by Sid Luft
I knew it was not right. Liza did not want to go, either. I’d met Liza in Central Park that day and she pleaded with me not to go to England and explained how she could stay in New York and study. Liza had a boyfriend who was an actor. “I can stay with him at his house,” she said. She was only sixteen and I think the boy was probably twenty. I told her that as much as I wished she could, I was not capable of making such a decision. “That decision has to be made by your mother.”
A while later, just when I thought Judy had finished battling me about taking the children to Europe, there came a loud knock at the door to my suite. “Sid?”
“Who is it?” I said cautiously.
“It’s me,” Judy said.
“Are you alone?”
“Yes, Sid.”
“I don’t believe you.” Why would I?
“No, no, please,” she said. “I just want to talk to you. Maybe you were right, Sid. Maybe they should stay.”
“Are you alone?” I asked a second time. She swore she was.
I opened the door, let her in, and as the door started to close, Judy started screaming, “He’s hitting me, he’s hitting me!” Just then, a private detective and a cop busted in. The two men forced their way into my suite and held me down. It was all very dramatic. One had me by the neck, the other by the arms. While I was restrained, Judy grabbed Lorna and Joey and ran out of the suite. They left the hotel, went immediately to Idlewild Airport, and flew to England.
Judy and the children arrived in London to headlines reading JUDY FLEES COUNTRY and “I’LL GUARD MY CHILDREN WITH MY LIFE” SAYS JUDY and JUDY FLIES IN AS HUSBAND STORMS. She had Lorna and Joey under twenty-four-hour guard and told the press that I’d threatened to have her declared an unfit mother and take away the children. “I don’t know why Sid says I’m an unfit mother,” she said. “The children love me. I hear he may be coming over to take them away from me. He will never do that. There is no chance of reconciliation. My marriage is finished. We have tried reconciliations, but they were hopeless.”
David Begelman, the man who arranged the kidnaping fiasco, interrupted to tell the press, “The studio will make sure that no unauthorized person—even Mr. Luft—will be allowed to see the children at this stage.”
I flew over to England about a week later, and things were still very chaotic. Judy had convinced the High Court to make Lorna and Joey temporary wards of the court so neither she nor I could take them out of the country. I didn’t see Judy, because she was shooting I Could Go On Singing. She was living in a rented house at 33 Hyde Park Gate while making the picture. I rented an apartment about six blocks down the road from her and was finally able to see the children.
While in London, I received an unexpected call from Judy one day. “Would you like to come to a prerecording?” she asked. I’d seen the kids, but that was the first time I’d seen her in a couple of weeks or maybe a month. I was apprehensive, but also I was curious and concerned. She sang, not badly, but not well. After seeing her, I was sure she was on tons of Ritalin. Sometimes she was in and out, but she was very affectionate that night. “Take me home, darling,” she said afterward. I don’t think she knew if I was Sid Luft or David Begelman. I really don’t! That’s how strong that drug was. I went home with her and she said, “Why don’t you stay with me?” I agreed. After all, she was my wife. She was tired and we went right to bed.
“What are you doing here?” Judy shouted at me the next morning. “Get out of my house!”
“I thought we were trying to reconcile,” I said.
“Forget it. And when we get back to the States I’m gonna divorce you!”
The medication changed Judy’s whole psyche. I didn’t know her half the time. From what I gathered, she was on Ritalin or something else throughout the whole film. Later, when I met Jack Klugman, one of Judy’s costars, he said to me, “Sid, I just wish you two were together when we made that movie, ’cause it was so difficult making that with her. She was trying to cooperate, but I know that she was on some kind of medication. But she got through it.” Even so, the shoot did mark the end of her friendship with another of her costars, her old friend Dirk Bogarde.
I Could Go On Singing was finally finished, and in August, after we attended a court custody hearing, Judy prepared to return to America with the children. I tried to defuse things with the British press. “I’d naturally like everything to work out the best possible way for both of us—and the children,” I told them. “I shall be seeing them before they go. I have been able to see them here. It’s all been very amicable—there haven’t been any problems. After all, we’re civilized people.”
