Leaving Home

by Anne Edwards

  In the late 1960s, Gstaad in the summer was a small Alpine village of about two thousand residents, not yet invaded by supermarkets, elegant boutiques, souvenir shops, and hordes of tourists, although once the ski season started after Christmas, its inns and small hotels required early reservations. I had loved Klosters, but Gstaad immediately took hold of my heart and robbed me of my breath. Set like a gem in a valley of the Bernese Oberland, surrounded by mountain lakes, lower mountains with towering mountains behind them, and the awesome Diablerets Glacier, its frozen tip blinding in the summer sun and a beacon in the winter, one became overwhelmed with the natural beauty that abounded. The Swiss as a people, although churchgoers, are not religious zealots. I attribute it to the magnificence of the terrain. How much closer can one get to heaven than the peaks of its glaciers and the gently sloping lower mountains carpeted in the summer—when I arrived—with a brilliant display of wildflowers? When church bells pealed, the clearness of the air gave them a pleasing, echoing sound like a chorus of well-tuned sleigh bells.

  The town’s one, long commercial street banded the lower mountains. On it was a fabulous bakery, a grocery, a unique multilanguage magazine-newspaper-bookstore and stationer, Cardineau’s, which was operated by a red-bearded, eccentric, intellectual Englishman, John (whose selection of reading matter would have pleased Voltaire), his charming Swiss wife, Monique (who worked while he read), and her elderly mother, Madam Cardineau (wife of the original founder and a fixture behind the cash register). As they carried books and newspaper in many languages, it was a meeting place for all foreigners living in or near Gstaad. Main street also contained several ski, shoe, and clothing shops, two banks, the post office, and a number of outdoor cafes (some fronting an inn or small hotel of which there were several). At that time, the ski runs were beyond the business section. (There was also the limited membership Eagle Club at the top of the ski run as well as a gemutlichkeit indoor/outdoor cafe.)

  The house that Leon’s secretary, Leigh, had leased for us was two blocks from the heart of the town and in what might be called “the flats.” The mountain train ran about two hundred feet behind us: quiet, no black smoke, a musical whistle that could well have inspired Rodgers and Hammerstein. The small cafe backing the train station was a favored gathering spot, and watching the trains arrive and depart along the winding tracks to upper regions was a form of genuine entertainment; one would not have been surprised to hear the Trapp family from The Sound of Music singing an appropriate song as it slowly diminished from sight.

  There were no slums or “bad places” to live in Gstaad at that time. Every street was clean, all the houses I ever saw kept pristine—at least their exteriors. In the higher reaches of the village, the chalets were larger and a bit grander and had closer access to the one grande dame hotel—the Palace, perhaps the most elite hotel in all of Switzerland due to the exclusive, highly acclaimed, and famed boy’s boarding school, Le Rosey, which was located just outside Gstaad. Attending the school were the sons and heirs of many world leaders and some of the world’s richest families who stayed at the Palace when they came to either visit, register, or collect their offspring.

  Homes in every section of town were built of wood in the chalet style, and ours was quite a handsome new construction. We could watch the trains come and go on our large rear terrace. Built on three levels, the lowest floor (which you walked down to) was set up as a separate (and quite commodious) apartment. This was Jay’s to occupy and he was thrilled with it. The house, which we leased furnished, also had a “cave” for entertaining with a built-in counter bar, a sound system, several pine tables and chairs, and a space that might be called a small dance floor. The upper and main part of the house contained three bedrooms and three baths, a sweet-smelling wood sauna, and a large, open, interconnected space that was sectioned off into living room, dining room, and kitchen.

