Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (32 page)

We pulled up to the side door, and I was the first one out of the car. I took Liza’s hand to lead the way in, and she grabbed hold of Joey, but halfway up the entrance carpet I lost hold of Liza’s hand when she slowed down for Joe. There’s a clip of me on an old newsreel turning around at that moment to wait for Liza, then grabbing her firmly by the hand and waiting for her to get a good grip on Joe. Joey, his sweet little face somber and pinched, turns around to take hold of my father’s hand, and then I turn back to the entrance door and lead us all in, hand in hand like a human chain. We all look pale as ghosts and determined to be brave.

Once inside, someone led us into the “family section,” the private area reserved for family and close friends. I remember wanting to turn around and look at the audience to see who was there, but I didn’t. It seemed rude, like staring at people during a church service. The service itself was small and private and didn’t last long. Father Peter Delaney, my mother’s old friend from London, officiated, and James Mason, Mama’s costar in
A Star Is Born,
gave the eulogy. Liza had originally wanted Mickey Rooney, but we were all afraid Mickey would fall apart and never make it through.

The family sat in the front row—me and Liza and Joe and Sid, and I think Mickey at the other end of the row; and Kay Thompson sat behind us with my godparents, Lester and Felicia Coleman. It was so hot, and I was getting dizzy. The coffin had been closed and was covered with a huge blanket of the most beautiful yellow roses
I’d ever seen, and the smell of the flowers only made me dizzier. After the eulogy they made us all sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” just as my mother had sung it when Jack Kennedy died. Kay Thompson nudged us and whispered, “Sing! Sing!” I suppose she thought my mother would have wanted us to. All I remember thinking was, “Why are they making us do this?” Then they had us all stand up as they lifted the coffin under its veil of yellow roses to carry it back down the aisle. Suddenly, I was afraid I was going to faint. The stress and the heat overwhelmed me, and I felt my knees buckle. Kay Thompson caught me from behind and literally held me up as they carried the coffin down the aisle.

Then they took us back into a side room, and I was shaking uncontrollably. I couldn’t stop. Felicia Coleman had helped me out, and I remember saying to her, “Please, I have to have something. Please, I can’t stand it. You have to give me something.”

Felicia turned to her husband and said, “Lester, can’t we give this child some medicine to calm her down? I really think she needs something.”

But Lester said, “She’ll be all right. I don’t want to give her anything.” At the time I thought he was being coldhearted, but in retrospect, I know he probably did the right thing. I think that, considering my genetics, he was really afraid to give me anything. And I did manage to pull myself together again and put on a brave face for the crowds outside. That’s the odd part of losing such a famous parent.

I spent much of my time that week trying to make total strangers feel better.

We didn’t go to the graveside. We all went back to Liza’s apartment. But not directly to the apartment. First Mickey Deans had a little errand to do. In a move that takes my breath away to this very day when I think of it, Mickey had scheduled a meeting and wanted me to go along. I hardly knew the man, but Liza said, “Why don’t you go with Mickey, then, and we’ll all meet back at my apartment.” I said “Okay,” and he and I got in a car, drove to a nearby office building, and went up a few floors and into a big office. I was too emotionally exhausted to pay any attention to
where we were. A few minutes later a man came in, and Mickey introduced me to him: “I wanted you to meet Lorna. Lorna, this is Mr. So and So.” I mechanically shook hands and said something polite and then just sat there in a daze in my funeral dress and hat while Mickey and the other man discussed some sort of business deal. I didn’t pay attention. Then we left.

Months later someone told me the other man was a publisher, and that Mickey had arranged to stop by on the way back from my mother’s funeral to cut a deal on a Judy Garland biography. I don’t know if it was true, but his book did come out a couple of years later under the title,
Weep No More, My Lady.
Needless to say, I didn’t buy a copy.

Mickey Deans. What a putz. He makes Kato Kaelin look like a Man of the Year.

After our meeting with the publisher and Mickey’s five minutes of fame, we went back to Liza’s apartment. The TV and radio were on all day, and every station seemed to be playing my mom’s music. They kept showing clips from
The Wizard of Oz
on television, and several of the newscasters did tributes to her. All in all, the TV news handled it very nicely. They showed the clip of the coffin being carried in over and over, and of us arriving at the funeral, but they were all very kind and respectful. I didn’t mind that part, but the radio really bothered me. All day long and into the evening they kept playing her songs over and over until I could hardly stand it. Everywhere I went, I could hear her voice. Late in the day Peter Allen’s sister, Lynne, put on my mother’s Carnegie Hall record, and I remember shouting, “Take it off. Please, just take it off. I can’t keep listening to that.”

But for some reason I still don’t understand, she said, “No, I won’t take it off. You must listen to this.”

When she said that, I really went off and started screaming at her, “Why is everyone doing this? Why do you keep forcing me to listen to her? Why can’t you just leave me alone?” But instead of taking the record off, Lynne just turned the volume up so we could hear it above my shouting. Angry and desperate to escape the sound, I went into the other room and slammed the door.

That night Liza came to me and asked me if I’d go with her and Mickey to see a friend of his out on Long Island and go swimming. It was hot, and Mickey didn’t want to go alone, and Liza thought it might be nice to get out of the apartment for a while. My dad had already gone back to another apartment with Joe. By then I was more than glad to get away from the crowd, even with Mickey Deans, so I said I’d go, and the three of us climbed into Mickey’s car and headed for the country.

