by Sid Luft
“And New York,” I added. “Very much New York, and very much a vacation.” I felt this tremendous wave of caring. I wanted to keep her from harm’s way. I looked at the young woman—a robust, high-spirited, hearty, strong person who was clearly not on any kind of medication. It didn’t occur to me she should curb her appetite in any way. I agreed with Judy that nonstop performing in front of the camera could be a terrible pressure to withstand. I never took pills myself. I enjoyed booze, but it was generally in a social context.
Judy had represented the home front, worked in uplifting films, sung chin-up, hope-filled tunes for a country that was losing its youth to a cruel war. Not to mention the bond tours, propaganda for Roosevelt, entertaining the boys. All this while I’d been testing aircraft for Douglas and flying for the Royal Canadian Air Force, delivering bombers to Europe and Russia. I thought, hell, I survived two marriages. And I was still young. I’d gotten through the insanity of the war. It was a new decade, and I was allowing myself to believe in the possibility of a new life.
Judy asked me so many questions. She was clever in extracting information. There were moments I thought she might open up, tell me what was true. I’d noticed the fine scar lines on the inside of her wrists and I thought, well, she has really harmed herself to some degree. Somehow I wasn’t able to ask her about those tracks. It was simply inappropriate. And if I mentioned her mother, Ethel, she’d switch the subject. It was easy for her to redirect: she merely had to hold me in a long gaze. I knew nothing about the inner machinations of Judy’s life. As we sat together in the middle of the night in a public yet sequestered niche of the Brasserie, I listened to Judy talk, in the most general terms, about events leading up to the present moment.
It would take some years before she recorded, in her unfinished autobiography, what actually had happened the year before we came together:
My mother called me at night many times and said, in a very quiet voice, [that she thought] I had a brain tumor and the only chance I had would be to have an operation. I never heard from my sisters. I never heard from anybody, except for Carlton [Alsop] and [his wife,] Sylvia [Sidney]. They were really standing by, since I had been ill; Carlton was there all the time. This was after he had worked at the studio. But he believed in me, and he hated what they were doing to me. I was fired from Barkleys of Broadway. Sylvia took me down into her house on Beverly Drive, because that house on the hill was so lonely, and she moved me into her bed and cooked for me and fed me and, you know, was wonderful to me. Carlton too, but the press kept pounding away at me every day in the newspapers and on the front page.
One day I thought, between the calls from my mother, no help from my husband, [Vincente Minnelli,] no telephone calls from a soul, I thought, I can’t take it anymore. So I, in a burst of complete irrationality . . . it was morning, right after the morning papers had come in and nobody was there. So, I went in the bathroom and I took a razor . . . I went into bed and laid down, and I got weaker, weaker . . . there was blood all over the place and so the cook happened to come in. . . . I wanted to go to sleep. I just wanted to go to sleep. And so she was horrified, she called the doctor. . . . There were a series of doctors and he came up and . . . the nurse got in touch with Carlton and Vincente and anyway they kept me out of the hospital and there was no publicity about it. . . .
I suffered a terrific feeling of guilt and awful shame after trying that, because actually I didn’t want to die. I had a baby to live for. It was just that the pressure had been too much for a minute. [In hindsight Judy was suffering from postpartum depression along with a dependency on pills.] I’d heard this doctor say that I was “suicidal.” My mother said there was something wrong with my brain. It was just too much for me.
Jimmy Tarantino in the Hollywood Nightlife started calling me a dope addict. It was a little scandal sheet in town, but it was a rotten thing in this town, because people really stayed away from me, as though I were a leper then. Of course, the first thing Carlton said: “You’ve got to get out of this house and you’ve got to go right down to Romanoff’s with me for lunch and walk in and just face the whole damn town and let them see you, because you look fine and let them know that you’re not some kind of a nut the way they’ve printed in the papers,” and so he started taking me out . . . three or four days later. I was wearing tall collars. We walked into Romanoff’s . . . but nobody would come to our table. When I walked in there’d be a kind of a hush that would fall over the room. The only one who would come to the table who was marvelous was Mike [Romanoff]. And he always came over and never mentioned anything. His expression for me was “great dame.”
