Judy Garland: A Biography

by Anne Edwards

  When Judy signed the Group V contract she was hopeful that some of her problems would be solved by its existence. Instead, from that date to the end of her life, it was to cause her privation, humiliation, and a shattering of her self-dignity.

  35Her world was now a sky crowded with dark and threatening clouds. When one came close enough, the clouds were seen to be clusters of maggots. They swarmed about her in the nighttime because she had come to be a nocturnal creature. Not that she liked the night. She feared it with such an intensity that she could not sleep until it had passed; nor could she be alone—or in the dark. All night, where-ever she was, the lights would blaze and the radio would blast and there would be people making her drinks she seldom touched, drinking her liquor, milling about, feeding their own convoluted dreams on her desperation.

  Liza was living with Peter Allen in an apartment in central Manhattan. Her career was zooming ahead and she was very much occupied. But Luft, on the road again as Judy’s manager, did not complain if she kept Lorna and Joey. Liza has said of her early years that it was difficult to know who was mother and who was daughter. The pattern was repeating itself with Lorna, whose maternalism overlapped her mother’s and encompassed her younger brother. In 1966-67 they really had no home and were constantly on the move from one hotel to another. Judy still controlled the mortgage on the Rockingham Drive house, but its ownership was in serious jeopardy.

  Mickey Deans came into her life as early as 1966, though they did not get together until more than a year later. Deans was managing Arthur, the fashionable discotheque owned by Sybil (the ex-Mrs. Richard) Burton. He had been a pianist at Jilly’s, a well-known local bar that had always attracted famous theatrical personalities. He was a good musician, very personable, an ardent conversationalist with a winning small-boy smile—the kind that said, Yeah ma, I’m guilty, but I love you and I didn’t mean to do it! He was very ambitious. Perhaps his job at Arthur was tough for him to accept in view of his showbiz ambitions; but he fed upon the knowledge that he was where the action was—and he was able to meet the top celebrities and entrepreneurs in New York City.

  His world was also a nighttime world, a world of wild music and frenetic sound, of booze and pills, of theater people, gay people, prostitutes, celebrities, musicians, the hangers-on and the con men. And his world did not shut down until four in the morning, at which time he was too wound up to go to bed.

  In an article he wrote for Look magazine, Deans describes his first meeting with Judy at a time when Judy could not pull herself together to fly to a performance.

  I first met Judy Garland in 1966. A mutual friend called me from the West Coast and asked if I would take an envelope to be delivered to me by a doctor over to Judy, who was in trouble at the St. Regis Hotel in New York.

  I agreed, and a little later, a doctor dropped by Arthur, the discotheque I was then managing. He left a small package with me, and I took it to Judy. When I knocked on the door of the hotel suite, it was opened by little Lorna Luft. Behind her stood her brother Joey, eyes wide with fear and apprehension.

  Judy stood across the room. Her hair was undone and obviously graying at the roots. She was wearing a cocktail dress but no shoes. In an attempt at graciousness, she started woozily across the room only to trip and fall across an ottoman. We both laughed, and this relieved the tension. As we smiled at each other, I heard Lorna telling Joey not to worry as this was the doctor.

  I gave Judy the envelope, which contained “ups,” pep pills. She popped them into her mouth along with some of her own pills, pulled herself together and made the plane she had been in danger of missing.

  Deans was not to see Judy again for quite a time, and by then she had blocked out the circumstances of their first meeting as she had been able to block out most of the unsavory day-by-day happenings in her life at this period. During the long, torturous months that were to intervene, she was, however, seldom alone. Luft and Alves, after the signing of the Group V contract, were at hand when a concert was imminent and during a performance. Bobby Cole had come back into her life as musical director, and he and his wife, Delores, were always on call. There were to be two semiserious romantic liaisons: with Tom Green, who also functioned as a publicity assistant to Luft and Group V, and with John Meyer, who was likewise involved in publicity; there were those members of the Garland Cult who called themselves “The Garland Group” and who lived vicariously and by any means, simply to be close to Judy; there were the various doctors who ministered to her; and there were members of her public relations firm.

