Get Happy (64 page)

How much problems on the set contributed to discord at home—and vice versa—is hard to say, but by the end of March it was clear that the Lufts had failed in their attempt at reconciliation. Leaving their rented house in Bel Air, Judy moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel for a couple of weeks, then flew by herself to New York, where she hoped to relax before traveling on to England and another difficult role in
I Could Go On Singing
. Not long after she landed in New York, she collapsed, however, the strain of working almost nonstop for more than fifteen months having caught up with her at last. Admitted to Manhattan’s Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center on April 15, she spent a week recovering from what was apparently simple exhaustion.

Despite all the signs to the contrary, Sid expected to join her in Europe, where he was still hoping to peddle his stereo system to the airlines. Arriving with the children from Los Angeles, he packed everybody but Liza, who stayed with friends, into a suite in the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Judy joined them there on April 22—but on a different floor. She would take Joey and Lorna to England by herself, she declared. Sid angrily rejected the suggestion, finally refusing to let them out of his sight.

The standoff at the Stanhope ended on the evening of Saturday, April 28. Three times that day Judy had summoned the police, but nothing she could say or do was sufficient to prod them into yanking her children away from Sid. Realizing that more drastic measures were demanded, she then appealed to her New York lawyer, who, wasting no time, marched into the Stanhope’s lobby with a squad of four—two private detectives and two city policemen. At seven o’clock Judy appeared outside Sid’s suite. Assured that she was alone, the suspicious Sid let her in and quickly closed the door, which was the signal for the assembled gumshoes to tiptoe from their hiding places and take up position. Five minutes later they heard what they had been waiting for—the sound of shouts and falling furniture.

“Get in, you guys!” the lawyer ordered the two detectives. “That’s what you’re here for!”

Whether Sid opened the door or it gave way to a battering ram of beefy shoulders is in dispute—but open it did. “The bastard hit me!” Judy screamed as her rescue crew rushed in. “He slapped me!” As Sid stood by helplessly, Joey and Lorna were hustled away to one of the two limousines parked outside—Liza was in the other—and by eight-forty-five Judy and her brood were airborne, on their way to England. She had won; her children were hers. “My marriage is finished,” she said from the safety of her London hotel. “It’s over. It lasted eleven years and it would take eleven years to tell you what went wrong.”

Judy had won a battle, but the war dragged on. Claiming that she had hired “goons” to hold him down while Joey and Lorna were carried off to England, a still-seething Sid swore that they would not remain there
very long. And five days later he followed them to London, determined to take them home. But Judy again thwarted him. Persuading the London High Court to make them its temporary wards, she made certain that neither parent could take the children out of the country until legal hearings had been held, a process that would probably consume many weeks, conveniently concluding about the time she had finished
I Could Go On Singing
—and would be ready to return to America anyway. “Whatever happens and wherever I go in the world,” she declared, “my children will go with me.”

Neither the edict of the court nor the presence of round-the-clock detectives did much to alleviate her anxiety, however. In constant fear that Sid would somehow find a way to snatch her children, Judy found no haven even in London. The self-confidence engendered by a year and a half of unbroken success had shown signs of cracking on the set of A
Child Is Waiting
. Now, with a bellicose Sid pounding on her door, it crumbled into dust, taking with it the recently constructed wonder known as Judy Garland III. As she started work on
I Could Go On Singing
, the new new Garland reverted to old old habits, and what might have been a congenial set—her leading man, Dirk Bogarde, was one of her most cherished friends—turned instead into a hair-raising ride on a runaway roller coaster, “ricketing and racketing,” as Bogarde phrased it, to its disastrous end.

Bogarde had been hearing warning bells for several months, from the moment Judy had telephoned from America, begging him to join her in a movie she described as terrible, but which, since it would be shot in England, she wanted to do anyway. They had been eager to work together from their first meeting, in 1956, at a New Year’s Eve party in New York. Beel, Bogarde’s country house in Buckinghamshire, was Judy’s first destination when she went to Europe in the summer of 1960, and the lazy days she spent there, walking Bogarde’s dogs, sitting in the sun and visiting villages that dated back to the earliest Henrys, probably persuaded her that England was the utopia for which she had so long been looking. What Bogarde himself most remembered from that summer was shared laughter. Judy, he wrote, was “without doubt, I suppose, the funniest woman I have ever met. We seemed, in that July, to laugh endlessly.”

