by Sid Luft
Copyright © 2017 by Sid Luft Living Trust
Foreword and additional material copyright © 2017 by Randy L. Schmidt
All rights reserved
Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated
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Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-61373-586-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Is available from the Library of Congress.
All photos courtesy of Royal Rainbow Productions LLC
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Contents
Foreword by Randy L. Schmidt
PART I: Manhattan, 1950
PART II: The Boy from Bronxville
PART III: Lost in the Stars
PART IV: The Black Irish Witch
PART V: On and Off the Road
PART VI: Leopold and Loeb
PART VII: End of the Rainbow
Index
Foreword
by Randy L. Schmidt
I love Judy. I want to protect her from the trauma she once knew. I don’t want her to be bewildered or hurt again. I want her to have happiness.
—Sid Luft
He’s the kind of person you can lean against if you fall down. He’s strong and protects me. I respect him. And most important, I like him as much as I love him.
—Judy Garland
“ANY WOMAN WHO’S a real woman wants a man to protect her and love her. That’s what Sid Luft does for me.” Closing night, backstage at New York’s legendary RKO Palace Theatre in 1952, Judy Garland beamed as she spoke of her newfound love. Her stint at the Palace had begun as a modest four-week run but quickly turned into a triumphant nineteen-week, record-breaking engagement of 184 performances grossing nearly $800,000. “We have accomplished so much together,” Judy said. “This whole thing at the Palace has been magical. Sid has done it for me. That’s my fella!”
Act 1 of Judy Garland’s immense career encompassed her beginnings in vaudeville, followed by sixteen years at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was there that she made more than two dozen feature films, including The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, and Easter Parade. That curtain closed on Judy in 1950, and she found herself out of work and unemployable at the age of twenty-eight. It was a frustrating and hopeless year until Sid Luft entered the scene. Ushering in a fresh sense of confidence and energy in Judy, Sid was the impresario who pushed her to play the Palace. That success marked the beginning of Judy’s act 2, when the star was reborn in a series of comebacks as legendary as the living legend herself.
Judy would marry five times in her short life of just forty-seven years. Her marriage to Sid lasted the longest, probably because Sid was so drastically different from the others. “Yeah, well, I was no Minnelli, that’s for sure,” Sid told Michael Shelden, a writer for the Telegraph, in 2001. “I grew up in a rough New York neighborhood and didn’t put up with shit from anyone. I’m a survivor, with the scars to show for it, and I think that appealed to Judy. She needed someone to lean on who wouldn’t crack.”
The self-proclaimed Hollywood tough guy was a former amateur boxer they called One-Punch Luft, who had a reputation for drinking and gambling. He was a test pilot turned producer with a strong build and even stronger Bronx accent. In a December 2005 piece for the Atlantic, titled “The Least Worst Man,” writer Mark Steyn distinguished Sid from Judy’s other husbands by saying he was “a rare friend of Judy who wasn’t a friend of Dorothy. . . . Unlike his predecessor [Vincente Minnelli], he was not ‘musical,’ in either the artistic or the euphemistic sense; unlike his successor [Mark Herron], he was not voraciously gay.”
The Lufts were married for thirteen years (1952–1965), but together—on and off and on again—for two decades. One gossip columnist joked, “So Sid Luft is what a girl finds over the rainbow?” Some saw Sid as Judy’s savior, the person who scooped her up from the depths of despair and gave her a second chance. Others thought he was a shady opportunist riding the coattails of his famous wife and milking her for all she was worth. But when you look at the big picture of Judy’s creative output during their time together, it’s hard to deny that they were obviously doing something right. The Palace, A Star Is Born, Carnegie Hall, The Judy Garland Show—some of her finest performances and greatest triumphs—all came during the Luft years.
Judy and I: My Life with Judy Garland is a book that was in the works for more than thirty years. In November 1963, newspapers reported that Sid Luft was writing his autobiography. It was to be titled I’ll Laugh Saturday, in reference to a private joke between him and Judy. The project continued intermittently with a range of ghostwriters and working titles, including Good Girl, Bad Girl and Star Light, Star Bright.
