Get Happy (71 page)

A taste of normalcy was all she was to have, however. When she returned to California in January, Judy was forced to face the brutal truth:
she was virtually destitute. “How long can you last without dough?” she plaintively inquired, and the answer—not very long—soon presented itself. The people who had helped to keep the house running—the milkman, the bread man, the laundryman, the pool man and the gardener—had already vanished, and now even food was a luxury. The arrival of the smallest windfall brought a rush to the market, usually for the makings of chili, one of Judy’s favorite dishes. During her absence, Sid had helped, after his own fashion, responding to Alma’s urgent phone calls by delivering a quart of milk and breakfast cereal—sometimes popcorn. But to keep the children fed and clothed, Alma and Lionel, those two almost saintly black people, had to dig into their own pockets. “Lionel, go get this child some hose,” ordered Alma when she saw that Lorna’s stockings were full of holes. “She can’t go out looking like this.”

With money borrowed from his wealthy father, Green, too, struggled to keep the household together. Others did what they could, and some of Judy’s fans took turns paying telephone and electric bills. All their efforts, however, only postponed the inevitable collapse. “Where did all my money go?” asked Judy, picking up the carpet and peering underneath, as if searching for a missing stash. “Do you see any? I made millions, and I don’t know where any of it is!”

To keep up her spirits, Judy kept a scrapbook of comically macabre news stories. There was, for example, the girl who was bitten to death by the black widow spiders that had made a home under her beehive hairdo. And there was the London train wreck in which the injured were carefully laid out on an adjoining train track—only to be killed by the train that came rushing to their rescue. “Every time she’d get really, really depressed,” recalled her friend Doug Kelly, “Judy would whip out her scrapbook and say, ‘Look at this! You think
I’ve
got troubles!’”

But Judy’s troubles were, in fact, as poisonous as an army of black widow spiders, and in the spring of 1967 she was forced to sell her house. She had never liked the place anyway, Judy publicly asserted, transforming despair into humor, as she so frequently did. But when
she was alone, talking into her tape recorder, she revealed how she actually felt—heartbroken and humiliated. “How do you act when they take something from you that you thought belonged to you?” she wondered. “Are you supposed to laugh—or sing?” She answered her own question, and, without any accompaniment, launched into a song—a dirge, really—from
Porgy and Bess
. “Ole Man Sorrow’s come to keep me company,” she sang, “whispering beside me when I say my prayers … marching all the way with me, telling me I’m old now since I lost my man.”

F
or every star that rises, another must fall. That was a law as old as Hollywood. Judy knew it—it was, after all, the theme of
A Star Is Born
—and so did everyone else. But how could she have guessed that she herself was destined to stumble? Or that, through a cruel and unsparing irony, her own spectacular decline would be matched, headline for headline, by the no less stunning ascent of her own daughter? For that was, indeed, what happened. “Liza’s a Girl Riding a Whirlwind,” declared one admiring paper, and while the folks on Rockingham Avenue were scrounging for dollars to buy chili, a fresh, slim Liza was pictured on the front page of the New York
Daily News
, cavorting on a Riviera beach as she prepared to wow an audience in Paris.

Liza had, in fact, been preparing to wow audiences all her life. Making her screen debut when she was only two and a half—she appeared for a few seconds at the end of
In the Good Old Summertime
—she had virtually grown up in M-G-M’s magic factory, spending much of her time there even after Judy was fired. She sat in Vincente’s lap as he rode his director’s boom; she made
friends with the actors and technicians; and she spent rapt hours in studio rehearsal halls, watching Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse practice their routines. At home she had a more convenient model, and late at night Liza would sneak down the stairs to hear her mother sing at parties. Years later, one guest could still recall her intense dark eyes, not merely observing, but staring, studying and memorizing her mother’s every gesture and movement.

Only seventeen when she appeared in a 1963 Off-Broadway revival of
Best Foot Forward
, Liza was on Broadway itself at nineteen, winning a Tony, the theater world’s Academy Award, for her performance in another musical,
Flora, the Red Menace
. “Can you believe that’s Liza up there?” Judy asked, in a happy daze of awe and wonder, at
Flora’s
opening. Then to Donald Brooks, the show’s innovative young costume designer, she excitedly whispered, “We did that! You got her up there looking the way she does. And I got her up there because I’m her mother and conceivably her inspiration—the heck with her motivation.” Separate careers in movies and nightclubs followed, and before she had even reached her majority, Liza was earning, according to one estimate, $400,000 a year.

