by Anne Edwards
Throughout what was to be her last American concert tour, the Garland Group was constant—traveling by any means possible to get to her concerts, cheering her on, waiting for her after the shows, remaining in the lobbies of her hotels as though on guard.
Ed Baily never missed one performance. He was, by now, totally dedicated to Judy, and even Judy was becoming aware of his dedication. It was, in fact, going to be impossible for her to be unaware of it, for at each performance Baily managed to have either yellow or pink roses (her favorites) delivered to the theater for him to carry up onstage and present to her at the end of the concert. She assumed Baily was a young man with some personal income that allowed him to “travel with” her (Baily’s phrase—and as explained by him, meaning on the same train or plane, stopping at the same hotel; but never in an authorized capacity or in the same company as Judy) and to overwhelm her with roses.
In one year’s time Baily sent Judy $100,000 worth of roses. (Christmas, 1967, he had a large Christmas tree designed and made entirely of pink roses and presented it to her onstage.) He sent roses not only to Judy but to all those members of her entourage whom he felt he must win over in his bid to enter their private circle. Long-stemmed roses were then about $15 to $18 a dozen, and never did he present Judy with less than five dozen.
In late 1967 and early 1968, Judy’s performances left a great deal to be desired—leading Variety to comment: “Nagging question is how long can Judy Garland keep it up. How long does she want to? Audience affection and good will are there, but there can be a limit to how long folks will watch a well-loved champ gamble with her talent.”
She appeared to be down once more. She was booked into the Garden State Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey, from Tuesday evening, June 25, to Saturday evening, June 29. She had a new conductor, twenty-two-year-old Gene Palumbo, and Lorna and Joey were appearing with her along with a group called the Tijuana Brats.
She stepped out onto the immense outdoor stage with the four thousand people in the audience not knowing what to expect. It was hot and she was perspiring and in her “sequined uniform.” She weighed ninety pounds and looked pale, but it was one of those evenings to be remembered. (Critics claimed it was her best performance in ten years.) She belted or caressed twenty songs and, according to The Asbury Park Press, “. . . carried a non-stop show with grace and charm, despite the moths buzzing around her face, the strings hanging from her sequined pants suit, and a too bright spotlight to which she complained, ‘No lady likes to be seen in that light!’ ”
The audience went wild and flocked to the stage at the end of each song; they jumped up and down on their seats; they screamed, “Bravo!” and “We love you!”
She pranced out onstage at the ten-fifteen opening with “Once in a Lifetime.” Her short hair was drawn back behind her ears, only a stray lock falling on her forehead. Tucked into the loose neck of her glimmering suit was a shocking pink chiffon scarf, and her shoes each sported a matching rose. She wore mammoth crystal earrings and a matching knuckle-sized ring.
“As long as I have love I can make it,” she sang; and then afterward she told the audience: “You’re a marvelous audience; I feel you. I’ve been around so many years, and I’ve loved you all that time.”
Someone screamed, “You still look great!”
“I don’t want to look like Mount Rushmore,” she replied, “just beautiful.”
Halfway through, she hopped up onto the piano for a drink. “I don’t want to break my image,” she croaked, excusing herself and offering a toast to the audience and to Palumbo.
She sang “How Insensitive” sitting on the center-stage steps; did a soft-shoe dance with several limber Rockette kicks to “The Trolley Song.” Her rendition of “What Now, My Love” was tender; then she smashed into “I’ll Go My Way by Myself.” At the end, mountains of roses were carried up onstage to her by Baily. “I’ll take anything I can get!” she said. The audience then sang “Happy Birthday” (it had been June 10 two weeks before). “God Bless!” she called out—and finally disappeared.
The next day, she gave a very “up” interview at her hotel, The Berkeley-Carteret, to The Asbury Park Press:
How do you like singing outdoors?
“I don’t mind it, but I don’t like it in the summer. The bugs, you know. They fly into my mouth.”
What do you do in that case?
“You park the bug like this.” She tucks her tongue into one cheek.
How’s your autobiography coming?
“It’s been quite a packed-in life. It will take years.”
Would you choose show business if you had your life to live over again?
“No! It’s a brutish business.”
Why do you attract a cult-like following?
“Maybe I’m some kind of female Billy Graham.”
Are you going swimming here?
“I’m afraid of water. I’m also afraid of flying,” she added.
How do you get around?
“Dogsled,” she joked.
Who are your favorite singers?
“Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee and Liza Minnelli!”
Your favorite food?
“Chicken, any way but fried, and ice cream cones. They never let me eat them at M.G.M.”
By night, a terrible storm had moved into the area. But the exterior turbulence was no more violent than the storm that was taking place in Judy’s hotel room. She had just discovered that on May 19, Luft had assigned her Group V Ltd. contract to Howard Harper and Leon J. Greenspan as security for a debt. She was appalled, furious; she refused to step out of the hotel until she had it on paper that she would receive money for her performance (her salary was to be $1,500 nightly, plus a percentage of the gate). Knowing she would not budge otherwise, Luft, using a piece of hotel stationery and crookedly printing the words, drew up a letter agreeing to pass over to her the amount of $1,200 (holding back $300 for federal taxes) each night before her performance.