Just two months after Judy’s untimely death on June 22, 1969, there was news that Sid was at it again, this time working with Leo Guild on a book for Holloway House. Even though he and Judy had been divorced for four years and she had remarried twice, Sid turned out to be the sharpest steward of her legacy. A Star Is Born, their mutual masterpiece, was beautifully and painstakingly restored and rereleased in 1983. Sid later produced Judy Garland: The Concert Years, an award-winning PBS documentary. Additionally, Judy’s TV specials from the 1950s and ’60s, as well as the twenty-six episodes of The Judy Garland Show, were issued on DVD under his guidance.
Sid remained in Hollywood and remarried twice, first in 1970 to Patti Hemingway in a marriage that lasted less than a year, and later to actress Camille Keaton. The last time he acquired a book deal for this project was in 1992 with HarperCollins, but the deal fell through when the manuscript wasn’t delivered in a timely manner. Sid never gave up on his plan to tell the story of his life with Judy Garland, but the manuscript remained unfinished at the time of his death on September 15, 2005, at the age of eighty-nine.
The late Coyne Steven Sanders, author of the outstanding book Rainbow’s End: The Judy Garland Show, knew Sid Luft for many years and contributed to his obituary in the Los Angeles Times. “Sid was a great showman,” Sanders said. “I think he understood Judy better professionally than anyone else did. He knew how to produce her shows, which were lavishly full-blown productions. I’d say he was the most important male figure in her adult life. He certainly was the most sustained relationship she had in her adult life. They had a great love affair.”
The original manuscript for Judy and I comes to a halt in 1960. This is quite telling, for it was that year that marked a turning point in the couple’s marriage: the arrival of Freddie Fields and David Begelman, Judy’s new agents. This was to be the beginning of the end for Sid, who soon witnessed a swift succession of steps in which he was gradually and strategically removed from Judy’s life, both professional and personal.
It is with the blessing and encouragement of the Sid Luft Living Trust that I have crafted the final sections of this book (parts VI and VII) with artistic license, using quotes mined from various interviews and conversations with Sid. My sincere thanks to Joe Luft and his partners John Kimble and Phil Sandhaus of Royal Rainbow Productions for this honor, and to Yuval Taylor, senior editor at Chicago Review Press, for the opportunity.
The primary sources include a 237-page transcript of notes from extensive interviews between an unknown interlocutor and Sid (circa 1996–1997), Sid’s quotes from Judy, the 1975 book by Gerold Frank (currently owned by Royal Rainbow Productions), and an eighty-page transcript of notes from a taped conversation between Sid Luft, Freddie Fields, and David Begelman (recorded August 22, 1963).
Other materials sourced include an audio recording of an interview conducted by Mike Wallace for Mike Wallace at Large, CBS Radio
Network, 1974; a transcript for “Judy,” a 60 Minutes profile produced by Igor Oganesoff for CBS News, August 3, 1975 (volume VII, number 29), with special thanks to Barbara Dury; Jeanie Kasindorf’s cover story for New West, “The Incredible Past of David Begelman,” February 13, 1978; an audio recording of an interview conducted by Lawrence Schulman (recorded September 15, 1993), with special thanks to John H. Haley; and Michael Shelden’s June 2001 feature for the Telegraph, titled “I Couldn’t Stop Judy Falling Apart.”
Love him or hate him, Sid Luft was Judy’s “fella,” and Judy and I: My Life with Judy Garland is the man’s long-lost “love letter” to his legendary wife. It’s a rich and intimate portrait of their lives and creative work together, and one that captivatingly explores the couple’s very public marriage as well as their private moments and shared struggles. That classic era of silver screen glamour from the days of A Star Is Born is gone, but it comes back to life in true Vicki Lester–Norman Maine fashion through Sid’s chronicles. Here you’ll find a wealth of information on one of Hollywood’s stormiest up-and-down relationships, and a fresh insight into a larger-than-life show business power couple. It’s a vivid illustration of how, at least for a time, Judy Garland and Sid Luft shared something sincere and special.
