Get Happy (59 page)

In such a big house, there was a room for each of the children, including Sid’s son John. Judy and Sid had separate suites, each with a bedroom, bathroom and dressing room. Hers sparkled with mirrors; his gleamed with rich, well-polished mahogany. The neighborhood was full of familiar faces. Next door, where Mapleton met Sunset, was Judy’s old friend Lana Turner. Instead of borrowing a cup of sugar, Judy wryly observed, she would reach across the fence for some of Turner’s sex appeal. In the other direction, two doors down, was the whitewashed brick French colonial that belonged to Humphrey Bogart and his wife, Lauren Bacall; and not far from them were Walter Wanger the producer and his actress wife, Joan Bennett.

Nunnally Johnson, screenwriter of
The Grapes of Wrath
and
How to Marry a Millionaire
, among other films, also lived on that stellar block. So did Gloria Grahame, who had won the 1952 Oscar for best supporting actress in Vincente Minnelli’s
The Bad and the Beautiful;
Art Linkletter, host of NBC-TV’s
People Are Funny;
and two illustrious songwriters, Sammy Cahn and Hoagy Carmichael. Bing Crosby, who, a few years earlier, had given Judy work on his radio program when no one else would hire her, was also a resident of South Mapleton, and his four boys could often be seen and heard racing their cars—Chevy Corvettes—down the street.

The Crosby boys’ hot-rodding may have awakened some people on South Mapleton, but not Judy and Sid, who joined other hard-drinking
late-nighters to form Hollywood’s most exclusive social club: the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, which included the most celebrated rodents on earth, next to Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Yet it was, really, only a group of friends who, with neither plan nor purpose, frequently found themselves in the Bogarts’ den, lifting a glass at an hour when most people in Los Angeles, that city of early risers, were pulling up the covers. The Bogarts had a rule: “If the light over the front door was on,” said Bacall, “we were home and awake and a chosen very few could ring the bell.” Their light burned often, and among those chosen very few were Frank Sinatra, the David Nivens, the Mike Romanoffs—he owned the group’s favorite restaurant—and Irving Lazar, the diminutive Hollywood agent. Swifty, Bogart nicknamed him, so quick was he at striking a deal.

And Judy and Sid, of course, although Sid was more tolerated than welcomed. Indeed, Bogart, who needled everyone, took special delight in attacking Sid. “Do you sing?” he demanded. Then, before Sid could respond, he answered his own question. “No, you don’t. Then why the hell are you making a living off a singer?” Ridiculing Sid’s fondness for conspicuous consumption—custom-made shirts, bespoke suits and bench-made English shoes—Bogart, who had been born to wealth, tartly informed him that class could be neither bought nor acquired. “And I can tell you that you don’t have it, my friend,” he savagely concluded, “and you never will.” A man incapable of turning the other cheek, Sid retaliated in his usual way, picking Bogart up after one such assault and pinning him against a wall. If the gibes did not stop, Sid told that cinematic tough guy, he would split his head open. Bogart laughed—he appreciated dramatic gestures—but continued the razzing.

He did his best, on the other hand, to prop up Judy’s unsteady ego, telling her that she had “more goddamn talent” than anyone else in town and presenting her with a pair of trick dice from his movie
Casablanca
—they always turned up a lucky eleven. But talent, Bogart added with a nudge, was no good in a living room; “you’ve got to get out there and do it.” When Judy did do it, in Long Beach in the summer of 1955, the whole pack showed up to give her a boost, traveling in luxury of course: they had a bar on wheels, which is to say, a bus stocked with the essential potables. “What fun we had with it all!” said Bacall. “We were an odd assortment, but we liked each other so much, and every one of us had a wild sense of the ridiculous.”

And fun they all had until February 1956, when Bogart, the head of the pack, the man who provided the taste and tonic that made it more than a drinking club, was notified he had cancer, the disease to which he succumbed the following January. The Rat Pack died with him, and although others—Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis, Jr., and the omnipresent Sinatra—later adopted the title, their loud, all-male crew lacked the same style. Missing was what Bogart called class.

As far as the major studios were concerned, Judy was a disaster to be avoided, along with typhoons and earthquakes. All the more remarkable was it, then, when a South Mapleton neighbor, Nunnally Johnson, did something even he admitted he might live to regret: he offered her the lead in his own production,
The Three Faces of Eve
. Based on an actual case in Georgia,
The Three Faces of Eve
was the story of a woman with a triple personality, and Johnson thought that Judy—“the queen of all the psychopathic cases,” as he dubbed her—would be a perfect fit. Judy thought so, as well. After reading the script and watching film clips of the real Eve as she moved in and out of her various identities, she assured Johnson that she could, as she emphatically expressed it, “kick the shit out of that part.” But the casting was perhaps too good, and the role of Eve was probably too disturbing a reminder of the divisions in her own personality—the many faces of Judy Garland. She passed up the part, passing up as well, perhaps, the Academy Award that went to Joanne Woodward, Johnson’s final choice for Eve.

