Me and My Shadows

by Lorna Luft

  I’d walked away from my mother. That last year, I’d walked away and left her to take care of herself. And she’d died. She’d goddamn died. Didn’t they understand that?

  That’s what I wrestled with the hardest that week. For fifteen years my mother’s ghost had haunted me, the ghost of my own guilt. “I could have saved her,” I’d thought over and over again. “I could have saved her. I should have stayed with her at the end.” But there in that conference room in Palm Springs, I finally confronted that ghost. The counselor looked me in the eye and said, “Do you really believe that, Lorna? Your mother died. Do you honestly believe you could have saved her?” That night, and for several nights after that, I lay awake and asked myself that question: Could I really have saved her? Countless books and articles have been written about my mother, about how she could have been saved if someone had really cared enough. I believed it myself. But there in that hotel room, I finally faced the hard truth: there was nothing I could have done to save her. There was nothing anybody could have done. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t even Mickey Dean’s fault. If she hadn’t overdosed that night, it would have been the next. Or the one after that. Sooner or later it would have happened, and none of us could have stopped it.

  I lay there in the hotel and I would cry for my mother, and for all those other mothers and fathers and grandparents who had died because nobody understood the disease that had taken them. I saw the pain in the faces of the people surrounding me there at the center, and I knew it was the same pain I’d carried for so many years. I wondered how different my mother’s life might have been if they had understood addiction when she was young, if there had been a Betty Ford Center to send her to during those last, agonizing years. And for the first time I truly understood that what had taken my mother from me was a disease, and for the first time, I was able to forgive her—forgive her for the pain in our home, forgive her for the anger and the terror, and, most of all, forgive her for dying and leaving me all alone when I needed her so much. And I looked at my baby son sleeping there next to me and thought, thank God. Thank God it doesn’t have to go on another generation.

  As my ten days at the center drew to a close, I received a message saying Liza had requested a meeting with me before I left at the end of the program. I’d seen her two or three times already since the day we checked her in. She was allowed a limited number of visitors; her father had been to see her, my father had been there, and a couple of her closest friends had been there, too. When I’d been to see her earlier, I’d already told her that I’d seen Elizabeth Taylor, and that she had been wonderfully helpful. Liza’s reaction startled me. Her head had whipped around, and she’d said, “What? What do you mean, you saw her?” There was a great deal of anger and resentment on her face as she said it, and I remember a little bell had gone off in my head. Uh-oh. Maybe this was what Elizabeth had meant. But my sister has always been very possessive about her friends, and I thought maybe she considered Elizabeth her friend, not mine. I chalked it up to possessiveness and didn’t connect it with her stay at the center.

  So when I walked into the one-on-one counseling session at the end of the Family Program, I had no expectation that anything unpleasant would occur. I was still overwhelmed by the power of the new discoveries I’d been making day by day. But the minute I sat down, it was clear that Liza was angry with me. She began to pour out her resentment about all kinds of things I’d never known she even thought about. There were two areas she talked about the most; one was what she called my judgmental attitude. She thought I was constantly judging her and her friends, looking down on their behavior. Things that I thought of as expressions of caring and concern, she thought of as criticism. The other source of her resentment was Mark. She was very angry about my obvious dislike of Mark. When I tried to tell her that I didn’t like him because I thought he was hurting her and because I didn’t like his lifestyle, she told me it was none of my business. I was very surprised by the way she felt, and very hurt. I tried to explain why I’d acted as I had, but it didn’t seem to make any difference to her. She was too filled with resentment to care about my point of view. I was stunned. I hadn’t expected her reaction. I should have, especially after my conversation with Elizabeth Taylor, but I didn’t.

  Then I got angry. When the counselor asked me what I wanted to say to Liza, I told her I was very unhappy with her behavior, too—all the insanity, all the deception. I told her that the thing I resented the most about her was the constant lying. She could never seem to tell me the truth about anything; either she’d avoid the subject or make up something to get herself off the hook. Even when I called, she’d often pretend not to be there or have someone say, “She’s in the shower.” I’d think, “God, how clean must she be by now? The woman takes more showers than anyone I’ve heard of.” I told her I’d rather she just say it was a bad time, that she’d call me back when she could. Instead I always ended up feeling stupid, like the dumb little sister, and I wouldn’t want to call her the next time. “Why do you have to lie to me about everything?” I asked her. By then I was in tears of anger and pain. She didn’t seem to have anything good to say to me, even about getting her help. I didn’t want credit, from her or anyone else; I just wanted her to understand that I’d taken a big risk because I loved her.

