Milking the Moon (51 page)

Well, sure. Someone would.

She had married this actor Mark Herron, who was in
8½.
I had met him on the set. He must have told her about my cats.

So she came, and I met her at the airport with two dozen American Beauty roses—I did it right. I would never take American Beauty roses to anybody on earth except a movie star because I don’t like those long-stem hothouse roses. They wilt after ten minutes. I would have taken flowers from my terrace for anybody else, but American movie stars have to have two dozen long-stem American Beauty roses or they’ll look sniffy. I alerted the press because she likes that attention. There were a lot of flashbulbs going and all that. I know how to handle prima donnas.

And we had this wonderful evening, just Judy and her husband and myself. Wonderful evening. We sat on my terrace and watched the sun go down and drank mint juleps because I had mint right there on the terrace, and we talked and talked and talked and then went and had dinner at a wonderful little restaurant. An offbeat restaurant where a lot of doctors and lawyers went, where everything was still cooked on a woodstove in the back. It was a famous restaurant among upper-class Italians, but not a tourist in sight. Had a little terrace on the street side. There was no traffic on that street ever—it was a side street. So we ate on the terrace, and she liked that.

About halfway through the meal she said, “Excuse me,” and got in the limousine and went back to her hotel and went to the bathroom and came back. There was a chauffeur-driven limousine parked right outside. And she couldn’t use a public rest room even in the fanciest of restaurants. The chauffeured car would drive her back to her hotel, which she had to do several times in the course of a six- or seven-hour evening. I was so struck by all that. And I noticed that under her three rows of real pearls on each wrist—adhesive tape. She must have done the Gillette act. But nobody said anything about it, you know. And I certainly didn’t look twice after I noticed it. I looked at other things.

After our dinner at the restaurant we went to the Piazza Navona, which has this famous ice-cream place. We sat there and a lot of people were nudging each other, but nobody made a fuss. There is something curious about the Romans—even if they recognize somebody, they won’t crowd them. In Naples, my God, you’d be killed in a minute from the lack of oxygen. But the Romans—after all, they’ve been seeing celebrities since long before Christ. Cleopatra did sail up the Tiber and get off, you know, in Rome. So they are used to it.

She did tell some good stories. Especially about Louis Mayer—what an old shit he was. She was only—what? fifteen, thirteen—and was under contract to MGM. They always closed down for a couple of weeks in the summer. So she was called to Louis Mayer’s office. She hated him and was afraid of him. Apparently he called her the no-neck monster, because she had a very small torso, long legs, and not a long neck. And this nice lady was there who coached her in singing and was kind of an assistant. And he said, “Well, Maybelle”—whoever the singing instructor was—“what are we going to do with the no-neck monster this summer?” And the singing teacher said, “Well, you know, Joan Crawford has gone to spend the summer in New York. Why don’t we send her to New York, and she could go to some museums and see some musicals, and we’ll ask Joan to look out for her there.” And he said, “Yeah, it’s a good idea. Call that tart and see what she’s planning for this summer.”

Joan Crawford—that tart.

So with fear and trembling, Judy went to New York. And it was just like my going to call on the Shadow with my box of paintbrushes. She had an old suitcase—this battered thing—that she had taken along with her. And she went to the doorman at the Ritz and said, “I’ve come to see Miss Crawford.” He thought it was some demented fan that had hitchhiked from Iowa or something. And he said, “The service entrance is over there.” But some bellboy or something who had been told to look out for this child traveling alone said, “Oh, that must be Miss Garland,” and they sent her up to Joan.

Judy said there was this secretary/companion that Joan had who was a very masculine lady with very short hair and a very masculine suit with a little bow tie and smoking one cigarette after another. Judy rang the doorbell, and this woman answered the door and said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, child, get in here quick before somebody sees you.” Because she was dressed in a costume she had worn for one of her films. She had a green angora sweater on and a chartreuse green skirt with applique black-and-white music notes.

