Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me... (7 page)

 

CHAPTER NINE

Reality Checks

I was wearing chicken soup stains the day Judy called me out onstage to sing “Just in Time” with her. No, I'm not making this up. I didn't think it would ever happen, although she had threatened to do it at the last concert, and that day was now here. It was the culmination of a tour to establish her reliability that had taken us on the road for months in 1961, against the hope that Hollywood would take another chance on her. Freddie's strategy had proved successful. Alas, that afternoon I spilled soup down the front of my beautiful, almost-new, brown wool A-line dress when a lumpy electrician backed into me with a ladder in a place where I should never have been standing. This is what happens when you drink your lunch standing up.

The lovely Lanz dress, soft and warm when I'd zipped it up early that morning, was now ruined and still wet around the chest area from repeated soakings in several of the Armory's bathrooms. I hadn't brushed my hair all day, and one heel was barely hanging on to its shoe. Judy couldn't've cared less about what I looked like as I stood in the wings as usual for the encores, a towel hung over my right arm like a Victorian maitre d', and the earphones I'd used in the light booth to call the show still hanging around my neck. She did take away the liebfraumilch in my right hand and passed it off to a stagehand paging the curtain, lest I walk out holding booze the audience might think was hers. Then she grabbed my arm and pulled, and suddenly I was out onstage, framed in the spotlight, and totally terrified that I was really going to have to sing. My throat was closing with the fear of it, and I was positive no sound would come out.

*   *   *

Thousands of miles traveled had brought me to that moment. Many of them traversed over well-paved roads. Boring rides in limousines. Overheated or freezing limos. On the way to airports, from airports to hotels, from hotels to gigs, from gigs to restaurants—or wherever else we went at two in the morning—from “wherevers” back to hotels, and finally back to airports. Those rides became too tedious to endure—except for the day in which her hand began a trip from my knee, where she had placed it when the car lurched, to my crotch. As it slowly crept no more than an inch every two or three minutes, I started to panic. Her move wasn't inadvertent. Judy did nothing inadvertently. Like Alice, I grew smaller and smaller as I shrank into the upholstered corner on my side of the car. Her arm, however, grew longer and longer as it stretched across the length of the backseat.

Omigod! What am I going to do? It was, for me, a close encounter of the unwanted kind. In an instant my body turned rigid, and I stopped breathing while every possible weak-kneed simpering response like, I don't think so. Please! Not my thing. I wish you wouldn't collided in my head. I rejected them all. Breathe, Stevie. Dare I look at her? I mustered all the courage I had and turned in her direction. I hesitate to recall the pained expression I must have worn. Take another breath and say something, I commanded myself. Nothing would come out. Her hand was now fully in my crotch, and she was staring straight ahead. Then she turned and smiled. What did it mean? Why was I even thinking about that? What should I do? The idea of being intimate with Judy revolted me. I wanted to reject her. And it wasn't just because she was a woman, although a relationship with another woman did not interest me. It was because I didn't like her. That was the biggest Oh no!

In that minute I knew, as surely as I knew my name, that I no longer liked her and I could admit it to myself. I loved her talent, but I didn't like her. The pass might not have been as distasteful if it had come from someone else. Beyond that, there was that other big Oh no! She was the great Judy Garland, and I was her assistant cum roadie cum wet nurse cum all other things menial. I was scared. Will I lose my job if I take her hand away? Will I offend her? These insipid questions were exploding in my head. Breathe, Stevie.

And then suddenly it didn't matter. If I lost my job, so be it. It all happened in that moment. I took another deep breath, and then I took her hand and put it back in her lap. I looked at her and smiled. And when I did, I understood that I had the courage of my conviction. After that I would never doubt it again. She smiled back, and we both moved on. It was another step forward in my real education, but I'm grateful that I was not tested again. She kept her hands to herself after that.