Judy was, thereupon, given a $1,200 check and got up to go to the theater. Arriving late, during the height of the storm, she nonetheless managed to make it onstage, throwing her hands up to her face as she did, blinded by the lightning, deafened by the thunder.
“Well,” she said, gasping, “We’ll press on together.” But the storm grew louder and the rain fell more heavily. It was a losing battle; until the closing songs her performance lacked spirit, and she was painfully off-key. She told her audience that they had pulled her through. But on Thursday night even they did not appear to help.
She was suffering from an ulcerated sore on the sole of her foot. For Friday night’s performance she steeled herself with a massive dose of painkillers. These plus her usual pill intake caused her to be heavily drugged. Yet the performance almost came up to that of her opening night, and her audience, unaware of her problems, went wild. Then, on Saturday, arriving thirty-five minutes late and appearing sluggish (the drugs again having taken their toll), she sat on the stage, attempting to sing most of her repertoire from that position, and because of the severe pain in her foot that the drugs now seemed unable to mask, she had to be helped to her feet by Palumbo. At ten-fifty, after twenty-five minutes of pure endurance, she collapsed violently in a heap on the stage and was rushed to a hospital.
She had received no injuries in her fall, but her foot was found to be seriously infected. Fearing blood poisoning, she returned to New York City, where Dr. Udall Salmon placed her in the Le Roy Hospital.
In her dressing room the night before her collapse, wearing a long, frayed blue terrycloth robe and chain-smoking menthol cigarettes, she had confessed to reporters that what she would like most of all was to star in a Broadway musical. It had been more than idle daydreaming. Hal Prince was casting the musical Mame and Judy felt that she was perfect for the role. She embarked on a concentrated campaign and did, at least, seem to have Prince interested. For the next few months, winning the part was the most important thing to her. With the final realization that Angela L
ansbury had the role (Miss Lansbury had supported her in The Harvey Girls), Judy then went on a campaign for the London Mame. Ginger Rogers won that role.
It is difficult to fathom how Judy thought she would have been able to sustain a strenuous musical like Mame night after night and for a long run; but it was easy enough to understand why she was attracted to the role. Mame, like herself, was a larger-than-life personality who raised a child under exceptional conditions. Mame was an aging eccentric with “pizazz” and at the same time a lovable, loving woman.
Not getting Mame was a deep disappointment—a personal rejection. Everything in Judy’s life, after that one shining night at the Garden State Arts Center, seemed to be falling apart. Her disillusionment with Luft was the most grievous thing she suffered. She now found that he had paid the hotel bill at the Berkeley-Carteret ($2,639.68—to cover the entire company for the five days) with a bad check, and the hotel was threatening to press charges. But the nagging question for Judy was what had happened to the money earned by the concert.
She was ill, and following her hospitalization at the Le Roy Hospital she went to Boston (borrowing money from a close friend) to seek help at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. She and Luft had had a final and irrevocable fight, and he had returned to California. She was between men. Humiliating things had happened to her. She had been locked out of her New York hotel, and all her clothes had been impounded for nonpayment of the bill by Luft. Baily and the Garland Group had found her huddled pitifully alone in the lobby. "I’m Judy Garland and I don’t even have a clean bra to my name,” she had wept.
Joey had returned to California with Luft; Lorna enrolled in the New York Professional Children’s School (“I must have gone to about eight hundred schools,” Lorna says. “Every place we went, Joey and I had to be put in school. I never had any friends as a child.”) For the time of the last tour, Lorna and Joey had been with Judy. It had been a difficult, a bad time. What followed was worse.
Judy’s health was failing quickly, and she was in desperate straits. Lorna, sixteen at the time, had been exceptionally close to Judy. She was incredibly reminiscent of Judy as a youngster: all show-biz out front, but insecure, frightened and withdrawn in reality. And although it was Liza who appeared to resemble Judy the most, Lorna had the essence, the vulnerability, the injured look so indelibly identified with her mother. There is no question that in the spring of 1968 Lorna was suffering. Judy begged her to join her in Boston, but Lorna finally decided to fly to California to be with Luft and Joey.
“Mama called again,” Lorna says in a McCall’s interview, “I told her I just could not come to Boston. She didn’t understand. She kept asking ‘Why?’ I said I wanted a life of my own.”
And so at the same age as Liza had been when she left home, the youngster flew to the Coast. Judy was on a sinking ship without a captain, crew, or passengers. And she was very sick.
37If there is one allurement of the past, it is that it is the past. Judy was back in Peter Bent Brigham, old friend Kay Thompson supportive and close by; but it was as though her life had not been given notice that the curtain had fallen. With Luft three thousand miles away in California, Judy thought she might be able to cast him from her thoughts. But it was impossible. She was living in the most abject humiliation: penniless and dependent upon the kindness of friends; homeless—her furniture and personal possessions now impounded by an appalling assignment of the Group V Ltd. contract by Luft to Greenspan and Harper. Intense hostility bound her to Luft. Any dependence or sentiment was gone. There was no more lingering tenderness—no more “romance that would not die.” It was dead and even difficult to recall what had killed it. Yet burial was hopeless. She blamed Luft. How she blamed Luft! But even more, she blamed herself. Vanity made her feel an equal sinner; ego gave her a gnawing conscience.
