Get Happy (72 page)

After that, Judy could sometimes be heard making harsh and spiteful comments about her older daughter—“ugly things,” to use Alma’s phrase. As Liza pushed her away, Judy devoted more of her praise to her second daughter. After hearing Lorna belt out her numbers in a school production of
The Unsinkable Molly Brown
, she turned to Doug Kelly and gleefully exclaimed: “Fuck Liza! This one’s going to pay my rent!” Still, relations between Judy and Liza were never completely severed, and every chill was followed by a thaw. When Liza’s first album was released, Judy was once again the proud mama. “Liza has a lot to learn,” she concluded. “But she’s doing well and she’ll get better.”

When she lost her house in the spring of 1967, Judy also lost the last semblance of normal existence. For the next two years she was little more than a vagabond, darting from town to town, hotel to hotel. With no one else to turn to, she had asked Sid to manage her career again, and in an effort to outwit the IRS, he had persuaded her to sign over her earnings to a corporation—Group V, it was called—owned by his friend Raymond Filiberti. Though Group V would pay Judy only $1,000 per concert, a figure that would rise to $1,500 after the first twenty-five, it would take care of all her expenses: hotel, food, clothing—everything. No longer would Joey and Lorna have to subsist on chili; Group V would buy the groceries.

Anybody but Sid would have been put off by Filiberti’s mud-spattered credentials, which included a year in a federal jail for having transported stolen securities across state lines. But for the first several months, Filiberti nonetheless did what he had said he would do, renting Judy a Manhattan town house off Fifth Avenue, then a suite in the St. Moritz Hotel, across from Central Park. With Tom Green keeping a careful watch on her drugs, Judy also fulfilled her part of the bargain. She undertook a punishing round of concerts that included four triumphant weeks at the Palace, and she made an appearance on the Boston Common before her biggest live audience ever, 100,000 people, many of whom sat through two downpours merely for the pleasure of seeing her in person. “It was as if her voice had come out of the long years past,” marveled the
Boston Globe
’s critic. Presenting her with a souvenir of the city, a silver Paul Revere bowl, Boston’s mayor, John F. Collins, was even warmer. “We have taken you to our hearts,” he said. “God love you and bring you back to us.”

But Judy’s dealings with Group V grew increasingly chilly, becoming downright frosty in October, when she got into a screaming match with Filiberti’s wife on a flight to London. Though Judy initiated the battle, suggesting that Mrs. Filiberti close her “flapping mouth,” Sharon Filiberti, seventeen years younger and ten inches taller, gave perhaps better than she got, deriding Judy as an “old worn-out bag” and a “broken-down singer.” Drinks, as well as words, were tossed, and by the time the plane landed in London, Judy was so upset that she turned right around and took the next flight back to New York.

Relations with Group V deteriorated still further in the weeks that followed. Judy missed three performances at Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum, and after breaking into her drug bag while Green was asleep, she made a disastrous appearance in Baltimore, wandering around the stage and muttering, just as she had done four years earlier in Melbourne. “Almost a classic tragedy” was how John Carlyle’s father, who lived in Baltimore, characterized the
“very
sick” woman he saw that night. “Who’s the son of a bitch behind all this?” he asked Carlyle.

That was, indeed, a question, and when Filiberti failed to pay her expenses at the St. Moritz in March 1968, Judy’s arrangement with Group V all but collapsed. Unless her bill was paid immediately, Green was informed one morning, the doors to her suite would be locked and even Joey and Lorna, who had left for school, would not be allowed back in. Having spent everything he had on Judy and her children—close to $60,000, by his calculation—Green then remembered that Sid had raised cash in another emergency by pawning Judy’s jewelry, which he later returned without her ever having known that it had been gone. With that example in mind, Green hocked two of her rings, then raced back to the St. Moritz with enough cash, a thousand dollars, to prevent her eviction.

This time Judy did notice that her rings were missing, however, and on Thursday night, April 11, she had Green arrested for grand larceny. Hauled off to the city jail in lower Manhattan, he was, as a reward for his good deeds, put in a cell with eleven others—a car thief, a wife beater and numerous snoring drunks. Though Judy had previously announced that she would marry him in the chapel at Dartmouth College, she now dismissed him as nothing more than an employee. So much for their late-night vows aboard the Super Chief; so much for Christmas with his family, for midnight mass and making angels in the snow. So much, indeed, for the career Green had sacrificed on the altar of Judy Garland.

Once unleashed, paranoia finds betrayal everywhere, and before it had spent itself, Judy’s rage took still another victim: a female fan, Nancy Barr, who, like Green, had also provided Judy with money, time and energy—even, by Barr’s account, a brief sexual relationship. Barr’s sin? She had bailed Green out of jail, an act that automatically put her
on Judy’s enemy list. During the days that followed Judy frightened her with so many hate-filled phone calls—she would sic the Mafia on her, Judy screamed—that Barr developed a nervous condition, a spastic colon. “I loved Judy,” she said, “but I could not cope with her. I wore out.” So said everybody who tried to help Judy hold her tattered life together.