Having car sex with Judy Garland was in no way the right answer to alleviating boredom, but after a while one simply had to do something. I was drowning in my own miserable small talk. “Tell me what it was like working with Gene Kelly in
The Pirate
,” and then there would be little snatches of fun when she talked about working with Mickey, Fred, and Gene. But I was not knowledgeable enough, or insider enough, to discuss the great professionals like the producer Arthur Freed and the other creative geniuses that she had worked with, like the composer Roger Edens and the choreographer Busby Berkeley.

In these countless car rides I went with her through every movie she'd ever done, patting myself on the back each time I remembered some silly casting detail, while unintentionally boring her to death. And when she was bored she was nasty. I was predictable in my style, formulaic in my conversation, and, with Judy, limited mostly to praise of her voice, her clothes, her wit, and her last performance. Thank God she never tired of praise.

*   *   *

Away from her I tried recapturing the feelings I had had for her before we met. She was, after all, the living incarnation of my childhood dream. But it became more and more difficult even to pretend I was in awe when we were together. The dream disappeared when the real Judy Garland entered the room. Clearly I had nothing in common with her, or she with me. She was sophisticated; I only thought I was. I was totally naive. Going on her concert tour was the first time I'd been out of New York. She was worldly; I was inexperienced. My husband was the first man I'd slept with.

When she was in her best of all possible worlds, Judy had a great imagination, and one day while on our way to somewhere, she told me she'd come up with a suggestion to relieve our limo despair. “I'm going to teach you the Mort Lindsey arrangement of “Just in Time” (a superb song written by the Broadway king Jule Styne for the show
Bells Are Ringing
). Judy didn't bother to ask if I could sing. If I couldn't I might then become the victim of some of her outrageous nasty humor for a couple of rides. Truth is I sang in tune and played the piano a bit.

*   *   *

Let's talk for a minute about what Judy thought was funny. She had a fine, funny, and fertile creative mind. She loved hearing a good joke; she would howl with laughter, and she was a good joke teller herself. But her best indoor sport was put-down humor, the Don Rickles variety that identified a human target and then eviscerated it with a sharp blade. It was mean humor and often dealt with one's physical attributes. For instance, Billy Barty, the wonderful elfin actor who was featured in movies and countless TV shows once the little box became so popular in the fifties, did not fare well with her. All things small in stature got “Barterized.” She loved to toss a good “bart.” Of Debbie Reynolds's husband, Harry Karl—whose manners she deplored—she quipped: “He eats two-minute eggs with his fingers.” Then there was also more subtly nasty humor.

One of my favorite Judy moments happened in an elevator at the Beverly Hilton. Judy and I stepped in on the twelfth floor. Richard Nixon and another gentleman stepped in on the tenth. Nixon looked at Judy and then turned toward the front, showing her only his back. On the fourth he turned around and said, “And you must be Judy Garland.” She smiled politely and, without missing a beat, replied, “And you're Richard Nixon.” Back to the car and “Just in Time”!

*   *   *

Mort Lindsey's arrangement was brilliant, and difficult. It contained eleven halftone key changes: one modulation every eight bars. A whole-tone key change is hard enough to sing, but a halftone is impossible—unless, of course, you're Judy Garland with a voice of liquid magic. When she performed the song onstage, it was nothing less than amazing. You could only listen in total awe of where that voice could go and admire the versatility of her enormous talent. She could take a melody anywhere, put it through the wringer, and squeeze tears out of the audience. On the other hand, when I attempted to make the halftone changes that came so effortlessly to her, I was lucky that Jule Styne was nowhere within earshot. But repetition, herein the substitute for talent, finally put me on the road to nine, ten, and, yes—at last—eleven key changes. I thought I was home free. Not so fast.

Once I had mastered the key changes in the melody, she started singing the harmony along with me. The new fun was seeing how far I could now go before I crashed. The answer: not very far. “You better get it right,” she warned, “because in the last concert I'm going to call you out onstage to sing it with me.” It was a teasing moment she was relishing, and so was I. It was always good to see her in a good mood.