It was a beautiful night, the sky filled with stars, and the air felt good on my face. As we drove, Liza pointed out the window at a particularly bright star and said, “Look, Lorna, it’s Mama.” I looked where she was pointing, and for the first time that day, I felt a moment of peace. I was longing for some silence by then, but there was still no escaping the sound of my mother’s voice. Mickey kept it tuned on the radio all the way out.

When we got to the friend’s house, we all sort of went our separate ways for a while. I was out in the backyard for a few minutes when suddenly I heard the strangest sound, like kids screaming, except not quite. It sounded so odd that I began to think the strain of the last few days was getting to me and that I was hearing things. But when the sound continued, I finally went to the owner and asked him, “What’s that noise?” Liza had heard it, too, and she couldn’t identify it, either. He said that he’d been an animal trainer for the circus when he was younger, and that he still had some of his favorite animals living in the basement of his house. Would we like to see them?

Liza and I looked at each other and said, “Sure.”

So he led us down the basement stairs and turned on the light, and there in cages all over the room sat these chimps. Their cages were roomy and clean, not like something out of a horror movie, and the chimps looked up cheerfully as we came into the room. They were incredibly cute. Liza and I took one look at each other and burst out laughing. We laughed so hard we nearly fell down. All I could think was, “This is perfect, just perfect,” and Liza said,
“Wouldn’t Mama just love this?” Nobody ever had a better sense of the ridiculous, or enjoyed a good story more, than my mother. The chimps were just the cherry on the sundae of that strangest of days. We laughed until we were sick and then, wiping tears of laughter from our eyes, told Mickey it was time to go home. We all got in the car and drove back to the city.

It wasn’t until we reached Manhattan and someone took me back to my dad and Joe that I finally escaped all the chaos of that endless day. The silence was blessed, and it felt so good to settle down in the sanity of my father and brother’s presence. We were all exhausted.

It was very late by the time I got to bed. For hours the only thing I had wanted was to be alone in a safe place. It’s hard to explain, but I knew that only by being alone could I be with my mother again, just for a moment. Only once during that terrible twenty-four hours had I felt her presence. I’d gone out into the darkness of the backyard in Long Island to be by myself for a moment and escape into the silence. It was a beautiful warm evening, and as I looked up at the stars, I began talking to my mother. It was so hard. And as I started to cry, suddenly I could feel her presence there next to me in the dark, comforting me. And it felt so good. I needed her so much.

I remember that moment when I read those horrendous tabloid stories about my mother’s ghost haunting my sister, taunting her and pushing her to collapse. I have felt my mother’s presence more than once since her death. So have my brother and sister. If my mother were really haunting Liza, it would only be to remind her of how very much she loves her. That night, in the darkness of the backyard at that ridiculous house, I felt her soothing me the same way she’d held me in her arms when I was a little girl.

I cried myself to sleep that night and for many weeks after. I missed my mother so much. I was sixteen years old, the same age my mom had been when she played Dorothy Gale, and I would never see her again.

Good-bye, Mama. I will miss you for the rest of my life.

Collection of the author

Me, singing “Over the Rainbow” at the neighborhood kid’s show at the Marymount School, 1963.

T
here’s an old proverb that says you should be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. I was about to discover just how true that was.

We stayed in New York for a week or two after my mother’s funeral, and then we returned home—me, Sid, Joey, and Patti—and settled into my dad’s apartment in West Los Angeles for good. At long last, I began the life I had longed for since I was eleven years old. I enrolled in Palisades High as a junior and began the normal teenage routine of school, homework, and dances in the gym on Friday nights. Patti, who for all practical purposes was already my stepmother (though my dad took his time about marrying her), took me and Joe to school every morning and picked us up every afternoon. We had regular meals, an orderly house, and eight hours of sleep every night. Life couldn’t have been more normal. We were practically the Brady Bunch. Peace, at long last.

I hated it.

I spent every hour planning my escape.

That’s the problem with living in continual chaos. It’s exhausting, sometimes frightening, like riding on a roller coaster blindfolded. The catch is that it’s also very exciting and very addictive. I had grown accustomed to a life of high drama, or at least
melodrama. For years I had survived on the daily adrenaline rush that came from coping with my mother, never knowing when the next crisis would break. I had also become accustomed to the life of a celebrity, always being in the middle of everything, clubbing with the rich and famous every night, staying up until all hours. The quiet domestic life in which I now found myself was as foreign to me as the old
Leave It to Beaver
reruns that still aired on afternoon television. It seemed old-fashioned and deadly dull. School? School was the place you met your friends, signed out for auditions, and then took off for the day. Study? You must be kidding.

And, of course, I was sixteen years old, drowning in hormones, trying to cope with life in the slow lane and a stepmother who was only ten years older than I was. It didn’t help that Patti was beautiful—tall, blonde, and gorgeous, with the full bust and hips that were still just a distant dream for me. At sixteen I was all legs, skinny as a rail, with barely a ripple under the bodice of my trendy clothes and hips that wouldn’t hold up my hot pants unless they were skintight. Just looking at Patti made me feel inadequate.