Judy and I

by Sid Luft

  When production for The Judy Garland Show moved from New York to Los Angeles, our family rented a house in Malibu for several weeks. In June 1963 I found us a house at 129 South Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood. Judy borrowed the down payment from a bank somewhere and bought the house in her name only, which pissed me off, but I couldn’t say much. Ours wasn’t what you’d call a solid reconciliation yet.

  A couple of weeks before the first taping for her show, Judy and I hosted a lavish housewarming party at the new house on Rockingham. This seemed to solidify our relationship and signal to everyone that our marriage was back on track and we were stronger than ever.

  It was the end of June and they were rehearsing the first episode of Judy’s show, the one with Mickey Rooney, when I finally got the five-page report from Oscar Steinberg. I met with Judy’s lawyer, Grant Cooper, as well as Guy and Oscar, and we read over the report together and started discovering all the discrepancies. It was worse than I could have imagined. As it turned out, David Begelman had embezzled funds from her on multiple occasions, totaling $200,000 to $300,000. Of that, $78,967.20 had already been documented. They were taking double commissions, making deposits into their own accounts, and in some cases they were paying Judy what should have been their commissions and keeping the rest of the money themselves.

  “I wish to advise you of certain items requiring additional explanation,” Steinberg wrote. These included thirteen checks, totaling $35,714, written by Begelman to “cash” on Judy’s Kingsrow account. The checks, drafted between May and October 1962, ranged from $500 to $6,000 each, and Begelman cashed them himself at either the Sahara or the Dunes Hotel in Vegas. The total was listed in Kingsrow’s bookkeeping as part of Judy’s salary for “protection.”

  Additionally, a $50,000 bank transfer was made from one of Judy’s accounts at the Chase Manhattan Bank in Berkeley Square, London, to the Chase Manhattan Park Avenue branch in December 1962. A letter Judy signed before a notary was included, instructing the bank to deposit $24,355 of the $50,000 to the “Executive Producer Account, Special, for David Begelman,” which was an account to which only Begelman had access. The letter also instructed that $3,245 of the $50,000 be deposited into an account labeled “201 East 62nd Street Building Company, Inc.” Interestingly enough, Begelman and his wife, Lee Reynolds, had moved into a cooperative apartment building that was being built at 201 East 62nd Street.

  A check in the amount of $10,000, written on the Kingsrow account to the Chase Manhattan Bank, was listed on the Kingsrow ledger as a bank transfer. “I was advised by an officer of the Chase Manhattan Bank,” Oscar reported, “that such check was deposited to an account in the name of David Begelman, in trust for Judy Garland. Subsequently, the account was changed or transferred to an account in the name of David Begelman and the funds were withdrawn.”

  Looking through the files Oscar used in making his report, I discovered that when Judy appeared on The Jack Paar Program back in 1962, part of her recompense was supposed to be a new 1963 Cadillac convertible. Judy’s signature was even on the letter about the car from Jack Paar’s production company, but she never knew anything about it. Just a few months after she appeared on Paar’s show, Judy and I moved to California and had to buy two new cars. She didn’t even know about the Cadillac. She said to me, “I don’t have a car.”

  After reading the first couple of pages of the report, I said to Grant, “These guys must be crazy!”

  “Crazy? My foot!” he said. “This is all criminal!”

  When a lawyer like Grant Cooper says this is all criminal, you take heed. This was criminal! But how do you deal with it? In cases of fraud, the government’s not going to play bill collector for you. You’ve got to get the money back from these guys yourself. I guess Grant and Guy were looking for Fields and Begelman to just confess and say, “Look, we want to make it up to you somehow.” But of course they were ducking it.

  It was all fraud. For example, in all these concerts that Judy did, there were souvenir program sales. On the ledger it said that “program sales” totaled $274 for forty-four concerts. You sell a program to one out of every four or five people in attendance. If you’ve got two thousand people in a theater, that means you sell five hundred programs. At $4.00 each, sales of five hundred programs would generate $2,000. Do that for just a week’s worth of shows and that’s a lot more than $274. It’s $16,000 a week. Cash! They were pocketing all of that money, too.