“I dare you.” I told her. “Daring me is treading on very dangerous ground,” she warned. I had no doubt that was true. The Judy Garland I'd come to know was willing to try anything—twice—to avoid a rush to judgment. She made it easy to believe that trying kinky things was fun for her. There were always sly sexual intimations about relationships with women that were titillating and bore further investigation, but that was
really
treading on dangerous ground, and after the touching incident in the limo, I didn't want to go there. But the stage was not dangerous ground, it was sacred ground, and that was different. Performance was something she didn't share except with superstars. Judy was the single and complete owner of whatever concert stage she walked out onto. I could count on her not wanting to share her moment with me—not even as a joke.

“You better be prepared,” she warned. “I'm gonna do it.” Not bloody likely, I continued to think. The only nonsuperstar she ever got out on the concert stage with her was Liza, which fell into another category entirely. Occasionally she would call Liza up from the audience to spell her for five minutes. It gave Judy an opportunity to catch her breath, mop her wet head, and gulp down some water. She would sit with her legs hanging over the apron—mugging and stealing the scene—while an earnest thirteen-year-old Liza kicked up her heels to her own choreographed rendition of “Swanee,” and I, up in the booth, intoned a prayer that Li's unwashed underwear—peeking out from under her short skirt—couldn't be seen by the audience.

*   *   *

So there I was, wearing the chicken soup and standing next to her on center stage while she's prattling on about how she couldn't have done a thing on the tour without me, and I'm staring out into the audience without any grace of word or movement. I am this big soup-stained, exhausted-looking creature frozen in the glare of the spotlights, nothing delicately deerlike about me. To complete this “deer-in-the-headlights” clich
é
, the car she's driving is about to roll on over me and kill me. I see it coming, and I can do nothing to stop it. I will die there in front of thousands about to enjoy this joke at my expense. Judy turned to Mort Lindsey, her conductor, nodded, and I heard, or thought I heard, the intro for “Just in Time.” Then came the downbeat along with a poke in my ribs, and there I stood, stupidly singing.

As it turned out, I got through the first key change without falling apart and moved right on to the second. I know I was smiling—and not because my childhood tap-dance teacher, Charles Lowe, taught me always to smile at recitals—because I'd managed not to mess up the song for her—yet. I can remember that I was even starting to enjoy myself just a little. Can you be scared to death and enjoy yourself at the same time? I know the answer. Yes!

But wait a minute. What happened to the music? I'm suddenly aware that I'm standing there singing alone. No Judy. No accompaniment. And now I'm being pushed off the stage. I see the wings coming up in front of me like big, flat, black maws about to swallow me, and I hear her mimicking the vaudevillian who coined the phrase “Give the little lady a big hand.” Hey, hold on there! What did I do wrong? I got it right. That's what. I had held on and sung, made three correct key changes. The joke didn't work.

She saw I wasn't going to become an object of derision. She wouldn't be able to make fun at my expense. She didn't need a straight man, she needed a foil, and I was going to be flat-out square, dull, and boring. The usual. Of
course
she wasn't going to sing with me. Of
course
I wasn't going to sing with her. Judy never shared a stage with anyone. Until she had to. Gee, Judy, thanks for the memories!

 

CHAPTER TEN

Love—or Something Like It

Judy wanted romance around the clock. She was starving for it. The love she got from her audience was never enough. Not even close. The minute she was not in front of the footlights, she craved male attention. She could not feel attractive or beautiful without being told so by a man. When
he
was present, Judy sublimated so it could be all about
him.
He was everything as long as he adored her. Without a man, 50 percent of her was missing. And this was David Begelman's moment.

I'd watched, and listened in on phone calls in which David promised his wife and his clients that he would take care of business for them in ways that were never fulfilled. For instance, it was no more than routine for David to assure the fine comedian Shelley Berman that he would call Warner Bros. on his behalf, a call that would never happen and for which there was probably never any intent. But substitute the name of anyone else in Shelley's place, and the deal with David was always the same. He was a slime. However, going well beyond the ugly episode in Boston, David—the scoundrel, the liar, the thief—could do no wrong as far as Judy was concerned.