Get Happy (60 page)

By the middle of the decade, however, Luft, Inc., that highflier of the early fifties, had lost altitude and appeared headed for a crash. The problem was not the usual one, a lack of income. Judy’s performances brought in a cascade of dollars, well over $600,000 in 1956 alone, according to Sid—and that was probably a conservative estimate. Whatever the exact amount, it was a staggering figure in the Eisenhower era, when the Lufts had to pay only $120,000 for 144 South Mapleton, an expensive house in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in one of the most expensive cities in the United States.

Yet however many dollars poured in, however many records Judy smashed at the Palace, in Las Vegas or London, they were never enough. Always teetering on the brink of ruin, the Lufts lacked even the funds to finish furnishing their downstairs rooms. In September 1956, that year of the big bucks, a visiting reporter, Joe Hyams, was astonished to note that, three years after they had moved in, their huge living room contained only two items—a Ping-Pong table and the piano Sid had been dunned for in 1955. “Judy Garland is almost
broke,” wrote Hyams. “Although the Lufts live in a big home it is unfurnished; she has a remarkably small wardrobe; they have no money in the bank.” When Judy visited New York, she did not even carry cash to buy lipstick, borrowing pin money, $30 or $40 at a time, from C. Z. Guest, one of her socialite friends.

Those debts, like many others, were never repaid, and the list of those who had claims on the Lufts grew ever longer. Some merely shrugged their shoulders, as Buddy Pepper had done when he thought Sid had shortchanged him at the Palladium in 1951. Others, the Warner brothers among them, were not so forgiving, and on one thing Harry and Jack were in accord: they despised Sid Luft almost as much as they despised each other. Five thousand dollars was piddling change to a man as rich as Harry was; but that was the sum, money loaned during the making of
A Star Is Born
, for which a furious Harry took Sid to court in 1955.

Owed six times that, brother Jack not only sued, but also attacked Sid in his autobiography, all but branding him a cheat and a con man. What seemed to gall Jack most was not, in fact, the money; it was the belief that he had been taken for a ride. Sid, he said, had also pried money out of him, $30,000, during the making of A
Star Is Born
. Then, as soon as the picture was finished, Sid had announced that he had just bought a racehorse for more than half that amount—$18,000. Although every girl could not be a Judy Garland, Jack bitterly observed, he was glad to say that a man like Sid Luft was equally rare.

In 1956 a foe even more formidable than the Warner brothers was complaining about the Lufts: the Internal Revenue Service demanded nearly $21,000 in back taxes. A year after that, in 1957, an interior decorator claimed $8,500 for work he said he had done on their house. So strained were the Lufts’ finances that in October 1957, shortly before they were to sail for England and Judy’s engagement at the Dominion Theatre, a beleaguered Sid found himself writing $15,000 in bad checks to cover expenses. All that saved him from possibly serious legal consequences was an accident at New York’s Belmont Park in which Rover the Second, a racehorse in which Sid owned a half interest, broke his leg. By happy coincidence, poor Rover had been insured for $30,000; Sid’s half was just enough to cover the checks.

Rover died only once, however, and back at South Mapleton the unpaid bills continued to accumulate. In 1958 not one but two tax collectors returned, the IRS delivering a past-due notice for more than $17,000, the State of New York adding another for $8,700. New York declined to wait any longer, in fact, for payments owed from Judy’s first appearance at the Palace, refusing to allow her to leave the state until she had either paid up or posted a $10,000 bond. Unable to do either, Judy was forced to hand over her costumes and jewelry, right down to the wristwatch her mother had given her on her twenty-first birthday. To a reporter for the
New York Journal-American
, she admitted the inescapable. “So I’m broke,” she said. “But I’ll get along—I always have. Nobody has to worry about me.”

Where did Judy’s money go? How did a woman who, as Sid told one reporter, had earned more than a million dollars in the previous three years, wind up in such a terrible and humiliating fix? The
Los Angeles Examiner
put into a headline the obvious question: “What Happened to the Million Dollars?”

Much of the million went, of course, to taxes, the Lufts having been unable apparently to find the tax shelters in which many other high earners stashed their dollars. Much also went to that big house on South Mapleton, which had a mortgage and a payroll of eight: a butler, a gardener, a cook, an upstairs maid, a downstairs maid, a nurse, a nanny and an all-around man—the plain-spoken Harry Rubin. Was such a big staff necessary? Rubin thought not, and he was probably right. At least, none of the Lufts’ neighbors, who lived in houses of equal size, required such an army of servants.

Except for her pills and doctors, Judy herself spent little. That remarkably small wardrobe Joe Hyams had mentioned consisted largely of the ski pants she wore around the house. Rubin bought them, a half-dozen at a time, at a sports shop on Wilshire Boulevard. By contrast, Sid—that “reckless spender on horses and living,” as Lynn Bari had called him—had a remarkably large wardrobe, his drawers and closets all but bursting with his specially made shirts, suits and shoes. While Judy traveled without even enough cash for a taxicab, her husband’s
pocket was usually bulging with hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of dollars. If Sid ever went without anything, in short, he kept the fact secret. It probably astonished no one that he was one of the first in Hollywood to buy a kind of car rarely seen on American streets in those days, a shiny black Mercedes-Benz. “It’s nouveau riche,” Judy said when he brought it home, “but I love it!”

