Judy and I

by Sid Luft

  Aline de Romanones, a close friend of Eleanor’s, was often a guest at the Berksons’. Aline was an American girl who married a Spanish count, became an agent for the OSS during the Second World War, and wrote the memoir The Spy Wore Red. She was present at Eleanor’s table that night, and later I’d see her with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Laddie Sanford and Mary Lasker were there, part of the café society crowd that seemed to adore Judy. This group was not interested in horses. I was overly sensitive to the fact that these were Judy’s friends with Vincente. The most exciting exchange I’d had all evening was with a gentleman who had fixated on my shoes and was interested to learn that they were custom made from a shop on Madison Avenue.

  Judy and I had been in one another’s company every night at one place or another, and after the Berksons’ I thought it a good idea to change the pace. I took her back to her hotel instead of on to any of the clubs. My attitude was Listen, baby, I’ve just gotten out of a marriage, you’ve got your own private army, but I’m not a walker. The undercurrent of attraction was a good feeling, but in a few days I’d be in Saratoga shooting and the fling would have to wind down.

  I strolled over to P. J. Clarke’s to have a nightcap and think things over. For the past two decades Judy had been working in a glistening white tower, unskilled in life’s ordinary aspects. Her least need had been provided for by servants, hairdressers, secretaries, agents, lawyers, and accountants—all the accoutrements of fame that I’d come to label “pop-ups.” But it was a hothouse atmosphere that was presently chilling out. She’d been wined, dined, and indulged, and now she was more in the cold than she realized. MGM was only temporarily supplying the limos, along with the escorts she’d ditched to be with me.

  Judy was not exhibiting any signs of rejection, however. She’d already disclosed bits and pieces of her MGM history. Apparently Louis B. Mayer didn’t sign Judy at age thirteen for any particular project; he’d just heard her sing and signed her up. It was Roger Edens who had accompanied her on the piano for the final audition. After she appeared in Every Sunday in 1936, Edens arranged for her to sing on the popular Jack Oakie radio broadcast. A 20th Century Fox talent scout then borrowed Judy for Pigskin Parade. Edens wrote a special version of “You Made Me Love You” for Judy to sing to Clark Gable on his birthday. Metro had pushed Judy into Broadway Melody of 1938. In 1939 Arthur Freed wanted Judy to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz while Mayer preferred Shirley Temple, but 20th refused to loan Shirley and so Judy got the part. Although at the time the film played to mixed reviews, Oz has become an American classic. Judy’s portrayal of the L. Frank Baum character has yet to be matched.

  The mix of Judy’s impish yet seductive charm was totally operative off screen as well. As I downed my last bourbon for the night, I thought, Where is it built into a contract that a star must function in a society with which she has no practical understanding but paradoxically happens to be the focus of? Certainly I’d perceived this fundamental split the year I worked as an agent for Zeppo Marx’s theatrical agency.

  I was now in the midst of a terrific lark with Judy Garland, movie star. She thinks I’m a big test pilot. She’s clearly looking, and I’m on the rebound. I felt I’d been decent to Lynn, and she thought I was crazy to believe I could be a producer. Now Judy was saying, “I think you’re great.” She was pretty and wholesome and a lot of fun. This one doesn’t want me, this one says, “Hey, you’re some kind of guy. You’re funny. What’re you doin’ tomorrow? Want to take me to dinner? Hey, give me a kiss.” Judy’s bubbly laugh was contagious, and her comic streak was completely natural. It was hard to believe someone so beautiful could be so funny.

  We seemed to have the same kind of electrodes, and together we were making quite a spark around town. I was not about to walk away.

  Edith Piaf, the “little sparrow,” was in New York performing at the Versailles, backed up by nine male singers, Les Compagnons de la Chanson. The stage set of pink and white plaster representations of famous Paris landmarks somehow managed to look fancy and urbane. It was the start of Piaf’s publicized romance with the French boxer Marcel Cerdan, who was very much married. She’d been in America shortly after the war ended and was not a success, but now she was playing to a sell-out crowd and rave reviews. The audience was filled with her peers: Judy, Marlene Dietrich, Charles Boyer.

