Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me...

by Stevie Phillips

Freddie got his pal Begelman into the company, and together they were trying to hustle comedians popular in the Borscht belt. They always brought me into their inner offices for dictation when calling someone impressive so that I could be impressed. Seemed to me they spoke to the A-list only when I was around. They were show-offs in the most charming way, full of themselves and aware of it, keeping things light all the time. When we left the building together they did their “crowded-elevator shtick,” which never failed to delight me. David might say something like: “She was so sick: sneezing, coughing, running a high fever. I tried desperately to keep away from her, but she was crawling all over me.” And then he would let out a huge fake sneeze, and I would watch as everyone in the elevator shrank into the corners, backing into one another to gain as much distance as possible from him. Or Freddie would do the one about the rash and then just happen to notice it on his hand. “Omigod, David!” he’d say, feigning abject horror. “What’s this? Do you think I caught it?” Nobody in the elevator had the slightest idea what “it” was, but from the horror etched on all the faces, you knew they thought “it” was at least as awful as the bubonic plague and clearly not worth catching. I would be giddy with laughter, trying my hardest not to give it up. They were both the most amusing men I’d ever met, and they liked that I liked them.

  Actually, at the start I had a crush on them both, but it wasn’t a physical thing; it was about their style. I loved their act, their two-man vaudeville show. They may have borrowed their shtick from the Borscht belt comedians they hung with, but I didn’t know that then. I simply thought they were hilarious. Sadly, I found myself comparing my husband with these two characters. He was so much kinder and sweeter, but he couldn’t make me laugh like they did. He didn’t have this pizzazz. On the other hand, he was real, while all the pizzazz was phony baloney. That I understood this didn’t matter.

  So when these two colorful characters told me they were going to open their own office, asking if I wanted to come along with them, I jumped all over it. Both their secretaries opted to stay with Universal because each, having been with the parent company more than ten years, was fully vested in the rich MCA pension plan. I heard the universe speaking loud and clear, telling me that Freddie and David would get to the top, telling me to bet on them, and if I was clever I could ride their coattails to success. Of all the agents that were flushed out into the larger world the day MCA’s doors closed, these were the two that would make it big-time.

  A woman entering show business in the sixties was nothing more than a scribe—not even. I was only a tad more noticeable because I was attractive and had a sense of my own style, even on a limited budget. I inherited vanity from my father and cared deeply about my appearance. I was also a flirt and always anxious to be thought of as pretty by men. Flirting was, sadly, one of the few ways to be noticed in an office back in the day. A nice smile and a clever remark went a long way toward helping a woman realize even the smallest of ambitions.

  One didn’t—I certainly didn’t—get an opportunity right away to demonstrate that my trendy hairdo framed a head with a brain in it, and although my two bosses were ready to acknowledge that I might have a brain, they weren’t ready to acknowledge it financially. Men got cash for Christmas; I got a handbag. It was a beautiful handbag, bought for me at Bendel’s by Freddie’s beautiful wife, Polly. I peeked inside with trepidation, hoping to find a check for even a hundred dollars, but there was none. Worse, I was still called on to fill in as a babysitter as a favor. You know what “favor” means.

  *

  The women’s movement didn’t fully get under way until Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Prior to that women were invisible or, if noticed at all, seen mainly as sex objects—certainly not as people with leadership potential. For most, work was only a means to an end. I, however, yearned for a meaningful career, a way of life, and I was beginning to understand just how impossible that was. I heard a little voice saying, Hey, wait a minute here. I’m just as smart as some of these palookas. I want the same chance they got. This had nothing whatever to do with sisterhood. I was thinking exclusively of myself.

  Fortunately for me, the bet that I made paid off. Freddie Fields and David Begelman started a company that grew to be one of the two or three largest agencies in the world. Although at the start they took advantage of my office skills, often leaving me at the end of a long day with enough typing to keep me working until midnight, I never once complained. (Sometimes one of them would come back at about ten with a thank-you and a buttered roll from Danny’s Hideaway.) I sucked up and soaked in everything. I had my eye on the summit from the start, and, by making the compromises to my marriage that I found necessary, I did in fact ride their coattails to success. A good part of the reason it happened had everything to do with Judy Garland.