I Could Go On Singing
did not pretend to be anything other than a soap opera. Judy was to play a singer, Jenny Bowman, whose long-ago romance with an English medical student produced a baby boy. More interested in her career than motherhood, Bowman gave the boy to his father, relinquishing all claims and promising that she would never try to see the child again. Now, fourteen years later, she has had second thoughts. She goes to London to sing at the Palladium and to beg her former lover—Bogarde—to let her see their son. Just once, she pledges, will be enough. It is not, of course, and that first meeting leads to many scenes of soppy melodrama before the final one, which finds Bowman standing on the stage of the Palladium—alone again.

From such a theme, the mother longing for the love of her lost child, Hollywood had often spun box-office gold. But Judy saw nothing sparkling in the screenplay of
I Could Go On Singing
—“a load of shit,” she called it. Though the producers, two young Americans, had agreed to make changes, chiefly in Judy’s dialogue, Bogarde knew that these would not be enough to satisfy her. Keep the new version away from her, he urged them, until he had had an opportunity to talk with her and the two of them had made their own revisions. Though she was all smiles on her initial, get-acquainted visit to the studio, the Shepperton complex outside London, Bogarde knew something was bothering her. That afternoon, alone in her room, he discovered what it was. His advice had been ignored, and she had read the new script, which she found just as objectionable as the old one. “I can’t play this crap,” she hissed. “I’m not going to do this fucking script.”

In times of acute distress, some people take to their beds, closing the door and pulling up the covers. Judy, however, inevitably rushed to the only room where her mother and Louis B. Mayer’s spies had dared not intrude—the bathroom. So it was that after making that angry pronouncement, she marched into her bathroom, slammed shut the toilet lid and sat down. There, in the only place where she felt secure, she began to sob, her face pale and her body shaking. “She was in despair,” said Bogarde, who sat next to her on the edge of the bathtub. “In despair for her children, in despair because she didn’t have anywhere to
live—Sid had made her frightened of going back to America—and in despair because of a script she loathed. Everything was on top of her. She felt trapped.”

Over the course of the next hour Bogarde did his best to calm her, reading her a few pages of his own suggested script changes, alterations that reflected her own expressions and verbal idiosyncrasies. “Hey! It’s good!” she exclaimed, and, drying her tears, joined him in rewriting other scenes as well.

“We’re very funny,” he said. “We could be a team, Bogarde and Garland.”

“No, no, no, no!” She laughed. “Garland and Bogarde.”

Before she had arrived, the producers had filled Judy’s dressing room with flowers, cases of Blue Nun wine and boxes of Bendicks chocolates. Bogarde himself had given her an emerald brooch with a bluebird design—a token of the movie’s first song, “Hello, Blue Bird”—and Ronald Neame, the director, had flashed his considerable charm. “The
theory was that if we all just loved and admired her enough, everything would be okay,” said Mayo Simon, whose screenplay had drawn Judy’s ire. “It turned out that there wasn’t that much love in the world.” That was a lesson learned almost immediately. Several hours after the first day’s shooting, Judy was in a hospital, the result of an overdose of pills—another attempted suicide. Her anemic excuse, presented to Bogarde two days later, was that Neame had not been effusive enough, that he had not, for all his charm, extended the warm hand she felt she deserved. “I’m a goddamned star,” Judy told Bogarde. “I need help.”

The atmosphere surrounding the picture was thus clouded from the start, and from then on very little Neame did met with her approval. On good days Judy called him “pussy cat.” On bad days he was that “goddamned British Henry Hathaway”—Hathaway was an American director renowned for his bluster—and Judy tried to have him fired. “Who is smoking a cigar?” she would bellow, knowing full well that Neame was the culprit. “I will not have anybody smoking cigars! I had too much of that when I was young.”