by Sid Luft
“What about the television shows?” I asked.
“The television shows are gone,” she said. “I’m selling my house, and I have no money.”
I hadn’t seen Judy for many months. She no longer made herself available when I visited the children. I went over that afternoon and was shocked when I saw her. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. “I don’t know where to begin,” she said, pacing back and forth. I kissed her on the cheek. “I don’t know what to do,” she continued. “I’m broke. I have no money. I have no resources. I’m too sick to work. We’re going to be on the street, Sid.”
Who was going to take on Judy Garland, though? Are you nuts? Are you crazy? She had a track record six miles long of hysteria, attempted suicide, and walking off of movie sets. She needed my help, and the children needed my help. As always, I assured Judy that everything would be OK.
First, I convinced her to leave CMA. Then I agitated her enough that we both joined forces in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against CMA, Fields, and Begelman in New York. The suit asked for $2.5 million in damages and argued that Fields and Begelman had “improperly and unlawfully paid to and retained for themselves from the gross earnings of Judy Garland and Kingsrow Enterprises property and monies substantially in excess of the commission to which they were entitled. . . .They deliberately and systematically misused their position of trust so as to cheat, embezzle, extort, defraud and withhold over $1 million for their personal use, which rightfully belonged to Judy Garland.”
We took the evidence we had—the material from Guy Ward and Oscar Steinberg’s audit, my taped conversation with Fields and Begelman, the Kingsrow ledger, the canceled checks, the whole nine yards—and we built this case. How could a woman who worked as hard as Judy did in from 1961 to 1965 be broke now in 1966? How in the hell does that happen?
After the suit was filed, I received a phone call from a man who said his name was Frank Sacco. He told me he was with David Begelman in Begelman’s Madison Avenue office and that he wanted to be the middleman who could straighten things out. I felt he was threatening me, so I told Sacco that the only place the suit would be straightened out would be in court. I never heard from him again, but it turned out that he was part of the East Coast Mafia.
Film producer David Weisbart wanted Judy for the role of fictional Broadway musical comedy star Helen Lawson in Valley of the Dolls, an upcoming film for 20th Century Fox based on the novel by Jacqueline Susann. I proposed the idea to Judy and she said, “I’ve got to do it, because I need the money.” So I hired an agent named John Dugan to negotiate on our behalf. “I want $100,000 a week for her,” we told them, but we settled for $75,000 for eight weeks’ work, then $25,000 for any additional weeks she was needed.
Judy headed to New York to be a mystery guest on the What’s My Line? television show. They paid for her stay, and it was around this same time that Barbara Walters did an interview with her. On March 2, 1967, Judy joined Jacqueline Susann for a press conference at the St. Regis, where it was officially announced that she would have a starring role in Valley of the Dolls. Given Judy’s history with pills, the reporters didn’t miss the chance to ask her about the film’s subject matter. “The book deals with pills, to some extent,” one said. “Have you found that prevalent around show business people?”
“Well, I find it prevalent around newspaper people, too,” Judy replied with a sly smile. They asked why she was she taking on a role like this. “There are bills to be paid, groceries to be bought, and children to feed,” she said. “I’m delighted to be in Valley of the Dolls, although my slanderous press already has me walking off the set! Mind you, the set hasn’t even been built, but already they have me walking off it!”
The next day, we all gathered for Liza’s wedding to Peter Allen at the apartment of Stevie Dumler, who was now Liza’s agent. Peter Allen was a singer and dancer Judy had discovered during her stay in Hong Kong a few years earlier. She had brought him and his performing partner Chris—they were collectively known as the Allen Brothers—along to be her opening act in London. Judy played matchmaker, and in no time Peter and Liza were engaged. It later turned out he was gay. I thought he was gay all during the marriage. I suspected it, anyway. I remember going up to their apartment and Liza made a pasta for us. Over the fireplace was a portrait, a painting of a guy, and I said, “Who’s that in the picture?” She said, “That’s a friend of Peter’s.”
