Get Happy (66 page)

The root of Judy’s problems with the network was that, for some still-unexplained reason, Aubrey not only disliked but despised her. Nothing she did could please him. On the one hand, the network—and Aubrey
was
the network—charged that she was unapproachable. On the other, it complained that she was too friendly, that she touched and kissed her guests too much. In reply to such criticism, all Judy could offer was the truth. “It’s pure affection,” she said. “I’m a woman who wants to reach out and take 40 million people in her arms.” Hurt and offended, yet realizing that her future lay in the network’s hands, she nonetheless promised to do as she was told. “CBS,” she said, “knows more about television than I do.”

Perhaps, but the network of
The Beverly Hillbillies
did not know much about Judy or the kind of show she could and should have done. Nor, as it turned out, did Jewison, who was no more able than Schlatter to come up with a viable formula. In their frantic efforts to find one, his writers each week churned out so many scripts, each one on a different color paper, that they once ran out of hues and had to return to plain old white. Sometimes Judy did not even know what songs she was supposed to sing until just before the taping. In a perhaps overly candid interview, she said that if things continued as they were, she herself would switch to
Bonanza
, her chief competition. “We’re in trouble,” she warned, “unless we all calm down a bit.”

By prearrangement, Jewison departed after the thirteenth episode, which was taped in November, and turned over the remaining thirteen to yet a third producer, Bill Colleran. Dismayed by what both of his predecessors had done, Colleran promptly threw out Jewison’s bad jokes and awkward gimmicks and put more emphasis on music, where the focus should have been from the start. He arrived too late, however. By December Judy and the network were almost at war. A calming influence during the summer and fall—she had even telephoned him from the set—had been John Kennedy, who advised her how to deal with a corporate despot like Aubrey. But on November 22, Kennedy
was assassinated. “It’s like—it’s like hopelessness without hope,” was Judy’s confused, yet altogether lucid, reaction. Trying to repay Kennedy’s kindness in the only way she knew, she planned an entire program of patriotic songs in his memory. But CBS responded with a loud no. By the time the show was broadcast, she was informed, Kennedy would have been forgotten.

In 1963, no series had a chance of beating
Bonanza
, and the best Judy’s show could have hoped for was a respectable second. It did not achieve even that, and by the end of the year, with its ratings scraping the bottom of the charts,
The Judy Garland Show
was vying with ABC’s
Jerry Lewis Show
for the title of costliest flop in the history of television. Whether
The Judy Garland Show
, broadcast on a different evening, with a more sympathetic and supportive network behind it, could have survived is impossible to say. Though it had many bad moments, it had enough good ones—a few were even glorious—to indicate what it might have been. There was the night, for example, on which Judy and Barbra Streisand sang in duet, then joined Ethel Merman for a trio—the three belters in one place and at one memorable time. And there was the picture of Judy alone, all but shouting “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” CBS’s sole concession to her plea for a Kennedy tribute.

But if Judy had done a number with Gabriel and a choir of angels, Aubrey’s face would have remained the same unyielding granite. He did not want to move her show to another night, and he did not want to give it another year, or even half a year, to find its way. Aubrey did not want to do anything, in fact, but kill it. “I won’t have that cunt ruining my Sunday night!” he declared, and in January 1964, CBS startled no one by announcing that one season would be enough for
The Judy Garland Show
. The March 29 broadcast would be the last.

Though Judy’s morale had revived a little at the beginning of the Colleran regime, it collapsed again under the weight of ever more bad news. The doubters were at last proved right—she was often late and unreliable—and tapings went into overtime, “golden time,” as TV people call it. At the final taping, she was so distracted—she did not appear either drunk or drugged—that she started a song only to stop it. In the end she stopped entirely, unable to complete a full hour. Colleran was forced to pad the last show with segments from earlier episodes.

Worse was to come, however. When she returned to her dressing room, she found an orchid plant, with a sarcastic, even sadistic, note from Hunt Stromberg, Jr., Aubrey’s chief henchman. “You were just great,” said Stromberg, who had been monitoring the night’s disastrous progress and had obviously been enjoying her humiliation. “Thanks a lot. You’re through.”

In the obscure recesses of their hearts, Judy once wrote, all women realize—“know, know,
know,”
she all but shouted—that the male must lead, the female must follow. That is the way it must be, she added, because women are by nature “dreadfully insecure” and they depend on men to provide their safety and security—even their meaning. “Don’t yield your leadership” was her plea to the opposite sex. “Don’t hand us the reins.” That was Judy’s philosophy, her creed, her faith—her every-thing—and though her own experience had proved it wrong again and again, Judy continued to cling to it, like a religious fanatic whose eyes, turned to heaven, never stop searching for a miracle.

