Get Happy (70 page)

The most convenient target of her anger was Mark. Judy was willing to push his career, it became evident, only as long as it was an appendage of her own. If Mark attempted to do anything by himself, even something as modest as appearing in a local production of Noël Coward’s
Private Lives
, she did her best to sabotage him, if only by interrupting him when he tried to memorize the script. Too timid to object, Mark finally went elsewhere to learn his lines, discovering, on his return, that Judy had registered her disapproval of his absence by tossing his clothes into the swimming pool. Fished out by Lionel, who laid them on the lawn to dry, they shrank to a size only a child could wear, the tweed overcoat Judy had bought him in London being nibbled down to a fuzzy jacket.

When all her other stratagems failed to gain her the attention she craved, Judy injured herself, then accused Mark of attacking her. Responding to a frantic late-night phone call, one chivalrous friend
rushed to Rockingham Avenue to find her face all bloody—Mark’s work, she said. Only later did Alma and Lionel show the friend the stucco wall, still bearing traces of dried blood, against which Judy had rubbed her cheek until it was raw. On another occasion Alma actually caught her nicking her face with a razor. “Do you see what Mark Herron did to me?” Judy indignantly demanded, not at all embarrassed or nonplussed.

Against such madness, Mark had little defense. “It hadn’t been too bad to fight with Sid Luft,” said Judy, somewhat wistfully. “He could fight back.” Mark could not, and his answer, finally, was to keep his distance. His absences from Rockingham Avenue became more and more frequent, and in April 1966, five months after their wedding, he and Judy separated. Mark went back to Henry Brandon, with whom he was to live until Brandon’s death, twenty-four years later. Judy turned to a new lover, a young publicist just a few years out of Dartmouth, by the name of Tom Green. About all she could say of her fourth husband was that she could never find him. “I used to hear from him once in a while. I think he called from a phone booth on casters.”

Joey and Lorna, who turned eleven and fourteen in 1966, could not make a similar escape. They were the real victims of Judy’s worsening condition, and for them the house on Rockingham Avenue was a battlefield from which there was no exit, a place in which tension was constant and scenes of violence and destruction were common. Almost any bad news, any slight or disappointment, might send their mother on a rampage, causing her to smash dishes, vases and anything else that was handy.

Destroying bric-a-brac is childish, but harmful only to the bric-a-brac. Setting fires is insane, a danger to life as well as property. But at least twice Judy did exactly that. She set the first one during a vacation with Mark in Hawaii, when she lit a match in his closet, then quietly sat in the sun until the firemen showed up. When Steve McQueen, who was staying next door, arrived first, Judy tartly suggested he mind his own business. “Don’t be a hero, Steve,” she said. “This isn’t the movies. Just sit down and wait for the fire department like everyone else.” The
cottage survived, but Mark’s clothes were destroyed, and so, to her chagrin, were Judy’s, ruined by smoke.

Her second arson, a year and a half later, lacked those small comic touches. Anger at Tom Green was the spark, and Judy’s own bedroom was the target. “Miss Garland’s room is on fire!” screamed Alma when she saw smoke coming from under the locked door. Unable to break through, Lionel and Esteban Matison, a young visitor from Mexico, ran outside and smashed open a rarely used door to her dressing room. By then nothing in the room, including Judy, could be seen through the smoke; Matison found her, unconscious in a closet, only by crawling on the floor. Too exhausted by then to carry her, he could only haul her out by her hair. Her bedroom was gutted, but the rest of the house was unscathed.

The staff was burned by a different kind of fire. When one of the maids announced she was quitting, Judy reacted as if she had been assaulted. Picking up the nearest weapon, a turkey leg on her plate, she threw it at her, then, as the maid was driving away a few minutes later, hurled a rock at her car, cracking the windshield. The children’s nanny, Mrs. Chapman, was subjected to even rougher treatment. Calling her “a Texas bitch,” Judy kicked her in the leg while she was ironing clothes, then hastily retreated when Mrs. Chapman brandished the hot iron. Judy had not surrendered, however, and resumed her attack as Mrs. Chapman was leaving, this time flinging a butcher knife at the departing car.

Is it any wonder that Joey and Lorna, the mute witnesses to such scenes, were afraid of their mother? Is it any surprise that when they came home from school, they listened for sounds of trouble before going inside? Or that when they went to bed, they shivered, afraid of what the night would bring? Sharing a room near the kitchen, far away from Judy’s own room, they never knew when she would wake them, sometimes hysterical, sometimes hallucinating. On those nights, her children could hear her coming, like an approaching thunderstorm, and they pulled the covers over their heads, praying that she would turn around. “It will stop,” was Lorna’s mantra. “It will stop.”

Children react to stresses in mysterious and unpredictable ways, and, close as they were, Joey and Lorna responded differently to their
never-ending anxiety. A pretty girl with blue eyes and honey-brown hair, Lorna took after her mother only in voice. “Daddy, I’ve got Mama right here,” she told Sid, tapping her esophagus. “Right here in the throat.” In every other respect, however, she resembled her father, and she reacted as he had done at the same age, with tough talk and sullen stares. If she did not despise her mother as Sid had despised his father, Lorna regarded her with decidedly mixed feelings. Judy went east to spend the Christmas of 1966 with Tom Green and his family—the children were to go to their father’s for the holidays—and Lorna all but exploded with fury when she did not receive a final good-bye. “That bitch!” she exclaimed.

