Judy Garland: A Biography

by Anne Edwards

  “No. Judy’s,” Tormé replied honestly.

  During the time of the filming of the television series, Judy was seeing and appeared to be very much in love with Glenn Ford. He was very attentive, and Judy dropped small hints that they might marry.

  By the end of the series, the affair was over and Judy in romantic limbo. Luft was in California and they once again had drawn swords. And Judy, in fear—by her own admission—of being bodily attacked, hired a bodyguard. Perhaps it was good that the personal side of her life was as traumatic as it was then; for after Judy had gone through twenty-six torturous shows and nearly a year of exhausting work; of having to fight through the cyclone winds of her addiction and her physical disabilities; of suffering monstrous tensions, crash dieting, infighting, and the insecurities caused by the ups and downs of television ratings, The Judy Garland Show was dropped. But it seemed destined to happen. A weekly hour format for Judy Garland was never a feasible idea. With her physical and psychological problems, there was no way to ensure that she could be consistent each week. And had she been able to hold up, and had she been presented each week alone and “in concert”—her best format—no audience could have sustained such a weekly assault on their emotions.

  Norman Jewison had said when he began the program: “Judy is a legend in her own time. She is a combination of Sammy Davis, Jr., Aimee Semple McPherson, and Greta Garbo.” Recognizing that, it is difficult to understand why both Jewison and CBS would then try to turn her into a combination of Crosby, Como, and Shore.

  What was wrong with the genuine, the legendary Judy Garland?

  33Directly after the cancellation of the television series, Judy was booked on a Far East tour to begin at Melbourne, Australia. For the first time on any such extended tour, she was to go without a manager or agent close at hand. But she had met a tall, dark, slender, aesthetically attractive young man, recently returned from Europe where he had performed a walk-on part in the Federico Fellini film 8½. Mark Herron, who was then in his late twenties, had graduated from theater groups in Los Angeles and Arizona and was now a Hollywood film hopeful. A friend, former child star Roddy McDowall—who was also close to Judy—introduced the two. Nervous about making the long trip “unchaperoned,” Judy asked Herron to join her as her secretary or tour manager. Early press reports referred to him, however, as her “traveling companion.”

  In looking back, it seems inconceivable that sensible men like Fields and Begelman would have arranged such a strenuous tour for Judy at a time when her health was failing badly and her addiction ruling her mind and body. But one must also be aware of Judy’s incredible ability to pull herself together time and time again and to appear so vibrant and full of energy (as she had during the shooting of the television series) that her true condition was masked and visible only to those sensitive enough to perceive the truth: that her “highs” were induced by grit, guts—but mostly pills. It was difficult for those on the outside to grasp the truth of her physical condition. Many of her hospital visits were attributed to nerves, exhaustion, or pills; and observers were prone to chalk up her “indispositions” as emotional disorders rather than physical warnings. For those close to her, it was another matter. Their own needs took precedence, coloring their final judgment. Any other man or woman in Judy’s state of health would have been hospitalized for a complete medical rundown, institutionalized for drug addiction, and finally retired—or at the very minimum, restricted to some less demanding work.

  Liza said, after her mother’s death, “Mama was just like a beautiful flower that withered and died.” That was now exactly what was occurring. She was withering. Her liver and kidney were both diseased. She had the beginning of a colon obstruction which made digestion painful—later she was to have a rectal obstruction, causing excruciating pain; she was plagued by anemia; and her nervous system was badly shattered. The pills had created a serious imbalance—a lack of coordination, at times, which caused her to fall as often as she did, requiring medical attention over twenty times. There is no way of knowing how often she hit her head during those falls, perhaps suffering minor concussions.

