Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (16 page)

Bobby and Jack Kennedy were around sometimes, too, though not as much as the moms. I knew Jack Kennedy was the President, but I didn’t really understand what that meant. To me he was just somebody’s dad or uncle, and my mother’s friend. He had more hair than any man I’d ever seen, and I used to stare at it and marvel at how thick it was. He was great with us children, too, warm and friendly. You could run and play with him, but you couldn’t climb on him because of his bad back. I remember one time when he stole the keys to the golf cart from the Secret Service and took us all for a ride. It was so much fun, even more so because the Secret Service came running after us like the Keystone Cops.

The Secret Service was always around when he was there. The agents all seemed to look alike, as if somebody had cut them out with a cookie cutter: big men in suits and ties and dark glasses who never talked and never, ever smiled. They were always hovering around Jack Kennedy. It used to drive him crazy sometimes. That’s why he stole the golf cart. I didn’t understand who these big men were. I used to feel sorry for them because it was summer and they were always wearing suits. I’d look that them and think, “Boy, I’ll bet they’re hot.”

Eventually, summer ended, and we had to go back to school. We returned to New York and moved into an apartment in the Dakota in New York City. I was thrilled because Betty Bacall lived there with Leslie and Steven, and once again I had my best friend almost within shouting distance, two floors up. I was happy in New York when I wasn’t in school, and I loved going to the Broadway shows with my mom. One of the most memorable was
Gypsy
with Ethel Merman.

Our trip to see
Gypsy
has become part of family lore. My mom always told us a show’s plot and played the records for a few weeks before we went to see a musical, so Joey and I would know what was going on.
Gypsy
was a particular favorite of my brother’s; he
loved the music. By the time we reached the theater to watch an actual performance, Joe already knew all the words.

We sat front row center that night, with me next to Mama and Joey on her lap. As the performance progressed, Joey got more and more excited, and when Ethel Merman launched into Joe’s favorite song, he couldn’t resist joining her. Several bars into the lyric, as Ethel took a breath, Joey sang out “Rose!” right on cue. Except that Joey couldn’t pronounce his Rs yet, so what he actually sang was “Wose!” Everyone in the audience heard him, including Ethel Merman.

Mama, embarrassed, whispered, “Hush, Joey, Miss Merman’s singing.” My brother, completely oblivious to everything but the music, continued to chime in right on cue, belting out “Wose!” every few beats. I could see Ethel Merman shaking with laughter as she tried to get through the rest of the song. She knew perfectly well who the little voice in the front row was coming from. Mama and I were laughing by then, too, tears streaming down Mama’s face, but Joey remained blissfully unaware of the havoc he was causing. He just kept belting out his favorite song.

T
here would never be enough good times for us after that. By now my father was coming and going as though we had a revolving door, and getting increasingly desperate. He couldn’t get my mother away from Fields and Begelman, and he was helpless to prevent our family from breaking up. He loved my mother as much as ever, but he knew her well, and he was terrified of what would happen to us all without him there to take care of us.

The world as I knew it was about to topple off of my father’s shoulders. When it fell, it made a crash that still reverberates.

Collection of the author

Mama and me, after I was introduced at the end of her famous Carnegie Hall concert, April 23, 1961.

T
he Bay of Pigs. All Americans of my generation remember it; in 1961 our entire nation held its collective breath for weeks. As fate would have it, we were in Florida when the invasion occurred. I was eight years old, and my brother Joey had just turned six. Our whole family had gone to Key West on vacation while my parents reconciled for the umpteenth time. The vacation had started out beautifully, nothing but fun in the sun for me and Joey, and my parents getting along for a week or two. They flew up to the White House for a weekend to visit with Jack and Jackie Kennedy, while we children remained behind to swim and play.

Then the crisis broke. I’d never heard of the Bay of Pigs; all I knew was that my parents were suddenly very tense, and when I asked my mother an innocuous question one evening, she replied, “Don’t you realize there may be missiles pointed at us right now?”

I remember thinking, “In the living room?” I looked around. I didn’t see any missiles.

The “missiles” were there, of course. The ones in our home were invisible but real. My parents were on the brink of their own war, and all four of us would soon be casualties.

Our ideal family holiday came to an abrupt end when Joe broke out with the measles. He was so sick that my parents got worried and decided to charter a small plane to fly Joe up to Miami. We packed quickly and got on the plane. My father proceeded to get into an argument with the pilot. He didn’t think the pilot was flying the plane properly, so Dad insisted on taking the controls himself. He kept saying, “I’ll fly the plane.”

My mother kept saying, “Sid, stop being ridiculous. Let the pilot do it.” For once, my mother lost the argument. My dad had been a crack pilot during the war, so he took over the controls and flew us to Miami. God only knows if he had a license.

Joey recovered, and two weeks later we went back to New York. Dad moved into the Dakota with us for a while.

To no one’s surprise, I found a bump on the back of my neck right after we got back and showed it to my parents. Dad said, “Bingo! She’s got them.” The doctors in Florida had thought about inoculating me against Joe’s measles, but my parents had decided to let me get them over with. Now it was my turn to have the measles. For what seemed like forever I lay in my darkened bedroom covered with calamine lotion, itching and miserable. The disease could have damaged my eyes, so they had to keep me in the dark all the time. That was pretty much the story of my childhood.