News of the untimely death of Marilyn Monroe on August 5, 1962, came as a shock to the world. This was especially troubling to Judy, since Marilyn had been one of Judy’s telephone pals during her years of insomnia. Judy remembered her relationship with Marilyn in a 1967 piece for Ladies’ Home Journal:
I knew Marilyn Monroe and loved her dearly. She asked me for help. Me! I didn’t know what to tell her. One night, at a party at Clifton Webb’s house, Marilyn followed me from room to room. “I don’t want to get too far away from you,” she said. “I’m scared!”
I told her, “We’re all scared. I’m scared, too!”
“If we could just talk,” she said. “I know you’d understand.”
I said, “Maybe I would. If you’re scared, call me and come on over. We’ll talk about it.”
That beautiful girl was frightened of aloneness—the same thing I’ve been afraid of. Like me, she was just trying to do her job—to garnish some delightful whipped cream onto some people’s lives. But Marilyn and I never got the chance to talk. I had to leave for England, and I never saw that sweet, dear girl again. I wish I had been able to talk to her the night she died.
I don’t think Marilyn really meant to harm herself. It was partly because she had too many pills available, then was deserted by her friends. You shouldn’t be told you’re completely irresponsible and be left alone with too much medication. It’s too easy to forget. You take a couple of sleeping pills, and you wake up in 20 minutes and forget you’ve taken them. So you take a couple more, and the next thing you know you’ve taken too many. It’s happened to all of us; it happened to me. Luckily, someone found me and saved my life.
The death of a friend was always tough. One time when were in Texas on tour, somebody had called Judy up at the hotel to let her know that Bob Alton had died. He was a choreographer and friend at MGM. Well, I noticed that night that Judy’s eyes were dilated. I could always tell when she had taken Dexedrine or Benzedrine. Then, without warning, she walked out onstage and told the audience, “I’m awfully sorry, I can’t sing tonight. Go to the box office and get your money back. Hopefully I’ll come back, but I can’t sing because a very good friend of mine has died.” That was the only time she did that, but she was certainly capable of the bizarre.
One time Judy had decided to kick her pill habit cold turkey, which is always a painful and dangerous way to withdraw. She said to me, “No doctors, no phone calls,” and she locked herself up and screamed her way out of it. I went through it with her and could only watch and hold her as she buried her head in a pillow and screamed. Eighteen hours later she came out of it. That was one of the most terrifying and most courageous goddamn things I’d ever seen.
But Judy was a pill-taker and nobody could stop her. She couldn’t think straight when she was taking them, and she certainly wouldn’t listen to me. I watched my friend Dean Martin squander his talent and drink himself to death. I couldn’t stop Dino, and I couldn’t stop Judy. But I tried. The fact is that she was married to the drugs before she met me, and she never really got divorced.
You can feel great compassion for someone who is ill or in pain, but when a person is drunk, using profanity, and you can’t deal with them, or if someone is just out of control, your compassion disappears. You take on another personality. A stronger personality. You have to keep saying, “Hey, don’t do this”
or “Don’t do that.” You constantly ask, “Where are the pills? Let’s find them. Let’s get to the bottom of this.”
They say the pill-taker is probably the most difficult person to deal with, or to keep clean. Heroin has a substitute, methadone, but there is nothing but total abstinence for the pill-taker. There is no methadone. There is no cure. There was no cure for Marilyn Monroe, and there was no cure for Judy Garland. Only abstinence. Total abstinence.
Back in the States, Judy headed for Las Vegas, where she began a run at the Sahara on September 18, 1962. She wasted no time filing for residency in Nevada. I knew her next order of business would be to file for divorce, but there would be a waiting period. She wanted to get jurisdiction in the state of Nevada, but I wasn’t going to go for that. So I beat her to the punch, filing for divorce in Santa Monica. They located Judy about four o’clock in the morning in Vegas and served her. That meant I had jurisdiction in the state of California.
