by Lorna Luft
As time went by, these outbursts increasingly occurred in the middle of the night, at about three A.M., like the old night visits at Rockingham Drive. Two or three times she actually threw me and Joey out of the house. The first time it happened, I was really upset. She kept screaming at me and telling me to get out. I was afraid to leave Joe alone with her in that condition, so I took him with me. We showed up at Liza and Peter’s house at about four A.M., and they were wonderful. Thank God, Liza was just as protective of me as I was of Joe, and Peter was like my big brother. We all took care of each other. They took us in and calmed us down. But just about the time I started to feel better, my mom started calling Liza’s house demanding they bring us back home. She kept calling and calling, screaming at Liza. Finally Peter took the phone. He was furious; it was the first time I’d ever heard him raise his voice to my mother. He shouted, “I am not bringing these children home while you’re behaving this way. Now, stop calling my house!” And he slammed down the receiver.
There was a huge silence, and we all sat there looking at each other. I knew in my gut I had to go back home. She was in bad shape and I loved her. I finally said, “Take us home, Peter.” So he did, reluctantly. When we finally got there, it was as if nothing had happened. My mother just thanked Peter for dropping us off and told us to go to bed. Later on, when she realized what she’d done and the guilt set in, she got angry at Peter. She couldn’t bear to face the way she was treating us, so she’d always look around for someone else to blame. On nights like that, it was Peter.
All in all, there were three or four of these late-night escapes to Liza and Peter’s. After the first time, I really didn’t mind. Their apartment became a place of refuge. Joe and I came to look forward to going over there, even if we had to get thrown out of the house to do it. It was so peaceful there.
I adored Peter Allen. I still do. He was one of the most gifted performers I’ve ever seen, and the best of brothers to me and Joe. I was never angry with him for marrying my sister, or for their divorce, either. I was just sad, for both of them. I don’t believe Peter intended to mislead Liza about his sexuality. I think he misled himself. Maybe he thought he could put his lifestyle behind him permanently when he married her. I admired his courage in going public about his sexuality years later. Peter truly loved my sister, but he was confused about the kind of love he felt for her.
We were all pretty confused during those years.
In those last two years of her life, my mother never seemed to sleep. How could she, with dozens of Ritalin and Benzedrine capsules in her system? If someone didn’t watch her constantly, she would wander around the house half the night like a restless spirit. One night when I couldn’t stay awake any longer, she wandered into Joey’s room. He was lying on his side, facing the door when Mama came into his room. Joe and I were light sleepers by then. He heard her but kept his eyes closed, hoping she’d go back out and let him sleep. Peering through his closed eyelashes, he could just see her outline, eerie in the darkened room. As she bent over his still form, Joe could hear her breathing oddly. She was taking heavy, wheezing breaths—a heavy, unnatural sound in the silent room. Joe began to panic, thinking, “Oh, God, Mama’s possessed!” He lay perfectly still, scared to death something evil was going to get him. A minute or two later Mama turned and made her way back toward the open door as Joe watched. Still in the grip of an overstimulated imagination, it seemed to Joe that my mother was floating, her feet moving silently through the air a few inches above the floor. Afraid to go back to sleep, Joe lay awake all night, fearing the ghostly form would return. When he tells the story now, we both laugh at the fear that gripped his twelve-year-old’s imagination. At the time, though, it wasn’t so funny.
I tried to keep an eye on her at night, but after a while I became almost obsessed with the need for sleep. When my mother didn’t sleep, I couldn’t sleep, either. I didn’t dare. I had to make sure she was all right. As the medication took its toll on my mother’s system, it indirectly began to take its toll on my body, too. People talk about twenty-four-hour-a-day jobs; I had a seventy-two-hour-a-day job. During that year in the brownstone, and later at the St. Moritz when we moved out, I rarely slept more than every second or third night.
The nightly ritual went something like this. My mother would go to bed, usually sometime after midnight, with the TV and radio going to provide white noise in the background. At some point, if we were lucky, she’d drift off to sleep. Joe would already be in bed, but I’d still be up checking on her until she finally dozed off. When that happened, I’d go back to my own room and go to bed, hoping for the best. An hour or two later she would wake up, either excited or agitated, and needing company. She’d come into our rooms and wake up me and Joe, and we’d go back to her room and crawl into bed with her. And she’d start talking. She’d talk and she’d talk and she’d talk, for hours at a time, with me curled up beside her and Joe dozing on the pillow next to me. For a while I’d talk with her, but after an hour or two, the best I could manage was, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” And she’d keep talking. Every now and then she’d doze for a few minutes, and when she did, I’d nudge Joe and whisper to him to go back to bed. He’d stagger back down the hall to his room in his pajamas and go back to bed while I stayed with Mama. Sometimes she’d wake up and start talking again, and sometimes she’d sleep for a few hours. Not daring to get up, and too weary to move anyway, I’d stay in the bed next to her, alternately dozing and listening as she needed me to. If I was lucky, we’d both fall asleep next to each other by dawn.