Eventually Joey and I were both healthy again, and it was back to business as usual. For Dad that meant traveling around selling stereos and trying to patch things up with my mom. For me school was a nightmare. Our parents enrolled us in New York P.S. 6, a local public school. The difference between P.S. 6 and Lady Eden was, to say the least, dramatic. Comparatively speaking, the new school was huge, with big ugly buildings and thirty or more students per class. I entered after the school year had begun, and I was terrified. I never got past the fear and discomfort of being the new kid in school. To make things even worse, by the end of the first day, everyone knew who my mother was. The rumor spread
like wildfire that the new girl was “Dorothy’s” daughter. Every kid in the school had seen
The Wizard of Oz,
so they all stared at me and asked questions. “Is it true? Is your mom really Judy Garland? Are you really her daughter? What is she like? Can we go to your house? Can we meet her?” And so on and so on. P.S. 6 wasn’t like Los Angeles, where lots of celebrities’ children go to local schools. These children had never seen a celebrity. I didn’t have the faintest idea what to say when they asked me about my mother except, “Yes, she’s my mom.” What was she like? She was like my mom. What else could I say?

It didn’t help that I wasn’t very good at school subjects, either. I already knew I hated arithmetic, and it quickly became clear that I wasn’t very good at reading, either. They put me in a special room for the “slow” readers and gave me a book called
A Big Ball of String
to read from every day. After that I had to read a whole series of Dr. Seuss books. I hated them. To this day just the sight of those books gives me a headache. What no one understood at the time is that I’m dyslexic. To this day I panic at cold readings. If I don’t have a script at least five minutes ahead of time, I can barely get through it. I can go to a Broadway show and come out singing every song I hear, but I couldn’t read those stupid little books. It was horrible. I was bored, frustrated, and humiliated.

Joey had the worst of it, though. Bad as public school was for me, it was worse for him. He was small for his age, and my mom sent him off to first grade in short pants, long hair, and knee socks. Everyone teased him. We didn’t find out until years later, but my brother also has a learning disability that made school a struggle for him. As Joe describes it now, “Sometimes my brain just won’t work like it should. I can see the pieces of ideas, but it takes me a long time to put them together.” School was a miserable experience for both of us. We lived for the moment the bell rang at the end of the day and we could just go home. I’d run upstairs to find Leslie and try to forget about school until the next day. For Joey and me, P.S. 6. was childhood purgatory.

There was only one thing I did find interesting at that school. Until I went to P.S. 6, I’d never been around “special children,” kids who were deaf or blind or otherwise physically disabled, and I found them interesting. One of these special students was in our class for part of each day. Her name was Helen, and she was blind. Each day a different child in our class was assigned to walk Helen back and forth to her special classes. One day it was my turn. As we walked down the hall together, I said, “Can I ask you a question?”

She said, “Sure.”

“What happened to you so you can’t see anymore?” Helen explained that because she was born early, they’d put her into an incubator. If there’s too much oxygen in an incubator, she told me, the baby goes either deaf or blind.

I remember thinking, “Boy, I hope I never have to go into an incubator. I don’t want to be blind.” I never felt sorry for Helen, because she didn’t feel sorry for herself. She was a pretty girl with dark hair and white eyes from being blinded. I thought she was an interesting person. Helen is one of the few good memories I have of P.S. 6.

I wasn’t at P.S. 6 for very long. Soon we packed our bags and moved again, this time to Scarsdale, in Westchester County. Except for not being near Leslie anymore, it made little difference to me. By that time I was used to change; we were constantly changing houses, hotels, schools, staff, everything. Only the family—Mama, me, Joey, and sometimes Liza and Dad—stayed the same. As long as we had each other, everything was okay. A move to Scarsdale was nothing. Staying in the same place for a long time—that would have seemed odd by then.

We moved into a house in Scarsdale, and my mother enrolled us in yet another public school, once again a faceless place with big buildings, large classes, and lots of strangers who asked, “Is your mom really Judy Garland?” Liza enrolled in the local high school,
where she got her first lead role in her school production of
The Diary of Anne Frank.
I remember watching the Nazis and being scared, but that’s about all I remember. We all went to see Liza, even my dad, and my mom was very proud of Liza’s performance. My dad didn’t move into the house with us, but he still came around regularly.

Joey and I liked the house in Scarsdale. It was a suburban area and a little like Mapleton Drive, with lovely country all around. When my mom wasn’t touring, she cut back on her medication, so there were still good times when she was home. That fall we went trick-or-treating together through our neighborhood—Mama, me, Joey, and our nanny. My mom dressed up like the clown in
The Pirate
and went door to door with us asking for candy. I wondered if people realized who she was, or if they just thought she was another Judy Garland impersonator. We giggled and ran and had a wonderful time.

The high point of the year for my mother professionally was the concert at Carnegie Hall. Of the hundreds of concerts she gave, this was one of her most brilliant performances. Joey and Liza and I were all there, in the front row, and when she brought us up onstage to introduce us to the audience, I was brimming over with pride. When my mother was onstage at moments like that, it was magic, and we were a part of it.