  The unfortunate beauty of Judy having Kingsrow and giving power of attorney to Fields and Begelman was that they were allowed to pay themselves. That’s such a huge conflict of interest on their part. That kind of relationship was absolutely idiotic. They claimed it was necessary to meet her needs as a person and as a performer. Perhaps, but it was completely unprofessional.

  If the IRS had looked into the situation, they would have found the fraud. Just look at the books and you can tell they were conscious of the possibility of being audited. All those amounts of cash were in Judy’s ledger as “protection.” They tried to say, “This is a high-security lady!” Those were amounts of money that went into their pockets for protection, in the amount of $115,000. Freddie knew all of this was going on. He was as guilty as Begelman, but Begelman was fucking the star, so Freddie went along with it.

  Judy was at CBS when she heard the Steinberg report was ready. She asked Oscar to bring the report with him to the studio, but Guy told Oscar not to take her a copy, because we didn’t want Fields and Begelman to see it. I waited until Judy took a week off from taping the show and finally confronted her with the news. I harassed my wife as little as I could during the making of those shows. I felt that it would be better for me to not be around and possibly interfere with the television responsibilities that she had, but I couldn’t help it this time. I was under the influence of this report.

  If Judy had wanted to, we could have buried Begelman. She was devastated to learn she was being robbed, but she didn’t want to face up to it. These men were deeply involved in the production of her television show, and she was anxious of spoiling anything. Deep down, she knew these guys should have been fired, but they were written into every detail of her agreement with CBS. They were to be her provider, her agents of record, and they were going to act as assistants to the producer to get the show together. CMA was putting together the package of stars and musicians for The Judy Garland Show. Firing them right then would have presented a legal hassle. There would have been a lawsuit and a real mess for everybody.

  Needless to say, Judy and I started fighting again. “Look, suppose he did steal $200,000 to $300,000,” Judy told me. “Sweep it under the rug now. I’m going to make $20 million on these television shows. What is $300,000?”

  Judy didn’t know what she was doing. I’m a businessman, and I know the implications of unreported income. I wasn’t going to be a part of fraud—her fraud—no matter how much money she was supposed to make. If you make $20 million you cannot sweep it under the rug, and knowing that a fraud was committed means you must expose it. I told Judy that I was the husband and I had to expose it. If I didn’t, I’d be a party to the fraud as well.

  Fields and Begelman had Judy running interference for them. It was the strategic planning of two con artists, and she didn’t get it. I tried to warn her, but she wouldn’t listen to me. As long as they gave her some money when she needed it, everything was fine. They didn’t steal all her money, but they certainly stole enough to gamble and buy shirts. They were keeping her career alive, though, so Judy didn’t care. All she cared about was being onstage.

  And so began another war. Accusations, arguments, and unrest at home. It was a nightmare. Everything was so convoluted and in disarray. Fields and Begelman wanted it that way, though, so they could control everything. They were controlling Judy, she was trying to control me, and we were all fighting each other. That’s a perfect thing for Leopold and Loeb. If Judy’s on pills, doesn’t trust Sid, is fighting Sid, and is not letting Sid in on anything, then tho
se two can operate unseen, freely in the background.

  It was as if her guards robbed the bank, undetected, and were looting until she was totally wiped out. They were supposed to be watching the icon and guarding the treasure, but there was nobody there to watch them. They just took all the treasures, moved them out quietly, and nobody said anything until it was too late. Unscrupulous is a good word to describe those two. There was no moral integrity whatsoever. They were absolutely fucking ruthless!