A call came in to Judy during her stay at the St. Regis informing her that she was about to lose the Rockingham house. It seemed as though things always crept up on her and caught her off guard. “People are always keeping reality away from me,” she explained to a reporter. “It’s perfectly awful! It’s awful finding out about things after the wolf is at the door. I don’t understand it at all.”
I got the government to back off the sale of the house, which bought Judy a few more months. “Well, if worse comes to worse,” she told the reporter, “I can always pitch a tent in front of the Beverly Hilton and Lorna can sing gospel hymns! That should see us through, somehow.”
Filming for Valley of the Dolls began in mid-April in Los Angeles, and I was called to the set the second day of shooting when Judy wouldn’t come out of the dressing room. She was dressed, with makeup on, and she’d tell them, “Be right out.” But she didn’t come out, and they’d had to stop shooting to wait for her. I got there and she said, “I’m a little rusty, Sid. But I’ll make it all right. Tell them out there not to worry—I’ll get it.” I knew she was terrified and had been stoking herself with pills. Finally, after several days like this, Judy said, “I cannot read these lines. I just can’t.” And they fired her. Judy cried a little in her dressing room and was driven home in a studio limousine. She called me in tears. “They fired me! They fired me! I don’t know why they wouldn’t give me a chance.”
I went by Rockingham when I knew she was home and comforted her as best I could. She was still upset. “See if you can get me that job back,” she said. “Sid, get it back for me!” I went in to see Richard Zanuck, who was running the studio at the time. As her ex-husband and the guy she was known to listen to, I said to Dick, “Give her one more chance, please.” I begged him, but he said he couldn’t do it. He was very firm: “Listen Sid, we gave her all the chances we could. We can’t disrupt this film like this. We have to replace her.”
I came back to Judy and said, “Fuck ’em! The hell with the goddamn thing. That part wasn’t for you anyway. Listen, if you can’t read those lines, it was a mistake in the beginning. The whole world is not gonna come to an end. You’re gonna be all right.” This was one of the toughest things I ever had to do to Judy. “You didn’t come out so badly,” I told her. They did give her half of her promised fee, although the IRS took most of the money. And that was that. That was the end of the Valley of the Dolls.
Judy finally lost the house not long after. It was put up for sale and sold, and Judy Garland was officially homeless. The IRS didn’t get a hell of a lot of money from the sale, but I was lucky: I got Judy some of her money that had been held in escrow. We put everything she owned in storage, and I started organizing the next tour for her.
Judy was philosophical about the whole thing. “In a way I’m glad they’re taking the house,” she’d told that reporter in New York. “It’s too big, too impractical. Besides, the man who lived there before didn’t love his wife. That sort of put a pall on it from the beginning! There are acres of gardens, and a swimming pool, and the place needs at least four servants and four gardeners to keep it in shape. I never really liked it. It looks like a Gloria Swanson reject. I say good riddance!”
45
JUDY’S NEW TOUR began at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island, and soon we were headed back to the Palace in New York City. Judy opened there on July 31, 1967, and played for a phenomenal four weeks. We called it “Judy Garland at Home at the Palace.” It was her third time there, and she even brought Lorna and Joey onstage as part of her act each night.
I negotiated a new recording contract with ABC/Paramount, and they released a live album with selections from the Palace shows.
Judy tried for a reconciliation with me around this time. I knew she’d been on and off again with Tom Green, a young publicist she’d been seeing. They were even engaged at one point. Needless to say, I was surprised when she called me to her suite and said, “You know how I feel about you, Sid, and I always will feel.”
“Well, I feel the same way,” I said, “but I’m not ready for that, Judy.”
“Sid, has something happened to you?”
“Yes,” I told her. I was emotionally confused, and that made her angry.
“Don’t tell me you’ve switched and become a fag!” she shouted. Who can blame her for wondering? Look at the cast she attracted! The likes of Vincente Minnelli, and then Mark Herron.