  CHAPTER SIX

  How Good Is Real?

  Suddenly Judy Garland is standing in front of me. She has walked into the reception area of Freddie Fields Associates all bundled up. This very cold December afternoon at the end of 1960 is one that I will never forget. Thirteen-and-a-half-year-old Liza is with her. Judy’s hair is short. Not as I remembered her. Liza’s hair is halfway down her back. Not as most of you have ever thought of her. Judy, who has met Freddie only once at that point, has come to the office in order to meet his partner, David, to see exactly whom she has gotten back into business with. It is a red-letter day for me. The girl whose life I fell in love with, my idol, is standing three feet from me, and I am about to be introduced. I may be nothing more than part of the wallpaper to her, but I am giddy with anticipation, delight bubbling up inside me. I imagine I am one big step closer to my childhood dream of walking through the screen and making Judy’s life mine. In that moment on that fateful day, I forget I have heard she can be trouble. I forget she is no longer welcome in Hollywood. I forget that what I loved was Judy’s screen life. My mind wipes out everything but the feel of her hand in mine. There is no way in that electric moment that I can imagine anything but the rainbow. And of course there is no way I can imagine putting out a fire she will set to herself at the Plaza ten months down the road.

  “I found Judy in a tiny second-floor walk-up in an uninteresting neighborhood in London,” Freddie has told us. “I confronted a small Buddha unable to earn more than five hundred bucks for any appearance. It looked like she spent most of her time eating.” Judy then tells him she wants to get back into films, and Freddie makes her a promise tied to her weight: The more she loses, the bigger the movie roles will get. Judy takes up the challenge; her diet will start completely on Freddie’s dime. Using plane tickets he has happily paid for, she gets on the plane to New York with her three children, Liza, Lorna, and Joey. Freddie has a limo bring her from Idlewild Airport directly to the office. She takes my hand and flashes her million-dollar smile.

  She has become Freddie’s third client. His wife, Polly, and his best friend, Phil Silvers, have loyally followed him into his new company. These two have given him not only a launching pad, but also a head start in earnings. His dream, however, has been to do something spectacular, something that will attract major attention from the entire industry and kick-start the company on the road to success. Freddie has divined that the answer is Judy Garland. He is determined to arrange a comeback that will restore Judy to her former stardom and glory. This is the miracle he needs to put his new management company, Freddie Fields Associates, on the map.

  My becoming Judy’s shadow (I don’t know what else to call myself here) was totally unplanned. David sent me to her hotel with some papers for her signature. After she signed them, she asked me to sit and talk for a while. She needed company—not wanted, needed. It was clear from the first that she hated being alone. The children could be parked in a room next door (and in fact they were), but they were company only when she wanted to be with them. I was adult company, and I was immensely flattered. Beyond! I had been with the company all of four months at the time and didn’t expect to
actually talk to a star other than on the phone when I said, “I’ll put you through now.” I want to remind you that I was nothing more than the office’s all-purpose schlepper, file clerk, typist, stenographer, babysitter, coffeemaker/-getter, and the occasional messenger, which is what brought me to Judy’s door at the Drake.

  And when I walked through that door, I opened a whole new chapter in my life. Only what I thought was going to be a thrilling chapter became instead a whole book, and not the kind of book I would ever have imagined. Entering that room changed my life from ordinary into something else entirely. I walked in a total innocent, perhaps a bit lonely and worn down by family dysfunction, but still just a girl.

  Judy did her impressions of Freddie, and she was not only funny but also a good mimic. I would discover that her imitations were always slightly skewed to the ridiculous and coupled with a soupçon of nastiness that comes from anger. But all I knew on that particular day was that we laughed and generally had a pleasant time. She was on her best behavior then and maybe for a few days more. She had some old friends in New York to go out with whom she hadn’t seen in a long time.

