by Lorna Luft
With Liza safely tucked away in Palm Springs, I returned to Jake and my baby, satisfied that I’d done my job. I knew I’d be overwhelmed with questions from friends and strangers alike, but I was prepared for that. I avoided people as much as possible, talked with the close friends who called to express their concern, and tried to go on about my business. I ignored Liza’s husband, Mark; he didn’t ask, and I didn’t volunteer anything.
Meanwhile, Jake and I went about making plans for our move to California. Bob Lemond, my manager, wanted to make sure I was there for the pilot season in the fall to audition for upcoming television roles. I had lost most of the weight I’d gained with Jesse by then and wasn’t working in New York, so we agreed I’d move to L.A. in September. It was already summer, so Jake set about making arrangements to lease out our New York apartment until we were ready to sell.
Things were moving along right on schedule when I got a message that the Ford Center was trying to get in touch with me. I called them, thinking it must be about Liza, but instead they told me they wanted me to come to the center for the Family Program. I had no idea what they were talking about. When they explained that I needed to come back to California and spend some time at the center myself, I objected. I couldn’t possibly go right then, I told them; I have a baby, and I’m getting ready to move. Privately I thought, “What are you bothering me for? Liza’s the one with the problem. I’ve been clean for over a year.” I thought I was fine. Problem? I didn’t have a problem.
As far as I was concerned, that was that, but the Ford Center didn’t give up that easily. They kept calling and calling, telling me it was very important that I attend the sessions at the center for the families. I continued to say “no” until they finally gave up and called Roni. Roni felt very uncomfortable about going, since she’s not a family member, and she urged me to reconsider.
Finally I gave in to the pressure and thought, “Okay, what the hell. I’m moving out there in a month anyway. I’ll get a sitter for Jesse and just take him with me.” I called my friend Liz Derringer to see if she could watch Jesse while I was at the sessions. “We’ll get a really nice hotel, and I’ll pay for everything. It’ll be sort of like a paid vacation.” Liz agreed. Jake and I packed up the rest of our possessions and made plans for him to follow in two weeks and set up our living quarters in Los Angeles.
Early in August I said good-bye to New York, flew to Palm Springs with Jesse, and checked into the same hotel I’d stayed in when we’d first brought Liza to the center. Liz would join me in a couple of days. But before she did, I had someone I needed to see first.
From the day I’d made the first call to get Liza into the Betty Ford Center, I’d been beseiged by people’s opinions about what I was doing. Some, like Gail and Roni, had put themselves on the line to help me. But others weren’t so supportive. I had gone out on a very long limb by getting Liza admitted to the center. In my heart I believed I was doing the right thing for my sister, but I needed reassurance from someone I could trust, someone with more experience than I had in dealing with the family crisis. Who better than Elizabeth Taylor? She was an old friend of my mother’s from their MGM days. Elizabeth was a few years younger than my mother, but they’d both been there during the same era. I’d seen Elizabeth socially over the years, usually at some celebrity event, but I didn’t know her well. I did know her to be a kind person. She had just finished the program at the Ford Center herself, so I called to ask if I could come by and see her at her home. She graciously agreed.
I still remember watching her walk into the living room that afternoon. The first words that went through my mind were, “What an extraordinary woman she is.” She was amazingly beautiful, in a way that took my breath away. I’d always seen Elizabeth at formal occasions before then, fully made up and dressed to the nines; but at home, with just the two of us, she was completely different. She was simply dressed in a white top and pants, and she wore no makeup. Somehow that clean-skinned simplicity made her beauty even more striking. As she gave me a hug and sat down on the couch across from me, I looked into those famous violet eyes and thought, “My God. You’re amazing.”
What was more important for me that day, though, was that Elizabeth is a lovely human being. Carefully watching my face, she listened intently as I poured my heart out about Liza and my fears for my sister. The first thing I said was, “I’m here because I don’t know what to do when my sister gets out of the center. I’m scared.” Most people would have said, “There, there. She’ll be fine. It will all work out.” But Elizabeth didn’t. She recognized the gravity of the situation, and she took me seriously. She truly cared about my sister—about the addiction, the current crisis, what Liza had already been through, and the press, already circling like sharks who smelled blood. She never gave me a glib, easy answer; she answered all my questions thoughtfully, with real honesty.
Most of all, I needed reassurance from Elizabeth that I’d done the right thing for Liza. She gave me the validation I needed. And she warned me that it wouldn’t be easy. She told me, “Liza may hate you for doing this. She may resent you for it. She’ll be going through a lot of changes. She may resent the fact that you’re clean and sober, and that you have a child. That she can’t be like you. She may have many painful feelings about you.” I kept saying, no, no, that would never happen, Liza wouldn’t feel like that. I was sure she wouldn’t.
I will be grateful to Elizabeth for the rest of my life for what she shared with me that afternoon. She was extraordinarily helpful, an invaluable source of information and support. People love to say nasty things about her, but she has always been kind and gracious to me. I didn’t go to her because she was a friend of my mother’s; I didn’t even go to her as a mother figure. But still, because of the generational difference, I felt that I had validation from my mother’s generation, from someone with so much more wisdom than I had. At the end I cried, and I thanked her for just being there for me. I left her house that day deeply reassured.