  By the time it was all over, we were both in tears. Everybody said the right things, and the session ended in a friendly manner. But I was deeply disturbed by what had happened. Even when we hugged at the end, I thought to myself, “I wonder if this is for real, or if it’s just another performance.” Like our mother, Liza didn’t get that Academy Award for nothing. The whole experience reminded me of moments with my mom years before. I couldn’t be sure whether Liza was expressing her real feelings or just giving another performance. The lying was so deeply ingrained in her that I wasn’t sure she could quit. I understood that; all of us—me, Liza, Joey, and Sid—had become expert liars as a way to survive with my mother, who was only willing to hear what she wanted us to say. Joe and I had struggled long and hard to develop honest relationships with people. But with Liza, it went much deeper. The line between truth and performance had blurred with her as it had with our mother, and the question that disturbed me the most was whether Liza, though finally sober, was still doing it. It had been different with my mom; Mama’s “performances” were a product of her advancing disease, of the chemicals working on her mind. Liza, on the other hand, was now stone-cold sober and had just finished a lengthy process of education and introspection. If the Ford Center hadn’t changed her, what would? I wrestled with my doubts all night after my conference with her, and for a long time after that I continued to struggle with it. Was Liza well now? I just didn’t know.

  Two weeks after the Family Program ended, Liza came out of the Ford Center. She rented a house in Beverly Hills and started giving interviews. The press agents were all over her for a statement. She gave a long interview to People magazine about her experience at the center, and for a long time the press was flooded with articles about her experience. Her story was always the same: she’d realized she had a problem and decided to check herself into the Ford Center because they had such an excellent program there.

  In all the interviews she gave the impression that she had taken the initiative herself every step of the way. She never mentioned her mental disintegration in the hospital in New York, and she certainly never mentioned the role played by the people around her who had done everything short of kidnapping her to get her to the center where she could be helped. On the contrary, she presented herself as if the entire program had been her own idea from the start.

  People close to the situation would say to me, “She never mentions you, all you went through to get her there. Doesn’t that bother you?” It really didn’t. I knew what I’d done, but I also knew it was Liza’s style to dramatize things and make herself the center of attention. It was her coping mechanism, a way to protect herself from the humiliation she would have felt if she
’d told the press what had really happened. I didn’t mind that she didn’t mention me. She hadn’t mentioned Roni or anyone else who’d helped her, either.

  The important thing was that she was healthy and sober and alive. I’d come too close to losing her to worry about who got the credit for her recovery.

  Besides, I had my own family to worry about. With a three-month old baby and a career change in the works, it was time to turn my attention back to my own life. I left the Ford Center Family Program excited, rejuvenated, brimming over with new information that I hoped to carry into my daily life.

  But first things first. For one thing, I needed to find a place to live.

  By this time Jake had picked up the rest of our belongings in New York, leased our apartment, and flown out to California to meet me and Jesse. We needed a place to stay, so Jack Haley offered to let us stay with him until we could find a place of our own. I had remained on good terms with Jack after Liza’s divorce and still considered him a friend, so Jake and I moved in for a few weeks as Jack’s houseguests. Jack was very happy about what I had done in getting Liza to the Ford Center, and he was very kind to us. Of course, he was still drinking like a fish himself, but the poor man seemed oblivious to the irony. I’d talk about what I’d learned at the center, and he’d express his warm support while sipping another mug of vodka. What could I say?

  Jake located a house for us to lease in Studio City, a small city nestled against the Hollywood Hills just minutes from the Burbank television studios. It was a very cute little house, and we got a cute little dog to go with our cute little baby. With no work to occupy my time, my life had gotten so cute it was nauseating. I was trying to live a normal, sober life, but the problem was that I didn’t know what normal was; I hadn’t had a “normal” day since I was seven years old.

  I started going on auditions for television work, but had little success in the beginning. I would get very close to a part, but at the last minute, the deal always fell apart. I didn’t know why, and it bothered me. Finally my manager, Bob Lemond, told me he wanted me to work with an acting coach named Jered Barclay to see if he could figure out what was wrong.

  Jered is a wonderful man. I liked him immediately. It didn’t take long for him to figure out what was wrong. I had arrived in L.A. after a career in New York, and I thought and behaved like a New York theater person. Like so many New York actors, I had an attitude about L.A. I thought the television people in Los Angeles were all slightly nuts, and I looked down on them. It was the old New York versus L.A. feud that has been going on in the acting community for years. What I didn’t realize was that I was taking that attitude into meetings with me.

  Jered sat me down and said, “Look, it’s like this. In New York, they sit you down and say, ‘Let’s play Monopoly,’ so you play Monopoly. But in L.A. they say, ‘Let’s play a game, but we’re not going to tell you what the game is.’ The game is Bullshit, and you’re going to have to learn how to play it.”

  When I protested that I hated all the bullshitting that went on in Hollywood, and I didn’t want to do it, he said, “Then you will never work here. You may as well pick up your baby and go back to New York, because you will never get a job in L.A.”

  “But if I do what you’re asking, I’ll be just like all the rest of them. I don’t want to be like that.”

  And then Jered gave me a great piece of advice. “You don’t have to be like that all the time. You only have to be that way while you’re standing in those offices. Think of it like this: Pretend it’s a piece of luggage. Call it your ‘full-of-shit’ bag. When you go to the meetings, you’re going to pick up your shit bag and carry it to work with you like a briefcase. As long as you’re in that office, you’re going to clutch that shit bag. You’re going to be Dorothy Adorable, act like everything they say is brilliant, and charm everyone in the place. The minute you leave the office, you’re going to put the shit bag in the car, go home, take a shower, and become a normal person again. As long as you don’t take it home with you, you’ll be fine. And you’ll get a job. I guarantee it.”