  Short of a week, however, her good behavior was finished. And then the calls started to come—calls to Freddie and David in which she demanded their undivided attention. If she couldn’t reach them, she got pissed. And then she settled for me, and I became no longer available to them. She was plummeting back into what the guys would quickly learn was her normal behavior, and while the elevator was going down she would keep one of us on the telephone endlessly, making it impossible for that person to do anything else but talk to her all day.

  Freddie and David understood immediately that being with her 24/7 was not going to work for them. They couldn’t do business. They decided in the very first week that they could not endure following her around on the concert tour they were planning. Judy was needy to the point of desperation, and they had to find a way to handle it. They’d taken notice that when I was around she was always happier—or if not happier, at least satisfied. This presented them with a unique opportunity to use me, and being the good users they were, they were totally willing to sacrifice me to appease the entertainment gods who were allowing them to build a company.

  *

  Would Judy ever be salable again? Could she be counted on to show up on time? Would she show up at all? The game plan was to book her into large venues and prove to the Hollywood community that she still had a huge following. F&D (kindly allow me to abbreviate them) wanted to establish a reliability factor, to show the world that she could perform night after night and deal with a difficult schedule.

  Although he didn’t talk about it much, Freddie had started his career as a kid in the Borscht belt, where being a waiter gave anyone who wanted it an education in personal appearances. He learned a lot about nightclub acts, about production, about lighting and stage design. He decided to take me with him on Judy’s first few concerts in Texas to show me the light cues; he taught me how to call the show (which meant giving the light cues to the electrician backstage) and watched me do it a couple of times.

  Given that I could, I became her stage manager. Then, having discovered that I was a fast learner who could handle other road chores such as the load-in, the stage setup, and the sound check, he cut back his handholding. F&D could stay in New York while I went to such cities as Buffalo and Birmingham, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, places they had no interest in (and not exactly places I had dreamed about traveling to either).

  F&D thought they were home free, and to a large extent they were right, for they now had a wage-slave assistant for Judy who could double as a constant companion. It was my husband who suddenly, after only a year and a half of marriage, had no one. But he didn’t see it that way. Although I would sometimes be gone for a good part of every week, during which he had to fend for himself, he thought this was a groundbreaking career opportunity, and with the generosity that was so characteristic of his good nature, he was happy for me.

  I, on the other hand, was grateful for the chance to get away from the marriage. Being on the road with Judy persuaded me that I didn’t have a clue about marriage, or my role in it. More to the point, I was now swelling with hope that I was well on my way to the success I lusted after, and marriage was damn inconvenient. I was running Judy Garland’s shows. I was traveling in limousines, and talking with authority to members of the press. I was full of myself.

  When you worked with Judy, you took good care to take good care of her. It was expected that anyone in that job would want to do that, and I did. Judy Garland was, after all, a public treasure, beloved by millions for her brilliant body of work and cherished by children all over the world who had grown up watching The Wizard of Oz year after year. She was an object of universal adoration, and deservedly so. And now, my having acknowledged that, my having made the all-important disclaimer, I have to tell you that “time-intensive” doesn’t begin to describe what it was like to work with her. She was demanding beyond any dictionary definition. As jaded as it may sound, the thrill of being with her night and day faded fast.