  As though she were not beset by enough trials, her stutter had grown increasingly noticeable. She became terribly self-conscious about it—but finally was able to employ the disability to her advantage, playing it up for humor or effect, covering it by adding a little circular, swinging gesture of her hand whenever a word was difficult to enunciate. The stutter, accompanied by that gesture, was to become a private “trademark” that all those close to her eventually aped even in her presence. In fact, one could pick out any person close to Judy by the use of Judy’s mannerism. The hand would seem to stutter with her, moving forward in tiny jerks. Finally the letter or word would roll out, and the hand would roll forward with it in a flourishing circular movement. The palm would open, the fingers spread—and the word would be freed.

  From the time of the Far East trip, she had no weight problem. It was quite the reverse—as with each passing year, she grew frailer, more birdlike. It is difficult, in fact, to know or understand what kept her going and even more difficult to comprehend how she was able to perform at all. For a Garland appearance was as physically debilitating and exhausting as a fighter going ten stiff rounds.

  The flight to Melbourne, because of her fear of flying and the imbalance produced by the nineteen-hour time difference, nearly did her in. In order to remain awake at the proper hours so that she could appear when scheduled, she had to take an extra large dosage of amphetamine. This made her unsteady on her feet and caused her to be an hour late at her concert. When the impatient and massive crowd of seventy thousand in that giant outdoor amphitheater saw her stumble from the wings, they assumed she was drunk and began to yell insults at her.

  “I love you too,” Judy called nervously back at them, but her audience was not in the mood for humor. They continued to heckle her. “Sing, sing! Get on with it!” they shouted.

  Judy stood unsure of herself for a few moments. Her hand was shaking and she had trouble with the mike. She was keenly aware of a hostility from her audience and she was badly thrown by it.

  Not being in her best voice, she nonetheless gave them a vital and conscientious performance lasting forty-five minutes. Considering her physical condition at the time, the performance was a miracle; but the Australians, set back by the delay and still suspecting she was drunk, as her footing was unsteady, could not be warmed up. They reacted indifferently, occasionally calling out a rude remark. Finally, during the song “I’ll Go My Way by Myself,” Judy put the microphone down on the edge of the stage and, in her own words, “got the hell out of it.” It was an upsetting experience. It was the first time she had run away from an audience and the first time she had ever felt she had to.

  The Sydney concert that followed went on without incident, but Judy was finding the trip exhausting and perilous. Her next scheduled stop was Hong Kong. There had been typhoon warnings, but in order to arrive in time, she had flown through extremely bad weather—reaching the Mandarin Hotel just before ninety-mile-an-hour gale winds began battering the city. Feeling very strange on arrival, she chalked it up to the strain of the last two concerts, the terror of her recent flight, and the unnerving sound of the storm winds beating at the hotel shutters outside her room, and asked to be left alone to rest. Some hours later Mark Herron checked to see if she was all right. Finding her unconscious on her bed, he rang for help, whereupon she was rushed to a nearby hospital. Local doctors, finding she had already been in a coma many hours, administered oxygen and worked over her body in a desperate effort to save her life. Finally, after fifteen long, critical hours, she gained consciousness. At that time a sobbing Herron spoke to the press. “She is very bad, very bad. The doctors won’t tell me anything,” he cried, and he asked the reporters—who had access to Telex machines—to immediately notify Freddie Fields in California.

  By the following day Judy was able to speak; she smiled; but she was pathetically weak. The
press now hinted at an overdose of sleeping pills. Herron and the hospital denied this, as they did reports that it had been a heart attack. Exhaustion was given as the cause of her serious collapse. Fields had flown Dr. Lee Seigel in from Hollywood. Dr. Seigel diagnosed her ailment as “pleurisy, a chest inflammation usually accompanied by high temperatures and difficulty in breathing.” Rest was prescribed; and Dr. Seigel, after assuring himself and Judy, too, that she would be all right, returned to Hollywood. Judy weighed a frail and dangerous seventy-eight pounds. She was very weak, but she told the press with a smile, “I’m going to be all right.”

