Get Happy (67 page)

The pattern of deceptions and thefts Steinberg disclosed was almost identical to the one Columbia Pictures discovered nearly fifteen years later. Too late to help Judy, the Columbia auditors revealed Begelman for what he really was: a forger, an embezzler and a liar of heroic dimensions. Ashamed of his lack of education, Begelman had, for instance, compensated in his usual way, inflating a brief military training course in New Haven into a Yale degree. After his friends had digested that fabrication, Begelman then gave himself an additional degree from the Yale Law School.

To Sid’s bitter disappointment, Judy chose to ignore the evidence, however. Taping of her series had begun only three days before she saw Steinberg’s report, and she wanted nothing to disrupt its smooth progress. “Look,” she told Sid, “suppose he did steal $200,000 to $300,000: sweep it under the rug now. I’m going to make $20 million on these television shows. What is $300,000?” To that cynical response there was no adequate answer, and on July 1, three weeks after their housewarming party, an angry Sid left Rockingham Avenue to cool down. When he returned a few days later, he found that his clothes had been put into storage.

Another attempt at reconciliation had failed. There were to be no more. After two and a half years of saying good-bye, Judy finally meant it. Liar and thief though he was, Begelman had won the day.

Thanks largely to Judy’s initial backing, Begelman and Fields had gained other prestigious clients, and now they were focusing their attention on the less troublesome newcomers. In the chaotic months that
followed the firing of George Schlatter, they were, in fact, often unavailable. She could get the President of the United States on the phone more easily than she could her agents, Judy complained. With no one standing between her and an increasingly hostile network, she was in the place she most feared: all by herself, with no one to defend her. On that painful night in March 1964 when she taped her last show—when she most needed their support—her agents were on the other side of the continent for the gala Broadway opening of
Funny Girl
, starring their newest and most promising client, Barbra Streisand.

Fields was callous—ungrateful, without question. But what can be said of Begelman, who had made love to Judy only so he could rob her? Who had vowed his support, then dumped her? Evil wears many faces, but it is perhaps most sinister when it is seductive, when it smiles and beguiles and flatters, professing love and admiration and sovereign kisses. Milton must, indeed, have had someone much like Begelman in mind when he described one of the fallen angels, the smooth and splendid Belial in
Paradise Lost
. “A fairer person lost not Heav’n,” said the poet; “he seemed / For dignity compos’d and high exploit.” But beneath Belial’s sleek exterior, “all was false and hollow.” False had been Begelman’s promises to Judy. Hollow had been his pledges of rewards and riches.

Men must lead, women must follow, Judy had said, but where had Begelman and Fields led her? After all her hard work, concerts, movies and TV shows, she was worse off in 1964 than she had been in 1961. Three weeks after the broadcast of her final show, the sheriff was once again knocking at her door, demanding payment on debts of nearly $70,000, probably a fraction of what Begelman had stolen. But he had robbed her of more than money. He had stolen her hope of financial security, her very future.

I
need to be needed,” Judy confessed to one of her lovers. “I need to be wanted.” That meant, of course, what it had meant since she was a teenager, competing for men with Lana Turner. For Judy, sex had an extra dimension: to give pleasure to a man was validation of her worth as a woman, as a human being even; it was the proof she required, ever and always, that she was something more than Mr. Mayer’s little hunchback. That need to be needed was what had made her so vulnerable to a predator like David Begelman. It was that need that sometimes caused her humiliation. One ugly-minded lover bragged that after she gave him oral sex, for example, he made her sing “Over the Rainbow” so he could hear those famous words sung through a mouthful of his semen.

In any event, the ranks of her lovers grew considerably in the sixties. One was Bobby Cole, a piano player she heard in New York and took west to work on her television show. A second was John Carlyle, an attractive and witty actor who had fallen in love with her when he worked as an usher at her first Palace show. A third was André Phillipe, a French actor and singer who performed
duets with her in her CBS dressing room. “A marriage of sounds” was how Phillipe characterized their relationship. Even more melodious music connected her to Glenn Ford, one of Hollywood’s most durable leading men. On a photograph of herself that she gave him, Judy wrote: “You have my heart and I adore you.”