His mother’s darling, the one she was always holding and cuddling, Joey suffered perhaps even more. “Biblical looking” was how Judy described him—a reference to his dark hair and almond-shaped eyes—and like the young David, whose soft harp soothed the melancholy of King Saul, so did the mere presence of Joey bring Judy a measure of peace. At night she would pull him into her bed for comfort and company, even if that meant waking him, tired and protesting. He was the one she worried about. “Take care of my Joey,” she would say when she went away.

What armor is strong enough to protect against a love both so extravagant and so irrational? There is none, and Joey’s defense was to put up no defense at all. He was unnaturally innocent, incapable of guile, and, in contrast to Lorna, always presented a sunny face to the world. The tragedy for him, and for Judy too, was that fear prevailed over love—he seemed happiest when she was away.

No matter how often she went on the road, however, no matter how hard she worked, Judy remained mired in debt. “Judy Garland Is Broke,” proclaimed the front page of one tabloid, which went on to say, all too accurately, that she owed money, and lots of it, to virtually everyone, from the Internal Revenue Service, the main claimant, to Sid, who, incredibly enough, was in line for $150,000 in fees for past managerial services.

It was at such a moment, the fall of 1965, that Tom Green, a conventional young man from Lowell, Massachusetts, stepped into the maelstrom.
The product of Catholic schools and Dartmouth, where he had been president of his fraternity and a member of nearly everything else, Green was good-looking and personable, well suited for his chosen field, public relations. Hired by Guy McElwaine & Associates, Judy’s prestigious Hollywood agency, in the summer of 1965, he appeared, at twenty-six, to be a golden boy with a golden future. Flattered when McElwaine assigned him to handle Judy’s publicity, he soon wondered why he, the newest and least experienced member of the staff, was given such an important client. Once asked, the question answered itself. Judy was no longer deemed worthy of the attention of more senior associates.

Nor, Green learned, was that an unusual response. “Everybody was dropping her flat because she was broke,” he said. “Nobody would help. She couldn’t get anybody on the phone. Everybody was, like, never home.” The few friends who did answer were polite but refused to give her what she most needed: money. One, the daughter of a Metro mogul, raised her hopes by actually coming to the house; but what Miss Moneybags offered, Judy did not want. “She’s just like all the other dykes that wanted me to go to bed with them,” Judy bitterly complained.

The most telling rejection, however, the truest indication of how far she had fallen, came from a man, little known in Hollywood or anywhere else, named Wayne Martin. “Judy’s No. 1 Fan” was the title he gave himself, and he had been avidly following her career, collecting photos, clippings, records and other memorabilia, since 1937. “Judy-land,” Martin called his living room, so crowded was it with Garland paraphernalia, much of which Judy herself had given him. But when a terrified Judy sought his aid in confirming a report that other fans were planning to kill her—to put her out of her misery, it was said—Martin shied away. His Garland collection, he explained, was like a sundial—“it only records the hours that shine”—and Judy’s shining hours were behind her. He did not want to get involved, Martin informed Green: he preferred to remember Judy as she had been, not as she was.

As he observed that phalanx of suddenly frosty faces, Green was filled with indignation, quitting his job because he felt that even his own firm was mistreating her. Mark Herron had wanted Judy to help
his career. Tom Green, that Lancelot from Lowell, sacrificed his career to help hers. “I told her I would do my best to get her life in order,” he said. “I was genuinely stupid enough to think I could help.” In the grip of the strongest of all human emotions—the desire to salvage another soul—Green embarked on a holy mission: the reclamation of Judy Garland.

Where the heart led, the body followed, and in the spring of 1966 Judy and Green became lovers. At the beginning, at least, theirs was a passionate affair, and in that decade of free and uninhibited love, they seemed to make love everywhere, Judy even disappearing under the tablecloth at a Santa Monica restaurant to perform oral sex while Green was picking at his appetizer. Forgetting the second course, they jumped into his snappy new Pontiac convertible and raced back to Rockingham Avenue. “I have the unfortunate habit of not being able to have an affair with a man without being in love with him,” Judy had once said, and, true to her habit, she was soon talking marriage. “If the captain of a ship can marry you,” she asked in December 1966, as they were speeding east on the Super Chief, “why can’t the engineer of a train?” Green could not think of a reason, and the engineer was pleased to preside over a mock wedding in the dining car.

Arriving in Lowell, an industrial city twenty miles north of Boston, they acted, at any rate, as if they really were married. “You know, I get so tired of being Judy Garland,” Judy told Green’s conservative, Catholic family. “What I am is a very proper lady, and I’d just like to have that recognized.” Worried that, as a Protestant with a bad reputation, she might not be welcome at Christmas Eve mass, she called the head of the archdiocese, Cardinal Cushing himself, to ask if she could attend. “Of course,” said the cardinal. “God loves everybody.” Thus assured, Judy accompanied the Greens to midnight mass, then, as they were leaving, joined Green in making angels in the snow, just as she had done when she was a little girl in Minnesota. “She was,” said Green, “delighting in being normal.”