  Road manager was only just the start of it. I grew quickly into much larger boots—with nasty cleats and steel-tipped toes. I had no choice in the matter (except quitting, not an option). In addition to handling the load-in, the stage setup, and the sound check, I now also handled the press. For me there were precious few hours between the end of one concert and the start of another. A day with Judy ended around four in the morning, and the new day began with the load-in for the next concert at 10:00 a.m. Time was not my friend. There was never enough of it. And, of course, traveling with Judy was necessarily all about her all the time. The things I might do for myself like occasionally go to a hairdresser or take my clothes to the cleaner didn’t happen because I had no free time. I saw to it, however, that every radio interview started on time, that her hair was always perfect, that her designer clothes were meticulously pressed. I made sure that a bottle of her liebfraumilch was no farther than her grasp and that she would never have to ask for it lest that make her the slightest bit uncomfortable. A lovely glass and the bottle magically appeared wherever and whenever. She preferred to do her own makeup but wanted me in the room when she did it in case she couldn’t find something right in front of her. This had everything to do with her compulsive need to have someone there, and nothing to do with lost lipsticks. She simply could not stand to be alone.

  Freddie and David started to believe that I could fend for myself, and if I couldn’t—well, that was my tough luck. I was expendable. Once I’d left to go on tour with Judy, I was out of their hair and beyond their care. What happened to me in the boonies was not important. If I became roadkill, someone else would pick up the body. For as long as I lasted, I was giving them breathing room.

  However, having discovered that my serving Judy solved a huge problem for my two bosses, I wanted to make sure that no other person ever replaced me. I wanted to impress them; I wanted to become indispensable to them. For this I needed to appear supremely confident, and, in truth, I wasn’t confident at all. I was a twenty-four-year-old innocent who knew almost nothing about the workings of show business, and in terms of worldly experiences, I hadn’t amassed any. I was hardly more than a clumsy grown-up child in trendy clothing, only a small step ahead of the demure secretaries who still wore straw hats and white gloves in the summer.

  The eighteen-wheel semi that rolled all night with the risers, the lights, the music stands, the scores, and the costumes pulled into the new venue in each city sometime after nine. It was then that I would have to start functioning on about three hours’ sleep if I was lucky. I went to each load-in already dressed for that night’s concert, because I knew there wouldn’t be any chance to change. By two in the afternoon my makeup usually looked as if it had been applied with a trowel. I wasn’t exactly a natural beauty, and without eyeliner and eyebrow pencil, my green eyes disappeared into my olive complexion and I became featureless. But the road was inten
se and permitted no time for personal touch-ups. I ran up and down the aisles all day long like a perfect Miss Know-It-All, with authority I granted myself to talk for one of the world’s greatest entertainers.

  Although she was starting to make money again, we hadn’t enough extra to pay for a roadie (those guys we see before a concert dragging cables around the stage, checking the amplifiers and the setup) and so I was the one dragging the cables and I was still getting my secretarial wages of $150 a week. It was just the two of us together, traveling on the cheap. She did the only important thing. She sang. I did everything else, beginning with calling the show from the light booth.

  After a while every city looked the same to me—that is, what I got to see of it, which was precious little. Occasionally Judy sent me out into the city to look for a pair of new tights or one of the smocks she loved wearing. Her liver was distended, and maternity smocks hid a figure problem that would endure until she dropped more weight. Often we were on the road for four days and back in New York for three, and on those days when I was home, I role-played the little wife, trying to make all the road anecdotes entertaining to my husband and our friends. Judy would go home to the children, who were now settled in an apartment I’d rented for her at the legendary Dakota.

  After I caught up on my sleep I always went to the office to catch up on the filing and to be debriefed, my menial mind-set still firmly locked in. And then one day when I went to FFA, I discovered that Freddie had hired someone new, someone permanent. No more temps replacing me. I was no longer their secretary. Freddie had found an elegant man named Jeff Hand who was part valet, part social secretary, and part confidant. Whatever he was, he was above filing. But I had no time to worry about that, for all too quickly concert time would roll around again, and it was back to planes and limos, hotels and halls.

  But there was something else going on here besides simply getting Judy out onstage and getting the job done. Sure, it was a fast-track education in working a show, but way more important, it was a high-speed education in addiction, in the human behavior of a very troubled soul. I couldn’t put Judy in the same category with anyone I’d ever met in my life up to that point. And yet, peculiarly enough, it wasn’t my first exposure to people who have to drink.