  Judy was eager to meet Piaf and congratulate her on her performance. As the divas embraced backstage, I was struck by the similarity: both were petite women with powerful voices and impassioned private lives. Yet Piaf was all soul, serious, life was not to be treated lightly; Judy would cheerfully kibitz with the audience and comment on issues the French generally held sacred. Judy interpreted the songs other people wrote, while Piaf sang songs she’d written alone or in collaboration. It was clear Judy not only admired other performers, she was genuinely entertained by them as well. If there was jealousy or competitiveness, it was not visible.

  The following night, sitting in the red velour “Royale” section reserved for the elite at Le Pavillon, I mentally gave Judy a makeover. Her makeup was intense and to my mind not necessary. I thought the severe haircut intriguing but not soft enough for such an angelic face, and the pillbox hats could go too. I was never able to persuade her out of those: she even wore one to the premiere of our film A Star Is Born. (Maybe if they’d been called something else . . .)

  Judy was content, munching away on the finest of gray caviar and sipping Dom Perignon, tokens of appreciation from chef Henri Soule, whose haughty air was misleading. Soule was to create the popular restaurant La Côte Basque, but he never considered it important or equal to his jewel, Le Pavillon. I was mesmerized by Judy that night, but time was running out. I needed to finish organizing a sound and camera crew for Saratoga. I’m working, I kept telling myself.

  One afternoon, Bob Agins and I were going to take Judy out to the racetrack in Jamaica, Long Island. We arrived at the Carlyle to pick her up only to discover that Judy had somehow misunderstood the invitation and was prepared to leave with me for the island of Jamaica. She had in fact visited designer Hattie Carnegie and ordered various outfits she thought appropriate for the trip. The bills had been automatically sent on to California. Her relationship with MGM may have ended, but the world was at Judy Garland’s feet and it was clear she assumed it would remain there. In reality, she owed the US government $80,000 and didn’t know it.

  The misunderstanding over the Jamaicas was an embarrassment for her. I just thought she was being funny, and off we went to the racetrack. It was much later that I realized in hindsight what an error of communication it had been: she was ready to be with me even at that early date, and at any cost.

  Nevertheless, I left for Saratoga, and Judy returned to Hollywood. Our attraction for one another was accelerating, and my bill at the Madison Avenue florists was $700. Judy loved flowers, especially yellow roses.

  PART II

  The Boy from Bronxville

  3

  FRANCES ETHEL GUMM, a name that was to appear on sundry legal documents for most of my life, was born June 10, 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, the very year I achieved local notoriety as the sole witness to a payroll holdup in Bronxville, New York, where my father had a jewelry store. I was six years old, and my sister, Peri (Pearl in those days), was a year older. The Bronxville High School and Elementary School were under construction. The payroll office was located in a shack, where salaries were dispensed in cash. I’ve always had photographic sense: I look at colors and shapes and they imprint. And I happened to see the getaway car that held up the payroll office. I remembered two or three of the last digits of the license plate, plus the colors of the vehicle: a green touring car with a black top and black wire wheels. Actually, I had seen men go into the shack with guns. I’d been a bystander along with my sister, who didn’t notice anything.

  The police were there within minutes. I was able to go up to them and say, “I saw it.” This was the Bronxville police’s introduction to me. Ov
er the years they would come to know me better.

  Around 1924 we moved to Bronxville ourselves. A square mile with nothing left to build on, no land to develop, Bronxville was surrounded closely, on one side by Mt. Vernon, another by Yonkers, and another by Tuckahoe. Every inch was accounted for. Previously, my father, Norbert Luft, would commute to Bronxville from our home in Mt. Vernon. I remember going to kindergarten in a big sleigh with four donkeys, flying over snow, innocently pushing into a new society, an environment of elitism and racial hatred.

  Father was a watchmaker, and he also sold fashionable jewelry. The customers entered from the arcade side. The glass partition featuring the sign NORBERT LUFT, JEWELER faced Kraft Avenue, a short street that started at the Bronxville River Parkway and ended at Pondfield Road.