  Our nearest neighbor was Lisette Prince, heiress to the Armour fortunes and a brilliant photographer who had fallen in love with a rather dashing ski instructor. (Their incredible wedding, which I attended, was memorable—rustic Swiss crossed with American high society.) In the higher reaches of town were the homes of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, David Niven, Sean Connery, Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards, Yehudi Menuhin, and Karim, the young Aga Khan who had attended Le Rosey as a boy. What impressed me more was the number of literary talents who lived nearby—William Buckley and John Galbraith, among them. Gstaad had a literary history, begun when Ernest Hemingway, forty-plus years earlier, had written A Farewell to Arms at a table in the small front tavern of the homey Rossli Hotel. This roll call of famous residents might suggest that Gstaad was a stuffy, pretentious place. Gratefully, it was not. Later, that perhaps changed. But when I lived there no one paid much attention to the celebrity of some of its inhabitants. In summer, Liz Taylor strode down the main street in jeans, little makeup, and a scarf tied over her hair. Sean Connery did not bother with his toupee, and Julie Andrews was followed by a gaggle of yipping dogs. There were those starchy characters who liked to align themselves with the rich and famous. I recall a pretentious Greek columnist who could have been cast in an old Preston Sturges movie, so over the top was he. There was also a suspicious-looking American with Hitchcockian resemblance who had the amazing power to turn up at the bank whenever one of the town’s Yanks went in to make a deposit. Most of us were quite certain he was a spy for the Internal Revenue Service.

  Leon and Catherine arrived not long after I did, and Michael soon joined us during a short break in his working schedule. It was great being a family again although I had the feeling (later confirmed) that Catherine and Leon had not gotten on too well in London, something to do with her dating choices, I believe. I thought he should have spoken to me first before confronting her, a matter of disagreement between Leon and myself. Shortly after, Leon left for Denmark for work on his current film, Welcome to the Club, a satire about American servicemen and USO entertainers in postwar Japan. The script was not much better than his previous production, but I remained as removed as was possible from making any comments. The short time he had been in Gstaad had not been unpleasant, however. He found some tennis partners and there had been some magical musical evenings spent with Yehudi Menuhin and his family.

  A week or so after his departure, I received the tragic news that Judy had died in her London mews house. I was prepared to fly to England when I was informed that her body was to be shipped back to the States for burial. All I could think of was the sad time in London when she had called me in the middle of the night to tell me Mickey was downstairs with a man having sex on a couch. And then, on my last visit with her, how terribly frail she was, her face hollow, her eyes huge, her frame shrunken. I remember coming away, feeling quite ill and thinking that must have been the way Anne Frank looked toward the end of her young life, for Judy had been so small, so shrunken that she had seemed a child. These were hard images to block out. When I was in Madrid, she had gone with Mickey to Copenhagen and I had received a letter from Hans Vanghilde, a Danish radio personality, that followed me to Spain. Mickey had given him my London address as someone who might be helpful. It seems Judy had suffered a breakdown during her concert appearance in Copenhagen. Mickey had gone on the next contracted stop on their tour and left her in Hans and Grethe Vanghilde’s care. By the time I received the letter Judy had returned to London with Mickey.

  Toward the end of the summer when I joined Leon in Denmark, I met the Vanghildes and experienced their genteel kindness and felt, that at least for the short time Judy had been with them, she had been in the company of good people. Hans was a sensitive man with a homely quality about him. Of sturdy Scandinavian stock, when we met he was dressed in rough, well-worn tweeds. He spoke fluent English and had a wonderful chuckling kind of laugh. He had met Judy only once, for an interview for his program, before he and his vivacious wife had been made her keepers while Mickey went off and left her behind.

  The Vanghildes (with four welcomin
g children and huge Lassie-like collie jumping about) invited me to their home for tea. We sat talking until darkness was hard upon us. Hans played the entire radio tape he had made with Judy (and that had been edited some time before airing). There was an evident empathy that passed between them.

  Halfway through Judy broke off what she was saying and confided, “I’ve worked very hard, you know, and I’ve planted some kind of—I’ve been lucky enough I guess to plant a star—and then people wanted to either get in the act or else they wanted to rob me emotionally or financially, whatever. And then walk away . . . [re her fame]. You’re only surrounded by people who are not truthful and who are using you.” (Her voice on the tape had an unfamiliar sound to it. I made a note in my journal that “the throb is there, but it is harder, more brittle, a dried branch that could crack easily under the slightest pressure.”)