PART I
Manhattan, 1950
1
NEW YORK WAS A SCORCHER. It was September, and the entire Eastern Seaboard was having a heatwave.
I’d returned to the city from Media, Pennsylvania, where I’d met with Sam Riddle, the owner of the great racehorse Man o’ War. I’d been working for a month to put together a film about the near mythical golden-red horse, a post–World War I symbol of greatness like Babe Ruth or Gene Tunney. Man o’ War had won the Lawrence Realization Stakes by as much as one hundred lengths. I’d been driven, in spite of the long odds on independent producers at the time, to make this Technicolor film. With two profit-making grade-B Monogram movies under my belt, I was eager to continue climbing the show-business mountain. I had no fear of heights.
Bob Agins, a lawyer I’d come to know during my not-yet-finalized divorce from the actress Lynn Bari, had accompanied me to Media. We needed script approval from Riddle before we could continue with the project. The screenplay had been written by W. R. Burnett, author of such megahits as Asphalt Jungle. We had high hopes.
However, Riddle had just nixed the Burnett script. It was the first of many vetoes. “It didn’t happen this way!” was Riddle’s favorite response.
As I ducked into the air-conditioned refuge of the 21 Club to meet my golf pals Jock and Neddie McLean for lunch, I was thinking maybe I should have just stayed in Los Angeles. I was early and the bar was half filled. I ordered a double martini with olive and cooled off while reading the Daily News.
Theater legend Billy Rose had devoted his entire column, Pitching Horseshoes, to Judy Garland. The column headline, LOVE LETTER TO A NATIONAL ASSET, was addressed to Judy at the Calvena Lodge in Lake Tahoe, where she was vacationing, and made reference to her recent “bout with the jim-jams.” Rose extolled Judy’s talent in a folksy story, telling how he’d recently wandered into her latest hit (and final film for MGM), Summer Stock. “A hundred minutes later I walked out of the projection room with a slaphappy grin on my face.” He finished off the lengthy piece with this advice to Judy:
One thing more: Next time you’re down in the dumps—if there has to be a next time—it might help you to remember that you’re only feeling the way most of us feel a good part of the time. Unfortunately, we’re in no position to ease your headache. You, on the other hand, through the medium of the neighborhood theatre, can do more than a million boxes of aspirin to ease ours.
Your devoted fan,
Billy Rose
MGM had recently suspended the country’s favorite daughter. I’d been aware of the press reports: Judy’s attempt at suicide was considered unimportant, a bid for attention. I was all too familiar with the stress and strains of performers. I had a built-in reflex not to credit the press with accuracy.
You couldn’t live in Hollywood, as I did, and not be aware of “little Judy Garland.” In fact, our lives had crisscrossed a couple times over the years. On both occasions she sang, and I thought how talented she was.
I’d seen Judy out on the town several times, once with Louis B. Mayer at the Trocadero nightclub, another time with her mother and friends at Victor Hugo’s, a popular supper club in the heart of Beverly Hills. But the first time we actually met was the day I visited my lover Eleanor Powell on the set of Broadway Melody of 1938. It turned out to be Judy’s fifteenth birthday. We were introduced. I thought she was full of beans, but she seemed a child.
In 1940, exactly a year before Pearl Harbor, I married Marylou Simpson, a Los Angeles debutante and an aspiring actress. It was also the year Judy Garland’s engagement to musician/composer David Rose was announced. “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” was a hit song, and Judy’s rendition of the Chopin melody lifted by songwriter Harry Carroll seemed to be playing everywhere. Three MGM films starring Judy Garland were box office successes throughout the nation: Andy Hardy Meets Debutante, costarring Mickey Rooney; Strike Up the Band, directed by Busby Berkeley; and Little Nellie Kelly, in which Judy played both the child and the mother (George Murphy’s wife). She was allowed to grow up in this film.
I understood it’s not the content that’s so important for an artist as much as how the artist uses it. That’s the difference between a genius and somebody who has some talent. Judy was a good example of genius. She performed in ordinary story lines, but the one distinguishing element was her tremendous gift: she was a great lyric reader and had the natural ability to coordinate her dance skills with her acting and voice. There was a reason George and Ira Gershwin, as well as Irving Berlin, wrote songs especially for her.
