by Sid Luft
Shortly before I left for New York I’d been out drinking with Freddie in Los Angeles. Just as Judy was finished with MGM, her manager, Carlton Alsop, whom Judy called “Pa,” was also leaving Hollywood, this time for good. His marriage to the actress Sylvia Sidney was ending, and as an ex-CIA man he was returning to Washington. Freddie knew Carlton was eager to sell his black Cadillac, and I wanted to buy it. So we went over to Carlton’s house for a late drink. I paid Carlton cash for his Cadillac, “the black teardrop job,” and he gave me the keys. There were other people around, enjoying themselves. At one point Carlton left the party room with a young woman. When it came time to go I looked around to say good-bye and wish Carlton luck, but we couldn’t find him. Freddie and I left the house by way of the front door. On our way out I spotted Carlton under the dining room table making love to his date, a young woman who went on to marry a Heinz, of ketchup fame.
Alsop was a rangy man with longish, blond hair, a deep baritone voice, and a twinkle in his eye. He was an articulate person who seemed to be interested in producing films, although I never quite knew what Carlton did other than that he had personally managed Judy Garland in her later career at MGM. When I bought his Cadillac, I was unaware that the previous year he had been by Judy’s side in Boston, during her hospitalization at the Peter Bent Brigham hospital, a wing of the Harvard Medical Center.
When I actually fell in love with Judy, I knew nothing of her medical history other than her recent problems at MGM. Apparently Judy had ignored her doctor’s advice and left the hospital too soon. She was feeling so much better and was eager to return to work. She shot Summer Stock, but she hadn’t confronted her substance abuse; right in the middle of work on her next film, Royal Wedding, she broke with MGM forever due to irreconcilable differences. Again, the rigors of staying “camera slim” became the excuse to return to medication—Judy’s direct path to chaos. Only in rare situations was she ever able to acknowledge the toxic effect of pills on her nervous system.
At the Little Club in New York City, Freddie reluctantly invited me to sit down. I demurred and thanked him, explaining I was about to leave the club with my date. But I sensed a kind of electrical force coming from the small, voluptuous Garland. She was glowing like a ripened cherry in the smoke-filled martini atmosphere. Judy’s brown-black eyes were made up to appear even larger, and they caught me in a kind of fierce, laughing eye contact. I noticed her hair was cut unconventionally short, like a boy’s, creating a disarming contrast. The plunging neckline on her black cocktail dress revealed alabaster white skin, and she wore ruby red lipstick. I thought her lips were more beautiful than Hedy Lamarr’s.
I remembered the reaction I had when I saw Judy in For Me and My Gal in 1942, costarring with Gene Kelly. She appeared glamorous to me for the first time, only to have MGM return her to the Miss Wholesome America image. Of course, there was a war on, and she was more valuable to the studio as a morale booster than as a sexpot. In Hollywood, sexpots were a dime a dozen.
Judy’s eyes darted all over me, through me. I hovered at the table locked into some sort of unexpected mutual attraction, which left Freddie muttering under his breath. When I returned to my date I felt as though I’d been through something I didn’t quite understand. Judy’s eyes coming on, her sensual lips, the small sleek head, the round, alabaster breasts showing off, all of it a heady potion to swallow.
The next day Freddie called me at the Hotel Ritz Carlton, where I was staying. “Join us tonight?” Judy and several friends—all men, as it would turn out—were planning to hear Billy Daniels sing at the Riviera Club in New Jersey. Without hesitation I said, “Sure.”
Freddie explained Judy was on her own, although she was still married to Vincente Minnelli. She was staying at the Hotel Carlyle along with two attendants and her four-year-old daughter, Liza. I said, “Isn’t it strange you coauthored Meet Me in St. Louis, which Minnelli directed, now six years later Judy’s left MGM, Vincente’s preparing An American in Paris, and neither of you are involved in the production?”
“And Sid,” came Freddie’s response, “neither of us gives a fuck.”
That night Judy’s limo picked me up in front of the hotel. She looked as glamorous as she had the night before. The two of us carried on a banter that excluded everyone. It drove Freddie crazy. I’d attempt to include others in the conversation, but Judy would find a way to single me out. I could tell it was a game. Again, her eyes were seductively penetrating.