  I took his words to heart. The next time I had a meeting, I packed up my little bag and took it with me. I was charming and adorable. One week later I landed a part in the television series Trapper John, M.D., a spin-off of the M*A*S*H series, set in a U.S. hospital after the characters return from the Korean War. I was offered an ongoing, supporting role as a staff nurse.

  I loved doing Trapper John; the cast was great, and it was wonderful to settle into the steady routine a television series provides. Since I didn’t have to tour anymore, I could be home with Jesse in the evening and on weekends. I found a wonderful nurse for him named Maria, and with the money from the series we were able to buy a house in Beverly Hills. I’d come full circle. I was back in my childhood neighborhood, just up Sunset Boulevard from Mapleton Drive, except now I was the mom, and the baby boy in the next room was my son. My dad lived less than five miles away, and my brother was just on the other side of the Hollywood Hills from us. Life wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good, and I was determined to make it work.

  Jake was happy with the situation, too. Money had always been very important to him, and he relished the things my salary could provide for us. Along with the new house came a new Mercedes for Jake and a relatively posh lifestyle. Jake still traveled sometimes as Rick Derringer’s manager, but most of the time he was home with us in California. He loved the glamour of Hollywood—all the trappings, the glitter and the glitz. We attended a lot of the premieres, always dressed to the nines, and Jake was always having me stop so we could have our picture taken. “Stop,” he’d say as I was walking along. “Have your picture taken.” And we’d pose for the camera.

  Jake always saw to it that I looked glamorous in public; he wouldn’t let me leave the house without being nicely dressed and fully made up. “You have an image to maintain,” he would tell me over and over. He was intensely aware not only of my career, but of my identity as Judy Garland’s daughter and Liza’s sister. It was very important to him that I promote a glamorous image for myself.

  I began to settle into our new life, and to form a personal and professional network. The most important of these relationships was with Bob Lemond and his partner, Lois Zetter. They became not only my agents, but important sources of friendship. Bob and Lois had formed a highly successful management team called Lemond/Zetter. They had a stable of the most beautiful men in Hollywood. If was a kind of standing joke; if you saw a really gorgeous guy, someone would crack, “He must be managed by Bob Lemond.”

  Bob managed John Travolta among many others, and it was through Bob and Lois that I first got to know Johnnie. Bob was the one with the artistic sense, and Lois was the one with the business sense who provided the nuts and bolts of the operation. Bob would pick out your head shots and plan your look; Lois would call to tell you if you got the job. They were a perfect team, each balancing the other’s gifts.

  I’d first met them through my friend Maxine Messenger, the columnist from the Houston Chronicle who’d helped me out of the jam with Danny Thomas years before. After going on tour with They’re Playing Our Song a couple of years before, I’d felt my career—and my marriage—both needed a boost, so I’d signed with Bob and Lois to manage me. Jake wasn’t exactly crazy about the arrangement, and he certainly didn’t like Bob and Lois personally, but he also recognized it was a good career move. Lemond/Zetter was highly respected in the business, with good connections to all the networks, and as long as they were getting me work (and they were), Jake was willing to put up with the arrangement. Bob had a reputation as a star maker, and Jake wanted me to be a star.

  Life wasn’t perfect, but it was, as they say “good enough.” I had a wonderful little son, a nice home, people to love, and work I enjoyed. My marriage wasn’t the kind of thing they write songs about, but then whose was? My two magical weeks at the Ford Center Family Program were rapidly fading into a memory as the demands of everyday life took over. I h
ad found a measure of understanding and peace in Palm Springs that summer, and if I wasn’t really applying my new knowledge to my relationships with those around me, at least I was staying sober myself. I told myself that was enough, and tried not to think too much about it. I had faced about as much truth as I could take for the time being.

  What I didn’t yet understand was that once you take the first steps on the long journey to health, there’s really no going back. One way or another, life will force you to make choices you never wanted to make.

  Collection of the author

  With Vanessa outside the house her grandmother was born in, Grand Rapids, Minnesota, 1992.

  CHAPTER 19

  My Own Backyard

  It’s remarkable how patterns repeat in families without our even knowing it. That had become very clear to me at the Ford Center. All three of my mother’s children had developed serious addiction problems. In spite of what we’d experienced as children, or more accurately because of it, we had each followed a similar path. For me and Liza, it was cocaine and alcohol, and in Liza’s case, pills as well. For Joe it was primarily alcohol. Yet at first none of us realized we were repeating a pattern. I never made the connection between my coke use and my mother’s medication until I went to the Ford Center.

  Unfortunately, addiction wasn’t the only destructive pattern that ran in the family.

  I had unknowingly repeated my family’s pattern in marriage as well. In marrying Jake, I had chosen an alcoholic, someone who needed a partner with the training I’d received during those years on Rockingham Drive. I was an expert codependent. I knew how to put Jake to bed, how to deal with his abusive moods, how to cover up for his excesses, how to lie to myself about the reality of our mutual addictions. I had married Jake because I felt comfortable in the role of enabler. It was what I did best.