  Bronxville was an upper-class WASP community dominated by the Mudd and Rickenbacker families. Father’s customers were bankers, stockbrokers, Wall Streeters who daily grabbed the half-hour ride into Grand Central Station. Bronxville had a population of about five thousand, a hardware store, a funeral parlor. There were two drugstores, one owned by Harry Liden and the other by our neighbors the Steinmans, and the Bronxville Hospital. On the opposite side of the train tracks was barren flatland.

  Pondfield Road was the longest street in Bronxville. It crawled from Yonkers almost up to Sarah Lawrence College, through Bronxville to Post Road, cutting across the middle of the city. We had the last house on Kraft Avenue. Altogether there were three Jewish families in the vicinity. The Steinmans lived on the south side, right on the border of Mt. Vernon.

  My mother, Leonora Luft, was born Lena Krasnakutsky. During the Russian pogroms she lived with a Meyers family; subsequently, when she came to America, she assumed their name. While Father called her Lena, the outer world knew her as Leonora. She was barely five feet tall, a little chunky, a very strong person. She was, you might say, a specialty.

  Mother had come to America at the age of thirteen. She lived with her brother in the Bronx, where she found work in a blouse factory sewing on buttons. I never got to know her brother, my uncle, but he was famous for his daredevil antics. Once, back in Russia, he jumped off a roof on a dare and broke both legs. In New York he rode a motorcycle everywhere. When he got hurt in an accident his little boy, Max, spent a few months with us in Bronxville. If there was a wife, I didn’t know her. I inherited a lot from this uncle I never knew. Cousin Maxie was a cute little six-year-old when he stayed with us on Kraft Avenue, but he was naughty by Luft standards. Maxie was wild and refused to mind Mother.

  At the time, Mother was strictly a housewife devoted to the family. But that would soon end when she became dissatisfied with my father’s earning capacity. She went into Manhattan, as the story goes, and on her own, visited some dress manufacturers. She told them where she lived and took a few dresses on consignment. Right away she sold one to my piano teacher, a French woman (I hated the piano and Peri loved it), and another to our neighbor Mrs. Steinman, whose husband owned the drugstore. Mother sold directly from the house. Within a month’s time she knocked down one of the walls in a bedroom and had a long mirror and shelves installed, and hired a seamstress.

  Mother had struck oil. There were no dress shops in Bronxville. Women had to travel to New Rochelle or Mt. Vernon to shop.

  Six months later, mother opened her fashion boutique, Madame Leonora’s, right in front of Alger Court next to the railway station: Bronxville, Fleetwood, Mt. Vernon, 125th Street, and Grand Central! About a year later, the railway company allowed the construction of more stores: a village tavern, a Buick agency with cars in the window, a large realty office. Madame Leonora’s was right smack in the middle of the mini mall. All the storefronts faced the Bronxville Railway Station. A customer might step off the platform less than a hundred yards from Madame Leonora’s. She eventually outgrew this space, and her next shop, designed by a German architect, was in Bronxville proper.

  Leonora would dress women who didn’t know how to dress. She would travel to Grasse in the south of France, where she’d mix her own perfume, “Leonora.” She’d also bring back samples of fabric and dress designs to be made at the shop. She fashioned all the silk pajamas for composer Jerome Kern, who lived a block away from us. At the age of eight, I would personally deliver the clothes to his wife in my wooden car made out of an ash can and four wheels. I felt terribly important doing this. What a sight I must have been for clients, coming and going in that contraption.

  My father was a good-looking man. He had grayish-green eyes; he was about five nine, medium build. Basically a mild-mannered fellow who spoke in a low tone with a hint of an Austrian accent. He never knew what to do with me.

  When we lived on Kraft Avenue, I built a hut out of wood with some pals. We made a wooden chimney tall enough to stand up in. We had a door on the hut and a bench inside. We’d smoke cigarettes in there. We’d climb up into the chimney and peek out. Once I shot a kid in the ass with a BB gun (and my father had forbidden me to have a BB gun). The kid’s father, a Hungarian, came to our house at night to see my father. I tried to explain to my father that we had to have the BB gun to protect our hut. I had warned the boy not to come near, but he started to turn around and I hit him. The kid was a big baby, I thought; he had to run home to show his father the blue mark on his behind. I certainly didn’t feel I’d done anything wrong. My father bit his fingers so as not to hit me. I was all of eight years old.