At the very beginning of 1964—at a New Year’s Eve party given by Ray Aghayan, the costume designer for her TV show—Judy met a man who, unlike Ford or any of the others, was prepared to give her what she most needed: unflagging attention. His name was Mark Herron, and he appeared to be everything any woman could ask for. Tall, slim and good-looking, he had inquisitive brown eyes and dark brown hair and was, in the eyes of one reporter, as “handsome as a soda-pop ad.” His virtues did not end there, however. Herron was also well-mannered, intelligent and amusing, qualities that during his drama school days had invariably landed him the leads in sophisticated drawing-room comedies. Originally from Tennessee—not far from where Frank Gumm had grown up, in fact—Herron, like Frank, retained a slight Southern accent, just a hint of old magnolia. His single obvious drawback, one that the newspapers never failed to note, was his age: he was only thirty-three, seven years Judy’s junior and therefore, as innuendo would have it, a hanger-on, a user, a gigolo.

A decade earlier, when he was the star of Los Angeles City College’s drama department, Herron—Truman was his first name in those days—had seemed destined for acting glory. “Best Actor of the Year,” the department had named him in 1952, and even before he received his degree, Herron had won minor parts in two films. After graduation came a signal honor, an invitation to join the select group that studied with one of the world’s finest actors, Charles Laughton. A still-greater prize came Herron’s way in the summer of 1956, when Laughton took him east for his Broadway revival of George Bernard Shaw’s
Major Barbara
. Herron was apparently not ready for such a high-powered production, however—he was to play Barbara’s stuffy brother Stephen—and less than three weeks before the Boston tryout, he was fired. He was never able, so it seems in retrospect, to regain his momentum. Eventually moving to Italy, he dubbed Italian films into English and played a small role in Federico Fellini’s
8½
.

That was as close as Herron was to come to the fulfillment of his early dreams. Always promising, he was, like so many others in his perilous profession, always disappointed, and the night he met Judy, he was still searching for a role that would ignite his moribund career. Judy soon asked him to move into her house on Rockingham Avenue, then invited him to join her on the concert tour that was scheduled to begin—so pressing was her need for cash—a few weeks after her final show. But this time she was not going to Las Vegas, New York or even London. She was traveling to the other side of the world, to the very antipodes—Australia.

Judy, said Harry M. Miller, the thirty-year-old impresario who had invited her, was “the one person Australia had never seen and would love to see,” and events soon proved him right. All three of her concerts, two in Sydney and one in Melbourne, quickly sold out, and she arrived to a press reception that eclipsed that given the Queen of England the previous year. “A Knockout,” the
Sydney Morning Herald
called her first show, in the tin-roofed Sydney Stadium on May 13. Her second show, three nights later, received an even more enthusiastic response, as if all those, ten thousand strong, who had missed the first, had been jealously hoarding their cheers. “I’ll keep singing until the roof falls in,” Judy declared, and, taking her at her word, they refused to let her go. “More, more,” they shouted. Those, however, were the last cheers she was to hear in that vast country, and in Melbourne, Australia’s second city, she was to discover just how fast an audience’s love can turn to hate.

Disaster is usually woven from several threads, unrelated yet combining to form a pattern of chaos and calamity. So it was with Judy’s misadventure in Melbourne. Priding themselves on their egalitarianism, Australians allowed no one, including Judy, special treatment. Though she had never had a problem passing through customs in any other country, in Australia she did, the inspectors at the Sydney airport going through her bags and confiscating the small pharmacy they contained—the uppers and downers she needed simply to live, let alone perform. A panicked call to a Sydney doctor, a Chinese abortionist, brought a fresh supply, but the unfamiliar dosages almost guaranteed an overdose.

Adding to her tension was the abrasive, frequently hostile tone of much of the Aussie press, which was deeply suspicious of all foreign entertainers, convinced that anyone who would travel so far was either greedy for money or unemployable everywhere else. Nor did Judy sweeten the mood by arriving late for her one press conference. One reporter, Charles Higham, likened the event to a rugby match, with the forty or so reporters, who had had too long to drink too much, jostling roughly around her. “Look this way, Judy!” commanded the photographers. “C’mon, give!” As often as she tried to pull Mark into the pictures—“He will be a great star on Broadway,” she said—just as often was he pushed aside, until his once bright smile melted into a look of helpless misery. “Oh, my God, this is so awful!” Judy whispered to Higham. “Is it always like this here?”

It seemed it was, and even Miller could not resist a sharp jab. Exasperated by her refusal to return to the stage for encores at the end of her first concert—“she was exhausted, like a piece of paper, with no energy at all,” explained Higham—Miller proved that a bark can be worse than a bite. “Listen, they’re going crazy,” he told her. “Only a jerk singer like you could produce such a response.” Unable to believe what she had heard, Judy asked him to repeat himself. Miller did, and was rewarded with such a mighty face slap that, as he ruefully admitted, his ears were set ringing.