Johnson was not the only one in Hollywood who believed that Judy had several loose screws. Psychoanalyzing her had long been a favorite pastime in a world crowded with people who were in analysis, who had been in analysis or who expected to be in analysis. “Schizophrenic” was the word most frequently attached to her. A psychiatrist who had actually treated her—California analysts were notoriously gabby—disputed that amateur diagnosis, however. “Schizophrenic,” he explained to a writer from the
Saturday Evening Post
, suggested a dual identity. For Judy, he said, a new term would have to be invented. “We would need a word that means a personality that’s split at least five ways,” he said. Whatever the arithmetic, there was no doubt that there were too many Judys: one beguiling, one selfish; one rational, one irrational; one proper, one improper. The list of her contradictions was almost endless, indeed: there were enough Judys to fill the stage of the Palace.

If Nunnally Johnson saw the psychopathic Judy, another South Mapleton neighbor—Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane—saw the charming one. “Wonderful in every way” was how Crane characterized her, a woman so full of fun and laughter, so different from her own mother, that Cheryl wanted to trade places with her playmate Liza. Judy’s own children saw that smiling figure as well. But they also knew
a woman Crane would not have recognized, a drugged and depressed Judy who sometimes stayed in bed for days, allowing only the maid, the cook and Harry Rubin to tiptoe silently into her room. “Shh!” the children were told. “Mama’s sleeping.”

Judy’s intake of drugs and alcohol was probably no greater than it had been when she was married to Vincente; but it was no smaller, either. In alcohol, the choice was usually between vodka and Blue Nun, a sweet and inexpensive German white wine, and she made sure that one or the other was never more than an arm’s length away. During shooting of
A Star Is Born
, for instance, her thermos contained not water, but a stiff combination of vodka and grapefruit juice. Later, for the picture’s premiere, Judy asked Michael Woulfe, her dress designer, to make her a hand muff big enough to hide a bottle of vodka, which was to be her tranquilizer during the more than three hours she was to sit in the Pantages Theater, anxiously awaiting the reaction of her friends and colleagues.

In drugs, she had a wider selection: Nembutal, Seconal, Tuinal, Demerol and Dexamyl—they sound like a recitation of kings from the Old Testament—were her daily companions on South Mapleton. Like Vincente before him, Sid tried a number of ruses to curb her appetite for those dangerous concoctions, hiring nurses to dole them out and persuading druggists to give her half-doses: they would mix the real stuff with innocuous, similar-looking substances like milk sugar, and then hope she would not detect the difference. But Judy outwitted the nurses, and she almost always knew—her body told her—when she was being cheated. In desperation, Sid sometimes even sneaked into her room when she was out, confiscating not only the pills and capsules in her medicine chest, but also those she had ingeniously hidden—taped inside drapes or under carpets, placed inside the mattress of her bed, buried in her bath powder. “You’re a gumshoe, Sid,” was her weary comment after one of his raids. “You missed your calling.”

Occasionally, as she did during her 1955 tour, she reacted with righteous anger to such draconian tactics. “Where are they? Where are they?” she was heard screaming a few minutes before the curtain was to go up in one auditorium in the Pacific Northwest. “And don’t give me that ‘show must go on’ shit!” And that night the show did not go on:
denied her pills, she denied her services, claiming she was sick and refusing to perform. Carried to an ambulance in a stretcher, she smiled bravely to her worried fans, never letting go of the glass of vodka hidden under the gray hospital blanket. “God bless,” she whispered. “God bless.”

“I think Sid is just—well, just everything,” Judy told a columnist at the beginning of 1955. “He’s a good husband. He’s a good father. He’s smart. He’s good at almost everything. He knows what’s right for me. He’s just the right man for me, that’s all.” That was quite an endorsement, but Sid did, indeed, give Judy something no other man ever had: continuous, unremitting attention. All the others with whom she had been involved—from David Rose to Tyrone Power, from Joe Mankiewicz to Vincente Minnelli—had enjoyed full and successful careers of their own. Sid did not. Judy was his career. She sang; he managed. She did not want to know about fiscal matters; he did, down to the penny. Theirs was more than a marriage; it was a business partnership—“Mr. and Mrs. Luft, Inc.,” as one newspaper characterized it.