I kept going out and Carlton and Sylvia were tremendous help for me. Eventually Metro called me in and said how do you feel and I said I feel great. I didn’t. I still wasn’t right. I hadn’t had my year or six months off. . . . I weighed about a hundred pounds. They informed me they bought Annie Get Your Gun for me. There was an enormous banter, because MGM paid more money for that than they had ever paid for any property to date. Irving Berlin came out and there was pictures in all the papers and big announcements with Berlin and [Arthur] Freed and myself—I was going to do Annie Get Your Gun.
I started rehearsal and I was still very tired and a very distressed woman. The first thing that happened was I started to lose my hair. My hairline started to recede badly. I went to the rehearsals and the costume fittings and unfortunately they put Buzz Berkeley on the picture. I think he’s a wonderful director. I think he did a fine job with the earlier pictures but psychologically Buzz Berkeley represented all of the years of Benzedrine, to work as hard as we could, and just exhaustion. To tell the truth he was in a very bad mental state himself doing Annie Get Your Gun.
I said, “I don’t think we’re a very good combination right now,” but they said, “Oh, we know what we’re doing, you just do as you’re told.” So we started the picture and we did a couple of scenes and I knew I wasn’t good. The prerecordings were pretty good. But I was just in a daze. My head wouldn’t stop aching. . . . They called a new doctor in, Fred Pobirs. He walked in the room and I was sitting there, very charming and really with the birds. Pobirs took one look at me and decided on shock treatment for me.
I went through a series of twelve shock treatments and it brought me out of it just fine, and after that I went with a nurse and my baby [Liza] and secretary to Sun Valley for a week, then I went to Lake Tahoe for a week, then I came home. I had put on maybe five or eight pounds but again I was back on pills for Annie Get Your Gun. . . . At any rate I went through it and we started to shoot and I was very bad. I wasn’t good and I knew it. I was really pitiful, because they had to keep putting black in my hairline because of my hair falling out badly and I had these heavy costumes and trying to play a terribly funny role. I kept plugging away and . . . I’m an Indian girl. Bob Alton was directing and I started being late again. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I didn’t know, and I was trying to take direction from both Buzz Berkeley and Bob Alton and all of the music and the costumes and the chorus boys and everything were confusing me. I had a migraine headache constantly. So I went back to my dressing room one day for lunch and they had evidently looked at the rushes and I wasn’t good, I was being late, so they sent me another notice dismissing me at noontime. I really blew my top. [MGM publicist] Les Peterson, that rat, came to the door saying here’s a message for you. I opened it and read it. It said don’t bother to report back to work after lunch because you are dismissed from the picture.
They put Betty Hutton in the picture. By then I decided to go to Boston but I didn’t have the money. After so many years at Metro, perhaps they’ll lend me the money to get well. . . . I went to Louis Mayer’s office and told him that I felt I had to go to Boston, and he agreed. [Mayer’s personal physician] Jessie Marmorston and Carlton accompanied me, and Louie B. said, “That’s the least we can do for you is to pay for your hospital bills . . .” To clear it he picked up the phone, confident, and talked to Mr. [Nic
holas] Schenck [president of Loew’s, parent company of MGM]. He put the phone down. “Mr. Schenck suggests you go to a charity hospital, because we’re not in the money lending business.” He looked at me, I’ll never forget what he said, he said, “You know, if they do this to you, they’ll do it to me too.”
Louis got the train tickets for Carlton and myself. . . . He would go with me to Boston so I wouldn’t have to go all by myself. He [Mayer] said send all your bills to me. [MGM paid the hospital expenses: $40,000.]
All of these tests had to be made and no one called, except Frank Sinatra. He sent flowers every day and so forth. It was very sweet, as he is with all his people. But anyway he was very kind, he sent a record player and records and flowers and bed jackets and perfume and all kinds of stuff.
Carlton was standing by every day and it was summertime in Boston and boy it was hot. And all he had to do was either stay at the hospital during visiting hours or sit in that hotel. We came to the last test and they said we’re going to take an electroencephalogram. I thought oh my God, I’ve passed all the tests, now they’re going to record my brain and they’re going to get down on paper my thoughts. I’m a dead pigeon because they’ll never let me out of here. . . .
