by Lorna Luft
Then the crisis broke. I’d never heard of the Bay of Pigs; all I knew was that my parents were suddenly very tense, and when I asked my mother an innocuous question one evening, she replied, “Don’t you realize there may be missiles pointed at us right now?”
I remember thinking, “In the living room?” I looked around. I didn’t see any missiles.
The “missiles” were there, of course. The ones in our home were invisible but real. My parents were on the brink of their own war, and all four of us would soon be casualties.
Our ideal family holiday came to an abrupt end when Joe broke out with the measles. He was so sick that my parents got worried and decided to charter a small plane to fly Joe up to Miami. We packed quickly and got on the plane. My father proceeded to get into an argument with the pilot. He didn’t think the pilot was flying the plane properly, so Dad insisted on taking the controls himself. He kept saying, “I’ll fly the plane.”
My mother kept saying, “Sid, stop being ridiculous. Let the pilot do it.” For once, my mother lost the argument. My dad had been a crack pilot during the war, so he took over the controls and flew us to Miami. God only knows if he had a license.
Joey recovered, and two weeks later we went back to New York. Dad moved into the Dakota with us for a while.
To no one’s surprise, I found a bump on the back of my neck right after we got back and showed it to my parents. Dad said, “Bingo! She’s got them.” The doctors in Florida had thought about inoculating me against Joe’s measles, but my parents had decided to let me get them over with. Now it was my turn to have the measles. For what seemed like forever I lay in my darkened bedroom covered with calamine lotion, itching and miserable. The disease could have damaged my eyes, so they had to keep me in the dark all the time. That was pretty much the story of my childhood.
Eventually Joey and I were both healthy again, and it was back to business as usual. For Dad that meant traveling around selling stereos and trying to patch things up with my mom. For me school was a nightmare. Our parents enrolled us in New York P.S. 6, a local public school. The difference between P.S. 6 and Lady Eden was, to say the least, dramatic. Comparatively speaking, the new school was huge, with big ugly buildings and thirty or more students per class. I entered after the school year had begun, and I was terrified. I never got past the fear and discomfort of being the new kid in school. To make things even worse, by the end of the first day, everyone knew who my mother was. The rumor spread like wildfire that the new girl was “Dorothy’s” daughter. Every kid in the school had seen The Wizard of Oz, so they all stared at me and asked questions. “Is it true? Is your mom really Judy Garland? Are you really her daughter? What is she like? Can we go to your house? Can we meet her?” And so on and so on. P.S. 6 wasn’t like Los Angeles, where lots of celebrities’ children go to local schools. These children had never seen a celebrity. I didn’t have the faintest idea what to say when they asked me about my mother except, “Yes, she’s my mom.” What was she like? She was like my mom. What else could I say?
It didn’t help that I wasn’t very good at school subjects, either. I already knew I hated arithmetic, and it quickly became clear that I wasn’t very good at reading, either. They put me in a special room for the “slow” readers and gave me a book called A Big Ball of String to read from every day. After that I had to read a whole series of Dr. Seuss books. I hated them. To this day just the sight of those books gives me a headache. What no one understood at the time is that I’m dyslexic. To this day I panic at cold readings. If I don’t have a script at least five minutes ahead of time, I can barely get through it. I can go to a Broadway show and come out singing every song I hear, but I couldn’t read those stupid little books. It was horrible. I was bored, frustrated, and humiliated.
Joey had the worst of it, though. Bad as public school was for me, it was worse for him. He was small for his age, and my mom sent him off to first grade in short pants, long hair, and knee socks. Everyone teased him. We didn’t find out until years later, but my brother also has a learning disability that made school a struggle for him. As Joe describes it now, “Sometimes my brain just won’t work like it should. I can see the pieces of ideas, but it takes me a long time to put them together.” School was a miserable experience for both of us. We lived for the moment the bell rang at the end of the day and we could just go home. I’d run upstairs to find Leslie and try to forget about school until the next day. For Joey and me, P.S. 6. was childhood purgatory.
There was only one thing I did find interesting at that school. Until I went to P.S. 6, I’d never been around “special children,” kids who were deaf or blind or otherwise physically disabled, and I found them interesting. One of these special students was in our class for part of each day. Her name was Helen, and she was blind. Each day a different child in our class was assigned to walk Helen back and forth to her special classes. One day it was my turn. As we walked down the hall together, I said, “Can I ask you a question?”
She said, “Sure.”
“What happened to you so you can’t see anymore?” Helen explained that because she was born early, they’d put her into an incubator. If there’s too much oxygen in an incubator, she told me, the baby goes either deaf or blind.
I remember thinking, “Boy, I hope I never have to go into an incubator. I don’t want to be blind.” I never felt sorry for Helen, because she didn’t feel sorry for herself. She was a pretty girl with dark hair and white eyes from being blinded. I thought she was an interesting person. Helen is one of the few good memories I have of P.S. 6.