  “If you’re unaware as I am,” she continued, “and you’re a woman, it could get pretty rough sometimes.”

  Nothing could have been rougher than that week she spent with the Vanghildes, certain that Mickey had deserted her, for he had departed the hotel leaving her an envelope containing fifty dollars and the unpaid hotel bill (taken care of by her sudden hosts). She was having trouble walking, refused to eat, and without her pills must have been going through a disorienting and painful withdrawal.

  “Do you know who I am?” she had asked Grethe.

  “Yes, of course. You are Judy Garland, a great star—so great that in a couple of moments you can give ordinary people something they will never forget,” Grethe had replied. “Please—say that again,” Judy asked in a wisp of a voice. And Grethe did.

  The Vanghildes told me that when Mickey finally returned to collect her Judy was in high spirits, “almost hysteria.” She and Mickey quickly got into the rear seat of the chauffeured limousine he had come in. The Vanghildes waved their good-byes as the car pulled off, but “Judy was so tiny that even the back of her head was not visible in the car’s rear window.”

  A few weeks after Judy’s death, and following a very public funeral in New York, Bobby called me. He and Mickey were flying from New York to London the next morning to spend two days there before coming down to Gstaad to see me. They must talk to me. Could I put them up? Frankly, I was not too keen on Mickey as a houseguest, but Bobby was my father’s kid half brother and we were joined by blood and a part of the same dysfunctional family. I had no idea what they needed to talk to me about but assumed it must have to do—not with Judy—but their own topsy-turvy relationship. I said as much and added that if that were the case that I would have nothing to do with it, for I was fearful that Mickey might be trying to lure Bobby into some pie-in-the-sky scheme.

  “No, no!” Bobby assured me.

  “What, then?”

  “We’ll talk about it when we see you,” he insisted and was gone.

  Leon was still in Denmark when they arrived a week later. From their attitude toward each other, I assumed (correctly as it turned out) that for now at least they were once again lovers, Bobby very much the protective member of their relationship. In his youth, although tall and big boned, there had not been much flesh on those bones and what there was—was pasty white. Asthma and a rare blood disease had plagued his early years along with the emotional injuries he had suffered as the unathletic son of Big Charlie. My father, with his athletic prowess and his short career as a soldier, had—however briefly—at least won their father’s praise (“love” is not a word one could associate with my grandfather). Bobby was unable to compete in any sport and was rigorously protected by his mother against any possibility of being placed in harm’s way. Yet, except for his spare body, he was undeniably Big Charlie’s son, tall and blond, the same square chin, crooked nose, and deepwater blue eyes. What he possessed, that my father had not, was a true intelligence and a gladiator’s will to survive. He fought and won his freedom by receiving a scholarship to Pomona College, located a short distance from Los Angeles, despite his mother’s attempts to keep him close to home in Portland, Oregon.

  His health would never be robust, but his transformation had been almost immediate. We saw quite a lot of each other during his first year at college. He came to Los Angeles whenever he had a free weekend. He had lunch with me at MGM where I was working in the Junior Writer program. Although we were both underage, he escorted me with much élan to the Mocambo nightclub situated on glittery Sunset Boulevard. Along with Ciro’s, the Mocambo was a favorite of Hollywood’s top players. We sat at the bar and sipped fruit-flavored-and-decorated cocktails and danced shoulder to shoulder on a small dance floor with movietown’s famous (and infamous) stars. Giant birdcages containing exotic, wildly colored birds hung from the lighted ceiling. The room was scented by massive floral bouquets. Laughter was high pitched, the atmosphere heady. Bobby was fascinated with Hollywood and its celebrities, but he never cared to become involved in the industry. Social causes, poor people’s needs, the emotionally crippled were of greater relevance to him.