  The Hollywood Reporter soon announced that Judy and her Kingsrow Enterprises had signed a new three-year agreement with CMA. A telegram was sent to me and several others saying that we should not go looking into Judy’s past. It was too painful for Judy, they said. We were to look forward to the future or get off the team. Then Judy fired Guy Ward and Grant Cooper. I knew the moment that happened that she was in grave danger. As soon as they were gone, Fields and Begelman thought they were out of the woods. Guy and I could have saved Judy, but when she was being totally controlled by these guys, she was mincemeat. I knew she was a fucking goner, because she was getting along just fine and she was in love with the world. That meant she was on whoop-de-doo pills!

  I became so uncomfortable with what was happening and the way we were living that I just couldn’t do it anymore. I took a long, peaceful drive down to Newport Beach and checked into a hotel for the weekend. I just needed some time to cool off. I left a message for Judy saying where I was, but when I came back to the house the following Monday, all of my belongings were gone. The family had quietly moved me out of Rockingham. I was out of the house, and Judy was out of control.

  I settled into a little apartment on Manning Avenue. There was a sense of relief, but at the same time there was no relief whatsoever. The relief was that I didn’t have to deal with the responsibility anymore. I could let somebody else do it. When I left, I thought it was going to be smoother sailing, but that never happened. I still had two young children who needed their father.

  Freddie Fields and David Begelman interloped in my family. As Judy’s agents and managers, they were supposed to merely guide her career. That’s all. This was my bone of contention from the time we started out with Freddie. We should have had a much closer understanding. Judy didn’t mistrust me before them, but then Begelman became Judy’s hero when he said to her, “You know, Sid hasn’t done his 1958–1959 tax returns, but I stopped the IRS agent.” She blamed me for not paying taxes, of course, and now Begelman was the hero. It was then that I knew I was in serious trouble with these guys.

  I arranged a meeting with Fields and Begelman on August 22, 1963, at a Sunset Boulevard office building, where we argued and fussed for more than three hours. What they didn’t know was that my cigarette pack in my shirt pocket was actually a microphone in disguise. Our voices were transmitted to a reel-to-reel tape recorder in a car outside being monitored by a private detective I’d hired.

  I told them both, “Look, I’m out and you’re in now.” We acknowledged there was a three-way cold war going on. There was a war between Freddie Fields and me, one between David Begelman and me, and yet another between Judy Garland and me. The one thing we could all agree on was that there had been two and a half years of unrest for everyone involved. “I think we should get some of the things out that are bugging me,” I said. “And I’ve got a lot of things that are swirling around in my mind.” There should have been a consensus between all parties from the start. Ground rules should have been established and boundaries defined.

  The problem was this, I explained: I really felt that for two and a half years there was a lack of intimacy in our marriage. An intimacy that a man should have with his wife. I wasn’t talking about sex. I was talking about the intimacy of a man with his wife to know her business, to protect her, to protect her children, to look after their welfare. I had been the father, the sweetheart, the lover, everything. And now I was being relieved. I was being replaced.

  “I think that you and Dave should have come to me as the husband,” I said to them. “You should have come to me and told me certain things after Judy and I reconciled.”

  According to Freddie, though, Judy had told them early on to keep me out of her finances and other business-related issues. “Keep Sid the fuck out,” she apparently said. “I don’t want him to have anything to do with this. Don’t show him the accounts. Don’t let him see the contracts. I want to help Sid keep his dignity, and I never want to hurt him, but one thing you must never do is talk to him about my financial affairs.”

  I told Freddie he should have walked away right then. He tried to argue that “Judy had that human right,” but I told him nobody has that right when they’re married to someone.

  I brought up the audit that Oscar Steinberg had done. I wanted some explanations as to where all this money went. “You want to know where the money went?” Begelman said. “You know how much money was paid to get cops into the Stanhope? Uniformed policemen broke in on you at the Stanhope and took your children away from your arms and it was illegal.”

  “Of course it was illegal!” I said.