I was in Boston four months. In the meantime, one day Frank did bring a lot of people up to see me. I got well enough to have a press reception at the hotel.
I didn’t hear from my mother or my sisters. I heard from Vincente. Carlton and I would go on visits for the weekend, we’d go to different people’s houses. They finally said I could go on a two- or three-week holiday on Cape Cod. My little girl [Liza] was with me.
Hugh Martin, who had done the songs for Meet Me in St. Louis, had a show, Best Foot Forward, running in a little theater on Cape Cod. We all went over to the theater, and of course Hugh was playing the piano—they didn’t have an orchestra, it was just a little road company. And the lights went on and there I was. Hugh and the whole cast just about died. We went out into the garden afterwards, where we had hot dogs, and then Hugh asked if I would sing for them. I hadn’t sung in four months. It was the first time in years that I really felt good. I had weight on me, I was sleeping and eating, I felt marvelous. I started to sing and I discovered an entirely new voice: a much more powerful voice. I’ve had that voice ever since.
All night long we continued to exchange stories about our past (though some were edited). A few of my tales struck Judy as hilarious, and she’d giggle or chortle, which was infectious, and soon we’d both be laughing uncontrollably as though we’d been smoking grass. She told me that in 1940 there’d been a kidnap threat against her. A young man, Robert Wilson (she’d not forgotten the name), had phoned the Los Angeles Police Department and threatened to kidnap her unless a ransom of $50,000 was handed over. Thursday was the maid’s day off, and Wilson and a friend were planning on breaking into her home on Stone Canyon Road in Bel Air. A teenage Judy had commissioned the home in 1938 and lived there for nearly a decade with her mother. Apparently the police captain arrested the boy right where he was calling from. “Imagine what kind of condition I’d be in if I’d ever been kidnapped!” She was sardonic.
Judy talked about her early years at MGM with Mickey Rooney. She said in her mid-to-late teens she was obsessed by boys. She’d had a romantic nature, and neither her mother nor the moguls could subdue her imagination. She wrote poetry to express her passions. They couldn’t keep her altogether a performing slave. Mickey had taught Judy to play Ping-Pong. And she was a good player, but Mickey was table tennis champ from 1935 to 1940 in California.
Judy and Mickey were shipped out on promotional tours, going from theater to theater. Tumultuous crowds waited for them. There were autographs to be signed, executives to meet, theater owners to be courted, luncheons, and press interviews, and their health was constantly threatened by overwork.
Judy loved Mickey, but they were never boyfriend and girlfriend. Having known Mickey from my early years in Hollywood, I knew he went for the glamour gals, like Ava Gardner, who later became one of his wives. Mickey’s mother would have preferred her son to love and marry someone like Judy. Mickey was multitalented like Judy. And they were very much like brother and sister, equal in every way—except in the salaries they received. Mickey earned three times more per picture than Judy, and eventually he quit MGM to form his own company.
Back in my suite at the Ritz Carlton, in the early morning light, everything I thought about Judy began to take on a definite shape. Her hair was silky, very fine on her forehead. Touching her continued to be altogether a new experience. Her white skin seemed to wrap around her limbs like satin. At the same time, there was nothing unformed about Judy: Her body had musculature. Judy was self-conscious about her shoulders, which she considered too round. Her legs were hard, and long for her size. She was short waisted, had full breasts with strong nipples. Other than her skin and her hair, she was not soft.
It was her enormous rib cage that gave her the advantage while performing—all the juice came from there. She was never to be winded onstage when at times, by all appearances, she might have been the walking dead. Her voice was bell-like, whether she was acting, reading a script, or just chatting. Her dialogue was thought out and very definite. She was not lazy in her speech. I could never mistake anything she said or did. Judy did not sound like any other woman, nor, as I would find out, did she make love like any other woman.
Unlike my soon-to-be ex-wife, Lynn, who put down my projects, Judy was interested, especially about Man o’ War. She knew nothing about horses, and the idea of owning a stable as a business intrigued her. I told her the common perception that a person must be a millionaire to own horses was false. This was the beginning of her fascination with jockeys, racehorses, and people who are attracted to the world of racing. I’d have preferred to tell Judy of my exploits as a macho bomber pilot. Instead she wanted to hear about horses.