Although most people had been wonderfully supportive of my decision to take Liza to the Ford Center, I knew it was a risky decision, and I had also taken some criticism for doing it. The chief critic was Mickey Rudin, my sister’s attorney. Mickey was the Sinatras’ attorney for years, and he has a well-deserved reputation as an attack dog; he’s smart and efficient, but ruthless. He’s a powerful man, one to be reckoned with. When I’d first checked Liza into the center, he had called me at my hotel to say he wanted to see me in Los Angeles before I returned East.
Roni and Pam and I drove down together to his office, expecting that he wanted an update on Liza and to tell us he was glad all had gone well. We couldn’t have been more wrong. No sooner had we sat down in his office than he proceeded to chastise us like schoolchildren.
“I can’t believe you did this,” he told us. “When I heard you had taken Liza to Betty Ford, I thought to myself, ‘The inmates have taken over the asylum.’ Do you know what this could do to Liza’s career? Thank God she knows I had nothing to do with this. I made that very clear to her.”
I just sat there, appalled at what he was saying. Aside from the fact that I resented being treated like a child, I was deeply upset by his callous attitude toward my sister. I’d always known that he was first and foremost concerned with business matters, but Liza trusted him, and I’d always assumed he was genuinely concerned with Liza’s best interest. Sitting there that day, though, hearing him talk about canceled performances and bad press, I realized our ideas about her “best interests” differed radically. I thought, “He doesn’t care one little bit about my sister. All he cares about is her career.” I was disillusioned and angry. I left his office that day feeling disgusted.
The center had been in contact with me in the interval. The Family Program would last ten days, they’d told me. I picked up Liz Derringer at the airport and got her settled into the hotel in an adjoining suite. I would need to be there at eight-thirty the first morning for orientation and be prepared to spe
nd the whole day. Early the next morning I arrived at the center. Walking into the room they directed me to, I found myself surrounded by several dozen strangers—and my sister’s husband, Mark. I was floored. He was the last person I’d expected to see there. I hadn’t spoken to him since Liza entered the center. Diplomat that I am, I said, “What are you doing here?” He explained that he’d thought seriously about his life since Liza had left, and that he’d made some big decisions. He’d realized he, too, had a problem and that he needed help. I was surprised, but I told him I was glad he’d realized it. I respected his decision, but I felt uncomfortable with him, and I was relieved when we were assigned to different groups. Mark completed the Family Program on his own, got help for his alcohol problems, and has continued to live responsibly. He and my sister have been divorced for a long time now, but I’ve come to admire and respect Mark for the changes he made in his life. I now know that Mark wasn’t to blame for my sister’s problems.
It soon became clear that the Family Program was hard work. Classes started every morning at nine and didn’t end until five P.M., with a break for lunch. We were given an agenda and a pile of reading material—books, pamphlets, articles to read. We even had homework to take home at the end of the day. There were large group meetings, small group meetings, seminars, movies, discussions—everything you could name. We were being given a crash course in the realities of chemical dependency and the role families play in the process. It was the most intense educational experience I’ve ever had. It was, for me, revolutionary. It was as if I had rubbed a magic lamp, and a genie had popped out and said, “You know all those questions you’ve had since you were a little girl on Rockingham Drive, Lorna? Well, here are the answers.”
I sat there enthralled, soaking it all up. They explained that an “alcoholic” is their term for anyone with an ongoing chemical dependency, whether the chemical is alcohol or something else. The dynamics and the behavior are the same, no matter which chemical the addict is using. When they explained that the “alcoholic” may actually be dependent on pills, I made the connection with my mother immediately. Mama never really drank much, so I’d always objected to her being called an alcoholic, but with the new definition I was being given, it made perfect sense. My mother’s “alcohol” was prescription medicine. And then when they said that “ninety-eight percent of adult children of alcoholics marry an alcoholic,” it was like a light bulb went on in my head. Bingo! That was me, me exactly. Suddenly it all came together in my head: Mama, Liza, me, Jake, and, as I would soon discover, my brother, Joe—all of us were bound together in an ongoing, destructive family pattern that I had never recognized. I had simply never made the connection. It had never occurred to me that all of these things were interrelated.
What really brought it home to me was listening to the stories of the people around me. In my mind, all the drugs and the craziness I had witnessed were tied up with the insane celebrity lifestyle I had known since I was a kid, but the people in that room with me couldn’t have been further from celebrities. They were just regular people from all parts of America, all lifestyles—mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, who had made tremendous sacrifices to place their loved ones at the Ford Center. In most respects their lives couldn’t have been more different from mine. Yet in the essential sense, our lives were exactly alike. They might never have been to Europe or Studio 54, but it didn’t matter; under the surface, we were all the same. We’d all done the same things, reacted the same ways, told the same lies, to ourselves and to those around us.