  In the spring of 1967, Judy came to New York and stayed at the St. Regis. It was a very joyous occasion: Liza and Peter Allen were to be married. But also, she had been cast in the film version of the best-selling Jacqueline Susann novel Valley of the Dolls. The role she had signed to play was that of Helen Lawson, “an aging queen of Broadway musicals who had the talent to get to the top—and had the claws to stay there.”

  A press conference was arranged at the hotel by Twentieth Century-Fox, which was producing the film. “So I’m cast in the part of an older woman,” Judy told the press. “Well, I am an older woman. I can’t go on being Dorothy for the rest of my life.”

  John Gruen, interviewing her for the New York Herald Tribune in the chaotic shambles of her suite at dinnertime, asked her how she felt about being called a legend. “If I’m a legend, then why am I so lonely?” she shot back.

  He observes:

  . . . She stood rail thin, her sleeveless black dress emphasizing the thinness. Her face is gaunt; the eyes enormous. There is electricity in her presence, but she seems disconnected just now. She reels around a bit, her speech comes in splutters, but she is cheerful, friendly, apologetic for the mess . . .

  . . . Suitcases are open on the beds. Clothes hang from hangers or lie on chairs and couches. Phonograph records, mainly of Judy and Liza, are strewn around the room, there are flowers, letters, bills, messages, photographs and empty glasses on the various tables of the three room suite.

  She had just heard the news that the banks had foreclosed the mortgage on her Rockingham Drive house and her furniture and private possessions were in danger of being lost. The news had come while Gruen was interviewing her. “Well,” she joked nervously, “if worse comes to worse, I can always pitch a tent in front of the Beverly Hilton and Lorna can sing gospel hymns! That should see us through. . . . Lorna is already showing signs of becoming a fabulous singer.” She added, “I think Lorna will make it very, very big one day.”

  According to Gruen, Lorna, then fourteen, pale blonde and blue-eyed like her father, stood close at hand during the interview, as did eleven-year-old Joey, his dark, slender face shadowed with private concern. Liza, the Coles, Tom Green and assorted others were present. Judy was not shy about discussing the truth openly.

  “Why should I always be rejected?” she inquired. “All right, so I’m Judy Garland. But I’ve been Judy Garland forever. Luft always knew this, Minnelli knew it, and Mark Herron knew it.”

  Judy left New York to continue work on Valley of the Dolls, accompanied by publicist Tom Green, who was being referred to as her “fiancé.” From the very beginning, Judy felt accepting this role had been a mistake. The further she continued into the film, the more convinced she was. With an instinct that the film could do nothing for her career and that in the end it would be a commercial but dirty film, she decided to do what she could to get out of the contract. A curious dichotomy of values and morals guiding her actions, she refused to appear on the set when she felt that a scene was either dirty or that she did not believe the dialogue. There followed accusations that these “delays” were caused by her drug addiction and her drunkenness. It certainly was true that she was as reliant as always upon the pills (she was not drinking, however) and that the daytime work schedule of a film caused a difficult imbalance to her nervous system, but Judy, unless physically incapable (and a translation of this phrase would mean totally unable to stand on her feet), could always fulfill
a commitment if the drive—the true desire—was there.

  Having relied on others in the decision that she appear in Valley of the Dolls, she had been guilty of not reading the script until the cameras were ready to roll. When she did, she was appalled. “That very strange Jacqueline Susann doesn’t seem to know any words with more than four letters,” she commented, adding, “I just can’t stomach it.” And the night before she was to shoot her first scene, she tersely said of Helen Lawson (her role), “That broad has a dirty mind.” After the scene, which involved a confrontation with Patty Duke as Neely, she cracked, about Miss Duke, “That broad has a dirty mouth.”

  She wanted a release from her contract, and since the studio refused to give it to her, she in turn refused to appear before the cameras. Finally, the studio was forced to fire her, paying her $40,000 in settlement and replacing her with Susan Hayward. (The film subsequently did very little for Miss Hayward’s career.) She was also given the $5,000 sequined paisley pants suit that Trevilla had designed for her to wear in the film. The suit—which was as spectacular as it was heavy and almost painful to wear—was to become a major costume for all her future appearances.