Later, I was to become conscious of her eyes in other ways. When our relationship eventually developed into a commitment, I could detect Judy’s pill intake by their expression, the pupils changing like a cat’s in the noonday sun. They would seem to cast long shadows as easily as the brilliant sparks that were flying over the table at the Riviera club. In the background there were the sound of altercations, disgruntled customers requiring “good” tables busily stuffing bills in the captain’s pocket, but we only had eyes for each other. We’d already had our photographs taken by news photographers who waited at the door for celebrities.
Freddie was so jealous it was funny. He was warning Judy, “Watch out for this guy.” He didn’t have to worry. I was not going to run after Judy Garland, the big movie star who was a little cuckoo, a little exotic. But when I sat down next to her I thought, I’m going to help her. I don’t know why I thought that. I saw her profile, and I caught a certain look in those eyes, so beautiful and yet so sad. My head was full of thoughts. It was, in any case, out of my hands. And it definitively was out of Freddie Finklehoffe’s, because Judy had already taken aim.
Back in the hotel, I read the newspapers, smoked, and roamed about in my pajamas. I couldn’t get Judy’s image out of my mind. I kept seeing her small hands, the unpolished nails short and smooth, the better to run her fingers through her hair, which she frequently did. With tiny feet in very high heels, she was barely five feet tall. Her legs were very developed, shapely, and she had a rhythmic kind of walk. Her voice was melodic, with a hypnotic effect, just like when she performed. Not self-conscious either.
All of this would have been of no consequence had she not focused her attention so exclusively on me, and had I not been so taken in. She had cast a spell, no question. I was certainly not wishing for any kind of involvement. I was not rushing into anything except the door of my hotel room, anxious to leave my $300 custom-made shoes out in the hallway to be shined. I took a deep drag on a Chesterfield, slammed down a shot of Jack Daniels, and went to sleep.
A few days later I picked up my date at a Broadway theater where she’d been performing. We were on our way to a party at Jackie Gleason’s apartment when the Checker cab got caught in a nasty traffic jam. We were stopped near the Capitol Theatre’s big neon lights beaming Summer Stock. It was the sort of movie I rarely watched: Judy allows her sister to use Judy’s barn for a summer theater; Judy not only falls in love with the lead actor (Gene Kelly) but becomes a performer herself. Movie houses were not doing well that summer, but Summer Stock was pulling in the crowds because of Garland. Judy performed a memorable routine wearing a tuxedo jacket, black tights, high heels, and nothing else but a man’s felt hat pulled over her brow. It was styled like an early Eleanor Powell production number.
“What’s the holdup?” I asked the driver.
“Judy Garland,” he answered. “She’s in a car by the Winter Garden at Fifty-First. I just came from there. Fans stopped her.”
I had a visceral response. “Is she OK?”
My date observed my interest, saying, “I didn’t know you were such a Garland fan!”
I waited for the answer from the cabbie: “Yeah. She loves it.” The driver talked like a relative. “She’s signing autographs out the car window.”
Edward Albee, the American playwright, would later remember:
Once upon a time. . . . I was sitting in the balcony of what was probably the Capitol Theatre, in New York, watching a Judy Garland movie which my memory tells me was Summer Stock. . . . When Garl
and finished singing, the audience watching that film was breathless for a moment and then, to a person, burst into sustained applause . . . Nothing has instructed and gratified me more than the time she convinced a bunch of afternoon movie watchers that a strip of celluloid was the real thing.
After our previous meeting, Judy had asked me to ring her at the Carlyle. I was attracted, perhaps too much, and so I’d managed to put off the telephone call. When I finally did place the call one night, I didn’t get through. It was very late, and I’d been drinking at the Russian Bear. A scuffle ensued and I found myself in a brawl outside the club. My expensive watch was lost in the melee. Pulling myself together, I rang Judy at the Carlyle again, and this time I got through. She was incredibly supportive of my woes and immediately left her hotel and came to assist me in searching for my watch. We found it—crushed to bits. We laughed and went over to the St. Regis for a nightcap. We made a date, but it got postponed, and we hadn’t talked since.