  Our gang also had a crank-up Model T Ford without tires. It was on rims. I wasn’t strong enough to crank it alone. I’d advance the spark to get it going and control the ignition. And if I didn’t get the handle in the right place, because of the compression, the cylinder would flip the starting device backward. It was in this way that I broke my thumb. There were a lot of kids walking around with broken thumbs. The Model T had a hell of a kick to it, and once we got it going we drove it all over the area. We had a swimming hole, the Model T, and the hut. That was our gang’s world.

  The drugstore owner’s son, Freddy Steinman, was officially the first Fred in my life. Curiously, there were many Freds, and they all played pivotal roles. He was six months my senior and a good student, but he topped me as a hell-raiser. In the second grade I used to follow him around. One afternoon we ran away from home on his bike. We pedaled all the way to Fleetwood on the Bronx River Parkway. Freddy hated his father, but I had no reason to run away from home myself. We had traveled about three miles when I got real uncomfortable. I don’t remember how I got home, but I returned without Freddy.

  Father was born an only child in Austria, and he learned watchmaking in elementary school. So he was an apprentice watchmaker when he came to New York at the age of eighteen. As a youth he had read so much about the Wild West, and he was eager to go out there. He didn’t particularly like New York City, and as soon as he could he moved to San Antonio, Texas, where he worked for a jewelry store. Whatever his fantasies had been about Texas, they were not realized. Father quickly saved enough money to return to New York. I could never get him to tell me much about his adventures in the wild, wild West, except he’d say it was the best drinking water he’d ever had, just like spring water.

  More importantly, he said, “There’s one thing in this life: I don’t ever want to work for anybody again. I want my independence.” That impressed me. Sometimes I’d be at Father’s shop, watching him handle pincers like a surgeon, expertly picking up the minuscule parts. I was fascinated by his patience and skill as he put a watch together, the incredible attention to detail. He had graceful hands, and he used them in an artistic manner. He taught Peri to string pearls, and she’d earn extra allowance money working on beads in the store.

  His clients were fond of him. “Hi, Norbert.” “Nice boy you’ve got—little Sidney.” Mother had named me Mischa at birth, after a brother. At times, and, to my horror, she called me Mischa. I changed it to Michael, as it sounded less foreign. Then I rejected Michael altogether in favor of Sidney. I thought “Sid” sounded more America
n. And for years I harbored resentment toward my father for settling in an environment hostile to Jews.

  I first noticed Beans McGyver when I was in front of the Bronxville movie house waiting for the doors to open. I caught him vandalizing my father’s sign with a piece of soap. He was knocking out the letters ELER from JEWELER. I must have tackled him, because we didn’t get into slugging it out. In a flash I spun him around, and we were rolling around in the gutter until he was out, so his head must have hit the curb.

  My father, seeing the blood on Beans’s forehead, grabbed me and took me inside the shop, where he proceeded to slap me hard on the face. “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded. This was my father, a quiet, nonviolent man. “Go in the back of the store and stay there,” he ordered. It was very confusing to me. He didn’t ask why we were fighting, and I didn’t tell him. He said if I went around beating up kids in the street, it would call attention to ourselves. He didn’t care about my reason.

  The Bronxville Police Department protected Father’s store in exchange for gifts. During the Christmas holidays he’d give the police captain a wristwatch or maybe the second lieutenant a signet ring. Norbert was friendly with the police, but he didn’t respect them. The police chief, O’Connor, was an Irishman, as were the motorcycle cops.

  Beans was eleven years old when he was rubbing out letters on my father’s sign. Years later, I ran into him in Pelham at the home of W. W. Hawkins, who was the editor of the World-Telegram. Hawkins’s son Ewing and I were classmates at the Hun School, and Ew had invited me to their house for a Christmas party. I hadn’t seen Beans since we were children. He was a freshman at Yale, a football player, a big guy, over six one; he weighed about 185.