Pledged to appear at the Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, on September 16 and 17; the Mosque Temple in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 30 and 31; and at the Springfield Music Fair in Springfield, Massachusetts, on October 2 and 7, she was now aware that if she did appear she would receive no remuneration. And that if she did not, she could be turned over like a piece of loan collateral (which she was) to Leon Greenspan and Howard Harper. For back in May, just previous to the Garden State Arts Center appearance, Luft and Raymond Filiberti had so desperately needed $18,750 that they had made an assignment of her contract to Harper and Greenspan.
It was to be one of the most controversial documents in her life. In it, Judy was “assigned,” “sold,” “transferred,” and “set over” to Harper and Greenspan for the fee of one dollar, along with an old film script called Born in Wedlock and “certain coal deposits located in the counties of Grundy, Scequatchie, Bledsoe, and Cumberland in the state of Tennessee.”
The specified ninety days had expired and Luft and Filiberti had not been able to repay the loan. On the twenty-eighth day of October in the Supreme Court of Westchester County, New York, Harper & Greenspan filed a Summons and Complaint against Group V Ltd. and Raymond Filiberti. Harper and Greenspan now wanted either their money or Judy Garland (also certain coal deposits in Grundy, Scequatchie, Bledsoe, and Cumberland, Tennessee, and the film script Born in Wedlock!). It is interesting that Leon Greenspan acted as his own notary public on the assignment, and were it not so thoroughly chilling to think of a human being parceled and sold along with some coal deposits and a script with an inane title, the situation might have an essence of hard-core black comedy.
It was a bleak and cold New York autumn when she returned from Boston after the Springfield engagement—broke, terrified, and alone. Yet it was curiously like other times she had come to New York by herself. There had been the time she had left Minnelli and MGM—that was when she had met Luft. And there had been the January when she had left Luft and signed with Fields and Begelman. Each of those times she had found solace in walking the city streets alone, trying to find some true corner of her own identity. However, it was not as easy to walk now. She was weak. There were physical things happening to her that alarmed her. She was not steady on her feet. Her vision had grown dimmer. The nightmares and sleeplessness had returned. And though she was finally so painfully thin that she should have been able to eat what she wanted (she stopped at the carts of street venders and bought hot dogs she could not eat), solid food sometimes gagged her, and when she was able to eat it she would suffer excruciating stomach pains, accompanied by such extreme constipation that she found herself waking up on the floor of the hotel bathroom not knowing how long she had been lying there unconscious. Nor was she ever sure she would not come back to the hotel to find her belongings impounded. One possession—a mink coat—she wore constantly, loving the elegant feel of it. She had posed in it for Richard Avedon for an advertisement for Black Glama Mink, and afterward it had been presented to her.
She was fighting a game battle for the survival of her spirit and therefore tried to concentrate on those things that would “get her through.” She read the Bible, learned long passages of it by heart; memorized some of Shakespeare’s sonnets; and tried to “get straight” all she could remember about her father. Frank Gumm, in fact, was occupying much of her thoughts. She related him to a feeling of gaiety and hope. In retrospect, it seemed to her he was the only man who had truly loved her.
Most family photographs had been lost in the impounding of her personal possessions through the years and by the gypsylike existence she had lived, and so she could not find a picture of him. For the first time in a number of years, she contacted members of the family. No one had a picture of Frank. It came to her as a shocking revelation that her only memory of her father was as a man who had looked younger than she now looked. He had been a laughing, fun-loving Irishman with a full head of dark hair and a lithe, graceful body. His image, however, seemed confused with other images: those of Tyrone Power, for one; Mark Herron; and now Mickey Deans.
Reverie kept bringing Deans to her mind. In the few times she had been with him she had been
able to forget her troubles. His enthusiasm and laughter had been infectious. There had been a rapport. They had liked the same things, had had the same offbeat sense of humor, the same ability to be silly without embarrassment. He was thirty-four and that was young, for she was forty-six. But her father had died young, and she could recall how small and protected and female he had made her feel when he took her that first day to MGM; how he had walked right in and faced all those big-time executives; how he had that time defied Ethel; how he had looked at her in her dirty slacks and no makeup with dancing eyes that said, “What do they know? I think you’re beautiful”—how he had, indeed, made her feel beautiful.
She had spoken to Deans from Boston. She rang him again on her return to New York, and they began to see each other. The last man in her life had now appeared. Being Judy, she was to believe and to publicly state that he was the true love of her life.
Deans was born Michael DeVinko in Garfield, New Jersey, on September 24, 1934, the youngest of three children in a Greek-American family. His father was a textile worker who had a hard time supporting the family. Deans hated the smalltime, lower-class life in Garfield. His only thought from the time he hit his teens was to leave it. Good-looking and with an outgoing personality, he was certain he could make it in show business if he had the opportunity.