Get Happy (54 page)

Sid had realized something that had escaped everyone else, including Vincente. Much of Judy’s self-destructive behavior was a rebellion against a lifetime of taking orders: she was allergic to anything that even hinted of coercion. Perhaps because he suffered from the same condition, Sid perceived that the best way—indeed, the only way—to deal with her was to leave her alone, to let her do exactly what she wanted. The prime example of the pressure she so intensely resented was the never-ending scrutiny of her waistline. Sid was the first to tell her to gobble up—to take that second helping of mashed potatoes if she wanted it. He did not care how heavy she was, Sid assured her, and neither did her audiences—an optimistic assumption that long lines at the box office soon confirmed. “I want to protect her from the trauma she once knew,” he said. “I don’t want her to be bewildered or hurt again. I want her to have happiness.”

Any good manager might have said much the same. But Sid had something else in his favor. In London, when Dorothy Ponedel complained about not being paid, Judy quickly shushed her. “I know what’s going on, Dottie,” she said, “but I love the guy.”

S
he had passed all of her tests, she had survived all of her trials, she had stared down all of her critics, and when she returned to Los Angeles at the end of June, Judy claimed her reward: a new movie contract. Wasting no time in capitalizing on the excitement aroused by her appearances at the Palace and the Philharmonic, Sid had struck a golden deal with Jack Warner, the Louis B. Mayer of Warner Bros. “Your artistry goes beyond the capacity of words,” Warner wrote Judy. “I sincerely believe you are one of the greatest entertainers the world has ever known. What more can words say?”

Nothing, when dollars said it so much better. Under their new agreement, the Lufts would become moviemaking partners with a studio now stronger than Metro itself. Warner Bros. would provide the cash, soundstages and technicians, while Transcona, the Lufts’ newly formed production company, would actually produce pictures—their contract spoke of as many as nine. If their features made money, both would share in the profits; if they lost, Warner Bros. alone would suffer. Sid and Judy could not have asked for better terms.

Three stories already had tentative approval. One was the saga of Man o’ War, which Sid had been peddling around town for years. The tragic history of the Donner Party, the westbound settlers who met death in the snowy Sierra Nevada, was the second. And a musical version of
A Star Is Born
, Hollywood’s favorite picture about Hollywood, was the third. Since acquiring Judy was the only reason Warner Bros. had consented to such a generous arrangement,
A Star Is Born
was the first to get under way, with Judy, of course, playing the star. Preliminary work began that very fall, just as she entered the final weeks of her pregnancy. For once, she was eager to begin. “I used to be scared to death of people and really scared of lots of things, but not any more,” she said. “That concert tour gave me courage I never had before. I sort of grew up in the last couple of years.”

The collaboration with Warner Bros. was one result of that newfound maturity, promising not only to restore Judy’s name to movie marquees, but also to give her the financial independence she had always longed for. Because she and Sid would be the heads of a corporation—they would control 70 percent of Transcona; two friends would own the rest—they would be employers rather than employees, the ones who gave orders rather than the ones who took them. With most of their money coming from profits rather than salaries, they would, moreover, avoid paying personal income taxes, which, in the fifties, were almost confiscatory for those in the highest brackets. Mired in debt a year before—Sid alone owed $60,000—the Lufts seemed destined to become rich, movie moguls in their own right. At that lucky moment, with good fortune smiling everywhere she looked, Judy gave birth to her second child, another daughter. Born on November 21, 1952, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, she weighed six pounds, four ounces and was named Lorna—Lorna Luft.

A new baby. A new husband. A new career. For Judy, there had been a parade of triumphs, all made sweeter by the disasters that had preceded them. But nothing, it seemed, could assuage her gluttonous sense of inadequacy, her oppressive feeling of self-contempt. Defying logic and the counsel of common sense, the same old problems persisted, impervious
to triumphs, unyielding to the seductive songs of ordinary happiness. Like a virus in the blood, a dark mood would unexpectedly seize her, and she would almost hunger for self-destruction.

One episode, which occurred in late 1951, during her months at the Palace, can stand for many. She had spent the afternoon seeing a revival of
Meet Me in St. Louis
, the film in which she looked most attractive. It was a festive occasion, shared with friends, but that night, as she sat in her dressing room, preparing to go onstage, she stared into the mirror and began sobbing. “I’m not beautiful anymore,” she said. “I just want to forget everything.” And with that, she grabbed the hot curling irons from her hairdresser and, until he snatched them away, held them close to her face, as if she intended to burn herself.

In the days after Lorna’s birth, that virus returned with more serious results. Aggravated, apparently, by postpartum depression, it was further inflamed by Sid, who was in San Francisco watching one of his horses run the day she carried Lorna home from the hospital. “I had to bring my baby home myself,” she said reproachfully when he did return. Although she seemed to forgive him, a day or two later she once again went into a bathroom and made cuts on her neck. “Judy,” said her doctor, “you keep this up and you’re going to hurt yourself.”