  “How do you think they did that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Cash, you shmuck! The only weapon she had against you in the last two years was cash. . . . You had the children under your arm asleep and all of a sudden thirty-nine uniformed policemen broke in and ran you over like Red Grange ran over the line. You were left with the phone in your hand, calling for a lawyer. It was like a bad comedy sketch!”

  That wasn’t exactly how it had happened, of course, but the memory still stung. “Who rigged that one?” I asked.

  “Cash rigged that one, pal. Cash. She bought the fucking precinct.”

  Another expenditure requiring explanation was the $50,000 London bank transfer that Oscar had uncovered. Several days before this meeting, I’d spoken with Begelman on the phone and asked him about it. He told me it had been used to bribe someone who had taken a picture of Judy in a British hospital. I didn’t believe that story for a second. When I asked him about that in the meeting, with Freddie present, he was trapped.

  “I’ll tell you, that was the most disturbing phone call that I had with you about that $50,000 thing,” I said. “That photo negative . . . $50,000.”

  “I didn’t tell you that . . . did I?” Begelman said. “Because I swear on my life . . . on my child’s life.”

  “You said it on the phone. You said to me, ‘The nurse took a picture with a camera.’”

  “I told you this on the phone?”

  “Yeah . . . Judy said, ‘Yes, I saw the negative.’”

  “But I told you this?”

  “Be quiet,” Fields said to Begelman.

  “And I said to you, ‘Dave . . . what happened to that $50,000 from England?’”

  “Do you want me to tell you the truth?” Begelman said. “Apparently she was taken to the hospital; they were pumping her stomach and she was disrobed down to here and somebody took a picture of her. But, I mean, this kind of picture.”

  “You saw the picture?”

  “Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.”

  They tried to convince me that all this money went to blackmailers or hoodlums and that a lawyer was involved. I asked them who the lawyer was, but they never answered the question. They couldn’t answer it. There was no lawyer. It was a made-up figment of Begelman’s imagination. This was all bullshit. This was a hoax. That someone would take a picture in a hospital, I just couldn’t buy that. No newspaper in the world would dare to print it.

  I asked them the whereabouts of the negative and prints. They said everything was in a safety deposit vault in New York. “Get rid of it,” I told them. “But I want to see it first.”

  “That’s not the issue now,” David said.

  Our conversation went on for hours until David finally asked me, “What do you want from us? Believe me, Sid, I wish you were sitting in my chair and I was sitting in your chair.”

  “Well, I’d like to have peace
of mind. And a peaceful reconciliation with my wife and family.”

  “How can we do that?” Freddie asked.

  “God, I don’t know.”

  My Aerophonics work had started to dwindle by this time. I’d demonstrated our in-flight music player for Pan Am and they said, “It’s a wonderful idea,” but they didn’t want to get into show business. American Airlines said, “We want it!” Then I foolishly revealed who had made the device for me. Marion Sadler, the president of American Airlines said, “Mr. Luft, if we like this form of entertainment and decide we want it, we’ll pay you for it.” Nothing could have been further from the truth. They should have said, “We’re gonna steal it from you!” That’s what they did.

  I told Freddie and David that I was busted. “I can’t borrow any more,” I said. “I’m having a rough go of it. I’ve got no dough, I’m living in a hotel, and it isn’t easy. I need a job. Don’t I need a job? Don’t I deserve one? And where was that job at CBS, really?” They had previously promised to bring me on board with the production of the show.

  “It was more than a job,” Begelman said.

  “It was the best fucking opportunity you ever had in your life,” Fields chimed in.

  “Well, get it back again,” I told them. “I’m a pretty intelligent fellow and I’ve had a lot of experience. I’ve produced some of the best things that Judy ever did in her life! You can’t deny it. I’ve done it . . . A Star is Born. She was up for an Academy Award! What about the Palace? You can’t deny those things and neither can Judy. If she wants to, that’s her business, but I know the truth. I’ve got to get on my feet, because I’m frustrated.”