One reason I wasn’t in a hurry to get back together was that I’d been seeing a pretty girl named Marianna Hill since Judy and I split. She was a very young actress, early twenties, and was making a Howard Hawks picture at Paramount at the time we met. She thought I was very attractive but much too old for her. And I agreed! I didn’t fall in love with her, but she was great company. She was the first woman I slept with after Judy. It was not the same, though. It was a sex thing more than a love thing. She was interesting and a nice girl, but I didn’t want to get married. I really broke her heart, so I’m told.
After the Palace run, Judy did a tour I’d set up for her of ten major cities, including Boston, where she gave a free-to-the-public, open-air concert on the Boston Common. They built a twenty-four-foot platform especially for her; she loved a runway like that so she could move about. It was her largest audience ever, more than a hundred thousand people. God, it was packed! John Collins, the mayor of Boston, presented her with a silver souvenir Paul Revere bowl and said, “Judy, we’ve taken you into our hearts; I think that is the sentiment of all of us. God bless you.”
I got Judy a gig opening November 30 at the brand-new Caesars Palace in Vegas. It was one show a night, $30,000 a week, plus other incentives. It was one of a very limited number of shows Judy performed in 1968. A few were triumphs, and a few were tragedies due to medication issues. I’d never seen Judy in this condition. I was convinced that she was suicidal and figured she’d never live out the year. If she made it through the year, she’d never make another movie. I was also sure that her voice would wear out from amphetamines and abuse. She just didn’t care anymore.
Judy was totally burned out. Wiped out. Destroyed. I couldn’t save her. If anybody had a chance to save her, it would’ve been me. But I’m a survivor type of guy—it’s just my nature—and I wasn’t going to be dragged down by anybody. I warned Judy. I begged her. She said “Get out!” And I got out.
Finally, by the middle of 1968, I couldn’t go any further with Judy. I couldn’t get to her after this period. I went back to California with Joey, and then Lorna soon followed. When I left Judy for the last time, Lorna left her mother, too. She had been Judy’s caregiver for far too long—and at, what, fourteen or fifteen years old? She called me up and said, “Daddy, I can’t live with her anymore. I want to come and live with you.”
Judy was always fearful and obsessed that I would kidnap the children one day, but now she was sending them to live with me—with her blessings and regrets. She just couldn’t care for them anymore.
CMA showed up around this time and dangled an $8,000 check for accrued royalties in front of Judy. In return for the funds, she agreed to drop the lawsuit against them, and she signed a new contract with Fields and Begelman. How could she? That lawsuit was the only thing she’d had going for her. They’d used her and made themselves rich, busted the two of us, and now she was penniless. This is still a sore wound with me. She never should have dropped that suit and gone back with those crooks.
Soon, I filed a motion of intervention that would allow me to take over the suit, and in December 1968 the New York Supreme Court granted my motion. A few days after Christmas, Fields asked me to meet him at Frascati’s restaurant. “Sid, I know what you want,” he said to me, “and I have $100,000 in my pocket. But before I give it to you, you have to take an ad out in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. The gist of the ad will be that the things you have said about Freddie Fields and David Begelman are a figment of your imagination.”
All I could do was laugh. “I don’t want your $100,000. The only thing I want from you is to get you in the goddamned courthouse.” But I’d never see my day in court; the suit dragged on for a decade before being dismissed in 1978 for taking too long make it to trial.
In the years after we separated, I’d always had some kind of a handle on Judy. I always had an idea where she was—in Vegas, in New York, or wherever—or who she was with, and she knew how to get in touch with me. But now I felt awful, because there wasn’t anybody to look out for her. In the back of my mind I was always conscious of her. I remained concerned, especially when rumors would get back to me that she wasn’t well. I think it was a great struggle for her too, being without me. I tried to ignore it, but I really couldn’t, because I knew better. I just knew that without me, she was really doomed. Somebody would fuck up.