  Shortly thereafter, Judy signed the Group V Ltd. contract and Luft booked her on a backbreaking musical tent tour during the hot months of June and July, ending with a stand at the Westbury, Long Island Music Fair, where the box office took in a record-breaking $70,000 in six days.

  On July 31, 1967, Judy, under Luft’s auspices, appeared for the third time at the Palace in a Group V Ltd. production called Judy Garland, At Home at the Palace. It was a family affair. The program proclaimed that “During the course of Miss Garland’s performance she will introduce her protegés, Lorna and Joey Luft.” Luft’s staff included Vernon Alves, Assistant to the Producer, and Tom Green, Director of Public Relations for Group V Ltd. Appearing with Judy were the immortal black vaudevillian John Bubbles (the original Sportin’ Life in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess), who had shared the bill with Judy when she had appeared at the Met; comedian Jackie Vernon; and a former Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey Circus star, Francis Brunn.

  She entered from the back of the theater in the now-famous sequined pants suit, looking fragile (she weighed ninety-six pounds), “jogging down the aisle, hugging admirers, shaking hands and just plain shaking” (Time, August 18,1967).

  “This is going to be an interesting performance,” she told her audience from the stage in a hoarse voice, “because I have absolutely no voice. But I’ll fake. Oh well, maybe I’ll hit the notes because you’re so nice and because it’s so good to be home.”

  “I love you, Judy,” screamed a man from the balcony. “I love you too,” she called back. Then, moving to stage center, looking like some lost but beautiful blue jay on that vast stage, and singing in a warm and certain lower register, she opened the show with “I Feel a Song Coming On.” It ended in a powerful crescendo, and after the wild applause quieted she laughingly commented, “My! I’m a loud lady!” She struck a saucy hands-on-hips pose. “No crooner I,” she added.

  Later in the program she asked the audience, “What should I do now?”

  Again shouts from the balcony and a man’s voice, “Just stand there, Judy.”

  “I get too scared to stand here,” she replied. “Guess I’d better sing.”

  And sing she did, belting out the old favorites, bringing a terrible intensity to songs like “The Man That Got Away” and a moving poignancy to “Over The Rainbow.” She was in rare form—much of the old Judy was on display—and there were shrieks and bravos when she made her first exit. “Don’t ever go away,” her audience shouted. She cried as she lifted the mike from the stand and held it trembling and close to her mouth, brushing tears away from her cheek with the other hand. She looked totally drained, ill, her cheeks flushed as if with fever. The costume she wore appeared to have become intolerably heavy for her and she to have shrunken inside it; the flashing sequins in the spotlight made one think of a lizard about to shed its skin.

  “Thank you, God bless, I love you very much,” she said in a croaking, tired, emotionally spent voice. The audience began its surge forward, reaching out for her tenderly, as if to touch the last frail leaf of November.

  “Audiences have kept me alive,” she confessed, and then leaning in close, confiding, “Everything I want is right here,” she told them.

  In the audience that night and seeing Judy for the first time was nineteen-year-old Edward Baily III. He was a young man on the edge of despair. He had not been a dedicated Garland fan, had never seen her in concert, but he had heard her on records. Somewhere about midway in her performance he says, “I don’t know what happened—but I was hooked.”

  After the show he raced around to the stage door, where about two hundred other Garland fans were gathering, standing there until two in the morning, when Judy left the theater. He drew back so that she wouldn’t see him, feeling she must not think of him just as a fan.

  Judy had been in good form that night, and though one could not say either the performance or the audience had risen to the evangelical frenzy they had at the Carnegie Hall concert, still the divine winds of revelation seemed to sweep from the stage to the last balcony of the Palace that night. Baily uses the word “hooked” as one might refer to an introduction to a drug or to a religion. He had gone to the theater as one might, in desperation, approach the tent of a faith healer—and for him, the miracle had occurred. Having never seen Judy in a film, Baily’s sole identification was with a middle-aged woman more than twice his age. Judy, by seeming to be able to see past all exteriors and into the soul, became the fantasy mother of his dreams. From the moment he became “hooked” he had been at-the-ready to do her bidding.

