Get Happy (73 page)

A
cool cat,” John Springer, one of the owners of Arthur, called Mickey Deans, who was thirty-four and darkly good-looking, with blue eyes and a voice so deep that it seemed to echo from the depths of a cave. And cool Deans was, which meant that there was apparently no problem he could not effortlessly solve—or find someone who could. A broken television set? A stalled car? A dispute with a landlord? Deans could help. A frantic telephone call in the middle of the night, saying that Judy Garland needed pep pills so she could board a plane for California? Deans could help with that, too. Such a phone call from a friend had introduced them, in fact: Deans had rushed to her hotel suite with a bagful of amphetamines.

Deans, in short, was a Mr. Fixit. Whether it was seeing to the comforts of the VIPs who crowded the dance floor of Arthur, or turning away the gate-crashers who hoped to join them, Deans was the man in charge. And he knew it. Not merely confident, he was cocksure. “If I was dead broke,” he liked to say, “I’d go out and set up a fucking hot dog stand on the corner, and within six
months I’d have turned it into a fucking chain.” Given to blunt talk peppered with profanity—his mother complained that he sounded like a hoodlum—Deans bore more than a passing resemblance to Sid Luft.

Though he had been seeing Judy for many months, their friendship turned serious only when she told him that she was about to leave for England. “I’m going to miss you,” Deans replied, then impulsively added: “Why don’t we get married?” He did not have to ask twice. Forgetting the ailing John Meyer, Judy had immediately announced the joyful news to one of the columnists who frequented Arthur, and less than two weeks later, on the evening of Friday, December 27, the excited lovers left for London, where they planned to become husband and wife.

With a new man on whom to lean, Judy was all confidence, and her opening at the Talk of the Town provided yet another English triumph, a night that was, in the words of one reviewer, “part happening, part experience, and all nostalgia.” As her run continued into the new year—1969—she started showing up later and later, however, and eventually even her loyal English fans grew restive. Although Robert Nesbitt, the club’s producer, pushed the curtain back from eleven to eleven-thirty to accommodate her, she still could not arrive on time. Finally, in late January, she met open hostility, a mini-Melbourne. As she began her first song at twelve-twenty
A.M.
, fifty minutes late, a few rowdies made obscene gestures and pelted her with breadsticks and cigarette packages. “If you can’t turn up on time, why turn up at all?” one well-lubricated young tough demanded, then, before anyone could stop him, grabbed her microphone and shook her by the shoulder. “That’s it,” said Judy. “I have had enough.” And she walked off, not to return for several days.

Despite a snag in their wedding plans—the papers certifying Judy’s divorce from Mark had been held up in California—Judy and her Mickey decided to solemnize their love anyway. A little after three o’clock on the morning of January 9, they stood before the altar of St. Marylebone parish church, the Georgian building in which, more than a hundred
years earlier, two other lovers, the poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, had also been united. “What about a witness?” Judy asked. “God is our witness,” responded the young Anglican priest, Peter Delaney, who performed a full religious ceremony. Two months later, on March 15, Judy and Mickey made their union legal, repeating their vows in the Chelsea Register Office, then holding a reception at Quaglino’s, a big, fancy restaurant in the West End.

The choice of such a large, formal room was a mistake, however, only serving to emphasize how many of Judy’s friends now did their best to avoid her. Of all the famous names invited, not one walked through Quaglino’s door. The American singer Johnnie Ray, who had been famous in the fifties, did attend, but his presence was partly a matter of business: he and Judy were scheduled to tour Scandinavia the following week. “I can’t understand it,” said a disappointed Judy. “They all said they’d come.” Champagne bubbled in rows of untouched glasses, the band played to an empty dance floor and the soaring wedding cake remained largely uneaten.

After that dismal celebration—“the saddest and most pathetic party I have ever attended,” asserted one London columnist—the happy couple flew to Paris for a brief honeymoon, then journeyed on again to Stockholm, the first stop on the Scandinavian tour. Although an overdose of sleeping pills caused Judy to cancel the engagement in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city, the other three concerts—in Stockholm, Malmö and Copenhagen—were unqualified successes. When she finished in Stockholm, she was applauded for twelve full minutes. “Of course she was fabulous,” said one paper, as if any other outcome had been inconceivable.

