had no idea how to cope with a woman in the final stages of addiction. She was dying in front of his eyes, but he never realized it. He started planning a string of Judy Garland Theaters and pretty much went along for the ride.

In late May, Mickey and my mom returned to New York briefly to try and sell the Judy Garland Theaters idea. They stayed with Mama’s old friend Charlie Cochran at his apartment there. My mother was feeling really sick by then, and Charlie was worried. He wanted to put her in the hospital, but she didn’t want to go, and Mickey didn’t think it was necessary. He took her to a doctor who suggested they switch her from Seconal to Thorazine, hoping her system would tolerate the Thorazine better. A few days later she celebrated her forty-seventh birthday resting in bed at Charlie Cochran’s apartment.

Joe and Liza and I all called her for her birthday. She sounded tired, but otherwise she seemed better than she’d been in a while. She was always happy when she first had a new man in her life; it seemed to renew her optimism, and she usually cut back on her medication for a while after she began a new relationship. And it was her birthday, so she was getting lots of attention, and that always had a therapeutic effect. Ironically, the fact that her body was now failing rapidly had calmed her and temporarily reduced her need for stimulants. Her body was giving up on her, and she was content just to rest for a while.

I was so relieved to find her sounding happy for a change. We had a good conversation—no guilt, no making me feel bad because I wasn’t with her. She told me that she and Mickey were going back to London in a few days, and that she wanted me and Joe to come over for summer vacation there. We could stay with her all summer and come back to California when school started in the fall. We talked about making plans to fly over when school ended in two weeks, and then I wished her a happy birthday and said good-bye.

That was the last time I ever talked to her. Five days later she and Mickey flew back to London, and four days after that, sometime late on Saturday night, June 22, 1969, she died. Later I would be glad that our final conversation had been such a good one.

I
got the news of her death from a friend’s mother. I had gone to a concert that night with a good friend from school, Jody Henderson. We’d gone to see the Young Rascals, a rock group from England that was popular at the time, and afterward I spent the night at Jody’s house. We’d had a great time and come home exhausted shortly after midnight and gone to bed. I was sound asleep in the twin bed in Jody’s room when for no apparent reason, I woke up. It must have been about three A.M., the time of my mother’s old night raids. I sat up in bed, wide awake, and looked around the room. It was dark and quiet. Everything looked fine. I felt a little odd, as though I’d had a dream that I couldn’t remember. Finally I thought, “Oh, well,” and lay back down again. A few minutes later I drifted back to sleep.