Get Happy (61 page)

“What’s wrong with that?” Rubin demanded.

“Well,” Judy replied, “you’ve gotta fuck once in a while, too, you know.” Rubin also became one of her lovers. “Are you feeling frisky?” she would inquire, certain of the answer. And off they would go.

Judy felt frisky with others as well, including, almost certainly, at least two or three women, the only relationships about which she remained
mum. When Rubin informed her that he had heard she was involved with another woman, her response was uncharacteristically vague. “You know,” she said, “when you’ve eaten everything in the world there is to eat, you’ve got to find new things.” Women were, in any event, never more than a side dish on Judy’s menu—men were always her main course—and although a few always followed her around from city to city, she was not drawn to lesbians. One, in fact, gave her a possibly lasting fright by trying to rip off her clothes in a restaurant lavatory—she actually succeeded in tearing Judy’s blouse—and Judy was saved from further trauma only by the belated intervention of Rubin and the restaurant manager.

Yet however many other lovers Judy had, Sid remained number one. “At least he does everything the way I want it,” she grudgingly explained to Rubin. She was speaking of sex, of course, but what most seemed to excite both Lufts was not some bedroom trick, some exotic toy or novel position; it was the sound of battle. Guided by their own
Kama Sutra
, they equated wedded love with wedded combat, the latter acting as an incitement, an aphrodisiac, to the former. After Sid returned from one of his trips, or at the end of a particularly spirited argument, lovemaking was as certain as sun after rain. “It was almost like a cycle,” said Rubin. “After the fighting stopped, they’d jump in the sack for about three days, and it was ‘honey,’ ‘baby’ and ‘dear.’ Then they got too close to each other, and it would start all over again.”

That cycle eventually included a trip to divorce court. In February 1958, for the third time in two years, Judy summoned her lawyer, Hollywood’s most renowned counselor, Jerry Giesler. Though no one, including Giesler, took her seriously on this third go-around—“Divorce Bug Again Bites Judy Garland,” said one newspaper—Judy herself seemed in earnest. Alleging, for the first time in public, that Sid had physically abused her, that he had even attempted to strangle her, she obtained an order of protection and hired private detectives to keep him away from the house. “You don’t know that sonofabitch,” Judy told Giesler. “He gets into rages that are unbelievable.” Still, no one was surprised when she changed her mind six weeks later, announcing that she was giving her marriage yet another chance.

Played too often, even the most exciting scenes become boring, and as the fifties neared their end, the Luft marriage approached its final hours as well. As in most such stories of a relationship gone bad, there was blame enough for both. For Sid, there had been few surprises. Judy’s troubles had been headline news long before he married her. The only thing he could not have known—no one on the outside could have—was how voracious her need was, how dangerous it was to come too close to that whirlpool of want and vulnerability.

Judy, however, had been surprised by Sid. If nothing else, she had expected such a famous brawler to give her security. But Sid had provided just the opposite, allowing hundreds of thousands of her dollars to slip through his hands and disappear, leaving her as destitute at the end of the decade as she had been at the beginning. What should a
woman expect from a man? That was the question Judy had asked in her
Coronet
article. He must be the leader, had been her answer. If he were not, “nothing else really matters—not money, not brains, not beauty. No, not anything.” In those sentences she had written the epitaph to her own marriage. For all of his schemes and deals, his tough talk and quick fists, Sid was a follower, not a leader—and nothing else really mattered.

Despite the bouquets of raves that were thrown her way at the end of the fifties, Judy said she sometimes felt as if she were singing in a blizzard, scarcely knowing where she was or what she was doing. And for good reason: she was sick, and getting sicker every day. The pounds she had put on after
A Star Is Born
had hidden a serious illness, a malfunction of the liver. She was not merely fat; she was bloated with the fluids her liver was no longer capable of removing. By November 18, 1959, when she finally entered Doctors Hospital in Manhattan, Judy was in pain, her eyes glazed, her limbs stiff and swollen and her memory failing—she was probably not many days away from death. “I don’t think she’ll make it” was one doctor’s gloomy prognosis.

For seven weeks Judy lay in bed, the fluids slowly being drained from her enfeebled body. She was suffering from acute hepatitis, probably caused, or at least exacerbated, by years of pill and alcohol abuse. Still very ill when she left the hospital on January 5, 1960, she was immediately ferried to Grand Central Station and a train that would speed her west, home to California. With her Judy carried some heavy baggage, her doctor’s somber warning that she might have only five years to live. Even if she survived longer than that, he cautioned, she would remain a semi-invalid, unable to sing or perform.