  Sometime around his junior year, he had the strength to come out of the closet—not an easy step in a conservative school like Pomona in the 1940s. Quite soon his appearance took on a more macho look. He worked out and added weight and muscle to his generous Swedish frame. Shortly after graduation, he shaved off his blond hair (which he had always loathed) and—bald headed (a look he maintained)—moved to New York and, refusing to take money from his mother (my “aunt” Edith), lived in humble circumstances while employed in a low-level job with the city’s social services, where he was now a moving force. I admired him for what he had accomplished. No two men seemed less likely to be lovers than Bobby and Mickey.

  How then to explain Bobby’s relationship with Mickey Deans? The obvious is, of course, sexual attraction. Mickey was a flytrap for lost souls. But Bobby (now self-renamed Robert Jorgen) had found his—or so I had believed. He was a reformist and somewhat of a utopian who believed there was a good person inside everyone (except Big Charlie!). I had concluded that both these elements plus sex had been responsible for the fact that here he now sat on the sun-filled rear deck of my chalet in Gstaad, a consoling arm around his lover’s shoulders, as Mickey—in his slick, con-man glibness—explained his need to see me.

  Had I received a letter from a London law firm regarding Judy? he asked. No, I had not. Well, I would, for she had given me her personal papers and writings, the last referring to her poetry and several attempts she had made at an autobiography. I recalled the time she had told me that she wanted to write such a book but that Sid “owned her life.” I had said that was nonsense, no one but she “owned her life” and that she should start by speaking into a tape recorder whenever memories of happenings and people who had affected her life came to mind.

  “I should,” she had replied. “You’re right, I should.” She had not mentioned it again to me.

  “I have a publisher interested,” Mickey said.

  “A publisher?”

  “For a book about Judy and our last year together. He has offered a generous sum.”

  He leaned forward, edging closer to me. I could not look into his eyes as he wore large, dark sunglasses. “You see, there’s been a problem having to do with Judy’s burial.” He began to explain, one hand now on the arm of my chair. He believed that Judy Garland was the greatest entertainer of her time and should be buried in fitting style. So, upon his return to New York with her remains, he had signed a contract with Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester County, New York, where other “greats” like the composer Jerome Kern and Broadway producer/librettist Moss Hart were interred. Ferncliff’s manager had assured him that “Judy would be its greatest star.” He had thus agreed for a special niche to be built in the cemetery’s marble mausoleum. The cost was $37,500. Judy’s coffin was transferred from Campbell Funeral Home in New York City to Ferncliff, where she remained in a temporary crypt (actually a file drawer—two bodies above, two below) as work on a permanent resting place was put aside to be completed when he
could pay the outstanding bill. He had not been able to raise funds, so Judy remained where she was and this hurt him to the quick (so he said). “It’s wrong. It’s very wrong,” he added as he adjusted his glasses and slid back, and away from me, in his chair.

  The publisher was offering him a sum that would take care of Judy’s burial and then some. The problem was, writing was not one of his talents (he played a credible piano and was a master talksmith). He wanted my help and since he had just discovered that I was the recipient of Judy’s papers, it seemed we should collaborate on what “he was sure could be a best-seller.”

  Mickey certainly did not lack for gall or swagger. It did not seem to bother him that his grandiose ideas had created this appalling situation. I did not hesitate in telling him that I would in no way consider collaborating with him on a book. He continued his pitch. Finally, to save further confrontation, I got up and walked back into the house. Bobby followed me.

  “Poor baby,” he said with a nod to Mickey sitting, brooding, on the deck. “He has all of Judy’s debts to deal with along with this ugly situation at Ferncliff.”

  “Judy’s debts!” I countered. “Who do you think created a good hunk of those debts? Mickey used Judy, just as he’s using you and trying to use me. Maybe he can get away with it with you. But you can bet your life on it—not me!”

  “You’ve got it wrong. Mickey was trying to help get Judy back on her feet,” he insisted.

  “Back on her feet? What? To stand on a stage, a wraith, all alone, like she did in Copenhagen, dying as she performed, badly disoriented? Judy needed someone to take care of her, not someone who would siphon off her last strength to support them! Judy was an American phenomenon. Perhaps the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century. She was also flesh and blood, a woman, a much overused, exploited woman, devoured by leeches like Mickey and all the other tacky men in her life.”