Not that all the Viking enthusiasm helped much with her finances. “She was almost broke through mismanagement, but I intend to change all that,” Mickey told a reporter, and he briskly worked to put together some moneymaking ventures. One was a documentary,
A Day in the Life of Judy Garland
. A second, which he was discussing with American promoters, was a chain of Judy Garland movie theaters, five hundred in all, across the United States. To reap her share of the profits—“a million dollars over the next year without singing a note,”
boasted Mickey—all Judy had to do was show her face a few times. Cool cat though he was, Mickey was no businessman, however, and his grandiose schemes, which were, like Sid’s, one part logic to three parts wishful thinking, died aborning.

“I don’t know if London still needs me,” Judy said, “but I certainly need it! It’s good and kind to me. I feel at home here. The people understand me, and I’m not aware of the cruelty I’ve so often felt in the States. I’ve reached a point in my life where the most precious thing is compassion—and I get this here.” In late winter she and Mickey settled in, renting a mews cottage on a quiet cul-de-sac in Chelsea. It was Judy’s first permanent address since Rockingham Avenue, and it was there, at
4 Cadogan Lane, that Mr. and Mrs. Deans—or Gladys and George, as they liked to call themselves—set up housekeeping.

After their return from Scandinavia, they left that quiet cottage only to visit the even more tranquil house that Judy’s publicists, Matthew West and Brian Southcombe, shared in West Sussex, an hour and a half from London. Built in the sixteenth century as the local lord’s lookout against deer poachers, the Deer Tower—for that was its name—stood high atop a hill, and from her lofty bedroom Judy gazed out on a landscape of singularly English splendor. Below her window was a riot of color, a country garden abloom with daffodils, wisteria, rhododendrons and all the other flowers and flowering shrubs that proclaimed the arrival of spring. A little farther away, at the bottom of the hill, a squadron of swans glided across a lake, on the other side of which lay a Gothic ruin and an endless sweep of farms and fields. This was the vista, little changed from the days of Shakespeare, Spenser and Marlowe, that Judy looked on and loved, staying in her room for hours on end to read and relax.

Judy also loved the idea of being a wife again—that most proper title, in her view. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning had written. But Judy could count only one way in which she expected to be loved. She wanted security, a man who would guard and protect her; and Mickey, the man who could fix anything, fitted the bill. “Mickey takes care of everything,” she bragged, “of everything and of me.” And Mickey was pleased to do it. “Judy was in love with love,” said Mickey’s friend Robert Jorgen, “and Mickey was in love with the idea of taking care of her.” The salvation of Judy Garland had become Mickey’s mission, too.

Yet no one could be with Judy every minute of every day, and Mickey, like his predecessors, searched for convenient excuses to go off on his own. Sometimes the dutiful Matthew West would sit with Judy in a restaurant, waiting for a husband who never appeared. Other times, West would take her to the Deer Tower, where they expected to be joined by Mickey, then receive a telephone call from him, saying that a business dinner in London would prevent him from coming. “Mickey was a bit of a scalawag, a party animal,” said West. “I think he probably wanted to get away from her, to be free, just for a few hours, of her constant demand for attention.”

His absences did not go unnoticed by Judy. By the end of May, when they visited New York, their relationship was showing such strain that she telephoned Tucker Fleming and Charles Williamson to ask for refuge in Los Angeles. “I’ve got to get away from Mickey,” she said. After their polite rejection, Judy turned to John Carlyle, to whom she had proposed marriage the year before. But Carlyle, too, fended her off. “Look, Madame Gumm,” he said, “you’re a married lady now.” Thus it was that Judy spent her forty-seventh birthday, June 10, in bed, with Mickey nowhere in sight and with only two callers, Charles Cochran, in whose East Side apartment she was staying, and one of Cochran’s friends.

Her sentiments changed from day to day, however, and after an evening with Mickey’s parents in nearby New Jersey—they lived in a modest red bungalow in the town of Garfield—Judy was all smiles again, touched by his mother’s concern for her health and welfare. “If you’d only come out here for a few weeks, I’d make you well,” asserted Mary DeVinko, alarmed by her daughter-in-law’s frail appearance. Thrilled to have become part of her new husband’s family, Judy exclaimed that Mickey’s parents were really her parents, too. “If anything happened to Mickey, I could probably go to New Jersey and live with them forever!”