It was funny and scary and mind-blowing all at the same time. Over and over again someone would share something, and I’d think, “I did that. I said that. That exact same thing.” And when the counselors described how families like mine act, it was unnerving. I thought, “God, how did he know I did that?” I was overwhelmed.
Instead of dreading the classes, I soaked up every word that was said. Sometimes I didn’t even want to leave at the end of the day. It was all so new to me, and I wanted to learn more and more. I was starved for it.
At the end of the day I’d rush back to the hotel and tell Liz what I’d learned. A close member of Liz’s family had a severe addiction problem, too, and she was blown away by what I was sharing with her. Soon she was reading the pamphlets when I was finished with them. It was intense but wonderful.
For the first time since childhood, I didn’t feel alone. From the day I’d stood in that doorway in Hawaii and watched my mother overcome with rage and chemicals, I’d been keeping a terrible secret in my heart, a secret I could never share with anyone. But there in that room in Palm Springs, I found out that it didn’t really matter that my mother was Judy Garland, the legendary singer and screen icon. It didn’t matter who your mother was; every one of us in that room had told the same lies, struggled with the same shame.
As I listened to the stories from the people around me, I kept thinking how alike we all were. The stories were funny and sad and tragic, but they all had a common thread. Every one of us was an accomplished liar. “Miss Garland isn’t feeling well tonight. She has the flu. . . . My sister is just tired. She’ll be all right for tonight’s performance. . . . Jake can’t go to work this morning. He has food poisoning. . . . Oh, no, I don’t have a drug problem. I just like to have fun at parties with my friends.” And on and on and on.
I thought about all the lies we’d told my mother, Sid and Joe and I. We don’t want to hurt Mama’s feelings. We don’t want to make Mama angry. And later it became, “Jake isn’t an alcoholic. Of course not. . . . I don’t have a problem. Don’t be silly.” Once you start lying, you never stop. It takes over your whole life.
I wasn’t the only actor in that room; we were all actors, and our lives were one long performance.
I also began acquiring a whole new vocabulary at the center. It was there I learned what words like “intervention,” “codependent,” and “enabler” meant. The counselors carefully and clearly explained the part that each family member plays in the addictive cycle. At first I really resisted the concept that by my behavior, I was enabling family members to continue their addiction, but there are so many ways we enable those around us to keep using. One is to cover up for them, protect them from the consequences of their own actions. I’d done that for my mother, and I was still doing it for Jake. Another way is to scream and yell at them constantly about what they’re doing. It only makes them want to use more, and it sets up a conflict that makes solving the problem impossible. That had become the story of my life with Jake. And finally, you can enable an alcoholic to keep using by simply pretending the problem doesn’t exist. Problem? What problem? That was what I’d been doing with Liza. She could be bouncing off the ceiling with cocaine or popping pills on my couch, but I’d never said a word. I’d just gone about my business as if nothing was happening.
Difficult as it was to accept the concept of enabling, accepting the idea of “detachment” was even harder. The counselors explained that when we were talking to an alcoholic under the influence, we weren’t talking to a person at all; we were talking to a chemical. We were having a conversation with a bottle of gin or a line of cocaine, not a human being. Reasoning with a chemical was out of the question. Trying to “fix” a chemical was equally impossible. Consequently, they told us, it was our responsibility to “detach” from a loved one in that condition until they were sober again. In other words, if your loved one comes home dead drunk, don’t undress him and put him to bed. Let him pass out on the couch, and leave him there. If he vomits and passes out on the bed, don’t clean it up. Let him wake up in it. Sleep in the other room. Turn on the television. Step over him and go to a movie with a friend. Let the alcoholic deal with it. We were only responsible for taking care of ourselves, and that was what we should do, just as it was the alcoholic’s responsibility to take care of himself.
I was stunned by this piece of advice. What do you mean, step over him and go to a movie? What happened when he woke up and was furious
about the mess left behind? What happened when he got fired? Sick? Run over? One woman in my group expressed exactly what I was feeling: “What do you mean, don’t pay my son’s rent? He’ll get evicted?’ When the counselor replied, “Let him,” she looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.
That was the hardest part for me, the concept of letting go. I simply couldn’t comprehend it. Over and over I would ask about my sister: “What should I do when she gets out? What should I do if she starts using again? How can I stop her if she gets out of control?” And over and over the counselors kept saying to me, “It’s not your responsibility. It’s her responsibility. Don’t do anything. Don’t help her. Let her help herself.” I couldn’t get that. It was incomprehensible to me. I finally voiced what all of us were thinking: “But she could die.” When the counselor said that was her choice, I thought he was insane. Didn’t he understand? I couldn’t let that happen. I had to prevent it. It was my responsibility, just as it had been my responsibility to take care of my mother. From the day my father had taught me to monitor my mother’s pill intake, I had been taking care of an alcoholic. I was very good at it; I knew where to look for the pills, what lies to tell other people, how to get medical help discreetly, how to administer first aid if they needed it. I was an expert. How could this counselor look me in the face and tell me just to walk away?