When the cab finally got through the traffic jam and arrived at Jackie Gleason’s, I saw Judy was there. I thought, My date is going to discover I’m a fan. Once again, Judy focused on me and excluded the rest of the world. She was enjoying the game. Judy found a way to keep dancing with me, and we danced well together. (I had been well trained by Eleanor Powell.)
Now we were making another late night rendezvous. MGM had assigned a driver to Judy who, at three in the morning, cheerily took us wherever we wanted to go. Judy was wearing one of her plunging-neckline black cocktail dresses and a black onyx ring with a pearl in the center. I again noticed her hands, which will forever remind me of Willie Shoemaker’s—small and strong. She also wore a gold chain bracelet with a mesh charm containing a lucky penny.
“That’s not the bracelet Gable gave you on your fifteenth birthday?”
“How’d you know?”
“I was on the set the day of your birthday. You were showing it off to everyone, including me.”
“Showing off anything else?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Luft, I don’t remember you.”
Judy looked fresh, as though she was starting out the evening. “I know a place you’ll like,” she said.
It was an after-hours club in a Midtown brownstone, a duplex, posh and dark. When we came in, Johnny Mercer was playing the piano. He was another golf buddy of mine from the California Country Club, where I’d been in the habit of going immediately after knocking off work in midafternoon when I was a test pilot for Douglas Aircraft. Judy sat down next to Johnny and began to sing with him.
Standing by the piano was an obnoxious patron. He was drunk and proceeded to insult Judy. I would never instigate anything, but it wasn’t in my nature to ignore a slur, drunk or sober. It was a holdover from my old barroom habit of belting anyone who was unduly offensive. In this case, I could see the owner was aware that the man was bothering other patrons, so I wrestled him to the exit and threw him down the stairs.
“What did you do?” Judy giggled.
“I threw him out.” She loved it—here was someone willing to protect her on the spot. Punch and Judy!
Judy and I knew many people in common, including Roger Edens. MGM’s musical supervisor was perhaps the single most creative influence in her life, at once both a mentor and a disciple. I told Judy how Roger, who was also a close friend of Eleanor Powell’s, would insist on driving me home from parties if he thought I drank too much. This was before the war, and Desi Arnaz was my neighbor at the time. Desi, a highly charged person, had a lot of charm. His energy overwhelmed me. He laughed a lot with his hands, and I had the impression he never heard anything I said. Desi wasn’t your average bongo player. It seemed he was on a fast escalator moving up, while I was on the one that got stuck. One night Roger was dragging me up the stairs to my apartment and Desi happened to be getting in at the same early hour. He glanced over, and despite my debilitated condition I noticed he was speechless at the sight. He wondered what I was doing with Roger, who was known to be gay.
“He should’ve known the difference,” Judy flirted when I told her this story. We had left the after-hours club on foot just before dawn. The car trailed us as we walked along Fifth Avenue, window shopping. The stores were filled with merchandise, the New Look—Dior’s invention—and other goods the likes of which we hadn’t seen for over a decade.
It was postwar, rebirth. I was thirty-four and Judy was twenty-seven. I’d been married twice. Judy was on her second marriage. She had married Vincente when she was twenty-four and he was forty-two.
As we strolled the avenue, Judy would take my arm or we’d hold hands. It was warm, affectionate. I sensed that she was emotionally tied up. She’d indicated that she and Vincente were not getting along—he was a company man, he couldn’t “protect” her. I wasn’t sure what she meant by “protect.” She never said she didn’t love him, but she was testing the waters.
“Where do you get your clothes?” Judy asked.
I explained how Leonora Luft, my mother, had weaned me on hand-tailored suits—handmade everything, in fact—a habit I never kicked.
We sat for a moment in the square at the Plaza. Judy said she’d never felt more free. We continued to hold hands, and she rested her head on my shoulder. Judy Garland was not usually allowed to go anywhere, because she would be mobbed by fans; it was not possible for her to take a walk, to shop. But the world was empty now except for us, and we seemed to be filling the space pretty good.