  Then on June 11, just fifteen days after her traumatic fight for life, Judy and Herron appeared in a local nightclub, wearing matching jade rings, and announced they had been married. Her “recovery” seemed incredible enough; but her marriage was unexplainable, as she was not yet legally divorced from Luft. Still, she insisted, “We’ve been married five days now,” and added, “I’m very happy.” Then, though still frail, Judy appeared able enough to join in the entertainment and sing a rather breathy version of “Over the Rainbow,” to overwhelming applause. She beamed and leaned heavily on Herron’s arm as they left the club.

  Reporters piled in on them at the hotel, and Herron was quoted the next day as saying, “We were married about six days ago—I don’t know what day it was. It was on board a ship. We had rented it for the day. We were just anchored in the harbor here in Hong Kong. It was sundown. I don’t know the name of the ship. A very nice Chinese fellow stood up for me. I don’t know his name. Judy wore a tan suit and she looked lovely. We’re both very happy and excited.”

  Irving Erdheim, Judy’s New York lawyer, did not have similar emotions. Alarmed that maybe his client had committed bigamy, he muttered a statement about beginning an immediate check to see if a Mexican divorce from Luft had come through. Freddie Fields told the press: “It’s impossible. Judy isn’t divorced from Sid Luft yet.” Guy McIllwaine, her press agent, declared, “It must be a gag!”

  Now came the even more unbelievable news release from Herron that they had just been married a second time in a traditional Chinese ceremony. He added the information that they had exchanged their first vows aboard the Bodo, an eighteen-thousand-ton Norwegian cargo ship, and that the service had been performed by a Captain Naavik with the crew as witnesses, and that the boat had been three miles off the Hong Kong coast.

  Norman A. Zierold in The Child Stars has this to say about the reports of what followed:

  With mystery trailing behind, Judy and Herron now sailed on board the liner President Roosevelt for Tokyo. Back in Hong Kong, the marine department stated it could find no record of the Bodo, on which the first ceremony presumably took place outside Hong Kong territorial waters, and a government spokesman said that in any event it was only a widely held myth that ships’ captains have the authority to marry people. As for the second ceremony, the spokesman declared, the colony’s law had long recognized Chinese-style traditional marriages as being for Chinese only. Judy dismissed repeated questions about their marriage certificates by saying they were “locked away!”

  After leaving Japan, Judy, a few pounds heavier but still birdlike, and supporting herself against Herron, spoke to the press: “Mr. Herron and I were blessed for a life together, but we were not married. We are blessed to be married and will be married later.” They revealed that their plans were to go to London and appear in a play together. But what is the most overwhelming impression of this entire Eastern charade is the resolute fashion in which Judy sought to prove the marriage to the world.

  Herron and Judy returned to Los Angeles, where Luft wasted no time in filing an affidavit for the custody of the children, claiming that Judy should be denied the custody because “she is emotionally disturbed and imbalanced.” He claimed in the same affidavit that Judy had attempted suicide more than twenty times. Judy was present in the courtroom when the charges were read, but left the courthouse extremely distraught.

  She had been met on her homecoming with the distressing news that her sister Sue had died while she had herself been ill in Hong Kong—word having been withheld from her at the time. A week later, she was back in the hospital (Cedars of Lebanon, where Joey had been born), and the doctor in attendance declared to the press that she had been suffering severe abdominal pains and that he was conducting further tests. There was some speculation about the possibility of appendicitis, but nothing further came of that.

  Following her hospital release, apparently well enough at least to travel, Judy and Herron flew to Copenhagen and then to London. It was supposed to be a holiday, a vacation away from all her woes—but on her arrival in London, she appeared in a very distressed state. Shortly thereafter she was admitted to the casualty department of St. Stephen’s Hospital, suffering from injuries to her wrists—which she claimed had occurred while she was using scissors to open a trunk bound with metal. Ninety minutes later, she was released, but she entered a nursing home.

