Get Happy (50 page)

Her new love’s name was Sid Luft—Michael Sidney Luft—and Judy had actually met him in 1937, when she was making
Broadway Melody of 1938
and he, a strapping young man of twenty, was working for Eleanor Powell, the picture’s star. They met a second time eleven years later—at a bowling alley, of all places. “She thought I was a conceited ass,” he said, “and I thought she was a shrimp.” Those negative opinions were radically altered, however, on their third meeting, in the fall of 1950. Also visiting New York, Luft saw Judy enjoying herself with Freddie Finklehoffe, his friend, too, at an East Side hangout called the Little Club. He went over to their table, said his hellos and asked if he could sit down. Finklehoffe, who was hoping to keep Judy to himself, did not waste words on polite excuses. “I don’t want any traffic with you at all, Sid,” he said. “Get lost.” But Judy, who later said that she fell in love with Luft even as he stood there looking down at her, laughingly intervened. “Of course, let him sit down, Freddie,” she said, and Luft pulled up a chair.

Judy and Luft were soon going out by themselves, and when Luft returned to Los Angeles a couple of weeks later, Judy quickly followed. Their romance continued to blossom in its new venue, and weeks before she and Vincente announced their breakup, Judy moved out of the house on Evanview Drive—she had already given up her house on Sunset Boulevard—and into an apartment of her own in West Hollywood. As surprised as her friends had once been by her engagement to Vincente, they were still more shocked by her affair with a man one magazine forthrightly labeled “Mr. Wrong.” But whether Sid was Mr. Wrong or Mr. Right—or, like Dr. Jekyll, both in equal parts—was never to be precisely established, by Judy or anyone else. What was clear was that in Sid, who had a boxer’s biceps and bulky build, she had discovered a man who would, quite literally, fight for her.

Sid was so fond of a good scrap that one amused writer had honored him with a prizefighter’s nickname—“One-Punch Luft.” On two occasions he had turned posh Ciro’s into a boxing arena; his last match, in the spring of 1950, created such a ruckus that almost a thousand of the club’s glamorous patrons screamed, shouted and shoved one another aside as they climbed onto tables for a better look. Now, back in Los Angeles at the end of October, One-Punch Luft was in the papers again, this time for breaking the nose of Jimmy Starr, a Hollywood columnist, on the sidewalk in front of the Mocambo, in full view of anybody who happened to be passing on Sunset Boulevard. One thing could be said for certain about Judy’s new lover: he was a volcano who could erupt at any time.

His father had owned a jewelry store, his mother had run two dress shops, and Sid had grown up in the leafy, WASP-y suburbs of Westchester County—Yonkers, Bronxville and New Rochelle—just north of New York City. Inviting as they appeared, in the twenties and thirties those were inhospitable precincts for Jews, and from the time he was five, Sid was made painfully aware that he was different, or, in his words, “a Jew—a little Jew.” Not about to be pushed around by anybody, he started toting a gun, a .22–caliber revolver, before he reached puberty. “Boy, 12, Walking Arsenal,” read the newspaper headline after
the police confiscated it, an action that may have prevented serious bloodshed when an older, bigger boy attacked him at an ice rink the following year. “Hey, Jew, get off the ice!” the boy yelled, then, whacking him with a hockey stick, proceeded to beat him up.

Nearly choking on his hate, Sid vowed to make himself powerful enough to kill, even without his revolver, and he embarked on a rigorous course of weight lifting, exercise and boxing lessons. Three years later, so muscular that he could walk up stairs on the palms of his hands, he approached his assailant, by this time a husky nineteen. “Remember me?” Sid asked, then took his revenge, returning, with compound interest, all the blows he had received on the ice those many months earlier. That, at least, was how Sid told the story of his stormy teenage years, and, to judge by his later history, most of what he said was probably true.

Sometimes, in fact, it seemed that Sid had been born angry—angry at his tormentors, angry at his circumstances and, perhaps most of all, angry at his father, who would not defend him. By choice coincidence, the relationship between the Lufts, Norbert and Leonora, was much like that between Frank and Ethel Gumm: the husband weak and passive, the woman strong and aggressive, a go-getter. Sid made no secret which parent he favored, and as much as he worshipped his doting mother, that Bronxville Brünnhilde, so, to the same degree, did he disdain his too-docile father. Indeed, when Norbert Luft accused him of some misdeed, Sid, then fifteen and well on his way to becoming a muscle man, threatened to light a real fire under what seemed like a classic Oedipal conflict. “You’re accusing me of something I didn’t do,” he told his father, as he made his hands into furious and very visible fists. “And if you keep on doing it, I’ll hit you.” Taking him at his word, Norbert backed down, which probably made Sid despise him all the more.