The second time I met Judy was several years later, when I joined Peter Lawford at the Hillcrest bowling alley, near the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Judy was part of the gang. By then I was married to Lynn Bari and Judy to Vincente Minnelli. She wore bobby socks and saddle shoes, reflecting the juvenile image she projected to the public.
I was not at first attracted to her. Anita Loos said, “Gentlemen marry brunettes,” which was certainly true in my case. When I fell in love I got married. I thought my wives sophisticated, glamorous types, not wholesome apple-pie girls. So Judy Garland was not an erotic fantasy. How could it occur to me our lives would in any way be connected? And yet some invisible cord was shortening with every contact, no matter how casual or distant the meeting.
The McLean brothers, whom I was meeting for lunch that day in September 1950, shuttled between Palm Beach, New York, and Hollywood. Eastern Seaboard playboys, they came from a wealthy family that had owned the Washington Post, among other assets. Their mother, Evalyn, was eccentric, famous for owning the Hope Diamond. Neddie and Jock were constantly attempting to interest their pal Henry Ford II in putting up money for one thing or another. The brothers smarted from Henry’s refusals, as though someone had spanked them. Now, at the 21 Club over a London broil, they were attempting to persuade me to invest in a cemetery on Long Island. I told them, holding back the laughter, that maybe it was the way I grew up but the idea depressed me. Neddie and Jock seemed dejected by my negative response, but I suggested they keep me in mind for something else.
I proceeded to tell them about my deal, Man o’ War. I would be meeting with Ted Law, a Texas oilman, in Saratoga the following week to shoot sample footage. Ted, who was my partner in Walfarms, our stable outside of Los Angeles, was also one of the investors in Man o’ War. I’d arranged for jockeys Eddie Arcaro and Sam Renick to ride, and we were going to re-create the 1919 Sanford Stakes, an allegedly fixed race that Man o’ War lost to the racehorse Upset. It was the only race that Man o’ War ever lost. I held Neddie and Jock’s interest through another martini, but I could see the idea of a racetrack movie didn’t thrill them as much as a cemetery. We made a golf date for later on in the month and went our s
eparate ways.
That Saturday night, I took a date to Billy Reed’s Little Club in the East Fifties and ran smack into screenwriter Freddie Finklehoffe sipping daiquiris with the “national asset,” Judy Garland. Oh, I thought, she’s left Lake Tahoe. Judy looked very different from the last time we’d met in the Beverly Hills bowling alley. Freddie, who was a pal of mine, would have to say hello and introduce me to Judy. And Freddie could be extremely territorial.
I’d become drinking buddies with him as a result of a bet. We both used to hang out at Ciro’s, an “in” watering hole on the Sunset Strip, but somehow we’d never talked to one another. Then one day as I was leaving for the Santa Anita track, Freddie asked if I’d place a bet for him. I did, and he won a considerable amount of money. Freddie was very impressed. By 1950 we’d shared a few adventures.
Harvard-educated, small, bookish, Freddie dressed in a sort of sloppy, Ivy League fashion as opposed to my Savile Row style. He covered his prematurely balding pate with a jauntily worn fedora, giving him a devil-may-care appearance. Freddie had worshipped Judy from the early MGM years, when he wrote and collaborated on many of her films, including Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway, For Me and My Gal, Girl Crazy, and Meet Me in St. Louis.
Everyone who worked with Judy respected her talent, and most everyone, including Freddie, was a little in love with her. Judy could memorize a script in one read, dance after simply watching the choreography, and perform in front of the camera in one take. In those years her coworkers were in awe. Joe Pasternak, who produced Summer Stock, said, “Judy Garland half dead was better than anyone else.”
At the moment Freddie was not happy. In the middle of a divorce from singer Ella Logan, he was actually going with a beautiful blonde, whom he eventually married. But for a long time he’d had a crush on Judy, whom he called “chocolate drop.” Their relationship was more of a hallucination on Freddie’s part, mesmerized as he was by Judy’s talent. It was one of those mythical romances.