  At the Palace stage door, Baily met, for the first time, the Garland Group. He and they were an instant brotherhood. Standing together for hours in the hot night waiting for Judy, they shared thoughts and confidences. Baily was immediately taken in, made au courant with all of Judy’s trials, and apprised of all the “members of her court.” According to Baily, it was implicit that one treated all of Judy’s round table with as much persuasive charm as could be mustered. What Baily had found was an adhesive, conjunctive, symbiotic relationship that encompassed all the members of the Garland Group and Judy as well. For the first time in his life he felt accepted, a part of a family.

  When Judy did leave the theater that night, Baily was moved by her smallness, her apparent exhaustion. He knew he was now pledged to remain close to her and that he must both cheer her and protect her at the same time.

  36“I can live without money,” Judy said, “but I cannot live without love.” That was the symbology beneath the public announcements of “enduring love” for all the young men who shared her last years. It was like shouting, “I am not afraid!” as loudly as she could in a cavern of echoing darkness. By loudly proclaiming, “I am loved; I am in love,” Judy could, for short periods, convince herself that this was the truth.

  In her public disapproval of Arthur Miller—“I don’t approve of Arthur Miller,” she had stated to the press, “because I don’t think he understood Marilyn Monroe very well”—she revealed the true raison d’être for each disenchantment. She had finally come to believe that Mark Herron did not understand her. Now she was certain that was true about Tom Green.

  There was a great deal of newspaper coverage involving some rings that Judy claimed Green had stolen. It is more likely that Judy had given him those rings when she was in a drugged state and that at a later date, feeling misunderstood, could not recall giving him the jewelry. The problem was finally resolved out of court, but the Green-Garland liaison was over. According to Judy it had never been an important relationship, but the twenty-nine-year-old Green had been a steadying influence for over six months, and members of the “circle” and of the Garland Group claim Green was the only man they knew who had tried to wean her off pills. Judy was in the state she considered “intolerable”—she was attempting t
o live without love. A new young man, John Meyer, entered the scene, but this too was never to become an intense or meaningful relationship.

  One night, after a Palace performance and with Judy still dressed in the sequined pants suit, Bobby Cole took her to an elegant Manhattan restaurant—where she was refused admittance because, in those days, it was still considered a breach of etiquette for a woman not to wear a dress. She was more amused than angry, but she did not feel like going back to the hotel. Cole called Mickey Deans and asked if women in pants were permitted at Arthur. Deans told him to bring Judy right over and was waiting at the door when they arrived. Judy appeared not to recall that they had previously met and Deans did not remind her, but there was a warm and instant interchange between them; Deans sat with her until after four in the morning, although Arthur had closed hours before. But Deans was, at the time, deeply involved in another relationship, and although there was a mutual attraction, and they found they both liked and laughed at the same things (Judy was most struck by Deans’s easy ability to laugh), a tacit understanding that the time was not yet right passed between them.

  After the Palace there were a series of concerts across the country that Luft, acting for Group V Ltd., arranged. Early on, Judy became aware of the shoddy deal she had received. But there seemed no one to turn to and little she could do to extricate herself from the situation. For though quite often during this period her hotel bills were unpaid, she was being supplied with the necessary pills to feed her habit. Legally, there was no way to obtain twenty to forty pills a day, and Judy was incapable of dealing with the situation on her own.

  But on the second night of a stand at the Back Bay Theatre in Boston, she refused to leave the hotel for the theater. Some two thousand fans were both disappointed and disgruntled. “Too many things have happened in the past. I couldn’t come,” Judy said to the press through a lawyer, Barry Leighton, but she did not elaborate, and Luft, with no apparent care about Judy’s public relations, contradicted a statement by the theater management that Judy had been ill and made a point of declaring that he did not know why she did not appear and that “. . my ex-wife was in good health the last time I talked with her, which was a few minutes before she was scheduled to appear at the theater.” What had really occurred was that Judy had become aware of the gross exploitation of her, due to the Group V contract and was questioning Luft on it. She was now demanding that Luft arrange to pay her before each appearance. And Luft, under financial duress, was juggling the money to appease the government, Judy’s creditors, his own creditors, and Judy.