Judy had survived so many crises and had made so many comebacks that it was hard for many to see that her situation had changed, that she had run out of options—perhaps even out of time. One by one, those who loved her either left voluntarily or were forced to leave: Liza, Tom Green, Nancy Barr and, finally, Joey and Lorna. For years Judy had fought Sid for custody, afraid that he might take their children. Now she herself pushed them away, several times actually kicking them out of their rented quarters and forcing them to seek haven in Liza’s apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street.

The first to flee was Joey. Probably not knowing who he was, his mother chased him around their apartment one wild night, then, as he leaped out the door and stumbled down the stairs, she hurled a butcher knife at him, aiming well enough that it brushed his hair. Barefoot and wearing nothing but a pajama bottom, the terrified Joey ran three or four blocks through the dark and snowy streets of Manhattan until, at three o’clock in the morning, he reached the safety of his father’s hotel.

Next to depart was Lorna, who, tough as she was, was not tough enough to withstand such ceaseless anxiety and so many sleepless nights. The result was three days in a hospital with what she called “a type of mental breakdown.” That was followed, a few months later, by a panicked call to her father in Los Angeles. “Dad, I have to come live with you in California,” she cried. “I have to come with you right now, today, tonight.” A few hours later she was on a plane headed west.

New York, Boston, Los Angeles. Judy now went from one to another, so restless that she could not remain very long in one house or apartment, or even in one city. And all the while she was so broke, sometimes with as little as five dollars in her purse, that she had to plead for her meals and rooms. “I’m a great star,” she had told Nancy Barr.
“Look what I’ve given to everybody. Where are all the fans? Where are they now that I need help?” A collapse during a performance at New Jersey’s Garden State Arts Center in June sent her to Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, but she soon left to board another plane. The woman who had always traveled with mountains of luggage landed in Los Angeles with nothing more than a shopping bag stuffed with skirts, blouses and pills.

John Carlyle put her up for a few days, then passed her on to his friends Tucker Fleming and Charles Williamson, who had a larger, more secluded home in the Hollywood Hills. “This is the proper way of living,” Judy said approvingly as she looked around her hosts’ well-ordered house. She had flown so far mainly to see Joey, and Fleming and Williamson made sure she did, treating them to dinner at the Factory, a popular discotheque in West Hollywood. There, to the applause of the other dancers, mother and son did an old-fashioned fox-trot. When he grew up, Joey vowed, he would be a banker; then his mother would never again have to worry about money. “Did you hear what he said?” a tearful Judy asked her hosts. “What a wonderful son I have!”

A proper way of living did not suit Judy for very long. “It’s just like the Christian Science Reading Room here,” she soon complained to Fleming and Williamson, and returned to Boston, where she had rented a one-bedroom apartment in the new Prudential Center. Eager for a good night’s sleep, her hosts were happy to wave farewell. “Judy made you feel you had run a two-minute mile,” said Fleming. “We have met any number of people who have said, ‘Ooooh, I wish I had known she needed help.
I
would have taken care of her.’ Nonsense! Nobody could have done it.”

New candidates always appeared, however, and several weeks later in New York, Judy met another young man, John Meyer, who was eager to try. Meyer’s story was to resemble Tom Green’s in everything but length, all the emotions Green had experienced in two and a half years being compressed into less than two months, from the middle of October to the middle of December. Within minutes of their introduction, Judy and Meyer, a piano player and songwriter, were talking like
old friends. Within hours, Judy was living with him in his parents’ apartment on Park Avenue. Within days, they were engaged to be married, and Meyer, like Green, had embarked on a holy crusade: the salvation of Judy Garland. “She can be greater than she’s ever been, and I can help her do it,” he told a dubious friend. “I can help her get back up there.”

The first job Meyer got her was not much of a step up: an engagement at Three, the gay and lesbian bar where he played the piano. Jackie Scott, one of the bar’s owners, at first turned him down, appalled at the thought that a woman who had filled the Palladium, the Palace and the Hollywood Bowl was reduced to selling her songs in a two-room bar on East Seventy-second Street—even if it was Scott’s own bar. But when a friend pointed out the obvious, that Judy was desperate for money, Scott relented, and for two or three weekends Judy showed up around midnight, sang a couple of songs to adoring crowds, and walked out with a hundred dollars, her only income safe from the IRS. After that, Meyer aimed higher, arranging appearances on three national television shows and—his crowning achievement—five weeks at the Talk of the Town, London’s premier supper club, at a salary of approximately $6,000 a week.

For Meyer, the exaltation of a relationship with Judy—“she lived in four dimensions,” he said—soon gave way to exhaustion, and a man who had astonished people with his nervous energy was suddenly struggling to stay awake. Judy had worn him out, too. A case of the flu ended their affair. While Meyer was in bed, fighting off a fever, Judy discovered another savior in another piano player: Mickey Deans, the night manager of Arthur, a smart Manhattan discotheque in which she had spent many late hours. Now it was Mickey Deans who would accompany her to London. Now it was Mickey Deans—DeVinko was his real last name—whom she wanted to marry. “I finally got the right man to ask me,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for a long time.”