Despite the mess in which he had left her finances, despite the welter of divorce suits and ugly public accusations, despite the lessons of history and common sense, a part of Judy still believed that Sid might be her miracle man. Indeed, even in his mid-forties, he remained the tough, quick-fisted guy who had first won her admiration. “Sid Luft in Wild Fist Fight at Night Club” was the headline dominating the front page of a Los Angeles tabloid in November 1962. Sid, it seemed, had accosted another patron at the Slate Brothers Club, demanding an apology for sarcastic comments he had heard the man had been making about him. When the other patron, a movie producer, angrily refused, Sid did what came naturally—at least to him. “I am not a man who can stand that sort of thing forever,” he said, “so I hit him.”

Though Sid’s attack may have reaffirmed Hollywood’s generally low opinion of him, it may have had the reverse effect on Judy. That barroom brawler was the One-Punch Luft with whom she had fallen in love, a man capable of providing the support his estranged wife required to survive the frenzy of a weekly television series. It was perhaps not surprising, therefore, that another, considerably smaller headline
appeared a few weeks later. “Judy Garland and Sid Luft Reconciled,” said the
Los Angeles Times
on February 14, 1963—Valentine’s Day, appropriately enough.

A house was purchased in another ritzy area just south of Sunset Boulevard, at 129 South Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood, and in June, on the weekend of Judy’s forty-first birthday, the Lufts held a housewarming party. Their family was together again. The only flaw in this otherwise happy picture was the inescapable fact that no woman, not even one as emotionally hungry as Judy, could have more than one miracle man at a time, and Judy already had hers—David Begelman.

In many ways the two men now crowding her life were mirror images. Both were Jewish, with roots a few miles north of Manhattan, Begel-man’s in the borough of the Bronx, Sid’s in the adjacent part of West-chester County. Though neither could be called handsome, both were charming, with an undeniable appeal to women. Both had expensive tastes—in clothes, cars and style of living—and both were big spenders, even if the money they were spending was not their own. And both had gambling habits that would keep them almost constantly in debt, scrounging for dollars.

There the similarities stopped, however, and Begelman possessed something Sid lacked altogether: the showman’s natural instinct, the gut feeling that, in later years, was to make him a genuine Hollywood mogul, in charge of two major studios, Columbia and M-G-M. That showman’s instinct was already evident in 1961 when he heard sounds he did not like as he was putting together her concert tour. “Her orchestra sounds godawful,” he told his friend Mort Lindsey. “You’ve gotta help me.” As a result of Begelman’s tireless wheedling, the talented, unflappable Lindsey did come to the rescue, and for the next several years he gave Judy probably the best accompaniment she had ever enjoyed.

Unlike Sid, who seemed just as content to peddle stereo systems to airlines as he was to manage his wife’s career, Begelman was in love with show business. Thrilled merely to be on a stage, he would often
stand in for Judy before her concerts, mimicking her movements and even singing her songs while the electricians were adjusting their lights. Perhaps his most important attribute, however, the one that separated him from many other agents with keen ears and eyes, was his willingness to do anything a client needed to keep performing. What Judy needed, of course, was love, and love was what Begelman provided—or so she thought.

From her need and his willingness to satisfy it was born a romance that obsessed her for many months to come. A decade earlier, Dorothy Ponedel had complained that Judy had been hypnotized by Sid. Now it was Begelman’s turn to play Svengali. When they were together, Judy’s eyes never left him. Whatever he wanted, Judy did. “David’s the boss,” she told one of her fans. Comforted by the bare knowledge that he was her lover, she would sometimes order her maid, Alma Cousteline, to call and ask him to hold his mouth near the telephone while she was falling asleep. “I just want to hear him breathe,” Judy said. Without Begelman’s assistance, it is doubtful that there would have been a Judy Garland III—or a Carnegie Hall concert, or the three movies and television series that came after.

It was now that Judy brought back Sid, who hated the man who so often had occupied his wife’s bed. Certain that Begelman was pocketing money from her company, Kingsrow Enterprises, he saw a way to exact revenge, and he convinced Judy to allow a Beverly Hills accountant to audit the books. The accountant, Oscar Steinberg, issued his report on June 27, and even Sid may have been surprised by the large number of suspect entries uncovered. Begelman had, for example, written thirteen checks on the Kingsrow account, a total of $35,714 made out to cash and noted in the ledger book only as “Protection.” Another check, for $10,000, made a curious migration. It went from a Begelman account held in trust for Judy, to Begelman’s private account; it was then withdrawn, disappearing without explanation.

Other checks had similarly odd histories, the most peculiar of which belonged to one for $50,000. According to Begelman, that check had gone to a blackmailer who had threatened to release a photograph of
Judy, nude from the waist up, that had been taken while she was lying unconscious in a London hospital. Whether there was such a picture is impossible to say; what can be said is that Begelman pocketed most, if not all, of the $50,000. No chicanery, however small, was beneath him. Not only did he sneak in a double commission for her appearance on the Jack Paar show, but he also kept for himself the new Cadillac the show’s producers had thrown in as a bonus. Unaware that Begelman’s spiffy new convertible was really hers, Judy had to buy a new car when she moved west to begin her television series a few months later.