Judy stayed in New York and got mixed up with a guy called John Meyer, who claimed to be—or imagined himself to be—a songwriter. She was living with him in his parents’ apartment on Park Avenue and singing in a gay and lesbian bar where he played piano. Just like the others, this guy thought he could save Judy. He did succeed in getting her on The Merv Griffin Show and several other national shows, and I believe he was the one who originally lined up a five-week engagement for Judy at London’s Talk of the Town.
I had a chance meeting with Judy in December 1968. I was on my way into the dentist office on West Fifty-Seventh Street for a root canal and she was there with John Meyer visiting another dentist office in the same building. “Hey, you, hey, fella!” she called to me. She looked terrible. She was so thin. That was the last time I ever saw Judy.
I really didn’t know what happened to Judy after that. I later learned that when John Meyer was flat on his back with a debilitating case of the flu, Judy made a leap from him to a man called Mickey Deans. Deans was twelve years Judy’s junior and the night manager of a popular New York discotheque called Arthur. Looking back, Judy meeting him was bad news. I knew it and I hadn’t even met the guy! But I knew of the circle of people, who they were and what they were. Deans picked up where John Meyer left off and headed to London to accompany Judy to the Talk of the Town engagement, where she received mostly rave reviews.
Two months later, on March 15, 1969, Judy married Mickey Deans at the Chelsea Register Office. The wedding reception was held at Quaglino’s, a popular West End restaurant. Word was that it was to be a star-studded event with everybody from Bette Davis to James Mason in attendance, but very few of her old friends showed up. The next day’s headline read, JUDY WEDS BUT STARS STAY AWAY.
Judy and her opening act, Johnnie Ray, set off on a four-city tour with stops in Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö, Sweden, finishing up in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her concert at Copenhagen’s Falkoner Centret on March 25, 1969, would be her final performance. “The air was thick with rumors that the star was no longer a star, that she had not only lost her voice, but that she could no longer even get through her program,” wrote a critic for the Politiken.
Suddenly she stood on the enormous stage and disproved all the rumors in the world. . . . After a large number of curtain calls, she finally gave in to the deepest wish of the audience. She sat down on the stage floor and began to sing “Over the Rainbow.” It was as though she sang it for the first time, with fervent innocence and sweetness. Tears came to one’s eyes. All the spectators arose and cheered Judy Garland. She had a great triumph.
June 22, 1969. Judy was living in London with her then-husband Mickey Deans, and he had allowed a doctor to give her a prescription of Seconal because she couldn’t sleep. She would pop those things lik
e candy, so you’d have to watch her. Judy would tell me, “Don’t put more than three Seconal by my bed,” and I’m sure she told him, too. I have to believe that Deans did it purposely. They say Judy had thirty or forty Seconal next to her bed, and Deans was nowhere to be found. He disappeared, this fuck! He was known for taking late night walks in a nearby park, so who knows where he’d been or who he was with. He came back the next morning from wherever the hell he’d been, and there was a phone call for Judy. It was the singer/pianist Charlie Cochran calling. Deans saw Judy wasn’t in the bed, so he called to her, but there was no answer. She was in the bathroom, he figured, so he knocked on the door, but there was just silence. He had to get into the bathroom through a window from the roof. It was then that he discovered her. Judy was dead.
The coroner ruled it an accidental overdose. Judy didn’t commit suicide, which was what a lot of the public assumed at first. But it seems as though Judy had awakened in the middle of the night, went to the john, and her head just dropped. She swallowed her tongue and suffocated. Ordinarily, if she took that amount of Seconal, she would have vomited some of it up. That, or her head would be up and she would have just gone to sleep. But when her head dropped, she suffocated. That’s what happened to her.
The doctor who prescribed this medication should have known something about Judy Garland and her history with pills. You don’t put thirty sleeping pills by her bedside. You might recommend three or four Seconal, but not enough to kill her! She wasn’t taking the normal dosage of any of these things. She’d take handfuls a day. She would treat that stuff like it was popcorn. You might say the Seconal killed her, but it could have been any number of things, too. Maybe she was doomed. Her death was a kind of assisted suicide, in a way. A lot of people took advantage of her and made a bad situation worse.