  Receiving an invitation to appear at the biggest charity show of the London season, Night of a Thousand Stars, Judy disobeyed doctors’ orders and left the nursing home on her own recognizance, appearing only a few hours later backstage at the Palladium, where the show was being held. She told the show’s director that she could not sing, but that she would simply take a bow and say a few words. Following the Beatles, she stepped out of the wings into a single spotlight. As soon as the audience saw her, they went absolutely wild. A spokesman for the Palladium said, “I think if Judy hadn’t sung, there would have been a riot.” They cheered and stamped and shouted, “Sing, Judy, sing!” with far different meaning in their voices than when her Melbourne audience had shouted similar words, and Judy reacted emotionally to them. There were tears in her eyes, and she kept mumbling, “Bless you—bless you.” There were cries for “Over the Rainbow.” Judy beamed, but shook her head and waved as she began to back away from the microphone.

  But the cheers continued, and she returned to stand alone on the gargantuan stage, the huge Palladium orchestra in the pit below her. Pitifully small, very pale, and weighing only ninety pounds, she looked as if she might need support. Taking the mike in her hand, she sat down on the edge of the stage—her huge eyes seeming vast in the frailness of her tiny face as the spotlight hit them. The audience hushed immediately. You could have heard a match strike. The band played the familiar introduction, and Judy began to sing in a soft, breathy voice that became more vibrant as the song progressed. Never had she sung the song “Over the Rainbow” more poignantly; never had an audience been more moved. They jumped to their feet when she had finished and cried and cheered, refusing to let her off the stage, then hushed again as she laughed nervously—to encore with a rousing performance of “Swanee.”

  Shirley Bassey was to follow, but Judy’s encore had ended in such wild acclaim that it was impossible to do anything but end the show with Judy onstage, thereby cancelling Miss Bassey’s number. There was the same audience madness that had occurred at Carnegie Hall. The Beatles and all the other stars, including Miss Bassey, came out onstage and massed around her, congratulating her as the audience surged forward in an effort to come as close as the pit orchestra would permit.

  And once again the press stated, “Judy Garland sang her way back to the dramatic comeback of the year ...”

  Happy in London, she remained there throughout the summer; but things were not right between Herron and herself, and he was often away (later Judy was to say that Herron had “conducted our relationship from a moving telephone booth”); and by September she had taken ill again—September 24 finding her back in a nursing home with an “acute abdominal condition but there is no danger.”

  Within a month, Luft’s charge that she was an unfit mother came to Superior Court in Santa Monica, California. Judy was in London. The portrait sketched of her in the courtroom was a frightening one. Luft had as witness a young man in his employ, Vernon Alves, who was to function later as his “production assistant.�
� Alves claimed Judy used barbiturates, had once tried to jump from a hotel window, and many times had spoken to the children in a loud and intoxicated voice. He also claimed he had seen Judy in a hotel suite in Philadelphia “running around without any clothes on . . . from room to room, screaming and accusing everyone of everything. I spent most of my time trying to catch her as she was bouncing off the wall. The last thing I did was catch her before she got out the window and throw her down on the couch.”

  The second witness was a maid—Rhoda Chiolak, who was in the Lufts’ employ from 1954 to i960 and from 1962 to 1963, and who substantiated Luft’s charges. It was a wild picture of Judy and was made more bizarre by Luft’s introducing Glenn Ford’s name and also asking that Judy’s money be held in receivership for the two children on the ground that she was squandering “the family fortune” on her current companion, Mark Herron. With all of this, Luft still failed to win any portion of the case, and Judy retained custody of the children. But Judy, in turn, dropped a “petition for contempt” order against Luft.

  Liza joined her mother in London and on November 8, 1964, shared the bill with her at the Palladium. It was Liza’s first major concert appearance, and Judy gave her full rein. Liza, long-haired and teen-aged, youth and talent brimming over, showed more than future potential. She was the stuff of star material, and sometimes it was difficult to tell the two voices apart.

  The concert with Liza seemed to be a turning point. Judy returned to the States on a concert tour, but it was obvious that her health was on the decline and that her performances were being badly affected. Many concerts were either cancelled or postponed. During one in Cincinnati she had to walk off in the middle of a performance; this time, though, it was because she had become too ill to stand on her feet.