The story going around then was that Judy was going to divorce me and marry David Begelman. Apparently Begelman was going to divorce his wife, Lee Reynolds, so that he and Judy could be together. At least that was the rumble. The papers reported on Judy’s dependency on him and how he had rushed to her side in London after the ordeal at the Stanhope. His wife wasn’t pleased and took a trip of her own to Puerto Rico. According to the gossip columns, “The amount of ‘babysitting’ and attention required by a star of Judy’s talent and temperament sometimes gets to be more than a manager’s wife can bear.”
I later learned that Begelman visited Judy frequently when she was in London making I Could Go On Singing, and letters and telegrams revealed they’d had a physical relationship. “No one will ever receive my love, my mind—my body—my breathing again,” she once wrote to him. “I gave you all I had to give.”
Foolishly, I hadn’t even suspected that Begelman might be having an affair with my wife. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe it. I was the dumb husband. In hindsight, there was definitely evidence of it. And it would’ve been just like Begelman to take advantage of his station. With a guy like that, the obvious next step was to start fucking the star.
I started watching these guys, especially Begelman, like a detective. I wanted to know what was going on with them, so I flew up to Vegas and got in touch with Clyde Duber, my private investigator friend. I knew my way around Vegas, but Clyde was a friend of a Jack Cherry, a district attorney there, so it was very easy for him to get around. We found out Judy was going to be in the audience at one of Tony Bennett’s shows. The maître d’ arranged for us to sit just where we could see Judy, holding us a table right behind hers. As the lights dimmed and the overture began, Judy walked into the room. She was right in front of me, sitting with Stevie Dumler, Freddie Fields’s secretary. Stevie spotted me during applause, and Judy soon turned around and grabbed my hand. We held hands, and she was trembling that famous tremble. The minute the show was over, in walks David Begelman wearing a new brown suit and one of his new custom-made shirts. He brushed right by me, grabbed Judy, pulled her through, pushed her in front of him, and waltzed her out. Like he was Mr. Luft! I had been replaced.
43
WITH THE NEW YEAR 1963 came the news that Judy had signed the biggest deal of her career, a four-season, $24 million contract with CBS for a weekly variety series to be called The Judy Garland Show. “It was a big decision, but a wonderful decision,” Judy would tell the press. “I don’t think of it as so formidable. I’m going to be a female Perry Como.”
A few days after the announcement, I was staying at the Beverly Rodeo Hotel and sound asleep when a call came in at 4:00 AM. No one should have known my whereabouts, but Judy had used her black Irish witchcraft again to track me down. “Hi, darling,” she said. “Do you think we’ll ever have a chance?”
“Judy, we’ll always have a chance,” I told her. “Where are you?”
She was in Miami. “Do you think we can sit down and talk—that there’s any chance after what we’ve gone through?”
“We always will. You know as well as I do, we love each other.”
We decided then to meet halfway. I splashed some cold water on my face and headed to New Orleans, wondering what I was getting myself into.
Judy was waiting for me at the airport with confetti and a bottle of champagne. As we danced in a nightclub on the French Quarter, she kept whispering in my ear, “This is it, baby! This is it!” But when we went back to the Prince Conti Hotel, she said to me, “Darling, you go to your room and I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.” I was puzzled to learn she had reserved two separate rooms for us on separate floors. “Good night, Mrs. This-Is-It,” I told her, and headed for my room.
We stayed in New Orleans for a couple of days, saw the sights, and tried to come to some sort of understanding, but we both agreed that something was missing. “Perhaps we’re both too scarred up,” I told her. Early the next morning, Judy had already checked out of the hotel when I discovered an envelope left under my door. The note inside, written on my Aerophonics stationery, read:
Dearest Sid:
No matter what way or what manner you handle what’s ahead for us in our divorce—your children need, love, and want you. You’re their father and always will be! Our marriage failed—but I’ll be your friend forever.
With deep sincerity,
—From J.
We’d reconciled again by Valentine’s Day, spent some time together at the Fairmont in San Francisco, and then Judy took off to London for the opening of I Could Go On Singing. In March, we met with lawyers in New York while staying at the St. Regis. They were all set to take our depositions for the divorce proceedings, but Judy told them it was off. “I’d rather reconcile with this guy!” she said.