Two years later, when she died, I came to treasure some of those moments of closeness. It was usually then, in the middle of the night, that we shared our secrets the way best friends do. But at the time, it was grueling. I was fifteen by then, growing rapidly and badly in need of rest and a healthy way of living. My life at Mapleton as a little girl, with its carefully regulated hours for play, naptime, sleep, and healthy home-cooked meals—never anything from a can—seemed like a dim and distant dream.
More than anything in life, I wanted my mother to be healthy, to get well and become once again the woman I remembered from those early years. I would have done anything to make that possible. But no matter how much my heart and spirit wanted to bring that about, my body was beginning to give out under the strain.
Quite simply, I was about to burn out.
Collection of the author
Joey, Mama, and me on the town, early 1968. That’s Angie Dickinson at the table behind us.
CHAPTER 11
Burn Out
Few things make me angrier, or cause me more pain, than listening to the drivel in countless books and interviews about how my mother spent her life unloved, neglected, and betrayed. Even her obituaries routinely talked about how she “never found love” or how “everyone she loved betrayed her,” leaving her alone and abandoned in her times of need. Near the end she fed that belief herself because she was too sick, too far gone, to face what was really happening. Didn’t love her? Neglected her? We, my brother and sister and I, loved her more than anything else in life. So did my father. My dad has taken so much abuse from the press over the years, but none of the people who condemn him were there to watch as he struggled to rescue a woman who was beyond rescue. There wasn’t enough love in the world, enough attention in the world, to save my mother. No one could have saved her but herself, and at the end, it was far too late even for that.
I should know. I nearly killed myself trying.
The months and eventually years of stress and physical exhaustion had begun to take their toll on me, too. From the time I’d walked through the door of that beach house in Waikiki with wet washcloths to clean up the blood three years before, I’d been struggling to clean up my mom’s disasters. I am my father’s daughter, and when the world toppled off his shoulders, I tried to hold it up with my own skinny arms.
For five years I’d kept on trying. But I wasn’t my father; I was just a kid, and my body was trying to remind me t
hat I had shouldered a burden far beyond my strength. When I continued to ignore what my body kept telling me, it finally took its revenge. One day, it just quit.
Most of that day is gone from my memory. The one thing I do remember clearly is walking down the staircase that afternoon. I had come down that ugly glass staircase into the living room after being up with my mother for one of our marathon nights. I don’t remember thinking about anything in particular that day; I was too tired for feeling or thought. I only remember descending the last stair, stepping into the living room, and for some unfathomable reason, looking up at the ceiling. I remember standing there for a few seconds, looking straight up, and then raising my hands overhead and beginning to spin. I spun and spun, right there by the staircase, my hands reaching for the dim recesses above my head. That’s all I remember. The next thing I knew, everything went black.
I later learned that I had lost consciousness and passed out on the floor at the bottom of the steps. Joe saw me fall, and terrified, he called my father, who sent for a cab (an ambulance would attract too much attention). I vaguely remember coming to for a moment as my dad carried me outside. That’s the last thing I remember for seven days.
They took me to the hospital and examined me. The doctors determined that I was suffering from severe emotional and physical exhaustion. They said it was a type of mental breakdown, in the sense that my brain had simply shut down from prolonged stress. I had been staying up with my mother until seven A.M. every morning, then pulling on some clothes and trying to get me and Joe to school. When I’d get back home in the afternoon, the whole routine would start all over again, day in and day out. My father talked to the doctors and confirmed that I hadn’t been getting enough sleep and had been under terrible emotional strain. He didn’t want me sent home to my mom’s until I was better, so after three days in the hospital they transferred me to the hotel where my dad was living at the time, for further rest. I don’t even remember the move. All together, I slept for four days straight. My dad and Vern Alves took turns watching over me while I slept. They made sure I got water periodically and tried to get some soup or juice down me every few hours. I don’t remember any of it. When I woke days later, it was night, and Vern was sitting next to the bed with me. He told me I’d been asleep for a very long time. I had no idea where I was or what had happened. That week of my life is still a complete blank.
I stayed at my dad’s a few days longer. I was too exhausted to leave, and I was also terribly confused. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Part of me was so relieved to be with my father, where it was safe and I could sleep. Part of me never wanted to leave, wanted to stay in that safe place forever. But the other part of me said, “You have to go back. You have to take care of Mama. She needs you. You have to make sure she’s all right.” That part of me was still the strongest, and after a few days of rest, I decided to go back home to my mother. My father didn’t try to stop me. He knew it was useless, that this was a decision I would have to make for myself, and that I was determined to return. He was in so much pain about it all. He had watched my mother destroy herself for years, and now he was watching his daughter fall apart, too, and he felt completely helpless.