Judy’s initial reaction was surprising but understandable: she was relieved. “You want to know something funny?” she later confessed. “I didn’t care. I just didn’t care. All I cared about was that my children needed me. Suddenly the pressure was off.” All her life Judy had been working; now she could rest.

For several months, through the winter and spring of 1960, that is exactly what she did, slowly recuperating from her brush with death. In
at least one way she was her mother’s daughter, a small woman of mulish strength and resilience. By summer she had largely recovered and was eager to perform again. Without her voice, she was no one; a Judy Garland who could not sing was not a Judy Garland at all.

Her first formal outing came in July, when she sat between Adlai Stevenson and Senator John F. Kennedy at a fund-raising dinner for the Democratic Party, which was meeting in Los Angeles to choose its 1960 presidential candidate. An ardent Democrat—she had broken down on the set of
The Harvey Girls
when the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt was announced—Judy made no secret that Kennedy was her choice. Peter Lawford, Kennedy’s brother-in-law, had introduced them six years earlier, at the New York premiere of
A Star Is Born
, and the senator and the star had become good if oddly matched friends. “He’s magnetic. He’s tough. He’s mature,” said Judy. They remained close even after Kennedy’s inauguration, Judy frequently telephoning the White House to ask the President’s advice on how to deal with the difficult people in her life. Kennedy, for his part, sometimes called her for a private concert—a few bars of “Over the Rainbow” sung a cappella over the phone.

During her months of enforced inactivity, Judy had had time, as well as reason, to look closely, perhaps for the first time, at who she was and where she was going. That reassessment led to at least one clear conclusion: it was unhealthy for her to live in a town obsessed with boxoffice returns and television ratings. By prevailing standards, she was worse than dead; she was a has-been. “I was liked in California but nobody needed me,” she explained. “The phone never rang. In Hollywood I was somebody who
had been
a movie star.” It was, she realized, time to leave.

For everyone, there is a place to which the heart turns in times of trouble, one spot, even if it exists only in the imagination, where the sun always smiles and the clouds roll by simply for decoration. For Judy, that place was the city that had resuscitated both her confidence and her career, and it was to London that she had looked during her months of recovery. “I want to get off by myself and think about the future,” she told Sid. Thus it was that on July 11, 1960, a woman who
was afraid of airplanes and never traveled alone did both, boarding a jet plane and flying, all by herself, to the one place in the world she believed would provide her with peace and contentment.

London did not disappoint her. In the months that followed, the English embraced her as warmly as she embraced them. She enjoyed weekends at the country house of her old friend the actor Dirk Bogarde—“the only really enchanting woman in the world,” Bogarde called her—and she laughed through evenings with a still older friend, Noël Coward. Indeed, Coward was almost as delighted by Judy as he was by himself; of all the famous people he knew, she was the only one he allowed to speak without interruption. “You are probably the greatest singer of songs alive,” Coward assured her, “and I … well, I’m not so bad when I do my comedy numbers.”

Reviving with her spirits, her voice was soon restored entirely—it was better, perhaps, than ever—and on the evening of Sunday, August 28, she once again stepped onto what was, for her, sacred ground, the stage of the Palladium. Although there had been little notice, that big house was packed to the last row in the top balcony, giving her such a joyous reception that she was induced to return the following Sunday, when she received an equally enthusiastic response. Almost immediately London had worked its magic, and almost immediately Judy decided that henceforth she would make her home in the place where she felt most at home: she would move to England. She had not renounced America, she told English reporters—she still felt very American. It was, rather, that she liked life better in England. “The tempo is slower, yet it stimulates me and puts me in a
VERY
happy frame of mind.”

Sid joined her in August, and in September, after renting a spacious house in Chelsea, they sent for Liza, Lorna and Joey. That fall Judy also took her songs to the Continent. American musicals had never found favor with the French, as they had with the British, and Judy’s first concert in Paris, on October 5, aroused so little interest that, to fill all the seats in the Palais de Chaillot, Sid was forced to give away hundreds of free tickets. Just one performance was enough to ignite a fire, however. On the second night, October 7, the box office was mobbed, and the audience cheered her through eight curtain calls. “Now we know,” said one critic, “why she is called Miss Show Business in America.”