I wasn’t at P.S. 6 for very long. Soon we packed our bags and moved again, this time to Scarsdale, in Westchester County. Except for not being near Leslie anymore, it made little difference to me. By that time I was used to change; we were constantly changing houses, hotels, schools, staff, everything. Only the family—Mama, me, Joey, and sometimes Liza and Dad—stayed the same. As long as we had each other, everything was okay. A move to Scarsdale was nothing. Staying in the same place for a long time—that would have seemed odd by then.
We moved into a house in Scarsdale, and my mother enrolled us in yet another public school, once again a faceless place with big buildings, large classes, and lots of strangers who asked, “Is your mom really Judy Garland?” Liza enrolled in the local high school, where she got her first lead role in her school production of The Diary of Anne Frank. I remember watching the Nazis and being scared, but that’s about all I remember. We all went to see Liza, even my dad, and my mom was very proud of Liza’s performance. My dad didn’t move into the house with us, but he still came around regularly.
Joey and I liked the house in Scarsdale. It was a suburban area and a little like Mapleton Drive, with lovely country all around. When my mom wasn’t touring, she cut back on her medication, so there were still good times when she was home. That fall we went trick-or-treating together through our neighborhood—Mama, me, Joey, and our nanny. My mom dressed up like the clown in The Pirate and went door to door with us asking for candy. I wondered if people realized who she was, or if they just thought she was another Judy Garland impersonator. We giggled and ran and had a wonderful time.
The high point of the year for my mother professionally was the concert at Carnegie Hall. Of the hundreds of concerts she gave, this was one of her most brilliant performances. Joey and Liza and I were all there, in the front row, and when she brought us up onstage to introduce us to the audience, I was brimming over with pride. When my mother was onstage at moments like that, it was magic, and we were a part of it.
In December my mom left for Berlin to promote Judgment at Nuremberg, which had just been released, while Joey and I stayed in Scarsdale with our nanny. When Mama got to Paris, she got really sick with bronchitis. She was afraid she was going to die. In her panic she called my dad and asked him to come to Paris right away. My dad virtually commandeered the next plane and raced overseas to rescue her. When Mama recovered, my parents came back to Scarsdale toget
her, and Dad moved in full-time. For a while everything was wonderful. It wasn’t exactly Mapleton Drive, but it was close.
They began having people come over again for small parties in the evening. One morning I went outside to find George Hamilton still asleep in a chaise by our pool, recovering from my parents’ party the night before. Dad played with Joe and me the way he had in the old days, tossing us into the air and carrying us on his shoulders. He was so relieved to be home with us again.
Christmas was wonderful. My parents got along better than they had in years. My mother staged a little holiday pageant in our living room just for the family, with Christmas songs and little parts for each of us, and tape-recorded it all. My dad still has the tape, with my nine-year-old voice saying, “Hi, I’m Lorna!” We all sound very happy. In a sense, I think my mom was playing a part that Christmas, the part of the happy suburban wife and mother. I didn’t mind; Mama was never happier than when she was performing. Her happiness was all that mattered to us.
My mother tried so hard to do the things with us that other mothers did. While we were living in Scarsdale, my teacher planned a class trip to the zoo. She asked for mothers to come on the bus to help with the children, and my mother decided to go. At first everything went fine. We looked at the animals, and my mom was treated like any other mother. Then we went for ice cream, and as we sat there eating, bees surrounded us, attracted by the sugar. A little boy in my class named Simon was allergic to bees, so he began to panic when they swarmed around. My mother had been swatting bees away from him all day, but now there was a cloud of bees, and my mother was trying to keep them from Simon. All her swatting attracted attention, and someone recognized my mom. A crowd immediately swarmed around us, asking for autographs. “Can I have your autograph, Miss Garland? Will you sign this, Miss Garland?”
My mom tried to be polite but kept saying, “Look, please, I’m just trying to help this little boy. Please, I’m here with my children’s class today. . . .” Of course, it was hopeless. In no time we were overrun with my mother’s fans, and we had to end our day early.
It was always that way when my mother went out in public. Most of the time it didn’t bother me. As my mother always reminded me, I was a very fortunate young lady. I had beautiful clothes, and went to great restaurants, and had the best seats at plays and concerts. When fans approached our table at a restaurant, my mother always smiled pleasantly and signed whatever they held out to her. As soon as she finished, we went on eating. It was a normal part of our lives. The only time it ever bothered me was when the crowds got out of control.
I remember one time in particular. It was at the concert my mom did at Forest Hills. Joey and I were with her. As we got into the limo after the performance, hundreds of people surrounded us, pressing up against the windows, banging on the sides of the car and chanting, “Judy, Judy, Judy!” Flashbulbs were going off from every direction. The crowd was hysterical, completely out of control, and the driver couldn’t move the car. As the fans surged around us, trying to get to my mother, the car began to rock back and forth so hard I was afraid it would turn over. Joey sat next to me white as a sheet, scared to death. My mother kept shouting, “Thank you,” and waving, hoping the crowd would move back, but they didn’t. Mama seemed perfectly calm, but I was terrified. The driver kept trying to move forward through the crush of people as my mother repeated, “Be careful. Don’t hurt them. Don’t hurt anybody.” Finally the police came to escort us, but even then we had trouble moving out. It seemed like an eternity before we finally pulled free of the crowd.