So a few days later I moved back home with my mother and had to deal with her regrets. She was overwhelmed with guilt about what had happened to me, and she kept saying over and over, “I’m sorry I was such a bad mother. I’m so, so sorry.” And over and over I had to say, “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t worry, Mama. No, Mom, of course you weren’t a bad mother.” And on and on and on. Somehow, it always ended up being about her feelings. I had to comfort her, endlessly comfort her, so that she wouldn’t feel bad about what had happened to me, when all I really wanted to do was go back to bed.
She was rapidly running out of resources. Not long after my hospital stay, we had to move out of the old brownstone and into the St. Moritz. Nobody told me why, but I suspect it was because we couldn’t pay the rent anymore. By that time Joe and I could pack in our sleep, so it was no big deal to move into yet another hotel. Besides, we didn’t exactly have fond memories of that hideous old mausoleum.
We left behind more than the brownstone. My mom was also going through friends and lovers at a dizzying pace as her condition worsened. One of the casualties was Tom Green. Things had been going downhill with him for quite a while, anyway. They fought constantly about sex.
By that time she and Tom were fighting about money, too. Tom had hocked two of my mother’s rings during one of her frequent stints in the hospital. I heard several stories about why he hocked them. At one point my mother said he’d sold them to buy birthday presents for Joe’s thirteenth birthday; another time he said he sold them to pay my mother’s hospital bill. He said she’d told him to; she denied it. Whatever the truth, the jewelry ended up in a pawnshop. The rings were beautiful: an emerald set with diamonds and another ring set with diamonds and pearls. I loved that emerald. We never got it back. I don’t have any of my mother’s jewelry. By the time she died, it had all been sold.
Apparently the incident with the rings was the last straw in a relationship that was already very strained. Not long afterward, my mother decided to get rid of Tom Green in true Garland style. One night she looked at me and said, “I know how to get back at that son of a bitch.”
She picked up the phone and called Bellevue Hospital, telling whoever picked up the phone that it was an emergency, and proceeded to give an Oscar-worthy performance.
“You have to help me,” she sobbed into the phone. “My husband’s taken an overdose, and he’s going to kill himself!”
I could hear the person on the other end say something, and then my mom replied, “His name’s Tom Green . . . No, no, he’s not here. He’s at the Alrae Hotel. You have to help him. Please! He’s just taken an overdose of sleeping pills, and I’m afraid he’s going to die. You have to help him before the pills get into his system!”
More sobbing, more talking on the other end, and then, “Please, please save his life. He’s had a breakdown. He needs help.” Sob, sob.
I sat in the chair by the phone, eyeballs popping, watching her. A moment later I heard her say, “Yes, yes. Oh, thank you, thank you. Yes, right away.” And then, “Oh, by the way. He’s got a Judy Garland fixation. Please be kind.” My jaw dropped.
Then she hung up, turned to me, and said, “That ought to do it.”
Sure enough, as I found out later, an ambulance went screaming over to the Alrae Hotel in the middle of the night, two big attendants took poor Tom Green to the hospital by force, and they pumped his stomach. All the time they were dragging him down the hall to pump his stomach, he was shouting, “I know who did this! It was Judy Garland! I tell you, it was Judy Garland!” And the emergency team said, “There, there, now, it’ll be all right. We’re going to take good care of you.”
My mother knew how to get rid of a man.
The same dramatic flair she’d used to get rid of Tom Green got us into and out of quite a few other fixes, too. By that time Joe and I had lived in more hotels than you could count. We might not have been born in a trunk, but we were more or less living out of one. It was kind of like, “If this is Tuesday, it must be the Plaza.” There was one little catch: we were out of money, but the hotels still insisted on getting paid eventually. By that time nobody seemed to know where the money had gone; between the IRS, at least one crooked agent, my parents’ old debts, and a string of canceled concerts, my mom was flat broke. My dad was, too. For years afterward there would be IRS agents knocking on the door in the middle of the night.
None of this deterred my mother from going first class. She had been going first class since she was thirteen, and she didn’t know any other way to live. She had no idea what things cost or how to keep track of her money. Someone else had always done that for her, ever since she was a kid, and the result was that no matter how much she worked those last years, there was never any money. Either she spent it, or somebody else took it (she was a sitting duck
for unscrupulous managers), yet she continued to live as though we were in the land of Oz, first class all the way.
Every now and then, though, reality caught up with us in the form of an eviction notice.
One day I got a call at school to come home right away, and when I got to the hotel, I was told that my mother was trying to kill herself and that she wanted to see me. So I went up to her room, and there she was sitting on the window ledge with a horde of reporters with cameras gathered in the street below. I looked at her and said, “Mama, what’s going on? Are you all right?”
She looked at me and said, “I’m fine, honey. We can’t pay the bill, so I’m threatening to jump out the window.” Then she had me call the manager, the same guy who’d been threatening to evict us for nonpayment, and say, “How’s it going to look for you when Dorothy jumps out your fucking window, huh?” My mother had a pretty rich vocabulary when she was angry. Of course, the manager caved in. As soon as he said we could stay, my mother calmly climbed back into the room.