From there the children joined us for a two-week vacation on the Cat Cay islands in the Bahamas. There was to be no more talk about divorce. I thought that portion of our lives was behind us.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that the real reason for the reconciliation was that Fields and Begelman thought it would be better to get me back in the picture now that Judy was doing this television series. It was a ploy; we made up because she was told to make up. CBS didn’t need any heat. They felt it was important for their star to have a husband, and they probably knew she’d go bananas without one. Their thought was If she and her husband start fighting and divorce, she won’t have the energy to do the show. So let’s make up with Sid so he can get you through!
Judy was certainly optimistic about The Judy Garland Show. As she told the press, working on a series would allow her to remain close to her family and home, and also promised financial stability. “You know how I look on this series?” she said. “As a secure way of living. I can get up in the morning and go to work and come home at night to things that are familiar and mine. I’m so tired of being on the road. The concerts have been marvelous for me, but I’ve been living in hotels now for the last three years and I’ve had it.”
Fields and Begelman were certain that this television series was going to be the most important thing in Judy’s career and life. They were promising her she would be rich. She thought those shows were going to be worth $1 million apiece and that after their first airings they’d be shown all over the world. As she explained to the media, “David Begelman told me there was no reason I shouldn’t have a steady home with my children, be very rich, and do a weekly show—that I should have been very rich a long time ago, like Bob Hope or Perry Como.”
It was almost like brainwashing. They said, “Think of it Judy, if you do the first thirteen shows and the next thirteen, that’s twenty-six shows. They’ll be worth $1 million apiece. We’ve done our homework. You’ll have freedom, because you’ll own twenty-six of your own shows. That’s like owning twenty-six of your own movies. And you know who will be in your first one? Mickey Rooney, just like the good old days.”
I was concerned about Judy’s finances, though, and how Fields and Begelman were handing the hundred
s of thousands of dollars coming into Kingsrow Enterprises. I was especially upset when I learned she’d given them power of attorney. I never took financial power of attorney from my wife, nor would I unless it were absolutely necessary. I don’t believe in that. I don’t think it’s right to think for somebody else. But, as I told Judy, I do think a husband has power of attorney morally with his wife.
I was getting reports of Begelman’s gambling in Vegas. He made enemies, and some people began to spread rumors that he was wasting Judy’s money at the racetrack and other places. Sure, I was gambling, too, but I was a successful gambler. I made money, I didn’t lose it. And I wasn’t gambling with Judy’s money—I had my own, and I had Ted Law backing me. My best day at the track was $56,000. My worst day at the track: $2,000, maybe. But Judy had always had a business manager. You couldn’t gamble if you had a business manager. You couldn’t ask him for money to go to the racetrack!
Judy assured me through all this that she was in very capable hands financially. She met with Herb Allen, a very successful investment banker, at the Four Seasons Hotel. That’s a powerhouse place to have lunch. The plan was that CMA was going to turn over some of Judy’s earnings to Herb to invest. She was very happy about that, and it seemed to be a successful meeting. But it turned out to be just another one of their tricks. Fields and Begelman convinced her that was how her money was being dealt with, but that wasn’t the case.
I was sure Fields and Begelman were pocketing money from her, or at the very least mismanaging it, but I needed to be able to prove it. After much pressure from me, Judy finally agreed to let Guy Ward, my lawyer, look over her financial records. Guy passed them on to Oscar Steinberg, a Beverly Hills accountant who was hired to audit the books, which were dated January 1961 to April 1963.
Tensions were high when Judy arranged a meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Fields, Begelman, and me so that we could try to mend some of our fences, so to speak. They were telling me they were going to cooperate in every way, how they respected that Judy and I were together as husband and wife again. After the meeting was over I said, “The jury’s out right now.” What I meant was that I was waiting for Steinberg to do his thing. I wanted to buy some time until I could get my hands on that report telling me what the hell went on in 1961 and 1962.