As they move into manhood, many men learn to control such youthful hostility, diverting it into healthier and more productive paths. Sid did not. He not only retained his early rage, but put it on such frequent and ostentatious display that it is almost superfluous to suggest that it was a cover for deep-rooted insecurities: a truly secure man does not need to raise his fists at every slight, actual or imagined. “A professional
he-man,” was how Joe Mankiewicz, that grizzled veteran of the analyst’s couch, characterized Judy’s new lover.

Yet many women like a belligerent swagger, particularly when it is combined with charm, penetrating brown eyes and more than passable good looks, and not long after he graduated from high school, Sid was the boyfriend and secretary of the tap-dancing Powell. Pleased with her acquisition, Powell told a reporter that when she took him on a trip to Havana, Sid’s athletic rumba “made the cheeks of the caballeros blanch with envy.” There was obviously more to young Sid’s job than answering the mail.

Flying had been Sid’s obsession since boyhood—in California he logged something like four hundred hours in the air—and in 1941, months before the United States entered World War II, he traveled to Canada to join the already embattled Royal Canadian Air Force. Returning to California after Pearl Harbor, as a test pilot for Douglas Aircraft, he was severely burned in the crash of a light bomber, an experience that profoundly changed his priorities. From then on, Sid said, he concentrated on only one thing: survival.

In November 1943, several months after that skirmish with mortality, Sid married Lynn Bari, a star of B-pictures at 20th Century-Fox. After the war he tried to find a place of his own in the movie business, and he did manage to produce two modestly successful pictures,
French Leave
and
Kilroy Was Here
, for tiny Monogram Pictures. When he met Judy in New York, Sid, a keen fan of the horses, was attempting to put together a third picture, a biography of sorts of Man o’ War, perhaps the most famous of all American racers.

Most of Sid’s projects, including that Man o’ War movie, collapsed before leaving the starting gate, however. The problem may have been, as some suggested, that he was lazy, unwilling to give his ideas the time and effort they demanded. Or it may have been that too many of his enterprises involved what could be termed sharp practices, dealings that, though not necessarily illegal, made sober-minded people hesitate before handing him checks. “A slicker, always off on some dream of a big deal” was how Judy’s friend Eleanor Lambert remembered him.

If he was not a movie mogul, Sid acted like one. A stylish dresser, with a fondness for expensive silk shirts, he could often be seen at the racetracks, Hollywood Park or Santa Anita, sitting in a box with the real moguls and sometimes winning or losing thousands of dollars in an afternoon. Like many of the rich, he also maintained his own racing stable, even if it consisted of a mere three horses. Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner could afford hay, oats and big losses at the pari-mutuel windows. Sid could not, and in 1947 an irate Lynn Bari filed for divorce, doing her best to portray Sid, that model of tough-guy masculinity, as nothing better than a kept man. “During our marriage I was the only breadwinner in the family,” she declared, adding that she had put her assets under both names solely because he had pleaded: he wanted, he had told her, to be considered “a man of property.”

Forgetting such humiliating comments, the two eventually reconciled, and a year later Bari gave birth to their only child, John Sidney Luft. But the differences that had surfaced when Bari filed suit were never repaired, and three years later, just a few weeks before Sid and Judy came together at the Little Club, Bari again asked for a divorce. This time, alleging “eight years of slavery,” she did not change her mind. “He’d leave the house in the evening ‘to get a newspaper,’ and he’d come back at 6 a.m.,” Bari told a Superior Court judge. “He didn’t care about a home. He preferred night clubs, and I didn’t.”

Judy did—and she preferred Sid, as well. “Judy, don’t mess with him,” Finklehoffe had warned her. “He’s trouble.” But after what she regarded as fifteen years of bullying by M-G-M, Sid was the kind of trouble she wanted, a man who would stand at her side, fight her battles and, if need be, pound his fists into the faces of her enemies. For Sid, unlike Vincente, she felt not a tepid affection, but an unrestrained and uninhibited passion. “Judy was so crazy about this guy called Sid Luft that anything he did she would ask for more,” complained Dorothy Ponedel. “He had her hypnotized.”

Though Judy had found a new man, a new career eluded her, and at the beginning of 1951 the question remained: what would she do with the rest of her life? “What is happening to Judy Garland?” one Hollywood
columnist demanded. “Where will she wind up?” Judy must have wondered herself, and for all her confident talk she could not hide that she was frightened—and had good reason to be. At twenty-eight, she knew just one thing: how to make movies. With several proposals from which to choose, she was guaranteed an audience. But how long could she keep it? Could a woman with her record of unreliability be counted on to appear on time for a performance? And every performance thereafter? That was a question no one, including Judy, could answer.