Judy liked to brag that she had spared Liza the hardships she herself had suffered as a child. True enough, but she had burdened her firstborn with a different set of miseries, responsibilities so heavy that they would have crushed most adults. In a strange reversal of roles, Liza became almost a mother to her mother. She was the one who helped to manage the staff on Mapleton Drive. She was often the one who made sure that Joey and Lorna got off to school on time and that they were fed when they came home. “It was as though Liza had become the mom and Judy the child,” said Mike Selsman, one of Judy’s press agents. “It was sweet, kind of nice to watch, but a little disturbing to someone like me, who had come from an ordered background.”

Liza’s heaviest burden, however, was the maintenance of a permanent death watch: it was her duty, she believed, to protect her mother from herself, to ensure that she did not kill herself. The only girl in Los Angeles with her own stomach pump, Liza probably saved Judy’s life on several occasions, climbing in her bathroom window when she suspected she had taken an overdose, and once even holding on to her feet when she was threatening to jump from a hotel window. In public, Liza tried to make light of such horrific chores. But the emotional cost was staggering. “It’s just so terrible because I love her so much,” she confessed in a shaky voice to one friend. “And I don’t know what to do.”

The child most like her, Judy called Liza, and the similarities were striking. Not only did they have the same unusual physique—a big chest, a short waist and long legs—but they shared the same likes and dislikes, even the same neuroses. Liza, too, was convinced she was ugly, a belief that was to make her, like her mother, eternally insecure.
Mother and daughter also responded to the same kind of man. It was Judy, in fact, who chose Liza’s first husband. Peter Allen was a twenty-year-old Australian singer and dancer she saw performing during her stay in Hong Kong and subsequently invited to London. She needed a new opening act, she said, and he and his partner, Chris Bell—the Allen Brothers, they called themselves—would be it.

Matchmaking was what Judy really had in mind, however, and she was certain that Allen—with his ginger hair, lopsided smile and infectious exuberance—was the ideal mate for Liza. Allen himself seemed to agree. Sitting at a piano when Liza first walked into the room, he greeted her with the appropriate Gershwin tune—“Isn’t It a Pity? (we never met before).” Liza apparently thought it was a pity as well. Joining him at the keyboard, she started singing, putting words to his music. From such harmony did love arise, and two and a half years later, on March 3, 1967, Judy’s matchmaking was rewarded with a New York wedding.

At this point, the parallels between Liza’s life and her mother’s became, perhaps, too exact. Just as Judy had surprised Vincente with another man twenty years earlier, so now, barely three weeks into her marriage, did Liza come upon Allen in an equally compromising position. Thus it was that three generations—grandmother, mother and daughter—had found themselves in almost identical predicaments, their marriages blighted by their husbands’ preference for men over women. Ethel with Frank. Judy with Vincente. And now Liza with Peter. As if under some mysterious curse, all three women were doomed, it seemed, to make the same mistake.

Lifting a peculiar situation into the realm of the bizarre was yet another unwelcome connection between mother and daughter. Unbeknownst to either of them, the men they were sleeping with—Mark and Peter—were also sleeping with each other. It was Mark who, wandering into the Hong Kong nightclub where the Allen Brothers were appearing, had first met Peter. And it was Peter’s performance in bed, not onstage, that had excited him. He and Peter had made love in Hong Kong, they had made love again in London, and they had most likely continued to make love still later in the United States.

A huge betrayal, Liza was to call her dismaying discovery, though she, too, had had ample warning that the man of her dreams had romantic dreams of his own—and that they did not necessarily feature her. Yet Liza’s marriage survived for three more years, and for a very good reason. Not only did she love Peter, but she depended on his brash Aussie assurance—he was her rock, she said—to keep her mother at a safe distance. At twenty-one, an age when most people start to take on the responsibilities of adulthood, Liza did the reverse. She decided, for the first time in her life, to act like a child. She had, in short, stopped being a mother to her mother.

By 1967 Judy was on her own, as far as her older daughter was concerned; Liza became one of those people Judy often had trouble reaching on the telephone. Peter answered the phone in their Manhattan apartment, and if Judy was on the line, he would say that Liza was out. If Judy telephoned the building’s front desk, the doorman would be more blunt. “Miss Minnelli is not accepting any calls from her mother,” he would say. When Judy was able to get through, the conversations were not always pleasant, Liza even rejecting her mother’s sobbing request for money to pay her utility bill. “She doesn’t want to have anything to do with me,” wailed Judy, hurt, resentful and, above all, uncomprehending.