The woman said, “We’re going to take you to the theater tonight, but you can’t go like that.” And she said, “Joan, we’ll have to find something for this child to wear, because when you see it, you’re not going to believe it.” Joan was back there showering, and her voice came, “You mean they didn’t fix her up?” And the woman said, “I guess they didn’t.”

There was a long corridor lined with double clothes racks. Joan would have six of the same dress in slightly different tints, starting with pale blue and ending with indigo. And as for jewelry, there was apparently a whole wall safe you could walk into. But anyway, the woman found her something very simple and got down and looped up the hem a little bit. So Judy was in this very plain dress, no jewelry, no makeup. Then Joan came in and said, “Well, they said to take care of you. We are going to the theater.”

Joan got this fur coat, big thick longhaired fur with big shoulders. This thing was from her shoulders to the floor. Longhaired fur. It was August in New York. August in New York. Judy said it was yellowish and looked rather like some kind of collie.

The tough one said, “Well, Joan, do you want to slip out the back way, or do you want to brave the fans?”

Louis Mayer always hired twenty people to go wherever Joan was in New York and shout, “Joan, Joan, Joan,” until everybody else on the streets joined them. You know: the star. The star was in New York.

And so Joan said, “Well, look, Mabel”—whatever the tough’s name was—“we’re supposed to take care of this child and teach her the game. We’ll have to teach her how to fight our way through the fans.”

So they went out the main door with two bellhops and one doorman, you know, saying, “Please let Miss Crawford through.” And all these fans had assembled because the paid extras were shouting. There were twenty that started it and fifty more that just turned up in the street. “Joan, Joan.” They were reaching and pulling out handfuls of fur. Finally, Judy was saying, you know, “Oh, don’t ruin Miss Crawford’s lovely coat. Please don’t do that.” She even took one woman’s hand away. And Joan turned around and said, “Get your fucking hands off my fans.” They got in the car, and Joan immediately got out of that coat and into this elegant silk coat that was in the car for
her to wear to the theater. And the toughie would lightly sew more tufts of fur in for the fans to rip out the next time.

Oh, I just loved it. “Get your fucking hands off my fans.” I died laughing. So they went off to the theater, and that was Judy’s introduction to New York.

*

My big party for Judy was the next night. I gave some great parties in Rome, and one of the best was for Judy Garland. That was a gang bang; I don’t usually give parties as big as that. I had groaning boards of food. And a little bar with a bartender. I had this Hindu couple—they were a famous dance team, and in my entrance hall they had arranged an exhibit of their dance costumes and jewelry and masks which was very amusing to come in to. Then on the terrace, which was about half a block long, I had all kinds of torches and hundreds of little tables amidst the trees and flowers. Fellini was there, and the composer Hans Werner Henze, and the Baron Saint-Just, the painter, and Leontyne Price. I just threw them together, a lot of people who hadn’t met each other. Bringing dreamy-eyed youngsters to beam at celebrities. Bringing bored celebrities to fight with each other. It was a great party.

But Judy wasn’t there. And nobody noticed that Judy wasn’t there.

She had lost her nerve about attending the party for some reason and, in the afternoon, flown back to London. Leaving her husband and her trained nurse, this lady-in-waiting whose name was so happily Mrs. Snow, to attend the party. I think she couldn’t face meeting Fellini and Leontyne and all that and just fled. Couldn’t face the big party. The little girl couldn’t face the grown-up party. She could belt it out onstage, but she was really very shy. She could play with an audience in a way she could never play with people at a cocktail party. She had that wide orchestra pit between them and her. I had the feeling that she was basically a sad person. Judy, you see, had been in a vaudeville act with her mother and sisters when she was a child. Her real name was Frances Gumm, and the Gumm Sisters was their act in vaudeville. She was always a little shy because her mother and sister were the flashy ones, apparently. And she’d never had a childhood. You know: “Get up, hon, we’ve got to catch the train, we play Kalamazoo this evening.” Vaudeville. And just never, never a doll, never a puppy, never digging in the mud. Just on trains singing those songs with Mom and her sisters. There was just something sad about her.