Judy’s entrance to what Walter Winchell called the “New York-iest” spot, the Stork Club, was equal to a coronation. First an army would lead us to our seats. Owner Sherman Billingsley would send over champagne, along with French perfume that Judy would keep for Tully and Dottie. She had her own preferences, two different musky scents: Balmain’s spicy Vent Vert and Patou’s Joy, heavy with jasmine.
Billingsley was quite a tyrant. He had a famous ongoing feud with Toots Shor, and he had eighty-sixed Jackie Gleason and Humphrey Bogart from the club. The Stork was later to take a dive from which it would never recover when Billingsley refused to serve Josephine Baker in 1951, an incident that grew into a widely publicized scandal.
I was becoming restless under the glare, and we decided to leave the Stork for Harlem to listen to blues. In the car, her eyes pinning me, Judy said, “Sid darling, you do know I’m a black Irish witch?”
“Baby,” I said, “I know you’re not Dorothy from the Yellow Brick Road.” We were both bombed while making an attempt to appear sober.
“Darling, say ‘darling’?” she asked.
“I’d rather hear about the black Irish witch.”
“Say ‘darling’ first.”
“Darling,” I groaned.
“Hnnn. That’s awful.”
“Can we work on it later?”
As the nights passed, we continued to dance, talk, and hold hands. We’d count per minute the smoke rings coming out of the Camel billboard sign at Times Square, usually en route to an exclusive nightspot where Judy was greeted like royalty. Chocolate mousse cake at Chauveron, the Latin Quarter, Voisin, Chambord: we were everywhere, laughing, dancing, drinking. Manhattan, or Gotham, as some columnists preferred to call New York City, was alive with the new chic. From the clank of the Third Avenue El so near to P. J. Clarke’s to the cheerful, reassuring red double-decker buses on Fifth Avenue, life was a bowl of cherries with a few diamonds thrown in.
Underlying the social activity was an intense subtext of sexual attraction, but neither of us were about to act upon it. I wasn’t going to wake up at the Carlyle
in Judy’s bed, and she wasn’t going to wake up at the Ritz Carlton in mine. She was too famous, and too married.
Our dating was primarily in the evening so that I was free during the day to work. I had managed, however, to manipulate my project, Man o’ War, into our “fling.”
Tully would call in advance to set up the evening. And so a dinner had been arranged at Seymour and Eleanor Lambert Berkson’s elegant Upper East Side apartment. Judy had cultivated the friendship with the Berksons through Vincente. Seymour was the publisher of the New York Journal-American, and Eleanor was a fashion authority, creator of the Best Dressed List. Clearly, Judy admired the Berksons’ sophistication.
That night I was to meet Judy at the Berksons’ apartment. One of the big pop song hits that year was Anton Karas’s theme from the film The Third Man. It had a hypnotic effect, and it seemed to be following me through airports, taxi rides, even floating up to where I sat in the Fifth Avenue double-decker bus on the way to the Berksons’. I was beginning to feel wonderful. Judy bolstered my spirits. She seemed very different from Lynn, who was a tall, sultry, attractive woman. Lynn remained a “good joe,” but her negativity about my work had come between us.
I had agreed to the evening at the Berksons, but I wasn’t comfortable. There was too much chatter about the black poodle that ran away and, of course, Vincente. Seymour wasn’t enthralled by my presence either, although later we did become friends. The apartment was spacious, beautifully decorated, with a butler and a maid in attendance. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t even know Judy that well. It was a sit-down dinner. I suppose Judy wanted the Berksons to meet me. She ate very little of the fashionable menu: salmon mousse, rare roast beef, asparagus hollandaise, tiny potatoes, and, for dessert, cherries jubilee, Eleanor’s favorite. The cherries jubilee was served flaming in highly polished silver goblets. (Eleanor frequently ordered the extravagant dessert when dining out; at a later date she was to watch a waiter flame the dish at her table and, unfortunately, drop dead when he inhaled the fumes. This incident may have changed her affection for the dessert.)