I later learned that Judy’s personal makeup assistant Dottie Ponedel wrote about this episode in her unpublished book. “Judy ran in [to the Carlyle Hotel]. . . . ‘Dottie, I met a guy, Sid Luft, and I’m in love and I’m going to have him. You see, Dottie, he was a pilot like your husband, and I’m going to see him again tonight.’”
2
AFTER DAVID ROSE, Judy had gone through crushes and love affairs and wound up married to Vincente Minnelli, a creative, self-absorbed person who was apparently not able to focus his life around her. In my case, I’d felt I’d fucked up with Marylou, I’d fucked up with Lynn. These were fabulous failures in that they could have been repaired if I’d been so motivated. My gut feeling had been that these relationships were not destined to succeed. Lynn loved me but did not believe in me. I knew she would be difficult if and when I fell in love again. She was a vindictive person. Lynn was separated from her first husband when we met, and she was determined to leave him; she hated him. Whereas, clearly, Judy did not hate Vincente.
Judy introduced me to her favorite bistro, Charles à la Pomme Soufflée. It was our first formal date. I picked her up around eight and was presented to her entourage: Liza, who was an adorable four-year-old with huge, luminous eyes, and “Tully,” who was married to Jim Tully, the so-called “hobo writer.” She was a wonderful, warm woman, as devoted to Judy as was Dottie Ponedel, who did her makeup and had replaced Judy’s mother in her affections.
Judy had made a reservation and preordered the menu, which included coq au vin. The management was well prepared. We were seated in a booth and given the royal treatment. It was romantic: candlelight and flowers. After a bottle of Dom Perignon, Judy said softly, “I was told about you, Sid.”
Encouraging her, I said, “Tell me about it.”
Again in her irresistibly melodic voice: “You’re a very tough guy.” Then she added, “But a very well-dressed tough guy.”
I could see Judy was serious in her lighthearted way. “You mean I’m a guy who flies off the handle as a way of life? Do I have to belt guys to know I exist?”
“Yeah,” she said, her eyes telling me lots of other things.
“Well, I couldn’t turn the other cheek—I’m not Jesus Christ, I’m another kind of Jew.”
“You do have a reputation around town.” She sipped her champagne. “Freddie warned me to stay away from you.”
We laughed at that. “Judy,” I said, “I’ve been in at least a dozen fights on the Strip, or in nightclubs. It’s not in my nature to
let an insult slide by.” I explained I was from the rough-and-tumble school. Since childhood I’d always been attracted to what society would label macho interests: Wrong Way Corrigan was my hero. I respected derring-do. I hadn’t been a test pilot for nothing. And I’d had my share of publicity in Hollywood. I was a sitting duck for gossip columnists. I knew it was a hype, and deep down I wasn’t interested in whether the press presented me as Mr. Nice Guy. I wasn’t running for political office.
“I think you’re nice, Sid. How about going to El Morocco?”
Patrons were squashed against the Morocco’s purple velvet ropes, and the waiters kept bringing out tables, reducing the dance floor to a dime. We danced until it was not wise to hold one another in public. I wasn’t eager to be pegged Judy’s “boyfriend,” which, of course, is what happened anyhow.
Later, over a coffee at the Brasserie, she explained she’d been working on the film of the Broadway hit Annie Get Your Gun when she was overcome with insecurities, insomnia, and a general state of anxiety that she felt was irreversible. She was taken off the film and admitted to the hospital, and she’d been replaced by an old friend of mine, Betty Hutton.
After Judy returned from the Peter Bent Brigham hospital in Boston, feeling wonderful, she was asked to lose weight. That meant not eating. She wasn’t going to take pills anymore, and this was a problem, so in part of Summer Stock she appears round and in another part she looks thin. “Couldn’t control my appetite to their requirements. Then they took me off Royal Wedding. At which point I made a scene.” I knew she was referring to the scratch on the neck reported as a suicide attempt. “Of course, it was the wrong thing to do. Such ominous reports: ‘It remains to be seen if she ever faces the camera again.’” She dropped her voice to a sort of bogeyman tone. “So I went to Lake Tahoe for a vacation.”