The whole experience was frightening for me, and for Joey, too. I still can’t be in a crowd like that without panicking. My mother reacted with panic when it first happened to her on the MGM tour for Wizard twenty years earlier, but she got used to all the hysteria. I never did.
Not long after our Christmas in Scarsdale, my mom was signed to do A Child Is Waiting with Burt Lancaster, and a CBS Special with her old pals Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. That meant moving back to California. Once again we all packed up and moved into a rented house in Bel Air.
My mom was gone a lot during that time, working first on the special and then on the film. I remember very clearly her making the movie. Mama would take me to the set with her sometimes, where I promptly developed a huge crush on the boy who played the lead in the film. Mostly, though, I remember the children.
A Child Is Waiting was about retarded children, as they called them then, and except for the boy who played the lead, most of the children in the film were mentally handicapped. Most had Down’s syndrome, which was called mongolism at the time. I remember the first time my mother took me to the set. Before we left, she sat me down and had a long talk with me about what I would see there. She explained that many of the children looked different from the children I was used to. She told me it was very important that I not point or stare at them because it might make them feel uncomfortable. I thought to myself, “I’ve been pointed at, so I know how that feels. Sometimes people stare at me and think I’m different because of my mom.” I took my mother’s advice to heart. I promised myself I wouldn’t stare at them no matter what they looked like.
When we got to the set, I was introduced to some of them as, “Judy’s daughter.” I couldn’t tell if they understood what that meant, but they tried to talk to me, and some of them hugged me the way little children would. I had trouble understanding them because they couldn’t pronounce their words clearly, and some of them looked a little odd, but I pretended not to notice. Instead I listened carefully and told myself over and over, “They just look different, but inside they’re like me. I mustn’t hurt their feelings or make them feel uncomfortable.” These children made me sad. Besides Helen, the blind girl in my class in New York, they were the only disabled children I’d ever met. The difference was that I’d never felt sorry for Helen, but I felt sorry for them. For a while I thought about becoming a teacher so I could help children like that. Years later, when I saw the film, it made me cry. My mother gave a wonderful performance. I was proud of her.
Things were bad again between my parents by then. A few weeks after we moved back to California, my mother moved us into the Beverly Hills Hotel. Joey and I accepted it as just another move, but in reality it was the most serious separation yet. My mother filed for a legal separation for the first time, citing “extreme mental cruelty” as the grounds.
Later that spring she went back to New York to do a record album. Joe and I stayed behind in California. Not long after she arrived, she got very ill again and had to be hospitalized. My godfather, Dr. Lester Coleman, called my father from New York and said, “Judy’s really sick. She wants you to bring Lorna and Joe and come to New York immediately.”
My dad just told us, “We’re going to New York to see your mom,” packed everything up, took us to New York, and moved us into a hotel. Joe and I enrolled in another new school. We didn’t find out until much later that we’d moved there because my mother was sick.
My mother’s sicknesses were getting more and more frequent. She had been in the hospital in Hyannis Port and New York. Almost every time she was away from my father for any length of time, she got sick. It wasn’t psychosomatic; the sickness was real. When my dad wasn’t around nobody monitored her medication or made sure she got enough food and rest. She was taking 200 mg. of Ritalin a day by then, ten times the normal dose. At night she would try to counteract it with barbiturates like Seconal, Tuinal, and Valium. Her liver and kidneys were breaking down, and her health had begun to decline alarmingly. The mood swings continued to worsen, as did the other psychological symptoms of Ritalin toxicity. Like her health, her relationships, especially the one with my father, suffered under the strain.
It was at this crucial point that Fields and Begelman decided to book my mother in England again, this time for the film I Could Go on Singing. In an escalating crisis, my mother decided not only to go to Europe without my father, but to take Joe and me with her. It was a del
iberate attempt to remove us from his reach. My parents were already separated again; Mama and Joe and I were living at the Stanhope, and my dad had taken a room on another floor. In her growing paranoia, my mom had developed a fear that my father would kidnap me and Joe. She had repeatedly hired guards since our return from England to make certain my dad didn’t take us, though Joe and I knew nothing about it. As far as we knew, the men in suits who came and went were just more of my mother’s staff.
My father had reached his limit. It was one thing for my mother to move into a neighboring hotel, but it was another to take us to a different continent. He’d already lost control of his house and his finances; he wasn’t about to give up control of his children. The result was a fight that made the headlines.
I remember the day vividly. My parents were arguing again, so my mom had sent me and Joey to Central Park with the nanny to play. At some point my mom left the hotel for an hour or two, and someone told my dad that Joey and I were at the park. Dad came and got us and took us back to his suite. I was wearing white knee socks and black patent leather shoes, and I remember sitting down and taking one shoe off. About that time there was a knock on the door of my father’s room. It was my mother. She came into the living room and told my father, “I just want to say good-bye to the children before I leave for England.” My father told me and Joe to go in the other room. We went into the next room and turned on the TV.