Her spirits soon recovered, the virus disappearing as quickly as it had appeared, and by the end of the year she was well enough to travel with Sid and baby Lorna for a New Year’s celebration in New York. But there, on the afternoon of Monday, January 5, she received genuinely bad news from California, news that was not only to send her into another emotional tailspin, but was to torment her for weeks, and perhaps years, to come. Early that morning, as she was hurrying to her job at the Douglas Aircraft factory in Santa Monica, her mother, the seemingly indomitable Ethel, had collapsed in the company parking lot, dead of a heart attack at fifty-nine.

Flying back to California the next day, Judy met with her sisters, Sue and Jimmie, to make plans for the funeral. Forest Lawn’s Little Church of the Flowers, where they had said good-bye to their father seventeen years earlier, was the site they chose, and two days later, at noon on a gray January 8, an old family friend, a Presbyterian minister from Bakersfield, conducted the services. Their mother had always been their
chief topic of conversation—“Guess what she did to me!” one or another would exclaim when they met—but Ethel’s girls did little talking on that gloomy Thursday. All Judy, who had refused to speak to her mother for many months, could say was “I didn’t want her to die.”

Judy may not have wanted her mother to die, but she had wanted her to disappear—to stay far away from her, her husband and her children. The road to that painful juncture was a long one, and, had no one else been involved, Judy might not have arrived there at all. But someone else—Liza—was involved. Not satisfied with having been a stage mother, Ethel seemed bent on becoming a stage grandmother as well, and, at the end of the forties, while Judy was still married to Vincente, she began to push Liza as she had once pushed Judy.

Watching the two in the same room was, for Judy, childhood revisited, the release of a hornets’ nest, a swarm of stinging memories, and she found her mother’s behavior so “deeply neurotic,” as she put it, that it made her ill even to see grandmother and granddaughter together. So strained was the atmosphere that when Ethel came to dinner, sullen silence presided, and though “their proud spirits would never allow either of them to admit it was a tragedy,” said Vincente, the relationship had deteriorated beyond salvation.

Eventually silence gave way to violent arguments, and the breach became unbridgeable. Most of her friends thought that Ethel was a tank who could ward off all blows; but rejection by Judy, final and irrevocable, was one disappointment too many: she cracked and tried to kill herself, swallowing half a bottle of sleeping pills with a whiskey chaser. She was saved from the effects of that lethal combination only by Jimmie’s timely rescue, and, with no further reason to stay in California, Ethel soon followed Jimmie and Jimmie’s second husband, Johnny Thompson, to their new home in Dallas.

Texas was not her address for long, however. Within hours of Judy’s own attempted suicide in June 1950, Ethel was back in California and, despite clear signals that she was not welcome, bulldozing her way into Judy’s house on Sunset Boulevard. Before long, one newspaper reported, she was “in complete charge of the situation.” That, of course,
had been the problem all along, and when her mother later returned to Los Angeles to stay, Judy would have nothing to do with her. “Judy didn’t want anybody meddling,” said Johnny Thompson. “And Ethel did meddle—although she always thought it was for your own good.”

For much of Judy’s Metro career, her mother had also been on the studio payroll, going home in the late forties with $150 a week, a spare but livable income by the standards of the time. That modest sinecure ended when Judy left Culver City, and in the spring of 1952, nearing sixty and in poor health—she suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes and an ulcer—Ethel found herself working at Douglas Aircraft for less than half that, a mingy $61 a week. There had scarcely been a time that she had not worried about money, fighting to keep herself and her family afloat; now, it seemed, she had lost the battle. “Poor Ethel!” exclaimed her friend Dorothy Walsh. “Her life was a real struggle. She tried so hard.”

Unable even to keep up the premiums on her life insurance, which was to provide her burial money, Ethel sought help from Judy, who was then singing to sellout crowds at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Judy still refused to see her, however, and Ethel got no further than Sid. Though he agreed to make her insurance payments, Sid balked at her additional plea for a loan of a couple of hundred dollars. “I’ll tell you what,” he said offhandedly, “we’ll send you twenty-five dollars a week.”

Hurt and insulted by his casual condescension, Ethel angrily walked away, and a few days later, on May 2, the
Los Angeles Mirror
ran a story about the estrangement between mother and daughter. In case any of its readers missed its message—that Judy was ungrateful—the paper spelled it out in unmistakable sarcasm. “While Judy Garland is busy making her ‘comeback’ and some $25,000 a week,” said the caption under its picture of Ethel, photographed behind her desk at Douglas, “her mother, Mrs. Ethel Gumm Gilmore, works quietly at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica as a clerk for about $1 an hour take-home pay.”