She called me in the middle of the party and kept me on the phone for an hour to apologize and give me all the reasons why she had to leave. She said
she wasn’t very good at facing crowds, and besides that, she really had to get back and rehearse these new songs for a record. And she went on and on apologizing when I should have been circulating, seeing that everybody had something to eat and something to drink, you know, doing my headwaiter bit.

Oh, well, everybody remembers the party, and not many people noticed that she wasn’t there. With Fellini and Leontyne Price, who’s going to notice that Judy’s not there? They’ll think either she hasn’t come yet or she left early, or they’ll assume they’d fall over her sooner or later. But that one evening we had together was so marvelous that I accepted it, you know. And it was a great party.

A Never-Ending Traffic Jam

Well, it began to look as though the Communists would
take over Italy. There were some provincial Communists who were Communist only because they had for centuries been peasants on farms, and they were the first generation in their families to be educated. Their fathers were the butter, eggs, and cheese people who smuggled all that into Rome during the war and made a fortune. There have always been the intellectual Communists who wanted to change the status quo. “Let’s have a complete change and clear the air.” But the intellectual Communists are different from the grudge Communists in every country. A lot of the ones who were coming up from the provinces were rather unpleasant. They were grudge Communists. There were bombings and street demonstrations constantly. Terrorists, poor darlings—all they can think of is a big noise and breaking something. Poets have words they can bombard with.

Finally, I did get tired of soldiers and police on my roof right above my bedroom running around every night. And gunfire. And I got so tired of street fights and traffic jams. I hate traffic jams, and Rome had become a never-ending traffic jam. The air was so thick with car fumes, and nobody smiled like they used to. The postal service didn’t work, the telephones didn’t work, and the banks were closed more often than they were open. Rome had just gotten impossible. I lived literally next door to the political party in power, the Christian Democrats, and there was a demonstration or street fight every day. One day when I was walking back to my apartment from the mushroom shop across the street, a policeman raised his billy club to conk out some demonstration going on, and knocked out my two front teeth. This was right in front of where I lived. I thought, I’ll bet it’s so peaceful in Mobile. I decided to start packing.

I had two beloved cats at the time, and of course, they had to come with me. I talked to the head of the Italian division of American Airlines about the best way to do this. He said, “Oh, yes, of course you can take your cats on the plane.” So I reserved three places because I did not want the cats away from me in this great upheaval in their lives and mine. But then, a couple of days before I was going to get on the plane, I learned that if any passenger within three seats in any direction objected to my having cats, they would have to go in luggage. Now, some luggage compartments are pressurized; most are not. I wasn’t about to even think of the possibility. One of the darlings was my beloved Rufo, the son of Miss Calico, who always let me know when she was going to have kittens. On one last litter, she put out a paw and said, “Don’t go. Don’t go.” She was a very old lady, she’d gone through many litters, and I guess her muscles were not as flexible as they had been when she was young. I heard this kitten speaking inside of her. “Meow, meow.” When he came out he must have heard me talking to her, because he came right toward me, this little thing. Dragging. I picked it up carefully and put it back with her. Well, she was busy with the next one, so this little thing turned around and came back to me. So obviously it was my cat. He had been with me many years in Rome, and I was not about to be separated from him on the trip to America.

So I hastily got in touch with a Mobile shipping line that’s been doing freighters for thousands of years. Then I had this telephone call from Milano. The man said, “You don’t know me, but I’ve just had a long-distance call from our head office in New Orleans. On whichever freighter we can arrange, you are to be given a cabin for two for the price of one plus five dollars for your cats. So you can have them with you in your cabin.” He didn’t even mention the possibility of putting them in the hold. They were going to be in this stateroom. Deck level. That’s why I took a freighter, so they could be in the cabin with me, not in the hold, not somewhere else. With me.