Before the Bogarts bought their own house on South Mapleton, an anxious Bogie had told Lauren Bacall to check with their business manager, Morgan Maree, to make sure they could afford it. Only after Maree had said yes did Bogart allow her to go ahead with the purchase. Watching the Lufts throw dollars around gave such a cautious man the shivers, and Bogart took Sid aside for a short lecture. “Listen,” he said, “you’ve got to get straightened out. Go to my business manager.” To Bogart’s annoyance, however, Sid soon tired of the budget Maree imposed, and the spending resumed, unabated and unrestrained.

Many of those greenbacks were strewn around the pari-mutuel windows at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park, where Sid, “a gambling man who can kill $10,000 in an afternoon,” as Hedda Hopper described him, was virtually a permanent resident. Indeed, one of Jack Warner’s complaints had been that Sid was always away, sitting comfortably in his box at Santa Anita, when there was an emergency on the set of
A Star Is Born
. How much money was wasted on what
Time
magazine termed Sid’s “unhappy knack of betting on also-ran horses” will never be known—it is doubtful that Sid himself knew. It was enough money, in any event, for Judy to cite it as one of her reasons for filing for divorce in February 1956. “Nobody ever made money on horses,” she cried. “I can’t stand it.”

She could stand it, however, and after three days she withdrew her suit. “I love Sid and he loves me,” Judy explained to Louella Parsons, “and I don’t think we were ever so glad to see each other in our lives.” But nothing, not even the threat of a breakup, could curb the gambling habit that had precipitated the suit. Six months later, when Judy gave her first show in Las Vegas, Sid apparently lost so much at the New Frontier’s gaming tables that she was obliged to do an extra show simply to erase his debts. “You could hear her shouting all over the theater,”
said Robert Street, one of her chorus boys. “She was furious—and you couldn’t blame her. There she was, used again.”

Years later a friend was to tell Sid that many people were convinced he had stolen from Judy. But that, in Sid’s view, was an impossibility. Despite a prenuptial property agreement that erected a brick wall between their finances—“The earnings of each of the parties shall be and remain their separate property,” read a key sentence—Sid regarded Judy’s money as his own. He could not have robbed her any more than he could have robbed himself. Sid was both too proud and too defiant to tell his tale-bearing friend that simple fact, replying instead: “Fuck ’em! People want to believe what they want to believe. I can’t straighten them out. I am what I am. I’ve lived my life, and I’ve lived it very, very well. And that’s it.”

In a 1955 article for
Coronet
magazine, Judy spelled out what she thought women wanted from men. What she was really describing, however, was what she herself wanted from a man. One of her odder requirements was an occasional fight. A “good tiff,” she said, clears the murky atmosphere from a marriage in the same way a cool breeze blows away foul air. This was dubious wisdom, at best, but at least Judy practiced what she preached—and then some. The Lufts were so often embattled that 144 South Mapleton could have been declared a war zone; their tiffs were not mere breezes, but raging hurricanes that sent everyone around them running for refuge.

Nor did they care who heard or saw. On a trip to Long Island, to the posh precincts of Southampton, where Judy sang at a birthday party for Henry Ford II, they made such a ruckus that they were asked to leave the Irving Hotel. At a party at Chasen’s, a favorite hangout of the stars, the Lufts exchanged words so raw, wrote a columnist for the
Hollywood Reporter
, that they could have been lifted from the pages of a Mickey Spillane thriller—Spillane was the writer whose novel use of obscene language shocked readers of that decorous decade.

Claiming that Sid had beaten her and locked her out of the house, Judy spent many nights on Van and Evie Johnson’s living room sofa,
having thrown pebbles at their bedroom window to wake them up. Whether Sid actually beat her is hard to say, but that she was often terrified of him was clear enough. “Get that son-of-a-bitching pig away from me!” she would scream, begging for help from Harry Rubin. But Sid, too, had reason to yell for help. More than once Rubin saw Judy, small as she was, give him a sound wallop or send something heavy flying in his direction.

Though the two younger children were usually only dimly aware of what was happening, Liza, who turned ten in 1956, was not, putting both hands over her ears when the wrangling reached its highest volume. Even the pugnacious Sid was sometimes overwhelmed by the battles at South Mapleton Drive, packing his bags and leaving town, usually for a distant racetrack. “After two or three days he got itchy and moved on,” said Rubin. “He spent as little time with Judy as possible.”

What Sid did during his many trips away from home he discreetly kept to himself, but Judy’s extramarital adventures can be recounted with near precision. Like many other stars, Judy had always been attracted to her leading men, casting soulful eyes at everyone from Mickey Rooney and Tom Drake to Peter Lawford and Fred Astaire. Before making
A Star Is Born
, she had informed one friend, with an almost despairing sigh, that she would probably also have an affair with James Mason. And so she did, just as she had predicted. Frank Sinatra, an old romance from the forties, reappeared in Judy’s life about the same time, and although she had spoken enthusiastically about the virtues of oral sex—“It’s really healthy!” she had told Harry Rubin—Judy was disappointed when she discovered that Sinatra, who agreed with her wholeheartedly, wanted nothing else. “I’m worried about Frank,” she confided to Rubin. “All he wants is blow jobs.”